Sandwich of Ruin!

Eye For An Eye

The summer before my 8th grade year, I visited the farm of one of my best friends, Joe. Joe and I had meticulously planned a weekend-long camping excursion out in the wild, which is to say about 500 yards away from the house.

Joe was pretty much my idol during the formative years between 5th and 8th grades. He was your typical farm kid: ridiculously strong for his age, and the guy could run like a deer. On the football field, practically no one could touch him once he had the ball. I admired the hell out of him.

Joe's family life, however, wasn't exactly ideal. His mother, a nurse at the Mayo Clinic, always seemed tired and ininspired, while his dad, a Vietnam vet, was an alcoholic who had a love for The Three Stooges and old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Joe also had a sister, and the two of them fought like it was some sort of religion.

I was a pretty small guy, probably topping out around 90 lbs or so that summer. Still, my small frame didn't keep Joe's dad from basically using me as slave labor any time I visited. Thanks to him, I learned, in intimate detail, the neutering process that all juvenile male piggies must endure, and I was almost trampled to death by sow-zilla (the same day this story happened, by the way, which tells you how busy that damned day actually was).

Well, once Joe's dad relieved me of my servitude, Joe and I started packing up our supplies for the camping excursion we had planned. The supplies consisted primarily of soda pop, hamburger, a tent, sleeping bags, Playboy and Penthouse magazines, and plenty of fireworks.

Joe had prepared a campsite on the grounds of an old grazing pasture that hadn't been used for grazing purposes in years. Stands of oak trees stood as sentries over old, rotting troughs and rusting farm equipment. Joe had fenced off about a 30 foot by 30 foot campsite. By 8th grade standards, it was probably one of the coolest things in the world.

We set up camp, and spent about a half hour or so drinking too much pop and throwing firecrackers at each other. Firecrackers, of course, gave way to a bottlerocket war, but we eventually stopped doing that when we realized getting hit by bottlerockets really kinda hurt.

We settled in to cook hamburgers and pass dirty magazines back and forth, trying to talk all grown up while hiding the growing stiffies pressing against our jeans. Nothing like naked pictures of Vanna White to get the little man to salute.

Once we were done cooking food, at around 11 p.m. or so, Joe proceeded to do a favor for his mom, which was to burn several sacks of garbage. The garbage consisted of all burnable items, like coffee filters, and banana peels and all sorts of other stuff that really didn't smell all that wonderful when it was burned. Rather than sift through each bag of garbage and picking out the least offensive stuff to torch, we just threw the bags on as they were and tried our best to endure the stench.

I crawled into the tent to escape the odor, and maybe ogle Vanna White some more in private. Joe stayed outside, attending to the fire.

Just then, a huge explosion rocked our little campsite, louder than any explosion I had ever heard up to that point in my life. It had obviously originated from the campfire, because a rain of sparks cascaded down onto the tent, burning little holes all over.

"Ahhhhhhh! Rhodes, get out here," yelled Joe.

I poked my head out of the tent. There was a crater in the middle of the campfire, and most of the fire had been thrown all around the campsite by whatever had detonated. I hopped around, stepping out hot coals with my Nikes.

"Not those sparks, dipshit! Put me out!"

I looked over at Joe. For the most part, he was already pretty much out. The front of his shirt was basically Swiss cheese from all the sparks that hit him. The shirt he wore under that shirt pretty much saved him from all sorts of burns. Considering he was hunkered right in front of the fire when whatever it was that blew up, blew up, I thought he was pretty lucky. Hell, the blast had knocked him on his ass, so it was amazing he wasn't hurt a whole hell of a lot. . .

That's when I noticed his left eye.

Whatever had blown up in that fire had hit Joe smack dab in the eye. The entire left side of his face was blood, and all I could see of the eye itself was the white sclera, because the retina was gruesomely rolled up into his head.

"Joe. . . your eye. . . it's really fucked up!"

Joe, who had been preoccupied with putting himself out, had apparently taken a whopper of a blow to the head, and it hadn't registered to him that he may have injuries considerably worse than spark burns.

Joe ran an exploratory hand up to his eye socket, and the realization that he couldn't see out of his left eye washed over him like some cold, clammy dread, and he started freaking out like it had never been done before.

Now, as I mentioned, Joe was a pretty built farm kid, even for an eigth grader, and I wasn't much of a match against him, so I wasn't too keen on trying to restrain him and keep him from further hurting himself. Still, I had to try. I yelled at him to calm down, and I tried to get in close enough to put my hand on his shoulder, hoping that would soothe him a little and bring him down from Frankenstein freak-out.

I touched his shoulder, and he punched me. He punched me very hard and, not being accustomed to getting punched very hard, I stumbled backward, ran into a log, and toppled flat on my back, knocking the wind out of me.

Now, I've had the wind knocked out of my several times during my life and, each time, I've freaked out just a little because, let's face it, when you get the wind knocked out of you, there's a very real part of you that wonders if you'll ever get that wind back again.

So, there we were, Joe and I, two young, scared kids freaking out together. Considering I had almost lost my testicles to an angry sow earlier in the day, I had had enough damned drama, thank you very much.

Thankfully, for whatever reason, as I finally gasped little snippets of air back into my lungs, Joe started to come down from his terrified state down to a more manageable just-really-really-scared state.

I managed to get Joe to listen to me and to get him grab my hand and follow me back to his parents' house. It was, without a doubt, the longest 500 yards I've walked in my life. Joe stopped me just before we opened the door.

"Ryan. . . what does it look like?"

Now, I had bascially forced myself not to look at his eye after my first startling realization. I had been focusing on getting my wind back, and calming Joe down, and walking through woods with a flashlight and pretty much doing anything in my power not to look at that eye. And now there was Joe, insisting I look at it. I shined my flashlight at his face.

Mostly, the eye had been caked shut by drying blood, so I was spared the ugly look of the eyeball itself. I was fairly surprised at how non-grossed out I was. I was mostly just concerned for my friend at that point, even though he had punched me only minutes before.

Joe's parents drove us an hour to Rochester that night, to St. Mary's Hospital, with Joe's sister taking a break from their constant fight-fest to stroke her brother's hair and tell him over and over again that he would be all right.

In the end, Joe was all right. He had suffered a fracture on the lower part of his eye socket, and the eye itself required some surgery, and ever since then he had to wear a protective contac lens, but for the most part he came out of the incident with the same vision he had before the explosion.

And the explosion? It turned out that the burnable garbage wasn't all completely burnable. Apparently, a can of Gillete shaving cream had snuck its way in there. Joe's eye took the full force of a speeding can of shaving cream.

He was lucky, frankly, to have survived.

Posted by Ryan at July 14, 2004 05:14 PM