Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (31 page)

24

Pigskin Dreams

W
hen I turned seven, my father bought me an authentic Wilson leather football. I could not hold it, as my hand was too small. My mother thought my father a bit premature and told him so. “He will
grow,
” he signed to her, his hidden closed right hand appearing ever so slowly from behind his open left covering hand. Rising upward, it grew, spreading wide, flushed with new life. I saw all this in his sign: the petals of a blooming plant unfolding as the stalk of his right arm rose ever higher, seeking the warmth of the sun. Then, so there was no doubt as to how big I’d be one day, he held his right hand palm down at his waist, and slowly raised it until it was over his head—and he smiled.

Watching my father’s sign, I tried to imagine myself someday as strong as he was and even taller. That, I thought, could not be possible.

I was more fascinated by my father’s signs than I was with the large clumsy object, now forgotten, that he had placed into my hands.

My father wanted desperately for me to have the childhood he never had—the carefree joy of his brother and sisters at play, which he’d watched from afar.

I grew. And as I grew, my father encouraged me to play the various street games of our block, the same games that were played on every block and in every neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Unlike my friends’ fathers, who were usually too tired after a day’s work or too preoccupied with the lengthening reach of the Depression, my father was an avid and in time a knowledgeable observer of these street games. And he was my greatest fan. As my friends and I played, he would stand on the curb, which was the sideline of our football field and the third-base line of our stickball games. Our “playing field” was not covered in the soft green grass of a real football field but in black unyielding macadam, interrupted by the occasional cast-iron manhole cover. All in all, it was a most inhospitable surface upon which to slide or fall.

And yet I would fall, and I would slide. Each fall and slide was accompanied by my father’s deaf voice shouting encouragement. “Great catch!” “You’re safe!” Though my friends could make no sense of these harsh sounds, I understood them, and they were the unremarked-upon accompaniment to many of our games.

One memorable day, while reaching for a winning touchdown pass, I ran into a parked car. My last conscious thought was that I had my man beat. I woke up in Coney Island Hospital. The first person I saw was my father sitting beside my bed. “You scored,” he signed. Then he added, “Now what the heck will we tell Mother?”

O
n a late-summer day when I had just turned sixteen, I reported for football tryouts, which were held on our high school football field. The field, like our school, was new—so new that it lacked even a single blade of grass. I would shortly discover that it did not lack other objects, most noticeably stones. I would further observe that those stones, randomly seeded, were uniformly hard. But I figured this field could not be any harder than the macadam on which I had learned to play the game.

The coach presiding over the tryouts was Harry Ostro, who had served with the 101st Airborne in World War II. Ostro had been a paratrooper in the largest airborne battle in history, Operation Market Garden, which was immortalized some thirty years later in the movie
A Bridge Too Far.
After successfully leading his platoon inside enemy lines, Ostro had been seriously wounded. But all I knew about him at the time, and only because it was all too visible, was that he had a metal plate in his head—something he never spoke about. The coach was, then and now, the toughest man I ever met. (He still pumps out fifty push-ups a day, having recently turned ninety-two.) The coach didn’t talk, he growled.

I made the squad that day—not for my negligible skills, but for my ability to survive the grueling physical and mental demands he imposed on us—and spent the next three months in mortal fear. Like my teammates, I never feared the opposing team. It was our coach we feared.

My father came to every game. Although I rode the bench, rarely seeing any action, he could not be dissuaded from coming. In rain or shine, sleet, and once in a driving early-season snowstorm, he was there. Sitting on the bench, my back turned to the stands, I couldn’t see my father, but I could hear his guttural voice as it cut through the shouts of the other spectators.

High school was a new world for me. My fellow students had rarely if ever seen a deaf man before, and I had dreaded the prospect of watching them stiffen, as people almost invariably did, at the strange sound of my father’s voice. My teammates, however, soon grew accustomed to my father, just as my friends on the block had. And they came to appreciate him for being such a loyal fan of our team.

Football was my passport to normalcy in high school. At that age especially, kids have a strong desire to fit in, to be like the others, to be part of the crowd, and as the child of deaf parents, I yearned more than most to hide behind a shield of normalcy. Because of football, I ceased to be known as the deaf man’s son; instead I was known as a football player.

When my first season ended and I was awarded a football letter, my mother sewed it onto my varsity sweater. I wore that sweater until it was in tatters.

The following year I grew two inches and added twenty pounds to my previously scrawny frame. I had matured enough for my coach to use me in games more frequently. At least, he reasoned, I wouldn’t be killed.

My father came to every game, as usual. Now we would spend the evening after the contest analyzing the good and bad plays. My father caught on fast, becoming an astute student of football. But to describe the nuances of the game, we had to teach ourselves a whole new vocabulary of signs.

The night before the final game of that season, unbeknownst to us, our star tailback fell down a flight of stairs and landed, right hand extended, on a broken milk bottle. The next afternoon he showed up for the game—at the field of our archrivals, New Utrecht High School—with his arm heavily bandaged. He could not suit up. The team was in a state of shock. Joe Darienzo was a senior. This was to be his last game. He was Brooklyn’s best tailback and the leader of our team. We all sat there in the locker room prior to the opening kickoff, dejected and with a sense of impending doom.

The coach stood with his arm draped over Joe’s shoulder and addressed the team.

“Men, this is the most important game of the season.”

We knew that.

“Joe wanted more than anything to play this game. But he can’t.”

We knew that.

“Joe is an important part of this team. But it is the
team
that wins or loses, not any single man.”

We knew that.

“As a
team,
we can win this game today.”

We weren’t at all sure of that.

Then he told us that I would start in Joe’s place.

That I hadn’t known. Nor had the team or my father. But when my father saw me in the backfield behind the center on the very first play, he knew that this would be a memorable game. And he began to dream up new football signs, since we would have much to discuss that evening.

How much, I had no idea as I stood in a daze waiting to receive the opening hike. Our center was looking back at me, upside down between his legs, with obvious skepticism on his face. His look did little to reassure me. The rest of the game passed in a blur. The only solid memory I have is being yelled at. The coach yelled at me. Joe, overcoat slung over his shoulder, his arm in a sling, ranging up and down the sidelines, yelled at me. My father, who had been given a sideline pass for the game, yelled at me, as he relentlessly recorded my every boneheaded mistake on his wind-up movie camera.

Every pass I threw was a picture-perfect spiral…right into the hands of a waiting defensive receiver. Every run I made was stopped at the line of scrimmage. Every inept hand-off to another backfield man I attempted was fumbled.

However, my teammates played an exemplary game, more than making up for my mistakes. In the final quarter we were tied. In the waning minutes our coach came up with a desperation play, an all-or-nothing shot at winning. It was based on the assumption that, given my pathetic performance all that long afternoon, nobody on the opposing team would be paying me much attention. As a threat, I was about as dangerous as our head cheerleader. So no one would wonder why the hike from center would go not to me, as was normal, but to our fullback, who was to my right. Exaggerating the fact that I was empty-handed, I veered to the left. (Being adept at sign language, I was an excellent mime and finally I had a role on this miserable afternoon that I could fill.) Meanwhile, the fullback made a big show of handing the ball off to Tommy La Spada, our shifty wingback, who was headed in the other direction. While this dumb show was playing itself out in the backfield, our linemen went into a choreographed ballet, feinting this way and that, confusing not only the opposing team but themselves as well.

In the midst of all the hullabaloo, with studied nonchalance I drifted back to my right, and Tommy, coming from the other direction, handed the ball to me with such deft sleight-of-hand that the oncoming defensive end missed the move. One look at the fierce expression on his face, and Tommy realized that the end was setting himself up to crush him to the ground. Tommy, although tough as nails, was one of the smallest members of the team—and he was no fool. I heard him scream, “
I don’t have the ball!
” That was a clarion call for me to get out of there fast.

Our cartoon play was so successful that no one now was watching me—and I ran for my life down the right sideline, unnoticed and untouched, and scored a touchdown. We had won the game, just as our coach had said. The crowd went wild. Through all the outpouring of sound, I could clearly make out my father’s harsh, whooping voice.

That evening my father laughingly taught me the strangest signs I would ever learn in my lifetime.

25

Exodus

M
y senior year in high school, I was offered a football scholarship to Brandeis University, a brand-new school in New England that had sophomore, junior, and senior classes but needed a freshman class. It also needed football players who would be willing to take the chance of going to a school that wouldn’t even be eligible for accreditation for another two years.

I had also been offered a football scholarship to NYU—but their campus was in the Bronx, and if I accepted that offer, it would mean continuing to live at home and commuting to school by subway. I never considered it for a moment.

My father was ecstatic. I would be the first on either side of my family to go to college.

“You must look like a college man,” he signed. “I don’t want them to think you’re a yokel from the sticks.” Brooklyn? The
sticks
? I didn’t argue. My going to college was going to be as exciting an experience for him as it would be for me. And I wouldn’t deny him the pleasure of dressing me up like a college man. Our once-a-year trips to Mr. Bloomingdale and Mr. R. and H. Macy became an almost weekly ritual the summer after my senior year in high school. Clutching photographs of college men torn out of magazines in his hand, my father scoured the racks of suits to find those that would make me look the part, and—perhaps more important—would last for four years.