Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (13 page)

In the first sixteen years of my life, my parents took me to at least a dozen so-called mental health professionals. Not one of them ever came close to figuring out what was wrong with me. In their defense, I will concede that Asperger’s did not yet exist as a diagnosis, but autism did, and no one ever mentioned I might have any kind of autistic spectrum disorder. Autism was viewed by many as a much more extreme condition—one where kids never talked and could not take care of themselves. Rather than take a close and sympathetic look at me, it proved easier and less controversial for the professionals to say I was just lazy, or angry, or defiant. But none of those words led to a solution for my problems.

It would take more than a discussion group to fix my school troubles. So when my next report card showed straight Fs, I realized it was time to go. There hadn’t been much keeping me there anyway beyond the vague idea that being a legitimate high school graduate was better than being a dropout. There was only one problem. I was just fifteen, and it was against the law to quit school before the age of sixteen.

The school had such a strong desire to be rid of me that they stepped up to the plate with a solution. “If you take the GED and score at least seventy-five percent, we’ll treat you as a graduate and you can leave.” My guidance counselor presented this to me in the same tone of voice he’d use to sell some punk a two-hundred-dollar Cadillac in his second job as a used car salesman. I took the test and got a 96 percent. They offered me a diploma, “for a small recording fee.”

“Only twenty dollars,” the clerk said with a smile.

I smiled back. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t need your diploma.” And I never looked back. My parents hardly seemed to notice.

It was time to figure out what to do, now that I was a fifteen-year-old grown-up. It was a little scary. I retreated to the woods to think, just as I’d done as a little boy in Seattle.

I had always loved the outdoors, and once I wasn’t in school it felt as though I had all the time in the world. It was spring, and I spent a lot of time alone, thinking about what I should do next. I would venture out from home for days at a time, living under trees and in falling-down cabins that I found in the forest.

One day I was walking through a glade of young pine trees, several miles from home, when a voice boomed out of nowhere.

“Stop right there!”

I ducked under some pine branches. There shouldn’t have been anyone for miles in any direction.

But there was. Twenty feet in front of me, a shaggy-haired guy in army camouflage sat tending a coffeepot over a small fire.

What the fuck!

I stopped.

The guy was camped in the middle of a small clearing. I saw a green tent behind him. There were no guns in sight. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

“You’re just a kid. What are you doing out here?”

I didn’t think of myself as “just a kid,” but he was older and bigger and appeared to be living in the woods. I considered running away, but there didn’t seem to be any threat. I decided to answer.

“I live here,” I said. “About two miles away. What are
you
doing here?”

“I live here, too,” he said. “Right here.”

“Here in the woods?” Grown-ups were not supposed to live in tents.

“For now. I’ve lived in worse places,” he said. “Have a seat.” I sat down and he began to talk.

Paul told me he was a disabled Vietnam veteran. He had been shot, and his leg didn’t work very well anymore. After getting out of the service, he’d been hitchhiking around the country, living off the land. I was fascinated.

“Want a drink?” he asked. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was offering, but I nodded. He opened a small glass bottle filled with what looked like fizzy water.
Canada Dry
was all the label said. I took a sip and would have spit it out if I weren’t on my best behavior.

“What is it?” I asked. I knew whiskey was nasty to swallow, but that drinking it was a sign of being grown up. Maybe this stuff would be the same.

“Quinine water!” He said it brightly, as though anyone should know what it was, and know it was good. By that point in my life, I had heard of all the most common types of liquor. Vodka. Whiskey. Rum. Tequila. Bourbon. None of them sounded anything like quinine water.

“I acquired a taste for it in ’Nam,” he said. “It keeps you from getting malaria.”

I had never heard of anyone in New England coming down with malaria.
Maybe it’s one of those rare diseases, like meningitis,
I thought.
So it’s like medicine water.
I took another drink. I had read about how they had to conquer malaria in order to build the Panama Canal. I looked around as I sipped my quinine water, comparing the Shutesbury woods to the Central American jungle.

Paul was living in a glade, far from roads, with nothing more than an army tent and a duffel bag. He had made a seat from a log, and he had a small ring of stones with a fire that warmed an old coffeepot. Where was his food?

“I live off the land, and I forage in town,” he told me. Whatever he was doing must work, I figured, because he looked healthy.

“Why don’t you build a shelter?” I asked.

“I don’t want to settle down,” he said. “I need to be able to move out on a moment’s notice.” In fact, he never did build a shelter. He seemed impervious to weather.

I had always thought I knew my way around the woods, but Paul showed me how much I still needed to learn. Paul could snare rabbits for a stew. He caught trout for breakfast. And to round it out, he knew how to forage in dumpsters for fresh baked goods and vegetables. Until I met him, I never knew the bounty that could be fished from a dumpster in a town like ours.

It was from Paul that I learned how to catch fish with a BB gun. It’s surprisingly simple, provided you’re a good shot. You sit at the edge of the pool, gun at the ready. Ideally, you sit in a tree branch so that you are eight to ten feet off the ground, looking down into the pool. Then you throw bread crumbs onto the pond’s surface. When the fish swim up to eat them, you shoot them. It’s a lot easier than fishing, but it does take a steady hand.

“I use a shotgun with slugs,” Paul said. “That way, you don’t have to hit the fish. They get stunned when the slug hits the water, and you just scoop ’em up. The only easier way to get fish is to toss a grenade in the pond and go in with a big net,” he told me. I soon heard he’d done that, over at Smith College. The shore was lined with dead fish when I walked over to check it out.

Thanks to Paul, I learned to walk silently through the woods. I learned to flow around and under the brush, so as to pass without a sound and without a trace. I learned to live in the woods, not just visit.

I also learned to watch where I stepped.

“Watch that wire!”

Wire?
Paul had rigged a perimeter of trip wires around his camp to prevent someone walking in and surprising him. They were virtually invisible.

“If that was rigged to a claymore mine, you’d be dead now!”

As a kid in the Shutesbury woods, it never would have occurred to me to watch for trip wires and land mines. Thirty years later, though, I still remember what he showed me, and I watch where I step.

He told me stories of his time in the Army. I expected a Vietnam vet to tell me of combat in faraway places, but that wasn’t what I heard. He told me about being ambushed by tigers in the jungle. He told me about loading bales of drugs and contraband aboard DC-3 airplanes. He told me of setting booby traps for the enemy, and impaling them with sharpened sticks. His stories bore no resemblance to my previous notions of war, which were formed watching Vic Morrow in the TV series
Combat.

Paul stayed in his camp all through that summer. I walked up to visit him almost every day, and I stayed several days on many occasions. It was a nice place to pass the time. There was no family trouble, no pressure to get a job, and no one to give me a hard time. The skills that had enabled Paul to hide in the Asian jungle allowed him to remain perfectly hidden in Shutesbury. Whenever I was there, I was invisible, too.

It was nice living in the Shutesbury woods with my friend Paul, but anytime I wanted to go to town I faced a six-mile walk. I never wanted to be a hermit. I always imagined myself being around other people, even though I had a hard time interacting with them. I realized that I needed some unique talent that would make people interact with me. That way, I wouldn’t have to initiate any interactions—I’d just have to respond, which was easier for me. Luckily, I was going somewhere with my talent for fixing and improving and innovating musical equipment. I seemed to be able to make it sing in a way that few others could. More and more, musicians began seeking me out.

With every passing week, I was growing up. I had learned to avoid land mines and had started imagining a future for myself in music.

That September, when the nights began getting cooler, Paul began talking about going south to Florida. One fall morning, I walked up to see him and he was gone. No trace of him. The camp had been swept clear. I could have walked through a few days later and I would never have known that someone had lived there for two months. No trash, no disturbed ground, no evidence of any kind.

I never knew where he went, and I never told anyone about him or what he taught me. Years later, I saw a news story about Paul testifying at a Boston antiwar hearing and discovered that he was a war hero, a highly decorated Green Beret.

It was time to come out of the woods and join society.

10

Collecting the Trash

F
or a long time, I had been considering how to escape my parents’ house. When I was fifteen, my father had bought a motorcycle to commute to school. He wouldn’t let me ride it, but it got me thinking about a bike of my own. I asked everyone I knew about motorcycles for sale. I scanned the classified ads for a cheap motorcycle. Finally, I found one. I bought a 1966 Honda Dream for twenty-five dollars. Once I made it run, I was able to get away, at least temporarily. It was with the possibility of escape in mind that I followed my parents to their friend Walter Henderson’s fortieth birthday party. My parents were always on their best behavior when they were out in public, so I knew they would not turn on me. And I would be downtown, where it would be easy to get away if things got strange.

Slave and Stupid seldom did anything together. However, they both liked the Hendersons, so they headed to Walter’s birthday party together. I liked Walter, too—at least what I knew of him. He taught English at Amherst College and wore a brown corduroy jacket. He was always an interesting fellow to talk to, and he seemed moderately interested in me. For some reason, my parents really wanted me to go to his party.

I had never gone to a faculty party before. They were for grown-ups—usually my parents’ friends. Some of their friends were okay, but others seemed to me arrogant and conceited, and it was starting to make me angry. I knew I was some kind of misfit, but it was becoming apparent that some of the grown-ups who smiled sweetly and told me how terrible and fucked-up I was were complete fuckups themselves. And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places in the world where misfits were welcome.

Slave said, “John Elder, Walter and Annette really like you. They really hope you’ll come to their party.”
Maybe they like me,
I thought.
Or maybe they think I’ll be entertaining because I’m weird.
Yes, that was more likely. They thought I was weird.

Stupid said, “It’s up to you, son, but they did invite you. If you ignore invitations, pretty soon they stop coming in.”

As if I ever got invited to parties.

I decided to go, but I didn’t ride with them. I went on my motorcycle. When we arrived, a big crowd was milling around in Walter’s yard. They had a tent set up, and a table with food, and what looked like a band. Everyone was dressed better than me.
They probably all have good educations, respectable jobs, and families,
I thought. But I figured,
I’m clean. I shower every day. I’ll be okay here.

Walter had had cards printed for the occasion. He gave me one when we arrived. It said:

W
ALTER
H
ENDERSON,
40

Lecturer, 40 different topics

Traveler, 40 different countries

Chef, 40 different courses

Lover, 40 different women

This was going to be my kind of party, I could already tell.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there. Annette saw me and led me over to talk to one of her friends. I guess she meant well. After a brief introduction, she flitted off to take care of the next guest. Her friend George turned out to be a rather pompous professor who tried to engage me in conversation.

“We have a son about your age,” he told me. “We’re very proud of him. He’s starting at Harvard in the fall.” Just then, another couple walked over and the woman said, “Our daughter Janet has decided to go to Smith. So she’ll be nearby for four more years! What are you doing?”