A Stolen Computer, Three Suicides, Seven Funerals, & Twelve Weeks in a Nuthouse...
...and that's just the Introduction.
“I didn’t give a shit. It’s important in life if you don’t give a shit. It can help you a lot. So, I didn’t give a shit.”
—George Carlin
IT TOOK TWENTY-FIVE YEARS for me to write this story. That being said, it is impossible to acknowledge everyone who supported this project along the way. I did have a list once, but I lost it when my computer was stolen in 2010. It was hard enough to reconstruct the revisions, never mind trying to remember all those names. I ended up rewriting more than half the book. Besides, most of the people I want to thank are dead now.
After I wrote the dedication, it was ten years before I picked up a pen again. In the most miserable stretch of this literary marathon, I lost six people in three years. Half of them were suicides. The rest included two of my uncles and my grandmother, who, for reasons I will never understand, died on my thirty-fourth birthday. Eight years later, when I was almost ready to exhale, my father died the day before my forty-second birthday. [And I buried my stepfather the day before my novel was released.] At last count, my family has seven birthdays in March, including my beagle Autumn, with mine falling on the ides. After all that we’ve lost, it’s less a time of celebration and more a moment of remembrance and reflection.
Looking back, I realize that this story would not have been possible without my grandmother. We became pen pals after my parents separated. I was just a seven-year-old kid who was often told that I separated. I was just a seven-year-old kid who was often told that I “should be seen, not heard”—but Granny listened. That was her gift. Over the years, there were so many times she would share her wit and wisdom in ways that got me to see the answers I sought, as if they had been in front of me the whole time.
It was through those letters that I first learned to make sense of things that didn’t make sense. Granny challenged me to see the world beyond my pain. She taught me that our lives consist of layers, that there is always more to our stories than we ourselves can see in the midst of our anguish, and that we can assuage our grief if we are but willing to take our eyes off ourselves long enough to find the words. While those letters have been lost to time, the experience instilled in me the power of language at a young age. That’s when I first knew I wanted to be a writer. The results are now in your hands.
When I was a senior in high school, my father bought me an electric typewriter for Christmas. I was making progress at Natchaug, a mental health hospital where I’d end up spending twelve weeks recovering from my first suicide attempt. Since I was no longer at risk, time at home was my reward. I had been anxious about reentry, especially going back to school, but soon realized it didn’t matter; you really can’t go through something like that, not at that age, and then waste your life worrying about what other people think. I sure as hell couldn’t. But I realize now that Dad was an optimist: that typewriter was more than a present; it was a promise. It was my father’s way of telling me that I had more to do. He believed in me even when I didn’t. I never would have finished this story if it hadn’t been for him.
As much as Granny and Dad nourished and supported my talent for writing, my mother encouraged my passion for reading. When I was a kid, Mom used to take me to the Paperback Trader bookstore in Groton, Connecticut. She always had four or five of those big brown paper bags stuffed with books to trade, only to fill them all right back up again with more books. If I helped her carry them, and I was on my best behavior while she browsed, she’d buy me a comic book. To this day, Mom loves to tell the story about my two Superman comics. She had asked me, “Why do you want two copies of the same comic book?”
“One for upstairs, one for downstairs,” I’d told her. That way, no matter where I went, Superman would always be with me. He was as real to me as the rising sun on a cold winter night. And still is. My mother got such a kick out of my answer that she did buy me those two comics. Truly, Mom had passed her love of reading on to me—and so much more.
Like my great-uncle and my grandfather, my mother, my older brother, and I are all late-deafened adults. In his senior years, as is common with age, my father became hard-of-hearing. We grew up in small towns that had no resources, and even less educational competence, for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. The technology that empowers access for so many people with disabilities today was the stuff of science fiction back then. Like the video calls we saw on Star Trek, speech-to-text conversion, instant messaging, hearing-aid compatible public payphones, telecommunication relay services, and amplified telephones were all centuries away to us. We never even knew about teletypewriters or caption decoder boxes until after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, even though such technology had been around for years. So, Mom would read from the time she got home from work until she fell asleep.
For us, there was an equality to books that we seldom encountered outside the written page (and have yet to see with ubiquitous clarity online). When I was in my twenties and my own deafness began to emerge, I realized that writing could bridge the gap between the hearing and the deaf—without, I hope, compromising Deaf culture. Literacy is the only requisite. Books themselves are never rude or inconsiderate; they don’t interrupt or talk over each other. Paper has no frequency or pitch, the words don’t mumble, and grateful authors never judge their readers—even though readers judge authors.
If a hearing person writes a bad book, as so many of them have done, only the most brutally honest critic will say, “Well, that wasn’t so good.” For deaf writers, the expectations are always higher because we know the odds are against us. Our challenges are not limited to merely breaking into the publishing industry. Hearing people still equate speech with language and intelligence, a myth as old as civilization itself, but that’s always been a tale told by idiots.
If a deaf person writes a bad book, as so few of us have done, the hearing world will once again assume that we can’t write. I have heard that crap all my life. So, I just stopped listening. I didn’t give a shit. I knew I could write, but I never wanted to publish a good book. Greatness, to me, is a waste of time. And since I knew my best would never be enough, I was determined to do better.
A breakthrough in my writing process came in my second year of college. I signed up for a course on Shakespeare taught by Professor Charles Russell. Although I’d hated the legendary Bard in high school, and originally took the class just to fill out my schedule, Professor Russell was a great teacher who soon became my friend and mentor. That summer, I read Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone and decided I wanted to be a novelist. Before that, I only wrote short stories. Interestingly enough, Lamb would have been my high school English teacher had my mother not sold the house after the divorce, but it was Professor Russell who gave me the best advice about writing: “Get yourself into a critical audience.”
Unfortunately, if great minds think alike, every idiot who knows a moron is a genius. It’s easy to be a sage when you’re surrounded by fools. Most people spend their lives gazing upon Olympus, dreaming of what might have been had they but the courage to climb. Some claim an ordained right to the mountain, infatuated as they are with power and prestige. I was always the one who wanted to reach the summit, to see the world from that legendary peak—to be the best writer I could be.
The elements I faced in my quest were merciless, much like The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: you seek the prize and hook it and try to reel it in but soon discover that your ambition has surpassed your talent so the experience you gain along the way as you kill it and lash it down and gut it and fight off all the predators, who only want a meal they didn’t earn, ends up tempering your craft with a steel resolve until the glory of the great prize is but a distant memory and you’re left with nothing but a tattered carcass. The journey was worth the destination only because it is over now, but the destination will never be worth the journey. It has taken too much, and I have traveled too far.
These characters have been with me now for half my life. I tried quite a few writing groups over the years but soon got so frustrated with all the compliments that I became my own worst critic. As a deaf novelist, I had to be harder on myself than any editor or critic could dare dream. For most of my life, I’ve seen hearing writers dictate deaf narratives time and time again, constantly confining our characters to their own misconceptions. But I never fit into a box, and I’m not about to start now.
Of the thousands of books that I had to read throughout my mainstream education, not one was written by a deaf author. I would like to think this story will change that, though I have no illusions. At best, I am cautiously optimistic. At worst, I remain wary that the hearing world will once again hijack our narrative. Nevertheless, people with disabilities—or, perhaps to put it more accurately, people who have become disabled—have a unique perspective on both the center and margin. I know how hearing people think because I was a hearing person. As my deafness evolved, I learned to put hearing ways behind me.
When I was a young man, I dreamed of winning awards and accolades as much as the next novelist. After twenty-five years in the margin, I am content to add this contribution for those who have been ignored for so long. Even the major publishing houses primarily constitute a hearing industry and, as such, remain largely uneducated about Deaf history and hard-of-hearing culture. Deaf writers have to be at our best just to get a foot in the door. But the more the hearing world told me that I couldn’t do it, the more I wanted to kick that fucking door down.
And I have.
Copyright © by Michael C. Haymes.