Mr. Drinker’s Glass Eye
(Dec 19/05)
Mr. Drinker had one good eye and one made out of glass and painted with what looked like real veins with a cornea and whites that were almost perfectly white, almost whiter. He could be looking out the window, or at the chalkboard, or sometimes at the top of his desk when he was thinking about something, like a question or a smart comeback to a student’s snide remark about poetry or proper grammar. When actually he was looking directly at you, always when you were up to no good or ripping pages out of a school textbook you were suppose to take care of and guard with your life. This other fat kid with two chins and a faint Frenchman’s moustache, the kind that never grow in full or looked like a real moustache, stabbed a moth that had alit on the windowsill, and ate it in one swallow; tiny, dusty wings flapping like mad in the corners of his mouth.
Mr. Drinker had one good eye and one made out of glass and painted with what looked like real veins with a cornea and whites that were almost perfectly white, almost whiter. He could be looking out the window, or at the chalkboard, or sometimes at the top of his desk when he was thinking about something, like a question or a smart comeback to a student’s snide remark about poetry or proper grammar. When actually he was looking directly at you, always when you were up to no good or ripping pages out of a school textbook you were suppose to take care of and guard with your life. This other fat kid with two chins and a faint Frenchman’s moustache, the kind that never grow in full or looked like a real moustache, stabbed a moth that had alit on the windowsill, and ate it in one swallow; tiny, dusty wings flapping like mad in the corners of his mouth.
His name was Rolly Sims, and his parents lived on welfare and whatever money they could win at the bingo or card sharking. They were real bona fide swindlers, and drove a Ford Pacer with tinted windows and a china dog with a busted neck that flapped like crazy on the ledge in the back window. Rolly’s older sister, Pam, wore miniskirts with leggings that went up only as far as the top of her knees, and a tube top that crinkled the skin under her arms and made her chest look flat and unappealing. Even to a younger kid with a constant boner and way too many fantasies and sexy ideas hammering away in his head.
Mr. Drinker sang in the Church choir and wore a black smock with a tie around the back. He wore thick glasses, the kind that you could burn a grasshopper to bits with in five seconds, that fit too snuggly against the bridge of his nose. He had these two red divots on either side of his head, where the glasses’ frames cinched into the skin above his ears. He was a baritone, and could hit those real low notes that sound like a hide-a-bed being dragged from one end of the room to the other. He taught me English Lit, and how to write a proper sentence without screwing up the grammar and punctuation. I always dreamed of asking him to take his glass eye out, so I could see what it looked like up close, inspecting the paint job and looking to see if the cornea was centred. And to see if it was true that you could see into someone’s skull, at the brain itself, when their eye was out. I never got the chance, nor did I eat a moth or get a blowjob from Rolly’s sister Pam, or look down her top, for that matter.
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