Love That Boy

by Ron Fournier

  On the muted TV above my desk, I could see black smoke swirling from the building. I assumed it was the work of an errant small-jet pilot. Mindy didn’t disagree.

  We chatted for eight minutes, until Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower. “Oh my God, did you see that?” Mindy shouted. I had, but I hadn’t processed it. “Hang on a minute,” she said, putting me on hold.

  One minute later Mindy was back on the line. “They think the planes have been hijacked.”

  “Who thinks?”

  “The FBI,” she said.

  “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The FBI believes the two planes that crashed into the towers in New York City just now were hijacked?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m here, Ron,” Mindy said. “The FBI is right here. They’ve got reports of hijackings.” I called my editor with the bulletin, the first of many that day.

  Lori was at home just five miles from the White House, standing in the kitchen talking to our sister-in-law, Ingrid. A small TV hung from the cupboard, and Lori had it on when the second plane hit the towers. Lori thought, Boy, they only let idiots fly today. She hung up with Ingrid and called me at the White House.

  I answered, “Fournier!”

  Lori could tell I was frustrated by the interruption from home. “Hi, honey,” she said. “Why are these planes flying into these buildings?”

  “They were hijacked,” I said. “I have to go.” Then I hung up. Yes, I hung up on my wife without giving her details I was sharing with the world, without telling her how I would keep myself safe, without even asking about her safety and her plans for the kids, ages 13, 9, and 3, scattered at three separate schools. I was chasing a story. I wanted to win.

  Lori set the phone on its cradle and exhaled. She told me later it felt like she had been punched in the stomach. She stared at the TV wondering whether I was in danger. Over and over, the TV showed pictures of the West Wing evacuation, and Lori strained to find me in the fleeing crowd. She didn’t know, but I had refused to evacuate because I was too busy reporting and dictating news of the attacks to my editor. It wasn’t until 90 minutes later that Lori finally saw me on live TV, slowly walking along an empty White House driveway, the West Wing at my back and a cell phone pressed against my ear. She shouted at the screen, “They evacuated the White House! Why are you in the driveway?”

  Years later, while working on this book together, I was still trying to justify to Lori why I was so inattentive on 9/11. “I knew it was a big deal. It was a big story, but it wasn’t real life,” I told her. “To me, work is almost like a game, and it’s not real life. When I come home, whether it’s 9/11 or impeachment or whatever, then life begins. I compartmentalize the two.”

  “Which has upset me the whole time we’ve been married,” Lori interrupted. We had never talked about her feelings before, and my defensiveness had struck a long-buried nerve. “9/11 was a big deal, impeachment was a big deal. I mean, how many times did we say, ‘This is the biggest story of your career. No, this is the biggest day of your career. Wait, this is the biggest story of your career’?” Tears were pooling in the bluest eyes I’ll ever see.

  “And here I am at home with three kids and you’re sometimes my only adult contact for days,” Lori continued. “I want to talk about stuff! Because what you’re covering is what’s happening in the country and it’s what everybody is talking about, but you wouldn’t talk to me about it. You tell me, ‘It’s work. I don’t want to talk about it.’ Okay, let’s talk about the diapers I changed and the laundry I did.”

  Lori didn’t sound angry. What I heard (now that I was listening) was humiliation and fear, the nagging sense that the news was more valuable to me than her. “Do you know how small that makes me feel?” she asked. “Do you know how insignificant I felt?”

  Truth is, I didn’t. I couldn’t empathize. Not yet.

  —

  Bush finished his off-the-record story about Clinton and I pushed “play” on my digital recorder. He nodded at his inbox, where a shiny baseball and Sharpie sat atop a small pile of papers. “Do you like sports?”

  “Hate sports,” Tyler said. I winced.

  I could feel a burning knot in my belly. Tyler was fending off Bush with one-sentence answers, and I was worried the ex-president would consider him rude or obtuse. I jumped in.

  “How about the Rangers and Tigers this year, eh?” I asked.

  Bush glared at me and held his palms up as if to say, Didn’t you hear your boy? I wrote in my notebook, Stop butting in. Bush turned back to Tyler and warmly smiled.

  “So, Tyler, at 14 this is probably an unfair question to ask, but do you have any idea what you’d like to be when you get older?

  “Maybe a comedian.”

  “Maybe a what?” Bush said, a bit surprised.

  “A comedian.”

  This was the first I’d heard of Tyler’s ambition. I had tried to get him to open up, but he never would. I knew what I had wanted him to be—a ballplayer—and because of his diagnoses and these guilt trips, I was coming to terms with the fact that my dreams weren’t his. But this was new. This was important. This was amazing.

  “Well,” Bush replied, “I’m a pretty objective audience. You might want to try a couple of your lines out on me.”

  “Nah,” Tyler demurred. “I don’t have any material.”

  I told Bush about an improv comedy show on TV that Tyler and I liked to watch together. Then I urged Tyler to tell Bush about the improv class he had just started to take. Tyler shrugged. Bush let him off the hook.

  “Ah, interesting,” Bush said. “I’ve met a lot of people. You know how many people ever said, ‘I think I’d like to make people laugh’? You’re the only guy. That’s awesome.”

  Bush had connected. With an impish smile, he told Tyler about the time that rocker/humanitarian Bono was scheduled to visit the Oval Office. White House aides, knowing their boss was unimpressed by celebrities, worried that Bush would blow it. “[Chief of staff] Josh Bolten comes in and says, ‘Now, you know who Bono is, don’t you?’ Just as he’s leaving the Oval Office I said, ‘Yeah, he’s married to Cher.’ ”

  Bush raised an eyebrow. “Get it?” he asked Tyler. “Bone-o. Bahn-o.”

  Tyler politely chuckled, and Bush explained the punch line. “It’s kind of ironic,” he said, “and yet the humor had a point.” The point was not to worry about what other people think about you—the perfect lesson for a teenager, particularly one like Tyler who has a hard time fitting in.

  “Anyway,” Bush continued, “so I’m curious to know, what is an improv class? How does that work?”

  “You mostly just practice your improv and make people laugh,” Tyler said with a shrug.

  Bush played along. “You mostly just stand up in front of people and they throw a subject out and you got to make it humorous?”

  “No,” Tyler said. “We haven’t practiced in front of any audience. It’s just like an empty room with a stage.”

  “But who’s watching? The instructor?”

  “Yeah.” Bush had drawn Tyler out of his shell. This was a more expansive conversation than he typically had with me or even Lori, perhaps because Bush had worked so hard to unearth Tyler’s passion. And he wouldn’t let go.

  “So they say, ‘Talk about baseball,’ and you have to come up with funny things about baseball?” Bush asked.

  I could tell Tyler was excited because the pace of his speech accelerated. “We have, like, these note cards and you have to pick the note cards up and say what’s on them.”

  “In other words, stream of consciousness?” Bush asked.

  I told Bush that the class syllabus stresses the importance of eye contact, mutual respect, and the empathy to understand how to play off one another on the fly. These skills come naturally to the young adults in the group. But not to Tyler.

  “Very cool,” Bush said, turning back to Tyler. “Humor is hard,” he said. “Yo
u found that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know why it’s hard?” Bush said. “Because the best humor is making fun of yourself, and if you got a big ego, it’s hard to make fun of yourself. That’s really the best humor in a way, particularly if you’re a big shot, you know. It’s a wonderful art. That’s neat that you’re doing that.”

  —

  Bill Clinton famously felt the nation’s pain. George W. Bush felt Tyler’s. While the former Democratic president reads large audiences and parses voting blocs like no other modern politician, his GOP successor reads a room as well as anybody I know.

  Bush probed. He listened. He waited until Tyler revealed his hidden passion—then pounced. Well, I’m a pretty objective audience. You might want to try a couple of your lines out on me.

  It was an example of what Stephen Gray Wallace calls “meeting them where they are”—a form of empathy specific to raising children. You do it literally: bending over and making eye contact. You also do it metaphorically. “Meeting them where they are means accepting them for who they are,” said the school psychologist and author who runs CARE, the adolescent research center.

  Wallace had a client once, a young man who wouldn’t look him in the eye and responded only with one- or two-word answers. Wallace took the boy outside with a Frisbee, and they played catch—silently at first. Over the span of a few weeks, the boy began talking while they played. Wallace met the boy where he was.

  Ben Vogelgesang has that certain empathy. We met at Dickey-Stephens Park, home of the Arkansas Travelers minor league baseball team, in North Little Rock, where he was sitting in the front row behind home plate with his 4-year-old son, Gus. Three things stood between them and a 95-mile-per-hour fastball: a squatting catcher, 20 feet of grass and dirt, and a square-mesh protective net that Gus waffled against his face.

  “Get your mug away from there, buddy,” Ben chuckled. It was boys’ night out, a tradition Vogelgesang had started when Gus was just a few months old.

  For as long as it took us to finish our beers, Ben and I talked about our marriages, fatherhood, and his son. “Am I his friend? Or am I his superior?” Ben mumbled. “I have no idea of what I’m doing.”

  I nodded. None of us do.

  “So why do you bring him here?” I asked.

  “One reason, really,” he said. “I love the game. He loves the game. But this is the one place where Gus talks to me.”

  A few minutes later, I shook hands with Ben and Gus and walked away while the father put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Climbing the sticky concrete steps, I could hear Ben probing: “So Mom tells me you’re having trouble in school?”

  I’ve seen my niece Anna meet Tyler where he is. They’ve always had an easy and authentic connection, and Lori thinks that’s because Anna lets Tyler be. When they’re playing video games, Anna is content to allow Tyler to call the shots. When he wants to play alone, Anna sits in the recliner next to his and quietly reads. He likes having Anna at his side, while at the same time not having to engage with her. She’s not a threat to him. She’s not a source of pressure upon him. Yet her presence makes Tyler less lonely.

  What did Anna’s example teach me? The power of acceptance—and presence. While wrapping up this book, I ended the habit of interrupting Tyler’s quiet time in our basement, where he reads, watches comedians on the Internet, or plays video games. Rather than announcing myself with a forced “Let’s talk,” I began a new routine: I now come downstairs without fanfare and slip into the recliner abutting his, pull out a book or a newspaper, and quietly read.

  Tyler almost always smiles and nods his head. Sometimes he’ll give me a “Hi, Dad!”—with the practiced enthusiasm of an evolving Aspie. Then we sit quietly, together.

  —

  Our hour was up. Tyler had been terse, maybe even rude, but Bush was solicitous. Rather than fight Tyler’s idiosyncrasies, he rolled with them, exactly as he had in the Oval Office nine years earlier. He responded to every clipped answer with another probing question. Bush, a man who famously doesn’t suffer fools or breaches of propriety, gave my son the benefit of the doubt. I was beginning to think that many people are more perceptive and less judgmental toward Tyler than his own father. Bush certainly was.

  He thanked Tyler for coming, and came from behind his desk to show us out. He invited us to tour a nearby warehouse housing artifacts awaiting the construction of his presidential library. There was more small talk; I think we chatted a bit about bike racing and journalism before Tyler walked out of the office a step or two ahead of me. Outside of Tyler’s earshot, Bush shook my hand, squinted in that way he does, and said, “He’s a good kid, Fournier.”

  “I know.” It was an honest answer. He’s a good kid, which makes him a happy kid, which makes me a decent dad—almost worthy of my brilliantly unique son.

  ACCEPTANCE

  “I Had Her Back”

  Falls Church, Virginia—Tyler and I are sitting in the car outside a bookstore. The Barnes & Noble in northern Virginia is where we spend many hours, sharing our love of books and time alone. He’s reading an early draft of this story. His story.

  “It’s okay,” my little professor says. “But it’s a bit of a cliché.” He asks me to say he’s no longer afraid of bees or of the dark. He instructs me to delete a passage in which I tell him, “Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s overcoming your fears.” It must be a misquotation, Tyler says, because his father doesn’t talk so eloquently. And he’s not impressed with my original conclusion.

  Fair enough, I say. “So help me find a better ending. What did you get out of the project, pal?”

  “All I got out of it was time with you,” he laughs. “No offense.” I tell Tyler there’s got to be a better way to end our story than saying we spent time together. “This isn’t Twilight,” he says, referring to the film saga he wouldn’t be caught dead watching. “This is you and me. Just write that we like to spend time together. That’s a big deal for a kid like me.”

  It would be a big deal for me—if I believed him. The fact is, I know that time with me isn’t his first preference. He’d rather be alone, and I can accept that now. But Tyler is telling me what he knows I want to hear, and he’s doing something he’d really rather not do. That’s progress for an Aspie.

  Thanks to the team Lori put together, Tyler is learning to connect and to belong. And thanks to the project she created for us, I saw that progress firsthand. Tyler will be a happy, thriving adult. I might have even helped. Being with him—accepting him, watching him overcome his fears, and seeing him through the forgiving eyes of others—this is my field of dreams. I don’t need to “have a catch” with Tyler to be a good father; I simply need to let him be. Rather than sweat over his Asperger’s, I now realize how much I’d miss if he wasn’t an Aspie—his humor, his bluntness, his joyful obsessions with everything from video games to his family. His unique wiring comes with almost no ego; not even the presidential visits seemed to affect Tyler’s sense of self. As the rest of society seems to be perfecting irony and affectation, my boy is constitutionally unable to bullshit. God, I love him. And now I know others will love him, too.

  On the trips to Arkansas and Texas, I saw through both presidents a successful future for Tyler—through Clinton, big possibilities for a boy with a sharp mind and rough edges; through Bush, Tyler’s gift of humor as a means to find confidence in himself and connections with others. In the Oval Office years ago, I thought Bush had ordered me to “love that boy” in spite of his idiosyncrasies. Now, I realize, I love my son because of them.

  This is what I tried to tell Tyler in the car outside the bookstore. “I get it, Dad,” he said dismissively. “Now can we go home? I want to play video games.”

  “Is this thing on?” Tyler, now 16, tapped the corrugated silver microphone, mimicking the professional comedians we had watched and heard together since the Bush visit two years earlier. The crowd tittered as he nervously shuffled his feet. “Hi, I’m Tyler, Bompa’
s grandson.” Using the kids’ nickname for my father, Tyler introduced himself to dozens of family and friends gathered for lunch at a church hall just north of Detroit. We were eating simple food—roast beef and chicken, if memory serves—and choosing from three brands of beer, including Dad’s favorite, Labatt’s Blue.

  When Tyler launched into his story, the clattering and clanging of lunch stopped, as did every conversation. “When I was a kid, we would go to Erie House and all of us would play on the tire swing out front by the lake,” Tyler said, referring to the cottage on Lake Erie where Dad once played hockey with his kids and their pals. “One day I asked Bompa where the tire came from. He said, ‘Oh, it washed up from the lake.’

  “The way my mind is wired,” Tyler went on, “I thought he meant the whole truck was at one point hanging from the tree and it fell into the lake—and the only thing left on the rope was that tire.”

  While the crowd laughed, I turned to Lori in the seat next to me and saw her tearing up. We were overwhelmed at the sight of our socially challenged son giving a public speech—and embracing his autism: the way my mind is wired. For the friends and family in the room, there had been a time, not that long ago, when they didn’t know what to make of Tyler. They didn’t know how to connect. They may have even been a little hurt by his perceived rudeness.

  But with his diagnosis came acceptance. In the last three years, we’ve noticed more family trying to engage him—not pushing him exactly, but going out of their way to listen. Although family members sometimes have a hard time understanding Tyler, they now hear him, because they know how important they are to him. Which is why it meant so much to watch Tyler share a favorite memory with these loving people. The setting made it all the more poignant: It was my dad’s wake.