My dad got shot when he was a child. It was World War II. He and his cousin were unsupervised in a room, playing the gun-gun game. When gun-gun dropped on floor, Mr. Bullet wooshed from Mr. Gun-Gun and slammed straight through my father’s lower jaw and out of his upper eye socket (God help me, my brain has blocked out which eye it was).
The legend goes that he caught the eye fragments with his hand before he sauntered up to my innocuous grandmother stating the super obvious, “Mama, I lost my eye.”
Thus, my dad’s fleeting momentary encounter with Mr. Gun-Gun and Mr. Bullet literally triggered his having to see life through the one-eye ratio that was left. As did his wife and children.
I was his second child, but since I was the second in a series of first males, I was bequeathed his name, which was in turn, bestowed upon him by his father. Thus, I was required by law to place three squiggly Roman numeral “I’s” after the words Alberto J. Villaraza to establish that I, I, I was the exact child to fail, fail, fail Math Quizzes 1, 2 and 3, so as not to be confused with the Alberto Villaraza Jr., Math wiz, scientist-extraordinaire, and exceptional poet. I do not know how well the daunting Alberto Villaraza Sr. was with quadratic equations, but at any rate, pipsqueak-me was too introverted so as to be confused with my intimidating grandfather in any possible way.
Stop . . .
Why is this turning out to be a poignant tale of Sidney Sheldon proportions? I woke up an hour ago with naught but a yen for quick jaunt to the urinal and a mug of hot Tsai.
Truth be told?
If it is indeed time, let it be. We shall see what unfolds.
Jesus was once quoted that if your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light. My father, who wasn’t always Alberto Jr. but more oftentimes nicknamed Bing, had but a single working eye. The other was a fake one; it was made of smoky glass.
I can’t say if my father proved Jesus right. But that one working eye must have been a marvel unto its own. I remember one instance when I needed help with my homework once. I asked him to read two long pages (small print) for his advice. He took maybe six to eight seconds to read the whole text. I was sure he was showing off. So I started to ask him all kinds of things from the text. He answered them all. Names, numbers, even qualitative details. That is one of the few memories of Bing I haven’t blocked out that made me realize that he belonged to the sort of people who had the memory of cameras and Xerox machines.
There seemed to be other benefits to having one eye. Bing excelled at sports that required you to keep one eye winked. Like bowling, billiards, or ironically, shooting a telescoped rifle. The same applied to science, for his main interest was devoted to biology, where you had to spend all day with one eye shut while another gazes into those old-style microscopes that lets you into the infinitesimal world of cells.
My own disadvantage with having to live with daddy’s single eye was more Stephen King than Sidney Sheldon. Before I had learned the art of skepticism, Bing convinced me that one part of him kept awake even as he slept. His proof was that when he took off his trademark aviator shades as he snoozed, one spooky glass eye always kept open.
And it was with conviction that my dad said that I must always behave because he was watching me with his smoky-gray eye even while he was taking his morning and afternoon naps.
As my dad snored away, I was a mouse in a corner, tracing the superheroes in my comic books or transmogrifying my Transformer figurines from car to robot, robot to car, car to robot, and so on. If I had to cut across his room and use his bathroom, I tiptoed.
When I grew out of my toys, my interests turned towards my dad’s massive collection of books. For a kid who had to live under the tutelage of my father’s all-seeing eye, the books were my only chance to escape the four walls of my house and later, the safety of our gated subdivision.
One by one, I devoured whatever paperbacks and hard bounds had attractive enough cover art, not yet developing a sixth sense of filtering what had value and what did not. Most of the books were acquired in second-hand book shops so you can imagine what was bought for the sake of 50%-off discounts and buy-one-take-one deals, usually partitioned into store shelves because people either didn’t want to buy them in the first place, or they were so mass-produced that one could find maybe a dozen copies in just a single store. Many of these were either self-help like “How to Quit Smoking in 60 days or “How to clean your house using just vinegar” or just those ratty pulp fiction paperbacks.
I think he bought a small bulk of his library brand new. Most of them were popular Spy-vs.-Spy such as Ludlums, Forsythes, and Flemings, but once in a while, a Sheldon, a Clavell, or even a Richard Bach can be stumbled on. If I looked hard enough, a Thomas Hardy or a Friedrich Nietzsche might be unearthed.
Back in those days, there were only three or four channels on television, mostly Marshall Law-programmed at that. I was often grounded for long stretches of time, for lines of below seventy-five in math and science, and so you can just imagine what it must have been like living in that two-story house with just those books to tell me what sort of life proliferated beyond our well-manicured garden.
The key was timing. I was in that moment when I was just beginning to redefine what my own take on Newtonian, Aristotelian and Euclidean parameters of 3-D reality. There is a certain stage in one’s life when suddenly, the real world expands outward like a lit match underneath a summer-dried pile of leaves. Without ample warning, your alphabet-soup existence towered over by He-Man, Optimus Prime, Voltes Five, and Voltron-Defender-of-the-Universe falls over, to be replaced by superheroes of a more complex make. If it wasn’t Frank Hardy, Hugh Hefner, The Brothers Kamarazov or the Mayor of Casterbridge, it was an aspiring seagull named Jonathan Livingston or a Little Prince that travelled across the galaxies in search of a better way of loving a rose.
My dad’s constant motto was to “minimize the risk.” He thought that I could live with his books at the same time resonate with the same fears he had of the world. I didn’t get shot when I was a child. I wasn’t afraid to fly for I hadn’t yet lived through the falls.
After puberty, Bing still opted to maintain his strict house rules: 6 pm curfews when I was still 18, having to ask permission to go out at night up to my early 20’s, getting grounded several times for an entire year in high school for failing one subject in two quarters. It was typical for a teenager like me for the villains in those stories to morph into my father’s face. He curtailed my freedom, when it was he who also advised me to read my very first novel – Six Against The Rock – the true story of how six inmates tried the only almost successful escape from the most secure prison in the world, Alcatraz Island.
I began to imagine that there was a rabbit hole at the wall directly underneath my air-conditioner. Every night, I pretended that I snuck out and was Bruce Lee or Axl Rose for a night, carefully replacing the magic hole when I returned from my nocturnal adventures.
Until the day I learned just how easy it was to put my blanket over some fluffed-up pillows, leave the stereo on, and jump over the fence. It didn’t take me long to learn the laborious art of pushing the car from the garage to start it a few good block away where my slumbering parents upstairs still think their middle child is dead to the world downstairs.
When my family bought a townhouse in the city, it became easier when I was awarded the room that had the fire-escape ladder right outside my third-story window. I watched and danced to many a good band and DJ that way. In college, I drank like a fish and drove drunk like a dervish, lucky to come home unscathed, the car still dent-less. By my early twenties, I was an expert in opening the squeaky gate and climbing to my room right before the early rays hit my sometimes vomit-stained fenders.
One of Bing’s favorite books is Dale Carnegie’s best-selling self-help, How to Win Friends and Influence People. When he was still alive, he neither won nor influenced me in any way he wanted. Instead, I maintained a rebellion that lasted for more than a decade, the same that eventually drove me into an intense vision quest for personal freedom that lasted long after my father’s strict tenets had no more direct influence on me.
