Ask any vampire. It pays to drink the finest blood.
Bedbugs — nocturnal, bloodsucking monsters that are itching up beds all over the city — have hopped the Jitney and landed in the Hamptons, where the little beasts are causing war among neighbors over who invited them in. Be afraid.
In the land of sun, sea and celebs, the pests launched an assault last month on a breathtaking model renting an East Hampton pad with her family — who then nearly died from buggy poisoning.
“It’s disgusting. It’s gross!” said Jill Taft, 43, a designer resuming her catwalk career. “If I get bitten again, I’ll probably go into anaphylactic shock. I won’t wake up.”
This is the story of bedbugs and a model. It’s also the tale of an exploding scourge. Bedbug outbreaks, which an expert says have increased “exponentially” in the New York area, with a peculiar fondness for Abercrombie & Fitch couture, are working their way into better ZIP codes.
They won’t vanish. Not until the government rescinds the 1972 ban on the bug-slaughtering chemical DDT, which was deemed potentially risky to birds. Humans have been paying since.
Summer started innocently. Jill and filmmaker husband Joel Roodman, 51, and cuties Sophia, 8, and Max, 3, who live in a (bug-free) Financial District penthouse, rented a three-bedroom house at 85 Hog Creek Road, complete with swimming pool, for the low price of $18,000 for the summer.
Hell broke loose Father’s Day weekend.
“We all woke up Saturday with strange welts on our bodies, our children included,” said Jill. “I thought, ‘God forbid, let me peel back the sheets, the dust ruffle.’ ”
She spied a black bug. “My heart sank. I picked it up with a tissue. It burst! Red blood.”
The critters were hiding in the sheets and mattress. “Some adults. Some teenagers. Egg sacs!”
Jill slept fitfully. The next morning, “I had over 79 bites (right), even on my eyelids.” The skeeve factor was forgotten on the drive back to the city, when Jill had difficulty breathing. She was suffering an allergic reaction.
“My heart started to race. All my bites started to swell up.” Joel stopped the car at the emergency room at New York Hospital in Flushing, Queens, where Jill was given intravenous steroids and Benadryl. “I was never in so much pain in my life.”
That should have ended it. But being the Hamptons, there’s a cutthroat real-estate angle. House owner Rich Gucciardo offered Jill, who fears permanent scars, and Joel a $5,000 refund. They refused.
“They’re crazy,” Gucciardo said about his ex-friends-turned-mortal-enemies. “We’ve had no [bedbug] problems. There are all kinds of things in the New York press about outbreaks in New York City.
“There’s a very high probability that they brought the bedbugs with them.”
Rubbish, say Jill and Joel.
Gucciardo said he called an exterminator, and “the house was habitable 24 hours after treatment.”
But professionals tell me eradicating the bugs isn’t so easy. Orkin sprays three times before declaring a house bedbug free, but only for a month.
Missy Henriksen, spokeswoman for the National Pest Management Association, which reps bug slayers, said bedbug strikes have increased 71 percent recently. “Five years ago, members were averaging one or two calls a year. Now they get that many in a week, with some who’ve gotten 50 calls a week or more.”
Yikes.
“We are Ground Zero for bedbugs in the United States,” said Douglas Stern, owner of Stern Environmental Group exterminators. He said travelers ship vermin from abroad. “In the Hamptons, the help could be bringing them in.”
“This is not a $40-a-night Red Roof Inn trip,” said Joel and Jill’s — you guessed it — lawyer, Douglas Hoffer. “They were off for summer vacation. They hired a nanny from overseas.”
The long, hot summer proceeds. Jill and Joel rented another house for $23,000, but want all their money back from the first.
Jill pronounced her new abode “very clean.”
Ick. Bring back DDT before we’re all pointing fingers and scratching.
MISPLACED SYMPATHY IN DROWNING TRAGEDY
The tragedy that took a Harlem girl of 12 and devastated the city still rips at the heart. Nicole Suriel, who could not swim, last month drowned on a school trip after she was allowed to swim off a beach without lifeguards.
A school-system investigation was launched. The Long Island town where the drowning occurred has opened a criminal investigation, as it should.
Meanwhile, Columbia Secondary School has found absolution in the pages of The New York Times. A warm, fuzzy and nauseating article this week tells how the principal of the school, described as a cross between Harvard and a day spa, is fighting to keep his job, as is the teacher who oversaw chaos as someone’s baby died.
It won’t bring Nicole back. But heads should roll.
Firefighter’s pension just breathtaking
John McLaughlin retired as a city fire lieutenant on a fat disability pension of $86,000 a year, tax-free. There is a punch line.
As The Post’s Carl Campanile reported, McLaughlin claims he suffers from breath-taking asthma. Yet the 55-year-old, known sarcastically in the town of Long Beach as “Johnny Lungs,” regularly competes as a distance runner. McLaughlin, now a councilman, has run all 26.2 miles of the New York City Marathon and takes part in triathlons, which involve gut-wrenching bouts of biking and swimming, the thought of which makes me want to gasp.
The “disabled” McLaughlin’s superhuman feats won’t stop the incoming checks, which are three-quarters of his former salary, paid courtesy of your taxes and mine. Suckers.
$oaking moguls is rich in irony
No surprise that folks toiling in securities and commodities contribute 10 times the tax revenue to this city that workers in bloated local government fork over. That’s an average of $21,543 a year per worker vs. a piddling $2,071, at last count.
Think about that the next time you moan when your useless subway line is cut. Tax the titans out of town? We need the rich more than they need us.
A new low for Hi
Mom was right. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
Cracked lovebirds Hiram Monserrate and Karla Giraldo are back! Hiram, who lost his state Senate seat after his conviction in the scariest boy-girl fight since Mel Gibson, persuaded a judge to lift the protective order that kept the crazy kids apart. Hi and Karla kissed and left a Queens court together.
Sweetie, don’t say I didn’t warn you.