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The Glass Eye (from my memoir Altar Boys, Greasers, and Reform School Girls)

Kenneth DiMaggio

    No matter where you move when you’re a kid, you discover that some of your neighbors are psychotic, paranoid, and drunk.
    Luckily, the neighbor known only as “Pete” from across the street also had a glass eye to go along with being psychotic, paranoid, and drunk.
    Pete lived in the only ranch house on my new and short street. The other eight houses had similar large awkward gables, wastefully wide front porches, upper story sentry box dormers, and garages with barn doors that none of their owners could ever fully close. Next to the mastiff mean houses on our street, Pete’s tiny, garage-less ranch house at the end of it was like a small kitten.
    But Pete—who was some seventy something year old Polish or Baltic state-immigrant, roared loud enough to make it seem like some pre-historic critter like a Tyrannosaurus Rex lived in that little yellow clapboard shoebox of a house.
    As soon as it was warm enough to open the windows, Pete put his Great Depression era, arch-shaped wooden cabinet radio in the window, and tuned as loud as possible to the accordions and om-pah-pah of whatever local station was broadcasting a Polka Hour. Come the first warm day, Pete was also out in gray trousers, slippers, a white sleeveless T-shirt, and always holding a beer. He had great timing though. Soon as you and your family pulled into the driveway with the Maroon, boxy, un-menacing but practical American Motors made-Rambler, Pete was there yelling about how he charged up San Juan Hill with a cutlass in the Spanish American war. Young as I was, I was already addicted to enough war movies and family war stories to know that the Spanish American War happened long, long ago (and could it even be considered a war with the way no one in our town remembered or memorialized it).
    Then there were times the neighborhood heard Pete banging on the walls of his tiny house. He was banging for help, we soon determined. He was not only very drunk, but also had a flashback from when he worked in a coalmine back in Pennsylvania. (My parents and the other neighbors confirmed that this part of Pete’s unfortunate past was true.) The police would soon arrive to reassure Pete that he was not trapped in Pennsylvania, just a small town called New Britain, Connecticut, (ha ha) and if he didn’t want to get “trapped” for a night in the drunk tank, stop banging on your walls and lay off the sauce until you could drink like a normal human being.
    But Pete liked the neighborhood kids. He was always buying us things like cellophane wrapped popcorn balls, or even more yummy and bad for your teeth, candied red apples on a stick. For such treats we had to hear him tell how he charged up San Juan Hill, or got trapped for a couple of days in a Pennsylvania coal mine, for which some of the older kids would cynically “Uh-huh, uh-uh” him while giving us younger kids a wink. One day Pete had enough. “Ya goddamn kids! Ya think life is nothing but cartoons and toys! But when I was not much older than your age, I was working in the coal mine! And not much longer than that, I had an accident which left me with a glass eye!”
    Well that got us to stop munching on our candied, sugary snacks. But—
    “For real Pete?” one of the older kids asked. “You really got a glass eye?”
    “Yeah, and can you show us?” from one of the girls.
    At which Pete smiled, then with his thumb and forefinger, pulled away the skin at the bottom and top of his left eye until he “popped” out a glass blue eye.
    “Whoaaa!” we all admirably chorused.
    But then a few seconds after he did, his eyeless socket started puckering. Soon manically. Uncontrollably.
    “Put it in! Put it back in!” we started yelling, (and with some of the younger ones like me, crying).
    As we soon learned, however, Pete was drunk and couldn’t get the eye back in.
    “Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” he cried as he tried to put the eye back.
    At this point, we were all yelling and crying. Try as he might, Pete was too drunk to put the eye back in.
    And then he dropped his glass eye.
    “Ah Mother fucker!” he yelled.
    As we all ran out crying from his house, I also noted what sounded like a very bad word I had never heard before.
    Neither had the neighborhood heard Pete rage like this while he looked for his glass eye. By now, he either stepped on it or cracked it; that, or the furniture and china he was throwing around smashed his glass baby blue.
    The police came, but this time with an ambulance. Once inside his house, they quickly subdued him. Pete had a nervous breakdown, is what the adults whispered, and he was recuperating at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Two weeks later, Pete was back, but wearing a black patch over his left eye. Without his glass eye, Pete no longer visited us with a bottle of beer at our driveway. Neither did he put his Great Depression era radio in the window with the volume at full blast whenever there was Polka Hour. The tiny little ranch house at the end of our street was now like a cornered mouse.
    And then one warm day we heard something that made us stop our barbecuing or pause in riding our bikes that had baseball cards clothes-pinned to the spokes so that our bikes made a “ratchety, ratchety, ratchety” sound as we pedaled. Pete’s Great Depression era radio was back in his bedroom window.
    And playing Polka Hour at full blast.
    And when Pete came out holding a beer, and wearing gray trousers, a sleeveless white T-shirt, and an eye that was now brown—well, it was good enough for Pete to be the old Pete again, the Pete who would always be a pain in the ass, but the Pete who had a right to be for the way life had kicked his ass working in some less than dramatic coal mine which took more from a man than any charge up a hill hardly anyone remembered.

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