Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (35 page)

I guess a fascination with trains runs in my family. When my father was little, his grandfather took him to watch the steam engines passing his drugstore, back in Chickamauga, Georgia. And here we were, over fifty years later, doing the same thing up here in Massachusetts.

Cubby looked out the window, scanning the lines of boxcars. He was a fifty-pound kid, bouncy, with a blue striped train conductor’s cap on his head. If he were a dog, he would have been wagging his tail.

We had driven forty-five minutes to see trains, and we were ready for action. We clumped across a few lines of track and parked next to the yardmaster’s shack, an old wood building that had faded to the same shade of gray as the stone ballast on the ground. The train dispatcher was watching us through the dirty plate-glass windows, and we waved. Oily smoke curled from a rusty pipe chimney. Everything was drab and dirty because it was dusted with years of soot from the diesel engines in the locomotives, which at that time ran twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

This train yard has been there since the days of steam engines, fifty years ago, so even before the soot from the diesel engines there was a pretty thick layer of coal dust. Cubby likes being clean, so it’s good he didn’t know any of that. When he got bigger, he would develop the same compulsive hand-washing habit as his grandfather and his uncle, but even then he hated getting grease on his clothes or on himself. I tried to keep him out of the worst of the dirt.

“Look, Dad—F types!” Cubby shouted as he pointed to two long silver FP40 locomotives on the far side of the yard. He’d picked out an Amtrak passenger train that stood out among the freight cars filling the yard. It’s unusual to see Amtrak trains idling among the trash and squalor of a freight yard.

We walked over to check it out. As I was about to cross a few lines of tracks where fifty old boxcars were quietly rusting away, Cubby shouted, “Stop!” At six years of age, Cubby already knew to stop and look carefully before crossing the tracks. After watching the parked train cars for the slightest sign of movement, we quickly jumped over the tracks. We stepped over some crack vials left by last night’s visitors.

“Look Cubby, do drugs, lose your mind, and get run over by a train,” I said.

“How come there aren’t any pieces of people on the tracks?” he asked.

“Maybe they got dragged farther into the yard.”

Cubby lost interest in drug addicts as we approached the FP40 locomotives, which rumbled at idle and hissed occasionally as excess air popped the safety valves.

Why were we there? Because Aspergians are driven to learn all they can about subjects that interest them, and one of my favorite subjects has always been transportation machinery. When I was learning to read, my favorite topics in the encyclopedia were trains, ships, and airplanes. And my favorite books for a time were
High Iron: A Book of Trains
and
Automotive Technology.

As we walked around the engines, Cubby spotted a little pile of beach sand in front of the wheels on the front locomotive. He asked what it was. “It’s sand from the train engine’s sandbox,” I said. Cubby was skeptical. He was used to being tricked. He had a sandbox at home, one that he and I had built. But trains should not need sandboxes. His ears twitched.

We moved closer.

“Look Cubby, that’s the sand pipe, and that’s the box where the sand is stored on the engine. The train engineer pushes a button to dump sand on the wheels when his wheels are slipping. Trains shovel sand in front of their wheels to get traction.”

I felt comforted knowing this exposure to the practical application of technology at an early age would benefit Cubby for the rest of his life. Especially with respect to understanding traction issues. As I pointed out, “Cars use sanders, too.” Cubby would nod sagely at tidbits of knowledge like that. Later, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I would catch him explaining traction to the other little animals at his school.

I felt very proud of him at times like that. A little engineer.

As Cubby grew bigger, so did the engines. Conrail was making a change from the older General Motors locomotives with DC traction motors to the newest GE units with AC traction. On later visits, I would explain the advantages of AC traction motors to Cubby, and I even showed him the inside of one of the new cabs with its sophisticated control panels. The big new engines were impressive to watch, especially pulling heavy loads. After watching the trains in the yard, we decided to go out and see them on the road. And I knew just the place.

One spring day, we drove to Middlefield, where the railroad crosses a pass in the Berkshires on the way to Albany, New York. We turned off the highway and followed a country road up into the mountains until we passed over the railroad. Shortly after, we turned in to a wooded road that ran about a mile to the tracks.

Up there, the air was fresh and clear. The sky was a brilliant blue, a shade you never saw in the city. Water was running in a little waterfall down the rock face where the railroad line had been blasted through the mountainside. The tracks hugged the side of the mountain, with a drop of at least a hundred feet into the Westfield River on the other side. There were two tracks side by side, with a service road next to them. We walked up the service road and waited for a train.

“Look, Dad!” Cubby threw rocks and watched them hit the water far below. He looked around for wildlife. “Think we’ll see any bears?” Cubby sounded hopeful. “You can get a gun and I’ll shoot it. Mom will skin it and we’ll eat it. Let’s find a bear, Dad.” Cubby was bouncing up and down at the thought of catching a bear for dinner.

But we didn’t see any bears.

Pretty soon we heard the rumble of an approaching train. Over the next few minutes, the noise got louder until the ground began to shake. Cubby and I moved closer to the edge, away from the tracks. The tracks began to sing and we saw the headlights come around the bend. Even from a few hundred feet, we could feel the engines as they struggled to pull the train up the hill. By the time they reached us, they were moving at a brisk walk, which was all the speed 15,000 horsepower could muster going up that hill. They struggled past us as we stood on the gravel road and watched.

“Sanders, Dad!” Cubby shouted as the second of five engines went past. Sure enough, the sand pipes were pouring sand in front of the wheels to help the train get a grip. Cubby was proud of himself for picking up that detail. Cubby waved and the engineer tooted his horn.

Five engines passed us, then 133 cars. Cubby counted them all. And all of a sudden it was quiet again. After a moment, we turned and walked back down the hill.

“How can anyone get run over by a train out here?” Cubby asked. “We could hear him coming for a long time. You’d have to be deaf to miss that.”

And then, without any warning, a train appeared behind us. Rolling fast, down the hill. Going the other way, on the other set of tracks. Silently. It came up on us so quickly that the startled engineer didn’t even have time to blow the horn till he was fifty feet beyond us. As the engines passed, we jumped a little farther out of the way, and I pointed to the air shimmering in waves over the engines.

“Those are his dynamic brakes,” I explained. “They use the electric motors on the wheels as generators, and the generators are feeding huge heating grids on top of the engines. So they are using the motors as brakes, converting the energy of the train into heat. The locomotives don’t make any noise, because their engines are idling.”

Cubby bobbed his head a bit as he soaked up that idea. The train continued to roll past in near silence, picking up speed as it went.

Cubby didn’t ask how people got run over by trains again.

As we walked back to our Land Rover, we picked up two old railroad spikes to add to our considerable collection of railroad memorabilia. I’d been picking up pieces beside train tracks since finding those telegraph insulators with Little Bear, fifteen years before, and now Cubby was continuing the tradition.

Don’t all the dads take their kids to see trains?
I wondered. I guess not, judging from the crazy looks I’ve gotten from other parents. Mothers would say things like “How can you take a child into a train yard? He could get killed!” Well, nothing killed us. Nothing even came close. Cubby and I were well aware of the enormous weight of these trains. I showed Cubby how objects can trail from the sides of moving trains, and we made sure to stay ten feet back whenever a train went by so we didn’t get hit by any loose steel strapping.

All those visits to train yards with Cubby probably had at least something to do with my favorite book as a child,
The Little Engine That Could.
The book had a yellow cover, with a bright blue locomotive driving across the page, and when I was two, I couldn’t hear it often enough.

“Choo choo!” was what I said when I wanted to hear the story.

My mother read it to me, over and over. I would huff and puff and imagine myself as a little steam engine. The harder I puffed, the more convinced I became. (A few years later, I became lost in the fantasy that I was a pair of windshield wipers. But at the time, I was in my steam engine phase.)

In the book, it was only a steep hill the train had to climb. But in my two-year-old brain, it was a giant mountain—bigger than anything I had ever seen. The engines chanted to themselves as they slowly climbed the hill.

“I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can!”

And I would chant along with them. I would bounce, too, with the effort of pulling that train. Today, I know that head bobbing and rocking back and forth and bouncing up and down—things I still do today—are characteristic of people with autism or Asperger’s. But that’s where it started, with me believing I was a steam engine, pulling those cars up the mountain. Bobbing up and down. And bouncing.

Eventually, we got to the top, that train and me. As we coasted down the other side, I grinned happily and bounced and said,
“I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could!”

Somehow, I always remembered that refrain as I grew older. It was very reassuring. But while I kept telling myself I was going to make it, I would also hear competing voices, at times quite loud and forceful. They were hard to ignore.

You’re no good.

You failed at school, and you’ll fail at this.

You’re just a fuckup.

It will never work.

You can’t do that.

You belong in prison!

I’m sure many kids hear voices like that as they struggle to grow up and make it on their own. And some kids give in and quit. I know that because I see those children every day. You can see them, too, sleeping in cardboard boxes in any city. I tried sleeping in boxes and Dumpsters, back when I was seventeen. I didn’t like it. And I resolved never to do it again.

All the bad things that have happened to me in my life have simply increased my resolve to overcome the obstacles that are thrown in my path. And I’ve done that with reasonable success so far.

But those voices were still there. And as I got older, they began to emanate from other people, too. The message was the same.

“You’re so anxious and worried! You should try antidepressants!”

“John, you need to relax. Sit down and have a drink!”

“You know, smoking pot calms you down. You should try it. You might not be so hyper all the time.”

I don’t know why, but I never gave in to the voices. Many times, quitting would have been easier than going on, but I never did. And I never turned to antidepressants or liquor or pot or anything else. I just worked harder. I always figured I’d be better off solving a problem as opposed to taking medication to forget I had a problem.

I am sure antidepressants, drugs, and liquor have their place. But so far, that place is in others, not me.

When I heard the voices as a child, I would say to myself,
I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!
As an adult, my vocabulary and my world have expanded. Now
I think I can
is reinforced by
I did it before.
But the negative voices are smoother and more sophisticated, too. Now, when I hear those voices, I tell myself:

All the other guitars worked; this one will, too.

The other jobs came out fine; this one will, too.

I am sure I can walk up this mountain.

I think I can drive across that river.

And so far, with some notable exceptions, I have.

Epilogue

W
hen KISS was on tour, we’d always come out and do one last song, an encore. This is the encore for
Look Me in the Eye
—the story of how I made peace with my parents during the writing of this book.

My father had been in precarious health for years, with psoriasis, arthritis, diabetes, and a weak heart. But in the late summer of 2004, a spider tipped the balance. A brown recluse spider. Brown recluses live in woodpiles, sheds, and attics—sometimes even in shoes—and seldom bite unless cornered. We think my father was chopping wood when he was bitten. In any case, a few days after he was bitten, his finger swelled up and began to hurt terribly and my stepmother, Judy, drove him to the emergency room.