What's That Pig Outdoors? (9 page)

In the summers some of us took the bus to Camp Echo, which the Y
operated in the woods near Fremont, Michigan. Though some of the boys were filled with the usual ten-year-old's horror at being separated from his parents for the first time, I wasn't. Those summer visits with my grandparents had accustomed me to being away from home. Like a grizzled old veteran lecturing a bunch of recruits, I airily told my cabin mates that their homesickness wouldn't last, that camp was terrific and c'mon, let's have some fun.

At camp and at the Y my friend Sam and I became quite proficient in the pool and were asked to join the Y's age-group team, he as a backstroker and I as a freestyler. In the beginning, because I couldn't hear the starting gun, I swam only on relays. But since I was a stronger swimmer than most—partly because I had entered puberty a bit earlier than my friends and was putting on muscle—Dad and the coach thought I might also excel in individual events if only I could get a good start. They tried placing me in the lane closest to the starter so that I could feel the vibrations of his pistol. The results were inconsistent. In a small, closed-in pool, I could sometimes feel on my skin the crack of the .22 pistol if it was a particularly loud one. Most starter's guns, however, didn't produce vibrations strong enough to register on me.

So I learned to keep one eye on the left hand of the swimmer to my right. As soon as it moved, off I'd go. Of course, there was a noticeable delay in my start, but with time and practice Dad and the coach helped me get the lapse down to two-tenths of a second or so. Today, when winning margins are often measured in hundredths of a second, that might not seem like much help. But in the schoolboy competition of the 1950s, it was plenty. Soon I stood out from the crowd as a swimmer and began to win my share of medals in regional age-group competitions.

It wasn't long before my rivals learned that they could make me falsestart by twitching their hands as we go into the “set” position. On a false start, the starter would fire his pistol a second and a third time to halt the swimmers before they'd got more than a few yards down the pool. Whenever that happened, one of my teammates had to jump into the pool to grab me before I worked up a head of steam. Three false starts and a swimmer was disqualified. The officials, however, quickly sized up the situation and announced that anyone who tried to make me false-start would himself be banished from the event.

In the typical American family unit of the 1940s and 1950s, the mother was the dominant figure at home while the father went off to work, and the Kisor household was no different. Mother took on the major responsibility for my speech and lipreading, and for persuading dubious educators to take a chance with a deaf child. We were close and still are, perhaps more so than other mothers and sons, because she invested so much time, energy, and emotion in the upbringing of her deaf son.

Mother is of a type well known, and much disliked, by educators of the deaf: one who, they say, refuses to accept the reality that her child is deaf and will not allow her child to accept his deafness. This sort of mother, they contend, is aggressive, demanding, pushy, certain of her position, contemptuous of others, and absolutely unreasonable. Not only will her child fail to live up to her absurdly high expectations; the emotional stresses that ensue are almost certain to cause personality disorders.

That this sometimes happens I have no doubt; I have met more than one troubled deaf adult who is a product of this scenario. But it did not occur at our house. Mother wisely did all her pushing and shoving and wrangling behind the scenes, keeping her son utterly unaware of it. Rather than force me to do things that I could not do, she simply created a large space in which I could try my luck, and if my efforts did not work, go on to something else. She allowed me to be independent. She gave me room to learn how to balance success against failure and accept the results with equanimity.

She accepted the reality that I could not hear. What she refused to accept was the concept of deafness held by most of the educators she met: that a deaf child should not be too ambitious, because the world will not allow him to achieve his goals, and that one must be realistic and guide him down paths of lesser resistance so that a simpler and easier life will allow him to be happy. In short, Mother refused to allow anyone else to set my limits. Only I, and I alone, could find and define them. For that wisdom I am deeply grateful.

I owe Dad just as much, for he believed as strongly as Mother did in his deaf son's potential. Moreover, he was never a distant, remote figure, as were so many fathers of the time. Almost every spring and summer evening we'd play catch out front, even when I grew older and my fastball
wilder, smokier, and more painful to catch. He'd coach third base for my Y club's softball games and volunteer as a timer at the endless swimming meets. He seemed to be everywhere.

He was always there even for my friends. In our early teens, my best friend, Sam Williamson, bit off a little more than he could chew when he bought a kit for a full-sized, fourteen-foot plywood Sailfish sailboat. His father, competent with tools but a busy professor at work on an academic project, thought the best way to help Sam fit a certain stubborn part into the boat was to enlist the skills of my father. Dad came to the rescue and helped Sam solve the problem. As I recall, it looked as if it had been done by a professional.

One of Dad's most important legacies to me has been a deep appreciation for a job done right, with skill and exquisite, painstaking care. We spent many hours together in the basement building models and furniture and repairing bicycles and washing machines. Patiently he instructed me in the various uses of an awl and a spokeshave, a chisel and a hacksaw, a plunger and a pipe wrench. The things we made always looked expertly done, not the clumsy products of a do-it-yourselfer.

He taught me, also, to make no little plans—especially when it came to home improvement. There was nothing we could not do so long as we had the proper tools, materials, and determination. Together we converted a back pantry into a powder room, brazing copper pipe and installing a heavy toilet. I was the one who scurried into the musty, cobwebby crawl space underneath the old pantry with the brazing torch; Dad, a six-footer, was just too big. I was so proud to be trusted with that important task that I momentarily lost my fear of spiders.

When we were very young, Buck and I were siblings of hackneyed normalcy. Like brothers everywhere, we battled mightily. I still remember a particularly painful whaling Mother gave me when I was about four and he eight, after l resentfully laid a Louisville Slugger across his shins with all my strength. I have no recollection what the dispute was about, nor does he.

But as we grew older, Buck took a close interest in his little brother's welfare. For three years he was the counselor of my Y club. Like Mother and Dad, he believed in testing my capabilities, discarding those activities that seemed fruitless and encouraging those that seemed promising.
He was a swimmer, too, and a counselor at Camp Echo. More than most little brothers, I followed in his footsteps. They were large ones, full of a loving encouragement that is rare among siblings.

My sister Debbie, thirteen years my junior, had yet to come along, and when she did, she would always be too young to have the sort of impact on my life that Buck had. Nonetheless, even as a very small child she made a difference—in an endearing sort of way. But I am getting ahead of my story.

As I entered junior high, there were two areas of endeavor in which I was superior to most of my compatriots: reading and swimming. I felt strong and confident of my place in the scheme of things. Mother and Dad expected to have to battle the school authorities so that I could attend Haven Junior High with my friends near our house instead of Nichols Junior High with the other deaf children miles away on the south side of Evanston. But the officials assented, for my language development had progressed to a point where I could no longer be scored on standardized junior high reading tests. What had they to lose? Besides, Haven had an excellent speech teacher—not a teacher of the deaf, but what was then called a “speech correctionist.”

Then I entered adolescence, that inescapable and implacable condition that tests the confidence of every youngster on earth.

5

Conventional wisdom holds that deaf youngsters' knowledge of sex lags far behind that of their hearing peers, simply because their shortcomings of language prevent them from acquiring information easily. Nonetheless, I entered eighth grade as learned, and as ignorant, about sex as any other thirteen-year-old of my acquaintance. When I was eleven Mother and Dad had given me a facts-of-life book for prepubescents, something that seemed to me better suited to a six-year-old with its irrelevant talk of pollen and eggs and its childish pictures of tadpoles and mice.

Like all my friends, I had obtained more scholarly instruction in the classroom of the gutter. A slightly older boy had informed me, in conspiratorial whispers, of the basic mechanics of the sexual act, and one my own age had introduced me to the pleasures of what then was called self-abuse. Moreover, I had discovered my parents' marriage manual in their bottom drawer.

Ideal Marriage
was a classic of ornamental Victorian obfuscation by a Dr. T. H. Van de Velde, who never used one Anglo-Saxon word where three Latinate equivalents would do. I was fascinated by him, and appalled. He used such highfalutin terms as “intromission” and “coitus” and “phallus,” forcing me, with almost every paragraph, to run downstairs to the living room to consult the big dictionary. His actual descriptions of “intercourse,” a word he seems to have tried hard to avoid, taught me for the first time about irony, although it would be years before I came across the literary term.

And until I happened on the
Kama Sutra
late in high school, I thought, thanks to Van de Velde, that there were only two basic positions for the sex act, and that they had to be arranged with the help of a yardstick and a carpenter's level. Worse, every time Van de Velde got down to business,
which wasn't often, he would stop to quote long and flowery passages from the classical literature of love, passages that were spiritual rather than carnal and seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand. He was the only writer I have ever encountered, other than Henry Miller, who could make sex sound like an energetic waste of time. I could not believe this book had helped my parents produce me, my brother, and my sister.