I was not running away alone. Theresa lived two doors down and she was going to run away with me, and of course Vanessa was too. The plan was to take the N train into the city, change for the PATH train, and run away to Theresa’s uncle’s house in New Jersey. There we all could start new lives, and work in his pizzeria. We had a plan.
I slept at Vanessa’s house that night, and at 4 a.m. we prepared to leave for our new life. We hadn’t counted on her Dad being awake preparing to leave for work.
"Where are you two going?" he asked.
"Jogging," Vanessa said. "Can you give us some money so we can go eat breakfast when we are done?"
Our "jogging" habit had paid off. We were on our way, to meet Theresa at the 18th Avenue train station with train money in hand.
The three of us boarded the N train, and were hurled off toward the city. We didn’t make it that far. At the 36th street train station Theresa came to her senses and decided she needed to go home. She had no reason to run away.
My mind was already made-up, I was running away. I could not turn back now. Theresa was two years older than me and was crucial to the plan. She had lined-up our new life. What was I going to do now?
Theresa suggested I go home too, but I refused, and Vanessa couldn’t let me go alone. They couldn’t change my mind; I couldn’t change my mind. My mind was set, and I was going. The problem was, going where?
The summers working in the amusement park in Howard Beach taught us how to take the buses to the Rockaways. Vanessa and I made our way to Nannie’s house on the trains, and buses. I would have run away to Grandma’s house, the one who understood me, but she was only one flight of stairs away. It was too close; I needed to get further away from the fighting, further away from the noise, further away from the madness.
By the time we arrived at Nannie’s house they were expecting us, and my parents were on their way. I tried to get away; I tried to climb out a second story bedroom window onto a nearby roof. There was no escape; nowhere to run. My parents were coming, and they were going to take me back home.
I waited for it, the slaps–but this time they didn’t come. My father yelled, demanding to know why I’d run away. I thought the answer was in the question. I thought it had been obvious. All his words blended into one another the further I retreated inside myself, until I didn’t hear him anymore at all. I had completely shut down.
I sat in my room "staring into space," his words, for hours.
"It’s like talking to a brick wall," he said before finally storming off into the other room.
When Vanessa’s parents asked why she ran away she said, "I couldn’t let Jeannie run away alone." Vanessa was grounded for a month.
I didn’t get grounded–ever. My mother said keeping me inside with her was only punishing herself. God forbid I intrude on her world.
Chapter Eight
Acting the Part
By the time I was nearing the end of elementary school, I had learned how to live by a script. I learned by watching television, by looking at magazines, and by reading books. In the fourth grade, I learned about having my period by reading Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret, by Judy Blume. I read, and re-read that book many times during the fourth and fifth grades. Margaret became one of my best friends.
I loved my books; all my friends lived within their pages. My friends often lived inside my books, and the television set. I imagined interactions with the characters, and tried to think of what they would say in different situations. Every interaction was played out in my head before it happened—if I could foresee an event.
For instance if I were to contemplate asking a friend to come over to our house to play, I would have the conversation over and over again in my head before approaching the girl. Many times my own words sounded stupid when I played them and I decided not to offer an invite.
After an interaction, I’d replay the scene hundreds of times judging if I sounded “stupid”. I imagined what would have happened if I said this or that, often berating myself for saying the wrong thing. My voice, my words were usually wrong so I tried to become other people, to take on other personas.
I tried to be the beautiful model in the picture hanging on the wall of the hair salon. If I could be her then all the girls would want to be my friend. This particular model had extremely short hair, shaved in the back with longer waves on top. The kind of hair you can only get from having professional stylists work on it for hours before a photo shoot, which is something I failed to understand.
I wanted to be her, I wanted that haircut, and so my mother allowed the hairdresser to cut my hair short—very short.
I didn’t look like the model, in fact, I looked like a boy! I of course was unaware of this fact until I went to school the next day.
In the fourth grade a boy’s haircut does not a popular girl make, so I had my ears pierced. For sure now with pretty studded earrings I could not look like a boy, but at school my pretty ears did nothing to detract from my head.
Pretending to be someone else became an obsession. I watched my grandmother’s stories (soap operas) and picked out characters to emulate—definitely not the best role models. When I found out that they were just actors and actresses playing a part, with a script, I knew I needed to be an actress. I could do a script, and I was already used to dancing on stage so this would be a cinch.
Scripts were just like dance routines, they were choreographed for you and as long as you follow the script you were doing it right.
Anything I want to do, I want to do perfectly. People often tell me that practice makes perfect, but that is not true. Perfect practice makes perfect. If you routinely practice something the wrong way, you will always do it that way. The only way to achieve perfection is to practice perfectly. I afforded myself no room for error—ever.
I knew nothing about acting so the logical thing to do was to go to acting school. Vanessa and I convinced our mothers to sign us up for an acting school in Manhattan.
There was an audition to be accepted. We created our own Toys-R-Us commercial to include acting, dancing, and singing—it was mostly dancing and singing. We practiced until we had every step and every word down perfectly.
I remember riding the train to the city, excited that I was going to be an actress. The possibility of this not happening, never crossed my mind.
The audition went well and we were accepted. Vanessa and I spent many hours learning how to act, and for the most part it was an exciting and fun experience. The problem happened when one day we were given no scripts—improvisation.
Our assignment was to perform a simple silent skit, no words, and no props of any kind. I felt the ball bouncing around in my stomach, the tears welling up in my eyes. My insides felt like they were shaking; panic was setting in.
I could not do it—I wound up acting out the task of making macaroni and cheese in my kitchen. It was the disaster that ended my acting school career.
Although I continued to try to adopt different personas, looking for a person that I could be, I was not very good at the task. I was able to adopt a precious few, but had tremendous difficulty switching between them, deviating from the carefully constructed script. Not all personas work in every situation.
I was a terrible actress. Who needed improvisation anyway? At least I still had my dancing.
I struggled to hold on to that part of me, the one thing that was mine, my identity as a dancer. I knew I was good at it, and I practiced and obsessed about its perfection.
Junior High School was approaching and I was hoping to go to Mark Twain, a Junior High School in Coney Island. It was a school for gifted students requiring academic entrance exams, an interview, and a talent audition. In addition to excellent academics, students needed to demonstrate a talent in one or more areas of the arts.
Despite my rarely doing homework, and spending many of my days banished to the hallways, academically, I remained at the top of my class. Thanks to my hyperlexia, by the third grade I had an eighth
-grade reading level, and by the fifth-grade, a twelfth-grade reading level.
I breezed through the entrance exams. Step one: top grades, and high passing scores on the entrance exam; check.
Step two consisted of choosing two talents; that was tough. Dancing was a given, but I played no musical instruments, was not confident in my singing ability, and my drawing and painting were mediocre at best. That left acting, so acting it was. I had training and experience on stage, and preparing a monologue was right up my alley—no interaction with anyone else needed.
The dance audition was first. I chose a solo piece I’d recently performed from Swan Lake—on pointe. Every step was in tune, every movement graceful, and every pirouette perfect. I nailed it, and I knew it. Smiling judges applauded; I was beaming.
“Now we are going to play a random selection of music for your freestyle dancing. Just do whatever comes naturally,” one of the judges said.
What? My heart sank. I stood there staring at the panel of four judges, three female, and one male. No one told me, I had nothing prepared, no plan, and no idea what to do. I stood there even after the music began.
“You can begin,” a voice came from the table of judges, and so I did.
I began, at the beginning of my prepared ballet routine. I adjusted for the pace and the tempo of the music, which was something out of Flash dance, but that did not make my attempt at freestyle dancing any less ridiculous.
It wasn’t until years later that I understood what was expected that day. That they wanted to see how I would move on a dance floor. When the music started to play, could I dance? Did I have any rhythm?
The rest of the day went by in a teary blur. My monologue was rushed; my face was flushed red from fretting over the dance scene that confounded me. The same unpleasant surprise awaited me at the end of my prepared piece. The instructions: “Pretend you are alone at a school dance.”
I stared down at the polished wood floors, and paced back and forth watching myself turn red in the mirrors before sitting down in a chair against the wall.
I glanced up to see four sets of eyes on me. Twisting my hands in my lap I began to mumble, “I shouldn’t have come here today; I want to go home.”
The call for the entrance interview never came.
Chapter Nine
A Confusing Middle Ground
“Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” ~ Stephen King
My hope was dying.
My fragile facade, the tattered house of cards I’d erected, came crashing down. My identity, the persona I became, the self I’d adopted, failed.
She didn’t dance, she didn’t twirl, she didn’t shine—she faded.
Thrust out of the safety of elementary classes with no hope of specialized schooling, the confusing transition to a middle ground began.
People rushed around me in every direction. I was caught standing in the middle of a busy intersection that was the school hallway, but there was no traffic light, and no street signs to mark my way.
I was lost on the third floor again, I think. Or, did I get off the staircase on the second floor? I was sure my computer class was in this corner of the hall.
A paper plane made of white wide-ruled loose leaf paper hit me in the head sticking to my hair. That’s when I felt the thump on my back and watched my book bag fly to the floor almost taking me with it.
I noticed the laughing before I saw the contents of my bag sprawled across the hallway. Papers were stepped on as dozens of kids tramped by, a sneaker hit my pen just as I was about to reach it launching it further into the sea of legs rushing past.
I scrambled across the floor to gather my books and haphazardly shoved them back into my bag.
The bell rang, and the traffic sped up, clearing most of the hall. Flushed and disoriented I stood up and looked around.
"She’s lost again," a girl said shaking her head as she walked toward the entrance of the classroom at the end of the hall.
"What an idiot," another girl snickered before disappearing into the room.
Another bell rang—great, late again. I shuffled into the class behind the two girls, not knowing if that was the right room. I figured that if they knew I was lost they were probably in my class, although I was sure I hadn’t seen them before. Besides, this wouldn’t be the first time I’d burst into the wrong class room late.
Just the day before I ran into my social studies class, sat down, and took out my books only to realize that the room had become quiet and even the teacher was staring at me. "You don’t belong in this class young lady,” she said. Dear God please let this be the right room this time.
It didn’t matter how many times I entered that building, I became lost every time. This new world of classes that changed locations every 45 minutes wreaked havoc on my school life.
I could not make it to school on time. I wandered the three long New York City blocks to school in the morning lost in my own thoughts. Each day I stopped at a small candy store on 17th avenue before school to buy two cowtails to eat on my way. It didn’t matter the time, I had to stop.
I suppose it would not have been so bad if I was only late in the morning, but I wasn’t. I was late to every single class. Either I could not pack my things quickly enough to make it to the next classroom on time, or I would get lost in the crowd and wind up in the wrong place wandering desperately trying to find my way.
I continually showed up to the wrong classrooms at the wrong times. Keeping my schedule straight, the locations of the classes, and the books needed for each subject was an impossible task.
After a long humiliating day of school, I had nothing left—no brain power or discipline. There was no way in the world homework was getting done. I suspect that many autistic children have this difficulty. By the time they arrive home, school has sucked all the life out of them. This certainly was the case for me.
I was drained from trying to be where I needed to be, trying to keep up with my things, and that didn’t even take into consideration the actual people around me. Junior High School dynamics differ greatly from elementary relations.
There were always cliques, but middle school made them more prevalent. The girls I was friends with as a child, mostly because of them being in the same class as me or friends of my mother’s, now had no obligation to remain friends with the freak who could not remember where the computer class was after six months of school. Who wanted to be seen with the girl who was constantly scrambling after her things rolling down the halls?
Although I was able to execute a choreographed dance routine perfectly, I couldn’t walk without tripping over my own feet. Gym was always entertaining—for the other people in my class.
I remember trying to learn how to ride a bicycle when I was 10 years old. I learned how to ride much later than the rest of the children on the block. I did all right when I rode the bikes with only back pedal brakes, the ones that you stop pedaling forward, and use your feet to go backwards in order to stop. I often crashed into poles, and flew over the Johnny pump on our block, but that was nothing compared to trying to ride a bike that employed hand brakes.
How did I manage to tip over sideways while riding and go splat onto the sidewalk? Or fly head first over the handle bars when depressing both the front and back brakes with my hands? I found it difficult to apply equal amounts of pressure with my left and right hands on the brakes simultaneously.
I would either squeeze the back brakes harder, or before the front, or worse, depress the front brakes first or with more pressure than the back sending me sailing over the front of the bike. Bicycle riding was hazardous to my health.
Have you ever heard the expression, “can’t ride a bike and chew gum at the same time?” Well, that was me—literally. I cannot do it, not then, and certainly not today. Riding required my attention. I must use my legs to pedal and make sure that I use both hands at the same time to brake. If you added chewing gum, eating candy, or talking of any s
ort I hit the floor.
When I was first dating my husband he wanted to go for a bike ride. He often liked to ride bikes, roller blade, and do various outdoor physical activities—all of which ended in some interesting and embarrassing stories for me.
One day we decided that we were going to take a ride down by the water. My brother John came along. We rode alongside the Belt Parkway and down under the Verrazano Bridge.
“You had to see her. I watched her riding in front of me, then without stopping the bike started tipping over to the side until she was on the ground,” my husband recalled during Thanksgiving dinner. “When I asked her what happened, she told me she had no idea. She was riding and then was on the ground.”
That is exactly how it happened too. If you liked to laugh, I was interesting to be around.
Being interesting, hard headed, and independent worked in my favor. Since everyone usually laughed at the stupid things I did or got myself into, I became the class clown.
It didn’t happen on purpose exactly. I had the habit of not being able to filter my thoughts before they flew out of my mouth. I wasn’t trying to be funny on purpose, nor was I trying to be insulting or to make fun of other people. But come on, if the English teacher came in to teach in leather pants what did she expect?
My flying thoughts were either met with scorn and ridicule, usually by other girls, or giggles and high-fives that came from the boys in class. I developed a reputation for always saying what I thought, and not caring how other people felt about it. The problem was, I didn’t understand why this was even something to notice. Didn’t everyone say what they thought? Why would you say anything else?
I did not have to work hard for my grades for the most part. If I needed to learn something, and I was interested in it, all I had to do was read. If I read the book, the information was usually branded onto my brain. That comes in handy when it is test time.
Twirling Naked in the Streets and No One Noticed; Growing Up With Undiagnosed Autism Page 6