The staffers smiled politely. One asked whether Benjy was prepared to live independently in a college setting. This is a big question facing many Aspergians hoping to attend college, and Benjy was no exception. Knowing the subject was sure to come up, I’d suggested Benjy rehearse some answers, and I sat back to watch him crush this fat pitch right down the middle of the strike zone.
“Sometimes I like to stay in bed and turn off the alarm and pull the covers up over my head,” he admitted. “And sometimes I forget to take showers.” Then came another mega-yawn.
The staffers smiled again, supportively, but I thought I read a different message as they looked to each other, as if saying, “This kid could require a lot of support from us. Lots and lots of support.”
They asked Benjy if his first choice of college for the coming fall was Wheeler. It was another standard question we had prepared for.
“Actually,” replied Benjy, “I wanted to go to Dartmouth College. But they don’t have a special program for students with Asperger’s. So I have to go to Wheeler.”
I tried not to fall out of my chair, then told the staffers about my father’s love of Dartmouth. They seemed to understand. I prayed Benjy would follow my lead, and try to explain his answer a bit, but he didn’t.
The next thing we heard from Wheeler was the rejection letter.
After the interview, I asked Benjy why he had not given the answers we had practiced. Such as, “Sometimes I forget to take showers, but now I’ve put ‘taking a shower’ on my list of things to do before I go to bed.” Not only did this answer showcase Benjy’s strong desire to improve his independent living skills, it also happened to be true.
“Those were your answers,” Benjy replied. “I answered my answers. I still do forget sometimes or I fall asleep early and don’t do my list. That’s the truth.”
“But my answer was true, too!” I insisted. “Lots of people forget or fall asleep, that’s no big deal. It came off sounding like a big deal. In an interview like that, you want to stress the positive, not the negative.”
“Your answer wasn’t as true as mine,” he said. “I have Asperger’s, Dad. That’s why I’m applying for this program. This is the way I am. I can’t help it.”
At the end of our final interview, the Program Director said the school would not explain why an applicant was not selected; otherwise, the staff would be forever defending its difficult decisions to disappointed students and parents. So we will never know. But now, leaving Wheeler behind in the Corvair’s rear-view mirror, I realized Benjy had been right and I had been wrong. His blunt honesty came from the heart—his heart. He wouldn’t stoop to misleading the Wheeler interviewers by playing a character conjured up by his anxious father. He was proud of the real Benjy.
Five hours later, I eased the Corvair into our driveway, yanked up the parking brake, turned off the engine, and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. Stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks, my antique Art Deco sculpture had borne me a thousand miles in 17 hours. I didn’t know if I would keep the car or not. But I’d always be grateful to it for safely bringing me home.
I unlocked the house and checked the TV room. This was Benjy’s scheduled NASCAR video game time, but he wasn’t there. I went up to his room and knocked softly. “Hey, dude, it’s Dad,” I announced.
“I’m asleep!” he claimed loudly, his voice muffled by layers of bed covers.
I went in anyway. At the head end of the bed, his quilt was pulled up over his head so that his size 13 feet stuck out before me. Often, I would tickle those feet, but not today. He wasn’t in the mood, I was sure.
“Sleep okay?” I asked.
“Not really,” he croaked. He sounded as if he hadn’t slept a wink.
“You’re not playing your game, huh?”
“No.”
I sat on the bed beside him and scratched his back through the quilt. He loved back scratches. “Wanna talk about it?” I asked.
“No, thank you,” he replied, emphatically.
“Maybe later, huh?”
“No, thank you!” More emphatically.
“Okay,” I agreed. “I got the new car here. Drove it a thousand miles. Impressive, huh? For an old car?”
“Could you leave me alone, please? I’m going back to sleep.”
Sleep sounded good. I called Wally to report my safe arrival. He said he told me so, and that I was now a true member of the Corvair Brotherhood. I hung up and then crashed onto my bed.
A few hours of sleep later, I returned to Benjy’s room, and he again ordered me to leave. But this time, I had come armed with hot chicken tenders. “Time for lunch,” I said as I poked my head into his room. “Late lunch or early dinner, your choice.”
He scrambled up from his bed. His face was puffy from crying. He grabbed the tray and crunched into the biggest chicken tender.
“We knew the odds were against you,” I said, sitting beside him on the bed, reviewing the Wheeler letter that he’d left on the kitchen table. “They had ten open slots and over two hundred applicants. And you were a finalist. They even invited you to apply again next year.”
Benjy ate just one chicken tender before he dropped his head back on his pillow. “Do we have to talk about this now?” He yanked the quilt back over his head.
“Steven Spielberg, Warren Buffett, and Ted Turner,” I pronounced, citing names Benjy recognized. “They were all turned down by their first choice of school.” Under his plate of chicken tenders, I had placed a printout of an article on this very topic I had found online a few minutes earlier. “It wasn’t the end for any of them, was it? Maybe it was more like a new beginning?”
He wasn’t biting yet, so I re-baited my hook and kept trolling. “James Monroe Community College is an excellent school. And you’ve already got English and political science credits there from the dual enrollment courses you’re taking. To go there for a year or two, get accustomed to the college workload and routine, then reapply to Wheeler—that could be the way to go.”
Still no bite.
To get some kind of discussion started with him, I even tried to set him up for his favorite joke about my frugality. “We’d sure save a lot of money if you went to community college and lived at home.”
No bite. Nothing.
“Are you sure there isn’t anything you want to say or ask?” I prodded.
Benjy fired the covers off his head. “I want to leave home,” he said firmly. “I’m nineteen years old. In a few months, I won’t even be a teenager anymore. It’s time for me to leave home and find my own place in the world.”
“More and more young people are staying at home with their parents,” I noted. “They’re finding it can be a tough world out there, and that maybe home isn’t so bad after all.”
“I want to go,” he said again. “If I have to stay here, it’s like I’m disabled when I’m just different. If I make lists and stuff, I’ll be okay. I just have to find a place that’s right for me.” With finality, he pulled the covers up over his head again.
“Benjy, if that’s what you want, I will support you every way I possibly can. Okay?”
No reply.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s nice out and the sun’s warm. Let’s take a ride in the Corvair. We can put the top down and get some ice cream.”
“No, thank you!” he blasted. “It’s just an old car, Dad!”
I patted him under the covers. “We’ll talk more later, okay?”
After I got up from his bed, he asked, “Dad, do you think my interview at Wheeler is why they rejected me?”
“I wondered about that on the drive up here. And you were right, you were absolutely right, and I was wrong. You showed them who you were, and that you knew you needed their help to live independently, and you were ready to learn from them. That was the right thing to do, the brave thing to do. I’m proud of you for doing it. And if that meant you weren’t selected, then maybe that was never the right place for you. So now we will find the right
place, okay?”
“There is no place,” he said quietly. “I’m too different.”
CHAPTER 6
The next morning, I gazed through the kitchen window and realized that Benjy was right about that Corvair now parked in our driveway. Yes, my father had loved Corvairs. And I was looking for a hobby—something to plug the gaping hole that Annie’s passing and Benjy’s leaving home for college would leave in my life. But, as Benjy said, and said, and said again, when you got right down to it, that thing in the driveway was still just an old car. It was not an answer to what ailed me, but an indulgence, and would likely become a time sink and a money pit. If I were an empty-nester, as I’d planned to be, perhaps I could justify it. But, with Benjy now staying in the nest and disdaining that old car every time we spoke about it, I feared it would push us apart. For three days, I’d been a Corvair owner. Now it was time to get rid of it.
Benjy rolled drowsily into the kitchen to take his meds. Still in his pajamas, his unruly long hair pushing out in every direction, he ignored me and was headed back to bed when he spotted the Corvair outside. “That’s it?” he asked, accomplishing the difficult feat of sounding both incredulous and asleep.
“That’s it,” I affirmed. “So? What do you think?” I tried to keep him talking so he wouldn’t retreat back under the covers.
“It’s an old car, all right. Does it leak oil?”
Suddenly, I turned ashen and hurried outside. How could I have been so stupid? I had driven a thousand miles in a Corvair, a car I had told Benjy was infamous for leaking and burning oil, yet I had been so desperate to get home that I never once checked the oil.
Uttering Hail Marys, I hoisted the engine cover, grabbed the dip-stick, and yanked it out. I held it up to the sun and squinted to see if there was even a smidge of oil. Just an iota would relieve my fears. But the stick was bone dry. I fetched the extra quart of oil that Wally had stashed in the front trunk. That quart, plus two more quarts I found in the garage, brought the oil level up to FULL. I was in despair. I had starved the engine of oil. I wondered if I would have to install a new engine before I sold the car.
“You didn’t check the oil, did you?” Benjy, still in pajamas, stood outside the front door.
“No, I didn’t,” I admitted. “I expect this will get me kicked out of the Corvair Brotherhood.”
“Why do you even like this car?” he asked, taking a few tentative steps closer.
“At the moment, I don’t know if I do like it. Maybe I will start a garden instead. Then at least we’ll both eat vegetables.”
“No, thank you. No vegetables. You should grow flowers instead.”
I sighed and laughed at myself. What a fiasco!
“What?” Benjy asked. “Why are you laughing?”
“Deathmobile,” I said. “I now have my very own Deathmobile. Dad would be so happy.”
Benjy eyed me gravely, as if I were teetering on the edge of insanity. I explained. “That was the name my friends gave Grandpa’s Corvair. The Deathmobile. It was a joke. Because they were so unsafe. Unsafe at any speed.”
That threw Benjy for a loop. “That’s not a joke. If they were unsafe, then they were Deathmobiles.”
“You ever hear of Ralph Nader?” I asked.
“Ralph Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in the year 2000 with Winona LaDuke as his running mate, and received almost a hundred thousand votes in Florida,” Benjy replied. “Al Gore and Joe Lieberman lost Florida to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by five hundred thirty-seven votes. Many experts believe that if Nader had not run, Gore would have won Florida, which had twenty-five electoral votes, and he would have become the president instead of Bush.”
Clearly, Benjy had heard of Ralph Nader.
“Ralph Nader has run for president multiple times,” Benjy continued, reeling off the years, parties, and running mates.
“Back in 1965,” I explained once Benjy paused for breath, “before anyone had ever heard of him, Ralph Nader wrote a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. He argued that automobile manufacturers could make cars safer. And he was right. In fact, he was so right that the government established an agency to make sure manufacturers made safe cars. So his book helped make cars safer, which was a good thing.”
“Yes!” Benjy enthusiastically seconded.
“And in his book Nader cited the Corvair as the most unsafe car built in America. The Corvair had a unique design, very different from other cars. He said that design was flawed, and that it caused deaths and injuries that would not have occurred in those other cars. So, for that reason, my friends called our Corvair the Deathmobile. Lots of people called Corvairs that.”
“Then how come Grandpa had one?”
Suddenly, the car interested him, so I gave him the salesman’s tour. “Well, let me show you.” I waved my hand over the engine. “All other American cars at that time had their engine and transmission in the front and their differential in the rear, so they had a big hump in the center of the floor. But the Corvair had all three in the rear. That design difference saved weight, reduced costs, created more interior room, boosted fuel economy, and improved handling and traction. Dad loved that the car he drove was different and innovative—and cheap to operate. He especially loved that.”
“You got your cheapness from him,” Benjy said.
“Thank you,” I laughed. “Yes, I did. But then Nader said that design difference made the car unsafe, and it became the Deathmobile. Even after the government said it really was safe.”
“It really was safe?” Benjy asked.
“The government agency that Nader helped create studied the Corvair, put it through all kinds of tests along with a lot of similar small cars, and found that the Corvair was as safe as or even safer than those similar cars, as long as the tires were properly inflated. Because so much weight was in the rear of a Corvair, its tire pressures had to be different from other cars, and a lot of people didn’t realize that.”
“So it wasn’t really unsafe,” Benjy concluded. “It was just different. So people thought there was something wrong with it.” He chewed on that thought awhile, as if he liked the taste, then circled the car, nodding. He understood it; he could feel its pain. “It’s like me,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I knew exactly what he meant, but I wanted to engage him and keep him from thinking about Wheeler.
“There’s nothing really wrong with it once you understand it. It’s not like it’s defective or disabled. It’s just different. Like me.”
I didn’t know if Benjy’s analogy was fair or true, and I didn’t care. All I knew was we were having a two-way give-and-take dialogue, and I didn’t want it to end and have him crawl back into bed. So I asked him to repeat his point to keep him talking.
Word for word, Benjy repeated what he’d just said, then added, “Normals put labels on things that are different, like ‘Deathmobile.’ Or ‘retard.’ But just because this car was different, that didn’t mean it was worse. It’s like I’m different from normals. That doesn’t mean I’m worse. I do a lot of things better, like reading and remembering stuff. I’m just different.”
“Maybe we should go to McDonald’s and continue discussing this over Chicken McNuggets,” I suggested. “I want to hear more about it.”
He eyed me suspiciously—I’d never before in his 19 years on this earth volunteered to drive him to McDonald’s. I couldn’t stand the place. But now I’d stoop to anything to keep the conversation going, even Mc-Donald’s, so I put the squeeze on. “Since when have you ever passed up Chicken McNuggets? Go upstairs and get dressed and we’ll go.”
Even though Benjy often had difficulty picking up social cues and the subtext of conversations, this was too blatantly obvious to escape him. He smelled a rat—an ulterior motive. “You actually want to go to McDonald’s?”
“I heard they have new stuff on the menu,” I said innocently. “Healthy stuff. Salads.”
He wasn’t buying it. “You don�
��t like vegetables. Besides, it’s too early for Chicken McNuggets,” he said, starting to head back to the house. “They’re only serving breakfast.”
“Hey! You’re not gonna crawl back under the covers, are you?” I called after him. “We’ll get that egg thing.” I scoured my memory bank for the catchy name. “An Egg McMuffin!”
“I don’t like eggs, Dad,” he reminded me.
“Look, by the time you get dressed, and we buy some more oil, and then drive to McDonalds, they’ll have the McNuggets,” I insisted, as if I knew what I was talking about. “You’ll be the first person today to order Chicken McNuggets.”
“McDonald’s serves Chicken McNuggets in Asia and Europe, Dad, where the clocks are several hours ahead of ours. So I can’t be the first person to order them today, because Asians and Europeans have already ordered them today.”
“Look,” I said impatiently, applying full pressure, “do you want to go or not? This is my final offer. Last call for Chicken McNuggets.”
He considered it. “I can get dressed slowly,” he finally conceded.
“It’s too loud!” Benjy yelled, putting his hands over his ears as I accelerated the Corvair away from our driveway. Like many Aspergians, he was extremely sensitive to loud noises.
“That’s because all the weather seals that keep noise out are rotted,” I bellowed so he could hear me.
With hands still over ears, he twisted and turned to examine the car. “There are no seat belts in the back!” he shouted.
“They weren’t required back when this was built.”
“Are you positive this car is safe?” Benjy demanded, still shouting.
I pulled his hand slightly away from his ear. “We’ve got modern seats, headrests, shoulder harnesses. It’s too old to have airbags, unfortunately. But I wouldn’t drive us in it if I thought it wasn’t safe.”
Benjy sighed loudly and slowly uncovered both ears to test whether the sound was bearable. Satisfied, he finally let his hands down. “It’s really very loud,” he reiterated. “Prolonged exposure to loud noises can damage a person’s hearing.”
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