Brendan Stern

When I was in high school, I was cruising around town with a group of Deaf friends in my car, looking for a good time, and ended up at a fast food drive-thru.

Because, you know, that was how we had fun at night in suburbia in the 1990s. 

While waiting to order burgers and fries, we spotted a dude in his mid-20s walking a dog outside. He had greased-up, slicked-back hair and was wearing an off-white, white shirt, tan Dickies pants, and flip-flops.

(How I remember the hairdo and clothes of a random stranger from over twenty years ago but forget where I put the car keys five minutes ago is beyond my wife.)  

“Oh, what a cute pit bull,” my friend in the front seat exclaimed in delight. The rest of us in the car nodded in enthusiastic agreement, the particular sort of groupthink at which high schoolers have a prodigious talent.

Before we knew it, though, that guy started punching and kicking that pit bull. 

And he would not stop.

“Should we do something?” that friend in the front seat, who interestingly enough became a veterinary technician later in life, cried out.

It was not a question. I thought it was my sacred responsibility to put an immediate end to the mindless, heartless, and gutless cruelty.

After all, I was playing high school football then and had imagined myself as brave, valiant, heroic, etc.

So, I honked thrice, wagged my finger like Dikembe Mutombo, and told him to stop.

Suffice it to say, the tough-looking dude was pissed off that a pimple-faced 16-year-old was telling him what to do. He responded by acting, well, even tougher.

He made his way over in his flip-flops with an angry mouthful of swear words that seemed something like “fuck you, motherfucker” on a continuous loop. I don’t know. I was never a good lip-reader.

Before I knew it, he was standing right next to me by the driver’s side window, asking me to roll it down, with his other hand fumbling behind his back, acting as if he had something inside his tan Dickies to brandish.

It was not cojones he was suggesting.

And I was scared. OK, I was terrified. I may have played a violent sport in High School. Still, there is a good reason why I enjoyed wearing that non-contact red jersey in practice.

My fingers immediately shot to my ears as I frantically moved my head to the left, then right, then left, then right again, repeating with great speed while mouthing, to the best of my limited ability, that “I’m deaf!”

Deaf! DEAF! D-E-A-F! 

It took a moment, but at last he seemed to grasp the tragic impossibility of dueling with a pimple-faced youth whose only visible form of ability was a panicky side-to-side head wag with fingers clamped to his ears, and the frenzied mouthing of mysterious content.

He gave a slow, solemn shake of the head—as if saluting a worthy adversary—then turned and retreated with the frightened beast at his side.

We drove away with our burgers and fries several minutes later.

Still to this day, twenty years later, that veterinary technician friend brings up what happened at every opportunity.

Never will I forget that night, either.