Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (23 page)

Then he’d swing to the right and fire again, and we’d blow another bag of flash powder. The flash powder bombs were filled with confetti that would rain down on the crowd for ten seconds or so. As the confetti from the first two bombs was falling, he’d point his guitar up and fire the finale—straight up at the burning smoker. We’d blow up the biggest charge of all, and I’d use the radio control to shut the smoker off. When everything went dark, the crowd assumed he’d blown it up.

It worked really well, too, until we played Olympic Stadium in Munich. At that show, the charge from the rocket guitar actually hit the smoker, and it fell seventy feet and shattered in the crowd barrier in front of the stage. There was a riot as mobs swarmed over the barrier to grab chunks of guitar. There was nothing left of it.

I jetted home so we could make a new smoker, and then I flew it back to Germany. I got two first-class tickets—one for the guitar, and one for me.

18

A Real Job

B
y the end of the 1970s, despite my success with KISS, I was barely making a living. I was working for the big bands as much as I could, but they only needed me to get ready for a tour. Then I went home, the money ran out, and I was flat broke.

In Texas, on tour, I dined at the Mansion on Turtle Creek and charged it to the band. I ate exquisite gourmet meals served by perfectly dressed waiters on fine china. In Atlanta, I dined at Trotters, beneath oil paintings of racehorses and jockeys. Limousines and private planes ferried me from place to place.

Back in Amherst, I had a Cadillac Eldorado convertible, but I couldn’t afford the gas to drive it. I dined on Kraft macaroni and cheese. When I couldn’t afford milk to mix it up properly, I made a slurry of water and macaroni and powdered cheese and ate it like that. I foraged for leftover slices at Bruno’s Pizza and robbed the condiment bowls for dessert. Instead of the Plaza Hotel, with its beautiful wallpaper and marble bathrooms, I stayed at 288 Federal Street, with newspaper plastered on the walls and a plastic sink in a four-foot-square bathroom with a stand-up shower.

It wasn’t too hard being broke. Any apartment was better than living in a lean-to under a tree, as I had for a time when I first left home. 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.

“Ampie, you should move to L.A.! You could work on films with me.”

“You should move to New York. You’d have more work than you could handle.”

Everyone was full of well-meaning advice about where I should go and what I should do. 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.

And I had someone else to think about. Little Bear was at UMass at Amherst, and we had just moved in together. She couldn’t quit school, and I couldn’t leave her.

It is scary, but what if I did move?
I asked myself that question at least once every day. But I didn’t have confidence that anyone would keep me around. Nothing else in my life had lasted. I had dropped out of school. My family had fallen apart. The thought of starting a new life two thousand miles away was overwhelming.

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. So long as he was living with Dr. Finch, I felt as though I needed to remain in the vicinity, on standby. I wouldn’t find out until years later exactly what he had gone through, but instinct told me I needed to stick around.

My father called every week.

“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.

“Get off the floor or I’m calling the cops. Get up! Now!”

“I’m sorry, John Elder, it’s just so hard.” He was drunk and wallowing, but he got off the floor. In just five years, he’d gone from beating me up to being a blubbering baby. I guess he had hit bottom. He was broke. His house was gone. His family was gone. He had a fifty-dollar car and he worked a second job as a security guard at Hampshire College to pay the bills.

Visiting my mother was worse. She had moved into an apartment in town and was still seeing women. She had a girlfriend who could have been my aunt. It just seemed unnatural. And some of the other females I saw over there were more like acolytes than girlfriends.

Sometimes it got even weirder than that. “This is my daughter, Anne. She’s your new sister,” she told me. Did she really believe some girl she took in was my sister? She was losing her marbles. Again. Soon enough she was back at Northampton State Hospital, and my new sister had thrown my mother’s stuff in the backyard and taken over the house.

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.

At least I had Little Bear. She knew what they were really like.

My friends had parents who sent them to college at places like Dartmouth and McGill. They had homes to return to, and they were in college. Not me. I rode my motorcycle back to Sunderland (a small town next to Amherst), to the three-room apartment I shared with Little Bear and her two roommates. I was on my own and I needed a job, now.

So I decided to do something about it. Jim Boughton and I started installing sound and light systems in local nightclubs. We started in the Amherst area and expanded south to Springfield. Then we went farther, to Boston and Hartford. The jobs didn’t pay much, or we didn’t know enough to charge much, but we had steady work.

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.

That was our new workplace. We spent our days installing colored neon lights along the ceiling and subwoofers in corners that hadn’t seen daylight in forty years. We put turntables and a mixer into a newly built DJ booth, looking down onto the dance floor.

It’s enough to make a living,
I told myself.
And it’s still music.
We started returning at night to admire our creations. Little Bear seldom came with us to those places. It was usually just Boughton and me. We’d drive to one club, stay thirty minutes, and head to another. The VIP. The Viking. Infinity. The Arabian Nights. Marc Anthony’s. The doormen all knew us, so we got in free. If we were lucky, the bartenders knew us, too, and we’d get free drinks. Not that I ever drank much anyway.

I’d watch the girls in dresses, girls in skirts, girls with hardly any clothes at all. They arrived alone and in groups. Sometimes they left the way they came. Sometimes they got lucky and left with a guy. At least, I assumed they were lucky.

I didn’t leave with any girls, 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 never set foot on the dance floor unless I was fixing or adjusting something. I couldn’t dance. I was clumsy, and I was sure I would look incredibly stupid. I had learned by then not to put myself in situations where people would laugh at me. Anyway, I was too shy to ask anyone to dance, and too self-conscious to accept if anyone asked me. I watched people doing lines of coke and popping pills at tables, in plain sight of the sound booth. Sometimes I’d see people shooting up on the steps in the alleys out back.

Heroin was scary. I’d read how you could become addicted with a few pricks of the needle, and I saw how the addicts lived. In Dumpsters, and passed out in doorways.
No way am I going to do that,
I thought. That was even worse than my father’s drinking.

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. And I stayed, convinced that it was better to be destitute in Amherst than in New York City.

The trouble was, the effects I wanted to design were getting more and more complex. I was starting to use microprocessors in my designs, and I couldn’t afford the equipment to make and test my circuits at home. I needed a lab, but I was reluctant to go back to the university because they’d want to enroll me in some kind of organized school program, and I’d had enough of that. I needed the resources of some still-nameless corporation.

I realized it was time to get a real job. Everyone else had jobs, except the lowlifes sitting in doorways downtown. I didn’t want to be one of them. I started reading the help wanted ads, looking under “Electrical Engineer.” I wondered if anyone would hire me. Most of the ads were faceless, boring ads for boring companies. One ad caught my eye, so much so that I still remember it:

M
ONEY PROBLEMS?

W
OMAN TROUBLE?

R
UNNING FROM THE LAW?

Y
OU CAN FIND A HOME IN THE
F
OREIGN
L
EGION.

I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. The Foreign Legion was actually advertising for mercenaries. It was a shame I wasn’t looking for what they had to offer: adventure, discipline, male companionship, and the chance to fight battles far from home.

I focused on local ads. Process Control. Jet Engine Testing. Quality Assurance Engineering. Field Service Rep. Sales Engineer. CNC Programming. But I could not imagine myself doing any of those things. I didn’t even know what most of them were. Then, at the bottom of the last page in the Sunday paper, I saw it:

E
LECTRICAL
E
NGINEERS

B
E PART OF THE TEAM DESIGNING NEXT SEASON’S HOTTEST

ELECTRONIC GAMES

That was the job for me. I called immediately, and was told to drop off a résumé. Résumé? I had never made one. So I started reading up on how to write one. By the next day, I had made up a fine-looking résumé, and the majority of the stuff on it—everything but my age and education—was actually true. I guess I did a good job, because Catherine from Personnel called the next day to schedule an interview. She also told me a little more about what they were looking for.

They were designing sound effects. They wanted to make games that talked and listened. They wanted people with experience in audio and digital design. “I can do those things,” I said confidently.

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.

When interview day arrived, I put on my suit and drove down. Actually, I was lucky I even had a suit. I had bought it the previous summer when KISS was interviewed for a TV show while touring in the South. It was light gray rough silk, from Christian Dior in Charleston. It was bought on the expense account, so I could thank KISS for my natty appearance at my first job interview.