ONE-EYED WINK JUNIOR

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 He taught me how to play the most dangerous game in the world . . .

When I was about eight years old, I lived in Salt lake City, Utah with my mother and my second step dad, Dick. When he wasn’t drunk, Dick worked at his brother’s lumberyard. We lived in a small bungalow on the lumberyard property, and the Wink family lived in a dilapidated old house right next door. They had a young son whom the neighborhood kids called, One-Eyed Wink Junior. He taught me how to play the most dangerous game in the whole wide world.

I had never seen anyone like One-Eyed Wink Junior. The first day we met, he took an ordinary teaspoon and, to my amazement, stuck it in his eye socket and popped his eyeball right out into his dirty hand. “Take a look,” he said. Without holding it in my own hand, I studied it carefully. It was a shiny glass eye all right, but it wasn’t spherical like a marble. Instead, it was more like a marble cut in half with its insides hollowed out. Plus, it didn’t move around with his good eye. Now matter where he looked, the glass eye just stared straight ahead. It was a little freaky and, needless to say, it was difficult to carry on a conversation with One-Eyed Wink Junior without being distracted by that glass eye. I was always tempted to look where it was looking. He spat on it, rubbed against his filthy pants leg, and pushed it back into its empty socket. I ask how he had come to lose his eye.

He said he had accidentally punctured his eyeball with a sharp fork as he was attempting to undo a stubborn knot in his shoelace. He inserted one of the fork’s sharp prongs into the knot and pried as hard as he could to force the knot to loosen up. But the fork slipped, shot upwards and punctured his eye. I must have looked stupefied. “It’s okay,” he said, “I have a lot of fun with it.” He loved to watch people’s reactions when he jammed that spoon into his eye socket and popped his eyeball out into his hand. Little girls screamed and grownups would turn away in disgust. In no time at all I was laughing, and I knew One-Eyed Wink Junior and I were going to be best friends. Then he showed me something really cool.

One-Eyed Wink Junior knew a thousand ways to get into mischief. For instance, one day he and I were standing by the railroad tracks behind the lumberyard when a freight train came slowly chugging by. It rolled on by us and then went over the grade crossing where the main highway curved downward about fifty-feet under the crossing and then rose up again on the other side. Directly across the other side of the grade crossing was a patch of soft snow-white sand alongside the tracks. One-Eyed Wink Junior looked at me with a sly smile and said, “Want to play the most dangerous game in the whole wide world?”

He told me how to run along the side of a boxcar, grab onto the ladder and lift myself up and hang on until I was well over the grade crossing. Then it was just a matter of jumping off into the soft sand before the train took me too far. It seemed like an easy enough thing to do, the only problem being that the train really picked up speed as it traveled over the grade crossing, so we had to make darn sure that we jumped from the ladder a few yards before the sand or we’d miss it and land on the hard rocks on the other side. On the other hand, if we jumped too early, we’d fall short of the end of the grade crossing and drop fifty-feet straight down onto the busy highway. Plus, it never entered our young minds that we could also miss the rung of the ladder and accidentally throw ourselves underneath the moving train. But that’s the confidence of youth.

Let’s do it. We stood close to the tracks and as the locomotive chugged by we took off running along side of it until we matched the speed of the train. One-Eyed Wink Junior ran right up next to a boxcar, grabbed the ladder and jumped up onto the bottom rung—smooth as silk. I grabbed the ladder on the following boxcar and scrunched my face against the buffeting wind as the train picked up speed. That small island of soft sand was definitely coming up faster than I had expected. Suddenly, One-Eyed Wink Junior leaped from the ladder, flew through the air and rolled over and over in the soft sand—a perfect landing. No more than five-seconds later I jumped into the air, wildly flailing my arms and legs, hit the soft sand with a thump and rolled over next to him. Not as smooth as One-Eyed Wink Junior, but man-o-man, that was the most excitement I had had since the time I road The Hammer at the Antelope Valley fair. My heart was beating so fast it felt like I had a flitting little hummingbird in my chest. We stood up laughing, dusted the white sand from our clothes and raced back across the grade crossing to wait for the next train. Those were the days.

Somehow, by the grace of the almighty spirit of little kids, I survived that summer unscathed. And once I returned to my aunt Mary and uncle Bob’s place California, I told all my buddies about the most dangerous game in the whole wide world and, of course, I gave a praising commendation to my brand new friend, One-Eyed Wink Junior.

BOUNCING BOOB HEAVEN

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I was in bouncing boob heaven . . .

My uncle Don’s twenty-four year old wife, Bernadine, was a staggeringly beautiful young woman whose ancestral bloodlines were half French and half Spanish; and I often heard him say how Birdie had inherited the best of both worlds. I thought she had great boobs.

My uncle loved water skiing and frequently invited me to tag along. One of his favorite spots was a place called Pine Flat Lake—a beautiful eighteen-mile-long-lake in central California. Once you were in the cool water, it felt like you could ski forever. My first time up, Don taught me how to be a conscientious observer. The observer’s job was to sit in the boat and watch the skier in case something went wrong. On the day something did go wrong, however, I was watching something else.

Birdie was driving the boat, I was the observer and uncle Don was skiing. He was a world-class ham who loved to flaunt his expert water skiing skill, so he was busy jumping as high as he could over the v-shaped wake that swiftly fanned out behind the speeding boat. The wake was high and violently rolled up on each side of the fan like two turbulently churning water berms. It was dangerous stuff, and I should have been watching him more closely, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Birdie’s bouncing boobs. You see, the boat was shaking and jerking as it carved through the choppy waves and, with each jerky bounce, Birdie’s swimsuit top slipped lower and lower until it was just barely hanging on. I was seconds away from bouncing boob heaven. My heart pounded with lusty anticipation and my fifteen-year old eyeballs were pressured up and cocked to spring from their orbital sockets. Birdie, on the other hand, seemed to be totally oblivious to the situation as she gripped the wheel and concentrated on holding the boat steady. I flicked a shifty glance at my uncle and, seeing that he was skiing backwards, diverted my attention back to Birdie. Then it happened.

Birdie’s swimsuit dropped, she grabbed it, the boat swerved sharply throwing both of us from side to side, I grabbed the wheel, Birdie pulled her top up and awkwardly jiggled herself securely back into place. Then she took the wheel and brought the boat back under control. It was all over in fifteen seconds. Whew! We both sucked in a nervous breath and burst into laughter like we’d just finished a wild carnival ride. Then I looked back towards my uncle. Oh god no! The empty towrope was skipping up and down on the surface of the water—uncle Don was nowhere in sight.

Don was down all right. We found him about a mile back desperately treading water like he was about ready to go down for the third the and, to make mater even worse, his own swimsuit had gotten ripped clean off when he fell. Needless to say, he was spitting mad and, to make matters worse, I managed to tangle the safety rope into an ungainly wad of knots when I threw it to him. The heavy nylon rope landed right on his head and quickly curled around him like a giant slithering octopus. I was terrified he’d drown.

Back at camp, my uncle chewed me out unmercifully in front of everyone. “Always keep your eyes on the skier,” he barked. He was really angry. It was embarrassing for me, especially right there in front of Birdie, but I managed to tough it out without confessing the true nature of my licentious little crime. And if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget the time I went water skiing in beautiful Pine Flat Lake, and those fifteen seconds when I was in . . . bouncing boob heaven.