Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (8 page)

He had always been quick to spank me, but as his drinking increased, he turned meaner and nastier. He became dangerous. Shortly before we moved from Hadley, my father was sitting at the dining table drinking. I walked by him, and I guess I was too noisy, because he grabbed me, shook me violently, and then slammed me into the wall so hard that I fractured the plaster. I was stunned, but my mother ran in, yelling, “John! Leave John Elder alone!”

As I sank to the floor, unable to move, he ran outside, got in his car, and sped off.

“I hope he crashes and dies!” I cried.

I didn’t like living in Hadley after that. It was a good thing we moved a few months later. The caved-in spot in the wall was an ugly reminder whenever I passed it.

As an eleven-year-old, I was somewhat able to defend myself. But it’s a miracle that three-year-old Snort grew up to become a Varmint and then an adult. He could easily have ended his days with a little squeal, in a furnace or an unmarked hole in the ground. I’m sure quite a few unwanted three-year-olds end up that way. After all, when you live way out in the woods, who’s going to notice if a toddler’s there one day and gone the next? And my father didn’t like Snort too much, back in those days.

My father would sit each night at the kitchen table, across from the sink and the black-and-white TV. His hair was tousled, his eyes black and sunken. He slouched back in the chair, with his glass in front of him and a half-empty jug on the floor. His cigarette smoldered in the ashtray, and the pack sat next to it on the table. Sometimes his hand slipped, and cigarette butts scattered all over the table. Sometimes my mother would be there, too, and then their cigarette butts could be anywhere. In the dishes. In the glasses. Even in our food.

As the night wore on, my mother would wander off. Sometimes she returned to taunt him, which made him all the meaner. I learned to be very careful around him at those times.

Sometimes he would call me.

“John Elder, come here, son.”

He would reach out toward me.

If I moved toward him, he would try and grab me. That was bad. He’d say, “I love you, son,” and he’d scrape his bristly chin against me and make slobbering noises while holding me painfully tight.

I was usually able to escape after a few moments, when his grip slackened or he reached for another drink.

“Come back, son,” he would blubber. But I’d run to my room.

Sometimes we’d argue, and sometimes he’d whip me with his belt. If my mother was there, she might try to save me from a beating. Maybe he would turn on her instead. I don’t remember.

Other nights, I’d hide in my room, thinking I’d gotten away.

And then he’d appear in the door.

I buried my face in the pillows, but I could see his shadow, blocking the light from the hall. And I could smell him when he came in. Then I could hear him taking off his belt, and I would hope I had a good pile of blankets on me.

Whack!
The belt would come down.

He would hit me as hard as he could. He seemed incredibly strong then, but he was just a drunken, out-of-shape college professor. Otherwise, he might have killed me.

I might sob, or I might be quiet. It depended on how hard he hit me. I thought of the knife my grandfather had given me for Christmas. Solingen steel. Eight inches long. Sharp. I could roll over and jam it into him, right to the hilt. Right in the belly. But I was afraid.
What if I miss? What if it doesn’t kill him?
I had seen the movies, where they just kept on coming. They didn’t die like they were supposed to. He might kill me for real, then.

So I never did. But I thought about it. Many nights.

Eventually, he would put on his belt, cinch up his pants, and leave.

In the daylight, I would go out into the yard and smash my little brother’s Tonka trucks with rocks. Big rocks. The biggest I could find. It was all I could do.

One night, he called my brother instead of me.

“Commere, little Chris,” he said, slurring his words.

My brother was too small to mistrust him. Stupid kid. He went closer, and my father grabbed him. Set him on his knee.

It looked so harmless. Just a brainless, smiling toddler, sitting on daddy’s lap. He sat there a few minutes and nothing happened. I relaxed a little. Snort was smiling. Then daddy reached down and mashed his cigarette out. In the middle of Snort’s forehead. My little brother screamed. He struggled. As I write this, forty years later, I can’t remember whether he got away.

Like dogs that had been kicked, we were wary of him after that. But we would never admit it to anyone else. Getting abused or beaten up or bullied is humiliating, even more so when it happens at home. It took many years for me to gather the strength to tell the stories in this book.

Still, for some inexplicable reason, I did well in school—better than I had ever done, or would ever do again. When I graduated from sixth grade, our class had seven achievement prizes. I won six of them. I was used to hearing my father predict that I would end up pumping gas. That night, though, he said, “Son, I am really proud of what you’ve done.” But then we went home, where he returned to his bottle of sherry, alone in the kitchen. And by nine o’clock, his proud feelings were long gone.

None of my teachers knew or guessed that my parents fought every day in those years. Loud, ugly fights. And my father began to fall apart. First, he got psoriasis: nasty white scabs all over his body. I had thought the cigarettes were disgusting, but those scales were worse. They fell off constantly, clogging the drain in the tub. He left a trail of white flecks wherever he went. On the floor. On the rugs. On his clothes. The worst concentrations were in his bathroom and his bed. I kept well clear of those places.

My mother had to wash our clothes separately, because if any of mine got mixed up with his, they came out with little white bits of scale on them and I wouldn’t wear them. It would take three or four washings to get them clean enough to wear again.

The way he acted, though, he didn’t get much sympathy from me.

And then there was the arthritis. And his knees—fluid, and pain, and gold shots, and cortisone shots, and who knows what else. He was only thirty-five and yet he was falling apart. No one knew why then, or so they said. But now I know. He was miserable beyond belief. Both my parents had gone from bad childhoods to a bad marriage, and now I was living with the result.

Our father would have been enough for any family, but we had my mother, too. By this time, she had begun the slow slide into madness that would eventually send her to the Northampton State Hospital in restraints. She started seeing things overhead. Demons, people, ghosts…I never knew who or what she saw. They were in the light fixtures, in the corners, or on the ceiling. “Don’t you see them?” she would ask. I never did.

Some of the things she said were so disturbing, I blocked them from my mind and can’t repeat them today. My memories of that time are like blinding flashes of harsh, actinic light. They hurt to recall.

My parents drove each other crazy, and they almost drove me crazy. Luckily, the Asperger’s isolated me from the worst of the insanity until I was old enough to escape.

My mother would say, “John Elder, your father is a very smart, very dangerous man. He’s too smart for the doctors. He fools them into thinking he’s normal. I’m afraid your father is going to try and kill us. We need to hide. We need to get away from him until the doctor can get him under control.”

For a long time, I believed her. My brother was littler, and he believed her longer. Now I know. It was all madness, or meanness. On both of their parts.

By the time I turned thirteen and my brother was five, my mother had found the Dr. Finch that my brother wrote about in
Running with Scissors.
I remember going to see the doctor for the first time, with my whole family. I was dubious, because my mother had been sending me to therapists, playgroups, and counselors for a while, trying to find out what was wrong. Nothing had worked. But even back then, I could see one thing that was definitely wrong.

“We have the wrong parents, Varmint. I’ve watched my friends’ parents. They aren’t like ours.” Varmint didn’t really know. He was too little.

My parents often left me to watch the Varmint while they were out. But this time I was going, too. So I spoke to him before we left.

“Varmint, we’re all going out to talk about you with a shrink. I can’t stay with you because they want to ask me what to do. Come down here. We’ll chain you to the heating oil tank so you’ll be safe till we get back.”

“John Elder! Don’t you scare Chris like that. We have a babysitter for him.”

We left Varmint and set out for the doctor’s office, on the top floor of one of the old buildings that lined the main street of Northampton. We rode an antique elevator, the kind that looks like an open cage, to the third floor, exiting into a large waiting room filled with threadbare furniture, with a girl who turned out to be the doctor’s daughter at a schoolteacher’s desk against the wall.

The doctor’s office was behind an old wooden door with his name stenciled on a frosted glass pane, just like the door to the private detective’s office in the movies. Inside, the office was very hot and stuffy. The steam heat hissed all the time, and I smelled it in the air. The windows looked like they had never been opened. The office smelled of old carpets and tired people.

The doctor came out to meet us. Or maybe we went in to meet him.

“Good afternoon. I’m Doctor Finch!” he boomed at us.

He was old and chubby, with white hair and a vaguely foreign accent. Apparently, my mother and father had made a few visits already, and my father had told my grandfather about them.

“Watch out for that Doctor Finch,” my grandfather said on the phone, when I told him we were going to see him. “I had him investigated.”

Why he would investigate the doctor was a mystery to me.

“They ran him out of Kingsport, Tennessee, on a rail, I heard,” he said.

I had read about running people out of town on rails in my history books.

“Did they tar and feather him, too?” I asked. Lots of times, angry mobs did that as part of the running on a rail ceremony. At least according to what I had read.

“I don’t know. Just watch him.”

So I watched him. Closely.

One at a time, my mother, my father, and I went in to talk to the doctor, and then at the end we went in together. I can’t remember what we talked about in that first visit, but shortly after we started seeing him, Dr. Finch did two things that changed my life: He told me I could call my parents anything I wanted, and he told my father that he could not smack me around. And, unlike the suggestions of every shrink in the past, Dr. Finch’s suggestions took hold. My father never hit me again. For this, I will always be grateful to Dr. Finch, despite his bizarre behavior later.

“John has decided on new names for both of you,” he said, calling them in after meeting with me alone. “I have encouraged him in this, as a sign of his free expression. John…?” He paused and turned to me.

“I have decided to name you Slave,” I said, looking at my mother.

“And your name is Stupid,” I told my father.

“Yes, John Elder,” said my mother. Anything to humor me.

“I don’t really like that,” said my father.

“Well, you have to respect John’s choices,” the doctor said.

Dr. Finch may not have known about Asperger’s, but he was the first person to support and encourage my naming of things on my own.

“And whatever he says, you can’t hit him.” This was repeated for my father’s benefit. My mother never beat me up. And from that day on, my father didn’t, either.

I began accompanying Slave and Stupid to regular sessions with Dr. Finch. And my parents went to more sessions by themselves. Varmint was too small to attend therapy with us at first, and my mother was reluctant to adopt my suggestion that we chain him up in the basement. Mrs. Stosz, the grandmother of one of my classmates, volunteered to babysit the Varmint.

As we got to know the doctor’s family, they kind of adopted us. I began hanging out with his daughter Hope and another patient, Neil Bookman. There was no denying that Dr. Finch was eccentric. He lived in a big old Victorian house near the center of town that was always swarming with friends and patients. They all seemed to worship him. I was a little dubious of that, but he’d gotten results for me, so I left it alone.

My grandfather never stopped telling me, “Watch out for that Finch…,” and I heard rumors about him from people in town, but he was the first shrink with whom I’d had a positive experience, and he did right by me in those early years. It was a shame things went so wrong a few years later.

7

Assembly Required

U
ntil my thirteenth Christmas, I studied rocks and minerals, dinosaurs, the planets, ships, tanks, bulldozers, and airplanes. That Christmas, I got something new: an electronics kit!

My parents gave me a RadioShack computer kit with forty-two components, including three transistors, three dials, and a meter. In a black plastic case. Easy assembly. Batteries not included.