"I can tell the difference between the drum and the bass line. I can't hear the bass, but I can feel it," he says. With Outkast's "So Fresh, So Clean" blasting in the living room, Erwin switches into sensory overload. "I hear just like I sound," he says, mouthing the words to the song as his head pulses back and forth to the beat.
Bryan was a rapper entering the hearing world again. But that meant leaving the deaf world behind.
After the debut of his first self-released CD, Trapped in Silence, Erwin received a cochlear implant that allows him to hear, after a fashion, in one ear.
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The whole experience, going from a youth of hearing to the brink of death and back again, has had a profound effect on Erwin. But understanding how, exactly, he has been changed by the warp of events is difficult for everyone around him, including Bryan himself.
His family says he should be thanking the Lord he's alive, living every day as if it were a precious gift. He should clean up the language in his songs, and write about the Bible, his father says.
The reminders make Erwin wrestle with guilt, but only for a moment before he twists it into a rhyme. "I'm trying to clean up my F's," he says. "I'm worried about going to hell every day of my life and the choices I make. I'm trying to get faith instead of the hate."
But Erwin admits that he's still not sure what he wants. One day he will tell Castro they're moving to Florida, the next day he'll talk about buying a house on the other side of Tucson, where the friends who use him for rides and money can't find him. The rapture he felt after hearing his CD for the first time has changed, too. "They all lied to me," he says. "That's not me with such weak beats."
The experience of being deaf has faded, forgotten as if it were a bad dream. Even the miracle of his survival after the accident seems to have grown pale, too. His lungs, which popped 11 times in the hospital, remain fragile, but he's back to smoking Newports. Getting high on pot, a required commodity in rap circles, didn't stop, either.
"What gets me angry is he has no concept of what the doctors and the good Lord did for him to keep him alive," says his father, recalling the day Erwin's doctor saw his son walking across the hospital parking lot, took a picture of him and cried.
For his part, Bryan is quick to own up to the fact that he's still angry -- angry at being deaf, at getting into an accident, and at the life that's been thrown at him. "I'm still pissed at the girl who got me in the accident," he says, pausing at the idea of revenge, "but I ain't crazy like that." He's even angry at the hospital where his life was saved -- so much so that he rails against University Medical Center (UMC) in a song he plans to put on his new album, Overcoming Adversity.
The night he's slated to go onstage at The Rock, he wants to hear that track. Sitting in his recording studio at home, surrounded by the sea of knobs and buttons on his sound equipment, Bryan swivels anxiously in his seat. It's only minutes before he needs to be at the club to rap his new beats after 2 Live Crew. But first he wants to play that song. The lyrics, he says, are fresh and real.
You know I could kill if I really wanted
because everybody's got a free will.
I'll make it a reality in my backyard
with bodies stacked like Hamburger Hill.
Do you like the way I think?
It was brought on by UMC.
They fucked me up
Took my hearing
So I think they killed me
I'm alone in this world
Family tries to help
But there is no help you see
The only help, he says, is rap. "I know I'm messed up. The music thing is going to be the positive thing."
For now, the most positive thing is that he can hear himself saying this. Maybe rap can help him figure that out.
