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.

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.

Vehiculous Undecidas

There's a brief scene in "Amadeus" where Tom Hulce, playing Wolfgang Mozart is in a wig shop being fawned over by multiple shop attendants. They try this outlandish wig on him, and that pink, bizarre wig on him, and then a final one-- purple, I think. Hulce grins in his chromosomally-challenged way at the mirror before him and shrieks,

"OOohh! I love them all! What if I had three heads?"

The sales associates look at each other in a moment of painful awkwardness until Hulce himself bursts into his personification of Mozart's high-pitched hysterics. Once they know it's a joke, the wig salesmen erupt in effete titters and applaud Mozart roundly for his "funny."

The way Mozart feels about wigs is the way I feel about cars.

I want them all.

What if I had three seat-asses, or three accelerator feet, or six steering wheel hands?

And three car payments.

My vehicle-acquisition whims seem to change with the passing of the hour, and it requires very, very little for me to get a hard-on for even the most unlikely vehicle. It's a good thing I'm not like this about women, or my marriage to Mrs. Apron would have ended before the ink on our ketubah was dry.

For a while, I was on about a 2003-2005 Volkswagen New Beetle, white, done up as Herbie the Love Bug. When I get through with it, it would look something like this:

I know for a fact that this is what it would look like because this is, in fact, a picture of my former car, a 2001 Volkwsagen New Beetle, done up to look like Herbie the Love Bug. Some schmuck took a picture of my car when it was parked in Brooklyn while I was on a visit to see my best friend who no longer speaks to me. I found the picture on the internet a year later. I don't know who the hell the dog is, or why he has lips that resemble hotdogs.

I don't really need to explain why I want to own a Herbie replica again, but I'll do it anyway because that's what blogs are basically about, aren't they-- explaining the irrational. Every day was special for me while driving this car-- every day, something happened. Someone said something to me, or snapped a picture of it, complimented me, smiled at me, waved at me-- well, at the car, really. Only once did somebody give me the finger while I was driving my Herbie-- and it wasn't because of some rule-of-the-road violation I had committed. I know that because it was a carload of high school boys. And they shouted, "FUCK YOU, HERBIE!" out the window of their Mercedes.

Of course, there are days where I don't exactly want attention-- just as there days where I don't want to deal with the eccentricities of a Volkswagen New Beetle's finnicky and unpredictable electrical system, once having lit up almost every single idiot light on my dashboard and making me fear the whole fucking car would explode. It's on days like these where I think I want a Subaru.

I've never driven a car with all-wheel-drive before, and the thought of driving in the snow without a steady stream of urine soaking through my corduroys is an appealing thing as one approaches thirty years of age. Plus, because my wife is a member of the American Speech Hearing Association, she gets (and I could get) between $1,500-$3,300 off the MSRP of a new Subaru. Apparently, ASHA and Subaru are making sexy nipple-twisty times with each other, and that's all kinds of hot. AWD and power seats beats a fucking mug or a tote bag any day. Plus, NIIHS crash tests just gave Subaru a big boner for strengthing its rooves to protect against potentially head-crushing rollover accidents. And I'm all about saving the brain, y'alls.

Plus, I kind of think the Outback is, um, sexy. Which means that I have some sort of ravenous brain cancer that will probably result in death and/or E.D. in a few short months.

Of course, nobody, however disturbed or dysfunctional could ever possibly think the 2002-2006 Toyota Camry is sexy, and yet, there I was making eyes at one, this very night, in fact. Not only was I lustily ogling a Toyota Camry, but I was doing it at a goddamn MINI dealership! There it was, a beige-on-beige 2003 Toyota Camry LE... surrounded by all of these sprightly, charming, primary-colored punchy little buggers. And the car I was looking at? The car I actually got out of my car to look at, looks kind of like this insipid motherfucker:

Some hump having a serious case of mid-life baldness obviously traded it in for a John Cooper S Edition mini, probably one with the Union Jack painted all over the goddamn roof and the side-mirrors. It bore an inglorious window sticker "AS-IS: NO WARRANTY." No price even. They probably pay you to take it. And there I was, staring at it like it was a porno.

I'm usually okay with who I am. Really, I am.

But, tonight, I was not. I'm scared.

Help me.

And stop looking at me like I have three heads.