Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (9 page)

The word
computer
meant something very different in the late 1960s than it does today. My new computer was really an electronic slide rule, for those who remember slide rules. To use it, you turned the two left dials until their pointers were lined up over the two numbers you wanted to multiply. You then turned the third dial until the meter read zero. When that happened, you looked at that third dial and it showed the product of the two numbers.

Before I could turn the dials, though, I had to build the computer. I had a bag of resistors, transistors, potentiometers, a battery holder, and a meter.

“How do I build it?” I asked.

“I don’t know, son. What do the directions say?”

“It says ‘easy assembly,’ whatever that means. We need pliers, wire cutters, a soldering iron, and rosin core solder.”

“Well, we have solder here. To solder the plumbing.” Sometimes my father imagined himself a handyman.

“The manual says we need
rosin core
solder. It says acid core plumber’s solder will ruin it.”

The nighttime version of my father could turn ugly in the blink of an eye, but the daytime version was actually pretty nice. He almost never said anything nasty about me before dark, and at times like this he actually worked with me on my projects.

How I struggled with that computer! It probably had no more than twenty parts inside, the rest of the “forty-two components” being the terminal strips those parts were mounted on, and the nuts, bolts, dials, scales, meter, and case that everything else lived in. Simple as it was, I arranged and rearranged pieces for two weeks before I got it working.

My parents bought me books they hoped would help:
Basic Electronics
and
101 Electronic Projects.
My favorite,
The Radio Amateur’s Handbook,
was recommended by the salesman at RadioShack. By reading those books, I figured it out. On the way, I learned to solder, and I began to understand what the different electronic components were, and how they worked. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes all became real to me—not just words on a page. I was feeling proud of myself, and I was ready for more.

I decided to sign up for an electronics class at the high school.
Maybe I’ll do well in that,
I thought. I had gotten straight As in sixth grade, but my grades had gone steadily downhill once I started junior high, and electronics sounded a lot more interesting than biology or German or gym.

Since electronics was a high school class and I was still in junior high, I had to see the teacher and take a quiz of sorts.

“What is ohm’s law?” Mr. Gray began.

“E over I and R,” I answered. “E is volts, I is amps, R is ohms.”

Twenty more easy questions, and I was in. I already knew more than the basic textbooks had to offer. Mr. Gray had an office in a closet filled with vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, wire, connectors, and all manner of other parts. I was fascinated. He thought I had already learned enough to skip Electronics I and go directly to Electronics II, but I was so driven that I completed the course material for Electronics II in my first few weeks. Then I began nosing around the university and learning what I could on my own.

My mother suggested that I go see Professor Edwards, the husband of a friend. Dr. Edwards taught electrical engineering at UMass, and he opened the door for me to a whole new world. He got me into the labs in Engineering East, the university’s engineering building, and introduced me to the brand-new Research Computing Center, where they had a Control Data 3800 computer system in a huge air-conditioned room.

They adopted me as a pet in the engineering labs. I studied there after school almost every day, continuing with an aggressive home study program at night.

I began eyeing the TVs and radios in the house. They were getting old anyway, and I was itching to take them apart so I could figure out how they worked. I decided that my parents should turn over all the household electronics to me, right then.

“Okay, you can have the old Zenith radio. But not the new one!”

My parents began handing over the radios. The old TV followed a few weeks later and I began to amass a considerable inventory of parts on top of the chest of drawers in my room, and on the dining table.

“Clean these parts off the kitchen table!”

“Ow! I just cut my foot on some old radio part!”

The complaints became more frequent, and my father decided to take matters into his own hands. Luckily for me, this happened in the afternoon. Later that night, drunk, he would have just thrown my things into the trash.

“Son, why don’t we build you a work area in the basement?”

That sounded good to me. There just happened to be a big door leaning against the basement wall. My father got legs, attached them, and the door became my very own workbench.

Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together. I began by building simple devices. Some, like my radios, were useful. Others were merely entertaining. For example, I discovered I could solder some stiff wires onto a capacitor and charge it up. For a few minutes, till the charge leaked away, I had a crude stun gun.

I tried it out on the dog, who ran and hid. That was no fun. So I decided to try it on my little brother. I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I’d recently removed from our old Zenith television.

“Hey, let’s play Jab a Varmint,” I said. I tried to smile disarmingly, keeping the capacitor behind my back and making sure I didn’t ruin the effect by jabbing myself or some other object.

“What’s that?” he asked, suspiciously.

Before he could escape, I stepped across the room and jabbed him. He jumped. Pretty high, too. Sometimes he would fight back, but this time he ran. The jab was totally unexpected, and he didn’t realize I only had the one jab in my capacitor. It would be several years before I had the skill to make a multishot Varmint Jabber.

He ran down the hall, yelling, “Momma, John Elder did Jab a Varmint!”

I soon moved on to more sophisticated experiments. But I ran into a roadblock: The college engineering textbooks used equations to describe how things worked, but I didn’t understand the math. I could visualize the equations in my head, but the ones in my head seemed to have nothing in common with those on the page. It was as though I thought in an entirely different language. When I saw a wave in a book, it was printed next to an equation with symbols I didn’t understand. When I saw a wave in my mind, I associated it with a particular sound. If I concentrated hard, I could almost hear the waves. There were no symbols at all. I could not figure out how to relate the two. Yet. Luckily, it was about then that my interests in electronics and music began to converge.

I had first become interested in music in the fifth grade. I tried playing the French horn with no success. A few years later, while I was in Georgia, I saw my cousin, Little Bob, taking guitar lessons, and I decided to try playing a bass guitar. My grandmother took me to Wallace Reed Music in Duluth, Georgia, outside Atlanta, where I looked at a git-tar with four strings.

Down South, they don’t say guitar. They say
git-tar.
And they don’t say violin. They say
fiddle.

“That there’s a bass, sonny,” the salesman said.

My grandmother asked the salesman if he could play it. He plugged it in to an amplifier, played a few lines, and handed it to me. I had no idea how to play it, but I touched a string and it thrummed in my chest. I was entranced. Thirty minutes and a lot of wheedling later, we loaded the bass, a Fender Showman amplifier, a speaker cabinet, some cords, and some music books into the trunk of my grandmother’s silver Cadillac and headed home.

I practiced all summer, playing along with the radio and studying my sheet music. I was a terrible bass player, though. I could hear the songs in my mind. I could read the music. But I could not translate the music in my head into movements of my fingers over the strings. The sounds that emanated from my bass were clumsy, just as I was clumsy.

I eyed my Fender Showman amp. Leo Fender had designed some of the most famous guitars and amplifiers in the world, but I still thought there was room for improvement. Could I take it apart and make it better? Maybe if I couldn’t play the bass, I could make something out of the amp.

I found a book that might help,
Musical Instrument Amplifiers,
and whined and pleaded relentlessly until my parents bought it for me. I was full of ideas for integrating my stash of former television pieces into the Showman amplifier my grandmother had bought me.

My ideas worked. My Fender amp got louder, a lot louder, and it began to sound hotter. I took it to some local shows and had the musicians play it against their own amps. It ran circles around most of them.

“Man, this sound is hot!” Musicians were quick to praise my work. I had a winner.

“Hey, can you do that to mine?” became a common refrain after someone played my equipment, so I started modifying amplifiers for local musicians, and they told other musicians. I also started fixing broken equipment.

I began to understand the relationship between my design changes and how things sounded. Musicians saw that.

“Can you make the bass snappier?”

“Can you get more definition in the low notes?”

“Can you soften the overdrive sound?”

With a bit of practice, I became able to turn the words of a musician into technical descriptions that I used in my designs. For example, “This sound is fat” translated to “There’s a lot of even-harmonic distortion.” And I knew how to add even-harmonic distortion on command.

Soon the musicians and I moved from changing the sound of the amplifier to creating entirely new sound effects. In those days, reverb and tremolo were the only effects available to most musicians. I began to experiment, producing new effects, new sounds.

I also began experimenting with transistorized circuits. The Fender amps were tube technology—designs from the 1950s. Transistor circuitry was newer, and integrated circuits were state of the art. By studying the circuits, I figured out how to make little battery-powered special-effect boxes. I worked hard to imagine the results of my designs, and I refined my thought process as I visualized a circuit, then built it for real, and compared my imagined results with the real results. Gradually, I became able to visualize the results of my designs with a fair degree of accuracy. My earlier problems with math texts stopped holding me back as I developed the ability to visualize and even hear the flow of sounds through my circuits.

At that point, I had made several key breakthroughs. First, I had gained an understanding of the electronic components themselves. They were the building blocks of everything to follow. Next, I somehow figured out how to visualize the complex calculus functions that describe the behavior of electronic circuits in time. For example, I saw the pure tones of a guitar going into a circuit, and I saw the modified waves—immeasurably more complex—coming out. I understood how changes in the circuit topology or component values would alter the waves. And, most remarkably, I developed the ability to translate those waves I saw in my mind into sounds I imagined in my head, and those imagined sounds closely matched what emerged from the circuits when I built them.

No one knows why one person has a gift like this and another doesn’t, but I’ve met other Aspergian people with savantlike abilities like mine. In my opinion, part of this ability—which I seem to have been born with—comes from my extraordinary powers of concentration. I have an extremely sharp focus.

I spent my free evenings at local concerts, and became part of the scene. Club owners, bouncers, and even bartenders began to recognize me; musicians talked to me and everyone seemed to respect me. I felt good about myself, and I felt even better when I discovered that many of them were misfits like me. Maybe I had finally found a place I’d fit in.

This was a relief, because the situation at home was deteriorating. We had been seeing Dr. Finch for a while now, and my father certainly treated me better, but my parents’ fights with each other were still brutal. And both of them were going downhill fast. My father was drinking more than ever, and he was depressed and withdrawn. Sometimes he stayed in bed all day; often he was simply gone. We didn’t have many family activities in those days. And my mother got more and more manic, until one day she vanished.

“Your mother has had a psychotic break,” the doctor told me. My mother returned a few days later, drugged and subdued, but the handwriting was on the wall.

In search of distractions, I began hanging around the junior high’s audiovisual center. Most of the kids hanging around the AV room were interested in the TV cameras and the school’s state-of-the-art black-and-white TV studio. Not me. I wanted to learn how to take things apart, fix them, and make them better. And the two technicians, John Fuller and Fred Smead, taught me how to do it. The two of them really helped me on my way, and I owe them both a debt of gratitude.

“Did you ever fix a record player?” John gestured to a pile of Rheem Califone record players. The school had dozens of these players. The language departments played lessons on them. The music department played operas on them. Social studies teachers played records of old radio shows. They were fragile, and they were always breaking down. My new work-study job was to fix them.