Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (34 page)

Third, she is patient when I ask the same questions over and over. For example, at noon most days I phone her and say, “Woof! Do you like your mate?”

“Yes, I like you,” she reassures me.

An hour later, I must have forgotten the last call because I call again and say, “Woof! Do you like your mate?”

“Yes, I still like you,” she says.

This may go on four or five times in the course of a day. By the fifth time, she might say, “No, I don’t like you anymore,” but by then I know she is just teasing. She really does like me. So I feel safe.

I have no idea why I ask the same thing over and over, but I do. If I am made to stop, I often become very anxious.

Fourth, she pets me. My childhood experience petting Chuckie didn’t work out too well, and that one bad memory pretty much cured me of petting other people later on. Luckily, Martha did not have an experience like that earlier in life. So, even though things did not work out for me being a pettor (one who pets), I thrive as a pettee (one who gets petted).

When Martha first met me, I was anxious and jumpy. I was always tapping my foot, rocking, or exhibiting some other behavioral aberration. Of course, now we know that’s just normal Aspergian behavior, but back then other people thought it was weird, so of course I did, too.

One day, for some reason, she decided to try petting my arm, and I immediately stopped rocking and fidgeting. The result was so dramatic, she never stopped. It didn’t take long for me to realize the calming effect, too. I like being petted and scratched.

“Can you pet me?” I say when I sit next to her.

I also say, while tilting my head, “Scratch my fur.” I have observed dogs tilting their heads like this, and it often works for them. She will scratch my head or rub my ears. Sometimes she rubs my forehead or my shoulders. And she scratches my back.

“Scratch lightly, with claw tips,” I say. Light scratching with somewhat sharp nails is best. For a while, I worried that the fur scratching would cause all my hair to fall out, and that the ear rubbing would give me floppy ears, like a beagle. But that didn’t happen. I just got calmer. I believe it calms her, too. Psychologists have done studies of people petting animals. They’ve proven it has a calming effect on the people, lowering their heart rate and blood pressure. I wonder why they haven’t done studies of people petting people. Normal people haven’t caught on to the benefits.

While I went through life as a pettee, I watched the dogs and cats around me, and I realized something: The pets that get petted the most have the thickest fur. Petting does not make your fur fall out. I am now sure of that. And you will never see a well-petted cat with floppy ears, either. The dogs with floppy ears all started out that way.

And the final thing is, we sleep in piles.

When I was little, I used to like hiding in small spaces. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I can still become unsettled lying down by myself on a bed. If I lie down by myself, I will pile pillows on top of me, but the best situation by far is to have my mate lie down, too, and pile herself up against me.

Every night, when we go to bed, she puts an arm or a leg on me, or lies up against me until I fall asleep.

If she doesn’t, I complain.

“Come on,” I say. “Put a paw on your mate!”

“Can you pet me?”

“Can you scratch my fur?”

I am always calmer and more relaxed in a pile, being petted. Nowadays, for the first time, I fall asleep quickly and I seldom have bad dreams.

If I wake up, she puts a paw on me and I go back to sleep. I put a paw on her, too. Sometimes I wake in the night, and find we have rolled apart. We’ll be sleeping on our sides, facing in opposite directions. I’ll slide over until our backs are touching, and I’ll slide my bent legs back toward her. She’ll awaken enough to reach her own foot over, and our feet will touch. I fall back asleep, content and warm.

I feel safe sleeping in a pile. I’m not sure why that would be, since I am the bigger and stronger one, but it’s true. Ever since I was a child, I knew that lying under a pile of pillows was a lot better than just lying on top of the bed. Sleeping in a pile is a lot better than that, though. It’s the best of all.

I like married life a lot.

28

Winning at Basketball

I
never did well at sports as a kid, and I was never a sports fan. A childhood of being the last one picked and the first one tossed hadn’t left me with very fond feelings about school sports. I came to be a fan rather late in life, and in a somewhat circuitous fashion.

In 2003, my son was about to enter high school. Since Little Bear and I had gotten divorced, and I had gotten remarried, Cubby had lived half the time with us in Chicopee, and half the time with his mom in South Hadley. We always chose one school for him to attend, and until then he’d been in South Hadley. But the school there wasn’t very good, and we began searching for alternatives. We looked at private schools, but they were very expensive. There were Internet sites that ranked school districts, and the top ones in our area were Longmeadow, Wilbraham, and…Amherst. South Hadley and Chicopee were right next to one another, at the bottom.

With some trepidation, Unit Two and I decided to look at Amherst, where I had grown up thirty years before. Although my family had lived in the tiny town of Shutesbury, it was part of the Amherst school district, and Amherst was where I had gone to school, where I’d hung out, and where I had met Cubby’s mother.

I called Jim Lumley, an Amherst Realtor who’d helped my parents years ago. He drove a Land Rover, and I saw him whenever it broke. He brought a list of Amherst homes down to my office right away, and we set out that afternoon to check them out.

As we drove around Amherst looking at houses, I began to feel that it was where I belonged.

It’s true that Amherst was the setting for some of the worst times of my life. Other kids hassled me. The school system wanted me gone. The police wanted me in jail. And my parents had fallen completely to pieces. All right there, in Amherst.

Even in my most Aspergian days, I knew I had many of the qualities needed to be popular. I was smart. I was gentle. I was funny. I even looked pretty normal, in a geeky sort of way. But my behavioral oddities had hidden those qualities from others, and had caused me to hide myself in shame. Everywhere I’d lived, until now, I had carried the burden of Asperger’s with me.

When Unit Two, Cubby, and I moved out of Chicopee, I left that burden behind.

So why would I return? Because I’d finally have the chance to turn a failure into a success. Moving to Amherst with my new knowledge of Asperger’s would give me a chance to start my life over again. A new me, in a new house, in a new town.

Jack would start high school in Amherst, just as I had. But unlike me, he was going to pass.

The move was a smashing success. The bad people from my youth had all vanished. The teachers who wanted me gone had long since retired. Most of today’s police force hadn’t even been born when I had moved away in the 1970s.

More important, people I had hardly seen in thirty years welcomed me with open arms.
Why are they doing this?
I wondered. Then I understood. They welcomed me because I didn’t do anything to drive them away. I had learned how to be friendly.

It was remarkably simple, but it had taken so, so long to figure out.

My friend Paul Zahradnik had dropped out of school the same year I had, and now lived just half a mile away. Thirty years later, he was an accomplished metal sculptor and real estate developer living at the end of a quarter-mile driveway. Gordy, the longhaired kid who had worked in the junkyard, lived in a beautiful home across the road. He still worked in the junkyard, but the yard had grown by twenty acres, and now he
owned
it. What a long way we had all come.

Like me, my brother had left home as soon as he could. He had stayed far away, working at advertising jobs in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. I hardly ever saw him in those years. When he wrote his first book,
Sellevision,
he decided to get back in touch with his family up here. I helped him find a small house in Northampton, and he started coming up here on weekends. He stopped drinking and doing drugs, and he met Dennis. His life started to turn around.

As soon as he heard I was moving to Amherst, my brother said, “Is there another building lot over there? Dennis and I can build a house next to you!” And they did. We built new homes next to each other, on a little cul-de-sac. His is gay and frilly, and mine is Aspergian and functional. I am sure mine is better engineered, but he doesn’t care. His is prettier. Even though the plumbing fell apart and left him ankle deep in water right before Christmas that first year.

When he walks his weirdly misnamed French bulldogs past my house, Cubby sets off a homemade bomb in the yard, and the roar and smoke tell him he’s finally home. In the winter, when it snows, I clear the street with our father’s farm tractor. And when his house floods, I rescue his furniture with my Land Rover and trailer and dry it in my garage.

Who would have guessed? After all those years, the success of my brother’s book
Running with Scissors
made me feel good about my condition and proud of who I was. And it brought us back together, in the town where we’d started, so long ago.

Appearing as a character in my brother’s books taught me something about myself. For most of my life, my history as an abused child with what I saw as a personality defect was shameful and embarrassing. Being a failure and a high school dropout was humiliating, no matter how well I subsequently did. I lied about my age, my education, and my upbringing for years because the truth was just too horrible to reveal. His book, and people’s remarkable acceptance of us as we are, changed all that. I was finally free.

When I returned to Amherst, everywhere I went it seemed I recognized someone. And I recognized the places. But the bad associations from my childhood were gone.

“You have to come to a UMass basketball game,” Paul and Gordy said one day. I had never been to a college basketball game in my life, but I somewhat reluctantly tagged along.

“Before the game, there’s a reception upstairs. Come up with us,” Paul said.

There were probably a hundred people in the room when I walked in. Thirty years earlier, that crowd would have terrified me, and I would not have known what to say. I would have hidden in the corner like a trapped animal, waiting to escape.

But now, with my knowledge of Asperger’s and my new confidence, nothing bad happened. I wasn’t scared and I didn’t hide. And something remarkable occurred: People liked me. People came up to me, shook my hand, and made me feel welcome. Just a little bit of knowledge of what to say and how to act made all the difference in the world.

It was incredible! I found myself making friends everywhere I went, and to my amazement, they looked out for me. For example, my friend Dave said, “Let’s get seats together!” A perfectly ordinary suggestion, but it was something I had never done before. I would hear the referee’s whistle, and Dave would lean over from his seat next to me to explain what had happened. Even if I was ignorant, the games were fun. And so were the people. They all knew more about basketball than me, but no one cared.

Not only did I make friends everywhere I went, but nothing bad seemed to happen. No one called me a Monkey Face. No one threatened me. No one threw me out. The last time I had been here, no one wanted me on their team. Now, it seemed everyone did.

Even my lifelong feeling that I was a fraud began to vanish. At a party at the coach’s house, one of the athletic department staffers sat down with me.

“You know, I dropped out of school, too,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I wondered how he knew I had dropped out of school. I realized he must have taken the time to ask someone else about me.

“You’re as much a part of this school as any other alumnus,” he continued. “You’re always welcome here.”

I almost cried.

I began attending all the games. Even though I was never a “real” student, I had acquired most of my education in those buildings. And it felt good to be back, among friends, in a place that felt like home.

I didn’t have to know everything. Other people could tell me the answers. I didn’t have to notice everything. My friends would look out for me. Suddenly, I had a revelation:
This is what life is like for normal people.

I joined the UMass Athletic Association, and began supporting the school.
My
school. The team picked up speed. With me on board, the team hired a new coach, and headed to the play-offs for the first time in years. My past was finally behind me. Whatever happened with our basketball team, I knew that I had won.

29

My Life as a Train

I
have always liked trains.

One day when he was about six, Cubby and I drove to the Conrail freight yard in West Springfield. The tires crunched with a pop-popping sound as we rolled over the gray stone that covered the yard and filled the space between the train tracks. My father had taken me to see the trains when I was little, and thirty years later here I was, doing the same thing with my own son. My father let me drive a train when I was five, at the museum in Philadelphia. I would soon do the same with Cubby.