Spencer lost his eye on a Tuesday. It was his right eye, and it happened on an evening three weeks before the start of our senior year of high school. His loss came at just about that time when summer officially reaches its saturation point, when young people in the suburban Midwest tire of hot, lazy days spent at menial summer jobs and wish for school again.
For my group of friends, summer nights had been reduced to cruising down nearby highway strips canvassed in the glow of grocery stores and gas stations. These nights often ended with nothing to show for our teenage pursuits, save a few guys left with cigarettes and milk shakes, in a sticky black and red booth in fluorescent, 2 a.m. truck-stop smoke-fog.
As one of the group, Spencer should have been with us the night of the accident, sitting shotgun with his huge arm hanging out the passenger’s side window. He would be the one anxiously searching through radio stations, fidgeting in his seat as we wondered together where we might go or what girls we could call, or how we could mess with the guy at the late night drive-thru, or anything else we might do that held the promise of turning a restless, hormone-charged high school boy into a man.
Spencer should not have been at home that night—he rarely was during the summer. It was a well-known fact throughout our class that during those high school summers, Spencer spent no more than two nights a week sleeping and eating at his own house, where he shared a modest-sized room with his two brothers.
But for some reason Spencer was at home that evening. He and his older brother were out lifting weights in the garage when there were words, an argument, a meaningless push. And at some point Spencer was losing his balance, falling face-first onto a vacuum cleaner attachment, and puncturing the globe of his right eye.
I found out the next morning by phone. Until that call, I was the only person in the history of my own little world that had lost an eye. But I told myself then that my loss was different. Mine was my left eye, and it happened when I was thirteen months old, back when I couldn’t remember things.
Thanks to a rare form of retinal cancer and months of radiation therapy, I came out of the whole situation with limited vision remaining in my right eye, a painted piece of hard plastic to stand in for my left, and a whole lot of tolerance for pain and discomfort and doctors. But by the age of seventeen, that had all become part of some other life.
In the most recent life, I grew up not so much as a cancer survivor, but as a survivor of a juvenile caste system created from the picking teams at recess or the getting of dates for dances, and of the grammar school terrors that came along with thick glasses and insecure classmates. But I eventually learned to cover up those things with hard work in school and a bulletproof sense of humor. I also adopted a faith that told me that God had healed me as a baby, that it was all for the best, and that somehow, He was still involved in the daily grind of my growing up.
But when that phone call happened on that humid August morning, the idea of losing an eye became something much more real. It wasn’t happening to some baby in a distant life, but to someone just like me, to a senior in high school, and—more importantly—to a good friend sitting on top of the world.
***
Spencer always wanted mints. Or gum. Sometimes a spray of my cologne that I kept in my backpack. He would show up at my locker between classes sometimes, and always after lunch, swiping at my pockets for the rattle of my Altoids. We had been a part of the same group of friends since our sophomore year of high school, and it was well-known that Spencer was a mooch. From me, mints and cologne. From others, a ride home, a couple bucks for a late-night burrito. And from all of us at some time, a place to crash Friday—and probably Saturday, too. Once, he even woke up on Easter morning at another friend’s house, where the Easter Bunny had graciously put together another basket of eggs and chocolate candy at the last minute—just in case Spencer had decided to stay over.
But Spencer’s tendency to want to share things that weren’t his was overlooked by anyone who knew him. Despite being shy—somewhat of a reluctant introvert at heart, Spencer had a public persona that was magnetic, and people loved him for it. He was the first of my friends to make it cool to wear tight, muscle t-shirts to school. He was taller than me and had broad shoulders and blue eyes and dimples. His blonde hair was always cut short, gelled perfectly to stand up in front. We started a rumor once that Spencer was training to become a professional bodybuilder, and people believed it.
If an attractive appearance and wasn’t enough, Spencer’s genuine affection for public spectacle naturally drew people to him. He was more willing to complete a dare than anyone I had ever known, regardless of the consequences. One year, on a dare, Spencer came up on stage in the middle of the high school talent show and chugged a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. He finished nearly all of it in ten seconds, tossed the bottle and its remains into the crowd, and ran to the bathroom, where he spent some quality time hunched over the toilet in pain.
On rowdy weekend nights, Spencer would strap on football pads and knock over mailboxes like a human bowling ball. Around Christmastime, we would spend nights driving around residential neighborhoods, where Spencer would jump out of the car and tackle inflatable snowmen and rearrange ornamental lawn reindeer into sexual positions—a sport we coined “deer mounting.” As long as there was a group of people or a video camera watching, Spencer was liable to do or say anything. He would do it boldly and deliberately, and he would never get caught.
Years after high school, as we reminisced together about all that we used to do, and how stupid we were, Spencer would only be able to laugh about his willingness to risk it all for the sake of entertainment, to confront deviance and danger and never get arrested. Or injured.
“My balls were too big for my own good back then,” he would say.
Like most people that knew him, I was convinced that Spencer was afraid of nothing—except, of course, for the little quirky things that only his closest friends knew about. Insects. Perspiration. Pretty girls. Whenever a group of girls would walk by, Spencer would instinctively adjust the crotch of his pants with one hand and brush his nose with the knuckles of the other—it was a sort of nervous twitch that we, his friends, would come to expect and would often point out, just to embarrass him. Before long it seemed to be almost normal.
Sometimes, during passing periods, I would find Spencer looking in a bathroom mirror. He would turn to me and shove his elbow to the ceiling, searching for the slightest hint of perspiration.
“Hey. Am I good?”
I would repeatedly assure him that no sweat was visible, and once he was satisfied with his hair, he would hit me up for another mint, and we’d continue on to class.
***
Months after the accident, after Spencer’s right eye was removed, he would be shopping at the mall with a white eye-patch taped to his face, and the punk kid behind the counter at the Halloween costume store would ask about it.
“Who’d you piss off?”
“A Hoover,” Spencer would say with a straight face.
The kid wouldn’t ask further, and Spencer wouldn’t tell him. He wouldn’t tell him how it wasn’t a fight, and how if it was, he would’ve kicked the shit out of the other guy. He wouldn’t tell him that it was just a petty push from a brother, that he had tripped, and that his eyeball happened to land on the hose attachment to a dirty old Shop-Vac.
And he wouldn’t mention the pain, or discomfort, or stretches of depression, or how he’d been having surgeries and losing weight and wearing gaudy eye patches for nearly three months while doctors reconstructed his eye socket so that a fake eye would work right.
Spencer didn’t need to say much in those days. He knew, better than anyone else, what he had lost, and the dull ache of the losing that was just beginning.
***
By the time I got to the hospital, Spencer had already been there for almost twenty-four hours. Doctors had performed at least one operation to try to save the eye, and he was resting with a generous dose of morphine. The first people I saw as I got off the elevator on the third floor were Spencer’s parents. They were waiting in the hallway, where pillows and blankets were strewn on stiff red couches. Spencer’s younger sister was asleep on one.
Until that day, I didn’t have a problem with hospitals. In fact, I liked them. They were clean and quiet, and anybody who worked there was kind. From the time I could remember things until fifth grade, I went twice a year to the children’s hospital downtown, where they gave me a light blue gown, put my clothes in a locker, and put me on a bed. Then they took me into a bright operating room and gave me bubblegum-flavored anesthesia, which put me to sleep so they could get a good look at my eye to make sure the cancer hadn’t come back.
And there were many more times before I could remember, when they first found cancer in my retinas, when they removed my left eye, and when they did months of radiation to remove the tumors in my right.
But when I went to visit Spencer that day, I found a new appreciation for something that the hospital means to many, but that I had never experienced there—loss. Of all the memories I had of the hospital, none involved losing things—a loved one, a limb, a friend or his eye or anything else of his.
Sure, I had lost an eye, but any fear or pain that had accompanied that time came only from what my parents had told me. If anything, I only remember leaving the hospital with more than I had before coming in. A neon-colored wristband. A cool band-aid in the spot on my arm where my IV had been. Probably lots of stickers and a balloon tied to my wrist. And a new toy or a box of baseball cards as a reward from my parents for being “such a trooper.”
Spencer’s mom started crying when she saw me. Her eyes were red from a long, sleepless night. She hugged me tightly. I hugged her back and said things I figured I was supposed to say, since I was the one who had been through this sort of thing, I guess.. I said that it was all going to be okay. As she told me about the doctor’s diagnosis, I could hear soft, nervous laughter coming from Spencer’s hospital room.
“Go on in and see him,” she said after awhile. “He’ll be so glad to see you.”
I guess I felt it then, as I hugged Spencer’s mom again and walked into the room, that this weird feeling of loss was something real and oddly familiar—not just for Spencer and for his family, but for me. And it wasn’t just about the loss of some body part, but about the changes that happen when a life gets interrupted, and when courage becomes as real and wide as each waking moment.
***
Four months before the accident, Spencer and I spent our Junior-year spring break together, cruising the beaches of St. Petersburg, Florida. We had come with my family and a couple other families, which included several kids close to our age. Naturally, the hotel’s outdoor pool and the crashing waves of the Gulf of Mexico satisfied our boyish inclinations for only awhile. Soon after arriving, we took to the strip of hotels to create our own adventures.
By week’s end, Spencer and I, along with my younger brother and his friend, had launched a number of eggs and pieces of fruit at neighboring hotels with a water balloon launcher. We had also doused a couple of seaside lovers with a bucket of saltwater and seaweed one night, but not before turning the elaborate Putt-Putt course across the street into our own driving range, with little regard for the safety of the other patrons.
One night toward the end of the week, as our youthful fount of deviance had just about run dry, we sat by the hotel pool, waiting for girls to walk by. As we hooted and hollered, my younger brother Sam stood up.
“Watch this,” he said.
Walking to the edge of the pool, Sam took a big swig of his can of Pepsi. Holding it in his mouth, he knelt down at the side of the pool and pretended to vomit it into the water, close to where some other people were swimming. As Sam walked back over to us and we laughed as if it was the funniest thing we had ever seen, a man climbed out the far side of the pool.
“Hey!” he yelled. The man was enormous, standing well over six feet tall—he looked like some sort of professional boxer. We looked around, as if he was talking to someone else.
“Hey kid!” the Boxer yelled again in a heavy Hispanic accent, this time directed at my brother. “You think you funny? You pretend to throw up in the pool?”
We only stared back in terror.
“People trying to swim here, kid. You got something to say?” It was hard to understand him. We looked to each other for interpretation.
The Boxer started toward us. We huddled together awkwardly.
“I know what you say,” he huffed. “I’m from Cuba, but I went to school in the States. So I know what you say.”
“We didn’t say anything,” my brother replied.
“Oh, you tough?” The man gestured toward the beach. “There’s a lot of sand out there,” he said, throwing his muscular index finger toward the beach. “I’ll take you one at a time.”
“Hey, you leave him alone!” The voice came from behind me. It was Spencer. I turned around to see him lifting a metal lounge chair up over his head, ready to use it if necessary.
“What’d you say?” huffed the Boxer again.
“I said leave him alone.” Spencer was defiant, lifting the chair higher. “He didn’t do anything to you.”
The Boxer stopped, turned around to see everyone in the pool area watching, then pointed his finger at Spencer again. He shook it for a second, then puffed out his chest.
“You better just show some respect next time.”
“You do the same,” Spencer retorted. The Boxer glared, raised his fist in the air, and turned to get back into the pool. We all turned to Spencer.
“Spencer, that was awesome,” Sam said, putting his arm around Spencer’s neck. “You saved me.”
We all turned to go, each of us shooting a bold look at the Boxer. After all, we had Spencer on our side. We were young and stupid, but in our minds, we were invincible.
***
The hospital room was dark. The daylight did its best to squeeze in around the heavy window shades, creating a soft glow that outlined the windows and made the sterile bed sheets glow like a fluorescent tide, its waves lapping faster, then slower, then repeating with each rotation of the standing fan in the corner. On the wall opposite the foot of the bed was a mirror, most of which was blocked from view by dozens of flower arrangements with sheaths of silver plastic that would sway and crinkle with the turn of the fan.
There were some unopened gifts on a table in the corner, along with a great shroud of balloons, some big and metallic-looking, in shapes like Garfield the cat covered in bandages and Spongebob Squarepants with his toothy grin. Others were small, unassuming, and tied in clusters that hid behind the bigger balloons from the shifting currents of air in the stale room. All the activity in the room seemed to be focused on the bed, where four or five pillows were stacked at the head.
For some reason, the muffled noise and shifting air of the hospital room reminded me of all the time we had spent in my basement at home. Whenever Spencer would spend the night at my house, we would always stay up late. Then, at some ungodly hour, we would search in closets and bedrooms for as many fans as we could find. We would use them to create a sort of wind tunnel in my basement, where we could sleep soundly in blustery darkness well into the following afternoon.
Those were the days when we had finally grown brave enough to start hanging out with girls. On those summer nights, we would invite girls in our class over for small pool parties in my backyard. Usually, before a night of swimming, Spencer would be over to make last-minute phone calls to anyone else we had forgotten to invite. Then, once all the calls were made, he would snap to attention.
“To the basement,” he would announce, most formally. “We must prepare.”
In the back of my basement, near the crawl space and next to the tool bench, was a bench press. Spencer would put as much weight on the bar as he could possibly lift, and I would follow with a few reps of considerably less weight. Then, after a few sets, we would do push-ups.
“Okay, Sheppie. Push down on my hands,” Spencer would say, holding his fists out a few inches from his waist. As I opposed he pulled up, tightening the muscles in his chest. Then I would go while Spencer held my hands down. We could continue taking turns until we were sufficiently “buff” enough to entertain our female guests poolside.
I liked those days. Sure, it was ridiculous—all the time spent making our muscles look bigger. But there was something that seemed to matter in witnessing those times. It was like being backstage before a performance, before Spencer went out to be the larger-than-life person everyone else knew him to be.
There were several people in the hospital room when I got there, many of whom were part of the popular crowd at school, the ones that would drink and party a lot, the ones I had least expected to be there so soon after the accident. They smiled awkwardly as I came in and shifted their ranks to let me around to the far side of the bed.
The whole right side of Spencer’s face was bandaged up, and he held his IV-free arm up over the left side to cover up the light—and probably a good amount of pain along with it. As I made my way around the bed, I reached across and grabbed his free hand.
“Who is that?” he chuckled groggily. I leaned down next to him.
“It’s me, the nurse.” I said. “Time for your sponge bath.” Spencer moved his arm and squinted at me through his good eye.
“Hey, Sheppie,” he smiled painfully.
“You’re lookin’ good,” I said. “Hair’s a little messed up, though.”
He laughed and winced and squeezed my hand with an incredible amount of strength for someone who had been doped up in a hospital bed all night and day. I let go and stood up. For the next twenty minutes, I joined in the chorus of awkward silences and forced chuckles. After awhile, the majority of the crowd said their goodbyes and cleared out of the room. I was left with Spencer, along with a couple of our best friends.
He turned his head toward me and smiled. “Looks like we’re twins.”
I wasn’t about to let Spencer start thinking about life as a one-eyed guy, although his mom had told me that the chances of saving the eye were slim.
“We’ll see about that,” I said, grabbing his hand again. For a moment nobody knew what to say. I put my other hand on top of Spencer’s head. As soon as I did, he started to sob. Then I did, too.
I guess I figured it was a good time to cry when I saw the most fearless person I knew losing it. But I look back on that moment and realize that I was crying because—in the midst of all the pain and awkward tears and uncertainty—it was beautiful. With one hand squeezing Spencer’s and with the other resting on the bandaged part of his face, I sputtered out a prayer to God.
I had said lots of prayers before—usually in church or at the dinner table, and I usually knew how they went. I knew what things were right to ask for and what words sounded good. I don’t remember what I said out loud in that hospital room. I do know that we were all still crying. I was and Spencer was, and some of my best friends that I had never seen cry before were crying, and I know that I asked God to heal Spencer.
When I was in college, I would occasionally attend a small church in town with some friends. One Sunday at church, an older woman asked to pray for my eye. Hers were sweet and powerful words, and I remember the warmth of her hand covering my face as she prayed for me. But I didn’t know what she was praying for, since my real eye was gone and a plastic one was in its place, and it had been that way for almost twenty years. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t going to be healed, that God finished His healing when I was thirteen months old, when I left the hospital alive and cancer-free. But something in the warmth of that woman’s hand disregarded physical limitations, and spoke to my spirit.
That’s the way I felt when I prayed for Spencer. As I said words like “please” and “heal” and “love,” I questioned myself, because I knew the chances of Spencer regaining full sight were about the same as my prosthetic eye becoming real again. But then the words were gone, and the prayer was done, and we stopped crying and told awkward jokes again.
And then I saw things, in the way that people see the future, I guess. I saw in my friend a long road of pain and confusion ahead. Sure, there would be reemergence of the old Spencer from time to time. But it would be different now.
There would certainly be joy and exhilaration and happiness ahead, as Spencer would be voted Homecoming King months later and I, the runner-up to my good friend, knighted to the homecoming court alongside him. But there would surely be bad days, days when the Spencer I knew would be lost in some dark place where he wouldn’t be able to see himself.
I think I understand now what my prayer was for. It was for a healing that I had touched and tasted and known so well in my own struggle. It was a prayer for loss, for a dropping of the old stuff that didn’t matter, for a gaining of a new kind of courageous.
I leaned down close to Spencer’s ear. “We’ve got this, buddy. I’m here for you.”
“You and me,” he said. I could see Spencer squeeze out a smile under the arm he had put back up over his face.
“You and me,” I said.
