What You Can Achieve By Looking People In The Eyes

How a chance encounter with an eyeball changed my life.

I was working in sales, in San Francisco. Honestly it was bullshit. I sold mailing lists to advertisers, or whoever had the cash to put up. I met with the smarmiest people, usually men. Always burning holes in my head with their obnoxious smiles, peering right into me, looking for some angle, some advantage to cheat me out of a buck. Peering into me and yet somehow never being able to see me. My boss, Doug, was one of these people.

I hated the hours too. I would get up at 7am, have breakfast, put on a thrift store suit, and then in the fog, drive my cluttered minivan through the deserted streets down to Mission St where I would open up what looked like a vacant abandoned storefront and set up in an office with stained carpeting, so that we could begin our “sales” promptly at 9am.

At this early hour, if I saw anybody, they were still passed out wrapped up in a blanket, there shopping cart of detritus spilled over next to them. The street vendors–the ones that lay out blankets to sell old power drills, necklaces, shampoo, and minted coins–didn’t set up by that hour. But on this particular morning, right on Mission St, in the dawn light, there was a balding disheveled greying man in a thick black overcoat stained with piss, wares already laid out, rocking back and forth.

Normally I saw a lot of people doing crazy things in my time in San Francisco. You get used to it and just quietly pass by them. And I don’t like looking street people in the eye because that always feels like an invitation, and if you invite their vortex into your world, your world might get pulled in like a black hole. I think this is why people ignore people on the street. They don’t have the spare energy to give. Or it’s shame. Shame that I have resources and you don’t, probably stolen from you generations ago. People won’t admit that’s the case, probably. But next time you find yourself averting your eyes from someone whose brain is melting before you on the street, ask yourself Why?

That’s what I did that morning. The man was rocking back and forth, and though I didn’t look at him right away, I could feel his gaze on me. At first I looked down the street. Always curious, I glanced at his wares. It was the usual fenced goods: t-shirts, ball caps, vegetable oil, little toy cars, whatever could be flipped for some cash.

But one thing caught my eye: a perfectly spherical glass eyeball. It was frankly cool. On impulse I decided to haggle with him over it. I was in sales. I could get this off him for a dollar, I was thinking. When I looked him in the eye to make the deal, though, it was only then that I noticed he had in fact one eye. The other socket was a mere divot, a thin seam of flesh where an eye had been. And I wondered of a sudden if this glass eye he was selling might not be his fake eye. I wanted to ask but dared not to. I was ashamed at his deformity, and the possibility that I wanted his eye, and that he was selling it out of desperation.

“How much for the eye?” I asked him, looking into his eye.

“You don’t get the eye,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you don’t see shit,” he said.

“Fuck it. I don’t want it.” I said. I turned to go.

“You earn it.” he said.

He patted the blanket next to him. I was starting to run late for work. And Doug was a dick when you showed up late.

“No,” I said.

“You see everything with the eye,” he said. What the fuck did that mean? It sounded like bullshit, and I didn’t have time for it. But a tear came to the man’s eye in that moment. I don’t know if it was emotional at all. It might just have been a duct malfunction. But as I saw the tear, and I saw him in this deplorable state, I decided to toss him a coin of generosity and so kneeled, not sat, next to him.

“Sit,” he insisted. I sat. Great. I’m roped in now. I was in sales. I knew how this worked. Fuck.

The man held the eyeball up and pointed the pupil at me.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“An eyeball” I said. The man farted right then, and seemed not even to notice.

“I don’t have time for this” I said.

“You get clarity. Clarity gives you time.” he came back.

I was really losing my patience. I was considering bailing when he shoved the eye right in front of my face, and from that close distance, then I saw: It was a sculpture, like tiny, thin, spear-point flower petals coming out of the center of the pupil, in an iridescent array of colors that changed in the light as he rotate the eye back and forth. A whole landscape was contained in that iris, alternating between the shape of sunlight in the shallow ocean, to silver ore, to flames in a fire.

“How much?” I asked.

The man shook his head.

“Ten dollars. And a promise,” he said. I felt like the money wasn’t the point, but I admired his hustle. He continued, “You promise to look.” He grabbed my arm with force. “Really look. If you don’t, you get hit by a car.” He let my arm go. Fuck me, I thought. That eye was a gem though. So I paid him and took the eye, hoping he didn’t just put a curse on me.

As a result I was five minutes late and Doug chewed my ass out. Normally I was afraid of Doug. Afraid to look him in the eye. He looked at you in a way that meant to scold you. But this time I glared at him right in the eye, and I saw a really tense, pitiful, scared shape to his look, masquerading as potent. And when he was done chewing me out, I said, “Fuck you, Doug,” which sent him balistic. But I felt euphoric. I hadn’t even realized how miserable I was until I walked out of there that morning. He was screaming at me that he wasn’t going to pay me at the end of the week. I told him we’d see about that.

And on Friday when I came in to collect, the check was there and Doug was nowhere to be found. When I asked where he was, the other sales reps said he’d been hit by a car.