Somewhat Silent

the captioner said “Dwight Gooden died in jail”, but what was really said was “Dwight Gooden was denied bail”.

It took me a few minutes to realize that Gooden wasn’t dead, just stuck in jail. It’s all in the context. It’s like that children’s game of telephone, a string of hear-and-repeat, where if the hearing’s off, the repetition’s off, and the listener’s left with inaccurate information.

I hate that I’m on the losing-end of the game, relying on a technology that is so often failure-prone, but with no other choice.

Guys, I have to tell you a story about probably my worst forehead-slappin’ experience with deafness…

I was 19, and driving an hour-long commute home from the bars in Detroit (they never card you there) at 3am in my old ‘86 Grand Am. Here I am, slightly buzzed, cruising along the highway - hoping to god that the parents weren’t up waiting for me. At a red light, I happened to glance to my right, and found myself looking straight into the eyes of a cop. My heart skips a beat, and as the light turns green I drive away, only to notice the cruiser following me closely (sh*t!). Sure enough, the dreaded lights and siren go on - I get pulled over.

Two cops climb out of the cruiser and walk over. At this point, I’m VERY nervous because if you get caught underaged drinking in MI, they impound your car and throw you in jail for 90 days. Turns out, that was the least of my problems. As one of the cops proceeded to shine a flashlight into my car, the other approached my window.

“Hi officer, just so you know, I am hearing-impaired and cannot hear well so I might ask you to repeat yourself often, and I have to see your face for lipreading…” (sweet as pie)

“You have a burnt-out headlight. License and registration.”

So I hand over my stuff, and the two cops walk back to their car. Ten minutes go by and I’m sitting there wondering why is this taking so long?

Suddenly, I’m hearing a voice in the open air - confused I look out the window but no one’s there. A mini-second later, it dawned upon me that the cop was speaking to me thru his loudspeaker from his cruiser! As if I was going to hear that? Shock gave way to anger as I sat there and debated how to handle this situation. Images from the show “Cops” flashed thru my mind as I considered my options, fearing that any unexpected moves on my part would result in being body-tackled and handcuffed. What the heck was he saying to me anyways?

So I just sat there - hoping that the ignorant cops would finally get a clue. More minutes go by, and he’s STILL trying to tell me something. Anger gave in to ragin’-pissed-off-indignity; all that pent-up anger of being deaf was surging up - so I blew out of my car, furiously marched over to the cop car in my vinyl club pants and stillettos - and started screaming at the cops for their lack of brains and haven’t they gotten any training in how to handle deaf people. Here I was, a little 19 yr-old, hopping up and down in a screaming tantrum at the police at 3:30am - who knows what the passerbys were thinking - it was exactly a scene straight out of “Cops”.

And you know what they did? After I said my piece of the century - they simply handed over a ticket and drove off, leaving me standing in bewilderment on the side of the highway.

I think that was the only time I really blew up in frustration at someone for not being considerate. The fact that a COP couldn’t even be considerate blew my mind.

Oy, so that’s the story. Anyone else have one to share?

One of the things that I’ve had the hardest time conveying to my hearing friends, relatives, and relationships is that group situations are extremely stressful to me unless I have met and spent time with each person individually. To put it lightly, they are hell. I end up quiet and in isolation unless someone seeks me out to talk to me, but that seldom happens because I’m quiet and gazing around in a daze looking at the pattern on the wallpaper or reading tee-shirts across the room.

Why aren’t I a part of the Deaf community, where this isn’t an issue? What in the world compells me to befriend hearing people that do not and cannot understand this limitation? I don’t know. I often think that it’s masochism on my part. Although realistically, it’s just a reluctance to abandon the culture and world and language that I was born into.

Where group situations are a hell, one-on-one is a heaven. I lipread, I comprehend, I learn, I build a dynamic, I memorise the person. I study their movements, their facial expressions, their thought process. I memorise their phrases, their body language, their eyes, their humor. I take on some of their characteristics, like an actor studying for a part. It’s almost a mating, an assimilation.

“You read minds!” people have said, when I utter words or sentences one or two steps ahead of them. This comes from the one-on-one. The bouncing conversation, the ping-pong, the intense period of initial communication. I crave that, and I need it. It enables me to understand, flawlessly, the people with the heavy accents. The lisps. The speech impediments. The people that no hearing person understands. I stumble sometimes, still, on the individual words but seldom on the meaning.

But how do I explain to a friend that I want to hang out with just them? How do I explain to my significant other that I really don’t want them to come with me when I’m meeting someone for the first time, or hanging out with a friend that I haven’t seen in a long time? It feels sneaky, underhanded, it feels like I’m excluding them from my life. And the friends that want to hang out in packs? It feels like I’m demanding their singular attention, a commitment of sorts. And the guy-friends who are in relationships? Forget it, I’ll most likely never see them again. Hell will freeze over before their girlfriend will understand why I don’t necessarily want her along to coffee or lunch.

To this degree, my deafness does drive my personal relationships. I’ll never be a social butterfly, I’ll never flit about making small talk, and you’ll most likely never see me at my best communication-wise with another person. You’ll percieve me as someone who communicates brilliantly with you, but in an inept and bumbling way to everyone else… And you’ll wonder at that paradox, and perhaps fancy that I just have some sort of special connection with you and you alone.

I’ve just been for a lovely evening out - a friend from out of town invited us out for a meal with him and we chose a favourite simple and friendly Italian restaurant in the middle of the city. All good - great food, nice wine, friendly company.

But…dammit I wanted to bang my head on the table in frustration - several times. We often go into this place, they know I’m deaf, and they always try to put us in a very pleasant “quiet” corner. The problem is it’s a restaurant - so “quiet” is strictly a relative term. It sounded like pandemonium to me. Did I hear one word in ten? Possibly. Though in terms of putting together amusing anecdotes, one word in ten isn’t enough to get the thread, let alone the punchline. So I tried turning my aids off, but that didn’t work because of the way we were sitting…turned them on again. Plenty of sound but hardly any more words, apart from the feeling, bizarrely, that I could hear the occasional word from another table altogether.

This could make me sociopathic, but I refuse to let it do that. The frustration tonight was partly my own fault - I should have taken a notebook but I forgot. And despite not hearing much, it was still a lovely evening. It was great to spend time with our friend, we were all happy, but I know I was missing a lot and that nagged away occasionally.

I’m used to that, of course. So this isn’t a rant - just a reflection really - and it certainly won’t stop me enjoying eating out with friends, which is something I enjoy a lot, even though I know I’d hear far more of what they had to say if we were sitting round the dining table at home.

Well, I’m happy to report that I finally visited NYC for the first time last weekend - stayed with a friend in Brooklyn for three days and three incredibly late nights (hehe). Absolutely LOVED it - what a great place to SEE, but not HEAR.

I was completely audiologically useless in the chaos of city noise - to the point where it was amusing:

Chinatown was a challenge (I was shopping for back-room black market purses) the vendors and I had to resort to using hand signals to get any communication across. On the Astroland pirate ship ride in Coney Island - the ride operator was trying to tell me something via loudspeaker. Turns out he was suggesting that I sit closer to the end of the ship for a better ride. Numerous people passing me on the sidewalks were asking for cigarettes unbeknownst to me. I got yelled at in the Subway station by the ticket attendent - she hadn’t realized that I was deaf and thought I was trying to jump the gate. Grand Central Station - some man approached me and was trying to initiate a conversation in which he wanted me to model for him (uh, no). Oh, that’s only the tip of the iceberg!

Overall, it was a great experience, but I wonder if I’d really be able to handle all that confusion and noise full-time? It feels like everyone in NYC needs to be communicating 24-7!