“Lice Lice Baby”

Unfortunately I had those little buggers before; when I was younger of course, now I keep my hair shorter than a butch lesbian and keep all the Walmart shoppers away with a stick…of deodorant that is.Needless to say it was very uncomfortable and not really all that enjoyable, I walked around with my hands up in my head as if I was constantly lathering with some kind of invisible shampoo.

They used my head as party central, and they tore it up like some drunken teens on Spring break. They were zooming around my head like as if they were Jeff Gordon and my head was the Daytona 500. I felt like a mobile high-rise apartment building, with my head being the penthouse, and there were more residences up there than rednecks at an NRA convention.

It was very embarrassing to say the least, especially when I was called into the school nurse’s office to have my head checked.She was sifting through my hair like as if she was a hunter, in rubber gloves and armed with a comb, searching for her prey, the infamous lice bug.

She found what she was looking for and called my parents to come pick me up so they could take me home to try to exterminate the bugs. When my parents finally got there, I was escorted out the back door like I was some kind of celebrity, trying to beat the crowd out of the gates.

My parents tried many ways to get rid of the little bastards. One way was drenching my head in pure kerosene, and since they were smokers they did it with a lit cigarette dangling from their lips. So there I sat in the tub, buck-naked with a head full of kerosene and one ash away from being Michael Jackson in a Pepsi commercial, needless to say it wasn't fun.

The whole time I had that stuff on my head I was fearful it would drip into my eyes forever blinding me, turning me into a highly combustible Helen Keller.

Thankfully that didn't happen; everything went off without a hitch, or so we thought. We later found out that kerosene only killed the adult bugs, and didn't do jack squat to the eggs.

Like in the Alien movies, if the space marines only killed the adults and let the eggs live, they would find themselves wearing a facehugger and giving birth to a bastard alien baby in no time flat, making all their cleanup efforts for naught. The same is true for lice, well except for the bastard alien baby thingy, as far as I know that won’t happen. 

If not treated correctly these creepy critters won’t go away, like Bebe’s kids, they don’t die, they multiply. So a few weeks later we found ourselves right back in the same situation, but this time my parents tried some over-the-counter lice treatment and spoke to the professionals before proceeding…which in this case was other parents who experienced the same thing.

We did the shampoo, washed every possible thing in the house we could, and dug in each other’s heads with a comb looking for eggs like a pack of gorillas cleaning each other. This time it seemed to work better, they seemed to be gone and killed dead, we were as happy as African Americans the day they heard O.J. was not guilty.

It was a rough time for sure, and I’m glad it’s over with, but I can tell you for sure if I ever get lice again I’m going completely bald like Moby.

MJM