Excerpt: Mean Little Deaf Queer

Terry Galloway's life, from a very early age, could be considered hard. Her mother, while pregnant with Galloway, was given an experimental antibiotic that wreaked havoc on the fetus's nervous system. Galloway had what she calls a "deafening hallucinatory childhood." In an excerpt from her humorous and harrowing new memoir, Mean Little Deaf Queer, Galloway recalls her early childhood, describing feelings of ugliness, confusion about gender, and being one of the boys.

I never felt envy until I was almost ten and saw Patty Duke as deaf-blind Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. That girl was a sight. Her hair a greasy, matted nest, filth smeared all over her scabby little body, her cotton jumper like the rag of an urchin. Patty as Helen was as ill-willed and determined and narcissistic as I'd always dreamed of being, and bored into a spitting-mad whirlwind. She was one nasty cookie, and I knew I had it in me to be just like her. Playing Patty Duke as Helen Keller became my private game. Taking off my hearing aids and glasses and letting the inner me rip.

I loved patting my way around my room, my eyes screwed to flickering slits, my tongue tucked to the back of my throat so that every utterance I made sounded half choked and slobbering. But the great outdoors held more potential for drama. I'd fall on the muddier parts of the backyard, which was pretty much denuded by our too-energetic-by-far black-and-white terrier, Britt, and thrash around until my clothes were good and caked. Then I'd grab handfuls of the patchy St. Augustine grass growing in the corners of the fence and rub them against my face in a desperate effort to "make sense" of where I was. I'd pat and stumble my deaf-blind way to the spigot and diddle with it until it started to drip, then pour, then spew. All the while I'd be muttering gabble until finally it would hit me, and light would dawn over my puzzled monkey face. "Wah-wah?" I'd ask. I'd pretend that, just like in the movie, it was the crucial question. I'd ask it again and louder: "Wah-wah?!" Since neither Tenley nor any of my friends were remotely interested in playing Helen's mentor and tormenter, Annie Sullivan, I was always alone in this game. But even though I couldn't see or hear Annie, I'd act as if she were out there listening anyway, just as intent on answering that question as I was. In my mind, Annie didn't look like her Anne Bancroft film version but like all the older girls I'd ever had a crush on. And if I finally got the connection between the word "wah-wah" and the stuff running over and between my fingers, the prize would be mine -- their sympathetic attention to my terrible handicap and their awed admiration for my wounded but undaunted soul. An answer to my bubbling desire, and a way to be both hero and saved.