How I put my eye out
by Joe Palmer
[ fiction - june 11 ]
First you have to understand that I was "precocious" and bright and that my first years I lived with my grandmother and her husband Joe Cargal because my mom had run away with me when I was a little baby in order to get away from Granma and her mother Aunt Jane Heacock, who was about as mean as they come, my mom said.
Well, my dad found me living with my mother's sister Opharuth Chesser and her daughter Rowena in Winslow down in Pike County and he took me back to live with his mom and Grampa Joe in Decker.
About then the War started and they were drafting young men who didn't have an excuse and my dad saw that the only way he could beat the draft was to prove that he was married and had his own home and a regular job so he went and got my mom from wherever she was and rented an apartment in an old house on Seventh Street and got a job at the Meadow Gold Creamery washing out the vats and tanks, and I went to Kindergarten at the Clark School next to the Coliseum near where we lived across from the Piggly-Wiggly Store. I remember December Seventh when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor sitting on the floor listening to the radio.
Every time my mom and dad got mad at each other, Granma would come and get me in her Oldsmobile and I would stay with her and Grampa until school started or mom and dad would rent another house to live in. We moved a lot what with my mom running around and my dad drinking all the time. He always smelled like beer and potatoes. We never owned a car but dad always used a truck from work he would bring home and park at our house. Once after we bought the house at 303 S 13th St across from Nelson's Bakery, some drunk run smack into the back of the truck parked in front and broke his teeth on the steering wheel.
Nelson's Bakery was inside the old ice factory building where German prisoners of war dismantled the machinery after the Amishmen bought it at auction. It was right next to the railroad tracks so they loaded the pipes and boilers directly onto the freight cars. I knew even then what the expression "the wrong side of the tracks" meant.
Anyway, I was always building model airplanes and lighting them on fire and sailing them into the brick side of Nelson's Bakery to watch them crash.
I started hunting squirrels with Grampa using a b-b gun. He would stick a dead squirrel on a tree and I would try to shoot it, pretending I killed it. Then when I was five and big enough he let me use Granma's old nickel-plated 20 gauge pump gun which I used to shoot pigeons off the edge of the barn roof for pigeon pie. You have to be careful to kill only the squabs because the old pigeons are tough and don't taste right and you have to aim just right so you don't spoil the meat.
I found an old reel of 16mm nitrate movie film in a box in the barn that I unspooled into the ash pit and threw a match in. Wow. Burnt off my eyebrows. Granma was mad at me for that.
B-b guns are fun. I remember when Duke Pyle shot his little brother Bobby in the forehead because he was mad at him. It raised a big welt and Bobby cried and carried on, so Jay Pyle whipped Duke, because their dad had not yet come back from Okinawa to do it where he was a soldier.
Then Grampa gave me a Fox-Stevens side-by-side 20 gauge that was my pride and joy. Many years later I swapped it for a Ruger Single-Six .22 long rifle. That's a pistol not a rifle. My mistake, but I thought the gun was rusting out. It was only lead corrosion that brushed right out. We never cleaned guns because my dad said the new gunpowder was smokeless and non-corrosive.
Once when I was walking behind Grampa down the railroad tracks going into the woods I was playing with the safety trying to remember by feel which way was on and the gun went off and shot Grampa a little bit in the left leg. It didn't bleed much and he never told anybody about it.
I loved shooting. In order to get the Marksmanship merit badge when I was twelve I enrolled in a Civilian Marksman course at the YMCA where we shot targets at the indoor range in the basement, using squib loads. I am an Eagle Scout.
I got a paper route one summer and delivered the Chicago Times until I got trip by train to Chicago with other paper boys where we stayed in an old hotel and read eight-pagers and went to museums. I saved enough money to buy a brand-new Ithaca model 39-A lever-action .22 from Van Meter's on Main Street. Once a policeman took it away from me when a woman complained that one of my bullets hit her porch when I was shooting at the gravel pit. Could be. My dad got back for me.
Muzzle-loading rifles and guns were common in those days because everybody wanted new breech-loading rifles and guns, and you could get Kentucky rifles for a song for the asking. Most of them weren't worth much. One of our neighbors, Mr. Creselius, was a gunsmith who fixed them in his shop out back. He made muzzle-loading rifles the old way by hand and sold them. He gave me all told two Kentucky rifles that he had fixed up. I did odd jobs for him like cutting the grass.
One of my Kentucky rifles I swapped for a 45-70 GVMT caliber Springfield '73 carbine that was in a case of rifles they found in the attic of the old building at Fourth and Main when they tore it down. They had been used at the University for reserve officer training during the Spanish-American War. They gave the rifles to the National Guardsmen, and that's how I got mine from one of them, Jerry Nightingale.
I had another '73 Springfield that my bandmaster Mr. Oscar L. Dunn, the brother of my English teacher Miss Rena J. Dunn, gave me. Their brother had carried it in the war. They said that Miss Dunn's lover had died in the war and that was why she never allowed anyone to take her picture and she never got married. Mr. Dunn gave me the old rifle because he knew I loved guns and as soon as George Robert Whitehouse graduated I was first chair cornet.
I couldn't afford to shoot the big rifles with store-bought cartridges, so I reloaded the 45-70 pills with black powder and 405 grain pistol bullets that me and my classmate Philip Jackson made in a mould for his 1911 Colt pistol. In order to seat the primers I closed the trap-door action on them and then crimped the bullets in with pliers. They shot just fine but it was messy cleaning up the residue from the black powder. That's why not many old guns survived. The black powder made them rust out.
Philip Jackson's dad, Dr. Jackson, was an osteopath who treated my dad for what he called "back problems," which were really hemorrhoids. Philip became a state trooper and married a colored girl, Phyllis Jackson. When she went to the store with Mrs. Jackson, she always walked behind her.
Gunpowder comes in different size grains, depending on what use you have for it. The FFG size was what we used. I found that you could bore a hole, say, a half-inch wide, in a block of wood, a piece of two-by-four or firewood, put in a jigger of black powder and seal it with a dowel driven in tight. Then add it to a campfire and wait for the fun.
I guess not a lot of people remember when you could buy gunpowder at the general store, but then I suppose most people don't know what a general store is. Once upon a time before box stores and supermarkets were invented, the only stores were general stores like seven-elevens and handy stores, they called them "groceries," that carried what you needed all the time, and the specialized stores in town where you went to buy what you wanted like fancy shoes, shirts, and sheets.
I used to buy my chemicals at Smith's Drugstore at Tenth and Main. Larry Smith would measure out small amounts of the stuff I wanted to add to my chemistry set, like nitric acid and potassium permanganate. Chemistry sets were what they gave to bright kids for Christmas. They came in all sizes and only the big sets had dangerous stuff in them. Mostly you could make invisible ink and stink bombs with any chemistry set, and parents thought the sets would turn their kids into researchers, was the argument. You learned about acids, bases, litmus paper, and the potential Hydrogen ion concentration (pH) from them.
With them you might learn you could take paint off with muriatic acid, which was just dilute hydrochloric, and it will melt concrete if you need to set a bolt or round off a corner, but from a chemistry set you couldn't even learn that the valence of hydrogen is plus one.
I tried to make nitroglycerine, but never got it right. I combined nitric and glycerine, but the reducing sulphuric acid was somehow wrong. I threw the bottles up against the brick walls of Nelson's Bakery, hoping for explosions, but it never happened. I also tried absorbent cotton balls, but they just melted and made a mess.
I learned the hard way what will happen when you cover a drop of glycerine with potassium permanganate crystals. I was using the kitchen counter when no one was home and I left my experiment on a piece of cardboard to do something else when nothing happened. It didn't even smoke much, but it sure burned. I caught hell for that.
Down in the basement lab I mixed up some flash powder using powdered aluminum and saltpeter, and lit a filter paper full of the stuff with a match. It went off and burned my wrists black and hurt like hell, so I put some bacon grease from out of the oven on the burns on my wrists and called a cab and went to Dr. Jackson's office and he washed the grease off under the tap with warm water and put Unguentine or something on and bandaged me up. I still have the scars.
I was going to cast some bullets at that same kitchen counter one day. I had bought a little electric ladle for melting lead and making toy soldiers, and instead of using an extension cord to connect heater, I plugged it into the wall socket in the kitchen. It burnt a big hole in the wall where the sockets had been and made a mess.
I had a laboratory in the basement where I kept my chemicals and batteries. The railroad workers discarded batteries from their handcars, the little gasoline-powered speeders the gandy dancers used to get to work on their sections, long before they were wore out, so I collected them when I walked home from school down the tracks, and connected them in parallel. I made several arc lights from flashlight battery carbons at 1.5 v. DC that worked well with them for power.
Once when Grampa and Granma took me to Kentucky to the zoo, I remember a monkey dropped her new baby and killed it, and Grampa bought some firecrackers. We went out on a sandbar in the White River near Decker and shot them off. I never had so much fun in my life. Granma was ashamed of the way Grampa chewed tobacco because they couldn't smoke in the mines. He died from cancer of the stomach.
I ordered a fireworks assortment from an ad on the back of a comic book, even though firecrackers were against the law in Indiana and you could not buy them legally there. My dad sold produce and veterinary supplies in Illinois where firecrackers were legal but he would never bring me any. So, I figured I could get away with a small order by mail, but the Postmaster phoned my dad who went to the post office and got them and threw them in the river. That's also where he threw Grandma's little .32 caliber pistol after she died. She always carried it in her purse and never in her life had a chance to use it.
One of my favorite toys was carbide, calcium carbide (CAC2) that makes acetylene gas (C2H2) when you put it in water. They used it in lamps for the hats of coalminers, and Grampa was an electrician in the coalmines. That's how he broke both collarbones at the same time. He was kneeling down connecting some wires between the tracks when two coal cars banged together. He was out of work for months and so they moved back to Decker. In those days miners were a dime a dozen and a job was all they had.
My fun was to take five-gallon cans with the tops off to the gravel pits. Then you put a few pieces of carbide in a baby food can with some water, and push the inverted big can down into the sand over the little can. Punch a nail hole in the bottom of the big can and light a wad of paper there. Soon the big can will blow nearly out of sight.
One of my junior high school memories is the day someone, not me, put a cherry bomb behind a bank of lockers and blew them off the wall during the morning session just after recess. What a mess! They never found the mad bomber but everybody knew it was Byron Bobe.
That's where I got the idea to take dynamite caps to school and show off. I was staying with my cousin Marjorie Alice, whose mother Ophie was the wife of Noble (Deuce) Fredericks, the guitar player. Marjie's husband Paul McAllister was working at Schenk Farms just outside Decker on Highway 41 where they had a little house. They raised hybrid seed corn and so they had to hire and run gangs of boys to de-tassel the corn when it started to flower. They wore special gloves with knife blades built in to them.
I was playing with Roy Schenk, the owner's son, when we found blasting supplies stored in one of the tornado shelters, in a cellar built with a door down close to the ground and steps that led into an underground room that was safe when there was a storm. There was a wooden box half full of sticks of dynamite, which were wet with acid and smelly, and there was a small tin box of blasting caps and a spool of fuse. I got so excited I didn't even think I was stealing when I cut ten foot-length pieces of fuse with my Barlow knife and crimped a dynamite cap onto the end of each piece. I used my teeth because I didn't have any pliers. A blasting cap is a copper tube sealed at one end with fulminate of mercury [Hg(CNO)2] crystals in it.
I wrapped the caps and fuses up in an old dish towel and hid them in my suitcase. I wasn't going to tell anybody about them, but Paul seemed interested in what I had been doing, so I went and got a dynamite cap with its fuse to show him. I told him to come outside in front where I lit the fuse with a kitchen match and threw the cap out into the weeds. Paul grabbed the baby Stephen and ran indoors. The cap didn't go off.
I couldn't see the smoke from the burning fuse so I went looking for it and found it just as it went bang. I was pleased as hell. I went in the house and Marjie started crying when she looked at me and went and got a wet washrag to mop the blood off my face. I didn't feel a thing out of the ordinary, and then what I saw out of my right eye turned partly black
at the bottom, and she went to the office and phoned our house. Then they took me home and I got sick to my stomach and puked and went to bed, and they said I was in "shock."
Next day I still couldn't see right, so my mom took me to Dr. Paul's office, he's the one that lanced the boil I had on my neck. That hurt, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. He looked in my eye with that flashlight thing he had and said it looked OK to him. So my mom told me to stop complaining. Next day she took me to my dad's fishing buddy, Dr. Shepherd, and he said I had a blood clot in my eye. He used the same kind of flashlight that Dr. Paul used, but maybe his batteries were fresher. He gave me some foul-tasting medicine to take and said I had to have hot compresses ten times a day and lie down, and so my mom and I spent the summer with hot compresses on my face, listening to WAOV a m, Water All Over Vincennes, 1440 on your dial.
Well, I could still see around the clot, and then the clot started to turn gray, and then everything turned white, and they said I had a cataract. The lens had become opaque like rice pudding. I couldn't see a thing out of it.
You know my mom did not like doctors because every time someone she knew had an operation they died or were sorry afterwards, so she told me "Don't ever go under the knife, Honey." Well, I just as soon never wanted to see another doctor so it was all right with me.
Then every day around lunchtime it would hurt and throb like hell, and the doctor said I had "glaucoma," and there wasn't much to do but more hot compresses and aspirins, but the medicine gave me a bellyache, so I had a bellyache and a headache at the same time, for years.
That was when my dad went off to live with some woman over a garage and they got divorced and my mom took the house on 13th Street where we lived from him. She got a job searching titles across from the courthouse because she was a good typist. Her men friends used to bring me presents like candy and bottles of Mogen David wine to shut me up, I suppose. It was like that story about Sadie Thompson where " that hieless virago made her way to Pago Pago, where the Chinaman and Dago beat a path to her door." That's from a book my dad had.
They used to separate out the smart kids when they started junior high school, that's called "middle school" now. I had skipped the fourth grade, and they put me in track five, the highest bunch of kids, and when we went to high school I was in the academic or college group, but the first week in Latin class I was sitting in the back of the room resting my foot on the steam valve on the radiator-heater and it broke off and filled the room with water vapor and really pissed the teacher, Miss Campbell, off.
So, she kicked me out, and they said my folks were nobody, the drunk and the whore, and so I would have to take French instead of Latin and not be in the college-bound class.
But I had my horn. I was the young man with a horn. I could play the cornet, and old-fashioned brass-band instrument still loved then by the public. I played in the First Indiana Regiment Band, left over from the Civil War that played every Sunday evening in Gregg Park at the band- shell, conducted by Emmett Prebble. No, he was one of my cornet teachers. The conductor played the trombone. I can't recall his name.
Champ Greenlee and I used to play cornet duets with the band, and I won a First in the state solo competition in Indianapolis, playing du Bellay's "Petite Piece Concertante."
So I went to college on a state music scholarship, to Indiana State Teachers' College, after my mom married Jim Kimmel and moved to Hamilton, Ohio. I was seventeen.
Luckily you didn't lose your scholarship if you changed your major in college. After one quarter of listening to the lousy strings in orchestra class, I decided public school music was not for me. I'd rather be a preacher, and that's not saying much. So, I changed to English and French. Miss Rena J. Dunn taught English literature and David Jackson taught French at Lincoln High School and they were swell. Mr. Jackson had gone to university in Grenoble as a G.I. after the war and come home with a French wife. Of course, Miss Dunn was "non-pareil." She made you put your books and notebooks on the floor next to your chair so that nothing could fall off and disturb her classes. Her favorite poem was La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and I wished later I had gotten the message.
By the time I got to college I had an eye that didn't see. It wandered crooked, and so I looked funny. One evening when we were making love lying on my back on a couch on the mezzanine of the Student Union auditorium, in my exertions the lens in my eye detached and fell inside my eye.
I could see again! But I couldn't focus, of course. Like Nature Boy I was kind of shy with one bad eye, but a real gone guy was me.
We got married and had kids, and I got fired from Hilton High School because the head of the English teachers, Dewitt Clinton Burnett, tried to get me to have sex with him and I made fun of him in front of the students. I didn't know any better. I had never met a respectable queer before.
My mother-in-law was making my life hell, trying to convince me to let her buy me off with the money she had saved from substitute teaching, to leave her daughter and the kids to her, and go away for good. We had an apartment in a big old farmhouse out in Greece near Hilton, and I had an old Ford we could get around in, so I tried selling life insurance, and Dictaphones, and I was a copyreader on the Democrat & Chronicle for a while substituting for guys on vacation. Then I got the draft call to report for a physical examination.
During the exam which was held in an auditorium full of naked smelly boys I told them I couldn't see in one eye but they didn't believe me, so they told me to go to Buffalo to an army hospital to be examined by a specialist who could count the number of eyes I had. I went by bus to the hospital and the doctor there was bored out of his skull with being the ophthalmologist in a military hospital with nothing to do, so he gave me every test he knew and said I was blind as a bat in one eye. I waited out on Ridge Road in a snowstorm [It was Buffalo, after all] for hours and caught a bus to Rochester. I came down sick with pneumonia and it settled in my bad eye, which then got worse when they put me in the Strong Memorial.
The surgeon tried to catch the detached lens with a wire loop after he had opened the eye up, but he couldn't get it, or things looked bad in there, so he scooped the insides out and put in a hollow gold sphere just my size and sewed it up. I remember the surgeon told me to be quiet and shut up because I was praying the Jesus Prayer after he made the incision, and then he told someone to put me out so he could do his work.
I woke up with a plastic tablespoon in my eye to hold it all together until the swelling went down. Then I got OK and had to go see the man in Detroit who made glass eyes, prostheses to fit. The new technology used injected molding of plastic resin to form the shell of the eye, which was then painted freehand by a guy who used special paint and a palette and silk brushes with natural light from a window in a high-rise building in downtown Detroit to match your eye exactly.
The man who made my eye was named Fritz Jardon who had come from Germany to open a clinic for making eyes. He wore a big gold ring with a black swastika on it. Injecting warm plastic goop onto my new eyeball wasn't much fun but it didn't last long. Soon I had a fake eye that fit perfectly and moved when I looked around. I put it in with little rubber suction cups.
Then it started to get irritated even though I had worn the eye for months without taking it out when we went to Coral Gables and Miami Beach with the U-Haul trailer looking for a job and a home, ending up at my grandfather Miley's house in Indianapolis where my mom had a job as secretary to the director of a private mental hospital, a full-blooded Sioux named Richard Condelaro.
Then it started making the eyelid swell up in edema and hurt bad. I answered an ad in the paper and Mr. Harold Barr, the principal, flew to Indianapolis and gave me a contract at the airport, they were desperate to find teachers, to teach school in Romeo, Michigan, thirty-five miles north of Cobo Hall in Mo Town.
I had three or four new plastic eyes made by Fritz before I gave up on the damned things and a just wore sunglasses so people wouldn't stare. I was a one-eyed teacher for forty years. The only advantage to being a cripple is that people felt sorry for you and when affirmative action came along it was better to be different from normal folks, in case other people wanted to act like Christians are supposed to act all the time.
