Beade Towne

Cut Rate Contacts

After college, before Bethany and I found each other, I went to law school for about five minutes. I dropped out because I could not force myself to read for hours on end about two drunks and whether they made a contract on a napkin so I went to London. My first job was selling contact lenses on commission in the Financial District.

The guy who ran the place had crooked teeth and wore loud, plaid jackets. Not that anyone saw him. He sat upstairs and watched the store on closed circuit TV. I talked to him twice: the day he hired me, then two weeks later, on the day he fired me.

Like lots of jobs in the medical field, this one was a volume business. We were the used car lot of improved vision.

I lied to get the job and its signing bonus, which amounted to a couple hundred dollars. I knew nothing about contact lenses. The other salespeople were always messing with their contact lenses. Looking in a mirror while they picked at their eyes, or taking the lenses out, and sticking them in that solution stuff. Perhaps my employer assumed otherwise, but I did not wear contacts. So I would sit near one of the little mirrors and mess with my eyes as if I did, just to fit in.

The girl who trained me was Vietnamese.  She had her hair pulled back and huge, contact perfect, dark eyes. She was pretty, and did not laugh at one joke I told her. In fact, everyone else who worked there was Vietnamese and they were very serious about the cut rate eye business. My training for the job was less than extensive. The girl quickly explained how it was done. She was watching the front door while I tried to ask a few questions. She cut me off.

“Jeez. You wear da contact lenses?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You can put da contact lenses in da eyes?” She was pointing at my eyes.

“Yes.”

“Then you show customer how it is done with you contacts in you eyes one time. One time only. Then you make dem put contacts in dey eyes. One time only. You slow at the training station, we wait while you be slow. With the contact lens, it is in and out, in and out, next customer, you see?”

She had already moved on. The five girls on the sales staff took turns when clients came in the store. She was a hard worker. She was not going to miss her turn because of me.

As I watched the other salespeople interact with the customers I was impressed with authority with which they moved the clients through the store. After all, these people were coming in there because they had less than perfect vision. Add to it the obvious language barrier between customers using a very proper His Majesty’s English, and a group of people who sounded like they learned how to converse in a gas station bathroom, and you had to wonder if either side really understood the other.

            When my turn came, I led an older woman to the optometrist. In fifteen seconds, the optometrist determined that she had bad vision. Then I took her to stand before the wall of boxes. This was kind of strange, like an inserted step in the process to make sure the client felt like they were getting some bang for their buck. First, this woman could not see. Second, she was confronted with a wall of small, identical boxes containing various strength contact lenses. I looked at the slip of paper I’d gotten from the optometrist. There was a spot on the wall I was supposed to lead her to that fit her needs. I wasn’t sure if we were in the right place.

            I took a box out, compared the numbers printed on the box with the slip in my hand, it was close enough. I nodded at her confidently, then led her to the training station.

            Since I did not wear contact lenses, there was no way in hell I could get a contact in my own eye, so the in and out was going to have to be in the woman’s eyes. I perched that little contact on my finger, moved it toward her eye, and dropped it on the floor.

            But I never stopped moving. Instead of acknowledging my mistake, I went through the motions of putting something in her eye. She blinked a few times.

            “That feels spot on,” she said. “I’d have thought where would be more discomfort.”

            I smiled, the professional at work.

            I was more careful with that second little bastard. I dug it out of the container, held it upright, pried her eye open, then jammed the contact in there before it could slide off my finger. There was a quick struggle, a cry of pain accompanied her feet thrashing in the air, then lots and lots of blinking.

            With my first customer, I had her do the second in and out with that one eye only, since the other contact was on the floor.  She did a much better job than I did, and before I knew it, she was out the door.

My first contact lens sale. With commission, I made about two quid.

            I was still adjusting to the pound versus dollar math. Two quid wouldn’t even buy me a pint, let alone pay the rent. I was beginning to understand the importance of the in and out.

Over the next few days, I learned more about my new profession. I learned that selling colored contacts was big money. More than double what a standard sale would bring. The Vietnamese women pushed the colored contacts hard.  It was the same thing with every guy who came in there.

“Yes, da big man, with dose big baby blues, you look like da John Wayne. You buy them, yes?”

I made the mistake of pitching the colored contacts only one time. The problem with the colored contacts was that you could actually see them in the customer’s eye. So if I dropped it on the floor, or stuck it in wrong, then the customer could tell.

“I have one brown eye and one blue eye,” that customer told me.

I looked closer, displaying surprise, but I could already see the other contact. It was folded up in one corner of his eye. I stuck my finger in there to get it, and the thing disappeared, like I’d pushed it on the far side of his eyeball.

Was it possible to push something to the opposite side of an eyeball? Until that moment, I had thought not. What was back there? Was my customer now looking backwards with 20/20 vision?

I had no clue what to do. Get another box off the wall? Admit to the guy that he had a color contact floating around somewhere in the back of his brain?

A cough interrupted my panic.

I turned.

The Vietnamese women and their blind customers were crowding me. They wanted the training station, and I was holding things up.

I told the guy his eyes were too brown for the blue contacts and he bought that for some stupid reason. So I took out the one we could see. Then I looked at the other eye and kind of poked around in there, before leading the guy back to the wall for some regular contacts. I took a deep breath when he finally staggered out the door.

Somehow, for a while at least, I managed to keep my ignorance under wraps and was able to keep up a counterfeit expertise without discovery. But while the pay was good, I felt guilty about what I was doing to our customers. I was terrible at putting the contacts in. My big thumb probably looked like something out of a horror movie as it came at them. They would squirm and thrash about while I wedged the contacts into their eyes, in and out, in and out. Then I’d stand them up, and lead them to the check out. They would try to count money, but most times I had to help them since their eyes were like waterfalls and their lenses were inside out or something. They couldn’t see a thing. Then I’d march them out the door and hope they didn’t get hit by a bus.

My fellow sales people treated me with the scorn, and I silently took it. Until one day I saw the girl who trained me do something that looked familiar.

 “I saw that,” I said once she was back in line behind me.

“You see nothing.”

“No, you dropped one of the contacts from your last customer and left it on the floor. You didn’t put anything in his left eye.”

She frowned. “Where you think I learn that?”

It took a second. “You got it from me?”

“Duh. We see you. You faster in and out. All we do it now.”

“All we do it? Wait, we’re only putting one contact in these people? That’s wrong.”

“Not right, not wrong.” She looked both ways, then held up her finger. “Da in and out. That’s all.”

I was beyond disturbed. Someone was going to get hurt, and it was going to be my fault. Not only did I wonder if someone might step in front of a bus, what if they drove a bus? These people were going to learn that they could see better with one eye. Thanks to me, England was going to become an island of winkers.

I tried every way I could to convince my co-workers that we had to stop the one eyed insertion process. No matter how long I tied up the training station, I got two contacts in each and every customer.

I pleaded, but the Vietnamese shut me out. They had found a better, faster way, and I had shown it to them.

It was only a matter of time before the guy in the loud jacket summoned me to his office.

He was sitting at a desk, a wall of tiny black and white screens behind him.

“You insist on putting your hands on the customers,” he said as soon as I entered the room.

“Excuse me?”

“You touch them. We are not as gregarious as you Americans. We are more reserved.”

He was wearing clothes that looked like vomit. Instead of saying that, I said, “Of course I touch them. I have to lead the blind people through your little maze of a store.”

“There have also been complaints from your co-workers.”

The Vietnamese women had turned on me. I could have fought it. Workers have more rights in the UK. I could have kept that job. But the guilt was wearing me out. I was done. Technically, leaving as soon as I was, I owed that signing bonus back to the company, but I didn’t have it, and no one asked for it. I walked back to the elevator, then picked my way through the customers and emerged on the busy street, my career in the cut rate contact business at a close.

Just before I descended into the tube stop, I looked over my shoulder. The customers were coming and going out of that store like little ants. Could they see? Were they in pain? Did they wink all the time like my uncle Ed?

Did it matter?

They just kept coming and going out of that store, just like they did all day long. The in, and the out. In and out.

Angel of Death

Bethany and I met the Angel of Death at about thirty thousand feet somewhere over the state of Missouri. We’re still alive, obviously, so it was more of a conversational “meet and greet” instead of a real “get to know you” encounter.

I’m not surprised at anyone we strike up a conversation with. Bethany, my mother, and my mother in law are all the kind of people who actually listen when someone tells them something, which makes them great to go to funerals with, because they somehow know exactly what to say, and how to say it.

When I try to be like that I feel like a sham, a fake, or I try too hard.

Bethany wasn’t officially my wife when we met the Angel of Death. We were in graduate school in Lincoln, Nebraska. We were on a plane headed back to Mississippi to get married. This was an exciting time for us, but you wouldn’t know it looking at my fiancée. She is a not her normally, chirpy self on a plane. That’s because she has to spend the entire flight concentrating on keeping the plane in the air. She has taken on that responsibility for everyone else on board, and if we go down in flames, or if the wings are loaded with ice, then it will be her fault.

Flying would be perfect in her mind if someone could design a plane that made no noise, and was able to always fly in a straight line. She doesn’t understand why a machine that is capable of lifting two hundred people into the air, flying them a thousand miles at five hundred miles per hour, then landing them safely back on the ground, can’t make those last few modifications toward perfection.

So she remains vigilant from the moment she gets on the plane to anything she feels may be irregular or out of the norm, and never hesitates to push her alarm button to notify the stewardess or even the pilot, if she can get past the locked door, to let them know about our impending doom.

                                               

You would think the Angel of Death would take a more sinister form on a commercial flight, maybe some nutty guy with a shoe bomb, somebody who locked all the bathroom doors, or even a stewardess who was stingy with the peanuts.

Not so. We were in a row with three seats. I had the aisle, Bethany was in the middle, and the Angel of Death got the window seat. Luckily, leg room wasn’t a problem for this demon of death; she was short, gray-haired, and dressed comfortably upper middle class. She was holding a novel with a crossword puzzle sticking out of it. She looked kind of like an editor. 

Now, my mother, mother in law, and my wife all see it as their duty to engage someone who is sitting next to them on a two hour flight. They would think it rude not to. While all three might engage any given stranger at any given time, it is not likely that they’ll come back with the same report.

My mother in law does it more like a history professor. She’ll spend a few moments with the people she did not know, then report, “I’ve been talking to Gene and Myrtle Norman from Atlanta. Gene’s in sales, Myrtle’s a part time decorator. They have two children, one is in politics and he works in DC, and the other fellow may be in some kind treatment facility. It sounded like a problem with alcohol, but I’m not sure.”

My mother will meet the same two strangers and come back with a more surfacy report, and generally one that seems to benefit her in some way. “That’s Myrtle and her husband. She’s a decorator and thinks I should switch out the leather couch with some kind of patterned one. She says neutral colors are out, and she’s also a big fan of Turkish rugs.”

Bethany will talk to the same two people and it will turn into a come-to-Jesus, kumbaya styled pow-wow. The three of them will huddle together. They will cry on her shoulder. She will cry with them. It will take hours. Then she’ll turn to me and mumble, “Those two are friggin crazy.”

For some reason, my wife is an everyman’s Dr. Phil.  People will tell her things they’ll barely admit to themselves. And they’ll do it anywhere. A bathroom. A restaurant. It can even happen at thirty thousand feet.

But, given that she had to guide the airplane all the way to Memphis that day, my wife’s initial greeting to the Angel of Death was hardly her usual one. They exchanged a low-key hello. There was silence for a few seconds, the woman had the novel open in her lap, then she asked if we were going on vacation.

My fiancée said, “Sort of. We’re going home to get married.”

The Angel of Death, who evidently was borrowing the Earthly name Dorothy, responded, “My husband died of cancer.”

This was not the usual conversational volley you get receive after telling someone you’re on your way to get married. My fiancée was so thrown by the response the plane turned to the left the slightest bit. Bethany put her focus back on guiding the plane as she offered her condolences to Dorothy.

Dorothy nodded, then shrugged. “Our oldest son committed suicide.”

Now Bethany went into full consoling mode. I was forgotten. The fate of the plane became secondary. She turned in her seat and placed her hand on Dorothy’s arm, a physical gesture to let her know it was OK, and Dorothy let go with her story, and in a voice that even I could hear. In addition to losing a husband to cancer and a son to suicide, Dorothy had another son in prison and another son who’d been killed in a car wreck. And this was all before cabin service. Armed with a ginger ale, (I’d been planning on getting champagne or wine but that didn’t seem appropriate now) Dorothy began relaying a life filled with tragedy and sadness.

It went on and on, Dorothy sharing some God awful occurrence, and my wife offering some well wishing words of comfort. Dorothy never stopped, and my wife-to-be could not bring herself to disengage. Their exchange got to be like banjoes dueling between the promise of hope, and the reality of despair. If my fiancée had been trying to keep the plane in the air, I think this woman was praying we’d go down in flames, just so she could add it to her repertoire of heartbreak.

            I was hitting some personal turbulence and descending into the emotional dumps myself. What had begun as a hopeful flight toward our lifelong commitment was dissolving into a descent into life’s potential hell. This was what Bethany and I would face together? A life that was nothing but loss, death, and sorrow?

Once she had exhausted the actual events that had made her life terrible, Dorothy started in with general statements that she’d picked up while serving as life’s doormat. It was getting creepier and creepier. “Enjoy the good times,” Dorothy told us. “Because life is full of heartbreak.”

            “I know,” my fiancée said, having long since run shy of appropriate platitudes for her responses.

            “It’ll surprise you. You’ll be going along, happy as a lark, then out of nowhere, it’ll all be gone.”

            “You have to enjoy the good times,” Bethany said, looping back to Dorothy’s advice.

            “And the good times don’t last nearly as long as they should.”

            “Life is short,” my fiancée said.

            “Sometimes you don’t even realize those were supposed to be the good times. It’s not until things are really, really bad that you even know that.”

            “Wow,” Bethany said. 

“You just can’t deny death,” Dorothy said.

“Nope,” Bethany said. “Or taxes.”

                       

After two hours with the Angel of Death, my fiancée was too exhausted to land the plane, even sleeping on my arm the last ten minutes of the flight. Once we were on the ground, I carried Dorothy’s suitcase for her.

 “And where did you say the two of you were going?” Dorothy said when I handed off her bag in the crowded terminal.

“Going to get married,” my wife said.

Dorothy frowned even as she said, “How nice.” Like maybe she was realizing what we were doing for the first time, and now she was piecing back together her words of the last two hours. But she couldn’t let death go. She had to get in one last negative word. “My husband and I got a divorce.”

I had not spoken to Dorothy the whole time, but now I could not hold my tongue. “Hold it a second. I thought you said he died of cancer.”

“He did. Throat cancer. After he ran off with his receptionist. Served the sorry bastard right.”

Then Dorothy hunched her shoulders and walked along in a defeated shuffle. Perhaps she was an angel at one time, but she’d seen too much heartbreak in her life and now death kept her firmly in its clutches as she trudged out of sight, pulling her carryon luggage behind her.

Jazz on the Bayou

 Ronnie will be joining us on the air real soon, but you can click on the link below for your tickets.

JAZZ ON THE BAYOU TIX

Info straight from the JOTB website is below

Easter Seals Louisiana has long been embraced by Gardner & Ronnie Kole. Both Gardner & Ronnie serve on the state board of Easter Seals. Gardner has served as State President and Ronnie as the only two term President of Easter Seals Louisiana. Ronnie has hosted the Easter Seals telethon in New Orleans since 1980.

In 1993, a wonderful idea developed to further support Easter Seals Louisiana. The Koles invited premier chefs from the New Orleans and surrounding areas to their Slidell home located on the bayou.

“In 1994 Ronnie contacted Jack Stroupe who had been elected to serve as District Governor for Rotary to ask that Rotary assist with Jazz It was a natural combination. The Rotary Club of Elyria, Ohio had founded an organization in 1917 that later evolved into Easter Seals. Jack and his wife Brenda joined the committee and brought many Rotarians along to work on Jazz, as well as the Easter Seals Telethon. They have remained on the Jazz committee and have been Co-Chairs since 1999.”

Now with the assistance from these chefs as well as corporate sponsors, “Jazz on the Bayou “ has become a major fund raiser for Easter Seals Louisiana.

Glenwood Canyon in CO

 

This was shot coming out of Glenwood Canyon. Glenwood Springs is also the place this famous guy died. Unfortunately, it is always so close to the end or beginning of our long journey that we have never stopped.