Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  MR. OVERMOISTURE: You can see him from a mile away, licking and relicking his lips, greasing them up with an assortment of balms and fruity ChapSticks. This, my darlings, is a condition known as OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Remember? I had it back in kindergarten when I peed every three minutes. This buzzard is one with an unhealthy fear of dry mouth. Same holds true for the constant gum chewer. Makes you wonder what he’s been gnawing all day or if he’s never met up with an Oral-B in his lifetime.

  THE SALIVATOR: Oooooh, heavens. This may be the worst. This fountain of fluids produces an overabundance of saliva that has caused many a woman to seek higher ground. The Salivator should put his liquid gifts to good use watering a few plants before picking up his dates.

  THE BRICK OVEN: Should we even go here? Men who smoke pot (I only know from what my friends report!) have mouths like parched and cracked fields. It’s like kissing a bag of dry dirt. The antidrug campaign could use this truth in its TV spots: Pot Ruins the Perfect Kiss.

  With the kissing part addressed, we can now turn to the area where this dating expert, mentioned earlier, says he knows all the secret body language to attract women. Again, I think a recuperating Huss would know much more than he would. No offense, fellow.

  Let me give you a few pointers on what WON’T attract girls but will send them fleeing faster than fair maidens being chased by hyena-toothed men. Here are some no-no’s I’ve put together if you want to show your menfolk these major turnoffs for us women:

  Flexing one’s muscles in front of mirrors while working out at a gym.

  Gazing at one’s self in store windows while walking with a date downtown, a condition also known as Peacocking. Also known as a condition occurring more frequently in men with Littlecocking.

  Sashaying around like some kind of superstud let loose perhaps from the penitentiary) for the first time in a decade.

  If a guy struts and moves like he’s on the prowl, cut him free and send him packing.

  If he plunks down lots of money in the offering plate and tips well at dinner, you may just let him touch the tips of your hair.

  Also, for those paying attention, pickup lines are very 70s. A friend of mine’s sister invented a game called 52-card Pick Up that’s a much better gimmick for snagging interest than coming out and uttering idiotic phrases like, “Baby, you’re like a fine grand piano and I’d love to pluck your keys.”

  This friend’s sister created a deck of conversation-starting cards designed to get the ball rolling. One of my favorite cards says a plain and simple, ¡“Hola!” What guy could resist a girl who sends over not only a cold beer, but an Hola card and, maybe, a shot of Cuervo?

  I’m also partial to the card that says, “Oh, Behave!” and one asking, “Sushi on Saturday?” Well, fine, buster, if you got the teef to chew through the seaweed in the center.

  With these tips in mind, go forward confidently. Choose wisely, and remember, a kiss is more than just a kiss. It takes skill, practice, timing, tenderness and TEETH!!!!!

  If there’s not one you can kiss at this moment, maybe a bit of digging and circulating in the real world or even the cyber-world can remedy that situation. There’s nothing like digging up past flames, according to yet another recent Harlequin Romance survey.

  The big discovery in one report revealed quite a bit about the human heart; in particular, how a good many of us long for that special someone from our past. One in four of us, Harlequin says, still carries flaming torches for lost loves, even to the point of making it hard for us to find Mr. or Ms. Right.

  The thought of rummaging about and recycling some castoff from my past sends cold shivers up my spine. Others were fine catches but I was stupid and didn’t see it at the time. If I was to try to dig up the good ones, they’d probably tell me to stick it.

  As for the Buzzards, how could I not have foreseen the icky or twisted paths a few of these former suitors would take? On the flip side, they are probably relieved as well they didn’t end up with me or my lovely sister, God love them. In our day, my sister and I used to drag home some real doozies for my mother and father to all but hit the floor upon meeting.

  Allow me, if you will, a trip down Memory Lane, doused with the rejects (both those we tossed and those who tossed us):

  LIFE’S A PILE MAN: This monotoned beast belonged to my sister for about half a summer. He would show up in his Burger Chef uniform, smelling of a deep fryer and loll about moaning, “Life’s a Pile,” every time one of us said a word, no matter the subject. For example, during dinner at my parents’ house one night—a nice grilled rib eye, baked potato and salad—Mama was talking about one of her bridge biddies having cancer.

  “Life’s a pile,” he said, cutting into his meat.

  Later during the meal, my sister said she’d love to go see Jaws 2 , and this man forked his buttery tater and said, “Life’s a pile.”

  I never heard him say anything else and decided to perform a mean test on him.

  “I’m the LaGrange High Homecoming Queen from 1979,” I said, grinning as wide as I could, as if this news would certainly elicit other verbal phrases to utter. “I won because I carried the black vote hands down. I get along much better with black people than whites for some weird reason.”

  “You know,” he said, and I was getting hopeful. “I’m telling you one thing.”

  “Yessss?” I just knew he was going to say something brilliant.

  “Life’s a pile. That’s all there is to it, man.”

  THE DUKE OF HABIT MAN: It was unto this twitching semigeriatric I was engaged twice. Once for two hours. The second time for about three minutes. He was double my age, rich as cream cheese frosting and crazier than a rabid baboon. He had a routine that could not under any circumstances be broken, including the habitual act of swallowing hundreds of vitamins, standing on his head, eating cafeteria lunches and, most annoyingly, making to-do lists all day long and scratching off each of these activities with giant moans of glee as he sat on the toilet and would not leave the house until he’d had four bowel movements. Talk about romance!

  RACCOON MAN: He, too, belonged to me. A true delight in tony restaurants, this creature refused to order a drop of food until the waitress had brought him ice water. As soon as the glass arrived, he dipped his paws into the ice and bathed his face, leaving it gleaming with water beads. If his face dried, he would rebead with more pawing and water splashing throughout the meal. My mother suggested he be tested for rabies.

  DIE REAR MAN: He was charming at first as he took me to Six Flags Over Georgia and won the stuffed lion that took up half the room. Charms fell fast after Mom’s homemade spaghetti dinner and his continual trips to our guest bathroom, where he must have missed that silver knob on the side known as the flusher.

  My sister rushed up to my room after I kissed my doting, lion-winning date good night at the door, so happy he was a SMOOTHER—that breed of kisser not listed previously but who is just right. Soft at first, no tongue until things warm up, and then just enough so as not to hit the uvula or bring about asphyxiation.

  “Your new boyfriend left you a big present,” said Sister Sandy, slowly delivering an evil grin.

  “You’re just jealous of my big stuffed lion.”

  “Oh, how wrong you are, my precious big sis. He left you something much more special and personal, and it sure will make that lion pale in comparison.”

  She yanked me from bed and forced me to follow her downstairs to the
bathroom where Mr. Six Flags Over Georgia had deposited what seemed to be a week’s worth of intestinal storage. I refused to EVER take his calls after that and brushed my teeth fourteen times after having kissed his crapping self at my door.

  THE FROG MAN: This one belonged to my sister. He was her true love, the stealer of innocence, the man with a chunky class ring and ugly Kermit-green letter jacket she wore every day. He had a head shaped just like Mr. Ribbit’s and big old wet amphibian eyes. His nose looked exactly like a frog’s body minus the hind legs. I once saw his tongue flick out and catch an insect, though my sister swears it was an M&M. I still say it was either a horsefly or mosquito because, and I’m not one to lie, it had wings. Big, veiny wings.

  FEMININE HYGIENE KING: Oh, all right. This odd bird was also mine for a spell. So sensitive, so understanding, so in touch with all things girlie. Every month (and how he knew exact dates is a mystery to me, unless he noticed all the oleander and rat poisoning on my person during “that time”), he’d send in the mail a huge supply of possum products and chocolates, even a lovely new lipstick to carry me peacefully through PMS. I’ve heard of penis envy, but I swear this oddball had Va-hee-na envy.

  After reading what we had to choose from, it makes me grateful on occasion that I married Tidy Stu, a man who genuinely gets a buzz from spraying Tilex or steam-vaccing the home turf. The sound of the washer rumbling is music to his dear, thoroughly clean ears.

  Nothing makes him happier than a new tube of Crest Whitening toothpaste and a little white box of waxed Oral-B dental floss, which he actually uses between his teeth and not to strangle palmetto bugs or hang jalapeno lights.

  My Eggs Are in Wheelchairs

  T hose who read my first book know that I blame all my mean and irrational behaviors on my useless and utterly evil Uterus I’ve named BIB, which stands for Bitch in a Bag. Anything from hissy fits and conniptions to going crazier than a shot cat. It’s all my uterus’s fault.

  If any of you have read A Confederacy of Dunces , my all-time favorite humor book, you’ll know about Ignatius and his “valve.” Anything that went wrong, and plenty did in walloping Ignatius J. Reilly’s crazed life, he blamed on his valve closing.

  Valve, uterus, prostate…We all have a menacing body part or two. I’ll wake up with a semiflat stomach and for no other reason than to be pure mean, it’ll start to swell up and cause me to wish for elastic stirrup pants by noon. The damn ute has a mind of its own, and now that my kids are born, it doesn’t do me a bit of good, though Mama swears if I didn’t have one all the other organs would fall right out of my possum.

  She loves to tell me about her spayed friends and the body parts that have slipped from their vaginas, pronounced “Va-hee-nas” by my friend John Boyle who thinks he’s speaking Spanish.

  “I’ve got this one friend who lost her bladder that way and another whose doctor confirmed the bottom third of her esophagus shot straight out of her possum,” Mama swears. “I also told you one thousand times, you’ll grow a beard and maybe even a small starter penis if you don’t keep the parts God intended unless they are damaged or cancerous.”

  What if these parts just make you mean? Why won’t HMOs and PPOs and all the Os insure women who are veering toward Velma Barfield’s way of life—she was the North Carolina “black widow” executed for doing in a few men and husbands. Don’t cheap-ass insurance companies know unmedicated women are like assault weapons in the wrong hands? Wouldn’t it just be cheaper and safer for all parties concerned to yank out all potentially murder-inducing parts?

  My friend Kelly, a book club member who suffers from hormone shifts and fallopian madness, said she gave her doctor the What For. In the South, that means he’s in deep sheeeeiiiit if he doesn’t comply with the raging woman’s wishes for something, anything, to prevent disaster on the home or public front. He put her on birth control pills, said the hormones in them should “level you out.”

  Oh, but it did not, my pretties. She went crazier than a drunk coming off Mad Dog. Three days later she was back in his office, smoke curling from her ears, saliva dripping from her incisors. “You either take me off this, or I’ll personally see to it you are fully responsible for the murder I’m liable to commit.” He stared at her and raised his gray eyebrows. “Surely you don’t want a murder bloodying your hands?” Kelly more or less spewed. “If not, I suggest you take me off these pills and get me on something new, some sort of homicide-prevention plan.”

  He began to tremble and with a twitching eye, wrote her two prescriptions. One for Lexapro, a high-powered mood elevator, and one for a tranquilizer—my all-time favorite group of drugs I call my “heart pills,” and “The Good Mommy tablets.” Without them, I’m a squealing mess.

  And so are a bunch of other women in their forties who are going through some bizarre physical and mental changes. Poor Kelly is so much more tolerable now that she’s medicated. “I’m just a pure and plain-old regular-ass bitch now,” she says. “I at least don’t want to kill anyone. Not today, anyway.”

  I confessed to her the time I tried to poison my own beloved. It was during one of my rare drinking episodes when I got fairly schnockered in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and was so mad at Tidy Stu I plucked an oleander leaf from one of the many poisonous bushes surrounding the hotel, having just read the book White Oleander . I realized he’d have to chew and swallow the plant to die, so the leaf was just what I like to call my “warning garnish.”

  I had horrible PMS and so did he, so I slipped one of the long leaves in his bottled Foster’s Lager. It was so long the tip rose from the hole where one drinks so I KNEW he’d see it. Who wouldn’t see a green leaf jutting from his beer bottle? Well, he didn’t!

  I watched from the hotel balcony as he sipped his Foster’s while the sun set, him probably thinking how grand life is and me all mad that when we go to the beach he does nothing but lollygags and expects me to do all the cooking, cleaning and childcare and then “service” his parts at night.

  I didn’t want to kill him—he’s really a decent husband and great father. I just wanted him to suffer a warning message or nasty case of Die Rear for a day or two. Thank the dear Lord the leaf turned out to be as benign as parsley, which I knew it would be, but I warn all others not to tamper with oleander, as it can be, in the wrong hands, deadly. When he finished his beer, he pulled out the leaf without so much as a thought and tossed it on the ground.

  Point is simple, sweeties. Women who drink right before their periods are dangerous. Remember that. We are potential murderesses and the gynecologists and therapists worth a pinch of their hourly salaries know this. Kelly and I both, along with thousands of you, my friends, are showing them this.

  The doctors now prescribe meds and plenty of them. To fail to do so would mean an astronomical rate of…well…unpleasantries one’s beloved(s) might suffer. Thus the pawnshops and rat-poisoning establishments would zoom in business should all the docs tell us to breathe deeply and go to yoga classes, down some soynuts, and all would be well in this world. We know better.

  It’s a good thing most of us were raised in decent, moral-abiding homes and the Ten Commandments were drilled into us like lug nuts in a wobbly tire. It also helps to bounce off these Do-My-Husband-In thoughts with other female friends who are married and harried and have visions of escaping the shackles of its duties. We are the women with secret longings of poisonings, potentially followed by prisons where they serve three squares a day as long as you do a bit of ironing and keep the dykes on your good side.

  I knew that buying a gun at Al’s Pawn & Lawn wasn’t an option. Too
many from my state knock off their mates, and I don’t look good in orange or on a gurney receiving lethal injections. Plus, my children need a mommy and a daddy.

  Like Kelly, I’ve been on the guinea pig pill wagon so much my brain doesn’t register when a mood lifter hits. I thought, and still do, that removing the entire kit and caboodle down there would make me sweet as Mother Teresa or a nice mommy like June Cleaver who spreads a table with a tender roast beef, homemade whipped potatoes and peas instead of a box of Fruity Pebbles and a vitamin tablet for good measure.

  I’m 100 percent certain it was cobwebbed old eggs, rusty tubes and the BIB that were purely responsible for a big old fight with Tidy Stu the night he forgot to thank me for a fine fish supper. Husbands with wives going through the change or the pre-change (which can last ten years!) should never forget to mind their manners. Ever. It can get you kilt. Just ask Velma.

  So there we all were, a family of four dining on salmon, and I am sophisticated enough to realize you’re supposed to pronounce it Sa-mon, without the L . I blackened it on my George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine so the sa-mon had stripes and everything—including lemon butter and dill sauce. I prepared Uncle Ben’s five-minute wild rice and some asparagus with a hollandaise sauce, and set the table quite beautifully with dishes his mother had given us as a wedding present.

  It was springtime and my husband was obsessed with the yard and doing mysterious manly things in it and to it. Machinery was always growling, whining and disturbing the peace. He loves to weed whack and mow and blow, snip, plant and prune.