What's That Pig Outdoors? (31 page)

My instructors are graduate students training to be speech therapists, not teachers of the deaf. Most of the therapists are women less than half my age. They are still learning their specialty, and over the years I've often been amused by their transparent efforts to present a brisk, businesslike, professional image to their clients. They are so very young, and they look like freshly minted nickels in the dress-for-success suits they don for our sessions instead of the sweats and jeans they wear to class.

And they are eager and determined. The truly talented among them quickly lose their stiffness and help develop a rapport, joining me in what amounts to an eager, even gleeful conspiracy against unintelligibility. The very best therapists are single-minded and hard-nosed. They won't settle for a reasonable approximation of a sound; they demand perfection. I am
capable of achieving it, they declare, and they won't be satisfied with less. And once in a while I do manage to attain that exalted level. Hanging on to it, of course, is something else, so I must go back now and again for routine maintenance, like an aging automobile in need of periodic tune-ups.

I am eternally grateful to these young almost-professionals, for the results always are worth the time spent in the sessions. For more than a year, sometimes two, strangers will understand what I say the first time I say it at our first meeting, the benchmark by which I judge my speech. Though I'm still aware of its limitations—raising my voice at noisy gatherings still distorts my production and hurts intelligibility—my speech feels solid enough to get me through most situations. In short, when it's running smoothly on all cylinders it gives me a confidence I haven't always had.

11

“Are you happy?” I was asked not long ago by someone who works in the world of the deaf.

I? I who have a loving spouse, two bright and strapping sons, a decent income, respect in my profession, a house in a pleasant suburb, and a host of good friends?

“Of course I am!” I all but shouted, exasperatedly throwing my hands into the air. I'm as happy as any other person whom life has nourished from a mixed plate of blessings and curses. It's difficult, however, to persuade some people that is true; they often assume that I am at heart forlorn and despondent, and concealing my pain. According to the ideology of many educators of the deaf—and many of the deaf themselves—I must live a melancholy life simply because I communicate wholly by speech and lipreading rather than with sign language. By insisting on doing so, they declare, I am a poor shadow of a hearing person, not a contented and fulfilled deaf person. I belong neither to the hearing world nor to the deaf community, they say; I am an outcast from both.

Is the goal of life to become well adjusted and carefree? Or is it rather to rise high in a competitive world? These notions are not mutually exclusive—and it's a safe guess that most people, deaf or hearing, achieve a balance between the two. But it's sometimes hard to persuade naysayers that the deaf who choose the road of speech and lipreading can manage to achieve emotional equilibrium within the hearing world.

Partly because I have no measurable hearing—the deaf who succeed in the hearing world tend to have a good deal of residual hearing that can be amplified to usable levels—some experts on deafness insist on forcing me into the mold of the “deaf personality,” a set of traits they theorize are created by the environment of deafness. Because lack of ready communication
at an early age has deprived them of the opportunity to develop emotionally in many ways, the deaf sometimes are psychologically typed as immature, rigid, egocentric, impulsive, and overly trusting. And that's just for starters. If their emotional development has been severely thwarted, many suffer debilitating mental illness.

That deafness
has
affected my mental makeup I have no doubt. To deny it would be to declare that environment has no part in the development of the human psyche, and that would be absurd. Obviously there have been times in my life, in both my childhood and my adulthood, when a knowledgeable counselor could have helped me deal with a deep emotional crisis. But, as do most essentially healthy people faced with mental upheavals, I managed, with the help of Debby and my friends, to emerge from each crisis as a stronger and wiser human being.

There have been two crises in my adulthood, linked to one another, and one still must be contended with. That is shyness. It's almost universal among the deaf to want to cause hearing people as little fuss as possible; though there are exceptions, we can be self-effacing and diffident to the point of invisibility. Sometimes this tendency can be crippling. I must fight it all the time, and on occasion it can get the better of me.

I hate crowds, and I dislike meeting strangers. I will find any excuse not to undergo that exceedingly complex ordeal. Let's face it: it is natural and inevitable for hearing people to consider a new acquaintance's deafness the salient part of his personality. “This is a
deaf
person I am meeting,” goes the unspoken question in the back of their minds, “and how is his deafness going to affect our relations?” Not the usual mildly expectant curiosity such as “This is Debby Kisor's husband I am meeting and will I like him for the same reasons I like her?”

If I'm lucky, I think, the person I am meeting will have no preconceived notions about the deaf. But that almost never happens. People bring to a meeting a lifetime's mental baggage. Some of it will be wise, some of it foolish, some of it astute, some of it ignorant. Sometimes their mental picture of the deaf will be a vague idea that they are extraordinarily difficult to communicate with, that because they cannot speak well they are not too bright but it is necessary to be kind. Fortunately this Neanderthal notion is rare and growing rarer.

In my experience most people are simply too ignorant about the deaf
to consider them members of a somewhat slow subspecies of humanity. They will form their judgments upon our meeting, not before. Usually their judgments will be skewed, and it won't be their fault. Their problem—and mine—is one of communication, beginning with my imperfect speech. It takes time for a stranger to get accustomed to it, to feel comfortable enough with it so that he listens to what I have to say rather than how I say it. Likewise, I must “learn” the stranger's manner of speaking. If I'm lucky, he'll be instantly understandable. More often than not it'll take a few minutes before both of us stop saying “Would you please repeat that?”

Often, however, strangers won't ask me to repeat myself if they can't understand me. They're afraid of hurting my feelings. They don't realize that after forty-six years of deafness I'm no longer so embarrassed by my sometimes unintelligible speech. Irritated and frustrated, yes, but hardly devastated.

This social interaction, so simple between hearing people, becomes between the deaf and the hearing an intricate but curiously graceless ballet, like a Balanchine
pas de deux
choreographed on an off day. Realizing all this, I know that if an introduction is to be successful, it's up to me to meet the other person more than halfway, to put him at his ease. And when it's necessary, I will.

In his splendid 1972 autobiography,
Deafness
, the British poet David Wright opined that coping with another's deafness is an excellent “litmus test” of a hearing person's character. Those with inquiring, interested minds, he wrote, will want to learn the intricacies of a deaf person's life. The dull and self-absorbed, on the other hand, will be too fearful to risk the social awkwardness of meeting and talking with a deaf person. In many cases this is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The brilliant can be shy, and the kindly fearful of giving offense. If I let my deafness do the sorting out, I can be cheating myself of the chance to know someone worth knowing. So, for the most part, I will grit my teeth and plunge ahead into the chore of attempting to put the other person at his ease. More often than not, the experiment will work.

Much of the success of the ordeal of introduction depends upon where it is made. A quiet office or living room enables the introductee to encounter my speech and voice at its very best. As I've explained, background noise affects my intelligibility, most often at cocktail parties. Often the other person
will be unable to hear me at all, let alone understand me, and turning up the volume on my larynx distorts certain sounds so badly that I am not intelligible at all. And if I am tired, my speech—and my lipreading ability—will suffer. When this happens, I get cranky, mulish, and standoffish, proffering a perfunctory handshake and the shortest of polite noises. I know perfectly well I'm being silly, that I'm depriving myself of the potential to know someone interesting. “You're being unreasonable,” Debby will hiss. “I know,” I want to hiss back, “but, dammit, I can't help it.”

Fortunately these episodes are infrequent. When it's necessary to meet someone, I'll set the stage as carefully as I can. Whether meeting a new neighbor or interviewing an author, I'll make sure the setting is quiet and undistracting. And if I can't do that, I'll try to wait until I can. Such are the little strategies of deafness.

Developing them took many years and a few wrong turns. One of those led to the second major personal crisis of my adult life: a flirtation with alcohol.

When I was a young man, I occasionally took on a few ounces of Dutch courage before and during social affairs. A couple of drinks eased the chore of talking to strangers at literary cocktail parties and on Friday nights at Riccardo's, a Chicago newspaperman's watering hole. Like so many other young journalists, I thought my life wasn't complete unless I joined the crowd for drunken bull sessions after a long, hard week.

Alcohol made me both braver and mellower, able to plunge into conversation more easily. It also, as one would expect, made me less intelligible. In the beginning my speech just would become slightly slurred, as it will for anyone with a few drinks under his belt. As the years went on, however, the slurring deepened as my tolerance for alcohol grew and I drank more to achieve that warm buzz of mellowness. The harder it became to understand me over the noise, the more I would drink. Soon came a point at many functions at which liquor was served when nobody could understand me at all. All that was left for me to do was stand by the bar, smiling idiotically and getting ever more befuddled.

I could easily have become a thoroughgoing alcoholic, and by some definitions of the term I'm sure I was. Usually I got inebriated just two or three Friday nights each month. Because I recovered by Monday morning, my work was never affected. But I would come home very
late, sometimes not remembering how. One morning, after a literary gathering in New York, I woke up in a hotel room. My clothes lay neatly folded over a chair, my shoes aligned at the foot of the bed. But it wasn't the hotel I'd checked into the day before. My head pounding, I asked the desk clerk how much I owed. Nothing, he said. It had been paid for in cash the night before. I still do not remember how I got there or the name and face of the good Samaritan who must have paid the bill and put me to bed.

Such blackouts mean that a drinker is reaching a point of no return. Fortunately, I knew enough about alcoholism to become concerned about those lapses in memory, and not long after that episode Debby finally had enough of my staggering home in the wee hours and embarrassing her at social functions. For a number of years she had been tolerant of my newspaperman's peccadilloes, and every time I promised not to drink so much the next time, she'd accept my vow. Naturally I'd be good for a while, but the old habit soon would return. She decided on a shock tactic. “Quit drinking or I'll leave you,” she announced one morning after the night before.

I knew she meant it, and that stunned me deeply, forcing me finally to face the realities of my drinking and contemplate the reasons for it as well as the consequences if I continued. I thought of seeking professional counseling, the logical first step for a problem drinker who wants to reform. But perhaps I could start by staying home from Riccardo's on Friday nights and avoiding cocktail parties unless Debby was with me to serve as a go-between. Maybe that would take care of the problem.