Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  I have every right to be grateful. God is good. My kids are beautiful, as is my home. I have a job many would love and great friends. Only a few people hate me, and if others do, they don’t say anything, which is nice.

  And yet I’m trapped in a cycle of hell fueled by depression and an off-and-on battle with alcohol. Am I an alcoholic? Maybe, whatever the hell that is I certainly qualify on most occasions, this being one of them.

  The pills begin to melt reality and the blood leaks from my wrists, though I’m cutting wrong and superficially, which I know because, really, I don’t want to die. I want someone to listen. I want my parents to realize I’m unhappy, that I’ve chosen a life I can no longer live, at least part of it. The husband part. I am sure at this point in my marriage that I want out, but know I’m trapped by fear of their disapproval and of hurting my children and the rest of the family.

  “He is a good man and father,” they have said, and I know they are right. He’s good to our kids. Still, in my messed up, mind he is the cause. I’m too confused to see my own part in the destruction of the union, and he won’t recognize his part either. We are on that hamster wheel that repeats the same arguments for years and years, nothing ever being resolved. The tapes play, a needle stuck in the groove of a single tune.

  Maybe this is distorted. Everyone has gifts and weaknesses. We are all a mix of good and bad, positives and negatives. He was forced to live with me: an imperfect, on-and-off-again alcoholic who at times was unmanageable. I had to live with his anger, the tiptoeing on pins and needles and hot coals, afraid if I said or did something wrong he would explode verbally.

  His fault? Maybe. My fault? Maybe.

  The blood is pooling and I ask him to take me to the hospital but he doesn’t, thinking I’m crying wolf again, so I get in my car, screwed up as hell, and drive to a friend’s house. Maybe he’ll take me. He’s my best friend, a great guy, but when he sees me he is afraid. He gently puts me to bed and then takes the futon for himself. I may be dying, but he doesn’t see it and neither did my husband. Maybe they just didn’t want to see it.

  Five hours later I awaken. I am not dead. Good. This is good. I didn’t want to die. Really. I only wanted someone, anyone on this planet, to realize that I was alive and hurting and wanting out of my marriage or out of my head or out of something that didn’t feel right and hasn’t for many years.

  My sister got a divorce and it nearly killed my parents. They broke like speared bulls and fell to the ground in prayer and heartache. They turned to God and church and found their peace, but not without a price. Mama’s blood pressure rose and Daddy’s nerves went to hell.

  My sister turned to a Christian singles online dating site and found her a second husband, a fine man who didn’t treat her like shit or yell and curse and make her work out to the point she had nearly zero body fat. The first husband had wanted her blonde, rail-thin and stripperlike, and for years she conformed.

  She finally had had enough and now is blissfully happy with her tall and adoring new husband, and her children are not in boot camps and prisons like I’d been taught to believe of the “victims” of torn, one-parent families.

  I am not happy but not strong enough to leave. What is wrong? Why can’t I stop feeling sorry for myself and realize life is good despite a husband I’m certain belongs with someone else, someone not like me?

  I adopt a child in a Third World country and help the poor and give to various charities and do all the things those into themselves are supposed to do to get out of the Me and seek humility to feel better.

  Love others. Help them. Forget self. Kill ego.

  It wasn’t working, nor was the Lexapro, the Effexor, or any of the medicines the doctors prescribed to straighten out my hormones and serotonin levels and prove to my brain that yes, life is good and I’m one of the more blessed in this crazy world.

  Only my brain wouldn’t listen. It wanted wine. Beer. Pills. Escape.

  I wanted out of my marriage. I loved him, but couldn’t stand the arguing and feelings of inadequacy. I didn’t want my children to suffer, as my parents had promised would be the case, should I divorce.

  “They’ll be into drugs and drop out of school,” one said.

  “Statistically, they’ll be in jails and juvenile detention centers,” the other assured. It went on from there.

  “The Bible says no to divorce.”

  “Children need a two-parent home.”

  I need a sharper razor blade and strong pills and someone to take me to the hospital and call my parents and tell them I cannot live this way a moment longer.

  The kids are safe and soundly sleeping, and my husband is downstairs watching television.

  I cut at my arms with scissors and Bic disposable blades and then decide the pain isn’t worth it, because, really, like I said a million times, I did not want to die. On the counter is a hairbrush, heavy and black, next to the sink. I take it in my hands and beat my arms as hard as I can. I feel no pain, only pressure, so I keep striking over and over and over until my hands ache from the constant hitting. Release, I’m thinking, trying to beat out the demons within.

  I pack a duffel bag with things I’ll need in the hospital. They will pump my stomach and call my parents and then everyone will know why I have to leave my house. It will all work out. I get in the car, turn the key and back out of my driveway and so-called charmed life.

  No one follows me.

  Seventeen hours later I’m in Brookstone telling my parents good-bye.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” I say and deep down believe it, know it to be true.

  The Cradle Will Fall

  B rookstone is the last stop before state-run institutions, death, disability or a lifetime of electric shock treatments and medicines that may make some well but are intolerable for others. I could envision myself as a dry-mouthed, twitching woman with mumbled thoughts and paranoia if I didn’t hurry up and get out of here.

  Sure, the staff may be nice and eager to help, but I didn’t want this kind of help. I wasn’t hearing voices or running for the Senate in some state of mania. I was simply a depressed and exhausted substance abuser who needed R&R and maybe someone to force me to stop drinking red wine the color of day-old blood.

  I curl fetally onto the vinyl gurney, rustling the scratchy white paper, and wait for a room to open up. A man comes in. He is splotching and smiling and turning several shades of red. A book by Augusten Burroughs called Dry: A Memoir is in his hands and he is saying he enjoys my column and figured I’d like the book, and by the way he’s also a real estate agent if I’m ever in the market for a new home and is also gay so don’t worry “I’m not hitting on you.”

  Not that I thought anyone would be hitting on me in a mental ward with my wild, dark-circled eyes, hacked wrists and arms that look as if they’ve been hammered by an angry roofer.

  “Anytime you want a new start,” he says with a wink. So cute. All the gay ones are so damn cute and understanding and easy to talk to. “New homes are sometimes the cure.”

  New home? I’m in the market for a new life, a way out of this pitch-black tunnel, but I take the book and thank him and promise to read it and will. At some point.

  Maybe I will buy a small house or condo, start over and see if that helps. I could paint the walls that new trendy color of coffee shops: low-key orange and butternut-squash, and sponge and texture them like they do on the home improvement shows. No one would scream if I nailed ho
les in the walls or bought things at yard sales and thrift shops and painted them all different colors with swirls and stencils, maybe flowers and abstracts.

  I close my eyes but sleep won’t come; it rarely does unless I pour wine and pills into my body. By now the beer and drugs are wearing off and I’ve been in the emergency room’s holding cell for nearly ten hours, waiting on a bed to open in Brookstone, waiting for someone saner than me to move through the gates of newfound wellness and check out. Those who leave the South Tower, reserved for the truly screwed up, are medicated and pharmaceutically lobotomized to the point that they graduate to North Tower where they give you plastic forks instead of just spoons to eat your meals.

  But they want me in South, at least for a while, to make sure I don’t find a way to hang myself or kill off another patient, not that I would.

  Around 1 or 2 AM I’m wheeled upstairs to the sixth floor where everything is triple locked and coded, with warning signs posted everywhere about NO ACCESS and how the police will restrain any intruder without permission to enter. I am helped into a stiff bed and notice first thing there are no shades, no curtains, no blinds. A half moon shines directly into my eyes and I feel doomed that day or night, sleep—what I need most—won’t come easy.

  There is no darkness except in my heart and mind. I stand and try to put a blanket over the window to block the moon and the promise of morning sun, which is destroying me and sizzling my brain along with the Shiraz and depression.

  I hear my mother’s voice calling up the mountain. Just pray, Susan. Pray. God is good, God is good, He is here; He is always listening. Ask, Seek, Find, Heal. I am on my knees in prayer. Please, please. Please. Help.

  I feel nothing and can only sweat the poisons from my pores and listen as one therapist and doctor after another quizzes me as to why I tried to kill myself and why my wrists and arms were sliced and pounded.

  “To let in the light,” I tell them, staring off through the bare, moon-drenched window. “I wanted someone to see how much I hurt inside and how tired I am. Nobody would. No one believed anything I said about what it was like to be trapped in this freaking hell.”

  They wrote frantically in their charts and one even took a Polaroid and I’m sure I showed teeth because that’s what I’m supposed to do—be happy, be funny. Even while in a mental ward and wearing a tired face with no makeup other than lipstick that I put on every hour or less because I have a lipstick disorder. No matter if I’m dying or going insane and curling like a C in a bed with no blinds and no cords or devices with which to kill myself, by God, I’m going to have my lipstick on.

  I answer a battery of questions, wondering why they can’t wait and do this in the morning, but by the end of the session, they determine that after breakfast, if I’ve not tried anything stupid, they will move me to the North Tower. A promotion. Yeah! I’m being promoted from Super-Crazy to Semi-Crazy.

  That night I don’t sleep but roll around in the bed covered in plastic so no one can pee or vomit and ruin the mattress, and sweat like I did on that pool chair at the Comfort Inn. I squeeze my eyes closed and taste the bitter aftereffects of Miller High Life. Maybe I fall asleep, but it’s hard to tell because every fifteen minutes a nurse’s assistant shines a flashlight at my chest to make sure I’m still alive.

  By morning, just four hours after I get in this damn bed, they hand me a little paper container shaped in ruffled ridges like a teensy chef’s hat and containing at least six pills, and they watch like hawks as I swallow. They ask to see inside my mouth and beneath my tongue.

  They try to weigh me but I refuse, and they say too bad and put me on the scales anyway. After that, they do the vital signs and exclaim a fast and irregular heartbeat and I tell them it will all pass with enough rest. Really.

  “Is there any way you could maybe not come in and shine that giant flashlight in my eyes every fifteen minutes?” I ask and try to smile, be polite and onstage as always.

  “It’s to make sure you’re not dead,” the humorless nurse’s aide said. Standard regulations, I’m told. On the North Tower, they shine the light only every half hour. Whew, what a vacation North is going to be.

  I try to return to my room and begin a wobbling walk (from the pills) until a gentle-faced male nurse leads me to the breakfast area where the others are gathered. They are like me only worse, or so I tell myself, and yet they’re kind enough that I feel a liking for all except one who keeps saying we’re cousins over and over and that she swears she can see wings sprouting from my shoulder blades.

  “I know you’re the Black Angel,” she says. “I know about you. I see your wings. We all do and have been awaiting your arrival.”

  I can’t wait to get to North, hoping nobody sees wings on my shoulders or says things about Black Angels. I stare at the food and try to cry but the drugs have numbed me to the point where it’s as if I’m starring in a modern version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Nurse Ratched will appear at any minute.

  I feel very little, like a brain-dead little zombie unless I look at my arms, but I don’t. I cover them up in black long-sleeved shirts even though it’s 1,000 degrees outside.

  Breakfast is bizarre and the other incarcerated nutcases like me either poke at their food or try to eat everyone else’s. I am famished, and the parched skeletal woman of an undetermined age next to me gives me all her sausage and waffles and blueberry muffins. She just wants to get out and go smoke and retreat to her singlewide where she can cook up what she truly craves at mealtimes: crystal meth.

  “I ain’t hurting nobody but myself,” she says and many of her teeth are gone or in stages of packing up and leaving her gums for good. “This place is a shit pit. My babies need me back at home.”

  I can’t take much more of this: I’m furious with my husband for sticking me here and for calling my poor mother and daddy who’ve already lived childhoods from hell with alcoholic parents. I am reminded of the phone call that came in the dead of night when I was ten years old.

  Early the next morning Daddy sat us down and told us what had happened. His eyes were red and swollen from crying and his hands shook. He faced us bravely, though trembling, and said his father had died, that Pa-Pa had been shot and so he needed to drive the four hours to Granny’s house to help her and my aunt and uncle deal with everything.

  I learned later that week what had really happened. Pa-Pa was in the war and had a bad leg that gave him fits, as did the memories of the living nightmares young men in combat must see and endure long after the gunpowder and bomb smoke clear. Pa-Pa drank every night and cleaned his gun and ate my granny’s fried chicken, and every morning got up with his hangover and heartbreak and went to the textile mill to do his blue-collar job until one day it became too much.

  He was hurting on his final night, his leg so painful he could barely stand it. The doctor had told him it might have to come off. He poured one whiskey after the other while Granny cooked and read her Bible and figured it was a night like most others when Pa-Pa fell into this kind of mood.

  Aunt June was there and nothing unusual was happening until they heard a loud boom, the unmistakable explosion of a gunshot blast from my Uncle Steve’s room. Granny screamed for June, the registered nurse and strong one in the family. She rushed in, fell to her knees upon finding Pa-Pa lying in a puddle of blood on the hardwood floors part of his head missing and brains everywhere. She called my daddy and before Granny could see her husband like this, scooped up skull bits and brains and crammed them down the bathroom drains.

  He had a pulse, but by the time the ambulance arrived, Pa-Pa w
as gone.

  Was it suicide? I think so. Others say no, that he was just drunk and cleaning his guns. Amazing what denial will lead a person to believe. Denial? Is that why I’m here? Pretending to be tired when maybe, just maybe, they are right and I’m super-sick and need to pack all my things and move into a place like this forever? Could this possibly be correct?

  The family history is mostly what I told them when they questioned me for two hours in South Tower the night I finally got a bed. “Does suicide run in your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “Anyone else?”

  I was afraid to answer. “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Not exactly’?”

  I no longer smiled or pretended to care what anyone knew or thought about the girl in the newspaper who made people laugh. Here I was the girl who was very sick and who would break if not fixed.

  “Tell us, Susan. What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

  I tried to sit up but the room was like a Tilt-A-Whirl. “My dad. He sort of messed around with it a little.”

  The doctors looked puzzled. “Messed around with what?”

  “He took some pills. Lots of them and parked the car in a ditch and chased them down with a bottle of liquor.” It was in uttering these words I realized I’d done the same thing. “He’s a Christian now. Not the same man at all as he was back then. He woke up five hours later and couldn’t believe he was alive.”

  Our stories were eerily similar. He drove to my Mama Callie’s, his grandmother who was very tough and strong, and told her what happened. She put him to bed for four days. I really think people just get tired. I’m fairly certain half the people up here in these towers are simply exhausted, overworked and overwhelmed.