Origins, Part I

Before I was El Deafo, I was just a regular kid. I rode on the back of my parents’ bike and sang songs. I sat in the sunshine and opened tiny bottles of perfume and smelled them. I wore a bikini bathing suit to preschool, no matter the weather. I stripped the clothes off of doll babies so that I could put them on my stuffed animals. I was having a good time.

But then I got sick. It was May, 1975. I was 4 years old. I threw up all over my parents’ tan loveseat while my mother paced around on her tiptoes and my father made phone calls. I ended up at the hospital a short distance from my house and had a spinal tap.

I was sick, all right, with bacterial meningitis. The nurses measured my head every day for two weeks to make sure that it wasn’t swelling too much. One nurse brought a wide tray of shots, all for me. She told me to pretend that they were lipsticks. I watched Yogi Bear and I watched the window, waiting for my mother’s white Volvo to drive past. My mother came every day.

I was scared, but only because I wasn’t sure when I would get to go home. Would I be forgotten? But I had visitors. My mother, all the time. My father, all the time, but I didn’t know it, because he was dressed like all the other doctors, and I wasn’t too fond of them. My brother and sister, who weren’t allowed to come into the room. I could see them out the window, waving: my sister in a yellow dress, my brother in a brown suit. They never dressed up. Neighbors came and read me books.

I was becoming El Deafo. I was losing my hearing, but I didn’t quite know it yet. I complained to my mother that all the other sick kids in the room were getting ice cream, but not me. That was my first superpower: ice cream without asking.

That superpower was followed by another: I could make every day Christmas day. My grandmother sent me a bunny rabbit in a pink dress that she had made. The bunny was wearing a floral nightgown with a matching hat, and I got my own gown and cap of the same material. My grandmother also sent a round pillow with a face on either side — one happy, one sad — because I was not speaking. A neighbor gave me a Fisher-Price house. My brother and sister gave me a stuffed Eeyore and a copy of The Meanest Squirrel I Ever Met. And they never gave me stuff. El Deafo was powerful!

After two weeks of head-measuring, shot-getting, gift-getting, and ice cream-eating, I was better. I could not walk. That was obvious. I could not hear, either, and that was not so obvious, until I went home.

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