Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (30 page)

We began reading books together. He loved Dr. Seuss. I read those books so often I could turn the pages and say the words from memory. I became bored with repetition, and I began to make subtle alterations. The story turned into:

One fish

Two fish

Black fish

Blue fish

I eat you fish.

And

See them all

See them run

The man in back.

He has a gun.

I liked my improvisations. They broke up the monotony of reading the same thing, time and time again. But despite the smoothness with which I worked these modifications into the good Doctor’s stories, Cubby would notice. He would get mad.

“Read it right, Dad!” he would yell.

Eventually, I started making up stories. That worked better because he didn’t have a routine to expect, but it was harder because I had to make the stories up as fast as I could recite them. His favorites were about Gorko, Uuudu, and Wuudu. They were flying lizards, and they had lived in Flying Lizard Land, but now they were here. I wove his children’s books into the Gorko stories, and he liked that. He especially loved hearing how Thomas the Tank Engine—his favorite train—was picked up and carried off to Flying Lizard Land by the cargo lizards, big lizards with nets.

We spent many enjoyable hours riding around, looking out the windows of our cars at distant flying lizards drifting on the breezes.

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.

We built stuff together, too. Cubby loved Legos. But he always insisted on building the kits exactly as they told you in the instructions. Little Bear encouraged that. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to modify them.

Cubby especially disliked my attempts to fit two heads or three arms to the Lego action figures. “Build ’em right, Dad!” he squawked indignantly at my two-headed spacemen.

I worked a lot while Cubby was small, and I left many of the kid management decisions up to Little Bear. She stayed home with him, and she deserves all the credit for his basic training. It was probably better that way—I’m not all that well trained myself, so I’m not always the best of role models. 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. When he was seven, we went to the New England Aquarium but arrived late. The Aquarium was closed, but snappily dressed people were entering through a door under a sign for some kind of reception. Cubby and I slipped inside when the attendants weren’t looking.

All the people were seated at folding tables looking into the aquarium itself. The penguin area below was dark, lit only by night lights. That’s where we went. Cubby began talking softly to the penguins.

“Hoooooot. Hoooooooooot. Hoooo.”

And they began to hoot back. It was the most remarkable thing. He talked to those penguins for an hour that night. Then we slipped out the back door and went home.

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.

“Neat,” he said. He wiggled his ears a little, thinking about ships. He was only five, so he almost always wanted to do anything his Dad wanted to do. It was great. I knew he’d turn on me later, but at five he liked anything I liked.

We were driving along, and I said, “Did you know Santa works in a shipyard like this?”

“He does not!” Cubby said. Cubby was always troubled when I told him strange things about childhood heroes like Santa. But I could never accept the cookie-cutter feel of standard children’s stories. I had to liven them up.

“What do you think Santa does all the time it’s not Christmas?” I asked him.

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.

“He has a job, just like all the other grown-ups.”

“What does he do?” Cubby looked a little dubious, to the extent that a five-year-old can look that way.

“Santa runs a container crane at Europoort, in Rotterdam. He works all day unloading ships. We’re going to see container cranes just like the ones Santa works on. Santa has a lot of friends that work the ships and the trucks. Maybe some of them will be here today.”

After a moment, Cubby asked, “What’s a container crane?”

Now I had his interest. I told him, “The container cranes are machines that pick the containers off the ships and set them onto trucks so they can be delivered to stores and warehouses and factories. We’re going to go see one today, unloading a ship.”

A minute or two passed while Cubby pondered the idea of Santa working in a shipyard. He asked, “Will we see elves in the shipyard?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Look closely at the people on the ship. Most container ships have crews made up of elves and sailors from the Philippines. The look similar but if you look carefully you can tell them apart because the elves are smaller. The elves are hard to see because they stay out of sight when the ship is near shore, so they don’t get kidnapped by bad people.”

Cubby didn’t ask why bad people would want to kidnap shipboard elves, but I could see he was thinking hard.

By and by, we arrived at the port. We threaded our way through the gates and warehouse buildings to come out on a wharf directly opposite a big yellow container crane unloading a ship. The crane looked like a huge daddy longlegs, with four huge legs anchoring it to the dock. It had an arm with a hook that dropped down to grab containers on the ship. The arm moved back and forth and in and out on tracks, so the crane could lift a container and move it hundreds of feet to set it in stacks on shore. We looked at the ship, with the name
MSC Fugu Island
in rusty letters. I read the name to Cubby and he asked, “What’s Fugu Island?”

“It’s an elf island in the Pacific. It’s on the way to Flying Lizard Land.” At the mention of Flying Lizard Land, Cubby looked overhead to see if any of the great lizards were visible, circling high above the harbor. We saw them out west, usually at a great distance. There were no lizards visible that day. Just seagulls.

“That ship has to have elves aboard.”

We watched as the crane lifted containers off the ship and I read the names to Cubby. Hyundai. Hanjin. Cosco. APL.

I said, “Those are all names of shipping companies. They own the containers. People who want to ship things call a freight line and get a container, and they fill it with their stuff.” Cubby was beginning to understand. “Container transport,” I said.

“Hard word,” said Cubby.

“They are hard words,” I agreed. “Just like
helicopter.
”

“Yeah,” he said. “
Helicopter.
” Cubby liked that word.

“Most of your toys came here from China in a container. Your shoes came here in a container. And so did Mom’s computer.” Cubby was impressed. He had no idea his clothes and toys had traveled the world.

After a while, the operator seemed to get tired of unloading. He started picking containers off piles on the dock and putting them on the ship. We watched the crane moving back and forth. Some people would have found it boring, but not us.

“Watch him carefully, Cubby. Sometimes they drop a container into the harbor and smugglers drag it away and loot it.”

The
Fugu Island
was at least 750 feet long, the biggest ship Cubby had ever seen. A passing tug looked like a bathtub toy in comparison. I pointed to a speck just visible between two container rows toward the middle of the ship.

“Elves! Right there!”

“Yeah!” he said excitedly. “Elves!” As soon as we saw them, they vanished. They seemed to have a sixth sense for when we were watching. Every now and then, we’d see an elf out of the corner of our eye, but then it would disappear.

Cubby said, “I wish we had a net.” Then he had a Christmas thought out of the blue. “What about the reindeer, Dad? Where do they go in summer?”

“Well,” I began, “reindeer are mostly for show nowadays. Think about all the kids in the world. The population of the world has gotten so much bigger since Santa first opened for business a hundred years ago. There’s no way he could deliver all those presents riding a herd of deer. Today, Christmas presents are moved by container ship and truck. So they use the reindeer to take pictures for Christmas cards and stuff. The rest of the time they live on a reindeer ranch in Finland. Maybe we can see them one day.”

Over on the pier, a bunch of trucks were getting ready to pull out with loads of cargo from the ship. “Look,” I said. “There’s Santa’s friend Butch, driving that truck!”

Cubby waved at him. Butch waved back as he pulled his truck out of the yard.

Across the pier, they seemed to be done loading the container ship. We saw smoke coming from the stacks and water was pumped overboard from holes in the side of the ship. Cubby asked if they were getting ready to leave.

“Probably so,” I said. “But it could be a while yet. We don’t see any tugs yet. I doubt they’ll be leaving before dark. You know, Cubby, Santa and his friends all go to the Sailor’s Rest after work. They’ve got a Sailor’s Rest right here. Want to go there and get a hamburger?”

“Yeah!” Cubby was hungry now.

We drove back out through the piers and across the street, where there was a scrap iron dealer and a run-down-looking bar with a sign hanging on a board and lights in the window. I pointed it out to Cubby.

“Michelob,” he said, looking at the sign in the window. He was already learning to read.

We went inside and sat at the bar directly under a
NO MINORS
sign. Cubby did not notice it, or if he did, he didn’t say anything. A bearded bartender in a leather vest came over, and I ordered two Cokes, a hamburger, and a hot dog.

The bartender snorted and moved off. Cubby looked around. “Are Santa’s friends here?” I saw some bikers, some truckers, some dock workers, a pimp, and two hookers. At a table in the corner, five rough-looking guys were playing cards. Quite a bit of money was visible on the table.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Santa’s pretty old. You’ve seen that white beard he’s got. He’s been working shipyards all over the world since before I was born. Santa’s father worked the docks right here in Boston, unloading sailing ships over there near the Black Falcon Terminal. That’s how Santa ended up in the shipping trade. He learned about it from his dad. And his dad passed on the Christmas racket to his son, just as his own father had passed it on to him.”

“Why is Christmas a racket?” Cubby asked.

“Because Santa skims some of the toys he’s supposed to give away, selling them on the black market in Russia and Mongolia, places where they don’t have Christmas. Toymakers donate stuff to Santa on the condition that he gives them all away, and he’s not supposed to sell toys. But he’s got a drinking problem and he can’t help himself.”

Cubby frowned. The image of a drunken, crooked Santa was disturbing.

“And you see that building over there?” I said. He looked at a large building across the harbor with
Boston Edison
written on the side.

“That’s a power plant. They burn oil and coal to make electricity. And around here, a company called Boston Edison owns all the power plants. They give Santa the coal he leaves in stockings when kids are bad.” Cubby and I had watched trains carrying hundreds of cars of coal to power plants like this near home.

“Sometimes the kids are so bad the power company has to get him a whole train load of coal.”

That image troubled Cubby. Luckily, he’d only gotten coal in his stocking once. And even then, Santa left him presents, too. We figured the coal was just a warning.

“Why isn’t Santa here in Boston like his dad?” he asked. “Why is he in Rotterdam?”