• There is a dark side to Asperger’s & it comes from our childhood dealings w/ people who do not treat us the way they would like to be treated. As I grew older, it seemed as though there were very few people who made me feel loved.
• As I got older, my practical jokes grew more sophisticated. When I was fourteen, my guidance counselor said, “John, some of your tricks are sick. They are evil. They indicate deep-seated emotional problems.”
• By now, the body was jet black from the soot & it was starting to drip from the heat of the burning tar, which was bubbling in the pail. I was glad I had used tar. The drips & the foul black smoke kept the people back.
• Now the grass was on fire, too.
• Looking back, I can see that my father was seriously depressed. At the same time, my mother was becoming genuinely crazy. She would tell me about the demons that were watching her, interrupting herself periodically to howl like a wild animal. My brother has described it very well: She would get a glint in her eye, and she would become manic. She would talk nonstop and smoke nonstop and go faster & faster & faster and then surprise you by doing something totally outlandish, like eating cigarette butts in the middle of a conversation. Is it hereditary? I wondered. Will it happen to me? The terrifying threat of mental collapse followed me long into adulthood.
• My brother and I lurched from one parent to another...
• I dimly remember going to visit her. We had to go through several locked doors, as in a prison, and my mother looked like an inmate. She seemed to be in a zombielike state from whatever medication they had put her on. I wondered if she would ever get out.
• One of the toughest things about living with my parents was the way they changed at the drop of a hat. Some days, my father would just lie in bed, mumbling nonsense like “The bats are flying all around…I have to go get the sink.”
• Both comments—snivels, I would call them, since no harm is being done—refer to my tendency to move in some kind of regular pattern without knowing it. I might be lying on the sofa, moving my foot back and forth. Or I might be reading a menu, gently rocking from side to side. Or I might just be bobbing my head up and down. Whatever I am doing, it feels perfectly normal to me. But I guess “normal” people don’t do it. I don’t know what causes me to start; in fact, I seldom notice when I do start. It just happens.
• Along with bobbing and weaving, I was also frequently criticized or ridiculed for inappropriate expressions. These attacks seemed to me to come out of the blue, and they usually made me want to run off and hide.
• I don’t recall any grown-up ever trying to figure out why I was staring. I might have been able to tell them if they had asked. Sometimes I was thinking of other things and just gazing their way absentmindedly. Other times I was watching them intently, trying to interpret their behavior.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• It was time to come out of the woods and join society.
• For a long time, I had been considering how to escape my parents’ house.
• 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.
• I wasn’t doing anything in particular. I certainly wasn’t going to Harvard. Somehow, I was in the improbable position of scoring in the ninety-ninth percentile on the intelligence tests and still flunking out of high school.
• “We don’t call ourselves garbage collectors. We are Sanitary Engineers.”
• Outside, however, the flames were roaring. The gasoline was burning fiercely, making a pyre higher than the roof of the house. Paint had started to bubble on the wall nearest the flames.
• Balls of magnesium, burning with a brilliant blue-white flame, were everywhere. The firefighters looked stunned. For some of them, the Vietnam veterans, it must have been like being back in combat. Right in Jim’s backyard.
• Now the yard, which had so far escaped destruction, was on fire, too. At least the scene was well lit. Two more fire trucks showed, and the chief arrived by car. A crowd had gathered. Jim’s parents had come back out, and now they stood off to the side, speaking softly to each other. His dad had finished his drink and his mom was enjoying the last of her cigar by firelight. Their calm was remarkable.
• Meanwhile, my father was struggling in his apartment in town, at one point eating sleeping pills in a drunken suicide attempt that left him drying out in the hospital. We were lucky his colleagues liked him and the university was tolerant. And I guess it’s hard to fire a professor with tenure.
• The fun started at six in the morning, Easter Sunday, 1976. I was asleep in a villa high on a mountainside, with a long winding road leading from our door to the town of Plymouth far below. According to Peter, the villa belonged to some rich Englishman who liked musicians. The sun was just coming up, the air was clear, and it was a comfortable seventy-one degrees. All around us, the island was quiet. Montserrat has no industry, no highways, and no loud noise. It’s warm and peaceful and very pretty.
• The truth was, I had no idea how to vacation. This was my first trip far from home with anyone besides my family. I had no money and there was hardly anything for me to do. One thing I learned from that trip was: Bring money!
• ...made me feel like an intruder. Who really belonged in the house? Us? Them? I found it unsettling. I was actually finding the whole trip unsettling, because I didn’t like changes in my environment. I liked sleeping in the same place and having the same people around.
• Billy Perry, Chris, and I went into town the first morning. The people all spoke in a rapid musical lilt that I found hard to understand at first but soon became used to. We learned one thing quickly—everyone knew where we were staying.
• He grinned like he was on a roller coaster.
• 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.
• When my creations came to life, I felt exhilarated. I loved to see and hear them run in a live performance. People would stare in amazement and roar with applause and cheers at the things I dreamed up. At times like that, it was fun being a misfit. When I looked around me, the creative people in the music scene all seemed to be misfits, so I blended right in. The only normal people were the managers, and I didn’t deal too much with them. I liked the people in the bands, and they actually seemed to like me.
• Sometimes I think I can relate better to a good machine than any kind of person. I’ve thought about why that is, and I’ve come up with a few ideas. One thought is that I control the machines. We don’t interact as equals. No matter how big the machine, I am in charge. Machines don’t talk back. They are predictable. They don’t trick me, and they’re never mean.
• I have a lot of trouble reading other people. I am not very good at looking at people and knowing whether they like me, or they’re mad, or they’re just waiting for me to say something. I don’t have problems like that with machines.
• It’s pitch-black, but you can see the NO SMOKING signs at the edges of the crowd. When the wind is right, you can smell the pot in the air. (Why is there wind in here, anyway?) The ceiling is so high, it seems like there might be clouds. And all around you, the crowd is moving. Churning. Laser pointers and cigarette lighters are flickering on and off like fireflies. The crowd is like a giant organism. It feels good to be standing above it, separate, with a little elbow room and a fence to keep people at bay.
• It’s like magic, how it’s all come together, though you don’t think of it as magic because you understand how every single piece works and you know there’s no magic involved. Just basic engineering principles. You’ve taken thousands of lifeless individual parts—lightbulbs, reflectors, circuit breakers, dimmer packs, power cables, clamps, and trusses—and turned them into a living thing. And you are its master.
• You’ve designed it and built it, and now you’ve become a part of it. It’s come alive. Electricity is its food, and you are its brain. You have become one with the machine. As long as you remain part of it, it’s alive. Without you, it will revert to its component parts. But if it burns up while you’re running it—maybe because you pushed too hard or made a mistake—that’s death.
• Becoming the brain of the lighting system takes intense focus and concentration. It’s easy to say, “Push the button and the lights come on,” but the reality is much more complex. The lights need to be brought up gently to keep them from burning out. To turn up all the lights, you must do a dance over the keyboard, bringing up first one, then another, because if you move too fast you could overload the system and blow a breaker, and you’d be left with nothing at all. Darkness. Your worst nightmare in the middle of a show. Darkness is when they riot, and you must never, never let that happen. You must develop a sixth sense for your system, to feel how it’s doing, to be really great.
• __And now you’re doing it. Cones of colored light are reaching down from the ceiling to the stage, washing over the scenery. The cones are moving and changing as you switch from light to light in a constant dance that follows the music. Fog machines behind the stage are generating clouds, and your lights are making patterns in the mist.

The faces of the crowd are visible, and they are all staring at the stage. There is action up there, and it’s loud. And you’re like the wizard of Oz. You’re right there in the open, and no one sees you.__

• One million watts of power, right there under your finger. There’s nothing like it in the world.
• I headed for the hotel, a sprawling two-story structure with peeling stucco, mold, and a faintly foul smell at the edge of a swamp. Everything in Florida was at the edge of a swamp. It was all swamp...
• It was the sort of place where you didn’t put your hands anywhere you couldn’t see. The kind of place where even the grown-ups peed in the pool.
• Ace arrived. He picked the guitar up and turned it in his hands. Carefully, as though it were alive and might bite. I could understand that. When you held it, you could feel the heat from the lamps sweep up and down your skin as the patterns changed. It actually felt alive. With your hand on the face, it brushed your palm as it ran.
• The first time I saw a poisonous snake I was probably eight years old. Even then, I knew just what to do. I went into the house. I went to the encyclopedia and turned to snake. I read all about them. Water moccasins were bad, and so were rattlers and copperheads, but I learned there were far more dangerous snakes elsewhere in the world. I decided then and there not to visit those places.
• After all, dead people were a fact of life in Florida hotel rooms.
• I remained with the tour from Lakeland on. It was a hard life, but it was exciting, and I felt good seeing how people reacted to my creations. It was a wild life, too, something I had never experienced and didn’t really know how to engage in.
• ...couldn’t embrace that concept. The idea of having to meet and befriend one person after another was just too scary to me.
• Did any of the girls try to pick me up? I’ll never know. My sensitivity to other people’s actions was limited enough that any attempt to pick me up went unnoticed. I often felt lonely when I saw couples together, but I could not see any way I could change my own situation, so I just plodded along.
• When people were drinking and doing coke around me, I often felt confused. I didn’t like feeling out of control, and I had seen people do outrageous things while they were drunk and have no memory of it the next day. The mere thought that I might do things like that was enough to make me cringe. So I didn’t know what to do.
• The few times I was drunk or on drugs, I would close my eyes and the world would spin, and I would say to myself, When is this shit going to end? Why did I do this? It didn’t take me very long to outgrow it, if outgrow is the right word. I stopped doing drugs and liquor, and I didn’t resume.
• The hard part was living the contrast between being rich and being broke. It was like being smart, and waking up one day to find yourself dumb as a rock, but able to remember your former brains. What I needed was stability. I needed two hundred dollars a week for ten weeks, not three thousand dollars one day and nothing for three months.
• I was constantly reminded of the bright future I’d have if I moved to the big city. But I had grown up in the country. My favorite places were the Georgia countryside and the woods in Shutesbury. I didn’t like cities. They were full of people—people who made me feel anxious, people I didn’t know how to relate to. I understood animals, and I understood the country. I felt safe in the woods. I never felt safe in a city or a crowd.
• I was also afraid to leave my parents. As much as I disliked them, I didn’t want to go away and find they had just crawled into holes and died. And there was my brother, too.
• “Son, I’m sorry I’ve been a burden to you. You won’t have to worry about me anymore.” His words were slurred, but it didn’t matter; he always said the same thing. He’d call me, drunk, from the floor of his apartment, then drop the phone on the floor. I’d have to drive over there and see what he was doing. Was he dead or just passed out? Wine, cigarettes, and trash were everywhere. It was like taking care of a child.
• I was too ashamed ever to tell a stranger—or even a friend—what my parents were really like. “My parents teach at the university,” I said. “My father is in philosophy,” I would tell people. I made them sound clean, tweedy, and nice, not shackled to a wall, frothing like rabid dogs, behind four layers of locked doors, which was closer to the truth.
• Going into a discotheque at noon to install sound equipment is very different from entering the same place at midnight. It’s completely quiet, and there is no natural light, because the windows and doors are painted flat black to keep people from looking in. Fluorescent work lights that are never on in the evening make the interior a uniform shade of gray. The place reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled liquor everywhere except the bathrooms. There, the stench of piss and vomit is stronger. A thin film of congealed smoke, sweat, and grease covers everything in the room. Wipe any surface with a white towel and it comes up the color of fresh iced tea.
• although I often wished I were as brave as some of the people I saw. I wished I could walk up to strangers and engage them in conversation. I don’t know what I would have said or done. It would have felt good, though, having that confidence and making friends. I watched the people talking at the bar. I watched people dancing on the floor. I saw them in freeze-frame in the light of my strobes. They glowed red in the light of my lasers, and they glittered with the lights from the mirror ball. The DJs always used the mirror ball for the slow dances.
• I knew everything there was to know about lighting the dance floor and lighting the people, but the people themselves remained a mystery to me. I could not figure them out.
• I watched it all with the same detachment I had learned to feel when I was excluded from playing with kid packs when I was five. No one made fun of me, but I still could not integrate myself into the groups around me. I wanted to make friends, but I didn’t want to engage in the activities I saw them doing. So I just watched. And I worked.
• My Aspergian ability to focus and learn fast saved me. Between Sunday, when I read the ad, and the interview eight days later, I became a passable expert in digital design. My head was spinning, but I had absorbed the contents of three engineering texts from the Graduate Research Center library.
• I had never worked in an organization before, so I watched carefully to see how it worked and where I fit in. At the top of our organization, we had the senior VP, a blond German fellow who wore suits and did not speak to underlings like us. He had a large office at the other end of the building and a pair of secretaries guarding it.
• The air was clean. There was no haze of sweat and cigarette smoke anywhere. The heat worked. No one carried a gun, at least not as far as I could see. There were no drunks passed out in our doorways, and our washroom sinks were never used as toilets. We didn’t have any coke dealers or hookers in the parking lot, and it was always safe to walk to your car when work was done. I realized that my coworkers had no idea how lucky they were. They took it all for granted. During that first week at work, I resolved that I would never again return to life in the gutter.
• Within a year, I was responsible for projects on my own. I seemed to have made it into the normal world at last. If I was careful, I thought, no one would find out about my past.
• __In the summer, it was brutal up there, because all the heat from the factory floor rose to the top floor and the sun roasted us from above, cooking the black tar roof. Black spots—bits of hot tar from the roof—began peeking through the nice hung ceiling that August. __
• Paul, the manager with the perpetual smile, came to visit one morning. “Guys, I need you to clean up your work area. We’ve got senior management coming to visit.” Paul was very polite. He never swore or raised his voice. But we knew what he really meant: “Look, you assholes, this place is a disgrace. Get this shit off the walls and off the floors so we don’t get our asses fired when the VPs come to check us out. Now.”
• While the crew was cleaning up, I looked around for something to do. I wanted to be a good corporate droid. What could I do to help out?
• Vito continued. “My boss is very upset over what you’ve done. He’d like to be paid for what you’ve taken. He wanted to take matters into his own hands, turn it over to the Guinea beaters, but I said I’d come see you and see if we can work it out. Peacefully.” Vito was Italian, and he could say stuff like that.
• Until then, I thought people who had been born to these upscale white-collar jobs must be inherently superior to a high school dropout like me. But I was wrong.
• I knew she wanted a relevant response—something connected to what she had just said, more than just “Oh.” I also knew from experience and observation that a statement like “I went to Newport to see the Jazz Festival last weekend” would not be an appropriate answer. It occurred to me that what I needed to do was to keep gathering information until I could frame an intelligent conversation. The successful conversational computer programs did that. So I asked a question.
• Listening to that exchange, it was obvious that this was the correct response. When I heard them talk, I suddenly understood that Laurie’s statement had been meant to entertain or impress me, and that my response should have been an expression of admiration or excitement. However, that never occurred to me at the time. It’s clear to me that regular people have conversational capabilities far beyond mine, and their responses often have nothing at all to do with logic. I suspect normal people are hardwired to develop the ability to read social cues in a way that I am not.
• Small talk—or any kind of talk that goes beyond a simple exchange of information—has always been a challenge for me. When I was young, I learned that people would not like it when I uttered the first thought that entered my mind when they approached. Since making that discovery, I have slowly taught myself how to succeed at conversation—most of the time. I have learned to begin conversations with a question, like “How are you?” I have learned a range of questions that are socially acceptable. But my inventory of questions is limited, and it seems other people are a lot more flexible.
• Thinking about conversations like the one I had with Laurie makes me mad. People approach me, uninvited, and make unsolicited statements. When they don’t get the response they expect, they become indignant. If I offer no response at all, they become indignant at that. So there is no way for me to win. Given that line of reasoning, why talk to people at all? Well, many autistic people don’t, possibly for that very reason. But, for some reason, I want the Lauries of the world to like me. To not think I am weird. I can be eccentric, but I don’t want to be weird. So I persist. I try to say the things a “normal” person would say.
• Normal people seem to learn certain stock questions and utter them to fill a conversational void. For example, when meeting someone they have not seen in a while, they say things like: “How’s your wife?” “How’s your son?” “You’re looking good—did you lose weight?” Normal people will emit statements like this in the absence of any provocation, or any visual indication that there may have been a change in the wife or son or the weight. Some people I’ve observed appear to have many dozens of these stock questions at their command, and I have never been able to figure out how they choose a particular phrase for emission at any given moment.
• When someone walks up to you, his appearance does not normally suggest a change in the status of his wife or son, and most people’s appearance does not change enough from week to week, or even month to month, to provide a logical basis for the question about weight. Yet people say those things and the recipients of the words smile and answer with similar platitudes, such as: “The wife is fine.”
• And then, surprisingly, they often say, “Thanks for asking.”
• How normal people know which of these questions to ask is a mystery to me. Do they have better memory than me, or is it just luck? It must be social conditioning, something that I am completely lacking.
• I am tongue-tied when approaching people unless they speak to me first. If I do speak up, I often say something that’s taken as rude or surprising—especially when I’ve told people something true that they don’t want to hear.
• My conversational difficulties highlight a problem Aspergians face every day. A person with an obvious disability—for example, someone in a wheelchair—is treated compassionately because his handicap is obvious. No one turns to a guy in a wheelchair and says, “Quick! Let’s run across the street!” And when he can’t run across the street, no one says, “What’s his problem?” They offer to help him across the street.With me, though, there is no external sign that I am conversationally handicapped. So folks hear some conversational misstep and say, “What an arrogant jerk!” I look forward to the day when my handicap will afford me the same respect accorded to a guy in a wheelchair. And if the respect comes with a preferred parking space, I won’t turn it down. Woof!
• As young executives, we had watched the big bosses conducting the truly important business of the company on the golf course. We knew that unimportant meetings took place in conference rooms. More important meetings took place in the boardroom. But the really important meetings—the ones that took all day and sometimes several days—took place at the country club. Bob and I had not yet been admitted to that inner sanctum, but we had it in our sights. We knew that we were following the example of our leaders, solving the tough problems for our factory out on the water.
• Perhaps the spray of water from a passing boat gave us the answer. I’ll never know where or how it arrived. But that was what they paid us for. Design ideas that contained less than five parts, cost less than ten cents, and saved the world by lunchtime.
• As summer turned to fall, the air became drier. Lower humidity meant more static electricity. The same phenomenon that makes you crackle and spark when you pull on a sweater was killing the Microvision units.
• In the end, it was such a simple thing. Paper clips are simple, too. Some of the finest engineering creations are in fact the simplest. At times, we are truly masters of the obvious.
• ...I tramped off to climb the corporate ladder, leaving Bob in his world of toys. The trouble was, the higher I advanced in the corporate world, the more I had to rely on my people skills and the less my technical skills and creativity mattered. For someone like me, that was a formula for disaster.
• By 1988, I had moved through two more jobs, and I had swallowed all I could take of the corporate world. I had come to accept what my annual performance reviews said. I was not a team player. I had trouble communicating with people. I was inconsiderate. I was rude. I was smart and creative, yes, but I was a misfit.
• I was thoroughly sick of all the criticism. I was sick of life. Literally. I had come down with asthma, and attacks were sending me to the emergency room every few months. I hated to get up and face another day at work. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop forcing myself to fit into something I could never be a part of. A big company. A group. A team.
• I believe there is a continuum from autism to Asperger’s to normal. At one extreme, you have children who are turned completely inward from birth. They go through life thinking their own thoughts, and parents and other outsiders can barely connect with them at all. At the other end of the spectrum, you have kids who are turned completely outward. They have scarcely any ability to be introspective or to perform difficult mental calculations. People like that might not make good engineers, but they often go far in life because interpersonal skill is one of the most important predictors of success.
• And in the middle you have people like me—some more functional, some less. We can focus our minds inward, and we also have some ability to relate to people and the outside world.
• Some Aspergians can focus their minds extremely sharply, and those of us who cultivate this gift are sometimes called savants. Being a savant is a mixed blessing, because that laserlike focus often comes at a cost: very limited abilities in nonsavant areas. I don’t think I’m a savant, just a highly intelligent Aspergian. But I suspect I was on the edge of becoming a savant when I was a small child, and my later ability to visualize mathematical functions and the operation of circuits was savantlike.
• I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.
• Scientists have studied “brain plasticity,” the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It appears that different types of plasticity are dominant at different ages. Looking back on my childhood, I think the ages of four to seven were critical for my social development. That was when I cried and hurt because I could not make friends. At those times, I could have withdrawn further from people so that I would not get hurt, but I didn’t. Fortunately, I had enough satisfactory exchanges with intelligent grown-ups—my family and their friends at college—to keep me wanting to interact. I can easily imagine a child who did not have any satisfying exchanges withdrawing from people entirely. And a kid who withdrew at age five might be very hard to coax out later.
• I also believe considerable rewiring took place in my own brain in my thirties and even later. I believe this because I can compare my thought process today to my processes as expressed in writing and circuit designs from twenty-five years ago. Papers I wrote back then are flat and devoid of inflection or emotion. I didn’t write about my feelings because I didn’t understand them. Today, my greater insight into my emotional life has allowed me to express it, both verbally and on paper. But there was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.
• I suspect that grown-ups drew me out enough as a child to keep me engaged and on a path that led to being functional in society. Adults were able to deal with my conversational limitations better than children. They could follow my disconnected responses, and they were more likely to show interest in anything I said, no matter how bizarre. Had I not been drawn out by interested grown-ups, I might well have drifted farther into the world of autism. I might have ceased to communicate.
• Even at 16 years of age, it would have been easy for me to retreat from dealing with humans and move into the world within my own mind. Looking back, I can see a path that might have led somewhere far away, perhaps to autism, perhaps to the place where the savants who can multiply ten-digit numbers in their minds live. After all, I got along well with my circuits, and they never ridiculed me. They presented me with tough problems to solve but they were never mean. Around the time I dropped out of school, it was almost as though I stood in front of Door Number One and Door Number Two, as perplexed as any game-show contestant and with much more at stake, and was forced to make a choice.
• My crazy family situation and my need to run away from home and join the working world in order to survive kept me from making that choice. So I chose Door Number One, and in doing so moved farther away from the world of machines and circuits—a comfortable world of muted colors, soft light, and mechanical perfection—and closer to the anxiety-filled, bright, and disorderly world of people. As I consider that choice thirty years later, I think the kids who choose Door Number Two may not end up able to function in society.
• As a functional Aspergian adult, one thing troubles me deeply about those kids who end up behind the second door. Many descriptions of autism and Asperger’s describe people like me as “not wanting contact with others” or “preferring to play alone.” I can’t speak for other kids, but I’d like to be very clear about my own feelings: I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said “John prefers to play by himself” were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. The sting of those early failures followed me long into adulthood, even after I learned about Asperger’s.
• I had found a niche where many of my Aspergian traits actually benefited me. My compulsion to know everything about cars made me a great service person. My precise speech gave me the ability to explain complex problems in simple terms. My directness meant that I told people what they needed to hear about their cars, which was good most of the time. And my inability to read body language or appearance meant—in an industry rife with discrimination—that I treated everyone the same.
• The cars I worked on tended to belong to affluent and better-educated people. Such people were better able to connect with an eccentric Aspergian like me, and they had an incentive to do so.
• When I worked as an administrator for a big company, I was in the position of bending my staff to the whims of my employer. Yet I often felt my employer’s desires and wishes were ill-conceived or just plain wrong, which made it very hard for me to feel good about imposing those wishes on others. As an owner, I imposed only my own wishes on my staff. And I only did what I believed in. I felt a lot better about that.
• Before opening my business, I had only interacted with a few people at one time: other engineers, people from marketing, family, and a small circle of friends. They were almost all people who knew me, or knew of me. All of a sudden, my new line of work put me in front of the general public. Anyone with a car and a problem might call, and I had to talk to them. I had never been exposed to such a variety of humanity. This was beneficial to me in a number of ways. First, my ability to interact with people improved tremendously over the first few years I was in business. People who watched me during that time noticed a change. My friends remarked on how “polite and nice” I had become.
• I also learned a lot about how to succeed in life from the people who patronized my business. My clients taught me about real estate management, banking, investing, and general business principles. That education has been priceless, and I could never have gotten it from any school.
• For the next fifteen years, I built myself a world of machines, a world in which I was securely positioned in the center. We worked on better and better cars, and we solved tougher and tougher problems. We became the repair shop of last resort—the place people went when no one else could figure it out. My Aspergian understanding of machines made our company unique in the auto service world. People began shipping Rolls-Royce, Land Rover, and Mercedes cars hundreds and even thousands of miles to our service department. I had finally made myself a place where I could feel safe and secure.
• “I would be honored” was all I could think to say. And I realized that for the first time I had become legitimate, a part of the local community and not just an outcast.
• I was also afraid he’d be born with two heads or three arms.
• I made sure he was tagged with a nylon serial number plate on a ring around his leg before I allowed him to be released into the general population of hatchlings. They had a big room where all the babies lay behind glass and grew under heat lamps, just like the baby chick display at the State Fair. Some were in incubators but most were just on trays. I was glad he was tagged, because despite what they say about moms knowing their kids, you could not tell the one-day-old babies apart except in the most general way, like whether you had a boy or girl. And I suppose if yours had an extra arm or missed a leg he’d be recognizable, but most of the babies in there looked whole and virtually identical.
• Standard baby drivel, I figured, especially the part about how much he looked like me. How could a six-pound baby with misshapen features and a head the size of an apple look “just like me”?
• So, as a result of my initial marking and caution, I have a very high level of confidence that the baby that emerged from his mother seventeen years ago is the same kid living in my house today.
• As we were leaving, I realized the hospital hadn’t given us very much for the $4,400 hatchery fee. No accessories. No clothes. No toys. Just the kid.
• __We continued to carry him around wherever we went, thinking he would be better socialized the more he was around people. I had not yet learned about Asperger’s when Cubby was born, but I knew I had a hard time with people, and I wanted Cubby to get along better than I had. I thought long and hard about how to accomplish that, and one of my ideas was to show him as many interesting people as I could. He was easy to carry around when he was small, and he looked closely at everyone and everything. I’d zip my windbreaker halfway, and drop him in the opening. With his little arms sticking out and the zipper holding tight, he was securely wedged in place. But just to be sure, I always tied the string at the base of my windbreaker, so he couldn’t fall out the bottom. __
• In the beginning, he wasn’t very interesting because he didn’t do anything, but then he began to yell. I took him out of the hamper and let him sleep on my chest. I had read that hearing a parent’s heartbeat calmed a baby. If he continued to yell, I held him tightly against me.
• Then he started talking. He would come up to me and say, “Baby Toss, Baby Toss,” until he got my attention. He stuck his arms up, too, to make sure I understood. I would pick him up and toss him in the air and catch him time and time and time again. He never tired of Baby Toss. He had the most remarkable confidence in my ability to catch him. If I were him, I’d never have done Baby Toss. I’d have been afraid the tosser would miss and I’d go splat on the floor.
• I also told him stories of where he came from. It seems like all kids wonder that. I told him about the Kid Store, and how he was on a tray, stuck in the window, when we picked him out. He felt proud when I told him he had been the most expensive kid in the store, the top model. Later on, when he went to school, he heard alternate explanations for where he came from. But he was happy and content until then.
• But when he became fully self-propelled I started taking him on expeditions, and I felt good at that. Sunday was our special day. Every Sunday he would wake up and say, “Adventure day, Dad!” I took him to all the places little boys love. Train yards. Junkyards. Shipyards. Airports. Museums. Restaurants and bars. Many weekends we went to the Conrail yard in West Springfield to watch the trains. Once, when Cubby was five, he got to drive a switching engine as it moved cars from Westside to East Springfield. Another time we rode a freight train over the Berkshires to the big marshaling yards in Selkirk, New York.
• Cubby was always fascinated by penguins. We would go see the penguins at the aquariums in Boston and Mystic. Sometimes, when it was quiet, he would talk to them.
• I cherished these times together. We roamed all over New England in those years. Cubby was a good traveler.
• One day we headed to the Port of Boston. We liked all kinds of machinery, especially big ships. I told Cubby that we were going to the shipyard to watch container ships, and that maybe we would see some tugs or a tanker, too.
• Cubby looked puzzled. Clearly, he never considered that Santa had to do something for the rest of the year. Like most kids, he forgot about Santa from December 26 until the following November.
• O__ne day he said, “Therapists learn not to analyze their friends if they want to have friends. But there is a condition in this book that fits you to a T. I’d like you to read this and see what you think.” And he handed me a book: Asperger’s Syndrome, by Tony Attwood.__ Seeing my wariness, he quickly continued, “I’m sorry to spring this on you like this. I’ve thought about it a lot. This book describes you exactly. You could be the poster boy for this condition. Your fascination with trains and bulldozers…it’s in here. The way you talk. The way you look at people, and how hard it is for you to make eye contact. The way you think.”
• “So is there a cure?” I asked. “It’s not a disease,” he explained. “It doesn’t need curing. It’s just how you are.”
• A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following: Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction.
• Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.
• A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).
• Lack of social or emotional reciprocity.
• The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.
• I had spent most of my life listening to people tell me how I was arrogant, aloof, or unfriendly. Now I read that people with Asperger’s display inappropriate facial expressions. Well, I certainly knew about that. When I was a child, I was told my aunt had died, and I grinned even though I was sad. And I got smacked.
• Just reading those pages was a tremendous relief. All my life, I had felt like I didn’t fit in. I had always felt like a fraud or, even worse, a sociopath waiting to be found out. But the book told a very different story. I was not a heartless killer waiting to harvest my first victim. I was normal, for what I am.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Try it yourself—what do you think of when you hear “Montagoonian”? Is your Montagoonian a short, stocky guy with a sloped forehead? Does he hunch over when he walks, his shoulders bunched together, with a club like a baseball bat in his right hand? Is his back covered with hair? Does he look like he could lift your pickup truck with his left hand? Or is your Montagoonian tall, thin, and distinguished looking? Neat as a pin, with wire frame glasses, a rumpled sport coat, and a dress shirt? Maybe a book and a pipe in his hand? If you’re like me, your idea of a Montagoonian is the first example, not the second. I guess I wouldn’t like to be thought of that way, either, but then again, I didn’t choose to live in Montague. And there’s no two ways about it. Living in Montague makes one a Montagoonian.
• So despite my increased adaptation to polite society I still occasionally have trouble with the names I give people and things. And I’m sure many other people with Asperger’s would say their experience is similar. What is a person with Asperger’s? We are Aspergians.
• Martha, my next mate, had to choose me, at least to a sufficient extent that I knew she would not ridicule my own expression of choice. Even before we had heard about Asperger’s, I noticed that she watched me very carefully. She found that I would calm down if she stroked my arm or rubbed my neck. She also scratched my head and rubbed my ears. Those things soothed me and made me less fidgety.
• I’m actually more than reasonably happy. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. But I wonder sometimes…could I be happier still?
• I attribute much of today’s sky-high divorce rate to people’s failure to choose wisely among families, and within families, among brothers or sisters.
• It must be my logical consideration of a decision many see as purely intuitive or emotional that throws other people for a loop.
• I’ve pondered the reasons the second marriage has been more successful than the first, and for the sake of other Aspergians with relationship troubles, I will share the things she does that have kept us together: First, she watches me very carefully. She has learned to tell if I am sad, or anxious, or worried. Some people say I never smile and I don’t have many facial expressions, but somehow she can get me to smile, and she can read what little expressions I may have. And she usually knows what to say or do to make me feel better. Or make me feel worse, which happens occasionally, when she’s turned. She always shows interest in me, and she seems to believe in me without reservation. When I tell her I’m going to do something, she always thinks I will succeed. I am sure that her confidence in me increases the odds for my success. When I succeed at something, I come home and tell her.
• Second, she watches what people say and do around me, and explains things I miss. Even today, I miss conversational nuances that are a typical component of conversation between “normal” people. Humor and sarcasm often go right over my head. There are times when a person says something they expect me to laugh at and I just stand there. There are times when people say things that are meant to be nasty, and I completely miss their meaning. She points those things out, gently, and I try to learn from what I missed. I miss less and less with every passing year. Fourth, she pets me. My childhood experience petting Chuckie didn’t work out too well, and that one bad memory pretty much cured me of petting other people later on. Luckily, Martha did not have an experience like that earlier in life. So, even though things did not work out for me being a pettor (one who pets), I thrive as a pettee (one who gets petted). One day, for some reason, she decided to try petting my arm, and I immediately stopped rocking and fidgeting. The result was so dramatic, she never stopped. It didn’t take long for me to realize the calming effect, too. I like being petted and scratched. “Can you pet me?” I say when I sit next to her. I also say, while tilting my head, “Scratch my fur.” I have observed dogs tilting their heads like this, and it often works for them. She will scratch my head or rub my ears. Sometimes she rubs my forehead or my shoulders. And she scratches my back. “Scratch lightly, with claw tips,” I say. Light scratching with somewhat sharp nails is best. For a while, I worried that the fur scratching would cause all my hair to fall out, and that the ear rubbing would give me floppy ears, like a beagle. But that didn’t happen. I just got calmer. I believe it calms her, too. Psychologists have done studies of people petting animals. They’ve proven it has a calming effect on the people, lowering their heart rate and blood pressure. I wonder why they haven’t done studies of people petting people. Normal people haven’t caught on to the benefits. While I went through life as a pettee, I watched the dogs and cats around me, and I realized something: The pets that get petted the most have the thickest fur. Petting does not make your fur fall out. I am now sure of that. And you will never see a well-petted cat with floppy ears, either. The dogs with floppy ears all started out that way.
• And the final thing is, we sleep in piles. When I was little, I used to like hiding in small spaces. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I can still become unsettled lying down by myself on a bed. If I lie down by myself, I will pile pillows on top of me, but the best situation by far is to have my mate lie down, too, and pile herself up against me. Every night, when we go to bed, she puts an arm or a leg on me, or lies up against me until I fall asleep. If she doesn’t, I complain. “Come on,” I say. “Put a paw on your mate!” “Can you pet me?” “Can you scratch my fur?” I am always calmer and more relaxed in a pile, being petted. Nowadays, for the first time, I fall asleep quickly and I seldom have bad dreams. If I wake up, she puts a paw on me and I go back to sleep. I put a paw on her, too. Sometimes I wake in the night, and find we have rolled apart. We’ll be sleeping on our sides, facing in opposite directions. I’ll slide over until our backs are touching, and I’ll slide my bent legs back toward her. She’ll awaken enough to reach her own foot over, and our feet will touch. I fall back asleep, content and warm.__I feel safe sleeping in a pile. I’m not sure why that would be, since I am the bigger and stronger one, but it’s true. Ever since I was a child, I knew that lying under a pile of pillows was a lot better than just lying on top of the bed. Sleeping in a pile is a lot better than that, though. It’s the best of all. I like married life a lot.__
• So why would I return? Because I’d finally have the chance to turn a failure into a success. Moving to Amherst with my new knowledge of Asperger’s would give me a chance to start my life over again. A new me, in a new house, in a new town.
• More important, people I had hardly seen in thirty years welcomed me with open arms. Why are they doing this? I wondered. Then I understood. They welcomed me because I didn’t do anything to drive them away. I had learned how to be friendly. It was remarkably simple, but it had taken so, so long to figure out.
• W__hat a long way we had all come.__
• Who would have guessed? After all those years, the success of my brother’s book Running with Scissors made me feel good about my condition and proud of who I was. And it brought us back together, in the town where we’d started, so long ago.
• Appearing as a character in my brother’s books taught me something about myself. For most of my life, my history as an abused child with what I saw as a personality defect was shameful and embarrassing. Being a failure and a high school dropout was humiliating, no matter how well I subsequently did. I lied about my age, my education, and my upbringing for years because the truth was just too horrible to reveal. His book, and people’s remarkable acceptance of us as we are, changed all that. I was finally free.
• There were probably a hundred people in the room when I walked in. Thirty years earlier, that crowd would have terrified me, and I would not have known what to say. I would have hidden in the corner like a trapped animal, waiting to escape. But now, with my knowledge of Asperger’s and my new confidence, nothing bad happened. I wasn’t scared and I didn’t hide. And something remarkable occurred: People liked me. People came up to me, shook my hand, and made me feel welcome. Just a little bit of knowledge of what to say and how to act made all the difference in the world.
• Not only did I make friends everywhere I went, but nothing bad seemed to happen. No one called me a Monkey Face. No one threatened me. No one threw me out. The last time I had been here, no one wanted me on their team. Now, it seemed everyone did. __Even my lifelong feeling that I was a fraud began to vanish. __
• And it felt good to be back, among friends, in a place that felt like home.
• I didn’t have to know everything. Other people could tell me the answers. I didn’t have to notice everything. My friends would look out for me. Suddenly, I had a revelation: This is what life is like for normal people.
• My past was finally behind me. Whatever happened with our basketball team, I knew that I had won.
• My Life as a Train" (chapter title)
• One day when he was about six, Cubby and I drove to the Conrail freight yard in West Springfield. The tires crunched with a pop-popping sound as we rolled over the gray stone that covered the yard and filled the space between the train tracks. My father had taken me to see the trains when I was little, and thirty years later here I was, doing the same thing with my own son.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• But it was hard. We went to see him in late January and he looked as if he had a basketball in his stomach. Judy said he was retaining fluids because of trouble with his liver. Martha felt sick, because her mother had died of cancer the year before and that’s how her stomach had looked. It was not right, not right at all.
• Somehow, I knew this was going to be different from all the other trips to the hospital. I realized he was dying. I rounded up Martha and Cubby and headed for the hospital. On the way there, I was angry because I could not remember a single good time we had shared when I was young.
• As he told his stories, things I had forgotten for almost fifty years suddenly came into focus, clear as day. I remembered the spring I learned to ride a two-wheel bike on the paved walkways outside the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. I never used training wheels. I went straight from a toy fire engine and a trike to a big kid’s two-wheeler, and I didn’t crash or fall off. I was really proud of myself.
• The sound of the diesel engine, the smell, and the activity were a good distraction for us.
• I gave him a hug, and I said I loved him. Very faintly, he said, “I love you, too.” And that was the last time I saw him. He died quietly at 2:30 in the afternoon the next day, while I was at work. It was a sunny late winter day. I got up and went home. It was over. The tire went flat on the tractor the next day.
• In place of my father, I have my memories. For so many years, I could not recall anything about him except the bad and the ugly. Now stories and memories that were lost to me for thirty years have taken on life. I hope they stay.
• Other memories began to stir, too. Today, at fifty, I can feel my bare feet sting on the sharp white pebbles in the dirt driveway of my grandparents’ house, and I can hear the crickets. I can smell that Georgia clay and my great-grandfather’s pipe. I can hear the twang as I reach up to open the screen door on the front of the house, and I can feel the cold floor as I step onto the black-and-white checkered tiles. It is these memories—a last gift from my father—that have made this book possible.
• At first, my mother had a hard time accepting that my memories could be different from her own and still be valid. She’d say, “You weren’t in the back of that VW that trip!” And I’d say, “I was, too. I remember the sky!” We both learned something from that. My mother was troubled by some of what I’d written about her. After we talked, I understood that I had made one or two errors in my portrayal of her, and I corrected them. In other cases, she and I have different memories, or we interpreted things differently, and she came to accept my version. I believe the process of writing this memoir gave me a better understanding of who she is and how mental illness affected her, and I know she gained a better understanding of me.
• There is no doubt that the storytelling skills people see in my brother and me were inherited from our mother. Whatever flaws our parents had, they were exceptionally...