Turning Up 'American Idol'
After surgery recovered his hearing, there was just one show he wanted to watch

By Josh Swiller
Sunday, June 18, 2006

The names that rolled off the "American Idol" assembly line -- Kelly Clarkson, Fantasia Barrino, Ruben Studdard -- sounded like the secret identities of new Marvel superheroes. Can't you picture a plucky Ms. Carrie Underwood in the newsroom, a pert blouse and dowdy glasses serving as cover for her crime-fighting tights? The contestants stared at me from the gossip magazines and "Entertainment Tonight," wielding toothsome smiles and shrinking bodies, secure in their possession of it, that special something, the "X factor," as judge Simon Cowell would say. I'd read about their voices: Ruben, like a big, sweaty, pillow of love; Fantasia, a gospel choir distilled into one being; Kelly, with a set of pipes that could shatter windows a Zip code away. I was a hard-core fan. But I'd never actually heard them sing, because I was deaf.

My father's family carries a defective gene -- my youngest brother and I, along with one cousin, are all hearing impaired. I was born with a moderate hearing loss that became profound by kindergarten, and learned to speak and read lips through years of study. My speech pathologist, the late Adele Markwitz, was a master at her art. Starting when I was a 6-year-old in Manhattan, she sat me down five days a week and helped me grapple with this strange beast called English, with its odd silent letters, c's and k's that went from soft to hard and back again, vowels that changed length on a whim. Frustrating business. But Adele had the patience of a saint.

"This sooks! I can't do it!" I'd yell.

"No, darling," she'd say. "This sucks."

Adele took her work seriously. Decades later, when her cancer was terminal, I treated her to lunch, and she wanted to take George W. Bush behind the woodshed, not for the war or the deficit, but because of his enunciation.

"Nu-clear. Nu-clear. How hard is it to say?" she asked.

I couldn't resist. "He sucks," I said.

She smiled. "Wonderful."

After 10 years of working with Adele, I got to the point where I could speak clearly and, using hearing aids, understand about 20 percent of what was said. Lip reading boosted that number to 70 percent, but was severely compromised by thick beards, foreign accents and overly cheerful women who talked through their smiles.

What's 70 percent like? It's hard work. It's always hearing the laughter but rarely catching the joke. One-on-one you can hear pretty well, but big gatherings -- high school parties, say -- are just noise falling on top of noise, like ocean waves in a storm. So you develop techniques to feign understanding, limit embarrassment and somehow stay afloat -- the smile-and-nod, the thoughtful lip purse, the "Oh, I have to talk to that guy; great to see you, though." (I didn't learn until years later that this is how everyone, hearing or not, gets through high school.)

I buried my head in books and did well enough for my parents to blow a hundred large on four years of Ivy League education, most of which I spent in a dull haze of smoke around a nightly poker game. Complaints? I had a few. My friends could easily carry on conversations across a table, could talk on the phone, could chat up pretty girls in noisy bars. But I didn't dwell on that. I had a little hearing, and a little can go a long way. I could watch "Cheers" with closed captioning on. I loved listening to music -- mostly slow Pink Floyd tunes, instrumentals and Enya-type wordless yodeling with no complex words to decipher, but still -- and could follow lyrics if I had them written down. (Except for the likes of mumbling Bob Dylan, who, according to Adele, really should be ashamed of himself.) I split the Ivy scene as soon as I graduated, becoming a forest ranger in the California redwoods and then a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Zambia, and traveling through Africa, Europe and Asia. All in all, I visited or lived in 24 countries and owned every album by Van Morrison by the time I was 27.

Then, a few years later, I lost what was left of my hearing. After nearly 30 years of high-powered amplification shoved right up my ear canals, the membranes that hold the inner ear fluid had worn out. They couldn't take sound anymore. Medically speaking, they went kaput. It was 2003, and I was 32, working for a plasterer in New York City. I was on the job, sanding the living room walls of David Bowie's SoHo penthouse, when someone dropped a bucket and the sound -- unbearably loud -- knocked me over like a falling brick. From then on, even the purring of a kitten felt like rough carpentry nails running across the surface of my brain.

I had to toss the hearing aids. For a while, I tried to communicate orally without them, but it was just too frustrating. Even one-on-one conversations were as difficult as those old high school parties. So then: silence. Sign language. And, after the initial adjustment difficulties -- learning a new way to communicate, switching to work in the deaf community -- the beauty of waking up to a world where every person, every creature, touched one with the same gentleness. Silence has a bad rap: We view it as an absence, a lack. But when you really step into it, you see that it's no such thing. Details you barely noticed before expand to take the place of noise. The coolness of a doorknob, the smell after a spring rainstorm, the insanity lurking in the eyes of certain height-challenged movie stars -- all become astonishingly apparent. And in quiet is a peaceful remove. While sound puts you at the center of your own swirling cosmos, sight lets you observe things from a distance.

Into this silence came season three of "American Idol." I understood immediately why some of my deaf and non-oral friends watched it, even though they could barely make out the words. Aside from the drama and the visual spectacle -- the stunned tears when a favorite was sent home early, for example -- "Idol" was like an introductory class in music appreciation, spelled out in scrolling captions. Simon was the key: I was fascinated by his descriptions of what I was missing. If you stuck a robot in Paula's seat that prattled variations of, "I truly love you, though you really sook," very few people would notice the change. Ditto a bear in glasses in Randy's seat, trained to say, "Dawg, song choice. Song choice, dawg." (Bless those at Closed Captioning Central; they actually spell out d-a-w-g -- I don't think Webster's has gone that far yet.) But Simon seemed to really listen to the songs, and his descriptions painted verbal pictures that I wanted to understand, sort of like a blind man who asks a trusted friend to describe a photograph. (Although honestly I don't know if that really happens; it's something I once saw Agent Smith from the Matrix ask Russell Crowe to do in an Australian weepie.)

It was an interesting experience, but something obvious was missing, both onscreen and off. I had grown up in the hearing world, and though I had never been completely at home there, I still thought it a rich and interesting place. I missed music, and conversation and laughter. I missed my brown-eyed girl and her la-la's.

So last spring, when the doctor said he could bring it all back, I mulled everything over for six months and then decided to go for it. A cochlear implant, a 3-centimeter electrode coil, would be embedded in my right ear, and a transmitter with a removable external piece -- actually, a small processor the size of a bottle cap -- would be placed in the back of my skull. Signals from the processor would pulse the implant, which would stimulate the hearing nerve in lieu of sound itself. The auditory world would come straight through a computer. The end result: hearing.

"How much?" I asked the doc.

"If all goes well, more than you ever had before," he said.

"Enough to talk on the phone?"

"Yes," he said.

"Enough to hear 'American Idol'?"

The doctor shook his head, and his face split into a long laugh I couldn't hear. He had played quarterback at Princeton before becoming a neurosurgeon. As a day job, he brought people back to life. "Excuse me?" he said.

"Don't laugh," I said. "This is important to me."

"I WASN'T EXPECTING MUCH FROM YOU," Chicken Little said to Simon. It was the first week of this year's "American Idol" finals. Kevin Covais, aka Chicken Little, was so nicknamed because he was a dead ringer for the big-headed character in a recent Disney movie, the one that ran around screeching that the sky was falling. He was staring down The Godfather, Simon Cowell. The packed auditorium was going wild at the audacity of it. Critiquing Covais's performance of Stevie Wonder's "Part-Time Lover," Simon had all but stuffed the dorky Beantowner in a gym locker. "Absolutely appalling," had been the verdict.

When Kevin fought back, it had been seven months since QB Doc had performed my cochlear implant surgery, and about six -- after a cushion of time for my head to heal -- since the device had been turned on. At first, the world had just buzzed like a TV tuned to a dead channel. Then it became a gleeping machine, then every voice sounded like a female Darth Vader, breathy, high and synthesized. But that quickly improved. I began passing auditory milestones I'd never dreamed of reaching. The first conversation with someone in the dark. First conversation with someone in another room. First coherent dinner party in a noisy restaurant:

"I'll have the steak au poivre."

"I'll have the salmon."

"Does the red snapper come with tomatoes? Because I get a rash from tomatoes."

"I'll take her tomatoes."

I could hear it all! Every day the input got clearer. And then, in January, "American Idol" returned for season five, and I went from introductory to master class.

Before the cochlear implant, I had almost never understood a single word on television without captioning. And even if I had, voices were just a way of conveying information -- my focus was on understanding what was said, not how it was said. But with the clarity of the implant, understanding was so much easier that, for the first time, I could really focus on the quality of the voice. I still had Simon's descriptions, but now I could hear the performances, too.

I watched from the season premier, missing only two episodes -- one for a stalled subway and one for half-priced martini night with a beautiful woman in a red dress. The audition shows were revelatory. None of the supplicants had accompanying music, and most of the songs they performed I'd never heard, so I couldn't compare them with the originals. (Save for the highway patrolman who sang "I Shot the Sheriff" 16 times in a row, frightening the judges.) Yet, suddenly, I could tell who could carry a tune and who couldn't.

How so? Easy. First, we'd hear five or six no-hope singers in a row, and the judges would cut them to shreds. Then after the chaff had been banished from the auditioning room to cry on host Ryan Seacrest's shoulder, curse like sailors, or do panty-less high kicks out in the street (don't ask), a shy young 'un would shuffle up, take a deep breath and make time stop for 10 seconds. The talent was that good. Or maybe it just sounded that good in comparison with what had come before. But whenever these blessed ones stepped forth, there was magic. And I didn't need the judges to tell me what I'd heard; I could recognize it. A piano note sounds like a piano note and a drum sounds like a drum, but a voice, holy smokes, a voice . . . I realized it can take you to places you didn't know existed. When, closing one audition show, this little curly haired thing named Lisa Tucker strode into the audition room and sang a ballad, it was like being dragged back through the history of heartbreak to the original sin.

"You're going to Hollywood!" the judges said as soon as she was done.

"I'm going to Hollywood?" she cried.

"Yes, you're going to Hollywood!"

She ran outside where her mother was waiting, the golden ticket clenched in her hand.

"My God," I said to my roommate, a classical music composer. "Did you hear that?"

"I can't believe you watch this crap," he answered.

SO WHEN IT CAME TO THE FIFTH MONTH, I heard Covais sing. Simon was right -- and I knew he was right, that was the amazing thing. Had I been taking my information from the captions and the

visuals, I might have thought: Here is the lone cowboy, trusting his song, telling off the smug and powerful. But hearing him -- well, the effect was ruined. That wasn't Stevie Wonder, but the tense warbling of, well, Chicken Little. Simon's facial expression when Kevin put him down said it all: Son, I could drop you like a quail-hunting heart patient; this is the end of your 15 minutes. Covais hung on for another week, but then was the low vote-getter, sang his goodbye and was banished from Idolworld, save for a predictably promising, "You haven't heard the last of me."

The finals continued. Crooners crooned, rockers rocked, balladeers balladed. The judges said, "Stick to what you know," and then they said, "Are you ever going to shake things up?" Now, I found the visuals distracted from the vocal. Kellie Pickler, gorgeous but seemingly dumb as a fence post, came on stage one evening looking like a frosted birthday cake. Taylor Hicks had his Steve Martin hair, eyes that reminded me of years of primo bong hits and dance moves straight from puppet theater. And Mandisa, lovely Mandisa, had a voice as big as, well, her caboose, which fairly or no, was probably her undoing. (Hey, don't shoot the messenger -- I dug her.) Each week was a spectacle. The circus had nothing on this.

But that wasn't what I was looking for, anymore. I wanted to listen to the songs. I wanted to learn what made a voice great; to understand what a sharp note was, what being "pitchy" was, the difference between singing loud and shouting. I went to my cochlear implant programmers, and together we devised a program specifically for "Idol," trading mechanical sharpness for more warmth and tone. I badgered a friend with TiVo, and she let me tape the show so I could skip through Ryan's bantering and the contestants' video clips, listening to the performances twice over and then to the judges' comments. Who was overpowered by the music? Who forgot to breathe? When I could predict exactly what each judge would say, I realized something: I was hearing. For real.

One night, Katharine McPhee, a glowy-skinned good girl, sang last -- the cleanup position -- and knocked it out of the park. Her voice, honeyed and low, filled the studio and lifted it off its foundations to some moonbeamed place. I could hear this. And I could hear the audience collectively hold its breath to listen. Sweet mango salsa, how does one get a voice to do that? Her voice said: Stop, I am in charge; you just be still. It said: I know your dreams. It said: Home. (And her breasts, it must be noted, floated above her dress and said: Wonderbra.) This was song. It didn't matter to me who won or lost, how many albums were sold, whether the bald guy got a raw deal or no.

I was hearing.

Now, every night, I take off my implant's external processor and microphone and put them in a drawer so my girlfriend's mutt won't chew them while I sleep. With the implant off, I'm stone deaf -- deafer even than I was before the surgery, because the operation killed off whatever residual hearing I'd had in my right ear. My noisy city turns as quiet as I imagine the moon to be. It is a beautiful thing to go to this place each night.

I realize there are many who don't have the option to switch between sound and silence, and others in the deaf community who wouldn't want it. I respect their choice. Having lived in Africa, having worked in the signing community, I know happiness is not based on decibels or song choice. (Sorry, Randy.) One of the great things about deaf culture, for example, is that absent constant background noise, people are alone with their thoughts a lot, which I think fosters a natural empathy. Being deaf to the feelings of those around you is much worse than missing some sounds.

I feel lucky to have experienced both worlds, and to still have so much to discover. These days, I'm working my way through the Beatles and Motown. I have so many questions: What kind of drugs were necessary to dream up a song like "Rocky Raccoon"? What kind of pain did Otis Redding walk through to come out with a voice like that? I'm also finding out many things I did not know: That, for example, Al Green is the exact vocal embodiment of the experience of loving, losing and loving again.

It isn't perfect. Around soft talkers I still miss a lot, and I am beginning to think that in all probability I will never understand Bob Dylan. But if Adele were alive, I'm sure she'd be weeping into her coleslaw at how much I understand. In fact, I'm flirting with the idea of taking it to the next level. Leonard Cohen's playing on the iPod right now (I've Googled the lyrics), and next season's "American Idol" tryouts are just a few short months away. Simon's already gone for a heavy guy and a gray-haired guy, why not for me? On a good day, I can pass for 29, the age cutoff, and I've already signed up for singing lessons.

Josh Swiller writes a blog, cochbla.blogspot.com, which tracks his experiences after surgery. His memoir about being a deaf Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia comes out next year.