Intro
Tailgating whist deaf,
auditory overload.
Outside is better.
I’d not been to a football game of any breed in a dog’s age. Fifteen years. I mean look at this picture of my old man and I. It was taken with a digital camera. You can tell by the date stamp. (Ignore the timestamp, apparently that camera was like a VCR; setting the clock requires a doctorate in mechanical engineering)
And that foray into fervor didn’t include a tailgate. In fact, I’d never done the whole tailgate thing. I’ve been to more hockey games than I have football games and one does not tailgate for hockey. And after talking with Venus, I found out tailgating isn’t a Canadian thing at all. So perhaps my ‘gating blindspot is due to my Canadian heritage?
But I digress. And allow me one more digression before I get down to it.
My time at Northeastern (BA in English ‘03!) did not include any semblance of college life. I needed dinero to help pay for that surely-it-will-be-lucrative degree. And so that old man above helped me get a job at Partners Healthcare in the Data Center. On the graveyard shift. I worked various days and various times during my time there. But no matter which variety you’re talking about, during college it would always include the midnight to eight shift. I would work all night and then go to school during the day. I lived in Dorchester, not on campus. This meant that I was either sleeping or commuting or working during the prime college life hours.
So this is what happens when a hard of hearing forty-something introvert goes to his first college football tailgate.
In the Parking Lot
Mark pulled the truck into his assigned spot early-ish. The lot was already dotted with cars and cops, tents and grills. I appreciated being early because it allowed my introverted ass (and the rest of me) to ease into the experience. Getting to a party late is like being dropped into the deep end of a pool that’s filled with ice. It’s a mental shock that’s felt physically. The dots quickly became dashes and then solid lines of people and cars. As it became increasingly hard to hear, I was surprised to learn this was going to be an introvert-forward experience.
The game was in September and this specific September was a painful one that left my feelings ebbing and ragged; my nerves flowing and raw. I’m not ready to write about the source of the pain. I only mention it because it informed my thinking, my experiencing my first tailgate. It also allows me to bring water to the story. Because it was raining. It rained and rained and rained some more. I’m superbly grateful the next experience Julie has lined up for me is taking place under the shelter of a roof!
While it rained the entire time, karma was kind and it treaded between a drizzle and a downpour. I was dressed appropriately and walked around like a Sith Lord. Hood up. Hoods also have an added benefit of making others more understanding of not hearing. Either that or the omnipresent background hubbub of many raindrops and many conversations made it harder for everyone to hear weather (#sorrynotsorry) or not they were hearing impaired. I didn’t care what the reason was, I was just glad to be afforded the understanding. Because like I said, my introversion was out front in this experience.
I felt the crush of the crowd physically. And it didn’t matter if anybody was actually bumping into me. Everyone has a personal space bubble. Introvert bubbles just happen to be human hamster wheel sized. For this introvert, that bubble welcomes in people I know and people I’m getting to know. Which worked out very well for my hearing needs. I would have to lean in as Julie introduced me to kith and kin. If we were separated by a food-laden table, I would have to play Bizarro Mad Libs. I would hear only a few nouns and the occasional verb. I have to fill in the blank nouns and adjectives; verbs and adverbs.
As the crowds became denser, I retreated to the other end of the truck. It was quieter, if not quiet, because for some reason there were fewer people crushed on that side of the lot. As I watched the peacocks and peahens that are college students strut their stuff, I felt out of place. The people watching soon ended as Julie wanted to give us a tour of her alma mater. I’m so glad she did. And not just because it gave us brief respites from the rain.
The BC campus is worlds different from the NEU campus. The latter’s footprint is like a pug’s, the former’s like an Irish Wolfhound. (I guess that would make them pawprints?) As we walked, Julie mentioned something about lawns. With an S. There are many swatches of green on BC. Northeastern had a couple of small stretches. But it was the buildings that left their mark on me. The College of Arts and Sciences was my main building at NEU and it was old and creaky. It was of early 1900s construction. The buildings in BC that we visited dated back to the founding of the college, the year of Emancipation Proclamation.
Julie said the rotunda in Gasson Hall is like something out of Hogwarts. And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t right. The vaunted arches support a dome so high it makes me feel small. The entire building had a majestic feeling. A far cry from anything found on Northeastern’s campus. Then we visited Bapst Library. Another oldie but goodie. I would have preferred more books but that’s not a preference exclusive to Bapst, a library never has enough books for me.
As we made our way around campus, we saw maroon and gold ribbons tied to railings. They all had writing on them. Outside of Bapst Library, there was a box of them. You can write prayers on them and tie them to the railing. After a certain amount of time, the priests will take them and bless them. It reminded me of Tibetan Prayer flags. Proving once again, there isn’t very much difference between religions. I thought this was a marvelous idea.
What wasn’t a marvelous idea was Julie continually keeping her dang hood down! We would exit a building and she would take her time putting her hood up. I always put mine up whilst still inside. I did not expect my hood anxiety to extend to Julie. But it did. Every time she took her time putting her hood up, I clenched my jaw hard enough to grind rocks. I refrained from saying anything because she’s been wearing hearing aids longer than I have. She knows what she’s doing. That said, there was one time later on that I shoved her hood up myself!
But anyway, enough about the parking lot and the campus. We were there for a football game.
After snapping a picture with the Doug Flutie statue, we made our way through the gate and under a blessed roof. Without any planning or communicating in the moment, Julie and I invented a new Olympic Sport: Synchronized Hood Removal.
Hood fatigue is real, y’all.
Having something pressing, even lightly against bionic ears is bothersome. If we move our heads, the mics scrape against the cloth, giving us an unwanted and unhelpful burst of sound. If we turn our heads sharply, the hood bunches up and presses heavily on one of the aids. Which causes feedback. Then there’s the obvious obstacle: something is muffling the sound the aids can pick up. Which means actively listening is even more active. It’s a lot. So it’s small wonder that as we freed our bionic ears from hood jail at the same moment, we let out a long sigh of relief at the same moment.
We stuck our landing, reveling in freedom we’d given our aids.Tom and Venus looked on in judgment. They gave us 10s. (The Russian Judge is another story.) And then we passed security and the game changed.
In the Stadium
An enclosed concourse is where even people with perfect hearing can understand that sound has a physical component. When you walk in from outside the walls and ceiling trap the conversations. And there are also speakers a-plenty adding to the cacophony. For me, sound ceases being heard and starts being felt. As we threaded our way around the crowds, in the stead of rain, bursts of sound would soak me. The speakers are hung at regular intervals. And passing under them is one of the few times my hearing alerts me to something new and not my sight. I feel sound increase as we come under a speaker and then decrease as we walk away from it. Shortly, though, we found a free spot on a bench and we sat down. And in doing so, we happened to form the third side of a triangle. The other two sides being a wall and the underside of the bleachers. The sound bounced around like Happy Fun Ball.
Which reminded me of something I read. (Shocker, I know.)
In Nyle Dimarco’s autobiography, Deaf Utopia, he talked about a game they used to play at his Deaf residency school: Loud. They would stand in the corner of a room and shout as loud as they could. They would feel their shout as it bounced off the corner and hit them in the chest. We were experiencing that.
When we made our way to our seats, or spots on one long bench as it were, the Bizarro Mad Lib game was next level. There was a legion of overlapping conversations. Those that I could make out had nothing to do with the game. Even after the game started. The PA system was loud. Almost too loud. All of this made talking with Venus or Tom or Julie very challenging.
Sometimes I’d only hear one word in a couple of sentences. My context clue engine went into overdrive. It would play back the mouth shapes and the emotions the eyes relayed to fill in enough of the blanks to get the theme of the sentences if not the details. There wasn’t all that much chatting going on though. Unlike some people we were there for the football.
During commercial breaks when the MC would bring out entertainment, remote control car races, throwing a football at a target, throwing t-shirts (FLUTIE WAS THERE!), I couldn’t always make out what he was saying. But that was OK, there were captions!
The stands were metal benches. I was not expecting that. It reminded me of the old Sullivan Stadium. When the Pats moved to Gillete, the metal benches were replaced with plastic seats. I guess I thought the metal bench set-up had been replaced all over. Metal or plastic didn’t matter though. I did very little sitting. Standing in a puddle and seeing the game was better than sitting in a puddle and seeing the butt in front of me. Plus, I was better able to handle the crowd on my feet. The exuberance lubricated with beer turned the energy aggressive. Lots of shouting but with my hood up I couldn’t make out the words. Except for one particularly legless dude who kept lobbing F-bombs at Michigan State. That was the same dude who fell into me. Three times. Luckily, I only stumbled forward down a row once and managed to keep my feet all three times. Shortly after the third time we decided to exit stage left.
In the Car
As we made our way back to the truck I saw a shameful amount of tailgating debris on the ground. You couldn’t help but kick a can or a bottle; step over a dirty paper plate or around a sodden hot dog bun. It was a shocking display of carelessness. The lot attendants had even given us trash bags as we pulled into the lot. All that was missing was a crying Native American (portrayed by an Italian actor).
As we sat in the truck trying (and failing) to dry off a tad, I could hear the occasional tintinnabulation of a booted bottle. Other than that it was much quieter. Except that it wasn’t. Julie and I talked about how in loud environments the roar stays for a time. You’d think removing ourselves from the game would be like a song that suddenly comes to an end. Instead it was like most songs, the roar slowly fades. But that’s not quite right. Songs end too soon.
The feeling we have is more like the lingering reverberations of a symbol. When we’re in the crowd, it’s akin to the initial drumstick hitting the symbol. When we’re in the truck, it’s the slow attenuation of the chime getting softer and softer until it finally fades. And it takes a long, long time for us to complete the fade route.
Our brains are literally ill-equipped to handle such noise. Since we hear less than other people, our brains don’t have the practice in processing so much sound. It also runs counter to what we’re usually doing; actively listening. Having to actively ignore so much background noise simply isn’t something we have to do. All this means that I’m doubly drained; my energy is drained because of my introverted ways and my brain is drained because of my hard of hearing ways.
So would I do it again? You betcha. I feel that the rain really changed the game. I’d be interested in seeing how I hear and how I introvert on a dryer day.
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