When the tractor came out of the snow, Cubbie saw it first. “Dad, look! The front tire is gone!” There was nothing but a bare steel rim. The struggle to get out had torn the tire right off the rim.
We fished the tire out of the snow and levered it back onto the rim with two big bars. We installed a tube and got that tractor back on all four feet within thirty minutes. Then we set to work moving the snow to make room for all the cars and the ambulance. That tractor could really dig, and I was sorry my father would never get the chance to see it run.
The sound of the diesel engine, the smell, and the activity were a good distraction for us. I showed Cubby how to run the loader and he shared the snow moving with me. A picture I took that day shows him with a big grin, lifting a huge bucket of snow and dropping it down the hillside. We got the snow moved, and when we were done we parked the tractor right by the stairs and sat down to wait.
The ambulance arrived and the two attendants pulled my father out the back. He smiled when he saw me, and he looked at the tractor. He couldn’t talk much. I asked if he wanted to go over to it and he said no, he was cold. But he smiled again. Cubby and I helped carry my father into the house and then onto the bed. Finally, he was home. I stood for a while and held his hand.
My brother came up and he got some old photo albums and showed them to my father. But my father couldn’t concentrate. He said he’d have to look at them later.
I gave him a hug, and I said I loved him. Very faintly, he said, “I love you, too.” And that was the last time I saw him. He died quietly at 2:30 in the afternoon the next day, while I was at work. It was a sunny late winter day. I got up and went home. It was over. The tire went flat on the tractor the next day.
In place of my father, I have my memories. For so many years, I could not recall anything about him except the bad and the ugly. Now stories and memories that were lost to me for thirty years have taken on life. I hope they stay.
Other memories began to stir, too. Today, at fifty, I can feel my bare feet sting on the sharp white pebbles in the dirt driveway of my grandparents’ house, and I can hear the crickets. I can smell that Georgia clay and my great-grandfather’s pipe. I can hear the twang as I reach up to open the screen door on the front of the house, and I can feel the cold floor as I step onto the black-and-white checkered tiles.
It is these memories—a last gift from my father—that have made this book possible.
Although some memories were as vivid and real as today, others were spotty. So, in an attempt to get more answers, I spoke to my mother. I had been estranged from her for some time, but we began talking as I wrote this book.
At first, my mother had a hard time accepting that my memories could be different from her own and still be valid. She’d say, “You weren’t in the back of that VW that trip!” And I’d say, “I was, too. I remember the sky!” We both learned something from that. My mother was troubled by some of what I’d written about her. After we talked, I understood that I had made one or two errors in my portrayal of her, and I corrected them. In other cases, she and I have different memories, or we interpreted things differently, and she came to accept my version. I believe the process of writing this memoir gave me a better understanding of who she is and how mental illness affected her, and I know she gained a better understanding of me.
For much of her life, my mother dreamed of being a well-known author. She published a few works of poetry, but the larger work of memoir always eluded her. She had the skills and the stories, but her life got in the way. The mental illness that gave her experiences to write about also prevented her from capturing them on paper. Her stroke and partial paralysis made it hard for her to write, and hard to think. But she hasn’t given up, and I am confident that her story will appear in bookstores one day soon, alongside her postcards and poetry.
There is no doubt that the storytelling skills people see in my brother and me were inherited from our mother. Whatever flaws our parents had, they were exceptionally intelligent, articulate, and creative.
It’s a shame that my father died before my book was written. I hope he’d be proud if he read it now. I think he would, and so does his brother, my uncle Bob. I’m afraid my portrayal of him may be less forgiving than it might have been because he was not here to offer explanations that may have moderated some of my harshest descriptions.
With the insight gained from writing the book, I now believe my parents did the best they could under tough circumstances. They were both damaged as children, and my brother and I grew up damaged as a result. But damage is not always permanent, nor is it always passed down from one generation to the next. I’m okay today, and so is my brother. Cubby has never been whipped, and he has never known the rougher things my brother and I experienced. Hopefully, he will avoid those dark corners of life.
I’ve already heard Cubby tell little James about the dragons. He makes his own fireworks, and the math and computer programming he does is already beyond me. So as much as he’d deny it, Cubby is a lot like his dad.
It will take a few more years (I hope!), but I’m looking forward to the day when I can watch Cubby take his own son to the train yard to watch the locomotives.
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE to thank all the people who made this book possible.
First are all the people that appear in my stories: my family, my friends, and even folks like Rug, who bought the porn for my high school teacher. Without them, there would be no book. Jim Boughton deserves special attention for being most unique.
I will always be grateful to my friend TR Rosenberg for telling me about my Asperger’s. TR lives near me in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has a thriving practice working with troubled young adults, and you can visit his website at www.strongbridgeassociates.com.
I also particularly thank my brother and Cubby for encouraging me to write this book, and my wife, Martha, for supporting me. The Robison Service staff deserves recognition for holding the company together while I focused my energy on writing. I also appreciate the support of my other family members: Judy, Little Bear (Mary), Big Bob, Little Bob, Leigh, and Relda Robison, Unit One (Ellen) and Unit Three (Annie), Three-B (Magnus), and Dennis. I also mustn’t forget Uncle Bubba (Wyman) Richter, his wife, Ann, and their kids, Leigh and Meredith. I thank the people who offered early encouragement and advice: my old friends Neil Fennessey and Leeann Every; my first listeners and then readers: Lois Hayes and her daughter Bekah, Alison Ozer, Claudia Hepner, and Jan Anderson; my friends who encouraged me: Bob Jeffway and his wife, Celeste, who spent hours reliving old times with me; Jim Lumley, Gordon Palley, Paul Zahradnik, David Rifken, Chris Cava, Charles Burke, Matt Dufresne, and Gene Cassidy; my friend Rick Colson, who took the author photos; my literary agent, Christopher Schelling; and Steve Ross, Rachel Klayman, and the team at Crown that worked so hard to make the book a reality.
Reading and Resources
I ENCOURAGE READERS who want to know more about some of the companies, bands, and individuals in this book to read about them online. Fat, my first band, has a small online presence at www.mainstrecords.com/fat. If you’d like to learn about the first big sound company I worked for, check out the history of Pink Floyd and their sound company, which was called Britannia Row, or Britro, at www.pinkfloyd-co.com. The equipment I worked on was built for Pink Floyd’s sound company, and other sound companies, but used on many tours, including Roxy Music, Sha Na Na, Blondie, Talking Heads, April Wine, Black Sabbath, Phoebe Snow, Dan Hill, Meat Loaf, Iron Maiden, Toby Beau, Nantucket, Cheap Trick, and others.
There is a wealth of information online on KISS and what it was like on tour. In particular, I’d suggest reading about the Alive II, Return of KISS, Dynasty, and Unmasked shows. Some of the websites I like are www.kissfanshop.de, www.kissasylum.com, www.kissfaq.com/tours/tours.html, and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_timeline. There are other articles elsewhere in Wikipedia, and each of the band members is in the www.imdb.com database. There are also many books about KISS, includin
g works by band members, crew, and fans. If you look closely, you can find me in the group photos that appear in books from that period. One that I particularly like is KISS and Sell, by Chris Lendt, our business manager in those years.
KISS was a very big deal for many people, and some of them gather annually for a KISS convention—usually in New York or New Jersey—where they swap stories and trade memorabilia. For 2007, the convention site is online at www.starzcentral.com/kissexpo. After leaving KISS, guitarist Ace Frehley continued to play my instruments in his own band, Frehley’s Comet. My light guitar and smoking guitar were key parts of his act for many years.
Milton Bradley was a pioneer in electronic games in the late 1970s. The products I worked on were Microvision, Super Simon, Big Trak, Milton, Omni, and the stillborn Game Computer. I also worked on speech recognition and sound effects for several games that never made it to market. In fact, that was one of my biggest frustrations: I’d work hard on something, only to have management cancel it at the last minute. I’ll bet 90 percent of our R&D group’s work ended up on the scrap heap. As an interesting aside, the computer we used to develop speech chips was a VAX, from Digital Equipment Corporation. The VAX was Data General’s competition in Tracy Kidder’s wonderful book The Soul of a New Machine. I worked on the design of custom integrated circuits in conjunction with General Instrument and Texas Instruments, both of whom supplied chips to MB.
Bob Jeffway, the engineer who appears in some of my stories, is online at www.jeffway.com. He went on to be a highly successful inventor of toys and games for many different companies. As a Milton Bradley staffer, he worked on many of the same games I was assigned to, and he also played a role in Dark Tower, Simon, and the Star Trek Phaser Guns. Later, as an independent game inventor, he helped create Mattel’s Diva Starz and Cabbage Patch Kids Kick ’n Splash toys, and Milton Bradley’s Whac-A-Mole electronic games. All the games we worked on can be researched online, and they still pop up for sale on eBay. But they’re not cheap anymore! Collectors are paying upwards of ten times the original price for working editions of these old games, and it looks like prices will keep on rising.
My automobile business, JE Robison Service, has been in business in Springfield, Massachusetts, for almost twenty years. We specialize in BMW, Bentley, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, and Rolls-Royce vehicles. The company started out fixing cars in a two-bay garage, but we’ve expanded into a multibuilding complex where we do major repair, overhaul, customization, and restoration work. The company has grown from two to twelve employees in that time, and we now take in work from all over the eastern United States. We’re online at www.robisonservice.com.
Our car projects often appear in enthusiast magazines. Sometimes—as in the February 2007 edition of Land Rover Monthly—we even make their covers. My pictures and articles appear in Land Rover Lifestyle, Rover News, and other car magazines.
I have been very fortunate to have achieved my childhood career goals not just once, but three times. I guess that means three things: I picked attainable goals, I persevered, and I was lucky. If I had decided to become president of GE, get elected to the Senate, and then become an astronaut, that might not have happened. Perhaps there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
There are many Asperger’s and autism resources available now, and more appear every day. As a starting point, I recommend checking out OASIS, the Online Asperger Syndrome Information and Support site at www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/. OASIS founder Barb Kirby cowrote a book that I found helpful, The OASIS Guide to Asperger Syndrome (Crown, 2001).
Local Asperger support groups can be an important resource for parents of children with Asperger’s and adults who grapple with it. In my area, there’s the Asperger’s Association of New England, with a website at aane.autistics.org. There are similar organizations in many big cities throughout the United States. Keep in mind, though, that many Aspergians are still “in the closet,” so you may not see as many people as you’d expect at such groups. Until my brother publicized my condition in Running with Scissors (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), I would never have participated in such a group. It was only the positive feedback from his book that gave me the courage to do so.
Psychologist Tony Attwood has written a number of excellent books that describe Asperger’s from a mental health professional’s point of view, and he’s online at www.tonyattwood.com.au. It was his book Asperger’s Syndrome (Jessica Kingsley, 1998) that introduced me to my condition. His latest work is The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome (Jessica Kingsley, 2007).
Temple Grandin’s stories about her life with autism should not be missed. I particularly like Animals in Translation (Scribner, 2005) and Thinking in Pictures (Vintage, 2006). She’s also got a website, www.templegrandin.com. I also enjoyed autistic savant Daniel Tammet’s book, Born on a Blue Day (Free Press, 2007). He’s online at www.optimnem.co.uk.
Dawn Prince-Hughes has written several interesting books. Songs of the Gorilla Nation (Harmony, 2004) came out a few years ago, and her new book, Passing as Human, will be published by Harmony in 2008.
Although it’s a work of fiction, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Doubleday, 2003) contains many fascinating insights from author Mark Haddon’s work with autistic kids.
Finally, my brother is online at www.augusten.com, and I’m at www.johnrobison.com.
About the Author
JOHN ROBISON lives with his wife and son in Amherst, Massachusetts. His company, JE Robison Service, repairs and restores fine European automobiles. Visit his business website at www.robisonservice.com and his author website at www.johnrobison.com.
Copyright © 2007 by John Elder Robison
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robison, John Elder.
Look me in the eye: my life with Asperger’s / John Elder Robison.—1st ed.
1. Robison, John Elder—Mental health. 2. Asperger’s syndrome—Patients—United States—Biography. I. Title.
RC553.A88R635 2007
362.196'8588320092—dc22
[B] 2007013139
eISBN: 978-0-307-40572-2
v1.0
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's Page 27