Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  On Saturday, Tim Bete, who is supersane and calm and in charge of everything and who did a splendid job, informed me that since I was the lunch keynote I’d be sitting with the Bombeck family. Had he told me that before he hired me, I’d have NEVER had the nerve to do this gig but would be in a ditch somewhere drinking Mad Dog and foaming at the mouth and nostrils.

  After recovering from a heart attack the moment his words were out, I excused myself to the ladies’ room to either die or pray. I fell on my knees, not caring that a woman muffled a scream when she saw this.

  “Dear God,” I prayed aloud, but not too loud. “Don’t let me mess this up. I’ll cut my sin count in half. I’ll give more to the poor. I won’t complain about having four breasts when some poor women have none. But please, just this once, let things go well, and I won’t bug you about personal favors such as less cellulite or an end to bloating. At least not for an entire week will you hear that selfish stuff from me. Amen.”

  I have to say it couldn’t have gone better, save for the statue of Mary covering her ears and blushing when I told the crowd about my friend Brewster’s near fatal crotch amputation. Only one lady folded her arms and gave me that mean, “I hate you and plan to kill you” stare. No one threw things or booed.

  But I did throw things at them. I had some hot-pink tape measures as a promotional item and hit an attendee so hard in the face she may need a glass eye. I told her how sorry I was and gave her a free book.

  My new friend Laverne, who writes funny senior citizen columns, said, “Whine, whine, whine. It’s not like she doesn’t have an extra eye.” God, I love Laverne.

  The highlight of the event was when Betsy Bombeck, a fun-loving woman, bought two of my books. In fact, that was the highlight of the entire year promoting this first book.

  I guess she bought them because I didn’t take out her left eye.

  She’s smart enough to realize they come in pairs.

  Four Teats to the Wind

  H ere’s the problem: I have four tits.

  Five if you count the time I had a zit the size of a golf ball on the right boob. If not, then four, just like a cow. Mooooo. Though my father said cows will often have an underdeveloped hind teat or, if you want to get techy, a supernumerary and nonfunctioning hint of a teat.

  It didn’t used to be that way. After suckling two pigs (children of my own), I was a normal, though quite saggy, regular-breasted mother of two. Those who read my first book know I broke down and purchased myself a set of fake knockers. It was a procedure my husband said was for bimbos and redneck women, so I’m not sure in which category I fit, but I threw him right into the asshole category for even saying such a thing. You can bet he didn’t get to see them for quite a long spell.

  All I know is that I was glad (at first) I got the old floppers lifted, stuffed, tucked and upgraded. It meant no more trips to Home Depot for duct tape every time I wore a swimsuit.

  What was even more frightening than securing the Lost Girls, a pet name for the old pair (since I used to have to fetch them from various locations), was the areola spreading like Oscar Mayer bologna. A lot of people don’t know the difference, especially men, between a nipple and an areola. I didn’t until I gave birth.

  A big sweet nurse came in and said, “You got to put the areola in that child’s mouth or his ass gone be starvin’ to death.” She was white but had a hip-hop accent and two gold teeth, one formed with a cutout star.

  “It’s in there. See? There’s my nipple in the baby’s mouth.”

  She reared back her head, those teeth blinding with a setting sun. “Girl, that’s yo nipple? That tiny, chewed-off piece a skin? Can’t no baby get a drop of milk lest you stick the whole wad up in their mouths. With a nipple that size, yo baby’s lucky to get his tongue wet, much less a meal. You need to stuff the areola up in there wid it.”

  Nipples. Areolas. I figured it was your basic nipple unit, an all-in-one package. The nurse bent in for a closer inspection of my feeding units.

  “Yo sweet, sore ass may not have a decent nipple, but, whoa, check out dem areolas!”

  “What?” I stared down at my achingly full, sagging boobies.

  “Honey, they big as flapjacks. They looked like satellite dishes wide enough to pick up the Al Jazeera Network.”

  And this is exactly why, upon learning I had this problem, I paid my handsome surgeon an extra thousand bucks to take my Oscar Mayer–sized discs and snip them around the edges as one might a Simplicity pattern until they were the perky size of a cheerleader’s, preferably a cheerleader who hadn’t given birth.

  My husband was livid upon seeing my itty-bitty areolas, wanting his satellite dishes back. But I had made a choice, paid for it and insured the suckers for the next ten years. It wasn’t as if I was planning to get a job as middle-aged stripper at the local VFW or Croaker’s Rest Home. Not any time soon, that is.

  That was three years ago. I figured by now they would have deflated, popped, leaked or sagged. Naturally, I paid the $100 for the warranty, thinking I’d at least own them as long as I did my Whirlpools. I thought one round of sex on the stairs would have done them in for sure. I guess these bags of saline are much harder to destroy than one may believe.

  It’s also a big myth that only hussies, divas, rednecks and insecure narcissists go in for hoo-hoo restoration. Plenty of women like me who resemble National Geographic pinups ask for the workup. I’ve had several mommy friends who got Up Grades because their babies had sucked the life and vitality out of their nack-nackers. I remember my own children pecking at my chest night and day as if I was roadkill, and the kinfolk horrified and asking, “When you gonna wean that child?” To which I responded ever so pleasantly:

  “When she can put four quarters in the Coke machine.”

  Those who are wondering what three years can do to a decent boob job, wonder no more.

  One morning, after gaining a few pounds from my late-night perimenopausal nacho-platter feasts, I realized my restoration had undergone a few unsavory changes, mainly in size and number. Yes, number. You read this correctly.

  First, you’ve got your base units—the smooth, round Mentors my handsome doc wedged underneath the chest muscle, kind of like cracking a giant oyster with a crowbar and sticking in a huge, inflatable pearl. Seeing it on TV, I was horrified that they use what resembles auto-mechanic tools to get the tit bags up under there. No wonder I was black and blue.

  Everything was great for a while until my uterus turned on me once again, deciding it would become my brain and continued ordering me to “eat, eat, eat!” and gain some weight, stimulating my appetite to the point I had nachos nightly and began to see a new set of cleavage atop the implanted and stationary base units.

  The problem was that my original set of natural breast tissue was growing from weight gain and the fibroids within as well as swelling from caffeine intake. Seems they decided to give in to gravity and take flight from the base unit. Perhaps they were upset and jealous, or maybe had turned into Earth Mamas wanting nothing but surroundings that were natural and organic, which saline and silicone are not.

  As long as I remained in a standing, upright position, everything looked fine, if not slightly lovely. One night as I rolled over in bed, my eyes caught a glimpse of something I can’t bear to ever see again as long as I draw air. I screamed a real bloodcurdler. My original boobs, which, as I mentioned, had suddenly grown and gained a good bit of weight and new tissue, had up and slid right off the Mentor 350s anchored to m
y rib cage.

  “Stuart!” I yelled. “Please come up here. Something horrible has happened.”

  “What now? Another fake heart attack?”

  He was referring to the winter I called 911 three times and went by ambulance to the ER swearing like Fred Sanford and saying, “This is it! This is the Big One,” convinced my palpitations were a heart attack.

  After about thirty minutes of hearing me moan and freak out, he finally trudged upstairs.

  “Come here,” I said. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

  He shook his head as if to say, “Great. Here we go again. Brown recluse bite this time? Ebola virus? Giant lumps on scalp indicating exterior brain tumors?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just wait a sec. I’m going to have to lay down to show you.” I climbed in bed and removed my shirt and bra. At first, his eyes lit up and ear tips glowed red with lust. “Get over here. You can’t see it until you come over toward this side of the bed.”

  He was clearly frustrated and wondering what his weird wife had done this time. I leaned over and let my original breasts roll right off the implanted Mentor 350s. Believe me, the saline rounds will stay put forever. I could go to the nursing home and they’d still be right up there even when my nipple and areola package hit my knees.

  “See? See this? These, rather?” I pointed to my udders.

  “No. I don’t see anything but a naked woman laying on her side acting crazy.”

  “Here. Are you blind? Put on my magnifying glasses.”

  He reluctantly slid them onto his ears, probably thinking that if he obliged he may get some later, and since I was already half naked…“Lean close and tell me what you see.”

  He bent toward my chest. “I see boobs. Big ones. Redneck titties is what I see.”

  “See? I told you. Boobs!!! Not a pair, not a set, not a couple…but boobs. Boobs galore! How many are you seeing?”

  He literally snorted, bull-like, and backed off as if an alien inhabited the Sealy. “And if I twist my body over the other way, same thing. Tell me the truth. HOW MANY DO YOU SEE?”

  He shook his head and turned on the TV.

  “I’m calling the doctor!” I cried out when he began cussing ESPN and not paying my udders a bit of mind.

  “You better call the shrink,” he mumbled.

  “Are you saying you don’t see four?”

  “Four what ?” He turned off the game and came back to the bedside, God love him. I picked at my breasts, lifting and flipping them about like boneless cutlets so he’d be able to count better. “Four. Four tits. Look, fool.”

  “No. I see what appears to be some form of malfunction, but I am the one who told you not to get that bimbo shit in the first place.”

  “I never knew they’d multiply with age,” I yelled. “I don’t only have two fake boobs, but, as you can see, I have grown my originals to the point they’re quite migratory and have a mind of their own and left the anchored pads the doctor put in.”

  He snorted more and yawned. “I’m going to bed. You may want to get some rest. You could be seeing things.”

  “I’m having a mammogram tomorrow, so I’ll just tell them about the multiplication of my teats. They’ll have equipment to prove it. I’ll just lay down on their dirty old tile floor and show them I have four and not two like most women.”

  He shook his head and shut the door. I scooped my four breasts back into place in their bra cups and hurried to my laptop, clicking onto my saving grace, www.implantinfo.com, the lovely Nicole’s Web site where there’s a chat room with tons of support and wonderful ladies (and men with implants, too). They are the ones who helped me get up the courage for the operation to begin with.

  “Help!” I typed, using my pen name, Sally. “I’ve got a problem.”

  After the other chatters finished up their conversations about how big they’d gone and what kind of bras to buy, someone noticed my plea for help.

  “What’s up, Sally?”

  “Well, they finally dropped, like y’all said they would, but I think they’ve done more than just drop.”

  “What do U mean?”

  “I have four. I look like the underbelly of a goat or cow when I lay down on my side.”

  About six chatters started writing things like, “LOL, I’m laughing my ass off.” and “Oh, my God.” and “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  One even wrote, “Wow. Your husband is one lucky man.”

  “Don’t pout,” one woman said, “I am growing a set of back tits. I put on a bra and tight sweater and my husband said, ‘Hon, you’ve got bigger tits under your shoulder blades than you do up front. You’d think you could get a four-cup bra for those suckers.’”

  “Hey,” I wrote. “I’m needing the four-cup bra, too. What can I do? I swear they are OK when I stand up or lay flat on my back, but once I roll over, say, to be sexy and gaze into the eyes of my man, all he does is stare in disbelief and pretend he only sees two tits instead of the four any other human being could see and count.”

  The chatters had a field day and hissy fits of laughter.

  “Sounds like you need a lift,” one of them said.

  “I got a lift,” I said.

  “Sounds like you need some Gorilla Glue,” another said.

  “I already thought of that, too, but when I asked at Lowe’s if you could use it on the breast tissue they called Security.”

  “Is there some sort of procedure the doctor can do where he stitches the real breast tissue onto the round Mentor mounds?”

  Oh, mercy.

  “Enjoy them,” a woman said. “Think about this. You get older every year and your original models are going to fall farther and farther south. By the time they’re at your abdomen, you’ll still have the two humps up top and maybe nobody will notice the lumps in your pants. If they fall low enough you can just say you have a set of balls.”

  I loved that line. I loved all these chatters. “Wait till you get a mammogram,” wrote Cindy Big’uns, who’d been silent in the chat room up until now. “I had mine last week, and ain’t nothing now where it ought to be.”

  “What do you mean?” I panicked. “My mammogram’s tomorrow.”

  “You think you got problems with four tits? Wait till you throw them suckers on the Old Smasheroma and that nurse tries to flatten everything out and see if you don’t come out screaming and all lopsided. I had one pop right then and there on the table, and it made such a loud noise we thought a gun had gone off. Half the lobby screamed.”

  I knew that most of the time, mammograms were fine and good screeners for cancer. I also knew that women with fresh nack-nackers were cautious about having them and entered the Squish parlors with much trepidation.

  I stayed up half the night worrying about the procedure and its effects. It ended up being no big deal. I truly believe the cell-phone conversation I endured in the office was much more painful than the actual procedure was. There I sat, about to enjoy my first four-tittied mammogram when some stupid jingle (“Roll Out the Barrel”)—fitting since she was shaped like a barrel—rang throughout the waiting room and a saucy lady, who’d forgotten to Jolen the left side of her mustache, lifted a teensy phone from her billowing lap.

  “Hello…Yeah, I’m setting here waitin’ to have my yearly Hooter Hammer…Uh-huh…Well, just put the pork chops in
the sink and they’ll be thawed out in time for supper…There’s a box of Shake-n-Bake in the cabinet and you can get it started up while I’m tossing up the goodies in this place, you hear?”

  Ma’am, we all hear, I wanted to say. Everyone in public now hears things meant to be said behind closed doors. And talk about loud? No one ever, ever whispers into a cell phone. They yell. They yell about their surgical procedures while others are trying to eat out. They talk about colonoscopies and drainage and goiters and rampant infections while other diners are coaxing their throats to swallow their $50 entrees.

  What cell phones have done, since becoming more affordable than a standard wall unit, is open a Pandora’s box on private lives. Everywhere Nokias and Samsungs are stapled to eager ears, clipped onto trousers or slipped into purses.

  How many times have I been in the Discount Depot, trying to find the carpet cleaner and rawhide bones, maybe a carton of Slim-Fast, when ring-a-ling-a-ling —or, worse, an extraloud rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” blares from someone’s belt loop? Talk about eavesdropping and blushing. It’s like a party line we’re not sure we want to be privy to. Conversations such as the following:

  “Hey there, Barbara Beelicious, now what chu up to?…Oh, lawsy, I’m here in Jabba the Bargain Hutt buying Vienna Sausages for Roy Dale’s third birthday. Little Devil, we’re going to have his party at the Twist and Tryst…Huh? I can’t hear you. Did you say what’s the Twist and Tryst? Uh-huh…Why, of course I realize it’s an adult bar not based on biblical teachings, but they do have that wonderful video game room and—Yes, I know that…but Roy Dale’s uncle has connections and the price is good.”

  About fifteen years ago—during pre-cell phone affordability—the gadgets were the novel toys of upstarts or those who wanted to play like they were celebrities. Then the price dropped and everybody got hooked up, giving rise to a boom of irritating, ceaseless chatter that follows one from the birthing room to doctors’ offices to shopping centers. And even a burial.