The Time I Lied About My Eye

Vioence Done to Men

In the West, men are evaluated by how well they take a punch to the face. That’s what this story is about, but it starts with a lie.

I heard her bare feet padding down the hallway from the bedroom. She blew it out the night before, so I let her sleep late. You don’t really know a woman until you’ve spent time with her wearing nothing but a t-shirt—often your t-shirt. I’ve bought maybe fifty KA and Jackson Zoo t-shirts through the years. They all live in other homes now. I’m not sure how a woman explains to whoever she’s with now why she has a size 3X KA Luau t-shirt, but then, it’s not really my problem. Is it?

Pointing to the red spot on my face, she said, “What happened to your eye?”

“I lost an argument with Her Majesty the cat.”

“She did that?” She said, examining the redness and the swelling.

“She did. She hates me because the other cat likes me.”

“She hates you because you tease her with that laser pointer.” She said. “This could get infected.”

“They love it when I use the laser pointer,” I said. “It won’t get infected. I put Nerosporin on it.”

“You mean Neosporin, don’t you?”

“Not the way I do it. I tried to make her laugh. I always tried to make her laugh. “Coffe’s made.”

“Where’s my green mug?” She asked. She was holding her head and feeling the suffering that comes the next day when you drink that much the night before.

“Her majesty, Miss Meow, knocked it off the counter, prompting me to scold her, prompting her to swipe at me. We have lots of other mugs.”

That was the last we ever discussed my eye or her mug. It’s probably a sin to bear false witness against a cat, but she hated me anyway. If this woman were too drunk to remember what happened the night before, I wouldn’t remind her. Besides, I’ve been hit a lot harder than that.

Men are judged by how much abuse they can take. That’s why young men are soldiers. We’ve recently added women to the military, but we have only very rarely begun asking them to stand in the path of cannon fire. I have mixed feelings about this business of women proving they can take as much abuse as men. I’m not sure that’s progress.

I’ve been knocked back a few times, but I’ve never been knocked out, and I’ve never taken such a beating that I had to stop fighting. Scars give a man character. I have a few. So does Frankenstein.

When I was in high school, a boy’s helmet hit my chin and split it open. My devout christian football coach dabbed his finger in my blood and drew a cross on his forehead, shouting, “Blood! We got Blood on the field!” That sounds like something I made up, but ask anybody who played football at St. Andrews.

That’s my blood coach. Thanks for that. When I got home, my mother dragged me to St. Dominic’s Hospital, where they put in four stitches. J.O. Manning told her to go to Hale and Jones and get me a padded chinstrap, which she did. I never missed a day of practice.

My relationship with the woman in the t-shirt was tumultuous. Until I turned fifty, most women I met were expecting some version of my father. She did, too. Our argument that night was that if I were more like my father, then I would make more money, and I could spend more of it on her. I doubt she’d describe it that way, but that’s the gist of the argument.

I don’t think she would have said it except that she was very, very drunk. When she was sober, she was extraordinarily kind, but some friends of hers came in from out of town, and they’d been celebrating. I wasn’t invited to their soiree but probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. I was trying to stop drinking. I can’t judge other people for drinking because there were times when mine was way out of hand.

I must have made a face when I saw how drunk she was when I picked her up. Since she thought I was judging her, she decided to judge me. She judged me all the way home.

After about the fourth comment that I wasn’t like my father, I probably should have just let it go and let her go to bed. Since she wasn’t really in a state where she could remember what I said, I decided to take a chance and be honest.

“I’m sorry if you feel like I misled you. If we’re going to have any future together, then I feel like you will have to be interested in me for my own sake, not because you think I’ll end up like my father. If you can’t do that, then maybe it’s a mistake for me to be here.”

When you’re my size, most women think they can’t ever do anything to hurt you. I’ve known women who get remarkable enjoyment out of hitting me as hard as they could to see if I would tell them to stop, and I never would. A hundred-and-twenty-pound woman can hit pretty hard, but I can take licks like that all day, every day.

“Shut up!” She said. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

and that’s when the mug came.

When we bought it at a silent auction, it was a pretty expensive mug. It broke into four pieces. She ran into the bathroom and locked the door. I put a dishtowel on my eye.

After about an hour, there was no noise coming from the bathroom. I knocked, but she didn’t answer. I got a screwdriver to open the privacy lock to the bathroom. She lay naked in the tub but without any water, asleep. “Hi,” she said, recognizing me.

I rinsed her off in the tub and put her in bed with a T-shirt. I then put nerosporin on my eye and a bag of frozen peas on it. I sat at my computer and tried to write, but I couldn’t. Instead, I read the AP News feed and some of my regular Sci-Fi bulletin boards.

I should point out that she wasn’t the first woman to hit me in anger. She wasn’t the last either. I intentionally left out any details that might identify her. Good luck trying to figure out which of the dozen or so women who have hung off my arm at one point or another might be the woman in this story. I don’t think she reads my stuff. I don’t think she thinks about me at all. I’m satisfied with that.

Men absorb pain, and we’re judged by how well we can take it. Rocky was beaten to a swollen pulp, but we cheered him because he didn’t go down. It’s not hard for a young boy to get the idea that’s the way to go.

While I don’t have the statistics, I’m pretty sure that men do more violence to women than women do to men. A black eye wasn’t going to ruin me. It wasn’t half so bad as the day I split my chin open playing football, and that was for fun. I lied about what happened to my eye because I feared that not lying might hurt her more than a black eye hurt me. If she couldn’t remember, then maybe that’s a blessing.

If I were to say something to women to help them understand us, it’d be that we’re not immortal. It’s pretty hard to break our outsides, but our insides are pretty fragile. We won’t ever tell you that, though. If you want to be around us, you’ll have to figure that out on your own. I hope that you will, though. We need somebody who understands us, not just somebody who rides the wagon we’re pulling.

Rocky and Adrian..