soap to teach me a lesson.
When it came my time to speak, this first-ever book tour talk in front of a live audience, complete with a radio crew from Public Radio South recording it for stations all over Dixie, I was ready. It didn’t matter that people were coughing and wrinkling their noses, plenty of them sneezing and wondering why the room smelled like a nursing home disguised in every spray available.
Poor sweet Libby. After the reading and speech, she told me how swell I did.
“People really seemed to respond,” she said. “They were on the edges of their seats sniffing all around like dogs.”
“It’s my Glade and Lysol perfume,” I said. “Would you happen to have a piece of gum? I swallowed some orange Dial and—”
The owner of the bookstore, a sweet woman, came toward me with a gift bag. Inside was a bottle of K-Y Warming Liquid. Jeez. Not only do I smell like a nursing home, she must think my va-gee-gee is as dry as an 80-year-old woman’s.
It was the new “warming” kind, too. What a doll. Whew. Glad that one was over. I just wonder why they never aired my talk on the radio, but I think I have a good idea.
Atlanta and the Dumpster
N ext big stop: Atlanta, Georgia, with my mama, Lord have mercy. This was where I’d attended college and was booted from my sorority for being so danged wild and nonconforming. I knew all those Tri-Delts would come to my alumni signing to see how fat and ugly I’d gotten while they’d whittled off the college and postpartum fat with Atkins, lipo, tummy tucks paid for by their doctor, banker, tycoon husbands.
Sugar pies, I was right. There they were. Skinny, rich and adorable Atlanta women and I was in a chunky stage with lots of hanging arm fat.
It all started because my last book gig ran up a big ticket, so the publisher gently suggested I might want to pay for this Atlanta University of Georgia Alumni appearance out of pocket and stick it to Uncle Sam next April.
Mama and I were pinching pennies and eating KitKats, her favorite candy bar that she takes everywhere, even to church and funerals. The hotels in Buckhead, Atlanta’s ritziest section where I was to speak in a big, fancy tower, were priced in the triple digits and the traffic a nightmare. We tried one hotel, then another, and weren’t about to pay $300 for seven hours’ sleep, a few tubs of cereal, a pot of weak coffee and turn-down bed service with a single square of chocolate. We could do our own bed turning and stick a giant KitKat on the pillow.
We whipped the car around and decided to try some hotels along Buckhead’s outer edges. Things are always cheaper on the perimeters. “Let’s try that place,” I said, steering into a darling stucco-style hotel that is part of a huge chain of affordability, comfort and great reputation.
We figured this place would provide shampoo and a hair dryer in the bathroom, a pot of coffee and a continental breakfast in the morning. Instead, we walked directly into a lobby and nearly fainted, inhaling that unmistakable odor of vomit and tee-tee. Croaker’s Rest Home smelled better than this.
Mama, eyes like a lizard’s, rotating and rolling around and surveying the stinky lobby, reluctantly handed over her Visa and vital information and took a rusting key from the manager.
A bad vibe encircled us, floating over our heads, entering our bloodstreams and causing our poor hearts to pump and palms to sweat. Men began appearing from nowhere, as if they walked like ugly, whiskery Caspers through the walls. I am talking about mean, unkempt, festering men. I decided to tell a lie so we wouldn’t be robbed, shot or raped in the middle of the night.
“We’re only going to be here two hours,” I said, so the old goats wouldn’t break into our room and kill us as we slept. The clerk raised his eyebrows, and winked knowingly. Why is he winking that way? I wondered.
He gave us the key to the back of the building where all these burned-up and rusted cars were parked. Every vehicle appeared to have been pulled from flames or a junkyard. We opened the hotel door and, lo and behold, the beds weren’t made and lady-of-the-evening paraphernalia was strewn everywhere. Six suitcases lay open, and spent condoms littered the filthy carpet while empty cans of Colt 45s and cigarette butts weighted the fake-wood furniture. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Mama screamed as if someone had stabbed her. Her eyes popped and I saw more white than I knew was humanly possible, while her jaw fell to her collarbone.
“We may not be rich, but this is NOT us. Run! We are hightailing it out of here.”
We all but sprinted to the lobby, fumes of that drug-and sex-drenched room still in our noses and clinging to our skin. At the front desk, I was gleefully telling the management we weren’t about to stay in such filth, but, “Thanks for your kindness, and we are sure you spread out a great continental breakfast all the same.”
Mama whispered in my ear. “The only thing spread out here is legs,” and I just prayed no one heard her.
While chatting with staff and his various staph infections, I was trying to get our hot Visa out of his eager hands when Mama snatched the card and dragged me by the forearm and pushed my fanny toward the car. We flew so fast out of the lobby our suitcase wheels sparked as they hit the asphalt.
“They think we’re prostitutes,” she said, locking the car with the click of a button and a huge sigh, deciding she’d drive this time. “This is what’s known as a Hooker Hotel. We just didn’t know it because we aren’t locals.” She stared at me, then fell over laughing, as she is prone to do.
“They think what ? Did you say hookers ?” We were both wearing normal, nonhoochie-mama clothing and looked like Sunday School teachers.
“Susan, didn’t you see all those men flocking around while we were checking in and asking us where we had dinner appointments? Those were the old geezer johns the hotel sent our way.”
I thought about this and realized that, Lawd have mercy, my mama was right: we were presumed to be hos.
“They think we’re a kinky mama-daughter act,” she said, burning rubber and squealing from the hotel on two wheels. She pulled off the main road a few blocks later and made an announcement. “This is where we’ll get ready for your big event.” She cut the ignition and I realized we were in one of Buckhead’s finest alleys and parked right next to a green Dumpster.
“There’s a lot of five o’clock traffic and plenty of people will probably see us, but that is better than the alternative, right?” she asked, unwrapping a KitKat and telling me to go first while she would be the Look-Out person and warn me when to cover up any naughty bits.
Let me tell you, there’s something about being buck-naked in Buckhead that is almost as frightening as entering a Hooker Hotel. I stood scared to death, bare-assed and trying to squeeze my front and back fannies into a girdle no bigger than a tube sock while Mama hollered that a BMW full of men in business suits was coming our way.
“HIDE!!!!” she yelled hysterically.
“I can’t.”
“Open that trash can door and jump in. It’s better than them seeing your possum, isn’t it?” This was her pet name for vagina. More on that later.
Well, no, it wasn’t. I could not face those Tri-Delts if I was both FAT and smelling like two weeks of rotting garbage.
Sometimes,
