Eddie and the Coke Bottle Goggles

A big thank you to

Alexander Semenyuk

for allowing me to be a part of Lighthouse! I’m honored to have been chosen as a contributor along with

Deborah T. Hewitt

,

Merissa Nicole

and

Brother Alexander

. The best writing is found on Substack and these writers are changing the game one post at a time.

I hope you enjoy my story. As a quick introduction, I am the author of the Historical Fiction Stack where my obsession with the past meets fiction, author spotlights and other fun posts centering around historical fiction/fantasy.

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Eddie Charon hit a high fly ball deep into left field on the afternoon of July 7^th, a date that his thirteen year-old teammates swore was impossible. They didn’t doubt the reality of the date itself. That fly ball shot a hole in the cloudless sky in the seventh month of the year 1949, the month Eddie secretly called July-ius Caesar, on the day he secretly referred to as the Seventh Seal. Years later he thought of how his fly ball triggered a life phase that was both a beginning and the end of days; a pinpoint in time as rare as a comet.

Next to the kitchen door in the Charon household hung a calendar with a photo of a sultry redhead in a grass skirt and bikini. Game was scrawled across July 7^th, the word elbowing its way into July 8th in barely legible uppercase letters. Eddie’s older brother Walter, on leave from the Navy, had tacked it up that morning. “Won’t Daddy get upset?” Eddie had asked. “You know he doesn’t like crass things.”

Walter stopped rolling up the sleeve on his white shirt and pushed the cuff past his massive bicep. The smoke from the cigarette stuck to his bottom lip circled his buzz cut. “You think Mr. Magoo will notice? Four-F will think it’s a photo of his mother!”

Four-F was the nickname his older brother called his father, behind his back of course, after the health classification of 4F which guaranteed no service in any branch of the military. Their father had been classified 4F instantly when he showed up at forty years-old to enlist on December 8^th, 1941, squinting over the piles of paperwork and breaking his pencil points. The intaking soldier took one look at his Coke bottle glasses and date of birth and he wasn’t even given the proper physical before he was shown the door.

Eddie’s mother had died shortly after his first birthday and his father was left to steer the boys to manhood. Eddie hadn’t liked the nickname Walt slapped on their father. It wasn’t Daddy’s fault that he was born with eyesight that dimmed year over year ending in legal blindness. Merv Charon’s job driving a refrigeration truck ended after he cracked the bumper of a red Ford Coupe, sending the driver straight out the door with loud promises of multiple lawsuits. After that Merv Charon’s boss tossed him aside like an unearthed mole on a garden shovel. The era of government cheese commenced at the Charon residence.

However, it was harder to feel sorry for Four-F when he pawed through the icebox, knocking over the scant jars and milk, feeling for whatever rotgut booze his pal Bingo left wrapped in a brown paper bag.  The day after the red Ford Coupe incident Merv picked up a beer and ever since his left hand seemed to curl permanently around a bottle. His former even demeanor flawed like a marble statue the sculptor tapped with the wrong hammer. His eyesight dimmed until the corneas turned from a robin’s egg blue to a frozen lake in an uncharted land. As Eddie moved through childhood, two things were daily staples: the war and empty booze bottles.

When Eddie wanted to play baseball, Four-F snorted. Walter had wrestled. Why not try out for that? No equipment expense necessary. But Eddie wanted to be like Snuffy Stirnweiss, the Yankees second baseman. Four-F swung those Lake Placid eyes toward Eddie but hovered on the space above his right shoulder. “Why the hell would you wanna be like a guy named Snuffy when you can be like DiMaggio?”

Eddie couldn’t be like DiMaggio because when Eddie played center field, he couldn’t see the baseballs to catch them. He could see something flying in space, defying time in a terrible slow motion that seemed to also distort the cheers from onlookers into a chorus of warped seal calls. But it made no difference. Wherever Eddie tracked the baseball, running with his head thrown back and his mitt turned up, it found a way to course correct in midair and land with a small thump in the grass in a three-foot radius with him as a living focus. Jeers followed and when he played the field…if he played the field…he was always in far left and only when the bottom of the opposing team’s batting order was up.

Stepping up to the plate was even more humiliating. A thousand faceless beings turned toward him as he tried to time the white blob with his bat swing, but he never made contact. The umpire called the final strike but his relief dissipated once he hit the dugout bench and the teammate torture began.

“Hey, Four-eyes, where’d you get them Coke bottles over your eyes?”

“A bat could hold that bat and get a hit!”

“Eddie, why don’t cha take up a new hobby, huh? Like knitting!”

His glasses were the problem. They were thick and horned rimmed and tended to slide down his nose when he was bent over a math problem at school. The frames were from the bargain bin at the optometrist and Eddie thought of their previous owner. Bet he’s dead, Eddie would think as he pushed his glasses up for the fortieth time that day. Bet he fell in an elevator shaft and the only thing not broken in a million pieces were these glasses, taken from his broken face.

The frames were bad enough, but lately he found himself squinting even behind those Coke bottle lenses. Every time he stepped up to the plate was a painful reminder that the lens prescription was outdated, but he wasn’t due for the eye doctor until October. Asking Four-F for an early visit was only an invitation for a rambling lecture on the lack of household funds. He had no choice but to keep squinting.

Despite their fading usefulness, the glasses gave him at least a small shot at a hit. But the glasses didn’t work with his baseball cap. They gave him a headache when the cap caused the earpieces to dig into his temples. He tried putting the earpieces on the outside of the cap but when he swung the bat they popped off his face and onto home plate where the catcher gave them an obnoxious rap with his mitt. When this happened the specter of Four-F would pop unwelcomed in Eddie’s mind, shaking the tin coffee can to illustrate the lack of coins like a railroad hobo.  If Eddie destroyed his glasses, he would be like all three blind mice rolled up into one.

To add to his humiliation, during the Fourth of July game his mitt mysteriously disappeared when he was at his last at-bat. When he inquired of his teammates if they had picked it up accidentally, their wide-eyed head shakes told him all he needed to know. They want me off the team. I stink to high heaven. He returned home and headed to his usual retreat: the Laboratory.

The Laboratory was Eddie’s name for the dilapidated unattached garage that was now a graveyard of tools. Eddie pushed open the barn-like door that creaked like the haunted castle door in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The familiar odors of gasoline, rotten wood and leather wafted out and the smell had the comforting effect as a favorite blanket.

Inside there was a massive work bench where a Black & Decker power saw sat mid-cut, the two by four meant to repair a hole in roof in a state of perpetual abuse from the blade. It wasn’t the only item frozen in Pompeian suspended animation. Scattered hammers and screwdrivers littered the workbench around a car motor with its parts lined up neatly like a three dimensional unsolvable puzzle. A casual observer may have thought that this was the lair of a person who one day went into town to buy smokes and never returned, but its former master was only fifty feet away, but it might as well have been a million miles.

Eddie always ran his fingers over the tools but never moved them out of place. They were like a braille story of a man whose dexterity made dead engines purr and whose after hours labor produced the treehouse that Walter’s friends crammed into to smoke cigarettes, allowing Eddie entrance on his promise of never being a rat-fink. The story ended when Merv’s eyes, those orbs that were supposed to give you a glimpse of a soul, simply clouded over in perpetual twilight.

Eddie tried not to think of his father working the lathe, grinning, saying, Tell me a story while I work, Ed, and make it a good one! Eddie fished in the large work bench drawer until he found his father’s baseball mitt, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t have the webbing between the thumb and pointer finger. In the middle of the palm was a faded ink drawing of a man wearing a pointy helmet, his eyes were two Xs. Under the picture it said KAISER. He tried to picture his dad as a kid, tongue in cheek, concentrating on drawing the face of the enemy. Four-F was once a kid before he was a beer-guzzling bastard. He put the mitt under his arm and headed for the door when he spotted something in the drawer that he had never noticed before.

 It was a line of eyeglasses, seven pairs in all, laid out in a chronology distinguished by the thickness of the lenses. The first glasses were round, wire rim jobs, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to Eddie’s current glasses, which he removed and placed gently on the workbench. He put them on. They’re better! The interior of the Laboratory sprang into sharp focus. He wandered through the door and the high-summer heat enveloped him, but he hardly noticed. He was seeing. Every dark jagged leaf on the great oak at the end of the driveway was in perfect clarity, even the ones at the very top. A Lincoln Cosmopolitan zipped past with a license plate of 3314-TAP. He could read it. He could see it!

But the problem remained of being able to wear those glasses while playing baseball. Despair began to creep back into his chest as he surveyed the high shelves where generations of junk formed incoherent piles. Then, he spied it in a corner among the scattered pieces of an old motorcycle that belonged to his grandfather. And then he had a plan.

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“Now what the hell is this kid doing?” Coach Normandy muttered on the afternoon of July 7^th, 1949.

Eddie secretly referred to his coach by his battle name. Among the boys whose fathers were veterans, there was a hierarchy of respect. A father who participated in the big named battles—Normandy, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Ardennes---were tops. Next up were the men who fought in these battles but were dead. After that were the fighter pilots, tank operators and on it went.

Down in the bottom of the barrel were the draft dodgers and the 4Fs.

And speaking of Four-F, there he was, walking to the rickety wooden bleachers with Walt, who scanned the crowd daring anyone to comment. Walt once knocked a guy over the skull with a pool cue after he made a crack about Four-F. Ripping on Four-F was Walt’s territory, and he’d take no nonsense from a stranger disrespecting his father.

Back in the dugout, much fun had already been made over Eddie’s Mickey Mouse-hand replacement mitt, which he bore with a stoically, knowing that this mitt would probably disappear along with his other one. But when it was time to get up to bat, Eddie was ready for them.

He stood and ditched his baseball cap with the same assurance as Humphry Bogart tossing his fedora in The Maltese Falcon. He reached inside his jersey and produced a brown leather cap with shiny glass eyes that reflected the bright sun. A hush moved through the kids on the bench as Eddie pulled the 1920’s racing cap over his head and adjusted the glasses.

 They burst out laughing.

The laughter reached hysteria by the time he approached home plate. The Umpire put one beefy hand on his hip and said, “Kid, now I’ve seen everything.”

The pitcher, a boy from the next town known for his fastball, just grinned. He’d struck this squirt out before and now he was wearing some crazy hat!

Coach Normandy just shook his head. It was hot. They were losing by one run anyway in the ninth inning which meant the game was over if Eddie Charon was up. He had had a mind throughout the season to tell the little four-eyes to try a different sport…like wrestling…but he had known Merv for years and had great pity for his youngest son.

Eddie stepped into the batter’s box like a Great War flying ace dropped into the wrong war film scene. He had sewn his father’s glasses into the racing cap after removing the original goggles.

The pitcher drew back. He glanced at the runner on third base, who led off with an expression like the Grim Reaper was waiting in foul territory. He knew full well that Eddie would strike out and end the ballgame. This intel wasn’t lost on the pitcher, either. Picking off the runner was a waste of his arm. In three pitches he’d send this little runt weirdo back to the dugout.

He wound up, his left leg lifting so high it almost nicked his nose and let the fastball fly.

CRACK! Eddie’s bat made contact and the shock waves of sound reached Four-F first.

“Attaboy!” He cackled before the stunned crowd could even muster a cheer. “That’s for the rest of you crumbs!”

The ball flew into far left field. The runner at third wasted valuable seconds watching the arc of the ball, not believing it until Coach Normandy screamed at him to get moving! Eddie began running to first base. He hadn’t even dropped his bat. Drop the bat! His brother Walt’s voice, and he let the bat drop midway between home and first.

By the time the ball was scooped up by the outfielder, Eddie was safe on first and the runner on third scored. Later on, Walter would repeat the story play by play for Four-F who would listen, opening another beer, nodding in enjoyment. This was good because Eddie didn’t remember anything after the bat hit the ball on July 7^th, 1949. His heart knew what his mind was struggling to reconcile. When the ball came at him, it still wasn’t perfectly in focus. He knew he had six more pairs of glasses to work through before the ball would again become invisible, this time forever.

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