The Rest of the Story

Most folks have probably heard about how fourteen year old Tom Greeson lost an eye to a piece of metal flung from an exploding lawn mower carburetor. Since Tom's family was about the sorriest white trash in five counties, they got him the minimum of medical attention, for which they could not pay, and declined to look into a glass eye for him. Tom's Uncle Vard carved and polished an almost perfect wooden sphere that he painted to match Tom's remaining eye as best he could, which was not so well. It looked pretty bad, and Tom was very self conscious about his wooden eye. He was apt to whip anybody who so much as looked at it too long.

When Tom was fourteen and entering high school, his Aunt Patsy talked him into going stag to a school dance. He cleaned up as best he could and hung out in the dark corners of the gymnasium where the dance was held. He chanced to see Nancy Blalock sitting all alone, apparently without a date, and marvelled at how she had grown over the last summer. She didn't look all that bad except for her cleft palate, and he screwed up his courage to approach her.

"Would you like to dance with me, Nancy? Tom stammered.

Nancy was thrilled. "Would I? Would I?" she gushed.

Tom yelled at her: "Hare-lip! Hare-lip! Hare-lip!"

He ran out into the night. Nancy retreated in tears to the girls' bathroom amid the cruel laughter of her peers.

There's more to the story. There usually is. Tom's humiliation led him to abandon social acceptance and to throw himself into his studies and the Scholars' Bowl team (a high school version of the GE College Bowl sponsored by Berry College). He excelled. Thanks to his grades, his performance on the Scholars' Bowl team, his family's unbelievable poverty, and his Melungeon ancestry, Tom won a full four year scholarship to Berry College.

In college, Tom wore an eye patch and told people he had lost his eye in a fencing mishap. Women actually thought he was kind of cool. After graduation with honors, Tom went into computer programming and eventually started his own successful business. He made out like a bandit in the dot com bubble and retired at 30 to his villa in Bequi. The folks in Bequi are under the impression that Tom's eye was taken by a swordfish.

Nancy continued to blossom and became a perfect ten aside from the cleft palate. A lot of boys were willing to overlook this flaw in order to get a shot at about the most bonalicious body in three states. After high school, Nancy moved to a major city and became an exotic dancer. Her schtick was to start off in a kind of burkha and end up in nothing but stiletto heels and a veil. She developed a huge following.

One evening during a lap dance a patron offered her a C note to take off the veil. As luck would have it, the patron was a technologically savvy cleft palate fetishist (or "Hare-lip Humper" as they sometimes call themselves). He partnered with her in setting up and running a cleft palate fetish website which made money hand over fist. While Nancy was the star, she included women with cleft palates from all over the world and paid them handsomely. Eventually, the enterprise expanded to cover fetishes involving any body part above the clavicle and Nancy retired from appearances.

She had reconstructive surgery at the age of 35, and you would never know that she once had a cleft palate. She married the plastic surgeon. She now runs a foundation that secures reconstructive surgery for deformed third worlders. She sometimes thinks back to the incident with Tom Greeson and laughs until she almost wets herself. So don't feel bad if you laughed, too.