I was just sitting here thinking about some boys I knew in school who were able to turn their eyelids inside out. It’s still difficult for me to believe that it can be done, even after witnessing it dozens of times firsthand throughout my middle school career, and I certainly never attempted it myself, but at one time in the mid-eighties in a small corner of some forgotten and overlooked suburban educational environment, the act of turning inside out the thin layer of skin protecting one’s eye was all the rage.

I don’t know what was more amazing: The fact that they could perform such an act, or that they even attempted to find out that they could. And I don’t know who among those brave pioneers in my seventh grade class was the first to even think of trying it, but whomever it was certainly deserved to be more celebrated than they were. True, perhaps an older brother or some other strong male presence tipped off that young man to the possibility of such a potentially girl-impressing/nauseating act, but it’s also possible that it was a completely original routine developed one fateful and inspirational evening alone in front of a mirror. Or maybe it was a result of a dare. Whatever the origin, within days of the introduction of the accomplishment, it was not uncommon to be able to look around at any time of the day, during any part of any class, and see some dude sitting there next to you with his freakin’ eyelids turned inside out.

As I said, I never even came close to attempting the eyelid trick. I wasn’t in the social group of young males that took to it so eagerly, and therefore it never occurred to me to try it, nor was I goaded towards it. I tend to think that even if I had been in their fold, the type that at age 12 liked to draw pictures of trucks with gigantic wheels all over the pages of textbooks and laugh incessantly at the spontaneous uttering of the word “boobies” by someone in the back row of the room, I probably would have drawn the line at voluntarily increasing my risk of eye infection or development of a stye. Besides, I had my own personal ingenious ways of grossing out girls. The fact that most of them were unintentional is beside the point.

I wonder sometimes where all those eyelid twisters are now. I lost track of most of them when we all hit high school where I went on to advanced classes, and they were placed in classes put aside for people who like to turn their eyelids inside out. Every now and then I’d pass them in the halls, or I’d see them on the school bus on one of those days when neither I nor my friend Dan was able to borrow the car from our parents, or I’d walk in on them as they smoked in the restroom during class. As far as I can tell, they’d grown tired of their little trick by 9th grade, so there’s really no reason to think that they perform it now. But it pleases me to imagine that they were able to recapture the passion they had for doing unnatural, irresponsible things to their bodies, and that they’ve been able to find some pleasure in their public-school-dropout lives by flipping those lids yet again, just for old time’s sake.