Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (32 page)

One of the most surprising things I learned was that Asperger’s is an
autistic spectrum disorder.
That is, it’s a
form of autism.
If someone had suggested I had an autistic disorder as a child, I’d have said, “You’re nuts!” To me, an autistic person was someone like Tommy, the autistic kid on the TV show
St. Elsewhere.
He never said anything, and he didn’t do much at all. Autism, to people of my generation, was something we imagined as almost a living death. I had no idea of the continuum that really exists, with profoundly impaired people like Tommy at one end and people like me at the other.

I guess it’s possible that even if I had been diagnosed at six, no one would have believed it. Perhaps our culture needed to evolve a bit more for subtler conditions like mine to stand out from the background noise of society.

If my parents had known what caused me to be the way I was, and acted on the knowledge, life might have turned out very differently for me. My life has been filled with lost chances because I didn’t fit in.

I left school in the tenth grade despite intelligence tests showing me to be smarter than most college graduates. A number of professors had encouraged me to start at UMass even though I had dropped out of high school, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too jarred by my failure. I did not want to let another school try and fit me into their mold so I could fail there, too. Starting at about six years of age, I learned not to submit myself to repeated humiliation from people or institutions.

I left Fat, the first band I was with, because I could not cope with the close personal interactions living in a house with ten roommates. And many of my earlier relationships fell apart because of my unusual style of communicating.

There were also missed career opportunities. At one point, I was asked to interview for an R&D job at Lucasfilm, which would have been ideal for my creative skills, but I was too afraid of going there, getting the job, and being found out as a fraud and fired once I had moved across the country. So I faded out of the music scene despite the fact that I was happier there than anywhere I have worked since.

Once I studied the book, I began to understand the differences between how I acted and how “normal” people acted in different situations. I started making a conscious effort to look people in the eye, and even when I looked at the floor while framing a response, I learned to glance at the person occasionally.

I learned to pause before responding when people approach me and begin speaking. I trained myself to respond in a manner that is only slightly eccentric, rather than out-and-out weird. When someone says, “Hey, John, how’s it going? How have you been?” I can answer, “I’m doing okay, Bob, how about you?” instead of “I have just been reading about the new MTU diesel engines that American President Lines is installing in their newest container ships. The new electronic engine management system is fascinating.”

I have taught myself to remember what’s happening with people close to my friends. When I see someone I have not seen in a while, I sometimes remember to say things like “How’s Mallory doing at college?” or “Is your mother out of the hospital yet?” That has proven hard to do, but I am making headway with it.

Changes like these have made a huge difference in how people perceive me. I have moved from being weird to being eccentric. And let me tell you, it’s a lot better to be eccentric.

Learning about my Asperger’s has benefited me in other ways, too. I’ve talked about feeling like a fraud, waiting to be found out and thrown on the rubbish pile of humanity. I felt like a fraud because I could not do anything in the normal way. I couldn’t complete school. I couldn’t “advance through the ranks.” I couldn’t “do it by the book.” And I always ignored the rules.

Because of that, I never felt legitimate. Now, with my understanding of my Asperger’s, those negative feelings are in large measure gone.

I now realize that the knowledge I have is genuine. When I worked as an engineer, my ability to create beautiful-sounding amplifiers and sound equipment was real. My ability to think up striking special effects was real, too. And now that I am older, I understand how rare those abilities are.

There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don’t conform. Luckily, the world is also full of people who care about results, and those people are usually very happy with me, because my Asperger’s compels me to be the ultimate expert in whatever field of interest I choose. And with substantial knowledge, I can obtain good results.

So I’m not defective. In fact, in recent years I have started to see that we Aspergians are
better
than normal! And now it seems as though scientists agree: Recent articles suggest that a touch of Asperger’s is an essential part of much creative genius.

25

Montagoonians

N
ames have been a source of difficulty for me as long as I can remember because the names I use are often not the ones other people expect. In some cases, people object to my use of names, and they occasionally get angry. Complaints like “I’m not Chubster! I’m Martha!” are all too familiar to me. But familiar or not, Martha will always be the Chubster, unless I adopt a different name for some reason, like her order of appearance among her sisters.

Why is she Chubster? Because at the time I named her, she had an obsession with being fit and thin. And what else could you name someone obsessed with fitness and weight? So Chubster it is, unless you want to use the diminutive form, which is Chubbykin.

To be considerate, I have tried on many occasions to use a name other than one I’ve chosen. I just can’t do it. When I try to call the Chubster Martha, I choke on it. Martha does not work for me. But
you
can call her Martha if you want. I won’t mind. I don’t impose my name usage on others.

I refer to my current house as The House. If, in the future, I acquire additional houses I might refer to them as Dwelling 1 and Dwelling 2, but until now The House has been an adequate, functional name for whatever house I have lived in.

The only exceptions to the rule of calling my dwelling The House have been the brief periods when I occupied The Apartment or The Tent or The Cabin or The Shed. Those times were considerably less pleasant than times spent in The House, so I don’t think about them very much. The least pleasant—and, luckily, very temporary—domiciling arrangements for me were The Dumpster, The Box Pile, and The Jail, but I don’t think of them at all.

My names for nonhumans are clear and descriptive. They are never tricky. For example, consider Dog and Poodle. There is no mistaking what they are. These are good, true, functional names.

My brother, who does not have Asperger’s, got a dog and named it Kitty Kitty. I would never do that. One day, my brother came to visit and we took Kitty Kitty for a walk in the Berkshires. He fell into a pool of road-repair tar. It served them both right for a name like that. I would never name a dog Kitty Kitty or Cat, and my dogs would never fall in road tar.

My brother persists in this deviant naming of animals. He currently has two dogs. One he has named Bentley. I believe he did that because I have a Bentley and he liked it. However, my Bentley is a car. An old one. Naming a dog Bentley is just wrong. The other one is worse. He calls it Cow. It’s a mystery to me why he would do that, since he presumably has the same genetic material as me. Sometimes I think he did it just to annoy me.

I think people who choose names like that must not be very logical thinkers. Perhaps they are people I’ve heard described as “Oh! So dramatic and emotional!” Or perhaps they just suffer from some kind of arrested development. I believe that anyone who interviewed my brother and me, and viewed examples of our naming practices, would reach that conclusion. My brother, of course, would disagree.

Another example of arrested development is the person who names a pet something like Molson. A dog is not a bottle of beer, no matter how much an alcoholic owner may wish him to be. Confusing a dog with a beer bottle is a sign of deep-seated mental confusion.

Unlike most people, my brother actually chose his own name. He was born as Christopher Richter Robison, but he didn’t like our parents, so he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs when he was eighteen. I have never called him Augusten, nor do I call him Chris. And he outgrew both Snort and Varmint. Our cousin Little Bob called him Xon, with the X pronounced as a Z, but that doesn’t work for me, either. In the absence of a workable name, I just refer to him as “my brother” without actually using a name.

To his partner, Dennis, I say, “Where’s my brother?”

To my son, I say, “Where’s your uncle?”

To my brother, I say, “Hey!”

Sometimes I have alternate names, and my names reflect function or position as opposed to type. For example, my wife has two sisters, and of course she had a mother and father, too, until they died. Sometimes several of them would be together, and I would have to introduce a stranger to them as a group.

In such a situation, I might point to a parent and say, “This is Unit Zero.” If Annie, the youngest child, were present, I would say “This is Annie, Unit Three.” If Ellen were there, I would say, “This is Ellen, Unit One.” If my own mate were there, I would say, “This is Martha, Unit Two.”

My descriptions make the relative position of each Unit clear in the greater scheme of things, which seems to me perfectly reasonable. Once again, we have an example of functional naming that is perceived as strange by the general public.

When I was little, grown-ups told me the names for everything and everyone. The hot thing was a stove. The dog was a poodle. The kid was Little Robbie, or Jeff. I had no power over the names, and I didn’t like it. Who were they, intruding into my innermost thoughts in that manner? But as I got bigger, I got my own naming rights. I began to acquire things that I could name. I was given a tractor, and I named him Chippy. But nobody respected my names. My father called my tractor “your tractor,” not Chippy. Sometimes people actually laughed at my names, which hurt my feelings or made me mad.

But I persisted. As I got older, I carefully evaluated each name I was handed for any new person or thing and decided on a case by case basis whether I’d accept it. If I didn’t accept the proffered name, I supplied one of my own. This sometimes presented problems, as when other kids didn’t understand their names were being offered to me on a take it or leave it basis. Looking back, I can understand how a kid might not have liked my naming him Blob, no matter how good a match that name was, or how repulsive he was.

There can be disadvantages to my naming habits. For example, when Little Bear and I divorced and I remarried, she lost her name. She’s antagonized by being called Little Bear, because it reminds her of happier times when we were together, and I don’t have anything left to call her except “Hey!”

The closer people are to me the less likely I am to call them by the names they were given. Bobby or Paul at work will always be Bobby or Paul when I refer to them. But my mother is never Margaret or Mom, only “my mother.” (I ceased calling my parents Slave and Stupid when I moved out, at age sixteen.)

Sometimes I recognize existing naming conventions and use them, to people’s surprise. We take for granted that people who live in America are Americans. People who live in Canada are Canadians. So what are people who live in the town of Montague? I was introducing a lawyer friend and his wife to some other people and I said, “This is George and his wife, Barbara. They’re Montagoonian attorneys.” To me, that was perfectly sensible, but George looked like he’d just been mortally insulted.

I had observed that people—when meeting someone for the first time—will invariably ask two questions within a few minutes of engaging in conversation: “Where do you live?” and “What do you do?” My statement addressed both questions with a fine economy of words, and no waiting or delay. Why were they offended?

It was a puzzle to me. What else could someone from Montague be but a Montagoonian?

I guess it’s the idea of being a Montagoonian that’s tough to take. Perhaps he was insecure about exactly what a Montagoonian was and whether it was good. Or maybe people only like to “be” things on a big scale. It’s not insulting to say, “Bob’s an American,” nor is it insulting to say, “Bob’s very tall.” But saying, “Bob’s a Montagoonian,” elicits about the same response as “Bob’s a Jew” or “He’s queer.”

That last statement highlights a difficulty I have in conversation. In some cases, introducing a person by saying, “He’s a Jew,” or “He’s a queer” would be offensive, on a par with saying, “He’s a car thief.” But in other cases, it appears to be complimentary or even funny. Figuring out the difference can be a challenge for me.

If you can’t identify with where you live, there is only one good answer: Move somewhere else. I’ll bet George would have nodded smugly if I had said, “This is George, he’s a New York attorney.” After all, everyone knows everything is better in the big city—the food, the Broadway shows, the lawyers, the girls. But he’s not a New Yorker. He’s a Montagoonian. And he should face that fact with a smile, or move. He has no right to get annoyed with me over it. I didn’t put him there.

After the reaction I got from the Montagoonian attorneys, I gave some thought to what it means to be something. If you say you’re an American, people will draw some predictable conclusions about you based upon their knowledge of Americans. But what if you say you’re something people don’t recognize? Outside of Montague, most people would not know what a Montagoonian was. I tried to conjure a mental image of what one might be. I even asked people on the street.