What's That Pig Outdoors? (34 page)

This service will give me a personal and professional communications flexibility I've never had. That, for me, is the real emancipation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (It ought to be mentioned that the act also protects the confidentiality of relayed calls. If, for example, I should want to wager on a horse with a nearby bookie, the go-between operator is enjoined by law from tipping off the cops or the tax men.) Who will pay for these services? The phone companies will, as a normal tax-deductible
cost of doing business, and the ultimate bill will be footed by the taxpayer. The yearly cost is expected to be between $250 million and $300 million, or about $1.20 per American telephone customer per year—hardly an onerous figure, and one that's likely to be somewhat offset by a resulting increase in productivity among deaf workers. It's less an act of charity than an investment that offers the promise of being paid back at least in part—and perhaps in full.

None of these arguments is to say that the deaf don't deserve a few breaks. We do. In many ways we are getting them, from the private sector as well as the public one, and we will continue to push for them. Our earning power is beginning to increase, and farsighted corporations are slowly learning that establishing goodwill—such as in sponsoring closed captioning of television programs—is a sensible thing to do. Likewise, the more adventurous companies are discovering, is hiring the deaf for jobs they once had been thought unsuited for. If we are realistic about ourselves, we will continue the public and private progress we have made in raising the world's consciousness about us that went so far in the 1980s.

And one way to be realistic is to admit that some of the deaf, thanks to varying talents and temperaments as well as happenstance, can successfully communicate with the world of the hearing. It is not always easy for us to do so, but the hearing also can find it difficult to achieve those linkages, not only with us but among themselves as well. It may not often happen, but when two dissimilar people—one perhaps deaf, one perhaps hearing—manage to share their humanity with one another, it can be a beautiful thing.

Only connect!
That was a literary tenet of the English novelist E. M. Forster, who is not much read today, and that's a pity. In his novels he showed how just a modest effort to communicate—to connect—could bridge vast chasms of indifference, bringing together people with little in common on a middle ground of mutual and sympathetic insight and understanding.

For the last forty years, I have visited a single barber in his two-chair shop in neighboring Wilmette. John cut my father's hair and now he shears my sons' mops. He is a man to whom talk is mother's milk; as his
scissors snick, he chatters ceaselessly. He cannot bear a conversational vacuum. Nor can he speak to the unresponsive sides and back of my head as he works upon them, but must stop now and then, whirl the chair so that I face him, and ask after my family or inquire about my opinion of a sporting event.

He listens gravely as I reply, nods approvingly or commiseratively as the case may be, and returns to his work. Scarcely two minutes later his face, again thirsting for an exchange, reappears in front of mine with another gentle question. Trimming my sparse shrubbery is a drawn-out affair. Am I impatient? No, for John refuses to let my deafness deprive him of his pleasure. He cuts, and he connects.

During the two decades since this book was published in 1990, my life has caromed down avenues I never anticipated. Of course, time has taken its normal toll. As I approach my seventies, my eyesight isn't what it once was. My lipreading skills have eroded slightly. Conversations are a little more difficult, especially with strangers. Part of the problem is that American society has become much more diverse than it was when I was growing up. No longer is a white Midwestern accent the norm in my territory, for there has been a huge influx of people who speak English as a second language or with a distinctive national accent. This makes lipreading far trickier.

Partly because of hereditary osteoarthritis that pinched my spinal cord, my sense of imbalance grew more acute; sometimes, when turning a corner or getting up from a chair, I will lurch like a drunken sailor, leading those around me to conclude that I had two or three too many. Recent spinal surgery banished most of the pain, but I must still rely on my eyes to keep a level horizon. No longer do I zip through airport security checks, and that's not entirely the fault of 9/11. My stainless steel artificial knee, also the result of arthritis, triggers paroxysms in magnetic detectors, every time bringing on a full pat-down search, legs spread and arms wide. A heart attack and triple bypass surgery have further complicated matters. All these things, however, are part of the normal course of life.

Both my beloved parents are gone, having lived into their nineties still fiercely proud of the son they had set on a road not often taken. They had watched eagerly as
What's That Pig Outdoors?
opened unexpected doors for me, one of them being a whole new career. So, happily, did my sons, who are now grown and fathers themselves.

Pig
was praised beyond my most extravagant dreams, primarily because it was on a subject ordinary readers found fresh and new. Newspapers
and magazines small and large liked it. A few grouches in the culturally Deaf world took exception, contending that the book was irrelevant because I refused to accept my deafness and learn American Sign Language—but in my experience most Deaf and hearing-impaired people (more about this seemingly redundant terminology later) simply were delighted that one of us had written a popular book that attempted to explain one person's life of deafness. Since then there have been other similar memoirs—from both the oral and the signing camps—but mine was first to stake out the territory.

The reviews inflated my sometimes shaky ego, especially during the publicity tour when the media, including radio and television, and groups and institutions of all kinds asked me to speak to them about the issues
Pig
had raised. This was electrifying. Suddenly people everywhere didn't care
how
I spoke. They wanted to hear
what
I had to say. This was a happy new development for me, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. No longer was I the terrified wallflower capable of faking fatal illness in order to avoid having to stand and deliver. Before long I had turned into a cool and confident speaker before a crowd.

The quality of my speech, however, has remained the same: lucid and understandable in calm and quiet situations, distorted and sometimes unintelligible in others. (It has been more than a decade since I had speech therapy at Northwestern. The student therapists helped me as much as they could, but after a few years the returns stopped increasing.)

And I was not entirely unassisted. Debby and occasionally Colin or Conan went along on many of my talks, serving as interpreters (often both ways) when interviewers and audiences had difficulty understanding my speech. Most of all, I reveled in “communication access real-time translation,” or CART for short, in which a professional court reporter, usually with a printed copy of my talk, would keyboard it into a laptop that projected the words on a large screen before the audience at the very instant I spoke them.

Of course I was not entirely successful. A few commercial radio and television producers discarded the results of taped interviews because they feared my imperfect speech would annoy their listeners and anger their advertisers. Many more interviewers, however, used the simple and familiar device of repeating key sentences I had said, apparently to emphasize
them but actually to enhance their audiences' understanding. Noah Adams of National Public Radio and the late Studs Terkel of Chicago's fine arts station had done this for speakers of broken or dialectical English—why not for a deaf guest? Resolutely they aired our talks. (My appearances, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been most successful on NPR and PBS stations, where producers and hosts are more adventurous than those at commercial outlets.)

I learned quickly which speaking invitations to accept and which to decline. Early in the first blush of
Pig
's success, I spoke at a high-society benefit for an inner-city school for the deaf in a Texas city. The organizers pooh-poohed my request for a CART presentation or, at the very least, an overhead projector to display my speech. “Just talk,” they said. The results were dismal. Like a ballplayer in a sudden slump, that evening I couldn't hit a curve. Afterward the society matrons gave me the fish eye and haughtily passed up the chance for an autographed copy of
Pig.
To add insult to injury, a week later the organization's president sent me a letter informing me that I was badly in need of speech therapy. I could have told them that—in fact, I
had
—but what else could I have done? Refused the invitation to speak, of course, but I was still a rookie at the personal-appearance game.

These days I pick my spots carefully. I won't do a full-length speech without CART or a similar device. I'll do a seminar or a question-and-answer session without such help if someone's available who is easy to lipread and is willing to interpret others for me. It's also easier for audiences to understand me when they are familiar with the subject of the encounter. Early on Debby and I developed a dog-and-pony show for bookstore autograph signings in which she would first read passages from one of my books, and then I would make informal remarks and answer questions. By and large the audiences understood me, probably because they were unconsciously waiting for me to repeat key words they had heard Debby speak. Like lipreaders, they were doing a bit of context-guessing to fill the gaps.

In recent years I've also used PowerPoint presentations with a laptop computer, a digital projector, and a screen during library autograph signings and talks to book clubs. Mixing photographs and maps with text on a screen adds a new dimension to the pitch, and everyone understands me.

The royalties from
Pig
were handsome enough to send Conan to college, but the prospect of riches was not the main reason I decided to write another book. (Riches are still only a prospect, but that's another story.) My fifteen minutes of fame with
Pig
were so good for my self-esteem that I hoped for more time in the sun. And, like most authors, I wanted to prove that I was no one-book flash in the pan.

As a book reviewer and a reader I had always enjoyed travel narratives out of precincts not often heard from, and decided to indulge my lifelong love for train travel. I'd tell the story of a famous American train from the points of view of both the crew and the passengers, throwing in bits of history as well. And so, in the early 1990s, I set to work.

The
California Zephyr
route from Chicago to San Francisco Bay is perhaps the nation's most storied and colorful rail line. It follows much of the first transcontinental railroad of the nineteenth century, and the scenery it traverses through the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada is breathtaking. Moreover, every train traveler has a personal story to tell, if only it can be found, and I thought I could dig up enough material for a lively book by riding with and interviewing crew members, including engineers, conductors, car attendants, chefs and waiters, as well as passengers from all walks of life. Sixteen times I rode Amtrak's version of the
Zephyr
to California and back to Chicago to gather stories.

Right away I discovered I couldn't do the job alone, as I had hoped. Notwithstanding my newfound acceptance of help, this was vexing, for like any other deaf person I still wanted to be able to make my own way in the world. Interviewing an amiable crew member wasn't difficult so long as I had a tape recorder, but introducing myself to a passenger in the
Zephyr
's lounge car and saying I was a writer often brought on a skeptical hush. Even to latter-day Americans, deaf people aren't thought of as writers—our command of English is supposedly too shaky—and so it was hard to persuade the average stranger that I was at work on a book. Sometimes a traveler I accosted would gasp in horror and depart without answering, as if he thought I was a con man on the prowl. If I hoped to get people to open up, I needed a hand.