It was the Eighties. It was that weird, in-between time right after the chaos and insanity of the Seventies, and we didn’t know exactly what we were supposed to do. We really liked the idea of being Hippies, but we couldn’t because Reagan was president, but Just Say No and AIDS hadn’t been invented yet, so you still COULD be a hippie if you really wanted to, so I decided to go out and try it…
I lived alone at the time, until Hannah showed up on my stoop.
Basically, Hannah had shown up on my stoop because she was pregnant, and had realized that her boyfriend was a pig, and that once that baby was born, she was stuck with him and nowhere else to go.
So she showed up at my place and asked if I could put her up for awhile. I wasn’t a pig. If I agreed to feed and house her, I would do so, and she knew that. She offered to clean house and do laundry, and even get a job, if she could find someone who would hire a 22-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant.
Aw, what the hell, I never liked doing my own dishes anyway. For the first and only time in my life… I had a housekeeper.
The sleeping arrangements became a hassle right away. She took the couch, and I slept in the bed. My bed. My twin-sized mattress-and-box-spring combo with no frame, to be precise. I’m not huge, but I’m not small, either, and I have wide shoulders, and the idea of supporting myself and one other and sleeping on the couch did NOT appeal.
Three days later, I happened to wander into the living room at four in the morning, and discovered that she had been building a nest on the floor out of blankets and pillows; the couch’s angle and support were TOTALLY wrong for a pregnant woman, and she was waking up in the middle of the night in dreadful pain. She would then get up, build a nest on the floor, and sleep on that; it meant she would wake up in pain again a couple hours later, but at least the pain would be somewhere else. She would then move back onto the couch for a couple hours. Back and forth, all night.
So I let her have the bed. That night, I discovered that the couch was not really well suited to a good night’s sleep to a non-pregnant male person, either.
…so we wound up sharing the bed. This led to some interesting permutations. We could both sleep in the bed; neither of us was that huge – but on Night One, I woke up in the middle of the night with her butt firmly lodged in my crotch. My crotch, of course, had no problem with this, and in fact was fully active and approving of the situation. I lay there for what seemed like HOURS, thinking about dead puppies and train wrecks, hoping that my crotch would shut up and sit down before she woke up…
…and the following night, she reported that she woke up in the middle of the night with her butt firmly lodged in my crotch, and my hand around her right breast. She lay there for what seemed like HOURS, wondering if she was about to be raped or something, until she realized I was gently snoring in her ear. I’d simply rolled over and draped my arm around her, that was all. I was out cold.
The morning after that, I learned about morning sickness, and why one should never get in the way of a pregnant woman, first thing in the morning. I’m just glad SHE agreed to do the laundry.
(and yes, others have pointed out that morning sickness is, like, usually towards the BEGINNING of a pregnancy, not the end. Apparently, no one ever told HER that.)
We were reasonable, mature, and forgiving people. By the end of the week, we were still able to live together in one bed… but we agreed that a bigger bed would be good.
So I went out and bought a waterbed.
There was a place in San Antonio that was selling king-sized waterbeds for $100, which was a fantastic deal even back in 1984. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it, and the salesman swore that the boxed model was identical to the display model in every way, except that mine wouldn’t come with sheets and blankets.
You know, putting together a waterbed is really a major construction project… you have to put together this big giant wood pedestal thing… and then you have to put together this big giant wood open-topped box thing that sits on TOP of the pedestal… and THEN you put this gigaaaantic clear blue baggie in the open-topped box, right? And then you run the garden hose in the window, hook it up… and watch it go.
Watching it go can take quite some time. It took HOURS for that thing to fill up. It finally did, though, and I had myself a really huge king-sized waterbed.
The first thing Hannah and I did was to do like the couple in the TV commercials, where they get on either side of the bed and fling themselves into the bed, right?
We discovered this isn’t the brightest idea in the world; this particular waterbed wasn’t waveless, and it promptly flung us upward again, continuing along our previous vector, and we plowed into each other in midair directly over the middle of the bed.
It was painful, but it was an excellent demonstration of Newtonian physics, right?
I also learned about the aphrodisiac effects of waterbeds on women.
Water beds take some getting used to. I learned that you can build up a FEROCIOUS rhythm on a full-motion waterbed, because everything you do, the bed does back at you a half-beat later… which makes STOPPING kind of an interesting experience, too. If you’ve never done this kind of thing, I highly recommend it.
It had its down side, though. I spent my first several nights on the thing suddenly waking up and grabbing the bed, because I’d try to roll over in my sleep, feel the bed MOVE under me, and wake up in a panic…
Now here’s the thing: the room wasn’t big enough to put the bed in the middle of it. I’d had to put the bed in the corner to have any space at all along the rear wall. This meant that only ONE of us could have an outside edge to the bed, right?
Remember what I said about morning sickness? HANNAH got the outside edge, and more power to her. This had led to a hysterical situation earlier that week when she’d woken, felt that familiar “whoopsy” feeling, and tried to get out of bed and go to the bathroom… only to realize that it is extremely difficult for a very pregnant woman to get out of a waterbed in a hurry. Think about it…
I’d heard the ruckus from the kitchen, and came in to see what was wrong, and witnessed the spectacle of a pregnant woman frantically trying to get the bed to stop moving long enough to grab the bumper bar on the edge and lever herself out of the bed. She wasn’t doing a very good job.
Hell, I didn’t know she was sick. I laughed. This led her to begin roundly cursing me while she attempted to wrestle the bed into submission, which just made the whole thing funnier. I stepped forward to help, and she took a swing at me, which made the bed go off and wobbling again, which made her lose her grip on the bumper bar…
She was so mad at me she forgot to be sick.
I should have taken this as an omen of things to come. A clue, anyway. The furniture was going to be ornery.
It happened a week or ten days or so after we’d began sleeping in the thing… and it began with my usual 4 a.m. bathroom stop. Upon returning to the bedroom, I moved to the foot of the bed to get in, right? Wasn’t going to climb over Hannah, after all. This had become routine to the point where she didn’t even wake up when the bed moved when I got back in.
I put my foot on the footboard, and stepped up…
…and the footboard came off with a loud PONK noise.
…and my foot shot out from under me, and I went face down into the mattress.
Hannah woke up and went, “Huh–”
…and without the footboard there, there was nothing holding the mattress in the big open-topped box. Furthermore, there was something heavy on the end where the box was open. Me.
…and in just under two seconds, a half ton of giant blue vinyl water balloon abruptly rolled over me like The Blob.
I had been on one end of the mattress. Hannah had been on the other. She hadn’t moved. The mattress had simply relocated, with her on it. Instead of being up near the end, she was now in the exact middle. So was I, for that matter… I think.
It had been so sudden, I wasn’t even sure where the edge of the mattress was. I didn’t know where ANYTHING was, except the floor, the mattress, and my girlfriend’s butt (it was resting on one of my knees).
About then, it occurred to me that my face was covered with vinyl, and weighted down with a half ton of water. I couldn’t breathe.
I lifted my arm to push the waterbed upward, to get some space between the plastic, and my face. Oh, wait, no I didn’t. I couldn’t lift a half ton of water. I lay there very much like a gingerbread man under a ziplock baggie full of gravy.
Except, of course, the gingerbread man doesn’t need to breathe. It occurred to me that this could quickly become a problem…
I felt Hannah get off my knee, and struggle off the waterbed. I needed to tell her to roll the bed off me so I could breathe. How was I going to do that? And how was she going to manage it? I pondered that for a second or so…
…and then, fresh air. She’d realized the same thing I had, and tried. She couldn’t budge the mattress any more than I could, but had managed to jam her arm under the thing, trying to find me, and had opened an air channel. Air!
“DON’T TAKE YOUR ARM OUT!” I said, calmly and patiently.
“I’m gonna call the fire department!!!” she shrieked.
“NO!”
“I’m gonna call the fire department!”
“NO!”
“I’m gonna call – why not?”
“Because in the time it takes you to get through on 911,” I said, “I’m not going to be able to get any air. By the time you finally get through, you might as well be calling a funeral home.”
“BUT WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?!?!?”
“Just keep your arm where it is, so I can breathe. I can get out from under here.”
“The HELL you can! You can’t lift all that!”
“Don’t have to,” I grunted, wiggling slightly towards her. She promptly poked me in the eye with a fingernail.
It took me an hour and forty minutes to flex, press, wiggle, flex, press, wiggle, lather, rinse and repeat my way out from under that half-ton deathtrap… an inch at a time… until finally, I had enough of me out from under the thing to just pull free. Thank ghod for hardwood floors; I might not have survived that much rug burn.
I spent the first half hour of that time arguing with Hannah, who VERY BADLY wanted to call the fire department.
I finally convinced her that I would certainly suffocate in the time it took her to get 911 on the horn, and she finally shut up and let me do it myself. A good thing she was kind of panicky; it never occurred to her that the phone was cordless… and back then, I still had a fair supply of macho to deal with… and I was TERRIFIED at the idea of ANYONE ever finding out I’d almost been killed by my own bed…
…plus, I’m quite sure that at some point, it would occur to her that she couldn’t greet firemen at the front door while stark naked… and knowing what I knew by then about women and clothes (particularly PREGNANT women and clothes) I was quite sure I’d suffocate before she could manage to get DRESSED to let the frickin’ firemen IN…
