The Mosquitofishers

I wear hearing aids- when I have to, or when I want to hear something, like a movie or an interesting person. Mostly with the aids, the world is annoying like my nerves are being rubbed with sandpaper until I can’t stand it. I hear rustling of leaves around my feet and it sounds like someone is creeping up on me. The sound of sand on the beach is really bad, screeching and scratchy.

I never knew that other people could hear in the dark. I could not see in the dark, and so it made sense that it was hard to hear in the dark, too. I didn’t know I could lip read until a doctor told me I had learned to unconsciously, and he proved it by saying the same thing in front of me and with my back turned.

But in elementary school, I didn’t have hearing aids. Mom was a big proponent of “LABELED IS DISABLED” and felt like I was already teased badly enough without having hearing aids. Plus she and my dad did not believe I was very deaf, just a little hard of hearing. I agreed with them on that, and I would not wear my aids to school even when the teachers insisted my parents get them for me. My parents did not believe a lot of things. They also did not believe that I should have been a boy and should be allowed to be one. How could I wear a dress, or girl’s things? The idea was so awful. Later, getting breasts was a terrible deformity that attacked my body, and I wore a Guatemalan poncho cape for three years to school until I accepted my giant breasts. Gradually I gave up my reality of being a boy. Like in that old show “What happens to a dream deferred…(something something…) it dries up Like a Raisin In The Sun.” But my breasts remained round and unwrinkled and would not go away.

I got crushes on boys and girls and teachers, none of them had crushes back on me. Some kids got crushes on me but I felt repulsed by them. I found a misfit poet boyfriend and got rid of my humiliating virginity, but I was definitely a failure at being either male or female.

I had a reputation for not listening to my parents or other people, either. I was both shy and stubborn. Mostly I sat in the back of the classroom and was so bored. Waiting for recess, when I could read a book. Before hearing aids, I had no idea the teacher was teaching so much with her voice. I almost never heard the other kids’ answers, unless they were trying to annoy me with loud whispers or fake sign language or lipsynching “Fuck You”. I looked at the board, tried to lipread, and I would get tired from trying to listen and looking, I would cover my eyes and press on my eyeballs until endless warping checkerboards of gray and gold appeared. The teacher would come over and ask was I okay. I was. The checkerboards were fascinating.

So eventually- homeschooling, hearing aids, Deaf summer camp where I learned some sign language and that there were other people like me. Now I’m seventeen.

Google- raising a fuss all the time ever since he was born, and my parents busy with his therapy and tutors and finally deciding to homeschool him too. For Google, computers saved him. Whatever was wrong with him, at least he would always have some kind of way to make money. "Labeled is Disabled", and Mom refused to have him properly tested and classified “like a genetic mistake”, even though then he would have gotten some free therapy and help in school.

I hated Google when he was born, and when he was growing up, he was the biggest pain. I had to pretend to love him because my parents did, and they would say how they were so happy he had a sister who would help him out when they got too old to take care of him. Ugh, that was a terrifying thought, and made me hate him even more as he hogged all the attention that he didn’t want, that I did. But luckily his strength of mind made him determined to figure out computers and animals, especially fish.

And I loved animals too. I only ever wanted to know one thing: how they thought, and if I could just be in their brain for a moment of my life, then I would be happy forever. I had to become a scientist, an animal behaviorist, because I would become part of the scientists' secret realm, and know the secrets of animals. “THEY” knew these things, more than God. Science and Martin Luther King were my parents’ gods, and the Ku Klux Klan was the horrifying Devil of their family theology; a confused and never explained atheist agnostic religion. I never understood it all, since Mom’s hippie days had added some psychedelic insights about infinite universes, which did not fit with the rest of it. But I knew with solid faith that scientists were to be believed in. “They Say” was the ultimate pronouncement. I wanted to be one of “Them”. An expert.

As teenagers, Google and I became better friends, and our animals were the most important things. Mom and Dad divorced after staying together with hatred “for the sake of the children” for many years, and finally we could have a normal relationship with each of them separately. They could talk now, and negotiate. But Dad was not making much money, he was trying to recover from being a real estate agent and losing everything. Dad had bought our house as an investment, and felt guilty for ruining all of our lives. Mom was stuck in a bad job that tired her out, and she had no time for us. When she got really down, she would utter her magic totem words, “Health Insurance,” and get the strength to go to work another day.