Kenny Beals had a glass eye.  There was no mistaking it.     It had no muscles connecteds to it, so it always looked out in a different direction from his real eye.   It was often surrounded by snot-colored mucus, a pale greenish yellow.  Not a lot, but it was there all the same.    The glass eye was the first thing you noticed about him besides his attitude, which was belligerent.  He had a little sneer on his mouth.  He had light-colored hair, a little curly and wiry, thin. You could see his scalp.    His skin was very pale. almost translucent.  He wasn't big or muscled, but he looked like he was coiled up like a spring, a powerful spring that could snap and unwind and rip your finger off.  He was always very careful not to let you see him pop it in and out.

Kenny Beals lived with the Reinhart family, who lived in a trailer directly across the street from the trailer we lived in when we first moved to Barbara Lane.   Now that we were in the new house, the Reinharts were kitty-corner; just down from Mac's garage, which sat on a plateau above the Reinharts.  The hill took a steep drop off right there, and the Reinhart's trailer was on an incline, almost a gully, where an underground stream came across Barbara Lane and onto our property, and emerged as a crick on the southern boundary of our lot.     We knew never to drink the water from that crick because it drained the leach field of the septic tank of the Reinharts and who knows who else up the hill.       

The cramped and steep lot of the Reinharts had contributed to the death of their two-year-old baby the previous year, when the baby caused their car to roll down the slope and roll over and kill her when she tried to jump away from the car .  

Kenny Beals was a foster kid.  Sometimes we called him Kenny Reinhart, I think he was introduced to us that way, but we soon found out his real name was Beals, so that's what I called him.  Maybe he was related somehow, or maybe the Reinharts wanted the foster kid money, I never knew, but I wondered what would possess them to take this kid in.  He was a monster. 

Sometimes I think I must have a personality that causes some people to take an instant dislike.  Charlie Viau's mean pal J.R. from up the road hated me right off the bat, and now so did Kenny Beals.  He really hated me.  I was a year or two younger , and a little smaller than he was. This would not be the last time instant dislike against me would come into play, not by a long shot.  And for my part, I can think of plenty of times when right off the bat I could not stand someone.   With Kenny Beals, it was like coming across a rattlesnake.  Instinctively, I knew he was a dangerous psychopath. 

He began taunting and prodding immediately and there was no avoiding him.  He lived right across the street and it was like he kept a lookout, so I would go out the back door and keep on going away from the house in the opposite direction to avoid him.   Every contact was a confrontation.  There was never any attempt to be friendly or to do anything except fight.  I would not fight him because I knew he would fight dirty and he would kill me.   If Kenny Beals saw me coming down the street, he would start throwing rocks.  He could throw a rock a hundred feet, and he was deadly accurate.  Because he only had one eye, his aim was better.     It was like the movies where the bad guy yells "Dance" and shoot bullets near the feet of the good guy.   Kenny Beals would ricochet rocks around me and keep me paralyzed, motionless.  I was lucky I never got hit in the head with one of his rocks. 

Everyone has seen the movie The Christmas Story, where Ralphie has his neighborhood nemesis - Scott Farkas, with the yellow eyes and the evil laugh and the sadistic little sidekick.    Kenny Beals was too mean to have a sidekick.  His foster family little brother Eddy J. Reinhart  stayed well clear of him.    I imagine Mr. Reinhart had probably warned Kenny Beals that if he messed with Eddy J., he would get his head twisted off. 

The rumor was that Kenny Beals had been in and out of Reform School a few times.     How he got the glass eye was never explained, nor was it ever inquired after.  That would have been an invitation for a punch in the face.   I guess my older brother must have gotten tired of the controversy, because somehow he got hold of two pairs of boxing gloves, and he suggested a boxing match between me and Kenny Beals to settle the matter.      I think my brother may have gotten the gloves from my godfather, Uncle Teddy Zawartany, because around the same time Uncle Teddy had coached me a little bit on how to box.  Uncle Teddy was my Aunt Winnie's husband. My godmother Aunt Winnie was my Dad's sister. Uncle Teddy was from Poland, and had seen heavy action in the Pacific Theater in WWII.     He was always good to me.   Always a big smile, and let me have a sip of his beer.

The next thing my older brother was giving me boxing lessons under the weeping willow tree in our front yard.  Boxing lessons. Like he was some sort of authority on Marquis of Queensbury.   This was nuts, it was like a plot line out of Spin and Marty on the Mickey Mouse Club.  Years later, when Bobby Livingston kept picking on my sister on the school bus, I punched the crap out of him (The Big Fight, 3rd and final fight of my ring career.  The other two were bare knuckle.)  I didn't give my sister boxing lessons.   But, as usual, I had no choice.    I was being set up to get killed.    Yet, come the day of the Big Fight, under controlled conditions, with a referee, Kenny Beals wasn't all that tough, plus I had the advantage of his glass eye, which he probably didn't want to risk messing up.  We threw a few punches and that was that.     The fact that he didn't kill me may have embarrassed him.    It happens a lot with bullies.  Call their bluff, they fold.  Which is why Ialways say, at the first sign of a bully, kick the living shit out of them so they know that next time, they are dead.

Things seemed to calm down somewhat after the Big Fight.    My brother was collecting newspapers for a Paper Drive to raise money for school.   He had a giant pile of bundled newspapers in the back yard, and we made a fort from the bundles that was like an igloo.  It even had a roof.   It was a musty little newspaper cave.    One hot afternoon Kenny Beals came over and coaxed me into the newspaper cave.  He pulled out a little bottle of ether that he had stolen from the doctor's office.   He opened the bottle of ether. It had a sweet smell.  When I woke up, Kenny Beals was gone.  I wonder what was up to in the newspaper cave that day.    

Later that summer I was in our back yard and I noticed Kenny Beals was up at Charlie Viau's house, hanging around their back back door.  I thought he was trying to get Charlie to come to the back door.  Several days later I learned that the Viau family was actually not home that day. The family had gone on a vacation to visit relatives up in Canada, and when they returned they discovered that things were missing.   Charlie Viau's house had been burglarized, and someone had stolen Mr. Viau's coin collection.     Then I remembered seeing Kenny Beals hanging around their back door a few days earlier, when I thought he was knocking at their door.   I told my Mom what I had seen. 

Soon Kenny Beals went away, and not long after, the Reinharts moved away to Baldwinsville.  I saw Eddy J. Reinhart couple of time in B'ville.  He was a character. He has a bike that had a label painted on it "Jizz Injected".     Kenny Beals was out of my life for good, until fifteen years later, and then I saw him again.    I saw Kenny in Baldwinsville, I was in town that day, visiting from college at Syrancuse U.,   and I was hanging out at the Forum, which was the popular bar for young people in my home town during those years.  There  I was in the Forum, chatting it up with some friends in the bar, when Lo and Behold, there was Kenny Beals, looking much the same as he always had, like Charles Laughton's Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but without the hump.  Just the big bulging glass eye. 

Only this time Kenny Beals was pretending to be friendly, like "how about old times sake"?  And he wondered if I had any POT   (Really, how dumb do you think I am Kenny?)   I looked around and I see these two narcs hanging around with Kenny - within earshot.  They didn't look like hippies.  Slick hair, "slacks".    Trench coats?  ?  Maybe not trench coats, but Members Only jackets , or something like that.   Whatever, they could have been wearing flashing neon signs -  NARC NARC NARC.  So obvious.  Kenny Beals kept up the small talk for a bit, then I told him to get lost.   The narcs were using him to entrap me.    How pathetic.  That was the last I ever saw of him. He probably died in prison.   

I wonder which came first, the glass eye or the giant chip on his shoulder?  Damned if I know.