“I really appreciate you telling me that,” I said, “and I’m sorry if I offended you. I have a very different son, believe me, so I love different. And right now, he’s in the middle of a crisis at home, I need to get back as soon as I can, and this is a very old car. That’s all I meant to say.”
He nodded, pulled a kerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and continued. “If you’re worried cuz it won’t be reliable, well, the mechanicals are new. I vouch for the mechanicals. You can rely on them to get you home. However, if you are worried cuz the car’s different, then the Corvair is not the right car for you, and you are not the right owner for the Corvair. So here’s your chance, you’re free to back out. Even though we got a binding deal under eBay rules, I not only won’t force you to take it, I flat out won’t let you take it. This Vair’s next owner will respect it and honor its differences. In turn, it will respect him.”
Two hours later, the last glimmer of the day’s light dried up as I raced my new Corvair up the Atlantic coast of Florida. Originally, to not tax the car too much, I’d planned to take it home at a leisurely pace along the scenic coastal highway. That plan was now toast. My new plan was to drive the ever-living-stuffing out of this car along traffic-choked Interstate 95 until the Corvair either pulled into my driveway or blew up.
Before Wally finally signed over the car’s title to me, I had to persuade him that, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, I truly was not a closed-minded Corvair-hater unable to embrace the car’s uniqueness—that, indeed, as a newly inducted member of the Corvair Brotherhood, I positively celebrated its differences and would do my utmost to uphold the CORSA creed. His words and passion for the Corvair inspired me as I left the terminal’s parking garage; I noticed and appreciated the car’s heavy rear end as it securely planted itself into the tight curves of the labyrinth of airport exit roads. The steering was light as a feather, even without the power assist that almost every modern car has. The high-pitched ringing of the aluminum air-cooled engine delighted me; it was the same whine my father’s Corvair had made as it assaulted the steep hill I grew up on. It was indeed a very different car. And I loved it.
But then I merged onto I-95, which ran right beside the airport. As I reached highway cruising speed, my eager elopement with this car suddenly seemed headed for an even more eager annulment. The interior of the Corvair was now the vortex of a Force Five tornado. Not being part of the car’s mechanical refresh, the original rubber weather seals around the windows, doors, and convertible roof had dried up; chunks of decades-old rubber were blowing away before my eyes, and, at times, into my eyes. The howling wind combined with the rattling doors and bouncing roof in a deafening conspiracy to break my will to drive on.
After an hour in this audiological torture chamber, chugging along in the right lane, the lone driver actually obeying the speed limit, battling truckers who sprinted up to my rear bumper to get me to go faster or get the heck off their highway, I forgot Wally’s Ode to the Misunderstood Corvair and conceived a plot to abandon the car. Hopefully, once my new Corvair broke down, as it surely would, it would do so near an open rental car counter, a bus station, or a promising place to hitchhike. I would then resume my journey home, Corvair-less, and let Wally know where he could reclaim the car’s lifeless remains, apologizing to him that I’d discovered I really wasn’t Corvair material after all.
Suddenly, I leaped from my driver’s seat as if a cobra had slithered into my lap. It was my cell phone; I’d put it between my thighs and set it to vibrate because there was no way I could hear it ring. The Caller I.D. said it was my house calling, which meant Mavis, as Benjy rarely called anyone. I’d told her the bad news about Wheeler before I pulled out of the airport, and asked her to check on Benjy. She was now at our house, bless her. I cut my speed so I could hear her.
“HELLO!” I shouted.
“He climbed into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and told me to go away,” I thought I heard Mavis say.
“Did he take his meds before he went to bed?” I hollered. “Eat anything?”
“YES!” she shouted back. “Where are you? It’s so loud!”
I explained why I sounded like I was speaking from the inside of a jet engine. “Was he still upset?” I asked, as I struggled to deal with an annoyed truck driver who flashed his lights at me to move over when there was no place to move over to.
She said Benjy seemed calm, and thought he had fallen asleep, which was the best possible news. She offered to spend the night at our house, but from her description of things, we agreed it wasn’t necessary. The trucker honked an enraged symphony on his air horns as he passed me.
Two hours later, near Daytona Beach, with the gas gauge just above Empty, I eased the Corvair off the highway and found a gas station. With my ears ringing as if I’d been in the front row at a rock concert, I filled up with Premium grade, per Wally’s orders, because anything else would make the engine knock. Another middle-aged driver squeegeed the windshield of his newish Mustang at the pump beside me. “Hey, great car,” he purred, walking around and inspecting it with greater care than I had just a couple hours earlier. “What year is it?”
I told him, along with a few added details. With the sun now down, the cooler outside air made me shiver. Suddenly, I needed to find a bathroom. Real suddenly.
“I had one of those,” the Mustang driver reminisced. “Loved it. Handled beautifully. Great for a teenager. Easy on the gas, easy to fix. Nader killed it, though. Ya never see ’em anymore.”
I shifted my weight from side to side. The Mustang Man looked ready to talk about the car all night. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I really need to get inside,” I said.
He knew what I meant. “When you’re our age,” he winked, not bothering to finish the thought. “You got a great car there. Enjoy.”
Inside the station’s convenience store, after I no longer had to hop around on one foot, I bought a prefab sub sandwich, a six-pack of energy drinks, a case of hyper-caffeinated sodas, and industrial-strength earplugs.
“Had it long?” the manager at the cash register asked, nodding toward the Corvair.
I checked my watch. “About four hours,” I told him. “Bought it on eBay and just picked it up in Fort Lauderdale.”
“Get a lot of stops here from people pickin’ up cars they bought on eBay,” the manager informed me dourly. “They think havin’ no road salt to rust ’em down here is a big deal. Turns out most of ’em are disappointed.”
I was suddenly very eager to hit the road.
“In fact, I had one guy turn around and head back south,” the manager droned on as I jammed my new industrial-strength earplugs deep into my auditory canals. “Said he was gonna beat the living…” I grinned and waved as I went out the door, pretending I couldn’t hear him.
“That boy of yours is amazing!” I heard my father exclaim as the highway miles piled up and my mind wandered. Dad and I had parked outside the bathroom door, eavesdropping on Benjy, who was in the tub with Annie, booming out a story about Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends on the Island of Sodor. He had not stumbled over a single word. “I’ve never heard a boy his age read so beautifully!” Dad raved.
“He’s not reading,” I told Dad. At the time, Benjy was not yet three years old.
My father’s jaw dropped. “He’s a genius,” he said softly. “My grandson is a genius.”
With traffic thinning as truckers called it a night, paper towels stuffed where the rubber sound insulation had rotted away and my earplugs sealing off my bruised ear drums, I could finally hear the thoughts and memories that this old car stirred. Naturally, in a Corvair so much like my father’s, the first memories that came were of him.
Not long after Dad and I listened to Benjy in the bath, while I was away from home on business, Annie called me late at night to report that Dad had just phoned. This was odd. My father was always an early-to-bed, early-to-rise guy; at the time he called, he usually would have been sound asleep for hours.
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“He was so absolutely insistent,” Annie said, her concern evident. “He insisted Benjy had to go to Dartmouth College, and we had to apply there immediately.”
At the time, Benjy was still a month shy of his third birthday.
“At first I thought he was joking,” she continued. “But he was dead serious and absolutely obsessive about it. It was very strange. Something’s wrong.”
I waited till morning to phone Dad at his retirement community. I thought a good night’s sleep might clear up his odd behavior.
I was wrong.
“Benjy must go to Dartmouth,” Dad insisted moments after he answered. “He’s a special boy, a genius. Dartmouth is the only place for him.”
“Dad,” I ventured gently, trying to be oh-so-careful in my choice of words so as not to offend my father, a very proud Dartmouth alumnus who may have never forgiven me for not following him there. “There’s plenty of time for Benjy to grow up and let his talents fully develop before he decides where he should go to college. After all, he hasn’t even turned three.”
There was a long pause. A very long pause. I realized that Dad had lost track of how young his grandson really was.
I soon learned from my father’s doctor that dementia was destroying his prodigious mind and memory. There was little anyone could do about the disease’s advance. Fortunately, his retirement community was well versed in the challenges of caring for a resident with dementia and pledged that Dad would be safe, secure, and comfortable.
Another memory, from a year later: As I waited in line to pick up Benjy from preschool, the Headmistress called me into her office for a private chat. “Your son is unique,” she told me.
I beamed proudly. “All children are, aren’t they?” I answered, trying to appear modest.
“In thirty-five years, I’ve never seen another child quite like him,” she said, treading ever so cautiously, in the same way that I had in speaking to my father about Dartmouth. Of course, I knew that Benjy was different from the other kids. I just didn’t realize that difference had a name. The headmistress urged me to take Benjy to a child psychiatrist, who ultimately diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome.
“He’s different, that’s all,” Annie said as I stared into space, cursing my genes, after we’d left the doctor’s office. “Maybe there won’t be sports, but there will be other things.” And there were—we read books and watched movies together, and had long debates over them. But not knowing those things were in our future, I was in shock.
And if I was in shock, Annie and I realized my father’s reaction would be even worse. By then, Dad had moved into our home; the retirement community could no longer handle him. And we were having a tough time coping. His behavior was increasingly erratic; he’d frequently erupt in anger, or dissolve into tears, seemingly over nothing. His wise and sober judgment had given way to confusion. Suddenly, his mail contained hundreds of magazines he’d never read, cheeses of the month he’d never eat, and deeds for timeshares in places he’d never visit. After his death, we discovered that, sight unseen, he had paid an astronomical amount of money for a family burial plot in a cemetery somewhere in West Virginia that had sent him a glossy brochure. The salesman refused to undo the deal when I confronted him about taking advantage of my father’s mental incapacity. “Y’know,” Annie comforted me, looking around the place, “of course he got ripped off, but it’s not that bad. It’s peaceful, with the mountain view and everything. I like it. Maybe he knew what he was doing?” So I swallowed my pride, and buried Dad there. And then, two years ago, I placed Annie beside him.
In the end, we never did tell Dad the news about Benjy’s diagnosis. Dementia had too great a grip on him. Why burden him with news of Benjy’s occupational therapy, psychological therapy, physical therapy, tests, expert evaluations, reevaluations, and day after day of “floor time” designed to teach Benjy how to socialize with others? Why trouble him over our never-ending struggles with health insurers and the public school system? Or the fights between Annie and me over the crushing cost of providing Benjy with his own personal “shadow” in his private school classroom so he would stay on task and not disrupt other students, or the weird fad diets that may have helped an Asperger’s child someplace that we then felt compelled to try? And on and on? Why tell him that he and I, thanks to our genes, may have helped make Benjy so different from other children? I knew how hard I was taking the thought of my culpability; I could only imagine how devastated he would be. I thought it might kill him.
So, for the next year, my father and my son played gleefully together on our living room floor, reciting stories and poetry to each other for hours on end. And Dad told Benjy, again and again, that one day he would go to a school where he would learn even more wonderful stories that he could read and recite, just as Dad had when he was growing up. It was a magical school, like a Hogwarts, but it was real and it taught only Muggles; it was a place for geniuses called Dartmouth College, and it was the only college on earth for him.
CHAPTER 5
With the eastern horizon offering up dawn’s first light, the Corvair passed South of the Border at the boundary between the Carolinas, the legendary faux Mexican food/gas/smokes/fireworks/trinkets palace; for the past hundred miles, billboards had blared come-ons like You Never Sausage a Place! You’re Always a Weiner at Pedro’s!
I’d driven all night, save for the one gas stop. With the roar of the Corvair finally blocked from my ear drums, I was warming to it again. It hadn’t broken down yet, which was a major plus. In fact, the car’s refreshed engine and transmission had performed flawlessly, as Wally had promised, cruising more than seven hundred miles without so much as a hiccup, while achieving 23 mpg—dynamite gas mileage from a car built in the days when gas mileage was often measured in single digits. As truck after impatient truck passed me while I stubbornly stuck to the speed limit, the car held its line, stable in their turbulent wake.
Now, the Vair and I were both running on empty and needed to stop, and it would be far better for both of us if that stop was voluntary. Then I was jolted wide awake by a sign for “Wheeler College—Next Exit.” My route had returned me to the Scene of the Crime against my son.
As I pumped high-test gas at the same station Benjy and I had used when we last visited the school, I mused wacked-out, sleep-deprived thoughts about rousing the dean of Wheeler from his bed to demand that he immediately make right the horrible injustice his underlings had perpetrated against my son. I’m ashamed to say it took me far more than just a moment to dismiss this idea and realize that it would be vindictive and juvenile, not to mention counterproductive. Perhaps Benjy would want to transfer here one day. Better not to burn any bridges. With a fresh six-pack of energy drinks beside me, I turned tail instead, and retreated back to the interstate, patting myself on the back for so magnanimously turning the other cheek.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why Wheeler had rejected Benjy. He was Honor Roll at his high school. He had fine test scores. He had recommendations from the state’s most prestigious special education officials. His extra-curriculars were excellent. His application was top-notch.
I recalled the day of Benjy’s final interview. He looked every inch the college man, wearing a blazer and tie for one of the few times in his life. Standing in the center of the school quadrangle near the statue of Ezekiel Wheeler, the philanthropic tobacco magnate who founded the school, soaking in the atmosphere of what he hoped would be his new home for the next four years, he proudly proclaimed, “There is a place for me. And I found it. Right here.” To become one of just 10 students selected to attend the unique Asperger’s program at Wheeler, he knew he had to impress the staffers who would interview him. He started pacing around like a prizefighter waiting for the bell to start round one, thinking about the answers he’d prepared to questions I’d suggested were likely to be asked.
“I was one of only twenty-five students with differences selected from my whole state to attend the Youth Leadership Forum
last summer,” Benjy answered when the two interviewers asked about his proudest achievement. “And it was a full scholarship, so my father didn’t have to pay a thing!”
The staffers grinned, and so did I, even though I knew Benjy hadn’t intended it as a joke.
“He’s cheap,” Benjy added, generating big laughs. This time, he grinned slyly. Now he was joking, which impressed the interviewers. Aspergians are often so literal that telling jokes is difficult.
“One of our projects was to go to the state capital and ask the legislators to declare October as ‘Disability History and Awareness Month’ in Virginia. And this year they did! I was very proud of that!”
Benjy was rolling. He told the interviewers he’d participated on panels at autism conferences, written articles about living with Asperger’s for a special-education journal, written his own novel about the last superhero the world would ever see, and had already taken—and aced—college-level English and political science courses.
He wasn’t just knocking the ball out of the park; he was belting it into another time zone.
But as the interview’s first hour stretched into the second, Benjy yawned. This was no garden-variety yawn, small and easily stifled, but a loud, weary, bored, not-covering-the-mouth, dental-office-clean-and-floss-all-the-upper-and-lower-teeth-then-check-for-cavities yawn.
I hurriedly explained that we’d driven five hours from home to Wheeler that morning. If I could have covertly nudged Benjy under the table, I would have. But I couldn’t get his attention.
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