Life Begins (4 page)

~~~

I didn't mean to break his heart
that day. I was six. All of the girls were laughing at me. It
wasn't that I didn't like him. He was kind of like a puppy dog. He
was loyal, warm, and strangely pathetic. He just made you want to
love him.

I do regret that I didn't respond
better to him that day. All of the girls were laughing at him. He
just sat there and took it. He just watched me go. I wish now that
I would have gone to him. I think we would have a better
relationship. But then again, I was only six.

I know that Jack loves me. I
couldn't ask for a better man. That's not saying that our
relationship is perfect. There are things I wish that I could get
out of Jack. But I think he kind of closed up over the years. I
can't really blame him.

Jack holds on to memories with an
iron grip. It doesn't matter if it was a pleasant memory or not, he
will hold on to it forever and never forgets. He could chronicle
our entire relationship with stupid things we did when we were
younger and are not important now.

He doesn't know it, but I know
that he has a shoe box in his closet with mementos. In it you will
find the napkin that soaked up the chocolate milk that came out of
my nose that day. He will cherish that until the day he
dies.

He's the only guy that would hold
on to a souvenir of when he was rejected by the woman he loves. I
have never known why he holds on to it. He has never used it as
emotional blackmail. He has never said to me, "Do you remember that
time in kindergarten when I told you I loved you and you broke my
heart?" And yet I feel like it is hanging over my head and keeping
us from being closer. I wish he would think about us.

~~~

Out of the bad comes the good. I treasure
every moment with Christine because it has led us to this moment in
our lives. I think that is what my father was trying to get me to
understand with the stories about the Jews.

I came on a little too strong when I was a
kid. I knew of love from what I saw of my parents. Christine didn't
have that with her parents. The thing about playing a part is that
you need to other person to play opposite you in a way that
compliments your performance. If you don't, then you are working
against each other.

As for that napkin, I have kept it all of
these years. I haven't kept it because it makes me remember when
she broke my heart. Right next to it in my little box is her
bracelet from when she had to go to the emergency room.

A few months after she broke my heart, we were
playing house. She was climbing into the tree house. She slipped
and fell. She broke her arm and had to go to the emergency room.
Through it all, I was the one that she wanted to be with her. That
wouldn't be such a great feeling if my heart hadn't been broken
earlier.

Although it is kind of stalkerish of me to
have kept her bracelet from the emergency room. I don’t think she
knows that I dug it out of the trash. I see what she says now about
me being pathetic. It’s a good thing that we are actually dating
each other now. She would probably dump me with some of the things
that are about to come out in this book.

And that is how the rest of our relationship
was though out the rest of our childhood. We had ups and downs.
There were times when I knew that she liked me. There were times
she was playing hard to get. Through it all, she just made me hard.
What can I say? She finally grew up enough to learn that a hard man
is good to find.

Autistics are known for their
obsessions and socially inappropriate behavior. In kindergarten, I
was sure of my love for Christine and wanted nothing more than to
be loved by her. We could debate the merits of loving somebody
regardless of how they feel about you and whether this is wise or
not.

As a writer, I have never
understood love and have spent the majority of my career trying to
make sense of it. I have seen some people so desperate to be loved
that they will put up with a great deal of crap just to have that
relationship status. It is like people are socialized to think that
if they are single, there must be something defective about them.
It is better to be in any sort of relationship than to be in no
relationship at all. In the same way, it is almost better to get
knocked up or to knock up somebody than to not reproduce at all.
Regardless of the quality of the relationship or the person’s
parenting, society looks at getting married and having children as
social passages that every person must do. If you don’t do it, then
there must be something wrong with you.

Looking back on my childhood, I
can tell you that the only sin I committed in kindergarten was that
I loved Christine before it was socially acceptable to do so. Being
autistic, I expressed what I was feeling. Being normal, Christine
rejected me out of a fear of what others might think of
her.

You can trace the majority of the
issues between us in this book back to this event in kindergarten
and our different ways of understanding and expressing ourselves.
One current theory would like to suggest that autism should really
be called Extreme Male Brain Syndrome because it values logic and
reason over emotions.

Now, I know there are some women
out there that will emotionally offended by the fact that I would
quote a male scientist suggesting that men are more logical and
reasonable than women. I will say this as nicely as an autistic
person can. Women think their illogical reasoning is perfectly
logical and are deeply offended if you suggest
otherwise.

I have been classes before where a
woman will cite a study that says 85% of women are more studious
than men. She then deduces from this that women are smarter than
men because women do better in school. The woman then has the
emotional satisfaction of saying her gender is better, even though
her logic led her to a fallacy. The study merely said that women
are generally more studious. They study more, pay attention in
class more, and act like what they are at school for is important.
This has nothing to do with actual intelligence of either of the
genders. The study merely commented that women exhibit better
learning behaviors than men.

I didn’t study at all when I was
in school, and I got all A’s, except for a B in Geometry. I could
have studied harder, but there was little to gain from the extra
work. In a man’s mind, if you are getting good grades while putting
in little effort, why increase your level of effort to raise your
grade by a couple of percentage points? Your GPA will still be a
4.0 whether you received a 93% or 100%. Sure the extra effort could
reward you with being the valedictorian, but who really wants the
extra pressure of having to stand up in front of a bunch of people
and give a speech when all you really want to do is celebrate the
fact that you are graduating?

This is how most men think. Over
the years, Christine has learned not to argue with me about the
genders and which one is better. She knows that I will through
cold, hard truths at her. She also knows that I generally support
women over men, except when women use their emotions to think of
themselves as better than men.

You see, what women fail to
understand is that guys don’t care about a lot of things. We
consider it not important and a waste of our time. Women get
emotionally invested in things and make it important.

My favorite male-female
superiority argument has to be where women think they are better
than men because they endure monthly bleeding without complaining,
carry another human being inside of them for nine months when they
are pregnant, and then they endure the excruciating pain of child
birth.

To this I respond: Men can pee
standing up. Even if we have a monthly hormonal cycle, we don’t
bleed. Not bleeding saves us money on feminine products. Men are
never worried about whether we smell down there. Men would have an
evolutionary and biological advantage over women in that we can
impregnate more than one woman at a time and thus have our genes
carried on at a greater level. Men can father children without the
fear of stretch marks or our private parts becoming deformed from
having passed an eight pound human being.

And if you still want to use the
enduring of the pain of childbirth, I would like to give the men
out there this little zinger. If a woman ever insults the size of
your manhood, you can always say, “It might not have felt like
much, but just wait until nine months from now.”

Guys don’t take the battle of the
sexes seriously. We make jokes about it, and then women take the
jokes seriously and get their feelings hurt. Women overthink men
and try to apply emotional understanding to us that just isn’t
there. It’s like this feminist belief that women are still being
oppressed by men and not receiving equal pay for equal work. Look
at the men you know. We are usually too preoccupied with trying to
get into your pants or pleasuring ourselves in other ways that we
would lack the time and initiative to establish a system to
suppress one group. In fact, as a straight white male, I’m a little
confused by minorities and women being so shaped by their personal
experiences. Straight white guys just exist. If we succeed, it was
because we tried. If we failed, it just means that somebody else
was better at it and that we need to try harder.

As an autistic, I don’t understand
this emotional coddling of people. They are wanting to blame some
external force for their failures. Can’t we just say that the
person sucked at what they were trying to do and move on? Sure, you
would feel better if you could blame something outside of your
control, but sometimes you just have to accept the fact that it was
all you and the decisions you have made in your life.

Maybe autism is being thought of
as Extreme Male Brain Syndrome because at the heart of the matter
guys don’t care about a lot of stuff that women are emotionally
involved with. It wouldn’t suggest that one gender is better than
another anymore than saying a neurotypical person is better than
the autistic person. Men and women think differently in the same
way that normal people and autistic people think
differently.

When I was in kindergarten, I was
certain of the fact that I loved Christine. Regardless of whether
it was socially acceptable or not, I loved her. She could reject
me, but I would still love her. That would always be a
constant.

I’m not going to say that I wasn’t
hurt by this. The years that followed were filled with me trying to
make sense of Christine and what she felt for me while trying to
not be socially inappropriate or awkward to where she would reject
me. It was a balancing act of loving that obscure object of desire
while trying not to be destroyed by loving more than I could
receive in return.

Christine was never one of my
obsessions. My obsessions include the Muppets, classic comedy,
American history, Batman, Star Wars, and some other random things.
I might be known for my love of the ideal blonde in the same way
that Hitchcock was, but this does not include Christine. She is the
perfect blonde and the perfect friend and lover. She is perfect in
every way a human being can be.

She’s a need and not an obsession.
I have always needed her in the same way that everybody needs food,
water, shelter, and warmth. When I told her in kindergarten that I
loved her, it was the logical conclusion of a boy who recognized
her importance to him and his life. Beyond ideals, beauty, desires,
and wants, she was so important to me that I would have given my
own life for the continual existence of hers. She was more
important to me than I was to myself. I had no other way of letting
her know this other than telling her I love her.

~~~

There’s a lot of things I could
say about Jack. He has always been socially awkward, uniquely
independent, and hard to get him to talk about his feelings because
he can never seem to get his heart and his head to communicate to
each other.

Over the years, I’ve learned not
to argue with him. He is logical beyond all reason and very hard to
win an argument with. I don’t want anybody out there to think that
he hates women. He doesn’t. He puts women ahead of himself and has
an extreme hatred of men, especially the bigger, more muscular kind
I used to date. He just doesn’t like when women try to act like
they are better than men. I think it goes against his ideals of
gender equality.

I once got into the gender debate
with him. He angered me to such a point all I could come back with
was, “God, you’re such an ass hole!” Without missing a beat, he
responds, “Why do you think I’ve been trying to tell you that women
are not superior to men? They date men. You have to question the
intelligence of a gender that habitually dates men with the full
knowledge that they’re ass holes. Even if I found men physically
attractive, I at least have enough common sense to know to not date
men because we are all ass holes! Women go from one terrible
relationship to another and never learn this lesson.”

I didn’t have a response to this.
I often don’t have a response for what he says, and I kind of like
it that way. He is rarely appropriate, but he is always honest.
What I learned from that argument was that he seriously doesn’t
understand women and communicating with me. “Look, Christine, I
don’t know what you want from me. I know of every complaint you
have ever had about any of your boyfriends. I’m trying not to do
those things while still having some of the same urges from being
near you and our relationship being what it is. I don’t know what
you want. I just know that you make me want to be a real man and
not just another ass hole.”