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.

Say What You Want

I miss being a precocious child.

I'm pretty precocious now, but it just isn't the same when you have 5 o'clock shadow and nosehair.

I think that, when you're college-aged, you're reasonably intelligent to grasp the idea that there are going to be precious few times in your life when you are going to be able to behave like a total asshole and face relatively few repercussions-- unless you have sex condomless with the wrong chick or throw up on a campus police officer-- and, knowing that, I think that most college kids make sure that they live it up a little because they're aware that they're going to have to settle down and grow up.

You know, at least ten or so years after graduation.

When you're a young child, even a precocious one, you don't really have the intellectual foresight to appreciate how lucky you are that you're a small child and you can say pretty much whatever you want. And, yeah, you might be sent to your room or remonstrated sternly by some D in a sweatervest, but, basically, nothing's going to happen to you.

Like the time my sister was giving me a hard time on the front lawn one beautiful summer's day, and I had had enough of her.

"Oh, go dip your vagina in duck sauce!" I yelled at her, at age 8.

We must have just had Chinese food.

What is even funnier about this situation to me now, looking back on it, was not that I said that to my sister, loudly, in the open space of our front yard, but that my sister then had the courage and lack of embarrassment to report, verbatim, what I had said to our parents. Truthfully, if she had told me to go bathe my penis is hoisin sauce, I don't know that I would have been able to repeat that to my parents.

Oh, it was a good life.

In fourth grade, when Ms. Curly asked me what would I have done, had I been one of the bears who found Goldilocks sleeping in my bed, I said,

"I would have decked that straying son-of-a-tulip."

I think I was just repeating a phrase I had recently read in a "Bloom County" cartoon from the book "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos." Ms. Curly, obviously not a fan of Berkeley Breathed, was not entertained. While displeasure spread over her face like Parvovirus, she didn't throw me out of the room. She just harshly said my name as her eyes bugged out, making her look, I remember thinking, just like Bill the Cat.

Then there was the time in sixth grade where I made a film about the Loch Ness Monster, investigated by an fictional policeman from Scotland Yard named "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python.

Amazingly, no phone call was placed to my parents' home. No letter from the principal. No disciplinary action. The Precocious Child wins again, remains unscathed, and lives to fight another day.

It was a good life, really.

Did I appreciate it then? The shield of immunity provided to the precocious child? No, I did not. Now, the only way I can say whatever I want is pretty much what you're looking at here. And, in one respect, that's okay, because there ought to be consequences for going around shooting your mouth off and being inappropriate in the company of others, in the public sphere-- on the front lawns of America. You can't expect people to work in an environment where people are telling their bosses to go dip their vaginas in duck sauce, for example. That just wouldn't work. But I do miss that freedom of the tongue.

Of course, this freedom returns, pretty much as it was, when you reach old age and you can just blame everything on dementia. At least there's something to look forward to.

Come on In

When you're a kid, having weird obsessions is usually charming. When you're an adult, it sometimes lands you in a psych hospital.

My childhood obsessions were as follows:

* Airplane crashes
* News anchors
* Classical music
* Cars from the 1970s
* Multi-line rotary office telephones
* Hypochondria
* Three-piece suits
* CB radios
* Doorknobs

(If you ever get bored and want to write to my parents to ask them why I was not engaged in intensive psychotherapy beginning at age 7, PM me for their mailing address. I think they'd like to hear from you.)

If you're not quite sure how a young boy gets obsessed with doorknobs, well, ladies (and gents?), you've once again come to the right blog. Go, you.

When I was a child, I grew up watching "Fawlty Towers," a brilliant BBC comedy series written by John Cleese and his then-soon-to-be-ex-wife Connie Booth. The show was written and produced in the mid-1970s, and only twelve episodes exist-- almost each and every one is comedic gold. The show takes place in a hotel in Torquay in a hotel that bears the same name as the show. As a child of maybe ten, I knew each line of episode by heart, and my eldest sister used to take great joy in lying in bed while I would recite entire sections of dialogue from "The Germans" or "Basil the Rat" episodes from memory, altering my voice to seamlessly change from one character to the next, and back again.

If you think kids don't notice details, you're crazy. The set of Fawlty Towers was very meticulously designed, and, even though it's supposed to be a not-so-hot hotel, (the front sign with movable letters frequently changed from anything to "Watery Farts" to "Fawlty Twats"), it was still formal, and uptight, and decidedly English. And what's more English than an S-shaped, serpentine door handle.


One day, I announced to my father that we needed to go to the hardware store. Back then, it was called "Channel."

"Why?"

"Because my door needs a new handle," I said confidently. Funny, they say teenagers think they're invincible-- but I was always afraid of approaching my father with some bizarre request as a teenager. However, when I was ten, I thought nothing of it whatsoever.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" he asked, his brow furrowed.

"Just take me to Channel," I said, "and I'll show you."

So my father and I went to Channel, and I pointed to a gold-colored s-shaped door handle, elegant and sweeping to a small curlie-q at the end. It was $27.00.

"Mummy, I love you, but you've got to be fuckin' kidding me. $27.00 for a fucking door handle? No. Don't you want to go to college some day?"

"No," I answered. Little did I realize then that I would be able to publish a book, produce my own plays, and get laid in this magical place. I pouted as my eyes searched hungrily for an acceptable compromise.

"What about this one?" I asked, prepping the puppy eyes. "It's only $13.00."

"Jesus Christ," my father muttered, grabbing the plastic casing encapsulating my new door handle, "let's get the fuck out of here already."

Not too long ago, my wife and my eldest sister and I were sitting together upstairs in my parents' house. This house has been home to generations of my family, beginning with my grandparents, my great-aunt, my mother and her brothers when they were little children, my father, me and my sisters, and now, most of the time, my nephew. The day-to-day residents of the house are my parents and my eldest sister, though she says she's moving out again. Some day. Affectionately disordered folks with my blood have played musical rooms in that house since 1957.

"Did you ever live in this room?" my wife asked me that night when we were all talking in the room now inhabited by my eldest sister.

"Of course he did," my sister said, "look at that fucking door handle."

And there, barely still attached to a chewed-up, run-down, beat up, bare-assed, hollow-core wooden door is a gold-colored swirly, elegant, shining door handle, the clear enigmatic emblem of a house that has had its details ignored, its moldings carelessly painted over, its chimney practically collapsing onto itself, and the same floor in the dining room and kitchen since 1957.

"That handle looks really funny on that door," my wife commented, gazing at it in a haze of humor and disbelief.

"Looks good to me," I said.