Along our irreverent way, we encounter a broad range of vivid characters: A retired dwarf Mexican lucha libre wrestler, a homeless street drunk, a charming and sometimes eloquent Chasidic rebbe, a perplexing bi-polar man who suffers from post-polio syndrome and occasionally poses as a paraplegic Viet Nam vet, a Bernie Madoff-like character who’s a high school friend of Daniels’, once idealistic but now madly acquisitive, and a pair of amusing and sinister Elvis-loving twins who are attempting to carry out their own jihad against the American Muslim community as well as White Power types and whose activities bring on a full-scale LAPDraid on a popular delicatessen. We see the legendary, catastrophic 2001 Daytona 500 NASCAR race. We learn how to ritually don the Jewish Orthodox phylacteries called tefillin. But most dramatically of all, we enter with Daniel the subculture of post-Soviet Russian immigrants, and watch with bated breath as Daniel falls in love with a single mother named Irina, a gifted photographer, and begins to see the light at the end of his post-marital tunnel.

I graduated San Francisco State University with a BA in English/Creative Writing and an award from the Academy of American Poets. I have worked mostly as a business writer and free-lance journalist. A series of my essays in the Los Angeles Times Magazine describe low-vision misadventures and ruminate on the experience of going blind from a genetically-caused retinal degeneration. The Book of Danny is my first novel.

Thank you for your time and consideration. This query is a multiple submission. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Manuscript available upon request.

A thought about the brevity of this mss: This novel may not be The Great Gatsby, but word count on Gatsby, by comparison, is only 5,061.

Sincerely,

Joel M. Deutsch
Los Angeles
Please use contact e-maial link on site to get in touch with me,

Wide-eyed, wired with insomnia, Daniel Silver barreled down the nearly empty 2 A.M Santa Monica Freeway in his jet-black Camaro at nearly 90 miles per hour until he had to slow down for the gentle curve of the McClure Tunnel, which spat him out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, headed north. He cruised up the PCH at a more moderate, if still illegal, 70.
The sudden, salty chill of an onshore breeze through the open driver’s side window raised Goosebumps on his bare left arm; all he was wearing was the faded blue pocket T he’d pulled on for bed, a pair of old khaki Dockers shorts, and sockless sneakers.
Folded uselessly on the other front seat lay A white sweatshirt whose chest was emblazoned in angular black lettering with the call letters and the FM frequency of the local NPR station to which he’d recently subscribed by phone during an on-aire pledge drive, giving someone his VISA card account number. The sweatshirt wasn’t much use to him Of course, just lying there, but still Daniel had to congratulate himself for at least remembering to bring it, considering the discombulated state of mind he’d been in lately.
He’d subscribed to the station just to have someone to talk to on his lunch break one particularly lonely day. And just to have something bigger than himself but smaller and nearer than the Law, or the Bar, or America, or the Democratic party or the ACLU to feel himself part of, after more than 20 years of marriage, recently dissolved by mutual, although not entirely rancorless , consent. Before they’d gotten themselves lawyered up, while they’d still been talking, there’d been a lot of you should haves, you nevers, and you always. Now, waiting for the divorce to be finalized, it was down to just phone calls with their respective attorneys.
Daniel scanned the radio dial, sampling each station for a second or two: off-key earnest alt rock singer-songwriters, classics war horses, house music like disco nightmare flashbacks, ranting talk-show hosts, Spanish-language stations whose hosts’ rapid-fire monologues went over Daniel’s head and sounded as manic as futbol commentary, and Golden Oldies programs that made him feel as if he were locked inside a laundromat. He punched off the radio.
In the changer he’d had installed in the Camaro’s trunk the first week after buying the car, there was a small library of good CDs: Glenn Gould’s second recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations, plenty of Mozart, plenty of Coltrane, a few choice Grateful Dead albums and much more.
But, right then, what appealed to Daniel the most was high-speed silence, a chance to think nothing but his own thoughts, a capella ,as he skimmed the Western edge of America, the Pacific Ocean lapping at sand on his left, rock walls looming up on his right.
He thumbed a rocker switch near the door handle and his window glided up , but still he could hear the throb and rumble of the car’s powerhouse V8 if he only just nudged the gas pedal the tiniest bit.
Sometimes Daniel wished he’d bought something a little more subtle to replace his staid-looking, aging Lexus when he’d had a vague intimation of change coming over him, earlier in the year.
Maybe it was just the proliferating birthday candles and general mid-life malaise. Or maybe there had been more marital discontents and apprehensions than he knew, or wanted to know.
If macho and predatory, neither of which he really was, was what he was going for, he could have bought one of those behemoth Subs that loomed up in your rearview on the San Diego Freeway like a tank, and still looked tough.
But no, he had to get a fucking Camaro. From a fucking cop, no less. A kid he knew from Traffic court who had three young children and couldn’t keep driving a sporty gas guzzler with a cramped back seat.
Benny silver, Daniel’s father, C.E.O. and, before that, top sales manager of West Coast Sportswear, had known a thing or two about car choices and image, himself.
“Let’s say you’re on a sales call,” Benny had explained to his son enough times for Daniel to have memorized the riff, “and your customer catches you pulling up in a Chevy Bel Air. What does the man see, is what you have to ask yourself. A prudent businessman?No sirree, bub. Not on your life. What he sees is a fella who’s not making the grade. A Pontiac, same thing, except then what he sees is an immature loser who’s shelled out a few bucks extra trying to look sporty. To make the best impression, you’ve got to move up to the right step in your product line, which in this case is the entire General Motors family of automobiles.
“Of course,” went Benny’s usual caveat, “you don’t want to go overboard. Let’s say for some reason your customer is having a bad day, and he looks out his office window, and there you are, driving onto his lot in a snazzy new Fleetwood or a Coupe de Ville. Does he think you must have something on the ball because you’re in a Caddy? That you must be a good, honest, successful businessman, the kind who inspires confidence?
Not a chance. What he sees is a sharp Jew with a swelled head coming to yank the wool over his eyes, and he’s not gonna let that happen, no matter what kinda deal you’re prepared to offer him. No matter what you do when you get into his office. Not even if you give him a whole box of Garcia y Vegas plus a bottle of Canadian Club, to boot. Doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost him. That’s why I went with the Buick. Buick says solid, it says dependable, it says you’re doing well enough, thank you very much, and that’s that.”
It was the Friday night, now Saturday morning, of Labor Day weekend. Back in West Hollywood, the heat wasn’t as oppressive as early September could be, but it wasn’t cooling off very much in Daniel’s third floor apartment, either. So, sleepless. So, the road trip.
From time to time, headlights or taillights swept by in one direction or the other like fast, luminescent fish. The speed felt good.
But just as he got to Malibu, he had to pump the brakes and come to a complete stop. Sideways across his lane is parked a California Highway patrol cruiser, its light bar flashing and a uniformed cop standing there with his hand raised, palm outward. Behind the cruiser, a procession of luxury sedans and high-end SUVs with a couple of stretch limos thrown in is emerging from the parking lot of a lavish ocean view restaurant. They bounce gently out of the driveway, some going south and some going the opposite way,protected for their left turns by another Highway Patrol cruiser holding back southbound traffic.
Daniel tried to spot familiar faces, but there were too many rolled-up smoked glass windows. . One thing he couldn’t help noticing, though, were the reflective red, white and blue stickers on the front or rear bumpers, or on both, of each and every vehicle. FREE BOBBY BAIL, the stickers proclaimed.
After the restaurant’s driveway disgorged the last of the revelers and the two CHP cruisers shut off their top lights and sped away, Daniel surprised himself. He’d made this middle of the night road trip before, and Malibu is where he’d always turned around and driven back home. But tonight, for some reason, he stayed on the PCH until it fed into U.S. 101 and just kept driving, rolling ahead through the dark
ness and thinking about Bobby Bail.

Joel Deutsch

Copyright © Joel M. Deutsch 2010

DEDICATION

to my dear friend Yana

For the great relief of having you to talk to

(Tip of the hat to John Sebastian and The Lovin’ Spoonful)

It’s hot, very hot. 85, says a digital thermometer atop a bank.
The afternoon traffic crawls over scorching asphalt
Most windows rolled up tight to hold in the A/C,
the occasional open one blaring some kind of music.

Beside him at the bus stop are Two small, dark-haired women,
identical twins in matching Disneyland T-shirts
that hang untucked over thickening midriffs and the tops of stretch fabric jeans,
one clutching the handles of a supermarket bag
Crammed with rags, sponges and trigger-spray housecleaner, the other holding up a yellow umbrella, wide open,
under the bright, cloudless sky.

The twin with the bag smiles and he smiles back,
Glancing sidelong at the other one, crunching his face to ask, wordlessly,
why the umbrella?

Her eyes follow his to the object in question
and back again.

.“My sister,” she says with a Spanish accent, a look of resignation
and a small shrug, as if that
explains everything.

Suddenly, there’s a din,the clatter of small hard wheels
and sidewalk cracks. it’s a girl, 18 at the most
Tanned,, supple, hair tied back,
clad in a cherry-red tank top, Baggy blue shorts and scuffed white sneakers
Like a skateboarding American flag
She flashes by with careless, ordinary grace, Thin wires trailing from both ears
to some propulsive pop tune in her pocket
and then is gone.

Across the street, a dreadlocked black man in a big straw hat
is arguing about something with a little white lady
whose gray head would scarcely reach his chest
if they were close enough,
but they’re facing each other
from behind nose-to-nose shopping carts,
his covered with cardboard, hers draped in green plastic garbage bags
and then the bus, arriving, blocks them from his view.

The sister thumbs a button, collapsing her umbrella onto its stem
like a wilted sunflower.
He waves the women ahead, hangs back,
looks at the poster on the side of the bus
and there’s the Mayor, in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled back and necktie pulled loose, brandishing the levered nozzle of a green garden hose
that’s still dripping, as if he’s just now stopped the flow.

Let’s Save Water! it says in big letters
above the Mayor’s head

The women are aboard now, starting down the aisle. He ascends
into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.

II.

It’s hot. Very hot. Vehicular Fragments–dark and light sheet metal, glimmers of chrome, glints of sun struck glass– ratchet across his patchwork view like film frames sputtering through the sprockets of a poorly-threaded projector. Now and again some kind of music blares,
then dies out.

There are two other people there with him. Short adult shadows, female.
Above one of their heads, something yellow hovers.
An umbrella? , he holds out an upturned palm,just to be sure. No, of course
It’s not raining.

Suddenly, there’s a din, the clatter of small hard wheels
and sidewalk cracks. A youthful figure shoots by,
Bare skin, muscle, flashes of red white and blue,
gone.

The bus, an enormous shadow bodying forth out of nowhere, pullls up.
He hears a click, and what he’s sure now is an umbrella
comes down, disappears.

“Pasele,” says one of the women, with a flicker of deferential arm motion. “You go ahead.”

“thanks,” he says. “Gracias.” He makes out the doorway
and ascends into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.

III.

It’s hot. Very hot. He hears a stop and go stream of traffic sounds and an occasional burst of music.

Then suddenly, there’s a din, the clatter
of a skateboard, if he guesses right,
Coming, going, gone,
its sound sponged up in the general din.

The bus arrives, a bulky presence blocking the weak breeze.
there’s a mechanical click very close beside him.

“Pasele.” You go ahead,” says someone. Female, Latina by the accent, much shorter than him, judging by where the voice is coming from.

“Thanks,” he says, moving forward, sweeping his white cane in short purposeful arcs until its tip touches the curb. “Step up,” calls the driver, and he ascends
into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.

By Joel Deutsch

I scrawled my signature where a precinct worker had his finger pressed down on what looked to me like a blank page in the voter registration book. Now I would request that someone accompany me to the voting booth. I’d done my homework. No explanations needed, not about the candidates or the state and local issues, either. Punch, punch, punch. Five minutes, tops. Probably less.

But then someone grabbed me by my elbow so abruptly that I almost dropped my white cane, and led me away to a smaller table.

“Sit down,” he said, pulling out a chair. I sat and found myself looking at a small, light-colored box. I ran my hand over it. It had a plastic shell. On its top surface were raised left , right, up and down arrows plus a large button encircled by a protective ridge to prevent it being accidentally pressed.

“this is our blind voting machine,” explained my new friend, hereinafter to be referred to as Dave. “You’re the first one to use it this election. Put these on.” He handed me a pair of headphones.

I listened but all I could hear was the chatter of the crowded room. I took off the headphones.

“Dave?” I asked. But Dave had disappeared. After a few long moments, he was back.

“What?” he sounded exasperated.

“Nothing’s coming over these, I said,” holding the phones out to him. “Have you ever tried to work this yourself?”

“That’s not necessary,” Dave huffed. “I don’t have to know how to use it. Just put on the headphones like I told you.” And then he was gone again.

this time, a man was already in the midst of reciting some instructions I’d missed the beginning of.

“Dave?” No answer. I set the headphones on top of the machine, got up and found my way over to the end of the main table. “Where’s Dave?” I asked the poll worker closest to me. A man, it turned out when he spoke.

“he’s not here.”

“Where did he keep going before, when I was trying to use that blind voting machine?” I asked. “did you see?”

“He had to do something on the computer over there against the wall. That’s how it works.”

“then where’s the precinct captain?” I asked. “I haven’t voted yet, and I can’t work that thing by myself.”

“Dave’s the precinct captain,” the man said. ” Now look, just leave me alone, okay? I’m busy, and you aren’t helping me.”

Despite my better intentions, I lost it. “It’s you who’s supposed to be helping me!” I snapped. I returned to my little table, took a seat again, and tried to regroup. I felt all around the side panels for some kind of start, pause and stop switches, but found nothing other than the tiny chrome ring of the headphone jack.

Maybe I should just forget it and go home, I considered ruefully. American democracy would surely survive without my participation this time. But the thought failed to console. I just couldn’t accept being so absurdly disenfranchised.

“Remember me? We folded our clothes next to each other at the laundromat a few weeks ago.” The voice was female, thirtysomething.

Veronica, let’s say was her name. She was an actress, and I’d enjoyed our chat much more than I’d enjoyed talking to the man who bent my ear by the dryers on another laundry day about how the pyramids at Giza had to have been built by extraterrestrials, or the Hillary Clinton supporter who, during the Presidential primary campaign, assured me that only affirmative action could have gotten Barak Obama elected President of the Harvard Law Review

“I’ve just finished voting,” she said, and I saw you sitting here. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

A few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, my savior introduced me to a male friend who was waiting for her. They’d offer me a ride home, Veronica said, except that she was on her way to an audition for a commercial. As she spoke, I found myself wondering what Veronica actually looked like, beyond the nearly generic medium-sized human figure my eyes could still see was there. I wondered what her friend looked like. Wondered what the long line of restless shadows waiting to get into the polling place looked like.

Actually, I wonder all the time what everybody looks like. And, not having exchanged a smile, a frown or even just indifferent glances with anyone for something like ten years, I am always wondering at one level of consciousness or another how a person survives such profound isolation as the loss of faces, let alone the total invisibility of other human beings, which will be my lot if I should outlive my last photoreceptor cells, brings on.

“You know,” she said, “you kind of surprised me.”

“How?” I asked.

“I mean, you voted exactly the same as I did, on everything.”

I understood. I was probably about twice her age, and I was wearing ordinary, off-the-rack casual clothes, not exactly the sartorial semiotics of hipness and liberality in Los Angeles.

I thanked Veronica for her help, wished her good luck with the audition, and headed off for the nearest bus stop while she and her friend went the other way to get their car. One end of my I Voted sticker was already unpeeling itself from my shirt pocket, and as I walked along I pressed it back down. Maybe if I’d worn a cotton shirt instead of permanent press polyester that morning, I thought, the sticker might have stayed put, and maybe Veronica wouldn’t have been quite so surprised.

This story first appeared under the title Almost Independence Day in the Fall 2008/Winter 2009 issue of the online literary quarterly R-KV-R-Y

http://www.ninetymeetingsinninetydays.com/

By Joel Deutsch

The waitress set down my coffee and laid a pair of large menus on the table. “I’ll come back when your other party gets here,” she said.

“Wait,” I entreated. “Would you mind telling me the salads?” I didn’t want to start off this first date by asking to be read the bill of fare.

She flipped open one of the menus and held it up. “Here,” she said, tracing down the middle of a page. “These are the salads.”

Her gesture was a blur of flesh against blankness, bringing to mind other, more intentionally mystifying sleights of hand. A Lake Tahoe blackjack dealer, years ago making conjurer’s passes over the green felt. A young hustler I once watched running a card scam from the tattered rear seat of a 22 Fillmore trolley bus on a rainy winter afternoon in San Francisco.

“I can’t read that,” I told her. “I’m partially blind.” For a while, I had tried saying, “Partially sighted,” a glass-half-full euphemism being promoted in the blindness community. But the fragile solace of the phrase depressed me, and, requiring as it did a kind of logical double-take to comprehend, it confused almost everyone.

I felt the waitress sizing me up. She probably noticed the uncommon tint of my glasses, a shade of yellow used by pilots, skiers and people like me with eye problems such as retinitis pigmentosa to enhance contrast. Maybe she noticed, too, that I wasn’t looking at her straight on but a little sideways, trying to work around the gaps in my vision. Her face was a soft-focus portrait shot through a Vaseline-smeared lens. For me, this was pretty good. If not for the noon-hour sunlight from the window, I would have seen only a cameo shadow of her head.
Apparently resolved that I was in earnest, she recited the list, a predictable chain-restaurant selection: Chinese chicken salad, Cobb, Caesar, small or large dinner salad of mixed greens. For this date, I could have suggested a pleasant trattoria a few blocks from my apartment with better food and a menu I knew by heart. But I had chosen this place because it was closer to where Susana said she lived. And, once I explained about my vision, she’d be impressed at how intrepid and wide ranging I was, despite my only means of transportation being the buses of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

As my sight had deteriorated in the last few years, so had my social life. I became preoccupied with the falling away of capabilities, the continual challenge of adaptation. I wasn’t feeling like a very good catch. And when I did get myself together and go out to mix, low vision confounded my best efforts.

Love comes in mainly through the eyes. Noticing each other to begin with. Reckoning by glances and body language, whether accompanied or not by words, what we think of each other and what, if anything, we are prepared to do about it. Now, unable to make reliable eye contact, I miss the essence of seeing, knowing all the while that I am being seen. Horrified by presentiments of even keener isolation yet to come, I placed a personals ad in a local news weekly.

The ad mentioned nothing about my failing sight. I wasn’t bent on fraud, I was just trying to give myself a fighting chance. Once contact was made, I would disclose all.

There were a few interesting phone conversations, a couple of uncomfortable meetings at cafes. Then I heard Susana’s message on the personals system voice mail.

She was a teacher. She read good literature. She even wrote, a little. Her social and political values were not uncongenial to my own. The odds looked promising.

What I saw of Susana when she arrived—form-fitting jeans and sweater, dark hair crowned by some kind of rakish little cap or beret—made me think of better times. I was nervous. But the compatibility factor seemed as strong as I’d hoped. And, thanks to the window light, I managed to get through my salad without having to use my fingers, even once. When the moment seemed right, I came clean.

“Maybe it’s not obvious,” I began, “but I can’t see very well. I have a problem with my eyes . . .”

“Go on,” she said. “I wondered when you would say something.”

As I elaborated, I tried to gauge Susana’s reaction. But she just sipped her water and said nothing, and her face was too blurred to supply me with any nonverbal clues. To my relief, though, the little that she said when I finished sounded more sympathetic and respectful, even admiring, than pitying or repulsed. Good, I thought. Maybe something was happening here. I proposed we get together again soon, and held my breath.

“No,” she said, flatly. “I can’t do that. I can’t go out with you.” I observed that we’d been getting on nicely. Enjoyably. A lot in common. Yes, she agreed, that was true. And I was a great guy, a man of qualities. So what was it, I asked, fairly sure that the problem wasn’t likely to be my balding pate or my few badly sung bars of an old Tito Rodriguez song. But I needed to hear just how she’d put it.

“I have this fantasy,” Susana said, “about what would feel right, the next time I’m with a man. And what I imagine is long rides in the car. Road trips. Down the coast to Baja. Or up to the Sierras.”

Stupidly, I couldn’t see where she was going with this. “Sure,” I said. “I like to do those things, too. Just because of this . . . “ I gestured toward my defective eyes.

“In the fantasy,” she interjected, “it’s not my car. And it’s not me that’s driving. It’s the man. And you can’t do that.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.”

Hanging from the grab rail of a packed, home-bound bus, I wondered: Was the woman simply a monstrous narcissist? Or had she brought to our meeting needs and expectations even more acute than my own, found me more appealing than I could tell and felt criminally betrayed upon my disclosure of the RP, even though all she had risked was coming out for lunch?

But then again, I thought, this was Los Angeles, and maybe it was just as she had said. Her litmus test of manly capability, failed. Where the man belonged was behind the wheel. In the driver’s seat.

A week or so later, checking my personals messages, I was startled to hear Susana introducing herself and inviting me to call, as if we had never met. I found it inconceivable that she had done this in ignorance, that my ad and voice greeting had set off not even a trace of a memory. I wondered if her psychology might be so convoluted that she wanted to reconsider but needed to set it up as an accident so as to save face. I knew full well that this was a fanciful, desperate conjecture, and, anyway, who in his right mind would want someone that neurotic? I called.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought something sounded familiar.” Like a boiler room telephone solicitor, she had been making her calls from a list she had compiled of intriguing personals box numbers, with only the odd descriptive word or phrase as annotation to remind her of details. Beside my box number may have been scribbled “loves music” or “writer” or “works out,” but apparently not “the half-blind guy I had that lunch with.” She had simply forgotten to cross me off the list.

If it was closure I needed, it was closure I got. I thanked Susana for the explanation, wished her a good life, hung up and moved on.

This story first appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, as well as on the Macular Degeneration support Web site.

By Joel Deutsch

It felt like instant karma. Payback for almost running over an unsuspecting kid a few years ago because I hadn’t been smart or brave enough to quit driving when I should have.

On a bright, warm September Los Angeles afternoon, I was strolling down Fairfax Avenue past CBS Television City and Farmers Market, headed for the neighborhood Lucky, my purposeful stride belying the fact that my eyesight was more than three-fourths obliterated by Retinitis Pigmentosa. But so it was.

Despite ongoing research into gene therapy, stem cells and retinal transplantation, among other potential remedies, there as yet exists no treatment or cure for this predominantly inherited condition that afflicts something like 100,000 Americans. And so my irreplaceable photoreceptor cells, which in most people last a lifetime, keep wiping themselves out by a process of bio-suicide called apoptosis, with nothing to be done about it.

The world looks like a hazy, unfinished painting. After a few nasty mishaps when the deterioration first became severe. I learned to scan ahead radar-like as I walked to catch at least a glimpse of approaching hazards. I owned a long, white cane, but I didn’t have it with me. Isn’t a cane, I thought, for when life feels constantly like coming awake in a strange house in the middle of the night? Doesn’t “blind,” after all, simply and unequivocally, mean sightless?

I’d considered carrying a cane if only as a signal, to forestall incidents like the time I stumbled into the side mirror of a bus while hurrying clumsily to board, and the driver, climbing out of his seat to readjust it, inquired sarcastically if I was blind or something. To simplify the process of asking strangers for help, as from time to time I must.

But I wasn’t about to do it. No way. For one thing, I had this spooky foreboding that to take up the cane would be a dangerous capitulation, would bring on total blindness even faster. Magical thinking, I knew. Primitive. A child’s metaphysics of causality. But I couldn’t help it. Besides, I’d be marking myself disabled, for all to see, destroying whatever vestige of masculine appeal I’d managed to preserve into middle age. I’d become just another blind guy, groping his expressionless way along on some pathetic errand of the terminal, aging bachelor. So the cane, as always, was hanging by its elastic handle loop from a hook inside my living room closet, gathering dust.

Now I was passing beneath the protruding eaves of one of the Farmers Market buildings, grateful to be shielded from the sun’s dazzle by more than just the brim of my baseball cap. A few feet away, the midday traffic rushed by in a din of car engines, horn blasts, diesel rattle, and the concussive thump of mega-watt, bi-amplified hip-hop bass.

Suddenly, something charged past me, tugging at my T-shirt sleeve. Through my remaining islands of vision, like a bird darting across a slit in a castle turret, flashed the profile of a small face, a boyish body hunched forward over handlebars, a flurry of legs churning.

“Damn,” I yelped, edging over more toward my side. I probably looked, I knew, as if I might be playing a crazy, private game of chicken, had meant to surrender those few extra inches of clearance at the last second, but had simply miscalculated. When the truth, of course, was that I had no warning at all. Anything moving faster than walking speed can slip from blind spot to blind spot, completely undetected. Skateboards betray themselves by their clatter, but not so bicycles, with their rubber-tired stealth. I took a deep breath and resolved silently to be yet more vigilant, in the future.

And then something slammed into my shoulder, the same shoulder, Another flashing image of a small boy, pedaling. But this time, I was flung from my feet. I felt my skull collide against asphalt. I had a dim but troubling realization that my body was laid out full length across the northbound curb lane of Fairfax and that I could, in a heartbeat, be crushed and dismembered. Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, I made a mad scrambled back to safety.

At the point where I had left the sidewalk stood a short, elderly woman. trailing a two-wheeled wire shopping basket behind her. Crazy,” she clucked empathetically, “crazy. They almost killed me, too.” She spoke with the old-time Yiddish accent that is rapidly giving way to Russian as the Fairfax District and neighboring West Hollywood become the Southern California version of Brooklyn’s Little Odessa.

“I’m fine,” I assured her, and as she continued on her way, I brushed myself off, gingerly checking for damage. My head was bruised and bleeding, my shoulder ached, the forearm I tried to break my fall with was a mass of lacerations, and my cap was missing, probably pulverized into blue cotton oblivion. Dazed, but nonetheless still in need of groceries, I proceeded with my shopping and trudged home to a stinging shower and some bed rest.

The next time I left my apartment, there was a nylon day pack slung jauntily from one shoulder, the kind students carry their books in. The kind in which the kid I knocked down that time with my Tercel was carrying his. And in my right hand, I held the long white cane. Not tapping it in an exploratory arc. Not yet. But bearing it before me like a protective talisman, a Mosaic staff. And feeling relief mixed with horror at the sight of people making way for the blind man I was still in the process of becoming.

This story previously appeared in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium and on the Macular Degeneration support Web site and in the online literary quarterly r.kv.r.y.

By Joel Deutsch

I always loved going to the movies.

I loved the big screen, the popcorn, the transient, sweet sense of being in communion with a room full of strangers. I loved the growing accumulation in my memory of scenes, shots, dialogue and soundtracks, of heroes and villains and stars. I didn’t even mind waiting in line, or complain about the rising price of popcorn, as long as I could find a few films worth seeing amidst the glut of blockbuster eye candy and brain-rot. But then, as the deterioration of my sight crossed into new realms of dysfunction, the cinema began fading out of my life.

A merciless retinal death squad started intercepting images before they could reach my brain. Actors’ faces became unidentifiable silhouettes. “Hey,” I whispered to my friend in surprise, at a screening of Wayne Wang’s Smoke, one of the last movies I tried to see in the theater, “Is that William Hurt, the guy standing on the left side?” I hadn’t been able to decipher the opening credits, and had just then recognized the familiar actor’s voice with a start.

Critical bits of business–love scenes in darkened rooms, money changing hands under tables, the lifted eyebrow–were completely lost. Fast cutting created not kinetic excitement but the effect of strobe-lit, senseless Rorschachs. Two hours into the epic-length Schindler’s List, I had to abandon my puzzled date to spend 20 minutes pacing around the lobby before I could go back inside. I was exhausted, not by my renewed sorrow and outrage over the Holocaust,
but by the desperate effort just to see Steven Spielberg’s grim pageant clearly and, failing that, not to fall apart. I never saw the little girl dressed in red, the symbolic spot of color in a black and white scene that was being heralded as a masterful, painterly stroke.

Soon after that debacle, I said goodbye to the multiplexes and neighborhood art houses, and resigned myself to only renting videos. With the 20″ RCA three feet from my face and the Brightness and Contrast controls cranked up radically, I could make a movie look almost normal again. Whenever my eyes grew tired, I could call an intermission, and there was always the Rewind function for reviewing anything I suspected I had missed. So I still had the movies, if not quite as they were meant to be shown.

Which is not to say I didn’t long for the immersion and spectacle of the big screen, as well as being part of an audience. I did, very much. So when a postcard arrived inviting me, as I managed to make out under my illuminated high-power reading glass, to come to Paramount Studios for the premier of a process called Theater Vision, demonstrated with Paramount’s recent hit Forrest Gump, my curiosity and expectations were aroused. Perhaps at least some remnant of my movie-theater past could be salvaged, after all.

At the door, an attendant hands me my Theater Vision equipment, an FM receiver no larger than a beeper, and a single earphone. “Just turn the little wheel until you hear something,” he says, ushering me inside. The Theater Vision commentary, I remember from the invitation, is broadcast from a tape synchronized with the regular soundtrack, so as to slip neatly into its silences.

The house, its lights turned up for the benefit of those of us to whom illumination levels still matter, is filled nearly to capacity. I can make out a lot of white canes and a fair number of guide dogs in the Down position on the floor beside aisle seats. With our blurry sight, our tunnel vision, with our perception only of light, or darkness, we have come to watch, or at least sit again in the presence of, the movies.

In the several years since the passage of the 1991 Americans with Disabilities Act, the vision-impaired have been regaled with a host of adaptive modifications to the public environment. There are Braille-encoded ATM keypads (though, absurdly enough, no alternative way to read the information on the ATM display screen, yet) and elevator buttons. There are chirping traffic signals, at least in such benevolent cities as Santa Monica. And now, there is even a way for the blind to “access,” the movies.

Settling myself in one of the few remaining seats, I am conscious of a small but desperate hope that Theater Vision will be a revelation. That it will be like standing blind on the floor of Yosemite Valley while the perfect guide–a combination poet, painter, forest ranger and geologist–causes the hooded visage of Half Dome, the implacable face of El Capitan, and the skinny, sparkling tumble of Yosemite Falls all to body forth once more in my visual cortex, as life-like as virtual reality.

The program opens with a round of speeches celebrating the promise of technology, the grit of the blind, and Paramount’s generous hand in the development of Theater Vision. A youth chorus performs two inspirational songs that make the treacly “We Are the World” of ten years before sound as edgy as heavy metal. Finally, the stage is cleared the house lights go down, and the curtains are drawn back.

I wiggle the button-size earphone into place, turn on the little receiver and locate the Theater Vision frequency in time to hear our narrator, sportscaster Vin Scully, read the opening credits, and then intone, “A feather floats down through the sky over downtown Atlanta.” I can see that the feather shot is well lit and held for a long time‹although I wouldn’t have known it was Atlanta. Fine. Some sort of interference keeps breaking up Scully’s voice. I adjust my receiver, and the sound improves, marginally.

Forrest (Tom Hanks), enters and joins a middle-aged black woman on a bus stop bench. The woman looks weary, perhaps from hard work she is a little too old to still be doing. But the script forces her to submit to the story-framing device of Forrest’s unsolicited monologue. Rosa Parks as the Wedding Guest. And the narration goes something like, “Forrest Gump sits down on a bus bench next to a black woman. Okay, whatever.

The plot moves through the travails of Forrest’s handicapped boyhood, his miraculous recovery, the blossoming of the friendship that becomes his first love, his tour of duty in Viet Nam, his audience with J.F.K. I have to fiddle continuously with the little unit, trying to get Vin Scully’s voice to come in clearly. And even though the copy he is reciting is dull, I try to be grateful for at least being tipped off what to notice. But my patience wears thin. For instance, there’s the scene where Forrest’s girlfriend is bent on relieving him of his blessedly oblivious virginity and Forrest doesn’t seem to be getting her seductive drift. So she, young, lovely, and inexplicably longing for his goofy touch, makes the simple, cunning gesture of removing her blouse. Her back is to the camera. I can see well enough to know that we’re being shown Forrest’s face, the reaction shot. But I can’t see his expression, just his silhouette seated motionless across from hers. I try to picture his astonishment. I want to hear something like, “Forrest’s jaw drops. His eyes tell us that even he, slow, simple Forrest, knows this moment will be forever indelible.” But all I get from Theater Vision is something like, “Forrest just stares.”

“Forrest just stares?” Still I keep watching, waiting for the promised redemption of Theater Vision, doing my valiant best to hold disbelief suspended.

At this, I ultimately fail. I can’t stop myself thinking about how thrilled I was when, to underscore Forrest’s arrival in Viet Nam, the dark, slashing opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” erupted from Paramount’s state-of-the-art audio system and pounded the auditorium like a Rolling Thunder bombing run, and I realize that this was the first moment of Forrest Gump I enjoyed, and that the thrill was purely auditory. Eyesight to the blind? I don’t think so. This Theater Vision thing hasn’t restored my failing sight with words; that’s what poetry does. Pablo Neruda describes waves breaking against the cliffs like spider webs. He says Death is standing in the harbor, dressed in the uniform of an Admiral. These images, I can see. “Forrest just stares,” I can’t.

“There must be some kind of way out of here,” goes Hendrix’s opening line. And so there is. Well before the movie is over, I pluck the bug out of my ear, brush past a row of bent knees, and make it out to freedom, dropping my Theater Vision receiver onto one of the damask-covered tables set up for a post-screening champagne reception before stepping out into the dark, sprawling Paramount lot to find my way to the bus stop.

To be deprived of the movies is not, for me, just to lose a beloved source of stories that nourish, illumine or at the very least divert. In Los Angeles, where movies and the business of making them are widely followed with more ardor and fidelity than the play of world events, where implication and nuance are subtext and the past a back story, it also means the loss of common cultural coin. Falling out of touch with the movies punches a big, leaky hole in the oil can of social lubrication.

But, movies for the blind? To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s last words in Magnum Force, you’ve got to know your limitations. The problem isn’t just narration about as evocative as a stock market wrap-up or freeway report on drive-time radio. It’s something much more fundamental. From the Lumiere Brothers’ sci-fi reels and the nickelodeon melodramas that astonished turn-of-the twentieth century audiences, film is first of all and more than anything a fiction of images. It is an artifice of frames and compositions, brightness and shadow. It is a pulsing of shots, camera angles and post-production edits, within which things appear to move and incidents to occur. Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of montage, would turn over in his grave, I think, to see the medium being interpreted this way, as if a movie were a traffic accident, needing only for its material facts to be reported. Descriptive narration will not render the sinister, vertiginous chiaroscuro of The Third Man and Double Indemnity. It will not paint the vastness of battlefields and the snapping of vivid war-pennants against the sky in Ran. It will not translate the impish and dangerous glint in Bruce Lee’s eye as he thumbs his nose in Enter The Dragon or convey the beautiful, heartbreaking effect of DeNiro’s slow-motion boxing-ring ballet in Raging Bull. A film does not exist apart from itself, does not yield up its essence to being told. A Bordeaux administered intravenously is simply not wine. There are things, sometimes, that a person should just give up.

As I’m waiting for the bus at the stop outside the studio gate, a shouter comes up the sidewalk, a skinny white guy who I guess to be in his 40’s, wearing an old Army field jacket. Every few steps, he yells something garbled but unmistakably vicious, out of some arsenal of useless, pointless rage. Suddenly he clams up and disappears behind the bus shelter, where I catch a murky glimpse of him, standing against the wall by the gate, trying to pick the street number, 5555 , off the cement with his fingers. I think about how a computer deletes a file by just erasing its address. I wonder if he believes he’s working some voodoo like this on Paramount Studios. I think about how people begin to vanish when you can’t see their faces anymore.

My bus arrives. The man leaves off picking at the wall, fires a volley of obscenities at the driver as I mount the steps. Pulling away, I can still hear his screams through the glass and steel and engine noise, fading with distance.

This story previously appeared in the Los Angeles Times and in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

By Joel Deutsch

“Cuando alcances mi edad habrás perdido casi por completo la vista. Verás el color amarillo y sombras y luces. No te preocupes. La ceguera gradual no es una cosa trágica. Es como un lento atardecer de verano.”

“When you attain my age, you will have almost completely lost your sight. You will see the color yellow, and shadows, and lights. Don’t worry yourself. Gradual blindness is not a tragic event. It is like the slow, grave sunset of a summer evening.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “El Otro” / “The Other”

When the train left the station
It had two lights on behind

The red light was my baby
And the blue light was my mind

—Robert Johnson, “Love In Vain.”

I discovered Borges’ “the Other” fairly recently, when my Parisian e-mail friend, Nicolas, fellow member of an Internet Retinitis Pigmentosa forum, recommended it to me. That Borges had lost his sight by degrees, I was aware, but I had never before come across any reference to this in his fiction. The “Love In Vain” lyrics, by comparison, I have known for years, whether as keened eerily by Robert Johnson himself on scratchy old recordings in that unearthly voice of his or delivered in an English parody of a blues drawl by Mick Jagger, decades later.

Watching helplessly as the world dissolves into a chaos of bright ghosts and dark vacancies is not, for me, so gentle an experience, does not call up the bucolic images that the Borges quotation suggest to my Midwest childhood memory of suburban summers. It does not recall for me fireflies pricking the gathering July dark with their tiny, airborne strobe-flashes, or ice cubes clinking in tall glasses, or muted talk and television sounds filtering outdoors through screens. My immediate response to the sanguine reassurance of the Borges passage was disbelieving, disdainful, to the point of rage, and the rage was quickly followed by depression.
But, soon after, in a grieving moment, “Love In Vain” came into my mind, the very sorrow of the song, the unapologetic, unqualified bereavement of it, making much more sense to me and, in the way that music can do, bestowing catharsis and consolation, all at once. And then I thought of this image, also involving a train, that seemed to say how I felt, myself.

I am the only passenger on a subway car that is plunging headlong into a tunnel I know to be endless. I can smell the fetid odor of old stone and sparking metal, hear the clatter and shriek of wheels on tracks. The tunnel’s Particulars—tiles, distance markers, call boxes–fade out with ferocious speed, and the tunnel itself becomes just a backward-rushing shadow, its concrete embrace more sensed than seen.

Panic. A vacuum in the belly, a racing in the heart. Now the light inside the car itself starts to flicker. I feel an urge to jump up and rush to the rearmost door of the train, to look backward out its thick glass window. But I know if I do that, what I will see. A shrinking point of light holding my last sight of the last station, with its posters, its turnstiles, its few midnight travelers strung out along the platfform like the isolated figures of Edward Hopper’s paintings. And the point of light will compress itself relentlessly around that tableau, crush it down to an atom of recollection, to the visual equivalent of an amputee’s phantom limb. So instead, I stay planted in my seat, rocking gently down the line to darkness, just trying to think of a good tune to whistle to myself when I get there.

Borges passage trans. J. Deutsch
This story previously appeared in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium.