When I was eight, my brother poked me in the eye with a fork. He was always doing ornery things like that with forks, pencils, rock, wood. We never knew what was the matter with him. Now he’s a successful lawyer.

For a long time I went around with a big white bandage and later a black eye patch over what was once my left eye. I didn’t mind the eye patch because it kind of made me look like a pirate. The kids at school called me “Long John” and “Blackbeard.” I didn’t mind that they called me pirate names because I had decided I was going to be a pirate someday, only a good pirate, not an ornery cuss like my brother. I read up on all the pirate material: Treasure Island, Captain Blood. I was going to be a pirate and the other kids who called me pirate names and got lots of laughs and smiles from the cute girls were going to be accountants and construction workers. Mrs. Fix shot down my pirate dreams one day after school when I asked her if there were still pirates sailing on the high seas burying treasure and so forth and she said no.

When I was ten the doctors gave me a glass eye. It was smooth and cool like ice and had a blue iris just like my old dead eye and popped right into my eye socket. I went over to my mother’s mirror and stared at myself for a long time. I still couldn’t see any better, but my looks certainly improved. I no longer looked like a bad pirate joke, that was for sure. I looked like a normal ten-year-old boy with a lazy eye. I could pop the eye out anytime I wanted and roll it around my desktop. This made me very popular with the guys at school--for awhile--until Michele Antone fainted and I was sent to the principal’s office and my mother was called down to school I was warned never to remove the eye again under penalty of death.

The kids at school stopped calling me Long John and Blackbeard, and instead began calling me Cyclops. A Cyclops was this giant one-eyed monster that ate people. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this new nickname. I liked the part about eating people, but I wasn’t so sure I liked being called a monster. It was okay to pretend you were a monster every once in awhile, that was kind of fun, but to be called a monster all the time because you had only one good eye was kind of sad. Nobody really wanted to be friends with the Cyclops, especially after the glass eye bit got old. And girls were totally grossed out by the Cyclops.

Leslie was this kind of cute girl who had only one good arm and a little flipper for the other one that she kept wrapped up in an Ace bandage. Other times she wore this mechanical arm with two mechanical fingers which always reminded me a lot of Captain Hook. We got along fine for a boy and a girl, except at school where we didn’t let on, for obvious reasons.

One Saturday morning we were just hanging around my house playing air hockey when I got this crazy idea to go up to my room and dig out my old eye patch. I found it at the bottom of a sock drawer and brought it downstairs to show Leslie. “Look what I found,” I said, holding it out to her. Leslie looked at the eye patch like it was a dead blackbird. “Yeah?” she said. “Put it on,” I said. Leslie looked at me like I’d just asked her to hang herself with it. “Go on,” I said.

I don’t know why, but she took it-with her one good hand she very awkwardly slipped it over her head and closed it over one eye. From under the eye patch I could see a tear begin its way down her cheek, the elastic cloth moistening. I wanted to say forget it. She didn’t look like a real pirate anyway, just kind of silly and pathetic. But before I could say anything she took off the eye patch and handed it back to me and turned and ran up the stairs. I heard the screen door slam behind her like a slap in the face.

My brother came downstairs and looked at me and said, “What’s the matter, Bub? Your little girlfriend run out on you?” He thought this was pretty funny until the Cyclops let loose a terrible roar like a hundred dying lions and my big brother fled the basement in terror.

Home