The Deaf Heart, page 9
When she saw Max, Evy threw up her arms in relief. “I want you to meet a friend—R-e-y-n-a-l-d-o,” she said with choppy, half-formed hand shapes. She was one of those people who hated to fingerspell, and felt it was a burdensome part of the language. Instead of working at it to form crisp, sharp letters on the hands, she had given up and left it up to the viewer to decipher the missing contours of the manual letters.
Max nodded his head to Reynaldo. “My name is Dempsey Maxwell McCall. Name sign—X over the heart—Max.”
Reynaldo asked why the cross over the heart.
Evy said, “Yeah! I was wondering about how you got that name sign.”
“Well,” Max began, “one time a good Deaf friend of mine was teasing me. Said ‘You should be one of the X-Men.’ I used to wear a big hearing aid box on my chest, wires coming out of my shirt, connected to my ears. My friend said, ‘You look like some kind of deaf m-u-t-a-n-t.’ He had another name for me—‘The Deaf M-u-t-e,’ get it? ‘Mute,’ short for ‘mutant.’ I told him I preferred to be branded with an X on my chest. So, that became my name sign.”
Evy let out a burst of laughter. Reynaldo half-smiled, looking back and forth from Max to Evy, waiting for Max to finish his story. Evy said to Reynaldo, “The X-Men, you know? Group of superheroes? They fight the bad guys. You’ve seen them in comic books.” Reynaldo looked at Max, not seeing the connection.
Evy then proceeded to act out the iconic moves of each member of the X-Men team, but it wasn’t working. Her gestures and facial expressions were gawky. And it didn’t help that she was wearing tinted eyeglasses and a blue polyester pantsuit in a loud pattern.
“The concept of the X-Men is like Superman,” Max said. “Know Superman—big S on the chest?”
Reynaldo’s face lit up. He mimed a cape, big arm muscles, and a curl on his forehead.
“That’s it!” said Max. “X-Men—similar idea except different people, different costumes. They make the world right.”
Reynaldo gestured an X over his heart, almost as if asking: “You promise?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” said Max, holding out his hand, almost sure Reynaldo wasn’t asking if he’d promise to make the world right. “Good to meet you.”
10/27/81 (TGIF!) Galveston, picnic table on the seawall
Hey Mom ’n Dad!
I’m getting a lot of stares from people walking by on the seawall. Guess they don’t often see someone with a typewriter out here. Just got back from Corpus Christi. Don’t ask me why they call that place “Body of Christ.” Could be that they’re still strapped under the Bible Belt down there. Zag, myself, and a few others from UTMB caravanned down to the local chapter meeting of the Biological Photographers’ Association. Socially, it was a good experience. Academically, it was literally nothing to write home about. It wasn’t the most informative meeting. Just a bunch of grandfathers reminiscing about the good ole days. We came away feeling pretty good at how knowledgeable we were about the photo areas presented at the meeting.
The trip down and back was gorgeous; such exquisite beauty in the Texas sky, the flat coastal landscape, and the vegetation. The simple, natural environment of Padre Island, a long string of low sand islands made Ocean City, Maryland look like a cheap little whore. (Pardon my Texan, Mom.)
Dad, I know how you were fascinated by Mount Rushmore. You’d be interested in knowing that there is a Corpus Christi Seawall, designed by Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (God bless you, sniff) the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. I think he was a little more creative with the presidential sculptures.
One night we ate at a really cheap Mexican joint with delicious, authentic Mexican cuisine. It was the kind of place where the grandmother cooks in the back, the mother is the hostess/cashier, and the granddaughter is the waitress. The father? God knows where he was or what he was doing. I ordered a combo platter of nachos with jalapeño peppers, tortillas with picante sauce, hot tamales, enchiladas, and burritos. My tongue is getting tamed. All in all, a worthwhile trip.
When we got back, Zag and I found an official-looking letter waiting for us. WE PASSED THE WRITTEN EXAM!!! YAHOOOO!! Cleared the first hurdle. Boy, were we hungover the next morning.
Zag and I have been to Houston a couple of times now. It’s only an hour’s drive up north. A couple from work took us with them to the Astrodome to see the Astros play the Braves. The ’Dome was something else. You should see the scoreboard. Instead of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a flag we sang it to the scoreboard with computerized images of the American flag, bombs bursting, and all that flash on the screen.
The second time we went to Houston, the same couple took us to an outdoor theater where we saw the American Deaf Dance Company perform for free. I saw some old deaf friends from RIT in the audience and chatted with them a while. The dance company was really good -- all of them were profoundly deaf.
Things are beginning to pick up down here -- can’t complain. Been trying to get rid of a pestx pesky head cold, hopefully this weekend so I can get out in the hot sun, rest, run, and swim in the warm waters of (cue the music) the Gulf of Mexicoooooooo! Sorry, couldn’t resist while you’re probably now getting your overcoats out of the attic for the winter. Am looking into cheap flights home for Christmas. Can’t wait … Love, Max
The Face of Grace
The Clinical Studio Patients are shot with the lights set up at 45-degree angles with the flash reflecting off the umbrellas. Positions for lights and patients are marked on the floor. The inpatient lenses are precalibrated. Follow settings on the calibration tape. Use cross-lighting to accentuate lesions or bumps. Always take a few shots with flat lighting. Use blue background for most medical departments except Orthopedics. Mandatory for plastic surgery. Use gray for Ortho and other departments that require full-body shots. Black velvet is for Employee of the Month and student directory/yearbook photos.
Since most biomedical photography labs within a university hospital have a clinical studio, Max elected to serve a two-week rotation in clinical photography as part of his residency. He needed the experience of photographing live human subjects, who mostly stood or sat before a seamless blue backdrop. Once, while on 24-hour call, he was summoned out of bed at four o’clock on a Sunday morning to photograph a patient. When he came in to open the studio, the patient was waiting in the hallway in a wheelchair with an orderly standing by. Most of the patient’s nose was gone. When Max read his chart, it said that the nose had been bitten off during a bar fight.
Dr. Robb had warned Max that unusual or shocking cases often came through the studio. About a year ago, he said, he’d had an unusual plastic surgery case where a woman had lost a drastic amount of weight. When she came in, with her clothes on, she looked good. Then she went to undress behind the curtained-off area for patients, and Robb heard all kinds of strange noises, such as grunting and groaning, and rubber hitting the floor. It turned out that she had been wearing a weight-loss suit underneath her clothes. When she emerged, large flaps of loose skin hung down about twelve inches around her waist. Following through on the case, Dr. Robb photographed the plastic surgery team hanging up the excess skin on two IV poles—like skewering a piece of meat—then cutting it off, and then suturing the new ends together.
Sometimes Max took pictures of patients with wounds that seeped fluids onto the floor. He had to delicately maneuver a camera around the patients’ bodies and step over puddles to photograph the angles and poses ordered by the physician. Working quickly to reduce the patients’ agonies and embarrassments, Max got them back to their stretchers and on their way to where they’d come from. Next, he exchanged the camera for a mop and cleaned up the mess. It felt as though he were photographing so much horror and death, seeing such ugliness wrought upon the human body day in and day out. But it started to feel like the norm—until the day the students arrived.
One day toward the end of his two-week stint, a group of medical, nursing, biotech, and physical and occupational therapy students lined up out in the hallway to have their yearbook pictures taken. Each semester, the photo department arranged an entire day for these “mug shots.” It was a nice respite for Max—taking pictures of healthy faces—since he had spent most of his time in the studio looking through the viewfinder at people missing an eye, a leg, or some other anatomical part.
Max was quickly seduced by the hundreds of bright, fresh faces parading through the studio. “Sit here. Straighten your back. Tilt your head a little bit. Would you like a glass of water? You want a comb? Wet your lips—we want to see a little highlight. It’ll make you look great!” He made little trivial remarks to keep them around longer. No wonder the lines were so long.
When a nursing student walked in and said, “Hi, I’m Grace,” so loud and clear that Max found her easy to lipread, he slowed his pace even more. There was something terribly erotic about a woman who was easy to lipread. It gave him goose bumps watching her lips, tongue, and teeth wrap themselves perfectly around words. To regain his composure, he took his sweet time marking her name off the student roster. Then he fiddled with the camera, making calculations with an exposure meter in an effort to appear knowledgeable. In fact, no calculations were necessary, since all of the exposure settings had been preset and standardized for the yearbook portraits.
Grace knew instinctively how to pose. He snapped a few frames and then mustered the nerve to say, with his best pronunciation, “Stop by the studio and visit us again sometime.” Her blue eyes seemed to answer that she would indeed.
A week later, Grace did stop by, to ask Max how her picture had come out. None of the other students had ever stopped by to inquire about anything like that, but he took the time to track down her image. He put on a pair of white, lintless gloves—which nobody used to handle routine, superficial assignments like year-book pictures—and retrieved a 35mm negative strip out of its protective sleeve as if it were the only documentation of the Holy Shroud of Turin. He displayed the negative on a light box and invited Grace to look through a photo loupe at the five frames of her face—Max had gone three over par on the usual lab protocol of two shots per student.
The cool illumination coming up through the frosted glass accentuated her profile and the long auburn hair spilling onto the light box. She brushed a lock of hair back behind her ear, revealing a nicely shaped nose with a faint sprinkling of freckles. Her full lips almost kissed the surface of the glass. Max stood by her side, blocking the view from co-workers who might happen to walk by.
“How would you like to get together for a barbecue on the beach?” she said, still facing the glass.
Having a hard time lipreading sideways, he said, “I didn’t quite get that. Would you please look at me and repeat it? I’m deaf.”
“Oh, sure! You know, my father is hard of hearing.”
“Cool!” Max said. “I mean—not that he can’t hear well. But, cool that—umm—your father and I have something in common.”
“Oh, he hears pretty good with his hearing aids. He doesn’t need to read people’s lips.”
“I see,” said Max. “Well, I’m afraid I do.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” said Grace. “What I asked before was if you’d like to get together at the beach for a barbecue.” Her enunciation of the word barbecue ended with her lips puckered.
Max answered yes to the lips. He hoped his volume wasn’t too loud. After work he rushed home to shower and then drove over to Grace’s house, following her directions. She lived with her father and brother, who, Grace explained, would be joining them.
“Oh … great … swell, bring them along,” Max said. The more the warier, he thought. They all climbed into Grace’s car—a Mercedes SL380 convertible, Max noted. She drove down Seawall Boulevard and turned off at a beach access ramp that led to the hard-packed sand of Porretto Beach along the eastern end of Galveston Island. Grace parked the car a few feet away from the Gulf. What Max had grown to love about Galveston was that, even as late as November, the evenings still felt like balmy summer nights.
Grace’s father and brother set up the hibachi near the car and lit up the coals. Max could see that her father was wearing a Miracle-Ear hearing aid—about the size of a tiny snail shell, well concealed inside the ear canal. They were good for people with very mild hearing loss, but of no use to profoundly deaf people like Max.
Max and Grace played by the surf, throwing a Frisbee back and forth. He learned that her father was an orthopedic surgeon, a breed he considered the blue-collar workers of operating rooms. They were strong, quiet, and put in long hours doing messy work with hammers, saws, nuts, and bolts. Then it dawned on Max why her father looked familiar—he was the chief of Orthopedic Surgery, whom he had met months ago.
When the sun went down, they stopped throwing the Frisbee. Max moved in closer to read Grace’s lips. The hot dogs and baked beans were ready. He sat on a rock munching on his hot dog while Grace sat a few yards away on a big piece of driftwood with her father and brother. Max could hear their voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Grace’s face became a silhouette as darkness engulfed the sky. Max couldn’t see her lips or her smile. He wanted to talk but couldn’t; it would be like talking to the stars. He finished his meal in silence.
Back at her father’s house, they had coffee. Her brother went to his room. Max, Grace, and her father looked furtively at each other while sipping from their cups.
As if on cue, her father set down his cup and asked, “Max—do you consider Jesus Christ your personal savior?”
“Uh, no. Not really,” he said.
“I see.” After a long silence, he said, “Well, Grace, hon, time for me to turn in. Nice seein’ ya again, Max. Goodnight, y’all.”
Dempsey Maxwell McCall said goodnight—to all of them. He walked out the door and down the steps. He got into his car and rode away with the framed image of Grace’s blue eyes and smile forever etched in his mind.
December 20, 1981
Pathology Lab
To my dear family (feel free to share w/ relatives):
Merry Xmas! Yesterday, the whole Pathology Department had their annual Christmas dinner at a fancy restaurant in Galveston. It was a dressy affair; Zag and I each brought a date. The whole thing was paid for by the department. Open bar and prime ribs were the highlights of the evening -- they were actually better than our dates.
I still feel bad & guilty that I’m gonna miss the holidays with you all for the first time in my life. As I mentioned over the phone, most everyone here will be gone for two weeks. That means we get the lab to ourselves to totally focus on developing our portfolios and not have to worry about the day-to-day operations of the lab. No interruptions. As Zag would say, “We gotta bang this sucker out.”
Made a little something for you since at the present time I can’t afford lavish gifts. I gathered a bunch of slides, some mine and some Zag’s, and put together a slide show with a script. I’ve enclosed a slide carousel since I’m not sure if I left one behind at home for you when I left. The slides are all in order -- every time you get to the next number on the script, all you have to do is advance to the next slide. This show revolves around bits and pieces of the life that I lead down here. Not all parts are represented because I don’t have a photographic record of EVERYTHING I do. If I did, you all would keel over from shock [FLOP] …
After the show you are probably going to think, “Does our son ever do any work, or is he ever serious about life?” Yes folks, he studies hard, works hard, has a serious side, but doesn’t want to bore you with that part of him.
OK, hit the lights …
SCRIPT:
Slide #1: here’s a little tour around Pirate’s Beach where Zag and I live. This is the entrance to our beach community. The road we’re on is Pirate’s Beach Boulevard. Legend has it that pirate Jean Lafitte buried some of his plunder here between 1817 and 1820. To this day it’s never been found.
Slide #2: folks, this is it! Home Sweet Temporary Home, the place where two aspiring medical photographers are developing their exquisite talents, and are on their way to fame and fortune. You can’t quite see our backyard, but every now and then Zag or I take a shovel and dig into the grass and lift up a hunk of sod to see if we can discover Lafitte’s treasure. Hey -- can you blame us?? The yard looks a little funny, like it’s been raided by a family of groundhogs with all those little mounds everywhere. We’ll flatten the yard out one day. (Don’t tell our landlord -- wink, wink.)
Slide #3: this is the site of the “Battle of Three Trees,” ignited when Lafitte’s men stole an Indian squaw. The cannibalistic Indians avenged the kidnapping by devouring four of Lafitte’s men. Hmmm, wonder if that’s how Texas got famous for its barbecue …
Slide #4: our beloved TV which we turn on every morning at 6:30 Monday—Friday to watch The Three Stooges for half an hour. We caught one episode where the Stooges played photographers. They were developing film in a darkroom. Here’s a snippet of their actual dialogue:
Larry: I can’t find the negative.
Moe: How about the positive?
Curly: I’m positive about the negative, but I’m a little negative about the positive.
Moe: Oh, negative, eh?
Curly: No, I’m positive the negative is in the developer.
They’re a great waker-upper and keep us from going off the deep end.
Slide #5: now for a look at the beach … occasionally we see horseback riders galloping up and down the hard-packed sand we have here. It’s a beautiful sight, but you have to watch where you step, especially if you’re barefoot [SPLAT! arrrgggh!! #@%$!!!]
Slide #6: there are many beautiful homes along the beach. Here is one that I especially like. It looks like one of those fancy restaurants that is partway over the water. I’ve heard they’ve called this whole area a “playground for alcoholic playboys of the Houston rich.”
