Life Begins

by Jack Gunthridge

  I was fine with that. I had become friends with Arthur and Leopold by that time. It was nice to have some guy friends. They taught me a great many things. If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have known that girls have cooties. You know, I would give anything to know that cooties is the worst I could get from a girl now.

  It was a moral dilemma for me. I didn't know what cooties were, but I knew that I didn't want them. On the other hand, I was still attracted to Christine. She was the picture of perfection. There's nothing like a flat-chested, knobby knee-ed girl to make a boy of six fall in love. I didn't even know why I wanted her, but I wanted her. But I was going to be a man about it and deny myself the pleasure of her company.

  And then one day, she forgot her milk money. I was there laughing and having a good time with Arthur and Leopold. And there sat Christine by herself crying.

  I don't know how it happened, but somehow I ended up next to her. I also accidentally bought her a milk. We ended up talking and laughing over our milks. I made her laugh so hard that milk came out of her nose. I gave her my napkin, and she cleaned herself up.

  As she handed me back the napkin, we caught each other's eyes. I then told her that I loved her. She looked back at me and told me that was nice. By this time, her girl friends had gathered around us. She got up to join them. They then got into a circle and started to laugh at me as they walked away.

  Arthur and Leopold came over to me. No words were spoken for about five minutes. Arthur then started to say how stupid girls were. We made a pact that no girl would ever come between us again. Who needs women anyway?

  It's amazing how early we learn our roles. Maybe we are spending our entire lives playing roles and hoping that we can get the part just right long enough to get through life.

  ~~~

  I didn't mean to break his heart that day. I was six. All of the girls were laughing at me. It wasn't that I didn't like him. He was kind of like a puppy dog. He was loyal, warm, and strangely pathetic. He just made you want to love him.

  I do regret that I didn't respond better to him that day. All of the girls were laughing at him. He just sat there and took it. He just watched me go. I wish now that I would have gone to him. I think we would have a better relationship. But then again, I was only six.

  I know that Jack loves me. I couldn't ask for a better man. That's not saying that our relationship is perfect. There are things I wish that I could get out of Jack. But I think he kind of closed up over the years. I can't really blame him.

  Jack holds on to memories with an iron grip. It doesn't matter if it was a pleasant memory or not, he will hold on to it forever and never forgets. He could chronicle our entire relationship with stupid things we did when we were younger and are not important now.

  He doesn't know it, but I know that he has a shoe box in his closet with mementos. In it you will find the napkin that soaked up the chocolate milk that came out of my nose that day. He will cherish that until the day he dies.

  He's the only guy that would hold on to a souvenir of when he was rejected by the woman he loves. I have never known why he holds on to it. He has never used it as emotional blackmail. He has never said to me, "Do you remember that time in kindergarten when I told you I loved you and you broke my heart?" And yet I feel like it is hanging over my head and keeping us from being closer. I wish he would think about us.

  ~~~

  Out of the bad comes the good. I treasure every moment with Christine because it has led us to this moment in our lives. I think that is what my father was trying to get me to understand with the stories about the Jews.

  I came on a little too strong when I was a kid. I knew of love from what I saw of my parents. Christine didn't have that with her parents. The thing about playing a part is that you need to other person to play opposite you in a way that compliments your performance. If you don't, then you are working against each other.

  As for that napkin, I have kept it all of these years. I haven't kept it because it makes me remember when she broke my heart. Right next to it in my little box is her bracelet from when she had to go to the emergency room.

  A few months after she broke my heart, we were playing house. She was climbing into the tree house. She slipped and fell. She broke her arm and had to go to the emergency room. Through it all, I was the one that she wanted to be with her. That wouldn't be such a great feeling if my heart hadn't been broken earlier.

  Although it is kind of stalkerish of me to have kept her bracelet from the emergency room. I don’t think she knows that I dug it out of the trash. I see what she says now about me being pathetic. It’s a good thing that we are actually dating each other now. She would probably dump me with some of the things that are about to come out in this book.

  And that is how the rest of our relationship was though out the rest of our childhood. We had ups and downs. There were times when I knew that she liked me. There were times she was playing hard to get. Through it all, she just made me hard. What can I say? She finally grew up enough to learn that a hard man is good to find.

  Autistics are known for their obsessions and socially inappropriate behavior. In kindergarten, I was sure of my love for Christine and wanted nothing more than to be loved by her. We could debate the merits of loving somebody regardless of how they feel about you and whether this is wise or not.

  As a writer, I have never understood love and have spent the majority of my career trying to make sense of it. I have seen some people so desperate to be loved that they will put up with a great deal of crap just to have that relationship status. It is like people are socialized to think that if they are single, there must be something defective about them. It is better to be in any sort of relationship than to be in no relationship at all. In the same way, it is almost better to get knocked up or to knock up somebody than to not reproduce at all. Regardless of the quality of the relationship or the person’s parenting, society looks at getting married and having children as social passages that every person must do. If you don’t do it, then there must be something wrong with you.

  Looking back on my childhood, I can tell you that the only sin I committed in kindergarten was that I loved Christine before it was socially acceptable to do so. Being autistic, I expressed what I was feeling. Being normal, Christine rejected me out of a fear of what others might think of her.

  You can trace the majority of the issues between us in this book back to this event in kindergarten and our different ways of understanding and expressing ourselves. One current theory would like to suggest that autism should really be called Extreme Male Brain Syndrome because it values logic and reason over emotions.

  Now, I know there are some women out there that will emotionally offended by the fact that I would quote a male scientist suggesting that men are more logical and reasonable than women. I will say this as nicely as an autistic person can. Women think their illogical reasoning is perfectly logical and are deeply offended if you suggest otherwise.

  I have been classes before where a woman will cite a study that says 85% of women are more studious than men. She then deduces from this that women are smarter than men because women do better in school. The woman then has the emotional satisfaction of saying her gender is better, even though her logic led her to a fallacy. The study merely said that women are generally more studious. They study more, pay attention in class more, and act like what they are at school for is important. This has nothing to do with actual intelligence of either of the genders. The study merely commented that women exhibit better learning behaviors than men.

  I didn’t study at all when I was in school, and I got all A’s, except for a B in Geometry. I could have studied harder, but there was little to gain from the extra work. In a man’s mind, if you are getting good grades while putting in little effort, why increase your level of effort to raise your grade by a couple of percentage points? Your GPA will still be a 4.0 whether you received a 93% or 100%. Sure the extra effort could reward you with being the valedictorian
, but who really wants the extra pressure of having to stand up in front of a bunch of people and give a speech when all you really want to do is celebrate the fact that you are graduating?

  This is how most men think. Over the years, Christine has learned not to argue with me about the genders and which one is better. She knows that I will through cold, hard truths at her. She also knows that I generally support women over men, except when women use their emotions to think of themselves as better than men.

  You see, what women fail to understand is that guys don’t care about a lot of things. We consider it not important and a waste of our time. Women get emotionally invested in things and make it important.

  My favorite male-female superiority argument has to be where women think they are better than men because they endure monthly bleeding without complaining, carry another human being inside of them for nine months when they are pregnant, and then they endure the excruciating pain of child birth.

  To this I respond: Men can pee standing up. Even if we have a monthly hormonal cycle, we don’t bleed. Not bleeding saves us money on feminine products. Men are never worried about whether we smell down there. Men would have an evolutionary and biological advantage over women in that we can impregnate more than one woman at a time and thus have our genes carried on at a greater level. Men can father children without the fear of stretch marks or our private parts becoming deformed from having passed an eight pound human being.

  And if you still want to use the enduring of the pain of childbirth, I would like to give the men out there this little zinger. If a woman ever insults the size of your manhood, you can always say, “It might not have felt like much, but just wait until nine months from now.”

  Guys don’t take the battle of the sexes seriously. We make jokes about it, and then women take the jokes seriously and get their feelings hurt. Women overthink men and try to apply emotional understanding to us that just isn’t there. It’s like this feminist belief that women are still being oppressed by men and not receiving equal pay for equal work. Look at the men you know. We are usually too preoccupied with trying to get into your pants or pleasuring ourselves in other ways that we would lack the time and initiative to establish a system to suppress one group. In fact, as a straight white male, I’m a little confused by minorities and women being so shaped by their personal experiences. Straight white guys just exist. If we succeed, it was because we tried. If we failed, it just means that somebody else was better at it and that we need to try harder.

  As an autistic, I don’t understand this emotional coddling of people. They are wanting to blame some external force for their failures. Can’t we just say that the person sucked at what they were trying to do and move on? Sure, you would feel better if you could blame something outside of your control, but sometimes you just have to accept the fact that it was all you and the decisions you have made in your life.

  Maybe autism is being thought of as Extreme Male Brain Syndrome because at the heart of the matter guys don’t care about a lot of stuff that women are emotionally involved with. It wouldn’t suggest that one gender is better than another anymore than saying a neurotypical person is better than the autistic person. Men and women think differently in the same way that normal people and autistic people think differently.

  When I was in kindergarten, I was certain of the fact that I loved Christine. Regardless of whether it was socially acceptable or not, I loved her. She could reject me, but I would still love her. That would always be a constant.

  I’m not going to say that I wasn’t hurt by this. The years that followed were filled with me trying to make sense of Christine and what she felt for me while trying to not be socially inappropriate or awkward to where she would reject me. It was a balancing act of loving that obscure object of desire while trying not to be destroyed by loving more than I could receive in return.

  Christine was never one of my obsessions. My obsessions include the Muppets, classic comedy, American history, Batman, Star Wars, and some other random things. I might be known for my love of the ideal blonde in the same way that Hitchcock was, but this does not include Christine. She is the perfect blonde and the perfect friend and lover. She is perfect in every way a human being can be.

  She’s a need and not an obsession. I have always needed her in the same way that everybody needs food, water, shelter, and warmth. When I told her in kindergarten that I loved her, it was the logical conclusion of a boy who recognized her importance to him and his life. Beyond ideals, beauty, desires, and wants, she was so important to me that I would have given my own life for the continual existence of hers. She was more important to me than I was to myself. I had no other way of letting her know this other than telling her I love her.

  ~~~

  There’s a lot of things I could say about Jack. He has always been socially awkward, uniquely independent, and hard to get him to talk about his feelings because he can never seem to get his heart and his head to communicate to each other.

  Over the years, I’ve learned not to argue with him. He is logical beyond all reason and very hard to win an argument with. I don’t want anybody out there to think that he hates women. He doesn’t. He puts women ahead of himself and has an extreme hatred of men, especially the bigger, more muscular kind I used to date. He just doesn’t like when women try to act like they are better than men. I think it goes against his ideals of gender equality.

  I once got into the gender debate with him. He angered me to such a point all I could come back with was, “God, you’re such an ass hole!” Without missing a beat, he responds, “Why do you think I’ve been trying to tell you that women are not superior to men? They date men. You have to question the intelligence of a gender that habitually dates men with the full knowledge that they’re ass holes. Even if I found men physically attractive, I at least have enough common sense to know to not date men because we are all ass holes! Women go from one terrible relationship to another and never learn this lesson.”

  I didn’t have a response to this. I often don’t have a response for what he says, and I kind of like it that way. He is rarely appropriate, but he is always honest. What I learned from that argument was that he seriously doesn’t understand women and communicating with me. “Look, Christine, I don’t know what you want from me. I know of every complaint you have ever had about any of your boyfriends. I’m trying not to do those things while still having some of the same urges from being near you and our relationship being what it is. I don’t know what you want. I just know that you make me want to be a real man and not just another ass hole.”

  His autism doesn’t make him an ass hole. It makes him a man that actually listens to everything I say and to remember all of the small details of every aspect of my life. He can say he isn’t obsessed with me, but he can also tell you things about me that even I have forgotten.

  Chapter Three

  Paradise Lost

  Although I have joked that my childhood ended when Christine didn't respond in the way in which I had hoped when I told her I loved her, my childhood really ended when I was twelve-ish. The exact time is hard to actually keep track of. It was about that time that Christine's parents were getting divorced.

  While her parents' marriage had never been perfect, there came a point where I think we both knew that it was coming to an end. At that time, Christine started to spend more time at my house. She would come over right after school and stay until it was time to go to bed. My mom usually had to tell her to go home.

  I remember it being a very odd time. On the one hand, I was very happy to have her there with me all of the time. But she also caused a certain amount of stress on my parents' relationship. I don't think I cared about that at the time. All I cared about was having Christine with me as much as I could.

  There was one time after dinner that Christine and I were sent off into the other room. We knew that my parents were going to have a discussion about Christine. I remember Christine feeling like it was her fault. She f
elt like she only caused problems and that nobody wanted her around. We ended up talking about her parents.

  I think it was one of the first serious conversations I have ever had with her. For the first time in our lives, we talked openly and freely. It was like how we used to be before the milk incident in kindergarten. But there was something different about it, too. We were actually mature enough this time to have a meaningful conversation.

  I think I ended up holding her as we talked. I don't remember how long we stayed that way. I wished we could have stayed there forever. My father eventually came up to my room. He looked at us, sighed, and then said that it was time for Christine to go home.

  After Christine went home, my father told me to stay in my room a little bit longer. He said he wanted to talk to me, but he had to talk to my mom first. About an hour later, I had a discussion with my dad about the birds and the bees. I don’t know why they call it the birds and bees. It’s a scientific impossibility for these two to get together. Birds are so much bigger than bees. And how do you know which one is supposed to be representing your gender. I mean, depending on how you look at it, girls could be the birds if they dwarf the bee’s stinger. On the other hand, the guys could be the bird because they are the ones that usually get stung.

  I don't remember half of what we discussed. I know that he put it in terms of being in love. I remember him telling me that it was a commitment. Once I made love to a woman, I might as well have married her. My soul would join with hers, and we would be forever linked.

  I remember him asking me about how I felt about Christine. We talked about her parents. I asked how he met Mom. Nothing was inappropriate with that conversation. It was like talking to Arthur or Leopold. It was odd. My dad treated me like one of the guys. From that point on, our relationship changed. I could always talk to my father if I had a problem or a question, but this was different. It was more like he was my best friend or older brother. I kind of liked it.