Lice, Lice, Lice Baby!

othing makes a parent feel more like a degenerate knuckle-sucking bat-shit crazy shut-in than finding lice on their kid's head.

When I was a child progeny, I lived in rural Alabama. Took the bus to school. I lived in a decent part of the county, good people, lots of churches, good soil. But there were pockets of insanity that can only happen when people are deeply isolated from public transportation and cable. The trailer kids, for instance.
My bus would stop at the trailer kids' place which was a dirt white single-wide set about a football field back off the main highway at the end of a weed choked puddle pocked red dirt driveway. It was never quite level and the door was gone. In the two years I rode the bus to school, that trailer never had a door. The kids would be standing at the side of the highway in perfectly starched shirts, perfectly pressed pants, lunchboxes in hand, their faces poking out through a pale circle of clean. It was incongruous and weird and to this day the open door of that trailer is like the drooling maul of Hell in my head.

When I found a fully adult louse crawling through my son's head my whole house morphed into that crooked doorless tornado target. I was disgusted. I wanted to move.

You read the lice notices from school and you secretly smirk and think, God which aborigines' kids are these? And wallow in the self satisfied luxury of knowing it ain't yours. Until it is.

I'd hunted for lice before. I'd held a promising dandruff flake under the magnifying glass with my wife leaning over my shoulder, laptop open to a googled image of a bug zoomed to Cthulian proportion. But we'd never found one. We just spent a lot of time tsking at the parents of children without lice black-tie ball and fund raiser, champagne glass to our lips, asking in a nervous whisper, You think it was the Greenburg's kids?

But no. It was my kids wearing a lice wig. And I had to make the call to the school and I realized that even if every other parent in the school didn't get a note saying BEWARE THE FAMILY G FOR THEY ARE BESOT WITH VERMIN, the frikkin receptionist knows. Might as well wear a sandwich board.

So I buy enough chemicals to qualify as a superfund site, and dunk Roon's head into a bucket of foul smelling gunk and carefully pull the NIT COMB through his hair and inspect it under the glass after every pull. My wife, who used to be an industrial hygienist has gone into hazmat mode. She's full-on FEMA. She announces we have to wash all the sheets and blankets.

All. Of. Them.

Everyone takes their special bath and does the monkey grooming daisy chain and we stay up till 3 am washing bed linens until we're reasonably certain the lice are dead. We wait three days and do it again because the eggs you missed might've hatched. We refuse all phone calls and don't go anywhere. We might as well be quarantined with a great big crimson L stitched on our chests.

So I send the kid to school with a note explaining our multifaceted assault on the infestation. They call me to take him home. He still has lice.

I stick him under a lamp and get the glass and there, behind his ear--eggs. Worse as I'm looking at the eggs, an adult louse wiggles out from behind a hair. Let me tell you, these things are not hard to see. It was like a rhinoceros. I actually smacked it and Roon yelped. So we do another day of treatment. I send him to school. They send him back.

I buy another truckload of chemicals. I spray the mattresses, the couch, the love seat, wash ALL of his clothes, spray his drawers, spray the dog, throw away his baseball hats, tooks, combs. I throw away all our brushes, buy more at the dollar store, get another bottle of VILE FOUL LICE KILLING PASTE and slather all our heads like I'm laying brick. Me and Darth Mom seriously consider shaving our heads and having the house fumigated. Another mom happens to call us to see if Roon has chicken pox because if he does, she wants her kids to get it and get the whole chicken pox thing over with and I admit the dark truth. She cracks up: Yeah, us too. She says her kids had it but they killed 'em with mayonnaise.

Mayon--naise?

Mayonnaise. Hellman's to be precise because when you bring out the Hellmans, you bring out the best. We put a chair in the middle of the kitchen and got some shower caps and to prove it wasn't entirely bizarre, I went first and let the kids dope my head an inch deep. I smelled like a hoagie for an hour but I have to say, after shampooing it something like 30 times, my hair felt luxuriously thick and manageable.

So we send the kid to school the nest day and he sticks. We do the sandwich head trick three days later much to everyone's hilarity, and we've been lice free ever since.