Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  When the early sun of a Sunday morning finds its way into the creases of my closed eyes, I awaken in a panic. My head throbs each time my heart beats. What time is it? Where am I?

  Something isn’t right. Something horrible has happened. What? What did I do? Why do I hurt down there?

  I am in a bed, oh, dear God, and not on the sofa where that nice girl from the dorm put me with the Coke and a couple of wet Bounty paper towels. The 22-year-old man who’d plied me with beer and beach music lies next to me sleeping on his side, breathing so quietly one might think him dead. I feel his calf and peek under the covers and see that he is naked. Acid rises in my throat as I quickly move my leg. How did I end up here? Oh, God, oh, no, oh, please, God, don’t let this be real.

  I feel a rush of cold air between my legs and realize my underwear and chinos are gone. My bottom hurts. I feel sticky and sore. This can’t be happening. I don’t remember even kissing this man, much less getting into bed with him.

  Please, God, don’t let him wake up. Please. Tears fall down my shamed face and I want to run home to LaGrange where the boys I knew didn’t do this to girls. I want to climb in Mama’s lap and nestle against her sheer nylon nightgown with my head on her breast and listen as her heart thumps the slow tune of love and reassurance.

  I tiptoe around the room, pale pink blood running down my leg from my most private, aching parts, and find my pants but not my underwear. I wonder later if it wasn’t part of the fraternity ritual after raping girls. Keep their panties. Hang them somewhere like a trophy.

  Only I don’t realize I’ve been raped. In 1979 if a girl drank too much and woke up without her panties and in bed with a man, then she was a slut and a whore and her name was forever tarnished.

  I run as fast as I can back to my dorm, slip in the side door, climb into bed and cry until sleep relieves me of the guilt. But only until I open my eyes three hours later.

  I cannot go into the cafeteria for lunch. Even if they did vote me second-prettiest freshman just a couple of days before.

  What in God’s name would they vote me now?

  Twenty years later they would have a name for this. Rape. Maybe statutory or date rape. And the man-boy who’d entered and destroyed my innocence would have a name, too. Date rapist. He’d go to court, his lawyers trying to prove consensual sex and airing everything they could find about the woman pressing charges.

  He may get a fine and community service. He may get nothing.

  But the victim would get everything. A reputation she could never shake. Decades of guilt that would be hard if not impossible to overcome.

  When the Bough Breaks

  W hy aren’t I dead? Why am I at the Comfort Inn & Suites at 11 AM trying to get a room, smelling of last night’s wine, bleeding and bruised and with a six-pack of Miller in my hand and a duffel bag in the other?

  “You’re Susan Reinhardt, aren’t you?” the young clerk trying to check me in early asks. “I love your column. You are so funny. Mom and I read you every morning and nearly pee in our pants laughing.”

  I smile because it’s expected. Inside, I’m rotting. My arms are swelling: biceps and forearms raw as uncooked meat from the beating with the back of a hairbrush. My eyes are bloodshot and my hair is covered in spilled Yellow Tail Shiraz and what appears to be dried vomit.

  “Thanks,” I say to the pretty girl trying to find a clean room hours before the normal 3 PM check-in time. She would type in her computer, then glance at me, sizing up the pathetic condition in which I’d arrived at her hotel.

  “I think I have some sort of flu.” I am lying. “I just need to get some sleep.” This part is true.

  “Let me see what I can do,” she says, and I tell her I’ll be out by the pool if it’s okay, and she says, “Sure. Whatever we can do to help, Mrs. Reinhardt.”

  “Susan. Just call me Susan.”

  Always smiling. Always onstage. Always trying to put on the outside face my insides don’t want to wear: roses and Gerbera daisies, when beneath the skin and Estée Lauder foundation, the 36-D bra, lay snakes waiting to release venom, fighting with a soul that searches for gratitude and God.

  I find a chair, the kind with plastic strips horizontal across the white framing. The kind that if you’re fat or if the chair is flawed, your ass slips through. I have a thin hotel towel that the blonde who likes my column gave me. I spread it out and set the six-pack by my side.

  My head is like its own heart outside my body, beating in the heat of a midmorning promising a July day like the kind we had in Georgia, the days when no one could catch her breath it was so hot.

  Already, it must have been close to 90 degrees. I twist off the lid of a bottle of Miller and drink half of the pale, gold liquid in one gulp. Almost immediately it mixes with last night’s near “accidental” suicide and gives me the illusion that everything is all right. Everything, I tell myself, will be fine. Sleep. That’s it. A couple nights of rest and good as new.

  It’s not quite noon and my kids are safe with their father who is a good man when it comes to raising children. I didn’t want anyone to see me in this condition, especially my two children.

  If only I could lie down for two days and not wake up, then my mind would clear and I wouldn’t think these crazy things people who have it so good in life have no business thinking. Depression is the dark blanket no one wants to cover up in.

  Ego, my daddy calls it. Dwelling on oneself is nothing but ego. Humility—he likes to say often that the only way to live right is through humility. “Remove self from your life and you’ll fulfill God’s plan. Self destroys.”

  Yes, Dad, it does. It tries, anyway.

  I have the Millers to stave off the black blanket of depression and the memories of last night’s insanity. There are four beers left, and maybe it will be enough. Probably not. The sun burns through my skin like a torch moving in closer. I am drifting in a sea of last night’s leftovers and the cold, cheap beer of my teens. Miller High Life. Brown Pintos, Gremlins, a purple Vega…good times. Boys who grinned with the shyness of youth and who wouldn’t look at women as things to hunt and capture for years.

  I close my eyes and see red and orange swirls because the sun is bright and I have no glasses. Time is something I don’t care about. Who knows how much is passing. I drink all the beer and jump into the pool, sinking to the bottom, wondering how long I can stay there, once again realizing no matter how bad the inner pain, the will to live is much stronger than the desire to die.

  I know a great man whose entire family committed suicide over a span of twenty years. First his mother, then his twin brothers, followed by his sister and finally his dad. He tried it twice, but is happy now and wrote his memoir. He is known as the Sole Survivor. I did a piece on him for the Washington Post and dozens of other papers, and for a while he was on all the talk shows.

  He isn’t going to follow his family’s tradition, he promises, and I believe him because he is strong and got therapy and found meaning in life. He knows he was spared for a purpose he intends to discover and fulfill.

  Wasn’t I? Shouldn’t I be dead? Not that I wanted to die, because, really I didn’t.

  Already, the sun has dried me from the pool water. The sweet girl comes out and says she’s managed to get a room clean and ready. “You can sleep all you want,” she says, and I smile at her as if the night before was just as wonderful as she must i
magine my “charmed life” to be. How could a woman be funny if her life wasn’t one big run of happy-go-lucky days and hijinks and capers?

  I’m on the radio a lot of mornings, cracking jokes, saying wild and supposedly hilarious things, or so they tell me. The hosts keep inviting me back. I deliver speeches all over the country that are more like stand-up comedy routines. People must think I have no problems, that life for me is one big sitcom of joy and joking and Lucille Ball–type activity.

  They know nothing of the darkness and periods of self-hatred and shame, the guilt—a gift that keeps on giving—that has followed me since junior high.

  I rise from my chair, the backs of my thighs stuck to the plastic strips and wet with heat and sweat. I find a pair of shorts and wonder how in the world I had the foresight to pack anything during last night’s dash for death. Or was it just a sprint for attention? Notice me. Save me. Please. Help. Please, someone, can’t you see? Can’t you fix this?

  I stagger down a hill to Eckerd Drug where there is a beer cooler with six-packs of Budweiser Select. I’m messed up as hell and yet sane enough to consider the carbs in my choice of beer. Why? People think the weirdest things at the most inappropriate moments.

  I stumble back up the grassy hill to the hotel and decide it’s too hot and I’ll drink in the room. The clerk is so kind. She must know I’m drunk, but says, “It must be hard, your job. Everyone needs a rest. You just let me know if you need a thing.”

  I think I hug her. That’s how I am. A hugger. It’s not fake, but real. I like to hug and be hugged back. The governor didn’t want me to hug him and neither did David Sedaris, but I understand some people just aren’t raised that way and have their own aversions and peculiarities. It’s all right. Everything will be all right. Yes…in a day or two.

  I turn on the air-conditioning and breathe in that distinctive smell that all hotels with decent ratings have. I adjust the fan so the white noise is comforting and drowns out the sound of cars and people walking on floors above mine.

  Sleep. That’s the cure. Sleep. I take out a beer, maybe it’s my second of the new six-pack, but I don’t finish it. An hour passes, or maybe two, and a loud knock that’s more like pounding awakens me from the fog of drunkenness and last night’s excesses.

  “Susan!” I hear a familiar voice shout. “SUSAN!!!!”

  Oh, please, God, no. It’s my mother. Then I hear a deeper voice, and panic. My father is with her.

  “Let us in. We need to help you, honey, please.”

  I stumble out of bed and hide the beer, what’s left of it, and unlock the door, run and jump back in, pulling up the sheets to cover my arms, which are turning a purplish blue. My wrists seep blood from the Band-Aids that lost their stickiness at the pool.

  I hide them under the cool floral comforter.

  “Come in,” I say weakly.

  They do, staring with frowns of concern on their faces, almost blank in spots, as if waiting on me to fill in the canvas of their unasked questions.

  “You need help,” one of them says, as they sit in the two chairs at the small round table near the window. “Stuart called us. He didn’t know where you were last night. He said you’ve been drinking again and are out of control. We thought all this was behind you, Susan.” Their voices are calm and kind.

  I try to control my mouth and facial muscles so I don’t slur. “He’s wrong. I’m just tired. I can’t sleep and needed one or two nights just to get my bearings and wits about me. That’s all.”

  They could smell the beer, the fear and the pummeled flesh hidden under the sheets, oozing out like secrets that can’t be kept.

  “Where is it?” Daddy asked.

  “What?”

  “The alcohol.”

  Mom stares like she did when I was in high school and she wondered what I’d been up to. “I don’t think she’s drunk, Sam. Look at her eyes. She’s on something. Pills. What have you taken, Susan?”

  Dad moves toward the bed. “You’re eyes are miles away. You need to tell us what you’re on, Sugar, ’cause you look stoned out of your mind. We’ve got to get you some help.”

  “I just need sleep.”

  Mama’s face reddens and the anger rises and can be seen in her chin and its jutting position. “You wanna be like my daddy? Fine. You can lay up here like some drunk and let the courts take your kids or you can tell us where to take you.”

  “Home.”

  “You can’t go home,” Daddy says. “Your children can’t see you like this. Tell us what you want.”

  “Sleep.”

  My poor mama couldn’t let her anger go. She was reliving a nightmare, had seen her own daddy drunk and passed out and unable to do more than lie on the couch and sleep off bad hangovers. My own father had seen it, too. His daddy was a weekend drunk. I got the gene, the curse, the weakness, whatever anyone wants to call it, but its roots, I know, are planted in dark soil of depression and fertilized with insecurity and self-doubt.

  Neither wanted to see their daughter—their humorous, seemingly successful, award-winning, published-author daughter—like this. What had happened? She’d been sober for so long. Wasn’t that part over? Hadn’t she gone to AA and straightened out her life years ago?

  “Oh, let her go home, Sam,” Mama says, chin still jutting with fury and disappointment. “Let her just ruin her life if this is what she wants to do.”

  I knew, even in the haze of my fried brain, she didn’t mean it. I knew she was simply rewinding her own past, seeing the ugly parts of her childhood.

  “I’ll go,” I say, voice cracking. “You can take me to Brookstone. It’s where I went last time.”

  They remembered. It is the psych unit at a local hospital, and if I’d been in my right mind, I’d have told them to take me somewhere for substance abuse and alcoholism. But I knew my insurance wouldn’t pay but for a few days in Brookstone, so I said I’d go. I sure didn’t want the traditional twenty-eight days in a real treatment center where they make you look way too deep within your soiled soul and scrub toilets and everyone yells at each other like in the Sandra Bullock movie 28 Days .

  I wanted a few days of insurance-paid R&R. I knew after that, my wonderful HMO would boot me out, and that was fine. Just fine with me.

  I pull off the cover and try to walk but am too drugged and drunk. I manage to slip something over my shorts and top and allow my parents to dump the leftover pills from my purse and empty the bottles of Bud Select from beneath a wad of towels I’d hid them under in the bathroom.

  Off we went, out the door and into a blinding white sun I wanted to yank from the sky and bury. I don’t remember seeing the clerk or telling her good-bye. I wanted to because she’d been so kind, but when I ask my parents’ permission they hold tighter and steer me toward their car.

  We must have sneaked out the side door, them not wanting the town to see their daughter as their own parents had been. A drunk. A mother of two with a decent job and good life…drunk. And on pills. Drunk and drugged out. In their minds, you couldn’t get much worse than that.

  We drive in silence to the hospital unless Dad asks for directions, and I try to hold myself up and tell them to follow the signs with the big H on them. I needed to sleep, but they kept waking me up as if it was some sort of punishment.

  Finally, we arrive in the emergency room where we stay for hours, answering questions and taking vital signs, and hearing how after swallowing so many different pills, I had no business being alive and
it was a damned miracle. But I knew hospital staff always told survivors they were miracles, so I didn’t put a lot of stock in what they were saying.

  After about 7 o’clock I beg my parents to go home because I don’t want them driving in the dark down the mountain to Spartanburg, South Carolina, an hour or so away.

  “I’m fine. See? I’m checked in.” I show them the bracelet with my name typed in pale purple letters, hug their necks and say my good-byes and I love yous. “Thank you for everything.” I smile, as if part of my job as a dutiful and obeying daughter trying to please, always trying to please and make everyone happy. It’s what I was raised and paid to do. Smile. Laugh. Be pleasant. Always. No matter what.

  At the time this was happening, I hated my husband. He had called them when he must have known that all I needed—or thought I needed—was two nights of rest in a fairly nice hotel. I’d tried the night before to treat my fatigue and depression with red wine. The TV and news reports all said how good it was for you. If one glass is good, more is better in my twisted mind, and a couple bottles later I was insanely drunk and depressed and decided to destroy myself, but not enough to die.

  I just wanted to clear away the thunderclouds within, bleed out the bad.

  I remember waiting until the kids were asleep and then the world swaying like a hammock and blurring. It went like this:

  Two bottles of pills are in one hand. A dull razor blade and pair of scissors in another. I swallow the pills and hack at my wrists, but even through the distortion and anesthesia of alcohol, Ativan, Benadryl and whatever else was in my junk drawer, the pain of the cutting is too much to bear.

  I want to live. I want to die. I want attention. I want to be left alone. I want the darkness to end. I want the light to enter. I want my parents and husband to see my unhappiness, but I don’t want the kids to see anything but a mom who takes them snow tubing and roller-coaster riding, one who body surfs in the ocean without fear and with a face wide with laughter, eyes crinkled in mirth.