This originally appeared in New York magazine’s website, The Cut
My girlfriend and I are draped across each other in bed. She brushes a stray hair from my face and moves closer. Her voice is like gravity—deep, growly, irresistible—and my synapses come alive when she puts her mouth to my ear.
“You have a seductive face,” she says.
I crane my head slightly back to look at her mouth, and say, “I have a duck face?”
___
I was nine the first time I realized I was half-deaf. My brother and his friend were talking about something—I’ve no idea what anymore. All I know is I heard it wrong and they mocked me tirelessly for it.
At the time, this devastated me, though as an adult, I tend to find such misunderstandings funny, and even have a name for them, as if my life were a zany sitcom. Adventures in Deafness, I call it. An example: A friend walks up to me at a party and introduces me to her partner.
“You remember Mark, my fiance?” she asks.
“Beyonce?”
___
In high school, people assumed I was shy or stuck up (or shy and stuck up) because I couldn’t hear group conversations and hence, often said nothing. My teachers encouraged me to talk more in class. I didn’t. I couldn’t. What if I was wrong? What if I said the same thing another classmate had just said? It was better not to try. I would not be humiliated again.
Silence is golden, as the cliche goes. A respite from the unending cacophony of the world. For me, silence is loneliness, the impossible search for something—understanding, connection, company.
Hearing loss affects more than 278 million people around the world. In the United States, 20 percent of us suffer from some degree of hearing loss, which often goes untreated because it is deeply stigmatized, prohibitively expensive, and cast off as an unavoidable byproduct of aging. “I can’t get hearing aids,” a friend’s mother once told me. “I’m not ready to be old.”
I wasn’t ready either. Hearing loss is a loss of the profoundest order. But when I was 19, my desperation outweighed my fear of being stigmatized and I broke down and got a hearing aid. And I mean that in the singular sense because I could not afford two. A set costs between $3,000 and $7,000, and they’re rarely covered by insurance. My first aid was the size of a raisin because I didn’t want anyone to ever know it was there. I wore it for a few weeks, just long enough to feel crushed by my inadequacy and the weight of the world’s indifference. Noises became amplified, but no clearer. My own voice boomed as if James Earl Jones had suddenly taken up residence inside my skull. Eating a tortilla chip was akin to the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan.
When I was 20, I got my pilot’s license. On the day of my flight exam, I misheard the directions from the tower and tried to land on the wrong runway—the kind of mistake that could get you killed. After passing the test, I never flew again.
When I was 22, I tried hearing aids again. I was a high school teacher and desperately needed something to make my job easier. I was still broke, so I wrote to a nonprofit called Hear Now. They approved me for one hearing aid. Again the world boomed alive in my ear, and again it made zero sense. The voices of those around me remained soft and jumbly. It was as if I were being forced to watch a foreign film of my life without subtitles. I wore it for a few weeks and then it went into a drawer.
A special ed student came up to me one day at the after school writing center, which I ran with a coworker. She whispered to us that she was pregnant and that her older boyfriend was angry and threatening her because he thought the baby wasn’t his. I didn’t console her. I didn’t offer her advice or counseling or help because I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I felt the grief of her muted words in my chest. I felt her hushed panic, but I did not understand it. I tried to offer her sympathy by matching her alarmed facial expressions, which was all I could do. My coworker later told me what had happened, and for the thousandth time I was struck dumb by my own uselessness.
Adventures in Deafness, part 108: Springtime and I am walking alone in my neighborhood one morning. Behind me I hear a cat-call whistle. Incensed, I turn around, ready to give an earful to the rude man disturbing my morning walk, and realize the noise I heard was a bird. It was not objectifying me—it was singing.
___
When I was 24, I got a “real” job, with benefits and a retirement fund. My hearing prevented me from being a teacher, but I thought I could handle an office environment. I still struggled every day, but most of my tasks could be completed online. With the money I was making, I could finally afford a second hearing aid, so I bought one. Much like every other time I had tried wearing them, the world remained elusive, incomprehensible.
What I didn’t realize when I took out the latest in my string of rejected aids—what no audiologist or ENT had told me in the 14 years I had been trying and not trying to wear them—is that hearing aids take time to work. I had to learn about it from a book, Living Better with Hearing Loss by Katherine Bouton.
It was here I learned that hearing aids aren’t like eyeglasses. You don’t put them on and suddenly every sound sharpens and settles into perfect clarity. It takes months, sometimes years, before your brain can relearn how to interpret the terrifying input of this brave new world. And even then, results are not great. And yet, the return policy on most hearing aids is 30 days.
Adventures in Deafness, part 37: My girlfriend says, “Fleetwood Mac is coming to town.”
“Fragrant man?” I reply.
“No….”
“Farting man?”
___
I’m 33 now. I once again have hearing aids. I bought a pair from Costco, where they were a fraction of the normal price ($1,800), and I didn’t even have to buy them in bulk to get the discount. (I did buy a fork lift’s worth of toilet paper while there, naturally.)
The diagnosis from the Costco audiologist was grim. He expects it to take two years for me to see results. And even then, he said, “You’ll never be within the normal range of hearing.” Then why am I doing this? I asked.
“It’s better than nothing,” he said.
A chicken can regenerate its inner ear sensory hair cells. So can a zebrafish. But not me. Not any human. The best I can hope for is “better than nothing.”
Adventures in Deafness, part 17: A friend and I are sitting in his apartment, drinking whiskey neat. Out of the blue, he puts forth the morbid question of whether I’ve ever wanted to die. But the question I hear is, “Do you want to date?” Panicked, I start rambling off reasons why I am undateable.
“Oh! Well, you know I’m pretty gay, right? I realize that might seem confusing because we slept together recently, but well, when in Rome, haha, oh, do I want to die?” Why yes, as a matter of fact. Right now would be fantastic.
___
“You’re a writer?” a different audiologist remarked as we were making small talk. “What a great way to never have to talk to anyone!”
And it is. Except when I’m conducting an interview or giving a reading or trying to follow a phone call or, god forbid, the increasing popularity of podcasts. And it’s great that this writing thing is working out because I am basically unemployable for most jobs that require talking to humans.
I had the opportunity to interview one of my childhood heroes, Jewel, for a magazine assignment. For our phone call I used a captioning service, which is supposed to translate speech to text, like closed-captioning but for phones. The transcript from that conversation starts out, “Hi this is Joe calling,” and soon becomes completely indecipherable. Here’s a snippet in which we were talking about her favorite books:
“a book I read a lot about (speaker unclear) shifts in my thinking sort of paradigm shifts that help me deal [be] less of a (speaker unclear) helps me be an architect of my life instead of just acting to like [through life] I go to a lot of detail about how I really what you perceive them how you respond um that is what builds your life um it starts in the mind and your mind builds actions in actions build a life so it is not aware of what you are thinking”
___
The worst job I ever had was, somewhat ironically, at Costco. I was 18, slinging hot dogs and churros in the pizza kitchen. It was the holiday season and I cried every day. One day I misheard my manager and she screamed at me for cleaning the wrong shelf and clapped loudly near my face. “Are you stupid? What do you think you’re doing?” I found a different manager and tried to explain my predicament. He let me wash dishes for the rest of that shift, but the next day I was back at the window, trying like hell to get the orders right amid the clang and warehouse echo and crying children and Christmas music.
Adventures in Deafness, part 41: My brother visits me from New York. As he goes out for a cigarette, he says, “I’ll be outside.”
“Beyonce?”
___
Once, a man followed me home from a bar because he thought I’d agreed to have sex with him. I must have nodded at the wrong time. I took a taxi home and still he showed up at my door. It took me half an hour to convince him to leave. He put my hand on his cock and it was the first time all night we understood each other.
Are you stupid? What do you think you’re doing?
The world is a trying place. I want to be around people, but it’s difficult to convince them to come to my house and sit in a well-lit, silent room with just me. My friends are sympathetic and they try. But there’s only so much they can do. Most days I vacillate between acceptance and a barely perceptible desperation. Other days, I want to disappear.
Adventures in Deafness, part four: I turn to my girlfriend in bed, where we are both clacking away on our laptops. “Did you say something?” I ask.
“That’s a dog barking,” she says.
We laugh for twenty minutes straight. It’s better than nothing.
