Traumatic exsanguination

The buttheadguy effect, part 3

I awoke to a burning sensation on my shoulder. It was a strange, crackling pain, the sort of pain one might feel if one’s shoulder were being sprayed with an impossibly fine mist of hot cooking oil.

With a start, I realized I had felt this pain before. I jumped up and turned on the light, revealing several rotund little insects on my bed, fleeing to the edges of the mattress.

I crushed one with my finger, staining the sheet with blood. My blood.

“Bedbugs!” I hissed, my countenance a twisted mask of hatred....

Freeze frame. Cue title sequence:

THE BUTTHEADGUY EFFECT

Peril and bloodshed that transpired in 2009 because Chris D broke Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984

PART 3: TRAUMATIC EXSANGUINATION

Action continues:

I despise bedbugs, and not for the usual reasons. Forget about their cowardly, nocturnal blood-sucking—bedbugs engage in some of the vilest and most repugnant sexual practices known on this planet.

First of all, bedbugs are so perverted, their females don’t use their genitals for sex. Instead, the males have spiny, hypodermic penises that actually pierce the exoskeletons of the females and inject semen directly into their abdomens. Biologists call this traumatic insemination—parenthetical quip about this also being the general scientific term for bad sex deleted—and bedbugs are the world’s most evolved practitioners of this abominable sex act.

And it gets crazier. Male bedbugs are also known to forcibly inject their semen into other male bedbugs, where it can mix with the semen of those males and be passed along to their subsequent mates. Ergo, in layman’s terms, so to speak, a male bedbug’s offspring are not necessarily his biological children; they could instead be the biological children of the dude who fucked him.

Sorry, bedbugs, but I think you little bastards are crossing the line. And I’m more open-minded than most. As a practicing bisexual, I’m well familiar with the business of penetrating both females and males. In fact, it’s kind of my thing. But, like the vast majority of bi folk, I work exclusively with pre-existing orifices. I certainly don’t go whimsically creating and fucking new holes like some kind of amphetamine-crazed Abu Ghraib Prison guard with a bayonet.

And just when you think bedbugs couldn’t debase themselves any further, they find a way. For male bedbugs have even been observed traumatically inseminating other species. That’s right, a bedbug is the sort of insect who can come face-to-face with a critter not of its own kind, and think to itself, “Well, screw you.” And mean it.

Now, I happen to know that I have very fuckable skin. So as I examined my savagely bitten shoulder, I felt obliged to entertain the disturbing notion that some fucking bedbug had, in fact, just ejaculated into me. I could just imagine the conversation my shoulder was having with my immune system at that moment:

“Immunocontrol, this is Dermal Security, and uh, this is gonna sound crazy but it looks like we got, uh, bedbug semen comin’ through the epidermis of the left shoulder. Over.”

“Uh Dermal, not sure if I copy, could you please repeat? Did you say bedbug semen?”

“That’s an affirmative, over.”

“Uh, so what you’re tryin’ to say is we got bedbugs rapin’ our shoulder right now?”

“We dunno what we’re sayin’, but we got a confirmed hit on bedbug semen off our 20. We need plasma cover up here ASAP!”

Now, before all you entomologists out there start sending me letters about how unlikely it is that my shoulder was in fact traumatically inseminated by bedbugs, I’d like to clarify that I’m not claiming that most of them shagged me. In fact, I’m sure the vast majority didn’t. I’m thinking of the perhaps one in twenty that gets a bit randy when he’s drinking blood. You know the type.

Anyway, I disgruntledly texted the owner of the guesthouse, who rushed to my room within minutes. He instructed me to switch to a different room and put all my belongings—including the clothes I was wearing—in sealed plastic bags for washing. The mattress would be immediately destroyed, and the next morning, every inch of the room would be treated with the foulest pesticides available. He said the bugs had probably arrived in the backpacks of a sickly Finnish couple that slept in the room a week before, so hopefully I’d detected the infestation before it spread to other rooms.

Unfortunately for the bedbugs, you see, I am one of the minority who wake up when they are biting—most feel nothing until the bites start itching hours later. If those pervy little vampires had only left me alone, who knows how many Manila tourists on which they’d have successfully dined, and how far they’d have spread before they were noticed.

But alas, they’d bitten the wrong man that night, and as a result they would die swift and horrible deaths, with my freshly-sucked, life-giving blood still digesting inside them. A grimly satisfying thought, indeed.

And that was precisely the grimly satisfying thought I was thinking as I walked out the door—backpack quarantined and stripped down to my underwear—and looked one last time at my former mattress, that doomed hive of amoral, pansexual, blood-drinking, body-piercing bedbuggery that would have lived to feast another day, if not for the tooth-terminating transgression of a certain small-town bully, so many years ago....

Glen exits the room and the camera zooms into a seam in the mattress to reveal an ominous, writhing mass of blood-engorged bedbugs indulging in a hideous orgy of depraved sexual violence. Then they all suddenly die in such horrible agony that you almost feel sorry for them. Cue baritone-voiced announcer:

“So ends another chapter in a sordid tome of misery that would never have been written, had not Chris D broken Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984. Tune in again next week, when it will be Glen who is threatened with extermination….”