~Tales from the Deaf Side: Waffle House Parking Lot (TGL)

~Smart-ass in Suburbia~
[The Giverny Life quod vide]

So I was standing outside a Waffle House (yes, a Waffle House, don’t judge me, you judgmental jackass) in North Carolina around midnight, enjoying a deeply loved, cherished, adored and possibly sexually-caressed cigarette right smack-dab in tobacco country while waiting for a friend to arrive.  A chill made the air a tad uncomfortable but not seriously cold.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a vehicle entering the parking lot and turned around, assuming it was my friend.  It wasn’t her.  It was an old pick-up truck that just straddled the line between ugly old wreck and classic Americana. 

Which side of the line it would teeter onto depended almost entirely on whether doctors someday invent a cure for rust.

No longer interested, I turned away to enjoy my cigarette in peace without the sorts of unseemly sightlines that cruising almost-wrecks create to interfere with my pleasure.  Unfortunately, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the damned thing had pulled up beside me, the driver leaning out the window.  Also, he appeared to be saying something to me, which I have trouble understanding in the best of circumstances, let alone circumstances involving an overcranked and under-maintained truck engine that found several noisy notes long since lost to history and decency. 

Taking a deep breath, I turned to face him with a friendly but not particularly inviting smile.  He immediately started talking, his over-moussed blond hair hair bouncing around as he incorporated all manner of head movements into his attempts to convey that he wasn’t afraid to commit to this little scene we shared.  From the way he kept checking with his passengers and glancing down the road and occasionally pointing toward a large illuminated building a short distance away, I realized he must be asking for directions.

            Now, directions I can provide even without hearing the question.  Assuming you’re not fastidiously fussy about where you actually end up, that is.  As I’ve discovered more than once, unfortunately, lots of people are pretty fastidiously fussy about where they end up.  Not to be unkind to this lovely world that has been provided to us, but it appears to be heavily populated with people entirely too obsessed with being where they’re actually supposed to be.

            But Owns-a-Wreck was looking expectantly at me.  His expression suggested he awaited some sort of pertinent, if not actually sage, reply from anyone who happened to be standing next to him.

            In this case, just me.  I did glance briefly about on the off-chance that someone had sidled up next to me for no good reason.

            Nope.
            The rest of the parking lot was distressingly free of heroes or heroines coming to my rescue.  Not for the first time, I felt a strain of bitter rage at how the fairy tales had deceived me with regards to how the world works.  

            So I looked at OaW and shook my head.  “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

            Apparently my voice did nothing to clue him in.  In his defense, my claim of not being able to understand him is nonspecific.  If he didn't recognize the nature of my voice, he had every reason to assume the problem was merely one of momentary miscommunication.  Either way, he doubled down and repeated his gibbering nonsense with such obvious sincerity that I could feel it even if I couldn’t understand any of his words.  Or even most of the sounds he made.  

(I assumed it to be gibbering nonsense.  Life gets so much more convenient for someone with hearing loss when he makes a practice of firmly assuming anything he can’t hear is pure blather and should be disregarded as a symptom of the intrinsic madness of our species.)

             OaW looked at me expectantly again as he finished speaking.

Clearly we were at an impasse.  So I did the most reasonable thing.  I tapped my ear with one finger and said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t understand.  I have severe hearing loss, you see.”

The driver looked aghast and, because his expression telegraphed what he was about to say, I understood his next words perfectly.  “I’m sorry, dude.”

Without thinking, blinking, or being able to blame drinking, I immediately replied, “It’s okay.  I stopped blaming it on you a long time ago.  We’re cool now.’

            Words, or at least my words, cannot describe his expression at that.  Suffice to say, he thought I was completely insane, and he might have had a point.  He opened his mouth as if to say something, then adjusted the brim of his cap, rolled up (and, yes, I do mean actual rolling here because, as I said, the vehicle was practically an antique) his window and sped out of the parking lot.

            It seemed like an overreaction, really, when you get right down to it.  I wasn’t considering murdering him and hiding his body at a junkyard or anything.  Had he but asked, I would have confirmed this.

I’m reasonably certain that enjoying that makes me a bad person.  I’m also reasonably certain that the fact that I don’t care makes me worse.

            The only thing I do feel a little bad about is the expectations I created, however tiny.  Recently, a store clerk asked me a general question about how deaf people feel about some topic.  Leaving aside the fact that she knew I wasn’t actually completely deaf simply because I understood her question (eventually), I couldn’t help but wonder why she thought I could speak for my ‘kind’.  I’ve never even considered doing something like that.  If I can speak for the general effects that losing my hearing have had on my life and that can be extrapolated, that’s fine.  But I’m not the representative, godhead, PR flack, or Lord of Misrule of people with hearing loss of any degree.

            Still, it’s hard to avoid wondering if I influenced OaW’s perspective of people with hearing loss with that exchange.  Would he now expect us to be assholes?  Given that he didn’t recognize the signs in my voice, I can’t imagine he’s had many examples to compare me to.  

            It’s easy to say, “Screw him if he’s so narrow-minded as to judge everyone from the actions of one.”  True, that’s the very personification of narrow-minded thinking.  Yet, if deafness of any significant degree is a recondite topic for him, it’s understandable that he goes with what he knows.  And I can say Screw him all I want (keeping mind this is all completely hypothetical and he might be the most enlightened soul this world has ever known.)  That wouldn’t change the fact that other hard-of-hearing people could suffer in the future for my behavior.

            This quandary is neither new nor fresh.  Black people have dealt with it for a very long time, as have women.  Society at large, and viciously entrenched members of the favored class in particular, does a very efficient job of taking examples of bad behavior and extrapolating it onto the larger group and thus reaffirming their prejudicial ideas and behavior.  At times, it reaches the point of forcing the minority’s hand.  Black people are lazy and criminal?  Well, then, white people are all trying to hold us down! Or Women are weak and emotional and can’t be trusted with power? Then men are violent and sexual predators!  And that isn’t acceptable either, but it’s hard to complain when you forced them into a corner in the first place.

            So this is an age-old conflict, humanity’s sad rumination on itself, and hard-of-hearing people hardly get the worst of it, given such examples mentioned above.

The specific problem with hard-of-hearing, though, is the relative scarcity of people with severe or complete hearing loss.  If one black person does something wrong, all you have to do is walk down the street and find another black person doing right by everyone.  Not quite as easy with my condition.  I’ve personally met fewer than a half-dozen people with severe hearing loss from causes other than old age.  That number is being generous, in fact.  My memory can only isolate two; I just assume there were a few others that I’m not recollecting right off.  So I have no confidence that someone else will show OaW a different side to my…kind.  Which is another reason I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of speaking as an authority and representative of the deaf and hard-of-hearing.  Not only do I lack the excessive ego necessary to self-appoint myself as Speaker for the Deaf, I don’t like what it implies about the power I’d have.  If I make a mistake or act like an ass, I’m more the willing to suffer the consequences personally.  I’m in no way willing to let others suffer with, or instead of, me.

            Still, I don’t regret weirding OaW out.  It amused me. That’s what matters, in the end, and I won’t hear a single word against it.
           Mainly because I'm going deaf.

~Fin~