crowd of admirers mulled about, pointing at him and nodding, trying
to communicate through exaggerated lip movements which made it
even harder to figure out what they were saying. For Hopkins, times
like these only underscored the advantages the legion of blind blues
musicians enjoyed. While blindness was like being at a party where
everyone else is invisible, deafness felt like a party where only you
were invisible. Years prior, before the car accident that robbed him of
his hearing, he heard it said that deafness was much more difficult to
cope with than a loss of eyesight, but he didn’t believe it. Now he
understood. Everyone always assumed that sight was the most
important of the senses, but if that were true, Deaf Lemon reasoned,
we’d have lids on our ears as well.
For most of his career, Hopkins had been thuddingly
unsuccessful. Until very recently, his biggest gig occurred when he
performed for the Existentially Challenged Society of America,
receiving a standing ovation from a crowd of handicapped people
who admired his courage, and (for those who weren’t blind) his
leopard-skin blazer.
Only more recently, when the Aurally Challenged Society of
America (a subsidiary) set aside a large portion of their annual
budget to buy enough records to get him on the local charts did he
actually make a name for himself. They felt that Hopkins had been
discriminated against unfairly because of his deafness. If anything,
they argued, his will to accomplish the impossible was reason enough
for any underdog-loving American to rush out and buy his new
record (which was also being distributed by the Society).
Their plan worked, and soon, substantial numbers of deaf people
across the nation were playing Hopkins’ record at absurd volumes in
a futile attempt to hear it.
No one knew who it was buying the records at first, so his initial
modest success was mysterious to him as it was to others. But soon
enough, interpreting it as some kind of fad, disc jockeys around the
country began adding the song to their playlists and in no time
fashionable people everywhere clamored for it. He knew his
burgeoning success defied all logic, but, since when did the success of
a fashion, an ideology or a religion have anything to do with logic?
Thus, Deaf Lemon Hopkins became not only a shoo-in for the
Existentially Challenged Society of America’s
Existentially
Challenged Citizen of the Year
, but also the first notable deaf
musician since Beethoven.
H O L Y S H I T !
8
 |
 |
 |
 |