Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (17 page)

“Need some help?” I was half-joking, but they took me seriously.

“He’s a great mechanic. From the U.S.” Billy pointed at me and they looked impressed. I ended up staying there two hours, helping them fix cars.

“You could make a great living if you wanna stay here, mon,” they said.

They didn’t have any money to pay me, but I didn’t have a car. So we had the basis for a good trade. I fixed some Mokes and Austins, and I got wheels.

I drove my Moke back to the jail to ferry the crew home. When I got there, though, the plan had changed. It seemed we were now celebrities. Drinks were on the house at the local bar, and that’s where we went.

When it came time to leave, we were all pretty drunk. I decided to go for a ride on the beach, which was only a short ride away. When I got there, I raced down the sandy straightaway, swerving around people as they lay on the sand. I headed to the end, into the little sand dunes. Mokes don’t go very fast, but I had this one moving pretty good as I popped over a dune, and just like that, I was in the ocean.

The Moke sank, and I quickly discovered the tide was coming in. Soon the Moke was gone from sight.

Standing on the shore, I felt sick and drunk. My friends had wandered off. And I had lost my transportation. The only sign of my Moke was the little red flag that was on a pole sticking up from the back bumper. Every time there was a trough in the waves, the flag popped out of the sea.

Shit,
I said to myself.
I’d better get it out of the water.

There was no sign of the people I had been riding with. I trudged back to the bar to get help removing the car. When I went inside, a band had set up, and two guys were playing steel drums. It was magical, the way they played those trilling melodies on instruments made from old oil drums. One of the guys from the jail was there, too. He’d changed from a policeman to a musician. Looking at him, you’d never have guessed. I was tempted to stay at the bar all night, but I knew we had to get that Moke back. I couldn’t afford to buy the rental agency another one.

I rounded up five guys and we walked back to the beach. The tide was still high, and we had to swim out to the Moke and stand on its hood and seats.

“All together, now, let’s dive down, grab it, and drag it back. One…two…three…dive!” Shit, that was hard work! But we did it. Once the Moke was back on the sand, I removed all its filler caps and we flipped it on its head to drain. I got a ride home while it sat and dried out.

The next morning, I got up early and got a ride to the rental agency. As soon as I arrived, I heard, “Hey, I heard you sank our Moke in the ocean, mon!” It seemed news traveled fast on Montserrat.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll have it running in a few hours.” I got some gas, some oil, and a fresh battery, and then I trudged back to the beach with two guys from the rental place as assistants. We flipped the car back on its feet. I filled it with fresh fluids, changed the battery, and cleaned out the carburetor and the ignition. I pulled the plugs and shot oil into the cylinders. Amazingly, it ran. We drove back to the rental agency, where I rinsed it with a hose and pronounced it good as new.

The next day, our vacation came to an end. I said good-bye to Willie and his iguana, and we flew home on a World War II surplus DC-3 with no door and with chickens in cages stacked in the aisle. Skimming a thousand feet above the ocean, we headed back to the snow, the spring thaw, and the mud. And our next show, Friday night at the Rusty Nail. A few years later, most of Montserrat vanished when the volcano erupted. The villa, the jail, the roads…all gone.

I didn’t end up staying with Fat very much longer. I had a hard time living with all the people in that house. I never knew what to say or do, and I often felt lost. But I had made a lot of contacts and become a lot more confident, at least with respect to engineering issues. Interacting about technical things had become comfortable, and the more I did it, the more I knew and the easier it got. I wouldn’t hesitate at all to walk up to a sound man at a concert. But I was still terrified of walking up to a girl.

13

The Big Time

G
ood things started happening to me as the winter of ’78 came to an end. That March, a long dark period of loneliness came to an end when I ran into Little Bear at the university one day. I was amazed to find that she was now a student there. We had not spoken in a very long time, but we reconnected right away. She told me that she’d left me when one of her friends made up an ugly story about me. She later learned it was all a lie, but by then it was too late. We both regretted the lost time.

We spent that spring walking the old railway lines around Amherst, collecting old railway spikes and glass telegraph insulators that had been abandoned in the grass. We talked about ourselves, our dreams, science fiction, electronics, cars, and motorcycles. I was in love.

I got another big break two months later: a job with a national sound company. One with big equipment. The kind used in stadiums, not barrooms.

The first to hire me was Britannia Row Audio, the sound company that Pink Floyd had formed to rent out their equipment when they were not on tour. Britro, as they were called in the United States, was headed by Mick Kluczynski, an English fellow who had been with Pink Floyd for years. I met Mick when he came to Amherst, doing sound for the university’s spring concert. Sha Na Na was playing, and their amplifiers were breaking down. I could see they were having trouble as I wandered in during the sound check.

“Having troubles with those Phase Linears?” I asked.
Maybe this will be my chance,
I thought.

“Fookin’ right we have trouble. I’m Mick, and this is Seth. Who are you?”

Mick was a short, chubby fellow with a strong English accent. “I run the main system,” Mick continued, “and my mate Seth runs the monitors.” The main sound system is the one that the audience hears—the system whose speakers flank the stage in huge piles. It’s sometimes called the house system. The monitor system’s speakers face the stage. Monitors allow the performers to hear themselves sing over the noise of the instrument amplifiers and everything else on stage.

“I’m John Robison. I’m an engineer. I know about Phase Linear troubles.” That sounded impressive. At least, I hoped it did.

And it was true. At the time, Crown and Phase Linear were the two main companies making large amplifiers for big sound systems, and I had fixed several Phase Linears for local bands. They had an unfortunate tendency to explode when you played them too loud. But all I had ever seen till then were sound systems with one, or at most two, Phase Linears. These guys had a mountain of them, at least twenty that I could see at a glance. I had never seen anything like that before. I was very impressed.

“Well, come up look at these, Mister Engineer.” Mick invited me up onto the stage and took me over to an area on the side that was filled with racks of auxiliary electronics. They had more equipment than I’d ever seen in one place, but I didn’t let on.

I asked for a screwdriver, and they handed me a complete Xcelite tool kit. At the time, Xcelite was the Rolls-Royce of hand tools. I had one or two myself, but an entire kit was a luxury. I looked at the fuse panels. The DC fuses were blown, and the glass was black. The black coloring meant a dead short. The output transistors had fried. I could fix them, but not there. I needed a shop.

“Where do you guys come from?” I asked.

“We’re from the U.K.,” he said. “But we’ve just opened an office here in the States. In Long Island City.” It took me a moment to figure out what “from the U.K.” meant. For some reason, British musicians I spoke to were never “from England.” They were always “from the U.K.” “The Floyd sent me here to run the place,” said Mick, “and Mr. Goldman here”—pointing to Seth—“is my number two.”

“I could fix these amps for you, but I’d need bench space to take them apart. Do you have space down there?”

It turned out they had a big radio studio with all the room I would need. We made a date for the following week, and I loaded my tools into the car and headed for New York. I had never been to Long Island City before. I was a little scared. Could I really do this?

I arrived in front of a nondescript building on a side street, one of a hundred identical buildings. Had I made a mistake? There was nothing to give any clue what might be inside.

Seth opened the door when I rang. I stepped into a foyer that opened up into a huge studio. Sound and light gear covered the floor, and speaker cabinets were piled against a wall.

“You guys have a lot of gear,” I said.

“We’ve got half the Floyd system here, with some stuff we’ve added,” Seth answered. “The Floyd have the biggest sound system in the world, you know.”

Just as they were “from the U.K.,” they worked “for the Floyd.” Only outsiders said “Pink Floyd.” I caught on to that pretty fast even with my limited social skills. I also hadn’t known that Floyd had the biggest sound system, but I nodded knowledgeably.

“Where are your broken amps?” I asked, anxious to prove myself.

Seth led me to a back room, where a long bench lined a wall and skylights provided illumination. There were probably fifty Phase Linear amplifiers piled up against the wall. The mound of broken equipment was at least ten feet wide, and taller than me.

“Are
all
of those broken?” Surely that wasn’t possible. I was expecting one or two broken amplifiers, not a truckload.

“Fookin’ right,” he said. “Have at it.” And with that, he went back up front.

It took me three days, several trips to the parts store, and two overnight shipments from Phase Linear, but I fixed all but two of them. And those two I stripped for parts. When I was done, we hauled the repaired amplifiers onto the soundstage. One by one, we hooked them into the PA. Seth ran each one up to full power, playing tapes of Judas Priest and Roxy Music he’d made on the last tours.

All fifty-two of my amps passed the tests.

“Fookin’ incredible,” said Mick.

I was very proud of myself. It was the biggest and fastest repair job I had ever done. And they had more. Piles and piles of broken equipment. They had ideas, too.

“We’ve got a three-way system now, but we’d like to go five-way. No one has that on tour. Think you could build a five-way crossover?”

“Of course,” I said, determined to sound confident. Then I headed home to think about it.

I told Little Bear about my plan.

“What’s a five-way crossover?” she asked.

“It divides the sound into bands. So you have the low bass notes, your bass guitar sounds, going to the biggest speakers. Then you have upper bass, the low range on the guitars and piano, going to the next biggest speakers. You have your low mids, vocals mostly, going to their own speakers, Your high mids, the saxophones and horns, go to another set of speakers. And, finally, your highs, the high hats, the cymbals, go to special high-frequency speakers.”

“Okay,” she said. It wasn’t clear if she understood or was merely humoring me.

I did the design and Little Bear made the circuit boards. We poured the acid to etch the boards into a Tupperware tray in the kitchen sink and assembled everything on the dining table in our apartment. Amazingly, it worked. I loaded it into the car to deliver it. On the ride to New Jersey, I pondered how far we had come from the two kids who’d fixed broken record players for the high school language lab just a few years before.

Seth was waiting when I arrived at the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts.

“You’re late. What took so fucking long?” he said.

“This crossover of yours better work. We don’t have a spare.” He was sure anxious.

There would be no rehearsal, I realized. We were going to plug it in and do a show.
Will it work?
I was tense and worried.
It worked when I did my last tests, five minutes before I put it in the car,
I told myself.

We hooked it up, and the first thing I heard through it was Gerry Rafferty’s horns playing “Baker Street.”

“Fucking clean.” Seth was impressed. “Smooth. Listen to those horns.”

It was like nothing I’d heard before. They
were
smooth. I was thrilled.

That night, I watched Meat Loaf play for a sellout crowd. During the show, his manager came over to me. “Fuckin’ great sound you guys have tonight. So clear!” I smiled. The five-way idea had really worked.

Britro had plenty of work for me after that night. It seemed their sound systems were everywhere. Whenever I’d go to Long Island City, they’d be setting up a new tour, always using equipment I had designed or fixed or built or modified in some way. All different kinds of music—Judas Priest, Talking Heads, Blondie, Phoebe Snow.

And I was the sound engineer.

By the summer of 1978, Britro had several sound systems touring at any given time. That August, I got a call about a system we had put together for a band called April Wine. Apparently, they were having trouble with the bass cabinets. They had blown thirty bass drivers. Britro asked me to ride up with them the next day to sort it out.

“Okay, but I have to bring my girlfriend. I promised to go away with her this weekend.”