I Spy with My Little Eye Something Beginning With "Fetish"

Sometimes, I try to legitimize my fetishes by insisting that they be referred to, in polite company, as "interests." Other times, I'm not so particular. Or polite.

They're fucking fetishes.

I'm sick and salacious and dirty and dotty and just plain nasty.

And I.

Have.

Fetishes.

The one we're going to chat about today, as you may have gleaned from the photograph above, is: the eyeglass fetish.

I can't stop buying eyeglasses. It doesn't matter that I only have one head and one pair of eyes. It doesn't matter that, unless you're Robert Stack in "Airplane!", you can only reasonably wear one pair of eyeglasses on your face at any given time.

None of this logic and rationality matters when you are fetish-stricken. It just doesn't matter. Because you're fucking dottier than a Dot Matrix printer.

I've wanted to wear glasses since I was in the third grade. I practically willed myself to need them, too. I don't quite know how it happened. In 1988, when I first decided I had to have (as an accessory) glasses, neither of my parents wore glasses, for near or distance, and neither did either of my sisters. But I knew, as a budding schdork, that I had to have some. And, when my eyesight didn't warrant them, I wore them anyway.

Actually, they weren't real glasses. They were red, plastic sunglasses that you'd buy at Thrift Drug for $2.99 and they had a Mickey Mouse sticker on each temple. I promptly removed both of those stickers, and I popped out the sunglass lenses with my thumbs, and I wore them to school.

"You look like even more of a fucking retard than before," Russell, the neighborhood sociopath said to me on Bus 30 the first morning I wore my new accessories. I didn't care. I wore them for three weeks until they broke on the playground after I was hit in the face with the tetherball. I wasn't playing, of course, just walking past. God only knows how long I would have worn them had they not retired themselves that day.

By some miracle, God decided to grant my wish for glasses two years later. In fifth grade, I got my eyesight tested at school and it was bad enough to warrant a trip to the optometrist. He was a shockingly old fellow with an appalling gut that was held firmly in place by a pair of brown, impossibly tight trousers. During my visit with him, he several times adjusted what I can only assume were his schnutz, and, even as a nine-year-old, I was alarmed. When he leaned in close to me to adjust the refractor, I couldn't help noticing that his breath smelled like he had been tossing an elephant's salad for three weeks.

"You're a very precocious young man," he observed about me, which, I have to say, was a damn sight nicer than anything I was observing about him.

I was overjoyed when he prescribed me glasses for distance vision, with the recommendation that I not wear them all the time, "lest you grow too dependent on them."

Like hell, I thought. I wore those fuckers to sleep the first night.

In 2000, I got hired at my first non-camp job. It was a small optical shop, and, as time went on, the manager and I became very close friends. He offered me as many frames and lenses as I wanted at or below cost-- sometimes free if it was near my birthday. And, Jesus, did I take advantage of the discounts. I must have purchased seven or eight pairs directly from him, both while I worked there and for years afterward. And, though I left in 2003 (on the very best of terms) and even though I continue to buy whatever frame strikes my fancy at an antique shop or a flea market, I still go to him to have the lenses put in. He never makes me feel like a weirdo or a freak, even though I'm both. He just smiles and orders the lenses and cuts the job.

And, ever the salesman, never fails to tell me how nice I look in whatever the new pair happens to be.

I can't wait to get lenses put in these antique bad boys. And, who knows-- it might even be close enough to my birthday that he'll do it for nothing.