The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller

Author:Thomas Fuller [Fuller, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

21

“Full Sprints!”

If deafness were a shape, it would be round. On August 4, 2022, the Cubs’ coaching staff met in Keith Adams’s office in the athletic facility at CSDR. They positioned their chairs in a semicircle, the perfect configuration for a deaf meeting where everyone needed to be able to see one another. As they gathered, multiple conversations took place across the room at once without anyone straining to understand.

There was Kaveh Angoorani, who had restarted the clock to his retirement; Ken Watson, the seventy-year-old CSDR alumnus who said he felt like a grandfather to the players; and Michael Mabashov, a lanky athlete who had nearly gone professional in golf and now gave lessons to a deaf clientele in Southern California. Farther along the curved seating arrangement sat Kevin Croasmun, a social studies teacher at the school who was also the wrestling coach; Davis Nguyen, who helped the team with their equipment and whose parents had arrived from Vietnam as refugees; and Galvin Drake, the enforcer, who was still driving around campus blasting electronic music at full volume. Ryan Zarembka, another assistant coach, came in slightly late, fresh off a flight from Texas, where he had visited his family.

The room smelled as if someone had purchased the entire aisle of antiperspirants and deodorants at CVS and taken the caps off all at once. The coaches wore the various polyester name brands of the modern American sports apparel industry, sneakers with short socks, loose athletic shorts, and T-shirts.

There has been a movement over the past two decades to design facilities used by deaf people in architecturally appropriate ways. This might include spaces that could easily accommodate “conversation circles.” Hallways would be wide enough so that groups of people could sign to one another as they walked; single file does not allow for ASL conversation. The corridors might be rounded so that people did not startle each other around sharp corners. The color schemes and lighting would be “visually quiet,” allowing for signers to talk with each other and not strain their eyes.

Keith Adams’s office, and the athletic facility in which it was located, had none of this. It was a standard-issue government building. He worked in a windowless cinder-block classroom, a very institutional setting with four banks of neon lights and white acoustic ceiling tiles. A dolly in the middle of the room carried foldable chairs, the kind you might see rolling past during coffee hour in the basement of a Methodist church. E-X-I-T glared in red letters from atop the doors. Inches from his desk, Coach Adams kept a hotel-room-sized refrigerator and a microwave oven, ensuring that he would never need to travel far for a snack. A buzzer sounded between periods, a noise that no one could hear. There were also speakers in the hallways that broadcast emergency messages. No one could hear those either. The staff in the athletic facility had rolled their eyes when the California agency that designed the building installed the speakers.

There were two concessions

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