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    Deaf Man Rocking
    Deaf Man Rocking
    Deaf Man Rocking
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    Deaf Man Rocking

    By Daryl Gramling

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    About this ebook

    Deaf Man Rocking is the hilarious story of a guy who has never heard his own jokes. Born with a severe hearing problem, verbal misunderstandings became a way of life, often to insanely humorous effect. The book covers the author's experiences with hearing aids as well as a cochlear implant. So with a computer chip permanently embedded in his skull, technically that makes the author a Cyborg. (He is quite harmless, however.) If you've ever wondered what it must be like to be deaf or very nearly so, this book will keep you laughing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaryl Gramling
    Release dateFeb 7, 2014
    ISBN9781310620775
    Deaf Man Rocking
    Author

    Daryl Gramling

    Daryl Gramling is the author of multiple works, ranging from serious non-fiction (100 Tough Questions for God) to humor (Deaf Man Rocking) to an upcoming novel (Executive Orders). He was born with a severe hearing loss which progressed to almost total deafness in his late 20s. In 1999 he was the recipient of an experimental cochlear implant which was undergoing clinical trials in the United States prior to formal FDA approval.Daryl resides in the Atlanta, Georgia area with his wife and two children.

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      Book preview

      Deaf Man Rocking - Daryl Gramling

      Deaf Man Rocking

      By Daryl Gramling

      Copyright 2014 Daryl Gramling

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share it, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, please visit Smashwords.com and purchase your personal copy. Thank you so much for respecting the hard work of the author.

      Table of Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Chapter 1 - Mrs. Jordan’s Epiphany

      Chapter 2 - Read My Lips: Cloudy With a 34% Chance of Weirdness

      Chapter 3: D.A.R.Y.L.

      Chapter 4- Move Over, Arnold. You’re In My Spot

      Chapter 5 - Mom and the FBI Scare

      Chapter 6 - Raising the Dead

      Chapter 7 - Bed Shakers, Strobe Lights, and TTY, Oh My!

      Chapter 8 - What Does She See In Him, Anyway?

      Chapter 9 - I Heard a Challenge

      Chapter 10 - I Once Was Deaf, But Now I Don’t Hear Too Good

      Chapter 11 – I Heard ‘Dat

      Chapter 12 - So You Want To Get an Implant and Be Like Me?

      Chapter 13 - An Interview with Yours Truly. (The Interview Tom Brokaw Never Got)

      Chapter 14 - It’s Not THAT Kind of Implant

      Chapter 15 - Yes, it’s That Ridiculous

      Chapter 16 - Deaf Man Rocking

      Connect with Your Author

      Other Books by Daryl Gramling

      Resources

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      This edition is dedicated to the amazing teams at Advanced Bionics for their leadership in developing and promoting the technology that brings rich, vivid sound to my ears every day of the year. To the engineers and scientists for pushing the technological envelope; to the corporate leaders for their vision; to the design and testing teams for solving countless challenges too great for me to comprehend; to the audiologists whose expertise keeps things running smoothly; to the surgeons who make seriously invasive surgery look easy; for the customer service team (you guys are incredible!); and for all the associates and partners of Advanced Bionics. Some of you I have had the privilege of meeting, many of you I haven’t. But I tip my hat to you all for bringing me back to the land of the hearing after I had lost it all.

      To my family – Kim, Katie, and Wesley, for their endless patience with my hearing problem over the years, and to my parents for telling me that a deaf man can still rock.

      Chapter 1

      Mrs. Jordan’s Epiphany

      Being hearing impaired is a funny thing.

      I don’t mean that in an abstract or philosophical way, although that certainly is true. When something is wrong with your body in an area as profound as one of your five main senses, it affects you in more ways than others can possibly imagine. For example, someone with normal hearing can easily pick up the phone and order pizza on a Friday night. But because I don’t hear on the phone, I can’t do that. For years, I basically had the choice of driving across town for my pizza or suffering with some really bad frozen fish sticks.

      Thankfully the Internet has changed all that, and these days I order pizza so much the driver often picks up his mail at my house. The Internet certainly has made my life so much better, largely because I no longer have to eat fish sticks. But when I say being hearing impaired is a funny thing, I’m not talking philosophically. I’m talking about the utter hilarity of it all. As a hearing impaired person (HIP), obviously there are many things I don’t hear that a normal person would. But the opposite is also gloriously true: the HIP constantly hears things that normal folks never do. Words get distorted, dropped, mangled, and blended together in ways God never intended, with the result being that the words arriving within the ears of the HIP can have an altogether different meaning than they did when they left the mouth of the speaker.

      It was in the middle of the fifth grade when I first discovered this sobering truth. Mrs. Jordan stood before her loyal class one day and happily announced that we would play a fun game expressly designed to publicly humiliate a certain member of the class, namely me. As with the case of most evil things, it sounded so perfectly harmless. What I’m going to do is whisper something into the ear of the person in the front of the first row here, quietly enough that no one else can hear it. That person will turn around and whisper the same thing into the ear of the person behind them, and so on and so on until we get to the last person in the room.

      That sounded a lot more fun than reading about how the ancient Sumerians didn’t even have the Internet, which of course was why fish was such an important staple of their diet. So most of the class thought this was a terrific idea. But although I couldn’t hear it too well, in the background arose the haunting theme song from the movie Jaws. I knew exactly what was about to happen, and before I could inform Mrs. Jordan that I had developed a sudden case of diarrhea and had to be excused for the safety and well being of my peers, the person in front of me turned around and leaned over to whisper to me. Her name was April, and it was about the fifth grade when I started getting interested in girls. Up to this point April was very pretty and although I hadn’t yet worked up the self-confidence to suavely make my move, hope springs eternal.

      But in this case, Al Qaeda detonated a roadside bomb that blew the sheer living heck out of that particular spring. When April turned around, her lovely, innocent face contorted like Jim Carey in The Mask. Before my very eyes she went from young and pretty to a horrid combination of Shrek and the Wicked Witch of the West. I tried to recoil from this nightmare leaning toward me, but she grabbed my shirt and quickly whispered something unintelligible in my ear.

      Huh? said I.

      More whispering. One more time, said I. More whispering, with just a touch of eye rolling thrown in to let me know I better not ask her again. Now get the picture. Here I am with thirty of my peers peering intently in my direction and wondering why I don’t turn around and repeat it to the person behind me. It was just a simple game, and I had better not screw it up. At that precise moment, two things happened. First, April looked at me in complete disgust and said, You idiot, it’s 1981. Shrek hasn’t even been invented yet. Second, I discovered a self-defense mechanism that hearing-impaired people from time immemorial have used with varying degrees of success.

      I pretended to understand something.

      So thinking quickly, I turned around and, to everyone’s relief, confidently whispered something into the ear of the student behind me. So all’s well that ends well, and before the school year was out, April and I were caught kissing passionately in the janitor’s closet, right?

      Not quite. I would go on to discover that on occasion, pretending I heard something indeed got me out of an uncomfortable jam, particularly when the subject matter was completely unimportant. For example, suppose I am place an order inside a local fast food establishment and have told the cashier I want a burger, fries, and coke. The cashier asks me a question that is clearly a yes/no question, but I don’t hear what he said and simply reply, ‘yes’. What’s the worst that could happen? I mean the cashier wouldn’t have asked me if I enjoyed cross-dressing or something. Most likely he had asked if this was a to-go order. So when I said yes, even if I had planned on sitting down, the worst that could happen was I carried a to-go bag to the nearest available table.

      But in Mrs. Jordan’s class on that fateful day, my evil scheme backfired. When the last student had received the whispered message, Mrs. Jordan concluded the game by asking him to whisper in her ear what he had been told. When he had done so, Mrs. Jordan said, What? You have got to be kidding me.

      So like a sleazy district attorney trying desperately to prove the guilt of an obviously innocent bystander, she marched to the desk of the previous student and asked, What did the person in front of you say? Same answer. So she proceeded to work backwards, getting closer and closer to my desk. I gulped, realizing that when she got to the person in front of me, it was all over. April would hop a horse and ride off into the sunset, leaving me coughing in the dust. It was the fifth grade, and there was no way she would be interested in someone who had just been laughed out of Mrs. Jordan’s class.

      So in short order the moment came. Mrs. Jordan stood at my desk and I meekly reported something that sounded as close to April’s message as possible. She asked April what she had heard from the person in front of her, and when Shrek, I mean April, opened her terrible mouth to speak, the secret was out.

      So, concluded Mrs. Jordan, we have our culprit here. What I said to the first student was, ‘I had an epiphany and want you to know it.’

      I closed my eyes and shook my head in abject defeat. And what smart-aleck Daryl thought would be quite funny was, ‘I have a big fanny and wish I would show it.

      And that

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