I could hear the water bubbling at the back, where my exhaust pipe was now submerged, and water was beginning to come up through the floor seams. I cut the wheel, did a three point turn in midstream, gunned the motor, and headed for the bank. The wheels spun a bit and we scrambled onto shore, pointing back uphill.
“You can drive again,” I said, climbing back out of the driver’s seat.
“Wow!” TR didn’t have anything else to say for a long moment as we listened to water pour out of the Rover as it drained. It never missed a beat. “Damn! My Suzuki couldn’t do that!” Having gotten over his shock, TR bought the Land Rover.
When I delivered it a few days later, we decided to take another ride. This time, we drove far into the woods, just over the Vermont border. I drove a long way down a woods trail, and when I went to turn around, I hit an old tree stump that was hidden under the leaves. We were stuck.
We got out to see what was wrong, and TR said, “The wheels seem to be pointing in two different directions.”
It was true. The stump had bent the front end so that the left wheel was turning left and the right wheel was turning right. TR’s new Rover wasn’t going to drive home without a new tie rod.
We decided to walk back to the road and find a phone. “I’ll have to get some parts and come back to rescue the car,” I said. TR was remarkably calm, given that I’d just impaled his new rig on a tree stump.
As we started up the trail, darkness fell and it began sleeting. My asthma was aggravated by stress in those days, and it started acting up. I could hardly walk. Son of a bitch, I thought. First I wrecked his truck, and now I’m going to freeze to death in the woods. But I didn’t drop dead. I kept going. TR was remarkably patient, and we made it to a phone. His wife came and picked us up, my asthma settled back down, and I rescued the Rover the next day.
From that beginning, we became good friends. For someone as mechanical and robotic as I can be, he’s an unlikely companion. He’s warm and friendly—sort of chubby and jolly and teddy bear–like. I’ve also learned that he’s a very perceptive fellow. For a number of years, he was director of counseling for the Academy at Swift River, a well-known school for troubled teens in the Berkshires. He then went on to found a company that helps teenagers in difficulty make the transition into functional adulthood.
Over the years, TR had noticed certain odd things about me, but he never said anything. One day, having known me about ten years, he decided to tell me about his observations. He deliberated about telling me for quite a while, though. He was worried about how I’d react. After all, I looked pretty normal most of the time. I had founded a successful business. I was able to talk to people, and people got along with me, although some found me odd. I had a wife and a son. I wasn’t in trouble with the law, I didn’t drink, and I didn’t do drugs.
TR had taken to coming down to visit me at lunchtime every now and then. One day he said, “Therapists learn not to analyze their friends if they want to have friends. But there is a condition in this book that fits you to a T. I’d like you to read this and see what you think.” And he handed me a book: Asperger’s Syndrome, by Tony Attwood.
I picked it up. Warily. “What the hell is this?”
I thought, Ten seconds ago, I was telling him what I had just read about Caterpillar’s newest D10 bulldozers and how they plan to compete with Komatsu in Asia, and now he hands me this?
Seeing my wariness, he quickly continued, “I’m sorry to spring this on you like this. I’ve thought about it a lot. This book describes you exactly. You could be the poster boy for this condition. Your fascination with trains and bulldozers…it’s in here. The way you talk. The way you look at people, and how hard it is for you to make eye contact. The way you think.”
“So is there a cure?” I asked.
“It’s not a disease,” he explained. “It doesn’t need curing. It’s just how you are.”
Sitting at the table, I began scanning the book. I always read when I am eating alone, though I have learned that it’s rude to do so when eating with other people. But this moment appeared to be an exception. One of the first things I read was this:
Diagnostic Criteria for 299.80 Asperger’s Disorder
A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:
Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction.
Well, I thought, that certainly describes me. Not looking at people, making the wrong expressions, and gesturing when I should be still…that was me all right, and it wasn’t good. I kept reading.
Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.
That fit me exactly. When I was younger, I had never been able to connect with kids my own age.
A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).
Well, sure. If I can’t connect with people, how can I be expected to show them stuff? That was me, too.
Lack of social or emotional reciprocity.
I’ve certainly heard that one before.
I immediately realized he was right. It did fit me. Completely. It was like a revelation. I realized that all the psychologists and psychiatrists and mental heath workers I had been sent to as a child had completely missed what TR had seen.
As a child, I had been told I was smart but I was lazy. Reading the pages, I realized I wasn’t lazy, just different.
I knew that I did not look at people when I talked to them. Hell, I had been beaten up and criticized for that all through my childhood. But until I read that book I had never realized my behavior was unusual. I had never understood why people treated me the way they did. It had always seemed so mean, so unfair. It had never occurred to me that other people might find what I did (or did not do) naturally disconcerting. The answer to “Why won’t you look me in the eye, young man?” was right there in the book.
The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.
I kept reading, willing my eyes to pick up the pace. My head spun.
I had spent most of my life listening to people tell me how I was arrogant, aloof, or unfriendly. Now I read that people with Asperger’s display inappropriate facial expressions. Well, I certainly knew about that. When I was a child, I was told my aunt had died, and I grinned even though I was sad. And I got smacked.
Just reading those pages was a tremendous relief. All my life, I had felt like I didn’t fit in. I had always felt like a fraud or, even worse, a sociopath waiting to be found out. But the book told a very different story. I was not a heartless killer waiting to harvest my first victim. I was normal, for what I am.
How could all those so-called professionals have missed that? How could they have been so completely wrong?
To be fair, Asperger’s syndrome was not recognized as a distinct condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of mental health professionals, until fairly recently, when I was in my thirties. The upshot was that I spent many years adapting to a condition I didn’t know I had. Learning about Asperger’s was truly a life-transforming experience.
One of the most surprising things I learned was that Asperger’s is an autistic spectrum disorder. That is, it’s a form of autism. If someone had suggested I had an autistic disorder as a child, I’d have said, “You’re nuts!” To me, an autistic person was someone like Tommy, the autistic kid on the TV show St. Elsewhere. He never said anything, and he didn’t do much at all. Autism, to people of my generation, was something we imagined as almost a living death. I had no idea of the continuum that really exists, with profoundly impaired people like Tommy at one end and people like me at the other.
I guess it’s possible that even if I had been diagnosed at six, no on
e would have believed it. Perhaps our culture needed to evolve a bit more for subtler conditions like mine to stand out from the background noise of society.
If my parents had known what caused me to be the way I was, and acted on the knowledge, life might have turned out very differently for me. My life has been filled with lost chances because I didn’t fit in.
I left school in the tenth grade despite intelligence tests showing me to be smarter than most college graduates. A number of professors had encouraged me to start at UMass even though I had dropped out of high school, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too jarred by my failure. I did not want to let another school try and fit me into their mold so I could fail there, too. Starting at about six years of age, I learned not to submit myself to repeated humiliation from people or institutions.
I left Fat, the first band I was with, because I could not cope with the close personal interactions living in a house with ten roommates. And many of my earlier relationships fell apart because of my unusual style of communicating.
There were also missed career opportunities. At one point, I was asked to interview for an R&D job at Lucasfilm, which would have been ideal for my creative skills, but I was too afraid of going there, getting the job, and being found out as a fraud and fired once I had moved across the country. So I faded out of the music scene despite the fact that I was happier there than anywhere I have worked since.
Once I studied the book, I began to understand the differences between how I acted and how “normal” people acted in different situations. I started making a conscious effort to look people in the eye, and even when I looked at the floor while framing a response, I learned to glance at the person occasionally.
I learned to pause before responding when people approach me and begin speaking. I trained myself to respond in a manner that is only slightly eccentric, rather than out-and-out weird. When someone says, “Hey, John, how’s it going? How have you been?” I can answer, “I’m doing okay, Bob, how about you?” instead of “I have just been reading about the new MTU diesel engines that American President Lines is installing in their newest container ships. The new electronic engine management system is fascinating.”
I have taught myself to remember what’s happening with people close to my friends. When I see someone I have not seen in a while, I sometimes remember to say things like “How’s Mallory doing at college?” or “Is your mother out of the hospital yet?” That has proven hard to do, but I am making headway with it.
Changes like these have made a huge difference in how people perceive me. I have moved from being weird to being eccentric. And let me tell you, it’s a lot better to be eccentric.
Learning about my Asperger’s has benefited me in other ways, too. I’ve talked about feeling like a fraud, waiting to be found out and thrown on the rubbish pile of humanity. I felt like a fraud because I could not do anything in the normal way. I couldn’t complete school. I couldn’t “advance through the ranks.” I couldn’t “do it by the book.” And I always ignored the rules.
Because of that, I never felt legitimate. Now, with my understanding of my Asperger’s, those negative feelings are in large measure gone.
I now realize that the knowledge I have is genuine. When I worked as an engineer, my ability to create beautiful-sounding amplifiers and sound equipment was real. My ability to think up striking special effects was real, too. And now that I am older, I understand how rare those abilities are.
There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don’t conform. Luckily, the world is also full of people who care about results, and those people are usually very happy with me, because my Asperger’s compels me to be the ultimate expert in whatever field of interest I choose. And with substantial knowledge, I can obtain good results.
So I’m not defective. In fact, in recent years I have started to see that we Aspergians are better than normal! And now it seems as though scientists agree: Recent articles suggest that a touch of Asperger’s is an essential part of much creative genius.
25
Montagoonians
Names have been a source of difficulty for me as long as I can remember because the names I use are often not the ones other people expect. In some cases, people object to my use of names, and they occasionally get angry. Complaints like “I’m not Chubster! I’m Martha!” are all too familiar to me. But familiar or not, Martha will always be the Chubster, unless I adopt a different name for some reason, like her order of appearance among her sisters.
Why is she Chubster? Because at the time I named her, she had an obsession with being fit and thin. And what else could you name someone obsessed with fitness and weight? So Chubster it is, unless you want to use the diminutive form, which is Chubbykin.
To be considerate, I have tried on many occasions to use a name other than one I’ve chosen. I just can’t do it. When I try to call the Chubster Martha, I choke on it. Martha does not work for me. But you can call her Martha if you want. I won’t mind. I don’t impose my name usage on others.
I refer to my current house as The House. If, in the future, I acquire additional houses I might refer to them as Dwelling 1 and Dwelling 2, but until now The House has been an adequate, functional name for whatever house I have lived in.
The only exceptions to the rule of calling my dwelling The House have been the brief periods when I occupied The Apartment or The Tent or The Cabin or The Shed. Those times were considerably less pleasant than times spent in The House, so I don’t think about them very much. The least pleasant—and, luckily, very temporary—domiciling arrangements for me were The Dumpster, The Box Pile, and The Jail, but I don’t think of them at all.
My names for nonhumans are clear and descriptive. They are never tricky. For example, consider Dog and Poodle. There is no mistaking what they are. These are good, true, functional names.
My brother, who does not have Asperger’s, got a dog and named it Kitty Kitty. I would never do that. One day, my brother came to visit and we took Kitty Kitty for a walk in the Berkshires. He fell into a pool of road-repair tar. It served them both right for a name like that. I would never name a dog Kitty Kitty or Cat, and my dogs would never fall in road tar.
My brother persists in this deviant naming of animals. He currently has two dogs. One he has named Bentley. I believe he did that because I have a Bentley and he liked it. However, my Bentley is a car. An old one. Naming a dog Bentley is just wrong. The other one is worse. He calls it Cow. It’s a mystery to me why he would do that, since he presumably has the same genetic material as me. Sometimes I think he did it just to annoy me.
I think people who choose names like that must not be very logical thinkers. Perhaps they are people I’ve heard described as “Oh! So dramatic and emotional!” Or perhaps they just suffer from some kind of arrested development. I believe that anyone who interviewed my brother and me, and viewed examples of our naming practices, would reach that conclusion. My brother, of course, would disagree.
Another example of arrested development is the person who names a pet something like Molson. A dog is not a bottle of beer, no matter how much an alcoholic owner may wish him to be. Confusing a dog with a beer bottle is a sign of deep-seated mental confusion.
Unlike most people, my brother actually chose his own name. He was born as Christopher Richter Robison, but he didn’t like our parents, so he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs when he was eighteen. I have never called him Augusten, nor do I call him Chris. And he outgrew both Snort and Varmint. Our cousin Little Bob called him Xon, with the X pronounced as a Z, but that doesn’t work for me, either. In the absence of a workable name, I just refer to him as “my brother” without actually using a name.
To his partner, Dennis, I say, “Where’s my brother?”
To my son, I say, “Where’s your uncle?”
To my brother, I say, “Hey!”
Sometimes I have a
lternate names, and my names reflect function or position as opposed to type. For example, my wife has two sisters, and of course she had a mother and father, too, until they died. Sometimes several of them would be together, and I would have to introduce a stranger to them as a group.
In such a situation, I might point to a parent and say, “This is Unit Zero.” If Annie, the youngest child, were present, I would say “This is Annie, Unit Three.” If Ellen were there, I would say, “This is Ellen, Unit One.” If my own mate were there, I would say, “This is Martha, Unit Two.”
My descriptions make the relative position of each Unit clear in the greater scheme of things, which seems to me perfectly reasonable. Once again, we have an example of functional naming that is perceived as strange by the general public.
When I was little, grown-ups told me the names for everything and everyone. The hot thing was a stove. The dog was a poodle. The kid was Little Robbie, or Jeff. I had no power over the names, and I didn’t like it. Who were they, intruding into my innermost thoughts in that manner? But as I got bigger, I got my own naming rights. I began to acquire things that I could name. I was given a tractor, and I named him Chippy. But nobody respected my names. My father called my tractor “your tractor,” not Chippy. Sometimes people actually laughed at my names, which hurt my feelings or made me mad.
But I persisted. As I got older, I carefully evaluated each name I was handed for any new person or thing and decided on a case by case basis whether I’d accept it. If I didn’t accept the proffered name, I supplied one of my own. This sometimes presented problems, as when other kids didn’t understand their names were being offered to me on a take it or leave it basis. Looking back, I can understand how a kid might not have liked my naming him Blob, no matter how good a match that name was, or how repulsive he was.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's Page 23