Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (19 page)

After a lifetime of being unpopular, I found that the tables had suddenly turned for me. Relatives I hadn’t seen since I was five showed up at the stage door, professing their fondness for me and requesting “two backstage passes, if you can spare them.” I usually could.

Relatives weren’t the only people I met. The sexual prowess of some of the guys on the tour was legendary, and I often bumped into their “friends.” One night in Maryland, for example, we had reserved the whole top floor of the best hotel in the area, where we registered under assumed names. Despite our efforts, there were always groupies hanging around. I trudged past them after the show, headed for the elevators. As I stepped inside, two girls got in with me. They were quite pretty, and very provocatively dressed. The one I still remember had red hair and a red silk blouse, unbuttoned practically to her navel. With high heels. She wasn’t dressed like a hooker. (By that time, I’d seen enough hookers to know the difference.) She was just, well,
aggressive.

I pushed the button for the top floor, then turned to them and asked, “Which floor?”

“Top floor,” said the girl with the bright red shirt.

“Do you have an invitation?” I asked. “Our security guys won’t let you off otherwise.”

“We’re going to give Gene Simmons head. He’s expecting us,” she said with a dismissive tone.

“Okay,” I said slowly. What else could I say? When we got to the top, I headed for my room and they headed for his. They were indeed expected.

I saw that kind of thing night after night, but the girl in the red shirt kind of stuck out. I guess it was her confidence—something I had never felt with anyone but Little Bear. That night, I closed the door of my room and went to work on my latest guitar modifications. Alone.

I was on my way to being a special-effects wizard for KISS. But that was in their world. When I went home, I stepped back into my own world, a much more ordinary place. The crowds, the noise, the stage—they were gone as if they had never existed. In fact, that’s exactly what some people in the tiny town of Amherst thought—that I must have made them up.

Before we had gone on tour, we had set up the whole show and rehearsed on Long Island. On several occasions, I had brought Varmint with me. He loved it. One of his seventh-grade assignments that term was to write about what he did on vacation. So, of course, he wrote, “My brother works for KISS. He took me to rehearsal in Nassau, where I met Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. I saw them without their makeup and they told me dirty jokes.”

In those days, seeing the members of KISS at all, let alone without their heavy and wild makeup, was a very big deal. So they actually sent him to the school psychologist over this “crazy fantasy” that he insisted was true!

I accompanied him to school the following day and set them straight. “What the hell is the matter with you people, hassling my little brother?” I asked the psychologist. At twenty-one, I had not learned about tact, but I knew how to be clear and assertive. And the memory of my own bad experience in the Amherst schools was still fresh in my mind.

I don’t know if it was my honest face, my size, or my vulgarity that did the trick. Or possibly the photos, which I carried in the gold briefcase Ace had given me, the inside of which was decorated with KISS backstage passes. Whatever it was, the school did not challenge Varmint’s KISS tales ever again.

“What a bunch of assholes,” I muttered to him on the way out.

“Yeah,” he said. He followed my lead and quit school a few months later.

It always struck me as funny, the way people acted. It was so incredible to them, the idea that I worked with KISS. I just thought of it as a fun job. Someone had to do it. Why not me?

“I can’t believe you know Ace Frehley! He’s my absolute hero! What is he like?” Anna, the girl who worked behind the counter at Superior Pizzeria, gushed when I went in for my pepper and onion pies. I never knew how to respond to questions like that.
They’re just musicians,
I thought.
What’s the big deal?

I tried to answer, once. “He’s just a regular guy,” I said. “Dark hair, a little shorter than me.”

“Stop!” she said. “He’s not a regular guy! And I know what he looks like!” And with that, she launched into five minutes of telling
me
what her hero was like. I slipped outside to polish my motorcycle. I had to escape, but I couldn’t leave until I got my food. She followed me outside.

“What about Gene?”

“Gene who?” I asked distractedly, as I polished my chrome exhaust pipe.

“Gene Simmons!” she said. “Is it true, what they say? Can he really lick his own eyeballs?”

Jesus Christ,
I thought.
This just doesn’t end
…

“Well,” I replied. “He does have a long tongue. And I know the girls really like him.” I did not know what else to say. Luckily, at that moment, her boss carried my pizza out the door and gave me the excuse I needed to escape Anna and NuttyRockStarWorld.

I don’t know if it’s an Aspergian trait, or if it’s just me, but I was never affected by celebrity. No matter how famous a musician was, he was just a guy with a broken guitar or an idea for a sound effect to me. But I could never explain that simple reality to other people.

“You’re just modest,” people said when they felt nice.

“What an arrogant asshole you are,” they said when they felt nasty.

The truth was, all I really saw were my engineering creations. To me, the guitar player was like the driver of a race car, and I was the guy that built and tuned the engine. So we were on the same team, but I wasn’t out there driving. I didn’t even see the racetrack. The engine was my world.

15

The Ferry to Detroit

I
called home every week when I was on the road with KISS that first season. There were no cell phones in those days, so calling home was harder than it is today. Motels had phones, but that was a real racket, with some sleazy innkeepers charging a dollar a minute for long distance. We carried our own telephones on the tour, in a big trunk with the other production office gear. As soon as we arrived at a new concert hall, we’d plug in to the switchboard and start dialing.

I always called Varmint. He seemed to miss me and I know he liked to hear from me. He was fourteen years old that summer.

Sometimes he had weird news of life in Northampton, where our mother had deposited him during her most recent bout of psychosis. That summer, he was living with Dr. Finch and his followers in a falling-down house near the center of town. The house had the atmosphere of a cult, and for that reason I seldom went there.

Sometimes his tone was urgent, as when I called from some civic center in the Midwest and he said, “John Elder, can I come see you? Maybe tomorrow?”

I realized something was up.
He must want me to buy him something,
I thought. With our father on the skids and an unemployed and nutty mom, I was shaping up as Varmint’s cash drawer. In fact, it seemed like the Varmint’s need for
things
was increasing even faster than my income. When he was little, he had dressed himself in aluminum foil. Now that he was older, he wanted designer clothes, and he figured I was the one to buy them. I looked forward to the day Varmint got a job.

“Okay,” I said, “go to the AirKaman terminal at Bradley Field at six o’clock tomorrow. I’ll fly you out to our show in Cleveland.”

I picked him up in a Cadillac. I rented Cadillacs whenever I could, despite the business manager’s whining about the expense. Varmint and I both liked them. They were always brand-new and they had a distinctive smell. Also, our grandmother had driven them when we were little, so we felt right at home.

I always treated my rented Caddies with respect, except for the time I loaned one to our pyrotechnics guy and he gave it to two stewardesses from Chattanooga. At least, they said they were stewardesses. They vanished with the car and Avis wanted to charge the whole thing—twenty thousand dollars—to my American Express card. Eventually, they found the car parked at the Charlotte airport. We never saw the stewardesses again. The band’s business manager settled the bill.

I never loaned my Cadillacs to the crew after that.

The airport we flew into at Cleveland was way out of town. But as soon as we got there, my little brother started in on me.

“Where’s the mall?” he asked.
He hasn’t been here ten minutes and already he wants to shop!
I thought. Well, there were malls back home. He didn’t need to be flown a thousand miles by jet to visit a mall.

“I need new clothes.” He was trying to be reasonable.

Not wanting to let him loose on a buying spree, I turned off the highway into a residential neighborhood.

“There are no stores here.” I gestured into the empty darkness.

Varmint looked around. We were in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but houses, and even those were increasingly far apart. It was a very dark night, and there were not many street lights. We had not even passed a 7-Eleven or a gas station.

Varmint
knew
there must be malls to serve the houses.

I had a sudden inspiration. Maybe I could pull it off. Varmint was a lot harder to trick now that he was older. But maybe…

“Varmint, there are no stores here. None at all. If you just came out here to shop, you’re going to be disappointed. Cleveland is a religious community. That’s what the name means. They’re Clevites.”

“What are Clevites?” he asked, skeptical. But I saw a hint of possibility.

“They are very religious people. They founded this city. They worship Saint Cleve, the patron saint of harvests. They’re like the Shakers back home.”

What could he say to that? He’d seen them worship the saints in Mexico. Slave had taken him there a few years back when she was looking for inspiration for her paintings. I continued. I had him now.

“Frankly, I was shocked to hear they allowed KISS to play here. Usually, they have gospel performers in places like this. You know, Varmint, there are other religious communities like this scattered around the country. The Mennonites. The Amish. The Moonies. They would never host a KISS concert. Not in a million years. But times are changing. We could be playing for the Mormons soon. In Salt Lake City.”

But he couldn’t get shopping out of his mind.

“I
really
need new clothes. Look, I brought pictures.” He had Calvin Klein ads, and clippings from
People
and
US
magazines with nattily dressed stars and models. He had cut out his favorites and made a kind of collage. It would have been cute if he wasn’t using it to shake five hundred dollars out of me.

“I can’t look at that junk while I’m driving.”
I should have put him in the trunk,
I thought. He was bouncing on the seat. The magazines were still in his hand. He wasn’t letting go of this idea.

“Varmint, you don’t get it. There are no retail stores in Cleveland. None. They just have churches, gas stations, and grocery stores. That’s all.”

“What do we do?” He said that as if it were
my
problem.

“I know what
I’m
doing. We have a show tomorrow, at Richfield Coliseum. I’m working. You can come along. You can see the new explosives we just rigged up for ‘Rock and Roll All Night.’’’

“But I need new clothes.” He was whining now. I had a fresh inspiration. Varmint was lucky I could think on my feet. Most big brothers would have run out of ideas and smacked him silly. But I was just getting started.

“Look, if you really want to shop, you can take a taxi to the waterfront and catch the ferry to Detroit. It’s ninety miles away, across Lake Erie. But I gotta warn you, it’s a shameful scene, Varmint. I wouldn’t do it, myself.”

I could conjure an image of the ferry landing clearly in my mind. It was a scene straight from the Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah. Worship of Graven Images. Depraved, orgiastic sinners waiting to be smitten by a vengeful God. All that and more, right there at the Cleveland dockyards. My inspiration took wing.

“It’s a sick scene, Varmint. All these greedy people, burning with lust to buy. Drinking, joking, jostling each other around. Gathered around the dock waiting for the ferry like junkies waiting for a heroin fix. I’m not going over there. And besides, I have clothes. I don’t need new ones.”

“Your clothes are disgusting,” he said with a sneer. “They’re dirty and they’re not stylish at all.”

“Well, I’m not spending the day on a ferry to go shopping. What if it sinks?”

“Do they sink?”

“Shit, Varmint, you’ll be out of sight of land for hours while you’re crossing Lake Erie. You heard that song about the
Edmund Fitzgerald,
right? By Gordon Lightfoot? The
Edmund Fitzgerald
was a ship. Nine hundred feet long. It sank without a trace in a storm.”

“Yes…” He was not sure how to respond to that.

“That was here, Varmint. On the Great Lakes.”

The image of a nine-hundred-foot ship sinking, right there, did not seem to bother him at all. His need to buy was very, very strong.

“Twenty-nine people drowned. The whole crew.”