Cockeyed

Table of Contents

 

 

 

—Ryan Knighton

For my gal

 

 

 

Every Sunday, when I was a kid, my family drove to the outskirts of Langley, British Columbia, my hometown. My grandparents worked a hobby farm there, just this side of the U.S. border. My uncle and his girlfriend would show up, too, even my great grandparents who arrived at pushcart speed in their immaculate Parisienne. Our Sunday dinners at the farm were the best of plain British fare—Yorkshire pudding, whipped potatoes and gravy, roast beef, the works, and I loved every mouthful. Every taste of those days.

The farm was everything my two brothers, my sister, and I could have wanted—pellet guns, cow shit, electric fences, horses, and a dying Toyota pickup we abused at high speeds around the back acreage. Driving always devolved into spinning doughnuts in the tall grass while my siblings clung to the roof and tailgate.

When I was in my early teens, my Uncle Brad was somewhat of a hero to me. He had long hair and a 1980s anthem-rock moustache. He stood six-foot-six, drove an orange souped-up Chevy Nova, and stockpiled porn mags under his bed like cords of firewood. What more could a boy admire? I didn't notice that he'd bummed around until he was thirty, only that he gave me an acoustic guitar when I was twelve.

My uncle also played bass in a band, a band called—wait for it—Bender. My Uncle Brad, Nova-driving Brad, doing rock duty with Bender. Here's a man who refused to age. That resistance is what I grew to admire most. He did not go gentle into a good benefits package or practical footwear.

Because I admired him so much, it stung even more the night he mocked a sprouting oddity in my face. I was at a cruel threshold in puberty. I wanted to be seen more as a buddy than a kid, an equal of sorts, and therefore I wanted, more than anything, to be cool in Brad's eyes. I needed to be—I don't know—Bender-worthy.

The entire family sat around the dining table, digging in. I had a mouthful of perversely bitter brussel sprouts when my uncle made a face at me, a stupid Popeye look with a cartoony tone to match. It's hard to be seen as a potential roadie when your hero teases you like the five-year-old he still takes you for.

“Aaargh,” he said, all piratey and probably stoned. “You be mocking me with that face of yours? Wipe that look off your face, or I'll do it with me forked hand.”

He pulled his left hand up his long shirt sleeve. Only his fork poked out. Stuck on the end, a thin piece of ham flopped about as he gestured. I couldn't help thinking of the meat as a piece of face he'd wiped the look from. The idea made me want to ralph more than the sprouts. I puzzled at his pirate impression, then looked around the table to see if anybody knew what the hell he was on about. Nobody seemed to get it.

“What?” Brad said. “Look at his face. Ryan's got a squint or something, in his left eye. See? He's kind of cockeyed.”

Everybody swung their gazes my way and stared. My mother was the first to agree, making the
oh yeaaaah
noise of concerned recognition. Someone mused that the brussel sprouts caused my new look, and someone else said I got winking half right. In the culture of my family, jokes and sarcasm express one of two things: affection or worry.

I excused myself from the table and tried not to run to the bathroom, but ran anyway. It was true, what Uncle Brad had said. My left eye squinted back at me from the mirror, its top eyelid dropped lower than the right one, relaxed and half drawn, sleepy and inert. I forced it open, pulling my face back into balance, but when I reposed to my normal feeling of expression, the left lid dropped down again. I must have worked at righting it for a good fifteen minutes before my mother knocked on the bathroom door.

She asked to have a look. Nothing hurt, I explained, and nothing seemed out of focus, either. I couldn't even feel myself squinting. Ma said she'd make an appointment with the eye doctor and reassured me it was probably nothing. Ma's side of the family have gimpy, weak eyes. I already wore coke-bottle lenses. They probably needed upgrading to binoculars, that was all.

Since nothing else could be said or done, we returned to Sunday dinner. Its usual rumpus carried on, but I felt a little freaked. My uncle winked at me to make amends for his pirate joke. Then my little brother, Rory, whined about how Ryan
gets everything and how, if I had a squint, he should be allowed to have one, too.

Ma took me to the eye doctor the following week. My new prescription didn't curb the cockeyed look, though, and the doctor couldn't detect any further trouble. Not to worry, he said. Maybe I had a muscle spasm. That would pass. The matter was set aside and soon forgotten. To balance my face, I adopted a sleepier, half-lidded look. The camouflage worked. Nobody seemed to mind the change. But I did, and my squint persisted, always there, as if trying to focus through a problem I couldn't see. Not yet.

VLADIMIR:
“I'm asking you if it came on you all of a sudden?”
POZZO:
“I woke up one fine day as blind as Fortune.”

In 1987, at the age of fourteen, I landed my first full-time summer job. It was so cherry. All my friends endured the usual suburban grunt labour and franchise humiliations, but not me. Five graveyard shifts a week Jason pumped gas, most of it into the monster trucks of beer-sodden cowboys. Among other paranoias, his clientele accused Jason of shooting them amorous looks. Never wipe a windshield too cheerfully. Other friends of mine, countless McFriends, as we called them, manned the front lines of military-style fast-food stations. The brand names had arrived, and they pressured the shrinking farmlands of Langley. Naked parking lots and malnourished strip malls began to pock the landscape. Soon they became a more frequent sight than the old, decaying dairy barns or lush cranberry bogs. But what did we care? We were fourteen and broke. Everything new was ours. Each franchise was a summer job, and each was a place to go, to find your
friends on Friday night, if you weren't working. Eat and kill time. We were a new fast-food order.

My summer job introduced a fresh paradigm. I took off into what seemed the most elite niche of rare and exotic careers known to me or my friends, a real job, an occupation of mystery, promise, and serious responsibility. I was a teenage shipper-receiver.

At $6.50 an hour, I was also two bucks ahead of everyone I knew. As if riches weren't enough, the Help Wanted ad I spied in the
Langley Times
promised that driving the forklift would be a primary duty around the warehouse. Here I was, only fourteen, already driving, required to drive, and getting paid for it. They called this work? Fortune had smiled upon me, I thought, a rich and toothy grin. My father spent most of his working day driving, too, pricing commercial fence installations around Vancouver and its suburbs. At the time, I liked to imagine us both poised at the beginning of a transformative summer, one in which we would discover a new bond in work and exhaustion, not just father and son anymore, but fraternal working stiffs with weird tans. You know, the kind drivers get from hanging one arm out the window. That was going to be my summer. That and weekends of shaking myself stupid in bumper cars. I'd earn money driving a forklift, then spend it crashing at the amusement park.

My employer was Great West Pool and Spa, a manufacturer and installer of outdoor pools and hot tubs. They did everything from sewing vinyl pool linings to engineering spas for maximum massage and kinky effect. A plain, blue phrase
hung on the wall in the shipping department, each letter stylized in an ocean wave motif—We Work For Your Leisure. Nobody but me was quite that naïve. Could Great West Pool have sold water and bubbles as accessories, they would have. A customized licence plate hung on the owner's frugal mini-van. It described him as a “SRVIVR.” The phrase meant to capture his survivalist, free-enterprise spirit but only conjured in me images of a man who had successfully driven his Dodge through a nuclear blast.

My cheer over the forklift was premature. Because I was new, for my first few weeks on the job I didn't drive anything. Instead, I rode the forks—or, more accurately, clung to them—while Pat drove, often with me hoisted near the warehouse ceiling. Up there I scanned the hundreds of neatly shelved boxes of folded pool linings for the right invoice number. When I found it, I dragged and pushed the two-hundred-pound cardboard box onto the forks, grunting and cursing, sometimes outright pleading, as if the liners could be motivated. All of this took place about eighteen feet in the air, in a precarious balance. In action, I was like a carnival sideshow, a man forced to combine walking the tightrope with wrestling the fat lady. But it didn't bother me, not as much as it should have. What bothered me was Pat, particularly when he locked the brakes and gutted himself laughing. I had to clutch the forks for my life.

Chewing him out didn't help. Once I did my best to muster some command in my barely pubescent voice. Imagine Scooter from
The Muppet Show,
his four-eyed geek
fury, seething, all pinch-voiced and nasal, imagine him really laying in and giving you shit—then you may have something close to the androgynous power I managed.

“Pa-at!” I whined, “Pa-at! Fucking cut it out! I'm gonna fall! Do it again and I'll—do it again and I'll tell Greg.”

“Pa-at,” he mimicked, “cut it out, Pa-at, I'm gonna fall.”

My father had warned me about this sort of thing, indirectly, through years of suppertime stories about his own warehouse goofing. Life on the shop floor is a culture of whimsical cruelty. You have to play along or die. Often they seemed to be the same choice. I remember eating dinner when I was seven or eight and my father recounting over a spoonful of beans and wieners how he and the other grunts had spent the previous night's graveyard shift at war in the parts yard. For kicks they'd jimmied the safety switches off the pneumatic nail guns and had themselves a shootout, each guy positioned behind an oil drum or bails of heavy gauge wire. Later they calmed it down a bit and just shot their lunches. The morning shift arrived the next day to find bologna and peanut butter sandwiches crucified to the lunchroom door. Warehouse work can be serious horseplay, I learned. Now I was on the forks, my loyalty in question, a hint of hazing in it, to be sure, and I intended to make my old man proud.

“Here, I have a good idea,” Pat continued, with what could only be a bad idea for me. “Let me help you down so you can go tell Greg your big sob story.”

He ground the gears into reverse, punched the propane, jerked us into motion, and locked the brakes again. The forks swung violently back, rearing the machine like an aggravated
horse. The force flung me against the greasy steel face of the lift. I imitated moss, and clung.