Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (8 page)

Pained frustration pinched my father’s face as he looked uncomprehendingly at my incomprehensible, stuttering signs.

Equally frustrated, I leaped instinctively to my feet, swinging my arms, my childish fists extended. As I listened to each detail describing the action in the ring, I danced in circles in front of my father. I swung. I ducked. I bobbed. I weaved.

The punches I threw jolted my arms. The invisible impact of their landing shot up into my shoulders. I hunched in pain. But my face was Joe Louis’s stoic mask, the one my father had shown me in the newspaper. I was killing Schmeling, that Nazi rat. Take
that
! How about
this
! Smack—my leather glove beat a tattoo on Schmeling’s bloody puss. I was making hamburger out of his Aryan face, turning his Nazi body into mincemeat. So much for the Master Race.

I rose up on my toes and pursued the retreating, cowering Schmeling around the ring.

I heard the announcer scream,
He can run, but he can’t hide. Louis has Schmeling on the ropes. He’s pounding the bejesus out of him. HE’S DOWN! HE’S DOWN! SCHMELING’S DOWN! He’s on the canvas.

I dropped to the floor and lay spread-eagled on the rag rug.

Louis is standing over Schmeling.

I jumped up. I stared down at the rug impassively.

Schmeling’s twitching.

I dropped to the floor. Rolled on my back. I twitched.

Schmeling’s as still as a stone.

I was as still as a stone.

The referee waves Louis to a neutral corner.

I jumped up and followed his command, taking myself to what I deemed the neutral corner of the room.

ONE.

I signed in exaggerated emphasis the number one
…TWO…
two
…THREE…
three
…SCHMELING’S TRYING TO GET UP…
I fell down. I tried to rise…and continued signing
…FOUR…
four
…FIVE…
five
…SCHMELING FALLS BACK TO THE CANVAS…
I fell back on the rug
…SIX…
six…I signed the number from the floor
…SEVEN…
seven
…EIGHT…
eight
…NINE…
nine
…TEN…
I made a fist, thrust my thumb up, and wiggled my hand furiously…
TEN.

IT”S ALL OVER! SCHMELING’S OUT!
I was signing like a maniac.

THE BROWN BOMBER IS THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE W.O.R.L.D.!

The noise from my radio was deafening.

I paraded around the room, arms upraised in victory; the tumultuous cheering pouring from the radio was music to my ears. “Take
that,
Adolf,” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

My father was whooping and hollering and stamping his feet on the floor in wild unleashed joy.

The neighbors in the apartment below us were pounding on their ceiling with the end of a broom. Our next-door neighbors were banging on the wall between our apartments. The neighbors upstairs were stomping their feet on their floor. It was chaos.

My mother felt the noise from the floor below her feet, and the reverberations from the walls and ceiling, and ran into the room in alarm.

My deaf father heard nothing, but the look on his face said it all. He was laughing uproariously at my performance. Tears were coming out of his eyes and running down his cheeks.

“
Great fight!
” he signed, when he caught his breath, “
I understood everything!
”

I stood there in the middle of the ring, on the rag-rug canvas, exhausted but proud. Thank heavens, I thought, the fight had lasted less than one round. At my age I was in no shape to go the distance.

“I didn’t know you knew how to box.” He broke up again. “Your signing was great. Very clear.” Then he laughed again; he couldn’t contain himself.

Every year, after that performance, I was called upon to do it all over again, as Joe Louis fought his way through, and disposed of, an endless string of hapless opponents. Fortunately for me, in 1939 Joe Louis KO’d John Henry Lewis in the first round. No pile-driving man was this John Henry. He was sent to the canvas with one punch from the Brown Bomber’s lethal fist.

My father was delighted, as was every other American, white and black.

The next year I turned seven, and Louis KO’d the oddly named, I thought, Johnny Paychek, in the second round. What the poor fellow had to do to earn his
paycheck
that night at the hands (fists) of Louis, I couldn’t imagine. Personally I wouldn’t go in the ring with Joe Louis for all the tea in China, let alone a mere
paycheck.

The fight had gone one round further than I had fought before. My stamina was improving, and my signing as well. But still my father preferred for me to do my
special
signing for each match.

I
n 1941 both my endurance and my
special
signing were put to the test. On a warm, clear June evening, Joe Louis fought the upstart, much lighter and smaller but dangerous boxer, Billy Conn. My father was wild about this fight but terribly conflicted. He explained, as a runup to the bout, that Billy Conn was a Jew fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world. My father’s head was with his religious brother, Conn, but his heart was with his long-time hero, Louis.

In anticipation of the fight, I went into training. My father had told me this would not be a one-round affair. Conn was too agile for that. He would stay out of reach of Louis’s gloves. There fore I needed to build up my wind. This time I might be called up on to got he distance. My father had signed to me that Conn could
dance:
the two fingers of his right hand formed a V, and the legs of the V
danced
across his open left hand. I could
see
BillyConn’s plan; he intended to
dance
his way to a decision. So I practiced dancing. When there was music on my radio, I had often seen my father dancing with my mother to the rhythms they both felt rising from the floorboards. With that image in my mind, I practiced.

By the night of the fight, I was ready; and now I had added my mother to the audience. She knew absolutely nothing about boxing and cared even less, but she seemed fascinated by my strange manic antics. Where my father laughed, she stared in utter amazement.

As they sat in obvious anticipation, I turned on my radio, and the fight began. I immediately went into a crouch and retreated, dancing. I was Billy Conn.

I ducked, I bobbed, I weaved around the room. Then I reversed position—now I was Joe Louis. I stalked, I threw ineffectual jabs in the air, into the space Conn had just vacated.

BONG!
The end of round one.

And so it went, round after round. I retreated. I advanced. I ducked. I swung. And I danced. Boy, oh, boy, did I ever dance that night; I danced my eight-year-old heart out. The look of pure amazement and wonder on my mother’s face was my reward.

Rounds ten, eleven, and twelve came and went, with the same result: Louis advancing, Conn dancing.

Billy Conn’s on the balls of his feet,
the announcer screamed.
He’s dancing up a storm. Dancing. Dancing. Louis CAN’T CATCH HIM!

Between rounds I sat in my
corner
(on the kitchen stool I had put there for that purpose). I was exhausted. How long, I wondered, could I—I mean, Billy Conn—last?

In the thirteenth round I had my answer. NOT LONG!
Conn is retreating. Conn is dancing, dancing…OOOPS, Louis has Conn trapped in the far corner of the ring. Conn looks desperate! He can’t go left. He can’t go right.
I stepped to my left. I stepped to my right. I was right back where I started from, trapped in the corner of the room.

Louis is shooting short punches to Conn’s body. Conn is covering. Now Louis is punching to the head. Look at those punches! They only travel six inches, but what damage they’re causing!
I covered my head. My head bounced backward, then sideways.
Louis is a punching machine.
Then I reversed position and punched, punched, punched the air. I was Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. I was a piston, a pile-driving man.

A tremendous roar shot out from the radio.
Conn’s down. He’s down! HE’S DOWN! Louis caught him right on the end of the jaw, between a bob and a weave.
My bobbing stopped. My weaving ended. My chin jerked up.
Conn’s not dancing now.
I stopped dancing. I fell.
You can run, but you can’t hide. Not from the Brown Bomber.
Lying on the rag rug of the
ring,
I knew that. “You can run, but you can’t hide from Joe Louis.”

The count droned its way to the inevitable conclusion of every one of Joe Louis’s fights:
TEN! AND YOU’RE OUT!

I leaped to my feet. I signed the inevitable numbers. I signed,
FINISHED!

Wonderful! Wonderful!
my father signed with obvious glee.

My mother just looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time, dumbstruck. She had never, in all the eight years of my life, witnessed such a signing performance. She was impressed.

In 1942 Joe Louis was inducted into the United States Army, along with a million other young boys and grown men. So were two of my mother’s younger brothers: Harry, the quiet one, who, to the consternation of his mother, Celia, dated only Italian girls and was as chary of his words as he was of his money; and Milton, the youngest, who always had much to say, all of it directed at the failures of the capitalist system. In those simple days you volunteered; you did not wait to be drafted. It was a different war, a much different time.

There would be no more fights for the duration. Even kids knew what the “duration” meant—until the war was over. While this life-and-death struggle was being fought, everything in our young lives would be suspended for the “duration.” And the cry went up all over Brooklyn, from a million mothers’ lips, every time we asked for something: “Don’t you know there’s a war on!” That effectively ended every discussion.

The fact that I could now take a break from my
special
signing was okay with me, as I didn’t think I had another round in me after that epic fight.

By 1946, however, when the war was over and Joe Louis resumed his boxing career, I was thirteen and stronger. Although my signing was now much more sophisticated and complex, my father insisted I continue to sign the fights as I had in the old days, with my
special
signing. So it was lucky for me that I had gained in strength and endurance, because Louis was now older and slower; he did not finish off his opponents as quickly as he once had. His bouts lasted many rounds. In 1947 he took the full fifteen rounds to gain a decision over the up-and-coming Jersey Joe Walcott. My father told me that that was my best performance as a fighter…he meant, signer.

I
n 1949 my father bought a DuMont television set. It had been reduced to $999. In those days the minimum wage was forty cents an hour. How my father managed this purchase is still beyond me. Being deaf, however, he viewed television not as a luxury but as a necessity.

With a plastic magnifying lens hooked to the front of the set by two wires, the eye-squinting eight-by-ten-inch screen was blown up to a highly distorted twenty-inch one. The resulting watery, convex image made us feel like goldfish looking out through the glass sides of a fish tank.

From now on my father would watch the fights on TV. There was no longer any need for me to sign them for him.

And so I retired, undefeated. In an extended ceremony, as my mother looked on with great amusement, my father crowned me with a newspaper hat that he had made out of a page from the day’s paper; I was now the reigning world champion of boxing signs.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, my father signed to me wistfully, “Sure, I like to see the fights on TV now, but somehow they just don’t have the same
excitement
as when you were in your prime.” I felt good knowing this. But then he added, a gleam in his eye, a smile on his lips, “And they sure aren’t nearly as funny.”

 
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