whatever happened to fanny fly?

Did that really happen? I was out about two thousand bucks, so something sure as hell went down. Anyway.

I found this mosquito in my apartment the very next morning. I don’t remember ever seeing a mosquito in my apartment before.

I remember I was watching the movie Killer Bees at the time, the 1974 version with Gloria Swanson, not that 2002 ripoff with C. Thomas Howell. It was Swanson’s best performance since Sunset Boulevard, and her second to last before retiring to veggie burgers.

I first saw the mosquito while lying on my bed watching TV and my initial thoughts were that it must be inside the movie itself. I keep my apartment thick with bug gas, just in case. Chemicals be damned, it’s the creepy little critters I’m afraid of most.

In fact, I had just set off a bomb that morning, so naturally I figured the thing flying on my TV screen must be part of the movie. But soon it became clear: this pesky little insect buzzing around my apartment was not a member of the movie cast at all, but a real-life bloodsucker right there in the bedroom with me. I decided to stay completely still.

Just in case you’re wondering: No, it is not necessary for me to leave my apartment while blasting it with insecticides. I have this old WWI gas mask for just such occasions. Sure, it’s got a few holes in it, but do you have any idea how much a new one costs? I picked up this little beauty at a garage sale for just fifty cents. Works good enough for me. And all those poisons do a great job of killing not just bugs, but the germs in my apartment, and on my body as well.

After a few minutes, however, it occurred to me that this mosquito must be attracted to the light from the television. So, I switched off the TV and soon enough the bug was gone. But it would be back. I decided not to turn the TV on again. In fact, I decided not to get out of bed at all but instead pulled the covers up over my head. I figured it would be safe to get out in the morning. Vampires don’t much like coming out in the daytime.

By morning, I didn’t see little Dracula anywhere, so I sat down for a nice bowl of oatmeal. As I drew up spoonful after spoonful, I looked around wondering how the hell it even got in. No idea.

It must be dead by now, I figured; but as I drew up my last bite there it was, sitting right there on the end of my spoon. I tossed the utensil and ran for my life.

So I repeated my little bug-bomb routine, complete with antique gas mask. I did it twice. No way anything could survive a blast like that. The only problem was, there was no body, no proof of death. Even so, I was convinced: No way it could have survived a bomb like that.

The whole day went by without a single sighting and that was good enough for me. Even though I was sure the mosquito must have come in through a crack in a window somewhere, still one can never be too careful. I decided to batten down the hatches just the same. I taped up all the windows, blocked off all the vents, and stuffed a towel underneath the door. I’d like to see anything get in now. Problem was, I didn’t know I had just locked myself in with the little monster.

Thus began a series of days I’d just as soon forget. That little bugger, it really knew how to get to me. Of course, it was still there flying in front of the TV. I’d switch from the bedroom to the living room, but it didn’t matter; it followed me wherever I went. It only got worse from there.

Then it was landing on my food. I couldn’t open a can fast enough to stop it from crawling all over my Beanie-Weenies. So I decided I just wouldn’t eat. If I wasn’t careful, the little gallinipper was going to starve me out. But it didn’t stop there.

Next thing I knew, it was landing in my tea. So I decided not to drink anything, either. I had to take the initiative.

I bombed the place over and over but it was me, not Mr. Mosquito, who seemed to be taking all the hits. No amount of insecticide seemed to have any effect on it, even as I was getting dizzy as hell.

I tried every kind of bug killer and mosquito repellent known to man. I lit citronella candles, put out dishes of soapy water, ate more garlic than Paul Prudhomme. Nothing worked. Did you know that eating garlic really does repel mosquitoes? Now that I think about it, that must be where vampire enthusiasts got that from in the first place. Makes sense.

I thought maybe I should take up cigarettes because I read somewhere that mosquitoes are repelled by the smoke. Then, I thought again. For one thing, there was no way I was going to start smoking. Secondly, if a mosquito was smart enough to stay away from cigarettes, then I should be too.

Then I heard you can kill mosquitoes by drowning them in booze. Seriously. Mosquitoes are attracted to alcohol. Look it up.

I thought I could set out a glass of wine and just let the little sot drink itself to death. While mosquitoes actually prefer beer, it’s wine that leads them to their ultimate demise.

So I filled a glass halfway with Chardonnay and went to bed, confident that by the next day my problem would be solved. It wasn’t.

In the morning, I found that the wine in the glass had indeed gone down, but there was no dead mosquito. Anywhere. Day by day, the glass got emptier and emptier until at last the wine was all gone. Great. Now, not only did I have a mosquito flying around inside my apartment, but a drunken one at that. The real problem was, I know how alcoholics are. Once you get them started, there’s just no stopping them.

That little drill bug certainly flew around like it was drunk. Maybe all the alcohol made it think less about drinking my blood. Maybe it made it even more aggressive. How was I to know? Next thing I knew, it landed on my arm, right there on my forearm. I froze in fear.

It was looking right at the TV. I happened to be watching the movie Infestation at the time. Then, the mosquito turned its head and looked right at me. For the very first time, I looked straight into its face. If I hadn’t seen it with my very own eyes, I never would have believed it.

It was Fanny. She didn’t say a word, but it was her, all right. I mean, whoever heard of a mosquito talking, anyway? I wanted to talk to her, tell her how much I missed her, but instead she was intent on watching the movie. That’s okay, I know how annoying it is when someone talks during a movie.

When the movie was over, she started getting antsy. So I quickly loaded up another: The Mist. The Mist is awesome.

While The Mist has these amazingly huge, bug-like creatures, it was taking too long for them to make their entrance and I could tell Mosquito Fanny was getting bored. I fast forwarded it and that seemed to make her happy. In fact, it made her so happy that she fell asleep right there on my arm. It had been a long day and I imagined she was all tuckered out. Me, too.

The next few days were bliss. All we did was watch movies. I suggested Arachnophobia, Charlotte’s Web, even The Princess and the Frog. Skeeter Fanny, or Fanny Fly, as I called her now, gave me this long look and that’s when I realized: Of course; how could I have been so insensitive?

We watched all kinds of movies together: Empire of the Ants, Highly Dangerous, and Invasion of the Bee Girls. I was even open to some newer films like Mimic, Starship Troopers, and Slither. She enjoyed Naked Lunch, but A Bug’s Life, she really liked that one.

By the third day, it was as if we had never been apart at all. That’s when she finally spoke to me.

“Thank you for the wine,” said my Fanny Fly.

She was so beautiful. She had long eyelashes that fluttered when she spoke. She was the cutest damn buzz fly I ever did see.

“How did you know I like Chardonnay?”

I told her I’m just the kind of guy who pays attention to stuff like that. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was actually trying to murder her at the time.

“And all that gas, that bug spray?”

Ants, I told her. I think they came in through the drain pipe.

“I have a lot of friends who are ants,” she said.

I told her that’s okay, these ants were not her friends. These were different ants. From Anaheim.

I was so happy. Fanny was back.

We did everything together. We ate together, drank together, even took baths together. She stayed right there on my forearm the whole time while we listened to Fulmer go on and on about how some Chinese street gang had kidnapped his girlfriend and was currently holding her hostage down in Chinatown.

It seems the evil sorcerer Lo Pan, cursed for two thousand years and relegated to the spirit world, needs Fulmer’s girlfriend’s body so he can return to physical form here on Earth. Fulmer says he and a friend of his, a truck driver by the name of Jack Burton, are going down to Chinatown to get her back.

Wait. That’s no girlfriend, that’s Big Trouble in Little China, starring Kurt Russell, directed by John Carpenter. Fucking Fulmer. Sometimes, I wonder. Nevertheless, I love John Carpenter. That gave me a great idea of what to watch next: The Thing.

After that, we watched Bug (the 1975 version by Jeannot Szwarc with Joanna Miles), THEM!, and The Wasp Woman. Then we watched The Black Scorpion, Evil Spawn, and Attack of the Giant Leeches. I love the 1970s. The 70s were what the 60s always wanted to be when it grew up.

Fanny’s favorite, of course, was The Fly, the 1958 classic with Vincent Price. Why The Fly? Because all the movies about mosquitoes, like Skeeters and Mansquito, even Mosquito itself, were all total jokes. Quite frankly, I think she was embarrassed to even be associated with them.

In fact, the only decent movie ever made with the word mosquito in the title was Peter Wier’s The Mosquito Coast, sort of a Swiss Family Robinson meets Lord of the Flies, and it wasn’t even about mosquitoes at all but a crazy white guy who decides to move his whole family down to the jungle and make ice there. WTF?

Why is it always white people who get such crazy ideas? Why is it always white people inventing contraptions to incubate themselves from the world around them? Why is it always white people depleting the Earth of its natural resources, polluting and destroying the environment at any cost? Why? Because white people are not from this planet, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get back home. That’s why.

The Fly, starring Vincent Price. Now, there’s a classic.

We must have watched it a dozen times. It was at that point, in fact, that my Fanny Fly insisted we watch David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake, as well. Believe it or not, I had never seen it before.

I explained to her that I do not do remakes. But she was persistent. I explained to her also that I do not do Jeff Goldblum. She didn’t let up.

Eventually, she won out—like all women do—even if that woman is a blood-sucking parasite. Especially if that woman is a blood-sucking parasite!

I agreed to watch the David Cronenberg remake. Some remakes are actually quite good, I’ll admit, like Scarface and The Thing; and besides, I really like David Cronenberg.

As the movie started, my Fanny Fly landed right on the tip of my nose. That’s how we liked watching movies now, as close as we could be. Fanny had the best seat in the house.

While the newer version of The Fly seemed to be competent, it had much less to do with actual science than the original. Sure, the makeup and special effects were superior, but that was to be expected. The first question I had was: Where was Mad Scientist Jeff Goldblum getting all those baboons?

Not surprisingly, the movie was more about shock value than it was storyline. And of course, there were the usual product-placement ads for Rolex, Sony, Memorex, Pepsi, Maserati, Budweiser, and Miller beer. I hate product-placement ads. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t watch modern movies. The Memorex line seemed especially clumsy.

I have to admit, however, that Goldblum, as bizarre as he always is, was perfect in the role of “lab jockey gone awry.” What can I say? I actually liked it, especially the scene where he melts the jerk-man’s hand and foot with his puke. That was especially good. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. As I said, I really like David Cronenberg. Movies like Videodrome, Scanners, and Shivers, just to name a few.

Like so many David Cronenberg films, this movie wasn’t so much scary as it was strange. Unlike the campy B-movie of the 1950s, this version left little to the imagination. First, fly hairs started coming out of Mad Scientist Jeff Goldblum’s back. Then, his face started breaking out in boils. While it was no secret what was really going on, I never would have guessed what would happen next.

In any good remake, the director takes it for granted that the audience already knows what’s going on—even if they don’t. The reason for this is that even if they haven’t seen the original, they’ve at least heard about it. For me, the big surprise was not coming at the end, but was right around the corner.

Fanny Fly started moving up and down my nose and I could tell something big was about to happen. Then, not long after Mad Scientist Goldblum started pulling all his fingernails out, that’s when it all went down. That’s when Mad Scientist Goldblum finally discovered what was going on, that he had not been turned into a superhuman creature at all, but instead a hybrid of man and fly.

Okay, so that part I already knew. What I didn’t know, what was different in this version from the original, was the name the scientist gave to this newly formed man/fly creature.

That’s when I realized Fanny Fly wasn’t bouncing on my nose anymore. Even worse, that’s when I realized the mosquito on my face wasn’t Fanny at all. I realized this now, but I realized it way too late.

The name the scientist gave to the new hybrid creature was a combination of his own name and the fly. The name of the scientist was Brundle, Seth Brundle. The name of the creature was Brundlefly. Brundle Fly. It was Brundlefly on my nose, not Fanny Fly. How could I have been so naive. Love does that to you sometimes.

And then, Mad Scientist Jeff Goldblum said something that reminded me of a song. It went like this:

 

 

I know an old lady who swallowed a fly

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly

Perhaps she’ll die

 

 

Next thing I knew, Brundlefly had flown straight into my mouth, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.

I leapt out of bed, heaving and coughing and flailing about like a man on fire; but there was no trace of Brundlefly anywhere. He must have gone down my throat. He was probably buzzing around my stomach right now. That must have been his insidious plot all along.

I gargled everything I could find but realized, it was too late for that. No amount of Listerine was going to help me now. Now was the time for extreme measures. So, I opened up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and swallowed it down like so much castor oil. It made me sick as hell, but there was no way that little bastard was going to survive a whole pint of pure disinfectant. I can only imagine Brundlefly died a quick and fitting death.

After all, it wasn’t Brundlefly fault. Brundlefly was a simple creature, not equipped for the persuasive powers of television. Heck, most humans can’t deal with television, much less an innocent little mosquito.

While I still worried Brundlefly may be carrying some infectious disease and that even a little trace of it might have made its way into my bloodstream, I knew there was nothing I could do about it now. Then I was reminded of that song again, the nursery rhyme Mad Scientist Jeff Goldblum was reciting in the movie. That’s when I remembered how the song ends, and took comfort in it.

 

I know an old lady who swallowed a horse

She’s alive and well of course!

 

 

Whatever happened to Brundlefly? While I take it for granted I did indeed swallow him down, the truth is that I had no actual proof. He could have just flown away. He could have died of natural causes, for all I know. After all, a male mosquito only lives about ten days. Even so, I later learned that a mosquito swallowed by a human usually suffocates quickly, or is dissolved by stomach acid, just like in the movie.

Days and weeks passed and my physical health was fine. I found that if anything was hurt, it was my emotional state. I really missed my Fanny Fly. One thing was for sure: I would never watch the 1986 version of The Fly again. I knew there was a reason I don’t watch remakes. Sometimes, you’ve just got to stick to the original, or suffer the consequences.