Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (12 page)

Now we had blue, red, and yellow lights all flashing. The road was blocked. Radios were cackling. If we had been in the city, there would have been a crowd gathered by now. They finally decided to put the fire out, but they acted as though it might be booby-trapped. The firemen seemed afraid to go near the paint cans. I guess the scene was unusual enough to be unsettling.

People continued shining flashlights into the grass around the tower, but there was no evidence to be found. I had made sure of that. I’d worn gloves, and all the materials had been scavenged or stolen. I hadn’t bought anything that was up in the tower, and nothing was traceable to me. They couldn’t get fingerprints off a tree. And they weren’t going to catch me.

There were no fire hydrants on Sand Hill Road, but the fire truck had a water tank on board. They unrolled a hose and walked in the direction of the tower. I wondered why they didn’t just drive there. Perhaps they’d blocked themselves in with all the cars up at the road. From fifty feet back, the firemen turned the water on my fire. The hose jumped, and a blast of water hit the burning pots and scattered them. All of a sudden there was a big cloud of steam and a flash; burning paint and tar went flying. Now the grass was on fire, too. All those firemen standing around suddenly had something to do. For a moment, the body was forgotten. More hoses came out, and shovels, and foam, and soon the whole area was wet and dark. Firemen walked around in the dark, stomping out embers. It was hard to see the body now that the light had gone. One of the cops shined a light on it.

“Turn the fucking light off! Don’t you have any respect!”

The power line had been turned off. I could tell, because the faint crackle from the wires had stopped. There was no sound but the crickets. The power company truck bumped down the road to the tower. The driver stopped at its base, and put out his wheel chocks, just like he was on a highway. The ambulance followed him down, and they backed up to face the tower. Another power company truck lit the ground at the base of the tower with its headlights. The cherry picker on the first electric company truck started rising. The medics gathered at the base of the tower with a stretcher. It was time to recover the body.

“Ready down there?”

“Ready.”

The lineman reached over and cut the rope. The body fell. The medics moved gingerly to pick it up. Suddenly, there was a shout, and the reverent mood changed.

“Fuck!!!”

A few seconds later, I heard the disgusted yell, “It’s a fucking mannequin!”

“A department store dummy!”

“It’s a fucking joke!”

Smiling, I slipped out of my tree and into the woods. I headed for home quickly, in case anyone came to check on me. I hid my lineman’s phone and dark clothes in the cemetery on the way home. I climbed the board I had left leaning against the side of the house and crawled in through my bedroom window. Before I dropped inside, I kicked the board away and it fell among the high grass, car parts, and junk on the ground in front of the house. I slipped into bed and pretended to be asleep. Soon I was.

I had always known that someday I would find a use for that mannequin I saw in the Dumpster behind Mr. Walsh’s clothing store. It had been hard getting him home and hiding him, but it had proved worth it.

The next day, I returned to the power line to get the mannequin. He was gone. I figured the police had taken him. There was no sign of the previous night’s excitement except a burned spot in the grass near the tower and some empty charred paint cans on the ground. The tar had soaked into the dirt in the middle of the stones, and my sticks were scattered about. I wished I could tell someone about my adventure. I had few friends, and I couldn’t tell my brother, because he was only six and had no sense. He would probably rat me out to some other little animal’s mother. I didn’t say anything about the incident to anyone for a long time.

A few days later my mother took me to the airport for my annual trip to visit my grandparents in Georgia. It was just as well that I’d be in Georgia in case the cops came around, asking about the mannequin.

9

I Drop Out of High School

A
s my sixteenth birthday approached, I found myself spending less time in school and more time hanging around bars with local bands. I was failing every subject. Working with John and Fred in the AV department was the only activity that interested me. That and walking Little Bear home. My graduation date seemed to recede two days into the future with every day that passed.

My parents seemed oblivious to my struggles. After all, they were starring in their own epic, and I was just a supporting player. At this point in their marriage, my parents largely left Varmint and me alone. That allowed them to focus all their energies on attacking each other. Their fights would increase in intensity until something blew. On several occasions, that meant a quick departure for my mother, my brother, and me.

“Your father has snapped,” my mother declared on one of those occasions. “He’s homicidal. He’s planning to kill us all. We have to hide until the doctor can have him committed.”

I had heard my mother say that before, and indeed I would hear it several more times in the year to come, but I still wasn’t sure who was telling the truth. She might have been right, I figured, given my previous experience with my father. In retrospect, though, I suspect it was merely my mother’s paranoia, fueled by her mental illness and Dr. Finch’s increasingly bizarre behavior. He renamed his office the Institute of Maturation, and on sunny days, he paraded around town with an umbrella, towing a passel of balloons. He said he was drawing attention to his causes.

At times, when my mother posed a difficult question, he would use a technique called “Bible dipping” to arrive at an answer. He’d say, “Margaret, open the Bible and put your finger on a passage.” She would do that, and he would read the passage and we’d discuss what to do. I don’t mean to disparage the Bible, but, frankly, it does not strike me as the place to look for answers to questions like “Should we leave home and go stay in Gloucester for a while?”
I want a professional to tell me what to do,
I thought.
I can go home and read the Bible some other time.

It was hard to object to even his most dubious techniques, though, because he and his family were always really nice to me, and he made me feel better.

After a few days’ “vacation,” we returned home. While we were gone, the police had arrested my father and locked him in the Northampton State Hospital for observation. When they let him out a week or so later, he was subdued and seemed to have less potential for violence. I watched him carefully because of his prior history, but I had always judged the probability of his murdering us to be low. When he got drunk, he was mostly just belligerent, and I doubted he would actually hunt us down and kill us while sober. Also, thanks to his talks with the doctor, he no longer attacked me, no matter how much he might have wanted to.

Dr. Finch was in some ways the least predictable variable in the whole equation. Sometimes it seemed like he calmed things down and other times it seemed like he fired my parents up.

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 and faster and 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, with my parents’ friends and the doctor’s daughter Hope popping in to take care of us when both parents were down for the count. My mother’s friend Pat Schneider sticks in my mind as helping more than most in that time, but many other people whose names I have forgotten pitched in. I don’t know what would have happened if they had not been around. I guess we’d have ended up in foster homes or something even worse.

When the ambulance arrived to take my mother to the state hospital a few months after our “vacation,” I agreed with Dr. Finch that she needed to be there. 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.

That was a very hard time for Varmint and me, because we didn’t know whom to believe. It seemed like everyone told us a different story.

“Your mother has temporarily lost her mind,” our father would say when she wasn’t around. “It runs in her family.” This was said in a perfectly calm voice. And when she was gone, he didn’t get drunk.
Why can’t he be that way all the time?
I thought. Our mother, meanwhile, prepared us for the idea that our father was planning to hunt us down and kill us someday. At least until she herself was locked up.

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.” “He’s just acting out,” my mother would rage. Was he? I could never tell. The next day, it would be as if nothing had happened.

To my grandfather Jack, it seemed pretty black and white. “Your mother’s family is just no damn good! All those Richters are crazy! Look at them!” I did look at them, and they seemed okay to me. Jack’s comments really worried me, though. For a long time, I wished I could move down to Georgia and live with Jack, but I never did.

“Your parents are really good people, and they mean well. They’re just having a hard time.” Pat Schneider and Dr. Finch’s daughter Hope would try to reassure us, but they were not the ones whose parents were raving or locked in cages.

I tried to look out for the Varmint, but it was hard.

With all the chaos, there wasn’t much chance of my being an A student ever again, or even passing my courses. I had too many family problems and too many defects. I have already mentioned my problems looking people in the eye. There were other issues, too. Apparently, I was also guilty of bobbing and bouncing and weaving. And the stress was making it worse.

“Why are you bobbing your head like that?”

I heard that line a lot from teachers and other grown-ups when I was little. I still hear a variation of it today.

“Dad, stop being autistic!”

That’s what my teenage son says when I rock back and forth in a restaurant.

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.

Then someone says, “Stop bobbing!” and I come to a halt.

“What’s the matter with you! I told you about that head bobbing five minutes ago and now you’re doing it again! Are you trying to make me mad?”

Reactions like that would just reinforce the feeling that I did not belong in school.

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.

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Wipe that stupid expression off your face! Right now!”

“You’re scary! You’re staring at me like a specimen in a jar!”

When I was in tenth grade, I heard the increasingly unwelcome “specimen in a jar” crack one time too often from my English teacher, Mrs. Crowley. “What
are
you staring at?” she would say. It was not a polite question but a rude demand. So one day I answered her rudeness with sweetness and light.

“Oh, Mrs. Crowley,” I answered, in my nicest voice, “I was just imagining you chained up, in a deep hole, with a heavy steel grate on top. And rats. Lots of rats. Crawling all over you.” Then I made a smile, baring my teeth the way dogs do when they’re ready to bite.

That got me a trip to the principal, and then the guidance office, and then the school psychologist. But it was worth it. Mrs. Crowley never once made a crack to me again.

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.

My parents decided on a last-ditch effort to keep me in school. They enrolled me in a group for troubled kids. We would meet each week in an old farmhouse owned by the university and talk about our problems getting along. There were six of us, and a facilitator, who was a psychology major. They didn’t teach me to get along, but I did learn that there were plenty of other kids who couldn’t get along any better than me. That in itself was encouraging. I realized that I was not the bottom of the barrel. Or if I was, the bottom was roomy because there were a lot of us down there.