Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  Then, one dreadful night, Tidy Stu up and cuts our son’s hair, giving him a set of ’Tard bangs to rival all others. I almost cried when I saw my boy until I gazed at my husband and saw that he, too, had a row of Munster fringe. You should have seen them. Stu Munster and Son Munster Jr., the ’Tard bangs doing nothing to enhance their features.

  That very night, still trembling with the desire to snip, chop, whack and tug, he up and shampooed, cut, shaved and styled our dog’s fur, focusing on his hairy buttocks region in particular.

  And to do so on the Sabbath! That evening my dog pranced by and I lost my breath. His fanny was shaved like a chimp’s hiney and he, too, sported a thick-and-short set of bangs, only on the dog they were ASS BANGS!

  Our Pom once had more hair than stocks a wig shop, and to see this newly mowed ass with Three Stooges bangs came as a shock. I should have NEVER bought Stu the Norelco Spectra. Since receiving this gift, he’s shaved everything in our home. Children, himself, the carpet, clothing…and now the dog.

  “I’m calling the Doggy Social Services. Zipper looks awful. Look, he is under the sofa and won’t come out.”

  “He’s styling, aren’t you, Zip?” Stuart asked.

  “He’s going to need therapy. And a pair of underwear for sure. He’s the only dog in the neighborhood with ass bangs. It’s really embarrassing.”

  Our neighbors, who typically never walked on our little cul-de-sac, all decided to make Hunter’s Ridge a destination so they could see the dog with a thick sheaf of bangs just above his little black anus.

  They’d stare and then start laughing. I heard one even praying. “Sweet Jesus, whatever’s going on in this house, please intervene.”

  Amen to that, brother.

  Would You Like a Waffle with Those Shoes, Ma’am?

  T he man jumped out of nowhere, scaring me half to death as he wielded his metal weapon of choice: a foot-measuring device.

  I was in a department store, obviously broke, as I checked out the 75 percent off shoes in the children’s section. My daughter saw the sales sign and sniffed up her nose, immediately running over to the shoe pyramid with no discounts—not even 10 percent—and falling in love with all the $100 hookers-in-waiting shoes.

  School was starting soon and all mothers who want to come across as decent and proper usually fork out money for new shoes. It keeps the Child Protective Services workers at bay. My wonderful parents and others at their church collect money to buy the needy kids attending their church new shoes for school. It’s just one of those things. New school year. New sneakers or, in my diva daughter’s case, clunky skank foot fare.

  I wouldn’t mind investing money in her feet if she’d wear the selections I buy. But her feet are growing faster than my waistline is and she is only interested in the hussy lineups with high heels and fur.

  We were eyeing different things, me choosing sweet sandals and sneakers and she blurting, “I hate those. I hate those, too,” when out of nowhere, the shoe man sprung on us like an unseen hornet.

  “Please take a seat,” this butler-toned fright of a man ordered my child, “and I’ll give you a thorough and professional measuring.” He took a look at her baby-blue Converse high-tops with the frayed shoelaces and then at my footwear, and his nose twitched as if zapped with an electrical device. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to wear a pair of cowboy boots bought twenty-five years ago when I was a sophomore in college.

  “My, she has thin feet,” he said, and at that point I realized he wasn’t right—a bit “tetched in the haid,” as we say down South. His facial features didn’t fit his bone structure and seemed disproportionately large on such a small canvas of skin.

  His eyes were huge and amphibious, bulging as he instructed Lindsey to stand straight and tall while he did his obsessive-compulsive thing for about ten minutes, proclaiming her arches weak, her feet long and narrow and a size 2.

  “What size are those…those…sneakers?” he asked.

  I felt like some sort of neglectful mother. Her Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers were a 13. “Her foot grew overnight,” I said. “Seriously, two days ago it was a 13 and she was crying last night saying how bad they hurt, and so I held her delicate feet in my hands and actually saw growth. Really. I saw her toes elongating right before my eyes.”

  He poked and prodded, taking this shoe job as seriously as if he was at a doctor’s office doing blood work for a matching organ transplant.

  “You are good at your job,” I said, wanting to hurry his odd ass up. “Almost like a shoe scientist.” His features enlarged further, to the point that they all but popped right off his head. He stood and went to the back room, that mystery place where shoe salesmen go to find sizes they never have in the style your kid must have or collapsing in the floor will ensue.

  He returned with every size I could have imagined: a 13, a 11/2, a 2 and even a 3. I wondered why he even bothered to measure if he was fluctuating so much with the sizes.

  “Every shoe brand is different,” he said. “Skechers run small. Nikes run larger. The human foot is a complex organ with so many bones and opportunities for complete ruination. One can’t just run off to some cheap store, grab a pair and hope their feet will last as long as their hearts. No, sir. You see folks in wheelchairs? Many got that way from foot neglect, and the proper shoe and fit is as important—”

  “Ohhhh,” I yelled, exhausted and in need of a Goody’s Powder. I grabbed my stomach, a trick I do on rare occasions such as this one. It works perfectly in getting people on tangents to stop the blabbing. I learned this from Fred on Sanford & Son.

  Just the week before, I’d spent three hours in a mall shoe shopping with my son, who came away with nothing but complaints. Hey, but no one measured his feet either. When I was growing up, measuring was a must, and it all began with that metal thing and a shoehorn and lots of fanfare and footwear. None of this do-it-yourself stuff that I had grown to love about discount places such as Pic ’n Pay, Payless Shoes and all the outlets where salesclerks don’t even come out from behind the register unless for a smoke break.

  This man tending my child rattled on for an entire hour, lacing and relacing, explaining everything about feet and shoes I NEVER wanted to know. It didn’t help we were the only people in the department and had his full attention. I am certain he had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and was not a foot fetish freak. Instead, he examined every centimeter of skin and bone on my child and chattered incessantly about sizing and lacing techniques and the proper fit. She didn’t seem to mind this attention to her tootsies, as if she was Cinderella and the Freaky Prince of Feet was about to shower her in shoes.

  When I finally got my diva to settle on a pair, I followed this man’s tall self to the cash register and proceeded to hunt down my debit card, lost in the bowels of my garbage dump of a purse. I needed to get the heck out of this place before I had a full-blown hissy fit. I realized I was moments from falling to the ground belly-up and feet swirling, upside down bug-style in my ugly-ass cowboy boots.

  I swooshed my Visa debit card as quickly as humanly possible.

  “GOOD SWIPE!” he shouted out with glee when my card didn’t screw up his machine. He moved to the left and placed his knobby skeletal hands on a large box and his entire face lit up, once again overextending his features.

  “Would you like a waffle iron to go with the shoes?” he asked, tapping his foot-loving fingers across the top of a cooking appliance that had no business being in the girls’ shoe department.

  “
Do what? Did you say WAFFLE IRON? As in what one would cook waffles in? As in a waffle iron in the shoe department?”

  His smile exploded, a real shocker, revealing teeth that seemed a full two inches long. I am quite certain he got the appliance for Christmas and set it on the counter to make a profit, poor underpaid shoe scientist that he was.

  “Does it make shoe-shaped waffles or something?”

  He ignored me. “It’s regularly $99.99 and on sale for $39.99 with an extra 30 percent off.”

  “I really don’t do much cooking,” I said, in total shock at the scene unfolding. “Especially waffles. The Surgeon General recently warned—”

  “Oh, you don’t have to be a cook to do this,” he said. “They sell the mixes at the grocery store and you just add an egg and some—”

  “Kellogg’s frozen waffles are fine by me,” I said as kindly as possible, trying my best to leave the store. My gosh, they’d already had last call for shoppers and were beginning to cut off the lights.

  “You sure you don’t want to get the matching Nike socks or sign up today for one of our cards and get 10 percent off your order, or perhaps you’d reconsider the waffle iron since it’s such a good deal and everyone loves a good waffle? It’s a great way to start them off in the mornings before school, which as you know rings the opening-day bells in a matter of days.”

  I knew at that point how to get rid of him. Same way you do a pesky boyfriend.

  “You are wonderful. I’ll bet you could have any woman you wanted, you hot little thing. Could I just have a comment card so I can send positive feedback to your manager? Even though you are a true Sex God with all your shoe knowledge and waffle skills, I just want to be friends, you know. It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s really a matter of—”

  He did a jerky movement as if pre-seizing and his expanding facial features began to quiver out of control. He dropped a comment pamphlet in my hands and set me free. His gayness couldn’t take my open sexuality.

  Later, I called Mama to tell her about this poor man who had the waffle iron displayed near his Nike footwear mountain.

  “I didn’t know they still measured feet,” she said. “After my mama died, my poor daddy wouldn’t take us when we were little ’cause he couldn’t handle all three of us in one store.”

  Left a widower with three daughters all under age ten, my Papa Roy was a creatively brilliant fellow. He got out the newspapers, and with a pen, carefully traced each of his daughter’s feet. With sharp scissors and a steady hand, he cut the feet out as one would paper dolls.

  “He carried those newspaper feet with him to the store and they laid them across the contraption and the salespeople measured them just like real feet,” Mama said. “We never had a pair of shoes that didn’t fit.”

  One more crazy relative shaking and threatening to topple the family tree, I thought, but couldn’t say much because I realized Back-to-School shopping, the chore I dread more than Pap smears and DMV visits, would be coming up in a few days, just like the shoe freak said while trying to interest me in a waffle iron.

  The past two trips had been nightmares. I wrote about the first experience in my previous book when my daughter, 3 years old at the time, screamed out the word “Asshole” when a big fat rednecky woman grabbed the last giant glue stick.

  After that experience, I shiver and shake and am all but ready for a rush job to the ER, suffering runs of palpitations, panic attacks and even a collapse in the crowded and highly competitive glue stick bin.

  I always dread late August when the mailman delivers the School Supplies list, educators usually giving us just twenty-four to forty-eight hours to round up the required goods prior to the first day of school.

  Those without kids don’t realize how dangerous this excursion can become, leading to a recipe for migraines, teeth gnashing, bloodletting, and all around evil and venom spewing.

  You talk about mean? A store so crowded with mothers and their 2.5 children on sugar highs trying to be the one to get the last 10-cent, two-pocket folder? What we always seem to have in my small city is a two-day descent into retail indecency: The tax-free weekend, and back-to-school shopping. I’d rather suffer the revival of that torturous hair-removal device known as the Epilady, which my mother-in-law gleefully gave me one Christmas.

  Here’s what went down merely days after my run-in with the shoe freak. I called Mom and Dad, pretending to be missing them terribly, knowing full well I had the School Supplies list in my pocket and a plan to con Daddy into hitting the stores.

  “I miss y’all so much. The kids cried last night because school is starting and they are literally pining for you both.”

  “You just bring them down tomorrow morning, hon,” Mama said, adding she’d be fixing her famous spaghetti dinner (the kind that brings about Die Rear).

  Early Saturday morning, I bribed the kids.

  “Tell your granddaddy you’d be honored if he’d accompany you on a shopping trip for all that back-to-school stuff and I’ll give you $5.”

  My son shook his head.

  “Okay, then. Ten dollars.”

  “Deal.”

  Saturday, August 16: Super Save-Mart in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We give the job to my father and I am flat-out surprised at how happy he seems. Of course, he’s never done this and had his feet rolled over and broken from cart stampedes or his scalp traumatized by bitchy women’s hair-pulling over the last glue stick. Why, Dad hasn’t been back-to-school shopping in his entire 70 years.

  He entered the house like the proudest granddaddy alive, hauling his sack of goods like a fisherman with a full trotline, and saying he had a grand time fighting cursing women barking on cell phones and stealing all the good backpacks.

  “We did it,” he said, of his trip with my son. “I want you to know there were backpacks everywhere. Upchucked out into the floors. We got the best one. Everybody said it was the nicest. Even the lady shocking everyone with her cattle prod to break up the fights said so. I saw blood, people. Blood! It was crazy. Much worse than running out to the mall on Christmas Eve to find last-minute presents. I need some wine. Peg? Could you pour me a liter in my special glass?”

  He was referring to the goldfish bowl we got him for his 70th birthday so he could tell his Baptist congregation he never had more than a glass or two of wine when partaking. Needless to say, each glass was really a bottle.

  Later that very day, my mother, not to be outdone, suggested we take my daughter’s list to the same store.

  “I really don’t think I can do this, Mama. Don’t you remember what happened to me the last couple of times? Don’t you remember Lindsey calling that white-trash woman an asshole and me having to say, ‘I’ll buy you a BASS POLE,’ just to try to cover it up?”

  “Come on,” Mama said. “I’ll take you to Stein Mart afterward and buy you something pretty.” She knew she had me on that one. Therefore, off we went into shopping hell.

  “What in heaven’s name is that?” Mama asked, pointing into the cart where I’d heaved an item from the list.

  “That’s an antibacterial soap refill.”

  She couldn’t stop laughing. “It must weigh 40 pounds. It’s the size of a car tire. You can’t take that to the teacher.”

  “Listen. She’ll be thrilled to the bone. In grade school little kids need stuff like Kleenex for all their boogers and antibacterial soap for after they pick them.”

  They also need a certain mat to take naps on, which I’ve been unable to find
, thus trip Number Three loomed.

  Sunday, August 17: I am in a trance, trying not to panic while in the regular-sized Save-Mart in Asheville, North Carolina. “Where are those naptime mat thingamabobs all the kids have to have?” I asked a clerk who wore the same expression one dons after being chewed by a gang of filthy rats.

  “Gone,” he gasped.

  “Will you be getting more soon?”

  “No,” he hissed, spit flying. “Never. Not in my lifetime.”

  Poor man. I can’t really blame him for being short with me. All in all, the trip wasn’t for naught. I knocked a lady out cold on aisle 5 after she pulled my hair and tried to steal my Crayola eight-pack of washable markers. I came home with two 20-cent glue sticks and a plastic pencil box, a pack of loose-leaf paper and most of the other items on the list.

  All shopping was complete except for the mysterious contraption known as the Kindermat—nowhere to be found in my two-state search. Exhausted and in need of some tub time and aromatherapy, I called my daughter’s Nana.

  “I guess Lindsey can always use a towel,” I said. “The stores said they were all gone and the shortage was near crisis level.”

  A moment of silence followed as Nana’s brain processed this information. “Poor thing. She’s not going to have a mat like all the other children to sleep on. What will she think and, more importantly, what will those teachers think?”

  “They’ll think her shoes look fabulous. We bought a darling pair the other day and if you need a waffle iron—”

  “We can’t send her without something decent to nap on.”

  “Listen, the list says a Kindermat OR a towel.”

  Nana began to sob. “She will be ruined for life. We’ll find her something.”

  “I’m not going back out there. It’s dangerous. I’ve got two bite marks, four bruises and will need a fresh tetanus shot. I did, however, manage to save roughly 77 cents per child.”