What's That Pig Outdoors? (28 page)

All that has undergone a sea change. In the United States today, a great deal of thought is being given to different ways of teaching the deaf to communicate and to help them take their rightful places in society. Thanks
to such upheavals as the one at Gallaudet University in 1988, the deaf are even beginning to take their future into their own hands. They are aided by federal and state equal-access and entitlement laws that have established public funding of sign language and oral interpreters for the deaf who need them in courtrooms, hospitals, schools, and other public institutions. Private organizations for the hearing-impaired often provide interpreters for social occasions. In some states, it's common—even unremarkable—for interpreters to attend lectures with deaf students at hearing colleges, for the law requires federally funded agencies such as schools and hospitals to provide them. The same laws give deaf people with hearing-ear dogs the same rights of access to hotels, restaurants, and public transportation as the blind with seeing-eye dogs. Equal-opportunity statutes are designed to ensure that the deaf get a fair shake at employment.

In practical terms, most of these things haven't been of great benefit to me, except in the general awakening they've encouraged, both in the United States and abroad. People do seem to be a bit more patient and understanding today; in fact, I am often struck that strangers frequently react without surprise to my announcement of deafness. Thanks in great part to the publicity the mass media have given the world of the deaf in recent years, it's rare to encounter the kind of thoughtless ignorance that makes a deaf person feel as if he is being treated like a pitiable subhuman.

Young people especially seem to accept the deaf as something more than “weirdos,” possibly because so many deaf youngsters are being mainstreamed in public schools. I'm often startled and gratified when a perky teenaged fast-food server takes my order, then smiles, looks me in the eye, and repeats the order, not in a painfully exaggerated way, but slowly enough so that I can understand readily.

Others who serve the public—salespeople and waiters, ticket agents and bus drivers, police officers and vendors—also seem to be much less taken aback by the idea of dealing with a deaf person, especially one who communicates with them in their own fashion. All in all, I don't feel as conspicuous as I used to whenever I open my mouth in public. And the little confrontations of each day don't seem quite so daunting anymore. Occasionally they do happen, but I've learned simply to brush them off, or perhaps add them to my store of anecdotes on the sometimes amusing, sometimes vexing pitfalls of lipreading. It is a wonderful knack to have,
and it will always get me through the day, but at times its inadequacies try my soul.

One evening not long ago, for instance, a plainclothes policeman loomed in the front doorway of my home. He displayed his shield and asked sternly, “Did you buy gasoline today?”

“Yes,” I replied, startled. Then, because it's always good sense when dealing with officials of any kind, I added the customary announcement: “Officer, I'm deaf, but I can read lips.” The cop was courteous but blunt. “The attendant at the station where you bought the gas,” he said, clearly enunciating each word, “says she gave you too much change—five dollars—and you ran off with it.”

“She did not and I did not!” I replied indignantly. With a sinking feeling, however, I realized that I'd often been careless about counting change. That afternoon the attendant had handed back a few bills and coins, which I didn't bother to check, and she had added what I thought was the ubiquitous “Thank you. Have a nice day.” I had smiled back, walked out to the car, and drove off—while she called the police with my license number.

“Uh . . . she may have,” I told the cop. “She said something I didn't understand.”

“Let's go talk to the fellow who owns the station,” said the policeman, who by this time had sized up the situation. Evanston policemen have become knowledgeable about deafness, for there are quite a few hearingimpaired people in the community. “You understand you're not under arrest?” he asked solicitously as we walked out to his cruiser. I nodded, hoping the neighbors peering from their windows understood, too.

At the gas station I shamefacedly explained what had happened. The owner, a bit embarrassed himself, replied that his attendant had been “ripped off once too often and had wanted to nail a thief, even for a lousy five dollars.” He wasn't sufficiently abashed to refuse the money I proffered.

When we returned to my house and the five-dollar desperado alighted from the police car, the cop leaned out the window and said with a thin smile, “Next time, count your change.”

And next time you don't catch the words, I told myself ruefully, ask the person to repeat what was said . . . even if it turns out to be a ubiquitous inanity such as “Have a good one.” Of course, I haven't kept that part of
the resolution, at least not with store clerks, for life is too short to waste on polite noises. Someday, I'm certain, I'll be found out again. But now I always count my change.

Each year I spend a week or two in Europe or the Far East on assignment for the
Sun-Times's
travel section, usually with a group of journalists but sometimes on my own. I'm often surprised at how nonchalant European restaurateurs and hoteliers are about deaf people as guests. (Their American colleagues certainly aren't clumsy about it, but it often takes a Manhattan or Los Angeles desk clerk a brief instant to recover from the surprise.) Often I have to awaken at an early hour to depart for my next destination, and when I explain to foreign desk managers that I am deaf and cannot receive a wake-up phone call, they're quick to understand that a bellhop must be sent to my room at the appointed hour to unlock the door and turn on the lights to rouse me. I leave the night latch off not only for this purpose but also so that someone can get into the room in case of fire. I am less afraid of burglars than I am of burning to death.

Just once, in Rome, did I have a problem. It was a brand-new hotel and, while the clerks' English was not as bad as my Italian, they simply could not seem to understand why they could not telephone me to awaken me. I didn't have the Italian for “I can't hear anything. I'm stone deaf, deaf as a post, deaf as a whatever the Romans say.” Only when a passing scrublady, who evidently had heard our confused exchange, spoke up did light finally dawn on the clerks.

I've often found that Europeans understand even the most wretched accent in their own languages better than they do Deaf American English. “Have you got a laundry service?” I once repeatedly asked a Paris desk clerk. He peered at me in concerned puzzlement, trying hard to achieve a breakthrough, but just couldn't. But when I pulled out my American Express phrase book, riffled to the right page, and recited, “Y
a-t-il une blanchisserie?”
a bright and benign light of understanding swept over his countenance, and he replied,
“Oui.
Just drop eet off here in ze morning.”

Just once or twice have I needed rescue from official misunderstanding in a foreign land. One day on Barbados, Debby and I had just debarked from a cruise ship and were waiting for our luggage to clear dockside customs so that we could hail a taxi for the airport and return to the United States. An arrogant customs agent kept us cooling our heels while
she alternated long, lazy pulls from a cigarette and a bottle of beer in her office. Time shortened, and we grew nervous about missing our plane. Finally the agent emerged from her office, and I waved anxiously. She sauntered over and said, “Have you anything to declare?”

I did not understand—it may have been her unfamiliar Barbadian accent—and hesitated. Immediately her eyes glittered with scorn and triumph. She raised her arm, pointed an accusing finger, and (Debby said later) bellowed, “This man doesn't know if he has anything to declare!”

As I peered confusedly at the agent, visions of roach-infested Caribbean jails marched across Debby's mind. She immediately shouted back, “My husband is deaf! He didn't understand what you said!” Her vehemence flustered the agent, who immediately passed our luggage without examining it, as if to get rid of an unwelcome embarrassment, and Debby hustled it and me out of the customs shed into a taxi. We made our plane with moments to spare.

Later I told Debby in a wounded tone that I thought I could have handled the situation. “Yes,” she replied soothingly, “but by the time you got everything straightened out we'd have missed the plane.” But I had my revenge. As we approached U.S. Customs at Kennedy Airport, she said, “Now let me handle this.” “No, let
me
handle it,” I insisted, dragging our luggage to the agent at the counter. Handing him our passports, I pointed to my ear, looked woebegone, and said, “I'm deaf.” Not my usual brisk and businesslike “I'm deaf, but I read lips,” but a slow and desolate “I'm de-e-e-af.” (If I'd thought of it, I would have limped and scuttled like Igor.)

With a nod and smile—and no questions—the customs agent waved us through. That was, it appeared, easier for him than struggling to communicate with a deaf man. I could have smuggled in a fortune in diamonds. American immigration and customs agents almost always assume I'm above reproach once I announce my deafness. Europeans, however, take nothing for granted, and the single time I passed through Tokyo a cadre of white-gloved agents answered me by carefully examining every shirt, sock, and shoe in my luggage.

Now, when dealing with immigration and customs agents of any nationality, I make sure they know I can't hear. I'm proud of my independence, but in commerce with bureaucrats it's smarter to avoid the game of seeing how long I can go without letting the other fellow know I'm
deaf. (Sometimes, especially if I have no difficulty understanding people, they just think my gravelly and nasal deaf man's speech is the result of a dolorous bout with the grippe, and the game can go on for a surprisingly long time.)

The most unpleasant traveling experience I have ever had occurred at home, aboard an Amtrak train from Chicago to New York, and I'm not certain what, if anything, anyone could have done to prevent it. On this trip I was traveling alone in a sleeping-car roomette, whose door cannot be opened from the outside if it is locked from the inside. Too much shaking, rattling, and rolling goes on aboard a train for me to feel the vibrations of a knock at the door, and I always pulled the roomette or bedroom door to but left it unlocked in case a conductor knocked. A deaf person never can lock himself off completely from the outside world. In an emergency there has to be a way for someone to get in to announce the presence of danger.

This time I awakened from a sound sleep with an uncomfortable sensation in my posterior, as if I were perching on a fence post. I looked up and saw that light was spilling from the corridor into the roomette. Then I raised myself on my elbows and looked around. A dark shape was leaning into the roomette, its hand underneath the blankets. I was being groped.

With an angry cry I sprang into a sitting position and unleashed a haymaker that missed its target by yards and catapulted me into the opposite wall. I scrambled out into the corridor to give chase to the groper, fast disappearing into the next car, but realized I was in my underwear, and halted. After checking to see that my wallet and belongings were intact, I gave up the idea of reporting the incident to the conductor. I hadn't gotten a good look at the culprit and would never have been able to identify him.

It is not only the elevating of public consciousness about the hearingimpaired that has freed us from centuries of isolation. For many of us the microchip is probably the greatest aid to communication the twentieth century has yet provided. It has made possible hearing aids of sophistication, miniaturization, and power unheard of in the days when I toted that heavy Bakelite brick and its batteries in a harness. It has led to medical
advances such as cochlear implants, tiny devices that when surgically placed within the inner ear help certain hearing-impaired patients to overcome the greatest frustrations of soundlessness.

The microchip has also made possible inexpensive, small, noiseless, durable, and easily obtainable replacements for the huge, clattering old teletype machines that a generation ago first allowed deaf people to “talk” with one another on the telephone. Today's TDD—short for “Telecommunications Device for the Deaf”—looks like a lightweight portable typewriter with a keyboard and two rubber cups into which a telephone handset is inserted. It's simply a computerized version of the teletype, its eight-inch-wide rollpaper printer replaced by an electronic digital readout that displays a single glowing line of text. (Some TDDs can also print out text on narrow cashregister paper.)

All deaf residents of Illinois are now entitled to a free TDD, thanks to a five-cent-a-month charge applied to all phone bills in the state. Most government offices, libraries, and other public institutions also have TDDs. Partly as an exercise in corporate noblesse oblige and partly to win the business of deaf people, a growing number of private firms are installing the machines and publicizing their phone numbers.