Burn Down the Ground (26 page)

My parents always had to remind me not to leave the pots and pans unwashed. I hated scrubbing them, and today I had left them dirty and piled on the stovetop. It was my birthday, after all.

When Dad noticed they weren’t clean he cried, “Kipree!” Then he signed, “Why didn’t you wash the pots and pans?”

“I cleaned the whole apartment!” I signed with wild arm movements. “So, I didn’t wash the pots. Who cares?”

My father was taken aback by my outburst. “Whoa,” he mouthed and signed, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s my birthday!”

“Not anymore,” my brother snorted. “It’s after midnight.”

“Fuck you, David!” I snapped.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry, Kambri,” he continued, stifling his amusement. “I’m serious. I’m sorry. Happy birthday,” he reached out to hug me, but I pushed him off. “Awww, come on, Kambri. We forgot. We still love you.”

Dad signed, “I’m sorry. Happy birthday. Thank you for cleaning.”

I charged to my bedroom and slammed the door.

The next morning, my father invited me to the mall. I thought he was motivated by guilt, but maybe he just needed to buy himself new Wranglers. He kept his sunglasses on as he strode confidently through Foley’s department store. Passing a row of mannequins modeling new swimsuits, Dad covertly yanked down their bathing suit tops.

He laughed at my shocked expression as he signed, “H-A-H-A-H-A.” When I was younger, he used to try to embarrass me by making vomit and fart noises in public. He may not have known what throwing up or flatulence sounded like, but he knew they elicited disgusted expressions from the other shoppers and embarrassed me. Now that I was older, he’d graduated to this public prank, befitting my maturity.

As we made our way from store to store, my father continued to molest the plastic women, pulling off their clothes and on occasion tweaking a breast or tickling the pubic area with his index finger. The other customers gave us a wide berth and cast disapproving looks over their shoulders. I couldn’t help but laugh at the horrified reactions of big-haired ladies, gasping and whispering to their shopping partners, “Did you see what that man just did?” I stood back, just far enough to avoid implication.

It didn’t take long for the mall police to catch up with us and I had to interpret.

“Who cares? They’re plastic,” Dad shrugged.

“It’s not right,” the guards awkwardly retorted.

Dad would not relent. “They’re not real. They don’t even have nipples,” he signed, with a sly grin.

I relayed Dad’s excuse. “But they don’t have nipples, he said.”

Reluctant to have this conversation with a teenage girl and her father, the uniformed guards resorted to pleading. “Please, just tell him to stop and go home.”

I started giggling and repeated in ASL, “Please stop and go.”

“Okay, fine,” Dad signed. We fled the store to the Thunderbird, laughing the whole way. Dad stuck the keys in the ignition so his hands were free to sign, then animatedly reenacted the scene, mimicking the exasperated faces of the security guards. “H-A-H-A,” Dad signed. “People are so U-P-T-I-G-H-T.”

I was laughing so hard I could hardly watch him. The mall outing had been a welcome distraction. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon with my father, even if he didn’t buy me anything. I still felt deeply disappointed at the hurtful oversight and knew that there would be no follow-up surprise or celebration. The memory of a morphine-laced apology from Mom, a drunken, attempted
hug from David, and a trip to the mall with Dad molesting mannequins would be the end of it.

I carried a heavy workload in my junior year of high school. In addition to my honors classes, I chose theater as my requisite fine arts course and quickly became a fixture in the drama room, loading equipment, watching rehearsals, and running errands.

Mom said I came out of the womb with a microphone in my hand. “You weren’t even two years old, but you were already talking and using sign language and told everyone you were going to be a movie star when you grew up.” But aside from the puppet shows I wrote, directed, and “performed” for the King boys, only one acting opportunity had presented itself during our time in the backwoods of Boars Head. I was only eight years old and Mom informed me I was headed to an audition. I had no idea what play I was reading for or what getting the part might entail. I was ready for the exciting challenge, though, as Mom drove us in the Chevy to a community theater in Conroe. I had already had the lead in my second-grade school pageant in Houston and performed in and directed a group of fellow third-grade girls in a brilliant rendition of “Silent Night” in Montgomery. Mom had never been cast in anything her whole life, but I still listened to her advice: “Remember to speak loud and clear!”

That would be a cinch. I had to do that around deaf people all the time! And as a CODA I could express myself in ways other kids couldn’t. A hearing person expresses feelings by changing the tone and intensity of his voice. Just as slight variations in the pitch and volume of one’s voice convey information in a spoken language, fluent speakers of ASL can pick up small differences
in a sign’s duration, range of motion, and the signer’s body language. It was normal for me to use body language and facial expressions to convey meaning and feelings in my signing with my two deaf parents and other deaf friends and family. The problem was that I hadn’t learned how to drop those communications traits when socializing and going to school with people who could hear. My animated speaking had become my unique accent.

Once inside the theater, I took my place at the center of a wide circle of auditioning actors. When it was my turn to read the script, I read, or I should say shouted, the lines with exaggerated facial expressions and wild arm gestures.

“I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND NOW TO LEAD A
DIFFERENT
LIFE FROM OTHER GIRLS AND, LATER ON, DIFFERENT FROM ORDINARY HOUSEWIVES. MY START HAS BEEN
SO VERY FULL
OF INTEREST, AND
THAT
IS THE
SOLE
REASON WHY I HAVE TO LAUGH AT THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF THE MOST
DANGEROUS
MOMENTS.”

With frantic motions, the director waved for me to stop. “Okay, thank you!” she yelled. “Well … Kambri …” She cleared her throat and bit her upper lip to suppress bubbling laughter. “You enunciate very well, and you certainly can
project
!”

Glancing around the room, I noticed that the other actors were exchanging astonished glances, covering their mouths and snickering. I wasn’t sure what was so funny. I spoke loudly and clearly, just like Mom had instructed, and the director had agreed. I had nailed it … 
right
?

If I had been reading for
Annie
, I may have booked the gig. Unfortunately, I had been auditioning for the role of Anne Frank.

What on earth had my mother been thinking? I could have acted better than Jodie Foster, but it wouldn’t have mattered. My
Aryan looks, golden hair, and Texas twang were more like the Hitler Youth instead of a Jewish girl trying to survive the Holocaust.

My mother was undaunted by the rejection and gave me a pep talk during the ride home. “It’s just one audition, Kambri. Some actors have to go on hundreds before they ever get a part. Let this be a lesson: You can’t hit if you don’t swing!”

Texas was a competitive place. Everything from football and basketball to shorthand and using a handheld calculator was an aggressive face-off organized by the University Interscholastic League, commonly known as UIL.

After skipping numerous tryouts for the musicals that my friends were cast in, I confronted my fear of auditions and showed up at the casting call for Richland High’s production of
Tom Jones
. The play, a farce, was perfect for my over-the-top facial expressions. To my delight, I landed the supporting role of Miss Western.

The cast and crew of
Tom Jones
had magical chemistry. That spring, we entered and won zone, district, area, and regional acting competitions. For the first and only time in our school’s history, our troupe qualified for the state finals, held at the University of Texas in Austin. It was such a big deal that all the actors’ parents—even Mom and Dad—made the trip south to see us compete.

Ours was the first play to be presented that day, and we turned in a respectable performance. After we gathered onstage to take our bows, we took our places in the audience. As we awaited the judges’ decision, the university theater students presented a parody of the competing plays. An outlandish and, at times, borderline indecent lampoon had us heaving with laughter.

Later, the judges filed into the auditorium and took their seats
for the awards ceremony. I sat chatting nervously with friends when I heard the familiar guttural noises and high-pitched nonsensical sounds of my father, but they were reverberating over the theater’s sound system. To my horror, Dad had climbed up onto the stage and was now doing his best gyrating Elvis impersonation into a microphone.

“Nyowwww wooo yooo laaahh haaaaa,” Dad sang.

Gasps and giggles rippled through the audience.

Seated next to me, my friend Scott asked, “Hey, Kambri, isn’t that your
dad
?”

“Shhhh!” I hissed and shrank down into my seat.

“It is!” Scott guffawed. “Oh my God! What is he doing?”

All the attention was again on the stage, but for all the wrong reasons. I felt nauseated as I watched the spectacle unfold. The emcee rushed from the wings and tried to wrest the microphone from my father’s hands. The struggle went on for at least five excrutiatingly long seconds before Dad finally let go. But rather than make a quick exit, he continued performing.

“Mooooooo laaa laaaa laaaa wooo yooo!” he “sang,” shaking his hips and swinging his arm in wild, giant moves to strum his imaginary guitar.

Breathless and confounded, the emcee wheezed into the mic, “If he belongs to you, would you get this monkey off the stage?”

Mom was standing in the back of the theater and hadn’t realized what was happening. Now she sprinted toward the front of the auditorium and scrambled up the steps as my father took his bows to stunned laughter and scattered applause. As she escorted him down the aisle, Dad waved and pumped his fists in the air like he was champion of the entire competition.

Order restored, I was relieved to have the awards ceremony
get under way and focus attention away from my father and onto the event at hand. To my disappointment, Richland High’s production did not place. My friends filed out of the auditorium to join their families in the lobby. I chose to hang back and wait until the place emptied before going out to meet my parents. I didn’t want anyone to see me talking to the dancing “monkey.”

Happy to see me, my father clapped when I stepped into the lobby. “B-R-A-V-O,” he signed and patted my back.

Jerking my shoulder away, I scowled and signed aggressively, “Why did you do that?”

“What?” Dad looked affronted.

“Why did you go up onstage? This is the State One Act Play competition!”

“The other kids got up there and acted crazy,” he replied, animatedly reenacting some of the more bawdy spoofs of the university students.

“They were allowed to be up there! It was part of the program.”

“Who cares? It was funny. People were laughing and clapping for me,” Dad signed, looking flabbergasted that I wasn’t amused by his antics. He genuinely had no idea what he had done wrong. He had seen a bunch of kids being silly onstage and figured he would have a turn. I had grown up accustomed to witnessing my father’s impulsive behavior, but this was the first time it truly mortified me. Representing my school in this prestigious competition was my proudest accomplishment and Dad was treating it like we were at an open mic at a bar.

“It wasn’t funny to me,” I said, scowling.

Putting the event behind me turned out to be impossible. My father’s theatrical stage debut—and the story of deaf Elvis—quickly became legend.

Dad’s impromptu performance wouldn’t be the last time he would humiliate me in front of friends. In the spring of 1988, I was embarking on my first date with Nick, a tall, deeply tanned eighteen-year-old I met at Malibu Grand Prix. My father sat on the sofa fixated on an episode of
GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
, a TV series that featured scantily clad women in choreographed matches. I waited at the dining room table for my date to arrive.

Opening the front door, I was happy to find a grinning Nick decked out in tight acid-washed jeans and a turquoise wife beater that showcased his smooth, bronze shoulders. He had a sparsely populated mustache and carefully crafted mullet, his bangs perfectly turned under by a curling iron.

Dad was usually not home when dates came to pick me up. But in that moment, my father tore his eyes away from the bedazzled wrestlers, took one look at my date, and sprang into action.

“Don’t fuck,” he signed, as we stood in the foyer of our apartment.

I jumped between my father and Nick, hoping to shield my date from witnessing this horrifying display. Dad’s warning was accompanied by an intense glare.

“Listen to me. Don’t fuck,” he persisted. “I don’t want you pregnant. I want you to graduate and go to college.” His hands smacked loudly as he delivered his passionate fatherly advice.