Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  I was young and free. Nothing could hurt me. Nothing. Not this preppy man-boy smiling and reminding me of someone who’d soon graduate and begin a life of shaking a lot of hands, feeding a lot of bullshit to those eating from the buffets of gullibility, probably the type of guy to kiss a lot of ass and end up a senator.

  The heat is sticky, the kind that clings to a person’s skin, even when she’s not sweating. It is the kind of early-September day in South Carolina when you wish you could tear off your clothes and run through a sprinkler for hours like we did as children. Relief appears nowhere because this part of the world quit breathing in August. No wind. No breeze. Just the fevered yawn of a day that won’t relent and give over to an evening offering mercy.

  The overworked sun begins its descent, streaking the sky in hot passion: purples, swirling pinks and oranges, like Day-Glo colors and neon crayons. I stare at those shades and think they can’t possibly be real, almost as if they’re in one of those cheap paintings they sell in beach gift shops.

  My date is inside chilling beer and cloning himself, probably planning his attack on my innocence as I sit unleashed from a home life that kept me tethered to good morals and choices, all out of parental fear and a conscience instilled from church camps and Sunday mornings. Bad girls don’t earn real love. They get boys who lust and, later, reputations clinging like black tar for life.

  I am drinking a Tab but waiting on something more potent, something to transport me from the sheltered, small-town Georgia girl to this college coed in South Carolina.

  I am part teen, part adult, but not old enough to vote or drink legally. I have been a college freshman for two days, and already snagged a date with a senior who is president of this fraternity where the beach music blares and the beer cools in ice-packed metal tubs. I notice it’s a cheap canned beer, one I’d never heard of. My date is supposed to be the campus catch, but I eye him from the front porch with suspicion as he spins the cans, hurrying their chill for the thirsty crowd cramming the small frat house that’s really a ranch-style brick home, the kind with three bedrooms and two baths where families of four begin their lives and sit around the dinner table over mashed potatoes and English peas.

  I’m leery of these people who all walk the same, talk the same, dance the same, drink too much and, mostly, pursue a campus lifestyle driven by the needy release of what’s inside their boxers.

  Only I don’t know this yet. But I will…by morning.

  This small Christian college is known for its tough academics, curfews and the outrageous parties thrown on fraternity row—a cul-de-sac of newly built ranchers with Greek letters glued to the bricks and the potential for just about anything once the front doors open, the music blasting and the beer flowing into throats and bloodstreams that will send messages to the brain that it’s OK to take advantage of a drunk girl.

  This is the late seventies and no one has ever gone to jail for raping an intoxicated coed. Who cares that she’s passed out and has no brain function—save for the ability to produce respirations? This is enough for consent in their twisted minds. She’s breathing. Her skin is warm. She’s alive. I’ll just fuck her.

  I am really still a girl, and the youngest freshman here due to a kink in the Georgia school system years ago that allowed a 5-year-old to enter first grade. My experiences with boys are limited to a handful of encounters, mostly in a silver Toyota wagon with the one skinny guy I dated my senior year and a fleeting meeting beneath a weeping willow with a bowlegged lifeguard a month before coming here.

  My date is considered by others as handsome, but I’m swallowing lukewarm Tab and thinking his are the kind of good looks with ulterior motives. There’s not much kindness in his eyes, or the hungry smiles he throws my way as he tends the bar, a job he seems born to do. His teeth are too straight and white, his posture too perfect. Boys with his breeding tend to mimic thoroughbred dogs: feisty and aggressive, pumped with way too much confidence and cockiness.

  He’s not about to move from the huge tin tub on the counter packed with ice and beer. He’s trying hard to get them cold, rotating them as if plates on sticks and simultaneously spinning on his Docksides as Chairman of the Board sings, “Give Me Just A Little More Time,” and he mouths the words.

  I instantly feel the goose bumps of disgust rise upon my flesh, and don’t like him but think I should try since he’s so beloved on this campus. He must have something going for him, something redeeming.

  He asked me out the first day of school. I was in the cafeteria and had arrived on campus with a bad home perm, a killer tan from spending the summer as a lifeguard, and long, thin legs from a devotion to jogging and a fear of fat. I was pretty from a distance, but up close one could see a nose on the large side, and skin still broken out in places, traces of adolescence lingering. I lined my eyes in brown eye shadow, double-coated them with Maybelline’s Great Lash in the pink and green tube, and wore Sally Hansen’s frosted pink lipstick twelve to eighteen hours a day.

  At the end of the first day at this college of under a thousand students, an older girl came into our dorm where we were all watching TV and eating air-popped Orville Redenbacher and made an announcement.

  “Susan Gambrell,” she said, “you have been voted by the entire Greek system the second-cutest freshman on campus. First place goes to Katie Graham.” She was a petite blonde, adorable.

  It seems they took a poll in the cafeteria that day, and by evening, I had a date with this man working the beer and singing, “What Kind Of Fool (Do You Think I Am),” while giving me looks that made me want to go home to Georgia and sit in our green living room while Mama fried chicken and Daddy mowed the lawn. Why hadn’t he asked out Katie Graham instead?

  I suddenly don’t want to be here. This is all too fast. Emotionally, I am still a girl, but this is the course expected of middle-and upper-middle-class kids all over America. You went to college.

  No matter that I wanted to be on All My Children with Erica Kane, playing her long-lost sister (my idea) because people said I favored Susan Lucci. I knew I could act and perhaps be a Courtland or a long-lost member of the Martin family if the writers didn’t go for the Erica Kane connection. Maybe, the Wallingfords would adopt me.

  Mom and Dad said I’d end up on the streets, most likely a prostitute on drugs if I went to New York or Hollywood. They always thought the worst of anything that veered from the norm. A French kiss meant teen pregnancy. A few beers meant a sullied reputation. A trip to the big city most likely led to falling into the porn industry or prey for murder.

  So here I am at this frat house instead of on the set of All My Children , watching this scene unfold, sun setting but not cooling, doors opening on all the family-style ranchers and each fraternity trying to out-blast the other with their stereos playing beach music, the brothers tapping kegs and testosterone.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” my date hollers from his post at the bar, which is really a Formica kitchen counter. “I got a cold one with your name all over it.” He grins and I can tell he is way too in love with himself. He’s the kind who thinks the world exists for his eyes only, and that when his senior year winds down all sorts of offers will come his way. He’s probably right. He will run for political office for sure. On the Republican ticket.

  “Be there in a minute,” I say, inhaling the heat that feels like those August days when you can’t breathe because the air is nothing but a hot fog, almost like an exhalation. I pour the last of my Tab in the shrubbery and walk inside feeling frumpy in the chinos a girl on my hall insisted I wear instead of my purple fake-leather pants that resembled the pair Peter Frampton wore on one of his a
lbum covers.

  The air-conditioning is no match for the heat slipping in from outside and the loamy breath of single-minded frat boys, bodies shoulder to shoulder as the night deepens.

  I’m not sure why I’m here in this South Carolina college town so small there isn’t even a Burger King. It is 1979, and the nearest McDonald’s is a half hour away. This is what I think as I take the beer and pop the metal tab, which curls like a sharp tongue. I pull long sips from the can. Cold, yeasty relief: my lover, my cure, my confidence.

  The music changes and The O’Kaysions are singing “Girl Watcher,” and everybody rushes to the wood floor to shag, a dance I’d never seen in Georgia but is the official state dance of South Carolina, learned mostly in a town called Ocean Drive, near Myrtle Beach. I don’t know how to shag and am not keen on learning. It looks stupid, like Izods and Docksides.

  I want to go home. I would rather be at the YMCA, in the gym standing against the wall while a rock band plays “China Grove,” and people dance any old way they want, throwing their bodies around or barely moving at all.

  This shag thing seems to have a formula: upper body relaxed, one hand holding the partner’s, and each person shuffling from foot to foot as if their shoes—always flats—are magnets and the floor is made of metal.

  The man leads. It’s almost like a slow jitterbug, and it seems corny to me and I’d rather hear Boston or Journey than these bands from the 60s. I’m not in my element. I drain the can of beer and accept another. I can feel the alcohol in my blood beginning the seduction of my sanity.

  It would be like this for years, but I wouldn’t know it. I would crave this booze, this buzz, the way a newborn needs milk to survive.

  My first shag lesson would come tonight, along with other lessons, ugly ones that haunt me to this day, staining my good name: first this man who is holding his hand out to me, asking me to shag, later by others offering their beers and empty promises.

  “Ready for another brewsky?” my date shouts from the din of music and laughter.

  Yes, yes I was. Two beers down and I am ready for more of anything to transport me from this house, this college, this town. I take it, hold it up as the foam runs down my forearm, as this man grabs my hand with his own, which is too soft to have ever known a day’s work. He tries to teach me to shag and I laugh and stumble and somehow get a few steps right. I am feeling better, too good now, as the music ends and everybody claps. I never understood why people clap after dancing. What is the point? Who are they clapping for? Themselves? The stereo?

  My date returns to the bar and I go back to the porch where a girl from my dorm is smoking and gossiping with three other girls. This is better, I think, and am relaxing and taking drags off a girl named Claire’s Virginia Slims Menthol Lights, the nicotine mixing with alcohol so that I feel beyond tipsy, almost drunk.

  My date sashays outside. He is trying to be Mr. Hot Stuff in front of the ladies. “Hiding from me again,” he says, smooth as glass, winking at Claire. “Come on back. I don’t want my brothers to think you’re free. You’re mine tonight, sweetheart.”

  “Sixty Minute Man” pulses almost sexually from the speakers and the floor becomes a sea of pink, green, Izod and madras shirts, Docksides and Topsiders squeaking on the sticky floor.

  “In a minute,” I say, gulping the beer, feeling a comforting burn in my cheeks and better by the minute. It was the same feeling I had the fall I turned 16 and decided I was no longer willing to be a high school Goody Two Shoes. All my friends drank. They split six-packs with boys or each other and drove around until the cans and bottles were drained and the hormones had peaked. They parked cars by the big lake in LaGrange and let the boys feel them up, sometimes even allowing them to slip a hand beneath their waistbands.

  I never did. Mama scared us. She said our reputation was all we had, and to lose that meant losing everything. “Your name is important. Once it’s cheapened and lost, you’ll never get it back.”

  My friend Gena had a purple Vega and we’d drive to Poor Boy’s Two, the name of a shady little convenience store known to sell six-packs to minors. We’d ease up to the drive-thru window, our hearts pounding. The owner didn’t want us coming in. He’d brown-bag it, double charge us, and tell us to hurry it up before the cops came sniffing around.

  All I could think about during the summer before entering my freshman year in college was the refrigerator, the tiny brown box all newcomers receive with a $50 deposit. My own cube of cold space to stock with anything I wanted.

  That was a no-brainer. A given.

  I imagined going to Kroger, the brand-new checkbook in my purse, bank filled with the money I’d earned that summer waiting tables, lifeguarding and teaching swimming lessons. I’d walk down the coldest aisle filled with nothing but beer and wine. Mama and Daddy would never know.

  I’d select pony Millers, Schlitz and wine coolers, the official beverages of my teen-aged years with dear friends Jill and Margaret, and consumed while riding in Jill’s brown Pinto. We were cheerleaders for the Grangers, a team that was always winning and going to the state play-offs. We dated some of the players, but mostly I liked that scrawny twin who sang in a band called Snatch and played lead guitar.

  I envisioned him as lead singer David Pack from the group Ambrosia. They had the same sweet voice. I’d go to his gigs and drink fairly responsibly with the other band member’s girlfriends. We all had 70s Farrah hair, and I often wore my purple fake-leather pants and heels. We’d sit up front, where people would make no mistake: We were with the band. We were the girls they’d go home with. Not those in the center of the hotel lounge, but us. The girls with long, thin legs, frosted pink lipstick, our hair with wings sprayed stiff as pine needles.

  I was careful about my drinking then. Mama would sniff me like an old dog does its bed before lying in it. She knew, because she wasn’t a virgin to alcohol, that it loosened inhibitions and might make her daughters realize they had urges between their legs. God forbid they drink enough to let a boy have his way with her.

  So she twitched her long nose and smelled us, me in particular because I was 16 and out of braces and entering a stage where parents had begun saying, “We’d never have believed it, but Susan Gambrell is turning out to be quite a looker.”

  I was unfazed by my long legs and little ass, attributes I’d kill for now. I paid them no mind when I saw them tanned and lithe in the mirror. All I could see were the flaws: the big ears, the flat chest, my mother’s nose, arms way too long for my body, olive skin fanned with pimples in the oily zones.

  I was awkward in my body. I didn’t feel pretty, not unless four pony Millers, condensation running off the 8-ounce bottles, found their golden way down my needy throat. I knew that once the four beers were in I was beautiful and the curtains of insecurity would part like those on a stage. My skin would tingle and the beer lit my cheeks like pink roses. The feeling was magical, giddy, and I could be anything or anyone as long as the beer didn’t run out.

  There wasn’t enough time to drink all I craved during the high school years. Mom and Dad never went to bed until I came home, the loud, often mufflerless Vegas and Firebirds pulling up our steep drive and some guy with a thick neck and questionable blood alcohol level would try to walk me to the door, sticking his tongue in my mouth along with the Wintergreen Certs.

  Mama would be in her thin gown and pillow-pressed face. I would see her breasts beneath the fabric, knowing she was tired but too curious about her daughter’s condition to go back to bed.

  “How was it?” she’d ask, walking toward me, her feet silent as they sank in the green carpet.
I’d hear the hum of the refrigerator and my father’s barn-animal snores.

  “It was pretty fun,” I’d say, trying not to exhale and hoping the mints covered my tracks. “I’m tired. Good night, Mom. I love you.” I’d hold my breath and kiss her soft cheek.

  She wouldn’t let me pass without a hug. I’d grind my teeth into the mint, hoping to squeeze out more wintergreen and mask the traces of my indiscretions. Most of the time, it worked. Or at least I thought it did.

  Maybe she knew but realized I was sober enough to get home in one piece, clothes on and walk like a debutant to bed.

  No more pretending now that I’m free. No more holding back. I am on my fourth beer and shagging like I’ve been doing it for years. A disco ball glitters above the floor, and I never noticed it earlier. I tilt my head and stare until I’m dizzy and all the colors of the sunset mix with the untamable hues of the ball. A hand, my date’s, passes me another beer, and I think nothing as I crack it open, drinking and dancing way into the night.

  The last thing I remember is falling onto a sofa pushed back against the wall to make room for the party crowd. I feel sick and heavy, as if I can’t take another step. The room sways and my stomach recoils. A girl from the dorm, older and wiser, takes a wet paper towel and presses it across my forehead.

  “Are you going to throw up?” she asks.

  I try to answer but can’t talk.

  “It’s OK, Susan. I’ll take you to the bathroom. Happens to all of us until we get the hang of it.”

  I remember nothing else. Just the cold paper towel, the kindness of this upperclassman handing me a Coke, the bodies blurring as they continued dancing, and the struggle to keep from vomiting or falling asleep.

  After that, the world goes blank. Black. A deep, dark hole of nothingness. Maybe the party kept going. Maybe not. Probably so.