Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

  “Okay,” she said. It wasn’t clear if she understood or was merely humoring me.

  I did the design and Little Bear made the circuit boards. We poured the acid to etch the boards into a Tupperware tray in the kitchen sink and assembled everything on the dining table in our apartment. Amazingly, it worked. I loaded it into the car to deliver it. On the ride to New Jersey, I pondered how far we had come from the two kids who’d fixed broken record players for the high school language lab just a few years before.

  Seth was waiting when I arrived at the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts.

  “You’re late. What took so fucking long?” he said.

  “This crossover of yours better work. We don’t have a spare.” He was sure anxious.

  There would be no rehearsal, I realized. We were going to plug it in and do a show. Will it work? I was tense and worried. It worked when I did my last tests, five minutes before I put it in the car, I told myself.

  We hooked it up, and the first thing I heard through it was Gerry Rafferty’s horns playing “Baker Street.”

  “Fucking clean.” Seth was impressed. “Smooth. Listen to those horns.”

  It was like nothing I’d heard before. They were smooth. I was thrilled.

  That night, I watched Meat Loaf play for a sellout crowd. During the show, his manager came over to me. “Fuckin’ great sound you guys have tonight. So clear!” I smiled. The five-way idea had really worked.

  Britro had plenty of work for me after that night. It seemed their sound systems were everywhere. Whenever I’d go to Long Island City, they’d be setting up a new tour, always using equipment I had designed or fixed or built or modified in some way. All different kinds of music—Judas Priest, Talking Heads, Blondie, Phoebe Snow.

  And I was the sound engineer.

  By the summer of 1978, Britro had several sound systems touring at any given time. That August, I got a call about a system we had put together for a band called April Wine. Apparently, they were having trouble with the bass cabinets. They had blown thirty bass drivers. Britro asked me to ride up with them the next day to sort it out.

  “Okay, but I have to bring my girlfriend. I promised to go away with her this weekend.”

  “Okay,” Seth said. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow.”

  I called Little Bear and said, “Get ready, we’re going on tour with April Wine tomorrow.”

  “Who’s April Wine?” she asked.

  “They’ve got an album called First Glance,” I replied. People said that April Wine were the Rolling Stones of Canada, but they were unknown in the U.S.

  The next day, a green station wagon pulled into my driveway with one of the crew from New York and a Brit I hadn’t met before. There was just barely room to stuff ourselves, my tools, and all the speaker boxes into the car. It was packed to the gills. We hit the road with Nigel, the Brit, driving. And he drove hard. As we slid around the ramp onto I-91, Nigel turned to me and said, “I went to Rolls-Royce chauffeur school, I did. Taught me how to drive right proper. And we’re in a bloody fookin’ hurry here. They’re waitin’ on us for tomorrow’s show, they are.”

  Once we left Massachusetts, I lost sight of the Buick’s speedometer on the far side of 100. At the speed Nigel was going, curves on the interstate felt like hairpin turns. We made the border in record time. When we pulled in, the customs officer looked in the back. The back of the wagon was filled with cases stenciled PINK FLOYD—LONDON.

  “Got Pink Floyd in the back of the car, do you?” he asked

  “Righto, mate. We shrunk ’em and stuck ’em in fookin’ boxes, we did,” said Nigel.

  Amazingly, the customs officer laughed and waved us through. We stopped for dinner at a little French restaurant outside Montreal, where I had one of the best meals I have ever eaten. With a change of drivers, we were off again, driving through the night. It must have been three in the morning when we caught up with the tour. April Wine was playing hockey rinks across eastern Canada, the only places big enough to hold the crowds. Nigel banged on the door for ten minutes before someone let us in.

  Little Bear and I sat up, shook ourselves awake, and got to it. By dawn, we had changed out half the dead speakers—enough to do that night’s show. We retreated to the motel.

  We spent the next week pounding our way across Canada, fixing sound equipment as we went. Nigel took the wagon back to the city and returned with another load of speakers and parts so we could finish the job. By August 12, the day before my birthday, we had reached the Bay of Fundy on the eastern tip of Canada. That night, we took the ferry to St. John’s, Newfoundland. It was an overnight trip, and Little Bear and I spent the night of my twenty-first birthday curled up on the top of the ferry, in the shelter of the smokestack. With an important job to do, the gentle roll of the ship, the stars, and the sea air, it seemed like magic.

  I couldn’t imagine a better life. I could almost forget my screwed-up family back home. I wished I could stay on the road forever.

  14

  The First Smoking Guitar

  Usually, I worked almost alone in Britro’s huge building, unless Little Bear was with me. I’d be in the back, and Seth and one or two of the crew would be fiddling with equipment out front on the soundstages. So I was surprised one day in 1978 to find a crowd milling around when I arrived with my cases of parts and tools. I could hear loud music playing, and as I walked in I recognized the song. KISS was there.

  “They’ve rented a soundstage to get ready for their tour,” Seth explained. “Just let them be and we’ll do our work in back, right-o.”

  Right-o. I went to work on a fresh pile of dead Phase Linears.

  I could see the stage from my bench in back, and I saw Ace Frehley, the guitar player, poking his fingers into a hole in the front of his Les Paul guitar. Being curious, I moved closer.

  “What are you doing in there?” I asked.

  “Hey, are you the engineer?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “I wanna put a smoke bomb in this guitar. I want it to catch fire at the end of my solo.”

  “I could do that. Can I see?”

  Ace had carved a hole in the front of the guitar and embedded a smoke bomb. He had the idea that he’d set the bomb off and the guitar would vanish in a cloud of smoke while he played his solo. It was a good idea, but the implementation was less than optimal.

  “This is a fucking mess,” I said tactfully. I thought for a minute. “We could build a metal box, embed it in the guitar, and put the smoke bombs inside. That would work a lot better.”

  “Yeah, it would last longer, too, because we wouldn’t be burning the wood.”

  “We could even insulate the box. And instead of fire, we could put lights inside.”

  Ace was getting into the idea. And it turned out he had already been thinking about lights.

  “How about these?” He showed me a bulb. “They’re for airplanes or movie projectors or something.” Ace was never clear on details like that. Regardless of where they came from, though, they were supposed to be bright.

  “Do you have a spare guitar?” I asked.

  “Shit, if you can do that, I have all the guitars you need.” He called out to the crew member responsible for his equipment, “Tex, have Gibson ship this guy a guitar tomorrow!” Then it hit him. He turned to me. “Hey! What’s your name?”

  “John Robison,” I said.

  Ace clearly didn’t think John summed me up. “We’ll call you Ampie!” he said, knowing that I built the amplifiers. I guess I wasn’t the only one who picked my own names. When I watched John Belushi name the Flounder in Animal House, I knew just how he felt.

  Gibson’s Les Paul model was the gold standard of the guitar world. The version Ace played cost almost a thousand dollars. And here he was, telling his roadie to call them and they’d ship me one, overnight, just like that. In the music world, that’s what power and fame did.

  That night, I headed home with a new job. I had never made special effects before, but t
hey didn’t know that, and I wasn’t going to tell them. My experiments had so far been confined to childhood pranks—nothing on this scale. It was a little scary when I thought about it. What if I fucked it up?

  You can do it, I said to myself as I drove home. And I knew just the person to help with this: my friend Jim Boughton, he of the foundry and the flaming washtub. I showed him the guitar the next day, as soon as FedEx delivered it to my house. It was a brand-new black Les Paul Custom. I had expected a factory second or something, not this. It was so perfect that I was almost afraid to touch it. But I did.

  “He wants a guitar that explodes and blows fire and smoke? And plays? He’s my kind of musician!” Jim grinned.

  We laid the guitar on a blanket on the hood of his Fiat 124, and in short order we came up with a plan. For the first design iteration, Jim cast a firebox that we embedded in the back of the guitar. But it didn’t work. It was crooked.

  For our next effort, Jim welded a box from stainless steel. He used a router to carve a hole in the back of the guitar, then removed one of the pickups on the front. The box fit right behind where the pickup had been. The pickup location was now a hole leading into the box.

  “Okay, we’ll cut some steel in the shape of the pickup, and we’ll use a spring and hinge to snap it open so the smoke can get out. We’ll need to make an insulated pad so Ace doesn’t get burned playing this thing. It’s going to get hot!”

  Tex, Ace’s roadie, called me every few days to see how we were doing. At first, he was skeptical, along with the rest of the guys on the KISS crew.

  “A metal box?? A fake pickup on a hinge???”

  But after Tex came up to see what we were doing, he became a believer, and so did they. Overnight it became “Yeah!! A metal box!! A hinged pickup!!”

  While Jim made the box and the rest of the mechanical parts, I worked on the electronics. KISS had just started using a brand-new technology—Shaffer Vega wireless radio systems—to send the signals from the guitars to the amplifiers. For a band like KISS, who moved around a lot, wireless was great because it meant there were no cords to trip over or yank out. It made my job harder, though, because it meant those huge lights Ace had found would have to run from batteries.

  Tex helped solve that problem. He found a small company, Frezzolini Electronics, that made rechargeable battery packs for portable TV cameras. I went to see them in an industrial park in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and Jack Frezzolini and Jim Crawford came out and showed me around. It was exciting to be treated like a real visiting engineer and not a kid. We walked out back, into an area where a technician was welding individual rechargeable batteries the size of C cell batteries into packs of all shapes and sizes. Then the packs were shrink-wrapped in blue plastic.

  There, on the bench, were the ones they had made for me. They were about five by six inches, not more than an inch thick, and weighed perhaps two pounds.

  “This pack has all the power you need,” Jack said.

  “Really?” I was skeptical.

  “Shit, you could start a car off this pack! Check this out.” We walked over to a pair of lights, and he plugged in one of my packs. The lights blazed on, flooding the room, so bright that I had to look away. “We developed these packs so TV crews could run floodlights and get a good image anywhere,” he explained. “How do you think they get TV coverage of car crashes, or mountain rescues, or animals in the woods? They use our batteries with light packs like these.”

  I was impressed. I left Frezzolini with two packs and two chargers.

  “I’ll send the bill to the band,” Jim said. What a great deal, I thought. A whole office full of people who pay your bills and take care of you. Maybe I can have that someday.

  When my creations came to life, I felt exhilarated. I loved to see and hear them run in a live performance. People would stare in amazement and roar with applause and cheers at the things I dreamed up. At times like that, it was fun being a misfit. When I looked around me, the creative people in the music scene all seemed to be misfits, so I blended right in. The only normal people were the managers, and I didn’t deal too much with them. I liked the people in the bands, and they actually seemed to like me.

  I had a girlfriend and I had a car. I had escaped my deranged parents. I was working for one of the hottest bands in the world. I was even making good money, when I worked. I’d gone from eighty dollars a week with Fat to eighty dollars every few hours. At long last, I was really making it.

  At least, that was how I felt when things went well for me. When they didn’t, I heard the little voices in my head.

  You’re just a fraud.

  This shit will never work.

  What will they say when they come to get it and it’s in a million pieces on your bench?

  Sometimes, working on the KISS guitars, I would get all tense and worried. But I would just work harder. There was only one thing to do. I had to make them work just as I had said they would.

  There were countless details to be attended to. For example, there was the problem of the fake pickup—the metal piece that swung open to let the smoke and light out. It was stainless steel, cut in the shape of the pickup that had previously occupied that space. Should we paint it? If we did, I was afraid the soot from the smoke bombs would ruin the finish.

  Tex had the perfect answer: decals. He even knew a guy who could make some. His buddy printed adhesive decals that looked like the front of a pickup, and we used them to cover the steel door. They could be changed every show, keeping them fresh. It was a great idea, and it worked. At the same time, the back of the guitar was hollowed out more to hold the Frezzolini batteries and the electronics I had put together.

  This guitar project was my first experience doing something as part of a team. Between the batteries and the lights and the smoke bombs and Jim’s welding and cutting, and Little Bear’s tireless soldering, we were pulling it off!

  Finally, we were done. We had transformed a stock Les Paul into a fire-breathing beast. The finished guitar looked just like any other Gibson Les Paul. But when you twisted the lower volume control, the bottom pickup swung back with a snap, the smoke bomb went off, and intense light blasted out of the hole. The effect of the light and the smoke was spectacular. It was time to bring it to New York.

  I had never built anything for anyone famous before. KISS was one of the biggest bands in the world, and I was really proud that they had chosen me to make the guitar. I wondered what would happen next. Would I become famous? Would I get more work? When I arrived, Ace picked up my guitar and peered into the workings, visible through a clear plastic cover on the back.

  “Far out! Let’s see it run. Tex, let’s wire up some smoke bombs!” When both smoke bombs lit off, the smoke poured out the front and filled the room. And it kept burning. In fact, it burned so hot that it popped two strings off the guitar. When I saw that, I just hoped our insulation held up.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Ace was impressed. And the audience was, too, as soon as they saw it. Ace played the smoking guitar on the song “2000 Man.” It was a huge hit with the crowds—they would roar when they saw the smoke and light pour out of it. After the first show, Ace came out to talk to me.

  “Ampie, this is wild. I love it. What else can we do?”

  That smoking guitar was the first of a long line of special guitars we would create over the next few years. Ace was full of ideas. I started designing when the tour opened and kept building and modifying my guitars as we traveled. The effects got better and better throughout the tour. I loved it and so did Ace.

  After a lifetime of being unpopular, I found that the tables had suddenly turned for me. Relatives I hadn’t seen since I was five showed up at the stage door, professing their fondness for me and requesting “two backstage passes, if you can spare them.” I usually could.

  Relatives weren’t the only people I met. The sexual prowess of some of the guys on the tour was legendary, and I often bumped into their “friends.” One night in Maryl
and, for example, we had reserved the whole top floor of the best hotel in the area, where we registered under assumed names. Despite our efforts, there were always groupies hanging around. I trudged past them after the show, headed for the elevators. As I stepped inside, two girls got in with me. They were quite pretty, and very provocatively dressed. The one I still remember had red hair and a red silk blouse, unbuttoned practically to her navel. With high heels. She wasn’t dressed like a hooker. (By that time, I’d seen enough hookers to know the difference.) She was just, well, aggressive.

  I pushed the button for the top floor, then turned to them and asked, “Which floor?”

  “Top floor,” said the girl with the bright red shirt.

  “Do you have an invitation?” I asked. “Our security guys won’t let you off otherwise.”

  “We’re going to give Gene Simmons head. He’s expecting us,” she said with a dismissive tone.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. What else could I say? When we got to the top, I headed for my room and they headed for his. They were indeed expected.

  I saw that kind of thing night after night, but the girl in the red shirt kind of stuck out. I guess it was her confidence—something I had never felt with anyone but Little Bear. That night, I closed the door of my room and went to work on my latest guitar modifications. Alone.

  I was on my way to being a special-effects wizard for KISS. But that was in their world. When I went home, I stepped back into my own world, a much more ordinary place. The crowds, the noise, the stage—they were gone as if they had never existed. In fact, that’s exactly what some people in the tiny town of Amherst thought—that I must have made them up.

  Before we had gone on tour, we had set up the whole show and rehearsed on Long Island. On several occasions, I had brought Varmint with me. He loved it. One of his seventh-grade assignments that term was to write about what he did on vacation. So, of course, he wrote, “My brother works for KISS. He took me to rehearsal in Nassau, where I met Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. I saw them without their makeup and they told me dirty jokes.”