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62 Willy Conley Characters in El Paso My friend Raymond straddles a rusted swivel stool at the counter of the Happy Jalapeno, a local café almost within spitting distance of the Rio Grande. It’s 7:30 in the morning and the Mexican waitress keeps coming back to give us a written report on their stock: “We out of green salsa.” “Chorizo sausage comming this afternoon.” “Sorry, no more blue torteeyas today—only yello.” Raymond doesn’t utter a word, not even writing a response on the waitress’s check pad. Instead he replies calmly in his most eloquent use of American Sign Language, “You illiterate fry-face, I’ve come all this way from Tokyo for some Tex-Mex food and now you’ve picked today to run out of it. Is an American running this place or what?” The smoke overhead from his cigarette creates a sense of fuming anger. The waitress writes, “Sorry, I not know hand language.” I reach over to take her pad and scribble, “Two breakfast burritos—lots of cumin and cilantro. Bring out a bottle of Tabasco.” I turn to Raymond: “It’ll be as close to Tex-Mex as they can get.” Raymond gestures to the waitress as she’s about to turn towards the kitchen. “Two—coffees.” He mimes holding a saucer and sipping from a cup. “Si, I know that one!” the waitress says with a smile. Professor Raymond Volmont is a tall, slender man with a voracious appetite that defies all natural laws of weight gain in a man of sixty-five. Language and literature had been his calling for fifteen years in Washington, D.C., at Gallaudet, the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, where he pushed them to rise above their native American Sign Language (but not leave it behind). He packed Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Chekhov into their isolated deaf-world brains. He couldn’t care less if they never learned to speak a word of English, Spanish or whatever. To survive in this country they had to be able to read and write in a language other than their own (which couldn’t be written on paper anyway). His favorite phrase was: “Read, read, till your eyes bleed.” Read everything you see, anything you can get your hands on, even if you have no reading material with you—in this country, there is always something to read in English in your present environment. Read the writing in bathroom stalls, the contents label of your can of drink, your candy wrapper, your cigarette packet, the subway advertisements, bus stop posters, the tags on your underwear. If it contains letters of the English alphabet—read it! Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 62 3/28/2012 10:24:49 AM Willy Conley 63 Raymond gave up on them years ago realizing that his efforts were fruitless except for the occasional, attentive student like me—or so I’d like to think—who tries to absorb everything around him. Raymond also gave up on capitalistic, egocentric, audiocentric America, and tells people that he “Deafected” to Japan—typical Raymond fooling with language like that. Actually, he was invited by the Japanese Theatre of the Deaf to go on an international tour with them as a guest artist performing the role of a white professor in their nonverbal, visual adaptation of Kaspar Hauser. Japan’s beauty, economy of space and materials, and its Zen aesthetics lured him to stick around. I have kept in touch with him throughout the years since my graduation. Raymond is one of the most intelligent deaf role models I’ve ever met. With no access to any in my line of work, I put a premium on any time I can get with him. It doesn’t help that I haven’t had a visitor for months who was Deaf, or knew sign language. Oh, how the Japanese Deaf adore him! How many non-Asian, deaf people actually study Japanese? They’ve implored that he stay on with their theatre. Now he spends his remaining years as a professional actor and lecturer on tour, not in it merely for the acting and adulation, but for the education of the masses. Hearing people worldwide need to see that deaf people lead normal lives, and that they could even be artists on the stage. He’s quite proud of the fact that he’s the oldest, working Deaf actor on Earth. “Theatre is the...

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