The Mad Bomber

THE BLACK SUZUKI SIDEKICK pulls up to the corner of East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue at 7:30 in the morning. I walk around to the passenger-side window and knock. But Frank Middleton, my exterminator, refuses to lean across and open the door. Instead, he gets out of the car and, without a word of greeting, walks into morning traffic. He’s wearing a black Stussy cap over a black do-rag and he’s holding a white, full-body polypropylene suit, the booties of which he tugs onto my feet as commuters roll by staring, too stunned to honk. As I settle into the passenger seat of the Sidekick, a shrunken two-seat SUV, I thank Frank for being concerned enough about my health to insist on the protective barrier. After all, the back of the twoseater is stacked high with pesticides. “You kidding?” he laughs. “You got bedbugs.”

If it’s true that cockroaches will survive the nuclear apocalypse, then pity them. They will have bedbugs. “It’s a fuckin’ war,” Frank declares soon after we drive off, and he’s serious about not bringing the enemy home. For the past three years, 51-yearold Franklin Delano Roosevelt Middleton, Jr., has been bombing these vampiric, appleseed-sized survivors. He bombs them in five boroughs, in Park Avenue castles and in Bronx basements, where he comforts crying bystanders and always, always tells them that he’s seen worse, even when bugs, bulging with blood, crawl out of the ceiling. He calls himself “The Mad Bomber.” He calls himself “The Terminator Exterminator.” He calls himself “Dr. Bedbug.” It’s no use debating the severity of the bedbug resurgence in New York with Frank. He knows what he needs to know: There are enough bugs to keep him busy seven days a week, up to 14 hours a day, working for two companies, with private jobs on the side. He got started at 4:30 this morning. To remind him how to fight, he’s got a copy of the Pest Control Technology Technician’s Handbook on his dashboard. To remind him what he’s fighting for, he’s got the program from his mother’s funeral lying in a folder on his console. I feel a little like an ex-con going for a ride-along with the righteous cop who busted me.

As we drive over Randall’s Island, I browse the collection of canisters and jugs piled up in the back. We’ve got, among many others, Bedlam spray (HARMFUL IF ABSORBED THROUGH SKIN); Gentrol Insect Growth Regulator Liquid Concentrate (KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN); and PI Contact Insecticide gas (IF INHALED: Move person to fresh air. If person is not breathing, call 911 or an ambulance, then give artificial respiration). Plus, everything in Frank’s car, including us, is covered with a fine white powder. It’s called Delta Dust, and its active ingredient is the neurotoxin Deltamethrin (AVOID CONTACT WITH SKIN, EYES AND CLOTHING). Also, somewhere back here is Frank’s private, special stock of toxins, acquired mysteriously and discussed cryptically. I start to thumb through the Technician’s Handbook, which appears to be water-warped. “You know why it look like that?” Frank asks. “I sprayed it.”

Basically, we’ve got a pressurized insect genocide on our hands when we greet John at the Bayside home of his mother-in-law. An affable electrician, John tells us that the woman has been living in the house since the 1930s. It shows. The place is not messy, exactly, but full. Tchotchkes— ceramic birds, plastic Virgins, a rose in a glass globe—clutter all the surfaces. Clothes hang everywhere upstairs. Musty brown carpet lines the whole place. The bugs can snuggle flat in any crack, crevice or nook and lay eggs deep in the carpet. We’ve entered an urban operation. John admits that the first exterminator told him he’d have to rip the carpet up to totally end the infestation. “He ain’t got what I got in my tank,” Frank counters.

With that, he picks up his 10-pound metal pail and his hose and goes to work. “They know I’m coming,” he says as he rips open the bottom of an ancient floral-print couch so he can spray inside. “They know this gravelly voice.”

As Frank moves through the first floor— targeting unseen pockets of bug activity—I remember that he mentioned being stationed at Ft. Benning in the 1970s. Did he learn any tactics in the military that help him in his current job? “Yes,” he replies, as he drenches the carpet. “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”

John leaves to make a phone call. Frank stops spraying and walks over to me. He confides that we cannot possibly kill all of the bugs in this house. He gestures toward a room full of hanging shirts and makes an expression that says, “This is a bedbug utopia.” The first exterminator was right. Our big bombs were not made for this kind of war. “But what am I gonna do,” Frank asks no one in particular. “Walk outta here?” He’s a mensch, and a show is a show.

The bombing, the final act, requires ventilators, and Frank has an extra one for me. It doesn’t have an eyepiece. I object. “Just stand behind me,” Frank instructs. And so, starting upstairs, he sprays with a canister of PI in each hand, dual-wielding like something out of John Woo. We do a scorched-earth withdrawal, moving backwards out of the bedrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and finally the front door as we leave a haze of insect death behind.

As we head back to the car, I wonder whether John’s mother will ever get rid of the bugs. It’s taken me two months and five treatments to get them under control in my tiny, uncluttered East Village studio. Frank was the third exterminator sent to my place by the major pest control company contracted to my management company. The first guy, Mario, was old-school Brooklyn brash and had a reassuring hatred of arthropods. Poison hose in hand, diluted blood dripping out of my boxframe, he turned to me. “Dat’s your blood,” he barked. “Dese mudafuckers been feasting on you.” Then with a little theatrical spritz of poison, he got back to work. “Time for dem to die,” he pronounced. But they didn’t.

Next came Gordon, a tattooed Chinese “cowboy,” in Frank’s estimation. Gordon didn’t say much, and he sprayed in a way that looked erratic. Still, his movement was purposeful, and I assumed it had to do with

the philosophy, “To kill the bedbugs, one must think like the bedbugs.” Whatever Gordon did worked, and I enjoyed a bug-free week or two. Then I woke up one morning to see a few little ones scurrying behind my framed poster of Goya’s “El sueño de la razón produce monstrous” (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”).

My desperation matured into paranoia. I slept for three or four hours a night. I dreamt of itches. I mistook the following things for bedbugs: breadcrumbs, coffee grounds, shirt buttons, sweater pills, birthmarks on my collarbone and back, chipped paint, pennies and shadows. I became freakishly aware of the movement of individual hairs on my body. I left smashed bug guts on my wall as a warning to the others. I saw my girlfriend less and less. Frenzied, I one day caulked along the baseboards, stuffed steel wool into random gaps and sealed it with polyurethane foam. I felt like Montresor, giddy at the construction of my tormentor’s tomb. For the love of God!

Finally, Frank arrived. At first I wasn’t impressed. He was a big guy, 6-feet tall, but he moved slow, and he dropped something heavy on the way up to my apartment. He seemed too eager to show me his technician’s certification, which he produced from a worn blue folder. Then he started spraying, and my doubts evaporated. He sprayed, and he sprayed and when I thought he was done spraying, he sprayed some more. He doused. He dumped chemicals in a way that made Mario and Gordon seem stingy. “I’m not cheap,” I learned, is one of Frank’s refrains.

A full treatment from the pest control company for which Frank worked includes steam to draw out the insects and their eggs, followed by vacuuming to suck them to their doom. The steamer malfunctioned at my place, and I wondered why Frank seemed so unconcerned. Driving by a row of Korean restaurants in Flushing, I ask him. When he steams, Franks tells me, “The bedbugs are laughing. They’re taking a steam shower.” The non-toxic steam is so much environmentally friendly claptrap. You see, Frank believes in the power of chemicals.

Before we get to the next job, Fran, Frank’s wife, calls. She’s making sure that I’m still with him and we haven’t picked up, in Frank’s words, “a couple of blonds.” Frank puts up with these calls and Fran puts up with Frank’s pineapple meatloaf and his habit of spraying their house once a month. Fran stuck with Frank during his three-year stint at Gouverneur Correctional Facility and then Camp Georgetown on a gun charge, and Frank stuck with Fran during her treatment for thyroid cancer. They got married last year in Las Vegas, and Fran changed her last name from Letteri to Middleton. They share a little white house on a shallow dead end in Haitian East Elmhurst. From their kitchen, they can see Citi Field looking out one window and LaGuardia looking out another.

As we park on 150th Street in Whitestone, I notice a handful of cough drops and half a bulb of peeled garlic on a little shelf above the dashboard. Frank says they’re for his throat, which is frequently sore, “and for vampires, too.” I ask him if he’s concerned about the health effects of persistent exposure to the pesticides. He says that he doesn’t want to be a technician forever; pretty soon he’ll apply for his applicator’s license so he can start his own company. Bedbug business is good, and Frank knows he makes a fraction of what he could if he was paid by the job and not by the shift. He says he stutters sometimes, and he never did before.

We walk into the Little Friends House Day Care. Several rows of toddlers, already open-mouthed in anticipation of baby food, gape even wider at the sight of my suit. A nervous teacher shuttles us down to the basement, where water bugs and mice have been sighted. This job is a rarity for Frank: Bed bugs are 90 percent of his work. Rusted play equipment and ancient aquariums are stacked five feet high down here. I’m seeing hiding places everywhere and feeling pretty pessimistic about the possibility of exterminating anything. Still, Frank gets to work with characteristic good cheer. He sets his hose on fan-spray and hits everything he can. He sets up mousetraps. He makes sure to put one near the entrance to the basement. “You gotta give them a show,” he tells me, “and make it easy for them to see.” Even if the war can’t be won, the civilians will sleep better.

We leave Little Friends and Frank calls his dispatcher to clock out. The day is over early and he’s going home to shower off the Delta Dust and get some sleep. Before he shuts his eyes, he’ll strap on another mask. This one pumps pressurized air into his throat to prevent it from closing. Frank has sleep apnea. It has only developed over the past couple years. While he dozes, he’ll leave on his cellphone. He’ll probably get a call before the afternoon ends. He’ll need to get back in the Sidekick and get back to bombing. He needs the sleep he gets to be good.

Interested in talking to Frank Middleton? You can try him at 347-215-1968