What did you say?

Three years ago, I visited the local Ojai audiologist because Jackie said I should.

To get my attention and gain my acceptance, she smiled sweetly, rose to her full five-foot height and said, “It’s enough already. I can’t stand repeating myself. It’s annoying. You need hearing aids. Go see that guy across the street of the hospital.”

I said I would and then conveniently forgot about it.

Jackie has many wonderful qualities, including putting up with me. But, like an elephant, a really big elephant, she never forgets. She also works quickly, completing tasks well ahead of schedule. For example, she takes the garbage cans out to the street nearly two days before their collection, in probable violation of the Andrew Street beautification rules.

In a gentle way, she quizzes me about tasks that have been assigned to me, knowing full well that I have not done them. So, after several nudges over a two-week period, I succumbed to her suggestion and made a date with the ear guy.

I felt confident that my problem was not physical. It was surely, I thought, simply due to my inattention when being spoken to. Just a case of establishing priorities when doing my thing.

The audiologist was nice enough and I was mildly cooperative. I took the press the button when you hear the beep test, confident that my hearing was normal. No old guy hearing aids for me. So, I was shocked when he said, “your high-end hearing is for shit. You need hearing aids, the bigger the better. The expensive ones, not the crap they sell at Costco.”

He sealed the deal by saying, “Now you can tell your wife that you don’t ignore her when she talks to you. It’s simply a case of high-end hearing loss. All’s forgiven.”

Three more years passed. I became an intermittent hearing aid user. I would often forget them and was grilled by Jackie about their absence whenever she felt she had reached her limit of repeating things like, “What time is it.” Or, “There’s a nuclear event scheduled at 4pm, what would you like for dinner?”

My hearing loss became more pronounced and my excuses for not wearing them more pathetic. I realized that I was missing what everyone in the free world was saying, including the real possibility of a nuclear event.

 I didn’t understand that my hearing would, like most of my other body parts, suffer the incessant ravages of old age and become a candidate for significant medical intervention.

There was a new audiologist in the neighborhood with a growing reputation for being pleasant, taking Medicare insurance, and occasionally improving one’s hearing. Pleasantness was the deal maker. I made an appointment.

I arrived at Dr. Nelson’s office 15 minutes early and, unlike most other medical professionals, found him ready to begin our adventure ahead of schedule. Good sign.

I have never had the pleasure of viewing San Quentin’s gas chamber, but the hearing test cubicle seemed to fit my imagined description. Three solid walls and a fourth with a glass panel, much like one that would allow the viewing of the execution by prison officials, reporters, and the public. A heavy thick door muted incoming sounds, much like those that might emanate from the condemned soul.

Examining the contents of my ear canals, Dr. Nelson discovered a motherlode of wax and discarded auto parts in my left one. Using a probe like the one employed by Humphrey Bogart while digging for gold in the 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the doctor extricated the baseball sized debris and displayed it to my eternal wonderment.

In contrast to the single test of three years ago, I was the beneficiary of a battery of them. One involved creating a vacuum in the ear canal accompanied by thumping sounds like Boris Karloff might make chasing people in The Mummy. Another had me repeat words that people like me often mistake for something else. Like bear and beer.

The press the button when you hear the beep test was, like three years ago, the highlight of the morning. Consisting of listening to tones played at varying volumes and pitches, I press the beeper to acknowledge my recognition of them. Missing one indicates the loss of a part of the hearing spectrum, and a candidate for hearing aids.

I tend to cheat when taking the test by pressing the beeper when there really is no sound. Sort of like memorizing an eye chart and pretending I can see. The beep equipment is diabolical enough to thwart these attempts, and the psychology of cheating seems to fly in the face of the purpose of the test. It’s a tool to help me hear better, not to gain admission to Harvard.

We finished the tests and adjourned to Dr. Nelson’s office where we looked at graphs and charts, fiddled with the keyboard, and explained things to me that I promptly forgot or maybe never absorbed in the first place.

In conclusion, I simply needed to turn up the volume on my hearing aids and make a few voodoo adjustments that are known only to a practicing Haitian princess.

And then we entered the magic code, inserted the devices, and tested my hearing. The first attempt produced sounds akin to being inside a half-filled bag of Lays Potato Chips, extra crispy. Fiddling with it produced a sound like being sheathed in two yards of holiday gift-wrap cellophane. Dr. Nelson was patient. Probably learned by having a practice that is largely to devoted to Medicare recipients and other similarly inclined complainers.

He suggested that I take my devices home and try them out. We both agreed that my brain probably needed some adjustments, and all would be well when I got used to my new ears, hopefully before being admitted to hospice care.

I made my way to the parking lot and seated myself in its once friendly confines. The sound of the car door closing was my first clue that this would be a challenge. A large, booming noise rattled me, and I was reminded of an F-16 jet breaking the sound barrier.

I arrive home. Our garage door is made of eight 20-foot-wide aluminum panels. When they roll up or down, they used to make a slight tinny sound. Not anymore. More like the shootout at the OK corral.

Entering the house, I drop my keys on the granite countertop and I hear glass breaking.

My iPhone rings, connected to the hearing aids via blue tooth. A shock courses through my body. I’m sure I’ve touched an overhead power line.

Jackie comes home and deposits a large, stiff brown paper bag on the floor and unloads the contents on the counter.  Breaking glass again and again.

Removing stuff from the countertop she drops a stainless-steel salad fork on the hardwood floor.  A combination of shock and breaking glass.

Enough is enough. I remove the hearing aids and my body relaxes from the military pose that I’ve been in since leaving Dr. Nelson’s office.

Bedtime and I sleep restlessly, thinking I won’t get to see him before our San Diego trip. I’m sure he’s booked, and I’m stuck with these clarion call hearing aids for a week. Or I can take them off and annoy people by asking what did you say? for a week.

Finally, it’s morning. I call. He can squeeze me in. I arrive. He fiddles. I’m happy.

And more importantly, so is Jackie.

What did you say?

What did you say?

I’d been doing more of that lately. Sitting in restaurants and trying to have a conversation was a challenge. I might as well have been talking to myself.

Casual conversation, even when there were only two of us, was hit or miss. I would have been better off with the kind of signal flags they used to wave at incoming F-14s on an aircraft carrier.

Turning up the volume, either through shouting or groping the TV remote, did as much good as farting in a windstorm.

Volume wasn’t the problem. I heard loud and not-so-loud things but I still couldn’t decipher what was being said. I spent most of my allotted time saying “Pardon me, what did you say?” Or “Come again, I didn’t hear you.” Or I’d pretend I could hear and stupidly say yes, no or maybe so. Turned out it didn’t matter much which expression I picked so long as the question didn’t include religion, politics or my sexual habits.

When any of those sensitive topics was at the core of the conversation, I’d use a different approach. I’d simply nod knowingly. Not up or down as in yes or no. It was more of a shoulder shrug coupled with a slight oblique shift either left or right that seemed to satisfy the listener’s needs. God knows what I had agreed to in the many years I had used this method that I had dubbed the Nodge.

Jackie seemed to tire easily as our evenings together wore on. Our conversations were heavily punctuated with what, huh, and come again? In no uncertain terms, she eventually said “You need a hearing aid.” Unable to resist such an eloquently worded request, I promised to call for an appointment—right away.

In a vain attempt to slow down the inevitable, I decided to do some research. Googling hearing aids produced as many hits as the search term, porn, might have. My initial reaction to scanning the hearing sites that Google had kindly delivered was one of sticker shock. My next reaction was one of bewilderment. Unable to discern obvious differences between various manufacturers and models, I turned from the saturated world of the Internet to my friends.

“You should go directly to Costco. They’re cheaper than anyone”, said Ralph. “And you can spend your wait time cruising the aisles eating the free samples.”

Mike demurred. “Sure they’re cheaper, but they just take a really good hearing aid and dumb it down. Besides, you probably need to buy a dozen of them.  All wrapped in bullet proof plastic that defies you to open them.”

Like a voyeur, I began looking behind people’s ears. Men were easy marks. Women, with their long hair, were a mystery, just like everything else about them. Since much of my time is spent with old people, it seemed as though everyone had hearing aids. The aid-less seemed to be an exception. I began to stop and talk to strangers who seemed quite willing to discuss their march from “What did you say?” to “You don’t need to shout. I can hear you quite well.”

When no one was looking, I’d stand in front of the mirror at the athletic club and stare at my not inconsequential, Dumbo sized ears and wonder what I’d look like with a canoe positioned in what would never again be just a space between my ear and my skull. Being a handsome, debonair bald men, I could not depend on shaggy hair to mask my otolaryngology disability.

Further research seemed useless and Jackie was getting wise to my game. So I decided to end things quickly by offering myself up to our local hearing aid provider. A kind young man in an austere setting took me under his wing. Wanting to justify the upcoming sale of the latest in hearing aid technology, Wayne administered a hearing test.

Feeling much like the Alexandre Dumas character Edmund Dantes in the Chateau d’If prison, I was herded into a not-so-quiet padded cell. Wayne placed a set of headphones long rejected by iPhone users on my head and left the cell. What followed was a series of beeps, some spoken words and a vain attempt on my part to cheat and pass the test. I later learned that no one passes the test.

Never once saying “You need a hearing aid”, Wayne proceeded to dissect the elements of my hearing test. Ten minutes of gazing at graph lines proved that I had lost about half of my high-end hearing capability. Big surprise. The little cilia sensory cells had departed my inner ear and, much like fingers and toes, would not return.

Wayne offered me a selection of devices whose price differences seemed indecipherable. They all looked the same and all seemed capable of Blue-Toothing their way through the world of audio connectivity. With the latest technology, I was but an iPhone app away from nirvana.

Available in various hues of black and white, I selected one that would come closest to my skin color. Like it would fool anyone with half a brain. Special order, of course. Thoughts of running away during that waiting period flitted through my mind. Bending to the inevitable, four days later I returned to Wayne’s place of business where the devices were installed in my receptive ears.

Later that day, I visited my attorney in Ventura. We were alone in his conference room when I heard a phone ring. He seemed to ignore it so suggested he answer it. “Answer what?” he said. It took me awhile to realize that it was my iPhone ringing through my hearing aids. How cool.

Last Sunday twenty of us went to the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. We sat in the nosebleed seats and listened to the LA Philharmonic play Gershwin and Ravel. From ten thousand feet, I could hear the piccolo, a small chime and the clicking of a stick on a block of rosewood. It was so magnificent that I teared up and felt like I did years ago at the opera

All twenty of us went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was family style and we passed simple but delicious platters of food around, drank inexpensive red wine and talked freely about the day’s events. I listened and heard the words. I neither nodded nor shrugged.

We got home at nine and Jackie, seeming less tired than usual, said “Thank you for hearing. I love you.”