Jim was hardly burned at all. He was grinning, proud. He had saved the house. He took off his gloves, looked at each arm, and nodded approvingly.
“No damage!” He grinned.
In the heat of the burning garage, he had actually thought clearly enough to put on heavy gloves so that he could push the tub without destroying his hands. Remarkable.
“Good thing that tub was on wheels,” Jim said.
It was good. Otherwise, the whole huge house would have burned to the ground.
Carol emerged from the house. I hadn’t seen her go in, but then, a lot was happening. “I called the fire department,” she said. “They’re on the way.”
Jim wasn’t too happy to hear that. “Why did you call them?” he asked, as flames from the burning tub reached twenty feet into the sky. Truthfully, at that point it was harmless. It would have burned itself out in an hour or so, and provided entertainment. Jim, John, and I preferred not to involve the authorities in anything, for any reason. Two of us ran alongside the house and unreeled the garden hoses. There were two, more than enough, we figured, to wet down the surrounding area till the gas burned out.
The flames went out in the garage as Jim trained one of the hoses on the ceiling and on a few burning scraps on the floor. Outside, however, the flames were roaring. The gasoline was burning fiercely, making a pyre higher than the roof of the house. Paint had started to bubble on the wall nearest the flames.
“I wish I’d pushed it a little farther away,” Jim said.
It was way too hot to approach by then.
I looked at the scene and concluded the house was not in any real danger. Nothing fresh paint wouldn’t fix.
At that moment, Jim’s parents emerged. They had been reading at the other end of the house. They appeared calm. Jim’s mother was smoking a cigar, and his father had a drink in his hand. They looked at us, the fire, and each other. Without a word, they went back inside.
Moments later, the fire department arrived. We were all standing back at least twenty feet because of the intense heat. Jim and I were regretting the loss of our engines, which would surely be nothing but slag when the fire cooled.
The fire department was ready to show its prowess. Four men ran down the driveway dragging a fire hose. Jim attempted to stop them.
“I don’t think you want to do that. That tub contains gasoline and magnesium. You need foam, not water.”
“We know what we’re doing, son. Step out of the way.”
“No! I’m telling you, water is dangerous on a magnesium fire! You need foam!”
“Step aside.” The voice of authority spoke.
And with that, two men held the hose and blasted the tub. There was a violent explosion, as the water hit the burning magnesium, and the water broke down into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen. The magnesium and gasoline exploded and rained down over the yard. We ran for cover.
Balls of magnesium, burning with a brilliant blue-white flame, were everywhere. The firefighters looked stunned. For some of them, the Vietnam veterans, it must have been like being back in combat. Right in Jim’s backyard.
“Goddamn it, I warned you guys! Now look what you’ve done!”
It was a scene from hell. Chunks of burning magnesium had scattered everywhere from the blast. Some were eating holes in the van parked in the driveway. Some were burning on the roof of the house. Several seemed to be eating flaming holes through the driveway itself. Multiple fires were burning, many with the distinct white-hot glow of burning metal. The firefighters retreated to their truck, where it turned out they did carry foam.
Now they had some real work to do. They had sneered at foam before, but not now. Jim politely reminded them it was their fault. “You should’ve listened to me. Look at the mess you assholes made!”
They mixed the foam and—much more cautiously this time—approached the fires. Even the foam was slow to extinguish them. They would spray a spot and it would seem to be out, then explode again a minute later. It was scary, this mess the fire department had made.
Jim realized the root of their problem was lack of knowledge. “In a university town, you guys should be trained on chemical fires!” They did not respond.
Two firemen approached the tub with pikes, the sort of tools they use to break down doors. They knocked the burning tub over, presumably to let their buddy spray foam inside. They seemed to have forgotten Jim’s warning.
“Stupid assholes, it’s still full of gas!”
Now the yard, which had so far escaped destruction, was on fire, too. At least the scene was well lit. Two more fire trucks showed, and the chief arrived by car. A crowd had gathered. Jim’s parents had come back out, and now they stood off to the side, speaking softly to each other. His dad had finished his drink and his mom was enjoying the last of her cigar by firelight. Their calm was remarkable.
It took the fire department over an hour to extinguish the blaze. When everything was out, and the night was once again dark, the chief had a long talk with Jim. There were calls for his arrest from some of the firefighters, but, really, there were no grounds. The chief could only threaten to return for periodic inspections of the house.
LATER ON, that night would seem like the calm before the storm, as my family and my life fell completely to pieces.
Little Bear told me she never wanted to speak to me again, and she wouldn’t even tell me why. I was crushed. She wouldn’t come to the phone and wouldn’t see me. I didn’t know what to do. I was so lonely. Two years would pass before I learned why she’d left.
On top of that, my parents finally separated. Varmint stayed with my mother, who moved to an apartment in town. Then, a few months later, my father moved to an apartment and my mother and Varmint returned to the house. The dog and I remained at the house through all of that, except for periodic forays into the woods.
Now that my parents had split, my mother decided she was bisexual. She took up with a woman her own age for a while, but then she got involved with a woman a year younger than me. It was unsettling, the idea that my mother would leave my father for a girl, but when her great love turned out to be even younger than me, that was just too weird.
Meanwhile, my father was struggling in his apartment in town, at one point eating sleeping pills in a drunken suicide attempt that left him drying out in the hospital. We were lucky his colleagues liked him and the university was tolerant. And I guess it’s hard to fire a professor with tenure. He had stopped going to Dr. Finch, saying, “He has crazy ideas, son. I don’t know what will happen with the doctor and your mother.”
Despite the good things the doctor had accomplished for me, I, too, was troubled. Things just didn’t seem right over there. I had gone to see doctors of one sort or another all my life. Their waiting rooms were places where other people actually waited. Patients flowed in and out. Their offices were always nice and clean. They looked, well, “professional.”
Dr. Finch’s office was nothing of the sort. It was old, and the furniture was run-down and threadbare. I never saw new faces there, just the same hangers-on—patients, he said—that I’d seen for years. Most of the time, the office was deserted except for Hope, the doctor, and us. It didn’t look like any other medical office I’d ever seen.
“The doctor is unique,” my mother would say.
“The doctor is crazy” was my grandfather’s response.
Friends from town would say things like “I hear that Finch is a nutcase!” Even though the doctor had done good things for me, it was hard to maintain my confidence in the face of those remarks, especially when I began hearing them everywhere. Dr. Finch grew a long white beard, and wore a Santa hat in the middle of summer, which was not exactly reassuring. I learned he’d been fired from the state hospital before we’d met him. Hearing that, I thought of my grandfather’s “run out of Kingsport, Tennessee” comment a few years back. Then I heard he was not even allowed in the local hospital. Can that be true? What did he do? I wondered.
Dr. Fi
nch’s strange behavior proved to be too much for my father and me. Both of us stopped going to see him. Not my mother, though. She believed in the doctor for six more years, right up until the day she escaped. And she dragged the Varmint along for a ride that got wilder and wilder as the doctor loaded her up on medications. Luckily for me, most of the shocking scenes that played out in front of my brother (described in his memoir Running with Scissors) were still a few years in the future, and by the time they occurred, I was well out of the doctor’s orbit.
It was not until 1983 that my mother finally broke free. When she did, all the vague worries I had ever felt about Dr. Finch became concrete. My mother went to the DA, saying the doctor had medicated her and then sexually assaulted her at a motel. At the same time, DA investigators discovered that Dr. Finch had billed my father’s health insurance for many nonexistent office visits. My mother was too upset to follow through with a sexual assault prosecution. She just wanted to escape.
So the DA filed larceny charges over the bogus billing. That allowed them to get a restraining order against Dr. Finch and protect my mother as a state witness. Even then, Dr. Finch tried to silence my mother by having her committed against her will. Knowing all this, I was not surprised when the doctor’s medical license was revoked in 1986.
By then, I was long gone. It was music that took me from that insanity to a much better place. I was building a reputation among local musicians, and they welcomed me with open arms. Friday nights, I stepped from the madhouse that my family had become into the Rusty Nail, a local nightspot. Now that I was an insider, I didn’t have to worry about sneaking in or getting carded. I’d even grown a beard, to look older. The bouncer and the cop actually greeted me at the door as they waved me inside.
As I walked into the room, the lead singer of a local band named Fat stepped up to the microphone. “This is rock ’n’ roll, people!” He shouted it so loud, I saw the lights dim and felt my ears bleed. A palpable wave of energy rolled over the crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder. “Nineteen seventy-five!” When they launched into “King of the Highway,” I was transported into my own world. I was so lucky I had the music to take me there.
I wish I could have brought the Varmint along. But I was just a kid myself, in grown-up clothes. He would be on his own.
12
I’m in Prison with the Band
It was Fat that saved me. Ever since I had dropped out of high school, I had been keeping their sound equipment going, and I had become friends with Dickie Marsh, the sound man, and Steve Ross, his assistant. Dickie was impressed that I had developed the ability to listen to the sound and tell him what knobs to trim on the graphic equalizer. He thought it was a natural gift, but it was really something I’d worked very hard at for several years.
After one show, Peter Newland, the lead singer and flute player, came to talk to me.
“You could move in with us and do music all the time,” he said. “We could even pay you. Eighty dollars a week.” With that, I joined Fat and had a home. The band members lived together in an old farmhouse in Ashfield, up in the Berkshires.
Billy Perry, the drummer, was across the hall from me. His drum practice ensured I’d never sleep too late. The rooms at the top of the stairs housed Mike Benson and Chris Newland, the band’s two guitar players. Peter, Chris’s brother and the band’s leader, lived in the master bedroom up front. Dickie and Steve were squeezed in on the top floor. I moved my stuff into an empty room in the back corner of the ground floor and parked my motorcycle in the backyard, right next to my window.
Outside of time spent living in the woods as a feral child, this was the first time I had actually lived away from my family. With my own motorcycle, a place to live, and a role in a top band, I felt I had it made. To celebrate, I bought a Tektronix 504 oscilloscope, which became my pride and joy.
I spent my days working on the sound equipment in a quest to squeeze every last watt of power out of the amps and get the very best possible sound from all the instruments. Fat became known for its sound as well as the quality of its music. Steve, Dickie, and I took turns driving the truck to shows and lugging the equipment in and out.
It was a great life.
Fat was one of a small number of bands that played its own music in clubs all over New England. Our manager also got us jobs opening for bigger bands at large concerts in Boston. That winter, we played with James Montgomery, James Cotton, Roxy Music, and Black Sabbath. The time I spent with them allowed me to meet other musicians, and I got more calls to design things—from more powerful amps to an electric flute.
Old friends like Jim Boughton would come to my shows, but for the most part I was on my own, with a new circle of people around me. I was getting pretty good at adapting to new people and places.
I was even starting to see the world. Every time I had a day off, I took a trip somewhere on my motorcycle. I rode into Vermont, New Hampshire—anywhere I could go in a day’s ride. That April, while the ground in Ashfield was still covered with two feet of snow, the band decided to take a trip to a Caribbean island, and I was included. They had saved up for this vacation, setting aside a few hundred dollars from every show. Personally, my entire net worth was the eighty dollars in my wallet when I left home, but Peter told me this would be an all-expenses-paid vacation. We flew from a dreary winter in western Massachusetts to Montserrat, a tropical paradise, where I would realize that I was kind of different from the typical rock ’n’ roll musician.
The fun started at six in the morning, Easter Sunday, 1976. I was asleep in a villa high on a mountainside, with a long winding road leading from our door to the town of Plymouth far below. According to Peter, the villa belonged to some rich Englishman who liked musicians. The sun was just coming up, the air was clear, and it was a comfortable seventy-one degrees. All around us, the island was quiet. Montserrat has no industry, no highways, and no loud noise. It’s warm and peaceful and very pretty.
You’d think anyone would be delighted to be there. Not me. All the small things I’d come to expect in life were missing. There was no regular American food. No hamburgers. No iced tea. There was nothing to eat but eggs and conch meat. And they said we could have chicken, but only if we killed the chicken, and if we killed it, we wouldn’t have any eggs. But there was plenty of conch. However, I’d never eaten conch meat before and I was suspicious. It’s like a cross between a scallop and a soft, decayed fish.
The truth was, I had no idea how to vacation. This was my first trip far from home with anyone besides my family. I had no money and there was hardly anything for me to do. One thing I learned from that trip was: Bring money!
Everyone except Willie, our native friend and guide, was asleep. I had taken a liking to Willie as soon as I met him, perhaps because he had a pet iguana that he led around on a leash made from scrap aircraft cable. This morning, the iguana was home and Willie was wild. He burst in the door and ran through the house, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Wake up! Wake up, mons! It’s a bust! Wake up!”
He ran down the hall, opening the doors and shouting at all of us.
“Wake up, mon, the law is coming!”
I opened my eyes and sat up. I didn’t have any drugs. I’m not up to anything, I thought. Why would I be getting busted? I walked out onto the porch and looked down the hillside. Four carloads of ragged-looking natives were climbing the steep road to the villa. Each car had two guys riding on its hood and who knew how many guys inside. The ones on the hood had clubs. It didn’t look like a raid. It looked like the natives were attacking.
I ran back inside.
“Fucking natives with clubs!”
“It’s a fucking attack! Wake up!”
A few of the guys began flushing dope, coke, pills, and whatever shit they had down the sink and the toilet. I hoped there was a septic tank. Half these native toilets emptied onto the hillside a hundred feet away. Fine surprise that would be.
It was the girls who had gotten us into this me
ss. I knew they would be trouble.
When we arrived, they were in the house. They greeted us at the door like they belonged there. Maybe they did.
“Hi, I’m Jen and this is my friend Barbara. Joe told us we could stay here till next weekend.” None of us knew who Joe was, but after a moment’s thought, the guys in the band decided the two girls could stay. Hearing that, the girls became more talkative.
“We ran away from home three weeks ago.”
“My father’s a New Jersey policeman. But he’ll never find me here.”
“You wanna smoke some pot?”
Oh, shit, I thought.
I didn’t like finding extra people in our vacation home. Arriving to find it populated by two girls made me feel like an intruder. Who really belonged in the house? Us? Them? I found it unsettling. I was actually finding the whole trip unsettling, because I didn’t like changes in my environment. I liked sleeping in the same place and having the same people around.
The other guys didn’t see it that way. Mike turned to Peter and said, “Two free girls, Peter. It’s an omen.” Two of the guys moved right in with them.
I never understood how some guys did things like that. A girlfriend for a week, just like that. I was too shy even to talk to them.
Billy Perry, Chris, and I went into town the first morning. The people all spoke in a rapid musical lilt that I found hard to understand at first but soon became used to. We learned one thing quickly—everyone knew where we were staying.
“Yes, mon, you stay with the girls in the Maxwell place.”
Everywhere we went, the girls had preceded us. I never did find out exactly what they had done, but it seemed those girls had been having quite a party since they came to town a week or two before. And now we were part of whatever scene they had created.
There was plenty of pot in the house, and coke and pills and liquor, too. I drank some beer, but the rest of the stuff just didn’t appeal to me, so I ignored it. Until that morning, when the law arrived. Jesus Christ, I thought. I’m gonna go to jail for someone else’s drugs! It’s not my shit! I wanted to yell out. But I didn’t say anything.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's Page 11