Once I asked for directions from a blurry red-headed waitress. She sidled up to my table’s edge, surrounded by a perfumey fog. I began to fret. I was having a slow summer lunch at a Milestone’s franchise in suburban Langley, my old hometown. More than usual I was hand-wringing about help to the men’s room because, this being my hometown, I didn’t know who might be watching or, worse, who my guiding waitress might be. What I did know was she wore a lot of the perfume aptly called Poison, and the scent gave me a double take.
Let me put an urban myth to rest. The myth of supersenses isn’t true. When you’re blind, your sense of smell does not, in my experience, rival Superman’s. What happens is you make smell perform new, unconscious tasks, such as recognizing people. The brain may have previously given that function to sight, but new neural pathways grow between compensatory senses. In my daily comings and goings, a smell or a voice now evokes a friendly recognition for me as powerful as a distant profile or familiar face once did. Now that I’m blind, a smell can grab as it goes by, the way a glimpse could once snag my curiosity.
This waitress turned my head with the smell of Poison. Its sticky sweetness caught my attention like flypaper on my eyeball, tugging my nose towards her with recognition. The Poison told me I might be about to ask Heidi for washroom guidance.
Heidi was a legendary high school debutante who, back in grade eleven, only dated keggers, those jockish guys who loafed around basketball courts, drove convertible VW Cabriolets, and worked weekends singing fraternity versions of “Happy Birthday” at The Keg. Cosmic justice dictates that most should still be slinging lager there, but I’m sure most made out just fine in the dot-com boom. For some reason—a reason indigenous only to a John Hughes storyboard—Heidi took an interest in me for three weeks in grade eleven, much to every Polo-wearing boy’s dismay, and much to my slack-jawed astonishment. Our match was, in high school paradigms, unnatural. Maybe her short-lived attraction to me was an impaired judgment caused by the chronic haze of Poison she wore. Who knows. Mine wasn’t to question such a gift as her.
She dumped me after those blissful three weeks, and, what’s worse, dumped me for a twenty-one-year-old security guard from Willowbrook Mall. He had an orange sports car and a moustache. I couldn’t compete. Although Heidi and I were an unlawful match in the high school order, our breakup was highly orthodox. You are always dumped for someone you perceive to be your inferior. It allows you the cold comfort of calling rejection by its less painful name: injustice.
Now, here I was, years later, reawakened to my past humiliation, blind, and possibly about to ask Heidi for a tender hand to the commode.
“Would you like some more coffee?” asked the blur who might be her.
“I’d love some coffee, but I’d love to be in your washroom even more.”
Yes, “creepy” is a good word for my attempt at a charming phrase.
“Uh, the men’s room is just over that way,” she said.
I stared vacantly ahead, and she, I imagine, continued to point wherever “that way” aimed. Then I heard the pleasant sound of coffee pouring.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that way means.” I plucked my white cane from the bag beside me. “See?” I showed her. “I guess it wasn’t obvious, and I forgot to mention—”
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry, I didn’t know you were blind! You didn’t look—You don’t look. . . . Not at all, really.”
I smiled with that warm feeling you get when you’re sixteen and someone says you look like you’re in your twenties. Maybe it wouldn’t be so awful to run into Heidi after all.
“Thanks, that’s very kind. Where’d you say that washroom is?”
“Oh, right. The men’s room is at the back.”
“Where’s the back?”
“Over there,” she said, and walked away.
All I wanted were directions, but, instead, my waitress had pointed to the blind spots in language. They’d eroded at some point along with my eyesight. In the nature of blind spots, I hadn’t noticed this new one, until she pointed to it.
You could say my waitress diagnosed a condition in language parallel to the one my doctor had found in my retinas. My peripheral vision was almost gone, and language’s ability to point and refer had narrowed, too. Those bits of language are over there, that way. Some are right here, in front of you. Here. No, here. Right there, in the way we speak.
What’s odd, though, is they are not the elements of language most blind people prickle about. Usually blind militants tub-thump about the sight-centred features of English idiom. Look at you! What a sight you are! A real looker. And you’re a vision. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So nice to see you! Things looking up? I’ve had my eye on you, so I looked into it, kept my eyes peeled, and here you are, a sight for sore eyes, but no eyesore. Out of sight! What have you got your sights on these days? Look out! Watch it! Be on the lookout, keep your eye on the ball. I’ll see to it. See you later? See you around. See?
On the flip side, English encourages the use of derogative blindness metaphors to mean things other than “without sight.” Some of these connotations include ignorant, limited, deranged, deceived, terminal, stupid, false, naïve, and, of course, confused.
But visual and blind metaphors have never bothered me. You won’t hear my fist slamming a podium about my victimization at the hands of metaphors or our tendency to assume sightedness. I once bought some cologne at a department store. As I caned by, the man at the counter stopped me to give his sales pitch.
“The fabulous feature of this elegant cologne is that you can keep it in the freezer and refresh yourself on a hot summer day with a stimulating, cool blast of aromatic body spray.”
Kinky, I thought. I’ll take it. He asked if I’d like to look at the swishy design of the bottle, then held it up for me to inspect.
“See the lovely edging?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell where the bottle went, so I stood there, waving my hand around trying to find where he’d hoisted the glassy smear. Realizing his mistake, the salesman smacked himself repeatedly on the forehead with his palm, muttering “stupid, stupid, stupid.” That was unnecessary, and perhaps as embarrassing for me as it was for him.
These features of the language truly don’t bother me because they are metaphors and I understand them that way. They still mean something to me, too, probably because I saw once. But I don’t see any need to make a big fuss about them now. Next thing you know, we’ll demand the sound “eye” be removed from “blind.” From that we’ll achieve the significant political success of becoming blond as a bat or blended by the light. Or maybe just bland.
My waitress’s words of guidance are the true linguistic peculiarity, one worth paying attention to. This, that, there, here, and so on, the indexicals that are used to point— literally—beyond the page or the speaker’s finger, have lost their meaning for me, the hands of the words chopped off by my narrowing field of vision.
I’m surprised that blindness can alter language and permanently disable parts of speech. My words, it would appear, are part of my body, and can suffer the pathology of its diseases as well.
“Excuse me.”
My waitress was back, and not a second too late to take another crack at directions.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she said, “but didn’t you go to Langley Secondary School?”
The future flashed. Jeering keggers point and snicker as Heidi tows me off to the washroom. A security guard with a big-ass moustache waits for us at the men’s room and says, “I’ll take him from here, honey.”
“Yes, yes, I did go to Langley Secondary.”
“I thought so! It’s Ryan, right? I’m Danielle! We were in drama class together. God, I didn’t recognize you at all.”
The fists I’ve balled in my lap relax. I can feel the natural slouch of my spine returning. The Poison takes on a slightly different sweetness.
“You look so different now,
” she said.
Blindness can have that effect, I thought, and braced myself.
“You too,” I replied, then realized how utterly confusing that must be.
“I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s because—”
The blank stare? The fierce squint? The face of disorientation?
“It’s—well . . .” She placed her hand on my head with daring compassion. “I know! You shaved your head. When did you do that?”
I burned with a new embarrassment at my narcissism. Just because it’s a sighted world, blindness doesn’t have to be the first thing people see.
“I remember back in high school, your hair used to be really long, at least down to here.”
“Yes,” I smiled, “to here.”
I’ll Be Waiting
These two drunks are having an argument outside a bar.
They were arguing as to whether that object up in the sky
was the sun or the moon. A third drunk stumbles out of the
bar, and one of them walks up to him and says, “Buddy,
will you help us out? We’re in an argument, and we can’t
decide who’s right.” The third drunk asks, “What’s the
argument?” “We want to know, ‘Is that the sun or the moon
up there?’” The third drunk says, “Aw, I dunno, man.
I ain’t from this neighbourhood.”
—as told by Townes Van Zandt
In the autumn of 1995, a few months after Jane and I parted ways, I enrolled as a graduate student in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. I could still read, but barely. At most I could see three letters of a word at once. For my course of study, my eyes gravitated me towards poetry. The briefer, the better. I also took courses in children’s literature, appreciating the really, really short words. Because of the extra time reading demanded and because of the split with Jane, I decided I would focus all my energy on my studies. Not two days into the semester, I met a woman named Tracy.
She had moved to Vancouver from the prairies. Tall and fair, with dark brown hair and a pixie-like face, she turned our heads. The newbie graduate boys followed her around campus, all of us cloying for attention. She suffered our charms with a wry grin on her face and sometimes egged us on. Maybe she looked over her shoulder as she walked away from us or touched our arms as she passed. Whatever Tracy did, it made us crazy.
My office was across the hall from hers. Luckily for me, we both smoked. Her office had a balcony, but mine didn’t. I knocked on her door one afternoon and asked if I could borrow her ledge. To smoke, I assured her. She joined me outside. Soon I stopped by often, and soon I inhaled about twice as many cigarettes as normal.
“I was thinking,” I said one day, “maybe you and I should do something sometime. It’s my birthday next weekend. I thought maybe—”
“I can’t,” she said flatly.
“Alrighty then. That’s okay, I understand.”
“Because it’s my birthday, too,” she finished.
We’d been born twelve hours apart. Having discovered that, we hung around together the rest of the day until, finally, she insisted that she had some work to finish. A pile of notes needed keyboarding, and the computer workroom would be too busy soon.
“Are you fast at typing?” I asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Because I can type, like, fifty words a minute. I mean, I’d be happy to burn through your stuff, and then, I dunno, maybe we could go eat or something.” I was already an hour late for a seminar about a book I hadn’t read.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’ll get it done at my own pace.”
“But I’m really fast. Greased lightning. It would save you a lot of time, and then we could go do something.”
“Really, you don’t have to do that for me.”
“But I insist.”
Tracy let me type while she reclined in a chair and dictated her notes. I explained that keyboarding was the best thing I’d learned in high school. I didn’t need to look. I could feel what I was doing. The difference saved me a lot of grief. I encouraged her to learn the skill, too, if she had time. She listened and agreed and, all the while, knew she could type faster than two of me.
Not long before, Tracy had separated from her boyfriend of many years. Our shared recognition—an immediate and unspoken one—that we could fall hard and long for each other was a bit too much so soon. Both of us still wanted a few lost weekends and compensatory trysts. We dated but agreed to leave the playing field open, neither of us ready for a serious thing.
I had only one difficulty with our arrangement. Tracy casually dated a few guys, while I wooed, well, her. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either, especially after one of her new beaus, a long-haired, revolutionary wannabe, tried to convince Tracy to give me the shrug-off. According to her macho cupcake, I was all brains, no physicality. For a degenerating blind guy, it was a bitter shot of neurotic juice. He thrust me into competition. I found myself running in the alpha Olympics of male sexuality, without prowess or dignity. I intended to make Tracy as jealous as I was, if not more.
Desire. The word itself originates from Sirius, the guiding star, a fixed and heavenly point of light. We navigate the world by it, and in relationship to that star, we know our place. This image, the source of the word’s meaning, is true to my experience. The feeling of desire not only directs us but compels us forward. We are, as they say, moved by desire.
Also implied is that desire remains a point of no arrival, a permanently remote idea we follow, and follow some more. As one might imagine, blindness doesn’t cooperate well with guidance from stars, suns, moons, or light bulbs. Anything light-oriented, really. At the time, I could still glimpse the tiniest bit of what I desired, but that didn’t guarantee I knew where the hell I was going.
During my university years, I had a favourite watering hole. The pub was called the Rose and Thorn but was known to its regulars more evocatively by its acronym, the Rat. When I was an undergraduate student, I often hung out there and read novels, even sketched outlines for papers on my napkin, or made notes on my expired bus transfers. The rest of the time, I tried to look artsy. For me, the Rat was an oddly productive joint. Once, before heading off to fall down in nightclubs, I spent a beery evening there with The Sun Also Rises. More than the book, I remember my accompanying fixation. I wanted to finish my first Hemingway novel with a pickled egg and an existential crisis on a mechanical bull. Neither was an option at the Rat, although it seemed like the kind of place you’d find personal growth through a mechanical bull or competitive patron tossing. I settled for a pack of Doritos and change for the bus to my next stop. Modern literature is always better with accessories, if you can find them.
Tonight Tracy was out on the town with one of her courting beaus. I figured if I was going to spend some quality time with my thoughts, why not take them out to the Rat. At least in a pub, the public had some chance of finding me. If I couldn’t read a novel there anymore, not under the poor lighting, at least I might find myself in a story. That was my thinking, if you could call it that.
One of the many things blindness makes me forget is that I still have to put my eyes somewhere. Daydreaming or listening to the music or conversations around me, I don’t lend enough attention to where I may have placed my gaze for the past five or ten minutes. When in public, I would be wise to screw my eyes to the table or floor, but I forget they’re casting about, saying things like, “Hello there,” or, “Hey, don’t I know you?” Or any number of accidental messages. Because I may not recognize what’s across the room, wherever I’ve locked my cattle stare, sometimes I inadvertently enter a staring contest with strangers who, unaware of my blindness, peg me for either an apprenticing hypnotist, a vacant psychopath, or, worse, a poorly socialized lech.
I knew I’d goofed up when I heard footsteps march towards me, high-heeled steps clicking louder and louder as they approached. The confident stride didn’t alarm me so much
as the halting sound, a brief, accusatory silence that parked beside my table. The shadowy blur of a woman wanted to know what I thought I was staring at. So did I. It took me a few beats to manage a guess.
“Uh, nothing? I was just looking at, well, no, nothing, really.”
“Well, I don’t know what’s fascinating you so much,” she said, “but, if you don’t mind, my friend and I over there would appreciate it if you’d stop staring at us and our, uh, nothing. Frankly, it’s fucking creepy.”
Saying that I saw “nothing” was untrue. I could have sworn, from across the room, that the profile of her head had been a poster. A poster of a beer mug. I didn’t think that would please her, so I kept it to myself.
I confabulate images all the time. They can get me into trouble, too. Unoccupied or restless, my eyes make up things to see, things constructed from what little information they still receive. Sometimes the blind claim to see bits of the immediate world, perhaps a person they are talking to, with extraordinary detail and complexity. It isn’t a memory of an image but a fresh and animated vision that feels, as only sight can, that it is real, not emerging from your mind and its still-active eye. It is phantom sight. And then it is gone, as fast as it came. Sometimes the image morphs into another vivid confabulation. A black garbage bag on the floor becomes a slick puddle of oil. Then, when I touch it, I feel the bundled black leather coat I’m looking for. Likelihood plays a role. I don’t mistake mailboxes for jigging leprechauns, but sometimes I can mistake, say, a woman sitting against a wall for a poster of a beer mug. I thought her blond hair was foam.
Under the table, my white cane remained on the floor, out of sight. My accuser hadn’t detected my blindness. I was passing for sighted, so although she was pissed, I was mildly pleased. In this circumstance arises a difficult choice. I have to decide whether I’m going to let my condition hang out, which can embarrass that person and cause them to retreat, or whether I’m going to continue to pass for sighted, which is sometimes an easier option for us both.
Cockeyed Page 9