Raymond LuczakASSEMBLY REQUIRED: NOTES FROM A DEAF GAY LIFE (excerpt)DAD STOOD BEHIND the meat counter at Lopez's A&P Store at the corner of U.S. 26 and Lake Street in Ironwood, Michigan, it seemed, for his entire life. His customers knew my name, only because he was constantly whipping out his wallet to show them my picture along with his eight other children between trimming, wrapping, and weighing their meats. I was one of the nine Luczak kids, but different because I wore a hearing aid harness underneath my shirt, and the cords from my hearing aid sprouted out of my collar to my ears. * * * WHEN I WAS nine months old, I had a bout of double pneumonia with a fever of 102 degrees. I seemed to recover completely but it would be almost two years before my parents would suspect my hearing loss. After all, I had six older siblings�within five years, I would get a younger brother and sister�and my parents had to tend to the endless distraction of such a large Catholic family. For my part, I had unwittingly learned to follow the gazes of anyone nearby who looked up at anyone saying anything, including my name, and therefore it appeared that I could hear my name. I did not have language then. I was already visualizing all sorts of scenarios with my wooden soldiers and acting them out. I did not speak, or if I did, I did not necessarily use words I had learned from others. I was the silent one who played intensely with his toys. It gradually dawned on my parents that my differentness might indicate a problem. The testing didn't take long. I was severely-profoundly deaf with a loss of 105 decibels (dB) in my right ear; an 82 dB loss in my left ear. (Normal conversations are conducted at 50 dB.) What this meant was that my ears, unaided, could not hear sounds up to 82 (or 105) dB, and at that point, the sound might be discernible, but not necessarily understood. Hearing aids do not necessarily guarantee automatic comprehension of speech, as the sound waves entering the hearing aid microphone are amplified. My understanding of speech varies wildly from locale to locale as well as lighting conditions�a conversation in a noisy restaurant with lots of drapes and dim lighting may be easier to follow than a passionate discussion in a classroom with no carpets or drapes. And instant lipreading comprehension is never a given; in fact, without being clued to the context of the conversation, lipreading is basically impossible. It was July 1967, the summer when Ironwood, after two generations of iron ore mining, had to close the last operational mine in the area. The land had run dry. (Over the next thirty years the town would shrink to from over 9,000 to less than 6,000.) I had to wear this huge bulky hearing aid on my chest. I also had to meet with my speech therapist daily at Norrie School, a few blocks away from home. One session stands out: the first time I saw a mimeograph of a man standing in a business suit and holding a briefcase. The word beneath him may have been "man" or "father," but his confidence was undeniable. I wanted to know him, but I didn't quite understand why. * * * BECAUSE THERE WERE so few deaf children in our region, we were all gathered into a public school program near Houghton, a two-hour ride away, where we would learn how to speak. Sign language was expressly forbidden. It was no secret that many deaf children showed an immediate rapport with sign language; it was believed that once exposed to signs, the deaf child's progress in learning speech would rapidly deteriorate. Most hearing parents do not want to hear that most Deaf people grow up to marry others of their kind, in the same way they do not want to hear that approximately 10%� if one still subscribes to the Kinsey Report�of Americans turn out to be gay. When I was just over three years old, my parents took me to Houghton where I would stay with a foster family during the week, returning to Ironwoo'd on weekends so I could spend time with my brothers and sisters. I remember arriving at that first house after the two-hour trip so clearly. The purplish-blue house was tall and thin, almost squeezed in by houses on either side. I did not understand why the strange fat woman and her son, who was a year younger than I was, kept staring at me. My brothers and sisters never paid any attention to my hearing aids, so these looks of naked curiosity were disconcerting. When my parents left me behind with my first foster family, I watched them leave from the front window. Dad's face looked distant as he tried to regain composure in order to start the engine. I didn't realize it then that I had broken his heart for the second time; the first time being the diagnosis of my deafness.
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