One Eyed Will

The day I met Will, I was on the set of a movie. He worked on movie sets as a production assistant. I was 19 at the time, still living at home in Orange County, and sometimes my friends and I would go up to L.A. to work on movie sets as extras. Some of the extras who did this for a living would call themselves background artists. The production staff would call them feeding props. We were basically treated like scenery, but it was fun for us to be a part of the filming regardless.

When I first saw Will, I thought he was pretty cute. It was during a lunch break that he struck up a conversation with me. We chatted for a little while and I noticed that he had two different colored eyes. One appeared to be green and the other blue. I commented on them and he told me they were two different colors because they are actually two different eyes. Only one was the eye he was actually born with. Ummmmm..??? He went on to explain that when he was a kid, his brother had chased him around the house one day with an ice pick while they were playing. Will’s brother ran into him and the ice pick accidentally got shoved into Will’s eye. When taken to the emergency room he found out he’d lose that eye. There was a girl in the hospital that had just died and happened to be an eye donor. Will became the new owner of that eye, which moved around as if nothing was wrong, yet he would never be able to see out of it. It would just be for cosmetic purposes.

Will asked me to go out with him and some friends to a local pub that night and I agreed. It still amazes me that I was able to drink in so many bars back then without getting kicked out for being underage. We had a lot of fun that night drinking cheap pitchers of beer, talking, laughing and getting to know each other better. We started seeing each other fairly often after that. I was always the one making the effort to drive to him since I still lived with my mother and he only lived with roommates. The parking was always horrendous being that he lived in a college town. Being a gentleman wasn’t one of Will’s greatest attributes, which I first noticed on the long walks to and from my car that he never offered to accompany me on. He did have other qualities I admired though. Will was very driven and passionate about film. He was only a production assistant, but aspired to be a director of his own films. He even had a masters degree from film school. Sex with Will was pretty amazing which was probably his most redeeming quality.

Over the next couple of months, I wanted things to progress to a deeper level with Will. That didn’t really happen. In fact, the more he would be aloof and hard to get, the more I tried to show him that I was the perfect girl for him that he shouldn’t let get away. I would just take whatever time he would give to me, and made all of the effort with not much in return. On one occasion, I remember I was wearing my adorable, very high black platform shoes. While we were walking my platform shoe suddenly went one direction while my foot went the other and it caused me to trip and fall on my face. Not embarrassing at all in front of the guy you’d most like to impress. He asked if I was o.k. I said I was fine, trying to laugh it off, and continued walking. Then about a minute later, the same exact thing happened with the shoe and down I went….again. This time it was a little more painful and my foot was throbbing. I stood up, embarrassed, said I was fine and we walked into his apartment. I sat down to examine my foot which was getting progressively more painful by the second. I took off my shoes and compared my feet. The injured foot definitely looked swollen to me. I asked him if he thought the hurt foot looked bigger than the other one. He took a quick look at them and said he thought they looked the same. I continued to stare at the huge swollen foot, comparing it to the obviously smaller uninjured foot and asked if he was sure that it didn’t look any bigger. He said no. I contemplated telling him that maybe he couldn’t see the injury very well since he only had one working eye, but decided that would be in poor taste. I asked him to take me to the emergency room where I got examined and x-rayed, with the end result being that I had broken my foot.

They put me in a cast and we drove back to Will’s apartment. When we got inside he asked if I wanted to smoke some pot. This isn’t something I normally did, but between the pain in my foot and wishing I was anywhere other than with Will in this vulnerable state, I said sure, why not. We smoked quite a bit and I began to feel a little better about the situation at hand. Then he suggested going to see a movie. I agreed and we drove over to the theater. After we parked I started to grab my crutches from the backseat and he stopped me. You may find the next sentence unbelievable, but I promise it actually happened. “Why don’t you just leave the crutches in the car.” He said. “You can hop.“ It’s amazing how much further away everything seems when you have to hop on one foot to get there. When we were finally in the home stretch and walking/hopping down the hallway to our theater, he had the nerve to turn to me and say, “Hurry up, we’re going to miss the movie. It’s already started.” I just stared at him in disbelief for a moment before telling him through gritted teeth to go on ahead, I’d catch up to him in a minute.

After the movie was over, we went back to his place and ended up getting into a huge fight. I can’t remember exactly what it was about, I just remember at one point him saying, “You know, you are NOT my girlfriend!” This fact I was becoming more and more aware of, but the way he spit those words at me stung regardless. I would have loved to storm out, jump in my car and drive home right then. Unfortunately, since my driving foot was crippled, that couldn’t happen. I hadn’t exactly figured out how I was going to get home yet, and being that it was too late at night to call anyone at this point, I was stuck here for the night so we just went to bed. We slept as far away from each other as was possible on his crappy twin bed, which for me wasn’t far enough. In the early morning my best friend called. She asked if I needed to be picked up and I told her YES PLEASE! Within an hour I was in the car heading home with her. I didn’t talk to Will for quite some time after that, and I wish I could say we never spoke again. I have a tendency when time passes to forget the bad qualities in men, and remember mostly the good times.

After a month or so I called Will. We caught up on the latest in each others lives. I told him my cast had finally come off, and we decided to meet. We started dating again and during this round of our relationship we actually became “boyfriend and girlfriend.” Something else happened as well during this time period. I discovered that Will was a cocaine addict. How I had no clue about this the entire time I’d known him is beyond me. I suppose it was because I’d never known a cocaine addict, or anyone who’d even tried cocaine for that matter, so I had no idea what the symptoms were. Also because he had never done it in front of me. I only found out through a conversation with his roommates. Things made a lot more sense to me after I found this out. This was a common drug in his work place, so he didn’t see it as big deal. I did however see it as a big deal and he knew how much I wanted him to stop. One night to prove a point, I asked him to let me try it so I could see why it was so important to him. He thought I was kidding since I swore I’d never try a drug like that, but when he realized I wasn’t he let me. I proceeded to do way more than I should have not realizing how much cocaine people normally did and ended the night with Will laying next to me, telling me to just breathe and calm down, that my heart was beating WAY too fast. Luckily I was fine, but that night didn’t change his drug habits one bit. He remained a cocaine addict while I continued to ignore how much it bothered me. Then Will got the job which would change everything.

It was working on a film in Australia. He would be gone for 3 months. While he was gone he called often, and we made plans for me to come and visit. I’d always wanted to go to Australia and he said if I just bought the plane ticket everything else would be taken care of once I got there. So the ticket was bought, date to visit set, but something started to happen. Being away from Will I started to see things clearly for the first time. I started to notice what a completely rude and selfish prick he really was. He was having his paychecks sent to me because of a problem with his bank, and since I had his money he was also telling me to mail certain bills for him, as well as take care of a few other things. He was treating me like an unpaid assistant. Instead of being appreciative of all that I was doing for him, he one day yelled at me for not sending something out on time. I lost it. My patience had run out. I don’t think he’d ever seen this side of me. I’m not sure I had either. I told him where he could put his checks, I expressed how unappreciated I felt, and I said that I didn’t care if I lost all of the money I’d spent on my Australia plane ticket, but I wasn’t coming to visit him. It was over. I did end up losing the money on that ticket but gained back so much of my self respect that I didn’t care.

I saw Will once more after that. This time it was accidental. He came into the bar where I was cocktail waitressing at the time. He looked terrible and I wondered what I’d ever seen in him. He tried to talk to me and I blew him off. He cornered me at one point and wanted to know why I wouldn’t talk to him. He told me he had stopped doing cocaine and that he and his family called that time in his life the black period. He told me that he didn’t really remember most of what happened during that time, including apparently how he’d treated me. I told him that I owed him nothing, and that while he may not remember anything during “the black period”, I unfortunately remembered it all perfectly. I then turned and walked away from One Eyed Will for the last and final time.