As a boy the sounds of the world came to me sunken. Distant. The murmurs of people talking always seemed to be addressed to others, never to me. Between my bad hearing and bad eyesight, part of this was good: Mom’s screams were not very loud then, though she’d come to the living room where I was playing and knock me over and scream, “You think you are fucking special? You answer when I call you.” Dad would magically miss seeing the slaps and weak punches I got and show up to hear, “Mark, your son doesn’t listen,” and he’d grab my Buck Roger’s t-shirt with the plastic iron-on 70s sparkle outline and stare Vietnam-vet crazy in my face and bark, “You answer your mamma when you hear her. Better cut out that bullshit.”
All my interactions were local, personal, up close. In a small pool with the rest of the world beyond under a static ocean. My sister translated. She stood just outside the pool for me and splashed sounds towards me. People thought it was twin speak and cute. Thought I called her Warwa instead of Laura because I spoke like a little kid, but it was all I could hear and I was too old to speak like that.
Clogs were in my ears. There because of the small ear canals and the hardened ear wax of the Siberian people who became Indians adapted to the dry tundra. My wax is hard, dry. It builds forever.
It unbalances.
Though the social outsider at grade school, I was friends, best friends, with a popular kid, Eric. Handsome, blond, athletic. He was the even tempered brave kid you read about in stories, like Luke Skywalker or that singer Shaun Cassidy my sister liked. I even drew him in Sunday school, which got me hit with a ruler when the nun snuck up behind me and screamed, “Don’t you listen! Draw yourself, you don’t have blond hair! It’s brown! (whack) It’s brown (whack).” Eric and I were always nice to each other and played together at recess unless there was a game we had to play. The powers that be had us play in an asphalt lot with many metal poles in it. Was it for aeration? Every few feet had a metal pole so everyone had to weave around them, me following the floating t-shirt behind. Eric took off with the soccer ball, few could keep up with him. He was a peach and blue blur passing everyone till the other team began to surround him. All the kids on our side shouted, "Eric, here, Eric!" I mumbled, "Eric," though I didn’t expect him to pass to me. He shouted my name and I heard the rubber pong of a kick, though I saw nothing. I kicked right away wanting to kick the ball to the far goal, to Mars, to the Battlestar Galactica, to the starship Enterprise, to the X-wing Luke flew. Eric and me felt like heroes. He chose me to join him in his school yard glory and perdition. He passed to me because I was his friend. My legs left me and I hit the pole with my head. Getting knocked out is like sleeping. I woke prone to many kids standing over me and I thought for a moment the asphalt was my bed. Eric asked, "Are you okay?" Other kids just said, "Wow." Some laughed.
After this happened twice they took me to the nurse for hearing tests. I take tests well. I guessed from her reaction, raising my hand for when the distant beeps happened. I didn’t want to get into trouble for not being able to hear or for people to treat me like a retarded kid.
In third grade, in English class, bespectacled already, my ear throbbed, beat, swelled. I tilted my head. A large football shaped ball of wax, darker than ochre and dry, fell in my hand. MY GOD. Parts of my ear were falling out! Or perhaps not. Others weren’t looking at me. I found it shocking that the destruction of my interiors could go unnoticed by others. Yet the moment felt real strange…the first time I ever really heard…wet breathing. Air conditioner whispers. The scratching of pencils other than my own. The football wax was gross, what I imagined human innards looked like, at least mine, all balled up and constricted. I thought discretion was better. I would get in trouble for losing a part of my ear, the mysterious insides. I pushed the wax ball in and when I changed my mind, the end throbbed back in as it had throbbed out.
I was scared others would find out.
I still couldn’t hear.
I think a teacher intervened and talked to my parents since someone was always telling me when the teacher was calling on me when I wasn’t looking. I had glasses, so I had also started looking at lips more.
Mom complained all the way in the car to the ear doctor and said I was just stupid and now she had to waste her fucking time taking me to the clinic. The ear doctor was old and had a strong, loud Texas accent, even louder than dad’s up close. With his Western buckle, he seemed like a frontiersman like Grizzly Adams. He took out a vacuum with a clear tube and vacuumed my ear. The ochre football came out after many “I’m a’ getting that sucker”s. The doctor and the nurse showed me, proud of their kill, in a white paper napkin. “That came out of your ear!” I nodded pretending not to know it, wondering if they were going to fix it and put it back in. And the world, as it had been in class the moment after the wax fell out, was hyper real with sound. I didn’t know fluorescent lights hummed or that Texan accents ached your ears when next to them.
I never knew car rides were loud or living in a town could be noisy. “I can hear that mommy!” I said over and over again. My mother cried with concern for me. It's the only time I can remember she cried for me, the day I could hear for real for the first time. The day the world was too loud.
They stuck me in speech therapy. Now I think my problem was a bit obvious, but I watched long cartoons I couldn’t hear too well and worked on speaking with kids I thought were dumb. Dad told me he took me out because he said my speech improved a lot, though I remember the rest of my childhood people always giving me a what look, saying, “Wah? Huh?”
When I was an angry teenager I moved back to Texas to live with my uncle Billy Bob (yes, his real name). He wanted to get rid of my California rads, likes, totallys, you knows….and my mumbles. Every night I repeated words after him over and over. I didn’t hear a difference and I didn’t know why my mouth made warbled sounds, but eventually, my pronunciation improved. But it was mostly acting. I learned to pretend, to act as if I can speak normally. Even now as an adult, when I get tired, the play of speaking normally ends and the garbles, what I heard as a boy sitting underwater comes out instead of standard English, Texan, Californian, or Chicano Spanglish. So that’s why I mumble.
It’s my native, underwater language.
Scott Russell Duncan gets called "Freak-magnet" by friends who don't understand it means them, too. Scott graduated from Mills College with an MFA and lives in Oakland. His recently completed novel is The Ramona Diary of SRD, a reclamation of the mythology of Spanish California. Read more at scottrussellduncan.com