Wednesday night I raced from a stressful day at my Pasadena office to downtown L.A. for an event at the L.A. Central Library, one of my favorite spots in the city.  I’m in love with the feel of being downtown, surrounded by highrises, with businessmen, homeless people and tourists scurrying about on foot.



The library is right at the heart, with a lovely architectural design featuring a painted ceiling, art exhibits throughout, and windows that bring lots of light to the endless floors of books.  Something about the space feels just right to me. 



I arrived early, and stopped into the classic old Biltmore Hotel next to the library for a drink at the bar.  The outside of the building is old-fashioned and not particularly impressive, but as you near the entrance, it begins looking more and more grand. 


Inside, it’s quite a remarkable throwback to early Hollywood, with gold décor and pictures throughout of the Academy Awards celebrations held there in the early ages of motion pictures.  I settled into a swanky bar amidst what appeared to be a lot of traveling businessman, and sipped a $10 glass of Chardonnay while staring at the sad little silver pedestal on the bar in front of me, holding an array of mixed nuts.



I was right on time for the event at the library, which was a reading and discussion with Josh Swiller, who wrote about his experiences as a deaf man working in the Peace Corps in Africa.  As I waited for the event to begin, I had a brief moment of doubt as it suddenly occurred to me that listening to a deaf man read aloud from his book might be a bit awkward.  I noticed sign language interpreters gathering near the front.  Perhaps he would sign and the interpreter would do the speaking.

A large group settled in next to me.  A woman about my age seated herself two seats to my right, knitting and telling a friend about her years living at a Zen monastery.  She encouraged a young man in the group to sit beside her, to my right.  He was hesitant, saying he has a cold and wanted to go get a cough drop and some water.  She offered him her water.  He said he didn’t want to give her his cold.  She said she doesn’t believe in that.  He insisted he didn’t want the water.  He left, but returned slightly before the event began, seated himself beside me, and began fidgeting in his seat to the point where I wanted to turn to him and tell him to knock it off. 

Josh took the stage, and entered into discussion with the curator of the speaker series.  After he answered a few questions, I wondered if anyone else was as confused as I was.  Not only did he not have any speech impediment, he often looked away while the interviewer was speaking to him, which meant he couldn't see her lips moving.  Was he psychic?  Had he developed such strong coping skills that he could now feel conversation?  Or was he a hearing stunt double sent in by Hollywood to make the event more user-friendly?

Josh was a tall, thin, dark-haired man in glasses who looked a hell of a lot like my recent ex.  He was charming and hilarious, sharing funny stories of growing up deaf among siblings who could hear, and how his parents wouldn’t let him feel sorry for himself because of his hearing problem, insisting that he had much worse things wrong with him.  Then he pointed out that one of his brothers was in the audience.  And the fidgety guy with the cold sitting next to me stood up at his introduction. 

It was kind of cool being seated next to the author’s brother (even if he was fidgety), and reminded me of the last play I attended—Neil LaBute’s “Some Girl(s)”—where I turned around to discover I was seated right in front of the playwright, who was taking notes on the show. 

Not only did Josh spend two years in the Peace Corps in Africa, but he’s also worked as a forest ranger in the California Redwoods, a sheepskin slipper craftsman and salesman, a Zen monk, a raw food chef, a journalist, a teacher, and most recently a hospice social worker.  Josh is six feature films just waiting to happen.

I spent a good deal of time watching the sign language interpreters, excitedly trying to see what signs they used whenever vague concepts, complicated words or sensory language were used.  My eyes jetted to the interpreters whenever I heard terms like, “precarious” or “futility” or “ragged, bloody flesh,” or even the name of the town in Africa where he lived, “Mununga.”  The hands flew and signed something and I wondered how much the story those people “saw” resembled the story I was hearing.  

Finally Josh mentioned that he now has a cochlear implant, which enables him to hear many times more than he had ever been able to before.  So he’s not psychic or magical, though that implant does sound a lot like magic.  As for his impressive ability to sound like he has no hearing problem at all, he spent something like 12 years in intensive speech therapy. 

I bought a book and waited in line for him to sign it after the reading.  As he signed, he mumbled to himself that no one can read his writing.  One of his friends approached him and asked, “Vodka or gin?” and I looked around in hopes that the library had installed a wet bar.  But no such luck.