Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (20 page)

“Well, if it’s a nice day, I’m going anyway.”

I tried to reassure him since he had made up his mind.

“When you get to the ferry terminal, if waves are breaking over the dock, don’t go. Okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed, but he hoped the weather would be nice. “You can drive me there in the morning and we’ll check it out.”

“I don’t know how to get there. And I have to work. Take a taxi. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for clothes and money for the taxi and the ferry. But you’ll have to get yourself there.”

“Thanks, John Elder.” He figured he’d won.

We walked down the hall to our room. Our security staff had set up a roadblock to keep unwanted fans from our corner of the hotel. They knew Varmint.

We met Ace and one of the crew coming the other way.

“Heeeey! It’s Baby Ampie!”

“And Big Ampie!”

Varmint did not really like being called Baby Ampie. He said, “I’m going to Detroit on the ferry. To get new clothes.”

“Well far fucking out, Baby Ampie. Have a beer!”

Varmint backed away. We continued to our room, and I showed Varmint where he could sleep, on the floor by the window. There were two beds in the room, but I was using one for myself and the other as a workbench.

“I’m not sleeping on the floor. Clear that stuff off the bed!”

“Varmint, you should be grateful for what you’ve got. I used four thousand gallons of jet fuel to get you here. And now you want a bed, too?”

My little brother had no concept of the cost or trouble to bring him there. I didn’t, either, but he didn’t know that. I looked at the bed and considered the situation. If I put him on the floor, he’d whine all night. If I locked him in the hall, he’d make a scene. I decided to let him sleep on the workbench bed.

“Okay, help me move this stuff carefully onto the dresser. But first we have to remove the TV so we have some space. Get me the Phillips screwdriver from the tool kit.”

Working together, we made a place for Varmint to sleep. Through it all, he did not show the least bit of interest in any of the electronic devices I was working on. I was disappointed.

It was clear that Varmint was not going to be able to sleep until he knew what was happening tomorrow with his shopping trip and the ferry ride. So he worked up his courage and headed for the front desk.

He got up on tiptoe to lean on the counter. Assuming a worldly expression, he said, “So where do I catch the ferry to Detroit?”

The clerk, a twenty-year-old farm girl with pimples, responded with a blank look.

“The ferry to Detroit,” he said again, slowly, in case she was too dense to hear the first time.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh…I don’t know,” she mumbled, with a dazed look. The help at the motels we visited was not always of the highest caliber.

Varmint returned quickly and confronted me. “Is this a trick, John Elder?” But I was quick.

“Look around. Decide for yourself. Have you seen a single retail establishment since we got here?”

I had him there.

“I dunno.” He was mumbling, too. He was confused. But he desperately wanted those clothes he’d seen in the magazines.

“The high point of the year in this community is the Festival of Saint Cleve,” I told him. “Our concert is at the start of festival week. You didn’t see them come out of church and go on a shopping spree in Mexico, did you?”

He realized I had a point.

I dismissed the whole thing. “Ask around. Find someone else.”

Varmint headed down the hall and I snuck after him to eavesdrop. He asked the first people he met. They were a sweet-looking middle-aged couple.

“Excuse me. Do you know where I can catch the ferry to Detroit, please?” He was on his best behavior now.

“Sorry, we’re from San Francisco.” They smiled at the nice boy with the blond curls. Nice people like them buy children like him and raise them as pets. But he didn’t want to be a pet today. He wanted clothes.

He realized he needed a local. Maybe someone else who worked there. Someone a little more on the ball than the clerk at the desk. So he found a janitor shuffling down the back corridor. Surely he lived around there. He’d know.

“Excuse me, where do I get the ferry to Detroit?” He was still polite.

The janitor just stared at him across his barrel of mops and brooms and rags.

“Whaaaaaaat?”

“I need to go shopping. How do I get to the ferry?”

“The ferry to Detroit? Waddaya, fuckin’ nuts? Ya wanna go shoppin’, ya go ta da fucking mall! Fuckin’ half mile up the road!” He turned around and shuffled off. “Fuckin’ idiot kid!” he muttered to himself as he rolled his barrel down the corridor. He coughed and spat on the carpet.

Varmint stood there with a sick smile, realizing he’d been had. He didn’t say a thing.

I retreated to my room, feeling very proud of myself. Anyone can trick a four-year-old, but it takes a master to trick one ten years older. I realized Varmint was getting bigger, and smarter. I might never be able to trick him like that again.

Soon he would be too big to call Varmint. I would need to think of a new name for him. Chris, the name he came with, would never do.

I took him to the mall the next day. He went home after the Cleveland show with a bag of fresh clothes, mostly satisfied. The next time I heard from him, he wanted me to buy him a new bike.

16

One with the Machine

M
any people with Asperger’s have an affinity for machines. 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.

I feel an affinity with many different kinds of machines. I’ll try to explain.

Imagine yourself at a sold-out concert. You’re out on the floor—at what would be the fifty yard line if it were a football field—standing on a raised platform that holds the consoles that control the sound and lighting systems. You’re looking over a sea of heads toward the stage. 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.

Even with nothing going on, it’s noisy. And you know the crowd can turn in the blink of an eye. You keep an ear open for gunshots. You worry about knives. You look down to see if the security guys are still in place in front of your platform. You are reassured to see them there, two weight lifters with black T-shirts that say “
SECURITY
” in big letters.

It’s a Friday night in June, eighty-five degrees outside. Before the show, the road manager said there were ninety-two thousand people on the floor, and the line to get in looks half a mile long. Inside, it’s supposed to be air-conditioned, but the air is hot. You’re sweating, and you can smell the crowd. You’d like to take a walk, but wading five hundred feet through that crowd to get to the door is not an appealing prospect. You shudder to think what would happen if there was a fire.

The longer the lights stay off, the edgier the crowd gets. The only lights you can see are the exit signs and the work lights where you’re standing. You’re vulnerable. If they riot, you know they’ll go for you first.

You think about that while you wait.

You, the lighting director, the sound guy, the road manager, and the fire chief are standing up there. The crowd is getting restless, and after a few minutes they begin to chant. It’s almost time. The red LED flashes in front of you. The lighting director leans forward, keys the mike on the headset he’s wearing, and says, “It’s showtime, kiddies.” You reach forward and fire the lights. The first time you hit the button, you feel it in your stomach…
What if nothing happens? What if they don’t work?

But then the light washes back from the stage and rolls over you. They do work. Your lights.

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.

You feel a chill as the lights change in response to your commands. You’ve brought a million watts of lighting to life by leaning forward and moving two fingers. Just a gentle push and you’ve moved enough power to light a whole neighborhood. For now, all of your mental energy is focused on that lighting system. Once the show has started, there is no time for daydreaming. You know the color and focus and aiming point of every one of the three hundred lights that hang from your truss. Now you concentrate and pick out each one, one at a time, and you make small adjustments as you scan them.

Now that you’re working, your concentration is so intense that you don’t even hear the show. You don’t see the crowd. Instead, you’re seeing each of those hundreds of lights as individuals, and it’s all you can do to keep them following the music. It’s just like playing a huge musical instrument, and your hands never stop moving on the dimmers.

If you had been backstage, near the electrical panels, you’d have heard the hum as the power surge hit the panel when the lights came up. Fifty feet above the floor, three hundred lights came on and a wave of heat rolled off them like someone just opened the door to a furnace.

When the show started, everything happened at once. The lights came up, the cannons fired, and the band started playing. From up high in the back of the hall, the follow spots—ten-foot-long spotlights with powerful xenon lamps—came on and picked out the musicians with long fingers of white light. Next to you, the sound engineer watches his meters as they turn from green to red. The fire chief holds up his sound pressure meter and frowns and waves it in front of the road manager. It’s too loud to talk. It shows 124 decibels, about the level of jets taking off at the Detroit airport. It’s too loud to be legal, but no one hears the chief. The crowd roars and the music gets even louder.

And it’s never enough. You can always have brighter lights, bigger amplifiers. These are machines that run at 100 percent, every show. One million watts of power, right there under your finger. There’s nothing like it in the world.

17

Rock and Roll All Night

T
he Return of KISS tour hit the road in the summer of 1979. The first concert was scheduled for June 15 in Lakeland, Florida. I would be there.

I had been working since spring, building a new collection of special-effects guitars for Ace. Tex and I had worked with luthier Steve Carr to make my electronic creations playable. Carr had done the fretwork and final finishing, and Tex had test played the guitars. I had designed and built the electronics. The band had just released
Dynasty,
and their songs were once again climbing the charts.