What's That Pig Outdoors? (36 page)

“How did you know?” they would ask.

“Easy,” I'd reply with a straight face. “I'm brilliant and wise.”

The result, a novel called
Season's Revenge
, appeared in 2003. It indeed began with a murder by bear, and did only modestly well—very few mystery writers break into the best-seller list with their fledgling efforts—but still persuaded my publisher to issue, in 2005, the second in the Steve
Martinez series, A
Venture into Murder.
And
Venture
sold enough copies to ensure publication of a third novel,
A Cache of Corpses
, in 2007. In the spring of 2006, when I retired from the
Sun-Times
after 33 years as a book editor, I set to work on a fourth mystery featuring “Stevie Two Crow,” a hero “red on the outside, white on the inside.”

I am sometimes asked if writing these books helped me to come to terms with my deafness. Of course they did. Reliving experiences and emotions in print helps a writer wrestle with the rough patches of life. For instance, as Steve Martinez's character took shape on the page, I realized that his sometimes obstinate prickliness about how whites perceived him mirrored my own as a deaf person in the hearing world. Sometimes Steve was his own worst enemy. Sometimes I had been my own, too. That lesson in equanimity I learned from the blind writer Ved Mehta hasn't always stayed with me.

Perhaps more important, these whodunits enabled me to
exploit
my deafness to an even greater extent than I had in
Pig, Zephyr
, and
Gin Fizz.
Those three books were works of personal journalism, a genre in which events are more important than introspection, but fiction allows its practitioners to plumb deeper feelings for the sake of art. This is why so many first novels are loosely but undeniably grounded on the inner lives of their authors. The trick is to move on in successive books until imagination, not autobiography, drives the compulsion to write.

Now Steve and his gorgeous girlfriend Ginny—indeed, all the imaginary characters of my fictional Porcupine County, Michigan—have become so real to me that I have kept on writing just to find out what happens to them.

In all these adventures I was the beneficiary of enormous technological advances. In the earlier incarnation of this book I wrote that the second half of the twentieth century, with its TTYs, phone relay systems, and other electronic marvels, marked a good time for an American to be deaf. That wasn't the half of it—not in an era when improvements in technology zip along at light speed.

Now both the TTY and the telephone relay system are fading into obsolescence, replaced not only by computer-based relay services and
e-mail but “instant messaging” on computers and “text messaging” on cell phones and wireless pagers (at this writing, BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPod Touches, and especially Sidekicks are popular with deaf people everywhere). Wherever I am, I can “keyboard-talk” on my Sidekick by instant messaging or relay with Debby, taxi dispatchers, or anyone with a text pager or computer. With my Sidekick I even obtained weather conditions while aloft in my airplane.

There is, however, a dark side to relay services. Many merchants hate them, even though they are familiar with the workings of the services. Scammers take advantage of the merchants' good natures, and all too many English-illiterate callers and inept relay operators frustrate easy communication. I try hard to keep my typed text simple and clear, and for the most part that works, although a doofus of a relay op can throw a monkey wrench into the machinery.

Late in my career as a newspaper book editor, increasingly tight editorial budgets dried up funds for interview tape transcriptions. At first I tried the Edward Hoagland trick, asking my interviewees to type their responses on a laptop computer to my questions as instant transcripts. Some, including Martin Amis, the British bad-boy novelist; A. Scott Berg, the affable biographer of Charles Lindbergh, and William Langewiesche, the distinguished nonfiction writer (himself a pilot) participated enthusiastically. Alice McDermott, the Irish-American novelist, was so annoyed by one of my questions that she heatedly pounded out her response while I worried about my fragile laptop.

Many more writers, however, were uncomfortable with the idea of typing instead of speaking their answers and declined my proposal to use the technique, despite the urgings of their publicists. In a few instances I used e-mail to interview these authors, but this means of comunication lacked the unguarded spontaneity of face-to-face conversation that so often makes an author profile stand out. It's hard to describe physical mannerisms and facial expressions when you can't see them.

For these reasons I did fewer and fewer author profiles and sometimes felt that I was cheating the
Sun-Times
of my talents, until I remembered that the budget squeeze was at fault. Everybody suffered from it—not just me. I was not being discriminated against. This wasn't a transgression against the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In any case, I continued to tape—and pay for the transcriptions of—interviews for my books. Finding competent transcribers was never easy. One of them, a professional secretary, was excellent—but she took it upon herself to “edit out” what she thought was useless dialogue that I shouldn't have to pay for. During my research for
Zephyr
, she omitted from the transcript a bizarre ten-minute exchange between a patient Amtrak official and a drunken passenger that—later transcribed by my son Conan—turned out to be a key episode in the book.

I did use e-mail, computer relay services, and wireless text messaging to deal with reviewers and publishers. For most of the later 1990s and well into the 2000s I rarely had to ask anyone at the
Sun-Times
to make phone calls for me. Nor did I need to bother Debby at home, except to ask her once a month to re-order my prescriptions on complicated pharmacy voicemail systems.

Deaf people now have the Video Relay Service, an Internet communications scheme in which the deaf customer and interpreter use either webcams or videophones to exchange messages in sign or in spoken language. It's a godsend for people who are poor typists or whose English is shaky—or both. On my Mac computers I've used Skype videoconferencing software to speak to friends and family using my voice—and to lipread them as well onscreen.

Many deaf people write blogs, and so do I. One reason I maintain two daily blogs and a Web site is to promote my books. Another reason is that a blog, like all the writing I did for newspapers, enables me to communicate with the hearing world on its own terms. Blogging is a wonderful way of coping with isolation, of staying connected.

In my view the most important technological advance for the deaf continues to be the cochlear implant, which over the last two decades has grown ever more sophisticated and effective. Some 100,000 people around the globe have received them. With the help of the Americans with Disabilities Act, they have helped “mainstream” many, many young deaf Americans in neighborhood public schools as well as colleges and universities once closed to deaf students. Babies as young as nine months old are receiving cochlear implants and, like their hearing brothers and sisters, are soaking
up the speech of their parents during the vital early years when the human brain is most efficient at learning language.

Am I closer to obtaining a cochlear implant? No. My inner ear is still ossified and the state of the art does not yet guarantee me more than an appreciation of environmental sound, let alone understanding “open set” speech without lipreading. That's not enough for me to want to undergo the knife again—a total knee replacement, a spinal fusion, two cataract surgeries, and a heart bypass in recent years have been plenty.

But learning about cochlear implants has advanced by leaps and bounds my understanding of what happened to me in 1944. Doctors said then that my auditory nerve had been destroyed. Actually, it had remained intact; what was obliterated were the fragile little hair cells inside the cochlea of the inner ear that relayed sound waves to the auditory nerve.

And it is possible—dimly possible—that the treatment of the time contributed to the problem. Dr. Robert Blessing wrote that he had used sulfa to treat the meningitis I had suffered. Today it is known that some sulfa drugs are ototoxic, or harmful to the ear. Not all are. Dr. Blessing did not say precisely which form of sulfa he used. I can only speculate, but I think the high fever of meningitis (and encephalitis, if I had that as well) fried those hair cells—and maybe, just maybe, sulfa helped fan the flames while at the same time saving my life. We probably will never know.

In the original edition of
Pig
, I was a bit skeptical about the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, worrying that unintended consequences would damage its effectiveness. In its early days the law indeed was abused by people who stretched the definition of “disability” beyond all recognition, even using it to commit fraud. Fearing financial burdens from having to pay for sign language interpreters, some cash-strapped physicians sent deaf patients elsewhere. To avoid possible ADA-based lawsuits in the future, some corporations quietly instructed their personnel managers to avoid hiring people with disabilities.

One ironic development was that the ADA spurred colleges and universities everywhere to open their doors to deaf students, skimming the cream of the academic crop and leaving a much smaller, less well prepared pool of incoming undergraduates for Gallaudet University. Academic
standards eroded and graduation rates fell at Gallaudet, and a disaffected student body and faculty revolted against the administration, endangering the university's accreditation.

Still, over the last two decades the ADA has proved remarkably useful. In the early days of the act, being able to use hotel-provided captioned television, TDDs, doorbell signalers, and the like made traveling much easier for deaf people, especially this one. More than that, however, the ADA has continued to raise national consciousness about the deaf in particular and people with disabilities in general. Enlightened employers are continuing to make the lives of deaf employees much easier with simple and reasonable accommodations that cost very little.

In the first edition of this book, I interchangeably used the terms “deaf” and “hearing impaired” to describe everyone in the state of not-hearing-at-all or not-hearing-very-well. Even then many in the Deaf culture detested the term “hearing impaired,” and I'll admit I used it partly to poke the more hostile ones in the eye with a sharp stick. Over the years, however, I have come around to the view that “hearing impaired” is not the best choice of words to describe a group of people who do not in any way consider themselves physically handicapped. Any group has the right to be called what it wants to be called, even though ignorant outsiders might employ other terms. Using capital-D “Deaf” for those who identify with the culture of American Sign Language is simply a reasonable accommodation to diversity. Today I have no trouble with it at all.