Be Different

by John Elder Robison

  A Reason to Care

  By the time I entered high school I was sold on the logical and sensible parts of manners and behavior, but I had some problems accepting why I should do some of the bigger behavioral things, like staying enrolled in school.

  In tenth grade I knew kids like me were supposed to graduate from high school and go to college. I loved computers and electronics, so I naturally imagined myself becoming an engineer. Yet even with that dream secured, it was difficult for me to see a clear path from high school through college to professional engineerhood in my head. There were just too many problems. My home life was awful, with a drunken father and a mentally ill mother. And I didn’t seem to be able to focus on what my teachers wanted. Class sucked, so I spent my days in the school Audio Visual Center instead. I even skipped classes to be there. When they threw me out, I hung out downtown. And why shouldn’t I? After all, the Hungry U and Augie’s Newsstand were far more interesting than the school library. I skipped whole days of school to do that.

  When I skipped school, I got a chance to spend more time with the musicians I had started meeting through my budding skill with electronics. Some kids learned to play instruments; I taught myself to fix them. The more of a failure I became in school, the more rewarding that work became.

  The problem was partly me and partly the school itself. When I did go to class, I never had it together. I hadn’t even begun my homework; and I didn’t pay attention on tests. No one from the school ever stepped up to get me back on track, so I continued on a downward spiral. I became a wise guy, constantly in trouble. If I didn’t get sent to the office for discipline, I sent myself to the nurse’s office for a nap. The result of all that was predictable—a report card of straight Fs. That led to my second year of tenth grade, and the realization that I was not college material.

  “You can still graduate,” my guidance counselor said. But I doubted his sincerity as I watched the prospect of graduation, let alone college, receding into the distance. I became convinced high school would never end.

  Why bother?

  I made a list in my mind. School totally sucked. My first and only girlfriend had just dumped me. I hardly had any other friends. I wasn’t getting a thing out of class. No one wanted me there. There was no good reason to be in school. Looking back, I realize that I was very sad at that time, and probably depressed. But I was rational, and I considered my next move carefully.

  The world outside was full of opportunity. I was doing more and more work for local musicians, and I could probably join a band full-time. I could probably get work fixing cars, as a mechanic. There were other things I could do, too, like drive a truck or run farm machinery. I was already doing small jobs for people and getting paid. There were days when I had sixty, even ninety dollars in my pocket. When that happened, I felt like a really rich man.

  Measured against those tangible prospects, the idea of slogging through high school and then getting accepted at a college and doing it all again for four more years just seemed unreal. The first problem was the humiliation I’d face when every other tenth grader besides me became an eleventh grader. How many other kids flunked school? I wondered. I could not imagine three more years of high school.

  “Success depends on you,” the teachers said. “You have to change your ways. No more cutting classes. And you have to buckle down and do the work.” Teachers always said that with a sneer, as if they were taunting me with some unattainable goal.

  Today’s teachers would have sent me for testing and special-needs evaluation. In 1970, though, that constructive step was some ways into the future. And I have to admit: I looked lazy. I acted surly. I’m sure I played the part of an angry, disaffected, sullen teen perfectly, because I was one. But that wasn’t the only reason for my struggle, or my behavior. In fact, it was the behavior that got me through the day.

  The thing was, cutting classes and acting up was the only thing that made school bearable. How could I stop? If I’d had the ability to “buckle down” I’d have done it years before. I knew the value of knowledge, but I assumed I could learn anything I needed on my own in the libraries and labs at the university. Besides, I was sure I knew more than enough anyway.

  If I had blown my chance at college, and I could educate myself, why was I staying at Amherst Regional?

  “Why should I stay?” I asked my guidance counselor that question over and over. There didn’t seem to be an answer. In fact, one particularly worthless guidance counselor said, “Look, if you drop out you are going to end up a loser pumping gas somewhere. Even the Army won’t take high school dropouts now!” That did it for me. I could get that kind of criticism at home, for free, from my father anytime. If the best they could do was cheap threats, I was outta there.

  I dropped out, or got thrown out, depending on your perspective, at age sixteen. One thing was sure: By the time I left, they didn’t want me, and I didn’t want them. It was good riddance on both sides.

  It felt good to be out of school, though it was also rather scary. People said, “You’re an adult now,” and I quickly realized what that really meant: Get a job or starve. I did whatever I could to make money at first, fixing cars and guitar amplifiers and anything else I could scrounge.

  At the same time, I tried to make sense of the grown-up world I now inhabited. Most of the stuff older people suggested or ordered or demanded I do now that I was an “adult” seemed totally foolish and pointless. Good manners. Button-up shirts and clean pants. Brushing and cutting my hair. Cleaning up my language. “How is any of that stuff going to make me happier or better off?” I would ask, but the answers never satisfied me. What’s in it for me? No one could ever answer that.

  “It’s rude to swear in a restaurant,” my grandmother said. So what? Why should I care if I’m rude? “You look like a wild man with that hair,” she continued. But why should that matter to me? I wasn’t looking at me, I didn’t have any friends around, and my grandmother liked me no matter how I looked. People’s demands were just annoying, and really self-centered. They complained about my behavior because they wanted me to change to make them feel better. It was all about the other people, not me.

  A few years passed, and I established myself in the working world. I made some money, and sustained some damage but came through alive and kicking. Through it all, I remained stubbornly independent. I dressed like I wanted, grew a beard and long hair, and kept pretty much to myself. Nobody’s going to tell me how to dress, talk, and act, I thought. And I am going to prove all those people who said I was a loser wrong. Especially my father.

  By the time I turned eighteen, I’d made a name for myself as the electronics wizard for local musicians. I was self-supporting and on my own—I lived with the guys from the band Fat. Social success still eluded me, but my technical abilities helped me make a living and gain some respect in the process. People said I was weird, but when it came to music and electronics, they also said I knew what I was talking about. That’s how things stood—right up to the day I met the girl.

  I’d been alone for a good while, since getting dumped in high school. I did my work, rode my motorcycle, ate, and slept. That was pretty much it. Every night I’d sit at my sound board and watch people pair up as my band played; that’s what nightclubs were for. Our music set the scene really well for the audience, but somehow what worked for them never worked for me. I wished it would, but it never did. I was beginning to think the bad things people had said about me as a kid might really be true. The demons had followed me out of school and into adulthood. If you wanted to sum me up in two words, these are what they’d be: sad and lonely.

  It was in the midst of that sadness that she appeared. I’d seen her a few times before, when we played the Rusty Nail. She was a little shorter than me, pretty, with short brown hair that curled inward at the ends, and dark eyes. I’d come to recognize a lot of girls that came to our shows, but none of them ever paid any attention to me. Until then. This one walked over and talked to me. I was sh
ocked, captivated, and intimidated all at once.

  I talked to guys every day. There were the guys in the band, and the guys in the bars and clubs where we played. There were dudes in stores and gas stations and even the cops and bouncers who guarded the door everyplace we played. Somehow, talking to them didn’t ease my loneliness. I wanted someone special, someone to really share my life. I wanted a girlfriend.

  But as much as I hoped to find love, I had no idea where or how to look. Until suddenly, when she stood in front of me, saying, “That looks really interesting. Can you show me how it works?” She wasn’t a girlfriend—not yet—but she was a girl. And she was interested in me. I was so amazed that I can’t remember a word of what we said, but I will never forget that first night. Would I ever see her again? I couldn’t stop thinking about her on the ride back home, and I thought of her all the next day. And she did return, to sit with me and talk all night.

  I watched her closely, and listened to everything she said. She was a nursing student at the university. She was five years older than me, pretty and sophisticated and smart, and to my great amazement, she was remarkably interested in me. How long would it last? I began thinking about what I’d heard. It was time for action.

  The next day, I washed all my clothes, even the socks and underwear. I put on my least-perforated blue jeans. I got the scissors from the toolbox and cut my hair. Suddenly, all the things my grandmother had said made sense. I did not want to look like a fright. I did not want to sound like a drunken sailor. I did not want to smell bad. I wanted her to be impressed, and I did everything I could think of to make that happen.

  I even polished my motorcycle, in case she wanted to go for a ride. The bike and I were the spiffiest we’d been in years. The guys in the band noticed, and to my surprise they knew just what it meant. “Check it out … John has a hot date,” they said. I hadn’t realized the change would be so obvious, nor had I expected them to divine the reason for it right away. But it was okay. All that mattered was that I looked good for her. I could handle a little teasing from the guys.

  It worked. “Would you like to go out after you finish work?” I couldn’t believe it—I had just been asked on a date. That never happened before, I thought. Was it the clean clothes, or the hair, or something else? I didn’t know, and I was afraid to ask. Cathy Moore became the first girlfriend of my adult life. We dined at the Whatley Truck Stop, and then we went for a ride. “Let’s go somewhere and look at the stars,” she said. We spent the night far out in the country, looking up into the predawn sky. She, me, and my black Honda motorcycle.

  I’m sure I was clumsy and a little robotic that first night, and indeed most nights back then. Despite all that or maybe as a result of my inimitable geek charm, things worked out. We held hands and cuddled and talked until the first light of dawn. Whatever she expected of me, I was way too shy and scared to try anything else. After she fell asleep, I lay there thinking, wondering if she would still like me the next day. To my amazement, she did. As the days and weeks passed, we got to know each other better, and I became more confident. She had a car, and we began going places together.

  She talked about her own time at St. Brigid’s High School in Leominster. Unlike me, she had graduated with honors and then gone on to college. She asked me where I had learned about electronics, and I said UMass, but I changed the subject before I had to admit I was never a real student. I began to wish I had stayed in school. I was starting to feel that dropout stigma. I never admitted leaving school to anyone in those years, but I knew, and it ate away at me.

  Now that I had a girlfriend, I began to understand that my behavior and appearance did matter to other people. I hadn’t really grasped that before, perhaps because I’d never had a strong enough connection to someone else.

  Now I could see it, and I really did my best, but I was hampered by a lifetime as a feral child. My parents had not done much to socialize me, since they were wrapped up in their own problems, and I had rejected whatever advice others had offered. My problems were compounded by Aspergian oblivion, though I didn’t know that at the time. I did my best, but I wished I’d paid attention and gotten an earlier start.

  I was almost nineteen years old. I’d left my family, dropped out of school, and joined a band. I’d lived my whole life with little to no regard for what anyone else thought or said. All of a sudden, my world had changed. I had an answer to that cynical question I’d been asking all those years: Why bother? I bothered because I’d learned that having someone to love and cherish was the most important thing in the world to me, and I had to look and act and feel like I was someone she would want to love and cherish back. That was why I had to bother, as much trouble as it seemed.

  Years later, Cathy is long gone from my life, married to someone else; but the feeling she brought has never left me.

  What Are You Afraid Of?

  When I was little we lived in Philadelphia, where the museum was one of my favorite places. Trains and dinosaurs were two of my special interests, and they had both at the Franklin Institute. They had a huge model train layout and several real steam locomotives. They even allowed kids to go up in the cab and work the levers, just like real train engineers. Another room was full of dinosaurs, or dinosaur skeletons. I really liked to wander through the big dinosaur room, but it was different from the train room. With the dinosaurs, I had to be brave, especially when I looked at the teeth on some of those monsters. One of the skeletons they had on display was a plesiosaur, a gigantic meat-eating aquatic dinosaur. “They were fierce,” the museum guides said, “but they’ve been extinct sixty million years. There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

  I heard his explanation, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that scientists weren’t always right when they claimed something was extinct. Take the coelacanths; they were supposed to have been extinct for millions of years, too, but a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa a few years before I was born. The books I read said that most of the deep ocean was unexplored and unknown—we knew only 10 percent of what lived there. To me, it was obvious that there could be living dinosaurs in the deep sea. There might still be plesiosaurs.

  That’s the problem with being what grown-ups call a “bright kid.” You learn stuff, and some of it is scary. And no one understands why you’re frightened.

  When my family went to the beach at Atlantic City, in New Jersey, I was brave and went in the ocean anyway, because there were a lot of people there and my parents assured me no one got attacked by dinosaurs. But I stayed in shallow water where plesiosaurs and other aquatic monsters could never get me.

  Shallow water also kept me safe from undertows, riptides, killer seaweed, and all the other stuff that lurked at the deep water’s edge.

  Even with that knowledge I never had bad dinosaur dreams until I read about the Loch Ness Monster. That story got me really worried. I saw pictures of something big swimming in Loch Ness, which was someplace in Scotland. It looked a lot like the plesiosaur from the museum. And it was alive. Could one appear here? Or up the road at Lake Wyola?

  Sometimes in my dreams a plesiosaur stuck its head in my bedroom window, ready to eat me. But they live in water, I told myself. They can’t be in our backyard. Could I be sure?

  “There are no monsters out there. It’s okay.” My mother would reassure me when I woke up from the bad dream, and eventually I’d fall asleep. But I did worry, and with good reason.

  My father was a philosopher, and I tried to tackle the problem the way he did in his classes, by asking myself questions.

  People like my mom didn’t believe in monsters, because they’d never seen one. With no evidence, why should an ignorant person believe? Mom wasn’t a scientific thinker like me. She was just a mom, trying to quiet me down. Any kids who had seen a monster got eaten, so they weren’t around to tell the tale. Kids vanished every now and then, and monsters might well be the cause.

  What’s the downside to a belief in monsters? If they are real and you believe, you a
re wary and therefore less likely to get eaten. If they aren’t real and you believe, you waste time being afraid of an imaginary threat. On the other hand, if they are real and you don’t believe, you could come to a really bad end. So the risk of not believing monsters are real is huge, whereas the risk of believing when they’re not is minimal.

  After long and careful reflection, I concluded that monsters may be real and I was wise to be wary.

  My father liked that. “A famous scientist used that same argument as a reason to believe in God.”

  Faced with a world of threats, what is a tyke to do? I pondered that question long and hard. I kept my window shut at night so dinosaurs and monsters couldn’t smell me or find a way in to get me. It got hot sometimes, but the safety was worth the discomfort. I read about kids who vanished and the only clue was an open window. Nessie?

  With my window safely closed, my second line of defense was the bed. Before getting in, I always checked underneath to make sure nothing was hiding down there. Then I made sure my toes were always covered, because you never knew what might grab them if they were exposed in the dark. My head stuck out, but there was nothing I could do about that because I knew I’d suffocate if I buried my head in the blankets. Sometimes, I figured, you just have to take a chance.

  I knew some kids covered their heads, but that was really dangerous. We breathe oxygen, but air contains a bunch of other gases besides the oxygen we need. That’s why people say things like, “Give me some fresh air.” They want air that is full of oxygen, not recycled air that other people have already breathed, where the oxygen is all used up.

  That’s the problem with burying yourself alive in blankets. You have stale breathed air on the inside and fresh life-giving air on the outside. So covering my head might well be a form of suicide, where I just passed out and died from lack of oxygen. According to my mother, that’s what happened when you put a plastic bag on your head. She warned me about that, lots of times. I didn’t want to die, so I didn’t cover my head with plastic bags or blankets. But I did cover every other part of my body with a blanket, and did everything else I could think of to protect myself from something that would sneak into my room late at night and eat me.