Raising Cubby (31 page)

I began paying closer attention when I went to retrieve him. Sure enough, he was always with the same group of kids. There were half a dozen of them, a mix of guys and girls. In fact, as he got
more comfortable asking for rides, he even began offering my services to drive his friends home. I wondered if I could induce them to pay me.

I turned to the first kid we drove home and held out my hand. “That will be three dollars.” He looked at me with a shocked expression, but he didn’t say or do anything. “Dad,” Cubby said. “Don’t be a jerk. Just drive.”

“Ignore my father,” he told his friend. Then the two of them began yapping about Grand Theft Auto and the Age of Empires game as if I wasn’t even there. As long as I kept the vehicle moving, I could have been invisible.

The idea of parents as friends, or even parents as part of the conversation, was a nonstarter. We were at the point where he knew everything, and Mom and Dad were embarrassments to be hidden away until needed for a ride or some money. Indeed, ride requests became a daily occurrence. There were rides after school, rides to the mall, and rides to friends’ houses. And of course there were rides home at the end of the evening. In no time at all, transportation became one of the more onerous duties of parenthood, and the principal way I interacted with my kid.

I began to see a pattern. Most evenings, I found myself summoned to a parking lot in South Amherst to follow a set of cryptic instructions, as if I were dropping off ransom money or doing a huge cocaine deal.

“Turn in the first entrance. Go to the second parking lot. Drive to the back, flash your lights, and wait. I’ll come out. Stay in the car.” He was directing me to a parking area in the middle of a good-size housing complex. It looked nice enough, but there was no telling who lived there or what they were doing.

“I want to see where you are. Stay there. I’ll come up.” My desire to see what he was doing seemed pretty normal to me. Not to him. “No! Remain with the vehicle. I’ll come down.” Jeez, I thought, listening to him is like listening to some hopped-up policeman
who panics when he pulls you over and you get out of your car.

Yet I was so impressed that he had friends to hang out with that I failed to ask any more about them. I wondered to myself when I waited in the car, but when Cubby appeared, he began yapping excitedly about his games or his chemistry, and any questions I had were quickly forgotten. It’s also possible I didn’t think to ask because I’m autistic, and I often miss stuff like that. Either way, we drove home with me none the wiser.

When we got home, he’d go immediately to his room and close the door. He’d done that before, but these days it was different. Now he began talking on the phone as soon as he was inside. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but I could hear murmurs. He was up to something.

The final tip-off was school. He had struggled and fought against going. Now, all of a sudden, he went willingly. Yet his grades were as poor as before—worse, actually.

Either he was selling drugs to his classmates, I concluded, or he’d gotten a girlfriend. I watched him closely for signs of drug use or drug dealing, and I didn’t see anything. He didn’t look high, and he never wore any of the gold chains, diamonds, or other bling that I associated with successful drug dealers. That left a girlfriend as the only possible explanation. When I asked, he spoke right up.

“Her name is Nicole. She’s a year older than me. She’s from France, and her dad teaches French at Hampshire.” When I was a kid, French females were the stuff of movies—beautiful, desirable, and exotic. I had no idea there were such people right here in our little New England town, with parents who taught at Hampshire College.

“Perhaps I could meet them the next time I pick you up,” I suggested.

“Okay,” he said. “But you have to behave.” I agreed, bearing in mind that my definition of
behave
probably differed from his.

The next day, when I went to retrieve him, he came out to the parking lot and led me back to a condo. “This is where she lives,” he said. “Be nice.” I snorted.

Nicole was a pretty girl, thin, shy, and quiet. Later he told me that they first met in front of the high school when Nicole was talking to one of his friends, and that they had walked into town together. I was never able to determine who chose whom; I finally concluded it was a mutual thing. For the first year, they were inseparable. Cubby went to her house most every day, except on days they stayed in town or went to our house.

With a girlfriend and an interest in chemistry that might really lead to a career, my son was growing up. It was striking how fast this change took place. The Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards were left in the dust of childhood. I wondered if all teens went through something similar, or if Cubby was somehow unique. The same thing seemed to be happening with his friends. When they came to the house, they watched grown-up movies and talked like adults.

Nicole never said more than fifty words to me, but I didn’t make much of that because lots of teenagers are uncomfortable around strange parents, and I knew I was stranger than most. A few years later, when she told my son she had Asperger’s too, her behavior made sense. Boys with Asperger’s—like my son—are criticized as weirdos and freaks for their social ineptitude. Yet many of those same awkward behaviors—avoiding eye contact or missing social cues—are often dismissed as shy and cute in girls.

Cubby and Nicole would sit together for hours, talking or watching television. Seeing them reminded me of the same period in my own life, when Little Bear and I would walk and talk and the days went on forever. We were not romantically involved in those years—neither of us knew how to take that step, even though we saw others doing it and we read stories in books—but we had hopes and dreams and we shared them endlessly. I suspected things
had progressed further for Cubby and Nicole, because I saw them holding hands and snuggling, something his mom and I had never done as teens.

I wondered if I should talk to him about sex and teen pregnancy, but I’m embarrassed to say I was just too shy. Whenever I thought about Cubby and sex, I recalled my teen years, when my social disabilities kept me clear of sexual entanglements more effectively than any conversation could have, and I convinced myself that he too was enough of a late bloomer that I didn’t need to worry. In the end, responsibility for “the talk” fell to his mom, and I never asked him what was said.

Still, there would be times that the little boy would reappear. He didn’t ask to be tucked in anymore, but he’d still say, “Pet me, Dad,” if I happened to sit down beside him on the sofa at night, just as he had when he was little. And he still smiled at my Gorko stories and the talk of fire lizards and other fanciful creatures, though he no longer watched for them in the forest outside.

Now, when Cubby searched in the woods, it was for a place to test his latest concoctions. He shot his drainpipe cannon into the brush beside the house, but I complained about the noise, so he began ranging farther and farther to find remote spots to safely stage his explosive experiments. That was a new source of worry, because he was out of my sight, which meant out of reach of help should something go wrong.

His answer to that was his friends, who accompanied him on his tests. “They’re always with me,” he’d say, “and we check carefully to make sure no one is around.”

His guy friends did accompany him, but Nicole didn’t care much for Cubby’s experiments. She preferred to immerse herself in reading and studying. In the beginning, he didn’t care, because he was so consumed by the drive to learn and create. Both of us expressed our worries to him, but he didn’t perceive our concerns either. It’s funny … looking back, that too is a classic trait of Asperger’s, but
being that way myself, I totally missed it in him. I guess the adage “it takes one to know one” isn’t always true after all.

Despite his dismissals, I continued to prod him. “It’s great that you do your test explosions far away from people,” I said, “but what if you get hurt?” Cubby dismissed my concerns in the superior way teenagers do. “Dad! My friends are with me, and I’m always safe. I’m not going to get hurt.” It was hard having a kid who professed to have all the answers. Proud as I was of his chemical prowess, I worried about accidents. My own teenage interests never had the potential to blow off an arm or leg.

He always filmed the results of his experiments, and he showed the videos to anyone who would watch, including my parents. “That’s very impressive, Jack,” my father said carefully. “I’m just worried that you’ll get in trouble. You be careful now.”

Cubby assured my dad that he took all possible precautions. He was very sure of his technical knowledge.

My mother felt the same way. After a while, he decided they were not his most receptive audience. He decided to upload his videos to the Internet instead. “Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “I have an Internet bulletin board, and people write in with their own thoughts and advice. There’s a lot of dangerous stuff online, and I want people to see things done safely and smart.”

Only three months earlier, he had told me he was starting a website where he could talk about chemistry with other students. Now he had a whole community, with hundreds of members and thousands of posts. I was shocked by how quickly it had blossomed, thanks to social media.

Once again, I was stymied by my teenage son’s impeccable logic. I might not have liked it, but the days when I could tell him what to do were receding fast. Any thoughts that my son might have an intelligence deficit were long gone. He was at least as smart as me, and clever to boot. I told myself that by way of reassurance: Any dad would have his hands full with a kid like Cubby.

Shortly before Cubby’s fifteenth birthday, we got bad news. My dad was sick. He went into the hospital, came out, and went back again. By Christmas, I knew he wasn’t going to get better.

He died in the last days of winter, a month before Cubby’s birthday. The following weekend, Cubby and I drove Grandpa John’s old car in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. He was awfully proud of that Jaguar. We missed him a lot.

The month passed, and the pain of loss receded. Cubby turned fifteen, and that reminded me once again of my dad. He’d always been there for Cubby’s birthdays with a cake and a spyglass or treasure chest or some other exotic present. Cubby felt the loss too, but he was distracted. He had a girlfriend, and after a quick bite of cake with us, he was off to celebrate with her. Those days, he was with Nicole and the gang six nights a week, and I hardly ever saw him. Some weeks, he didn’t go to his mom’s at all, and she had to meet him in town just to see his face.

Despite all his new interests, he’d maintained his membership in the South Hadley Boy Scout troop. Every four years, the scouts hosted a big get-together they called the Jamboree, and that spring he announced that he wanted to go to it. He’d missed the previous one when he was in Mexico, and the next one wasn’t going to happen till 2010; he’d be done with scouting long before that.

Jamboree happened at the end of August, and Cubby did have a lot of fun. However, the thing that made Jamboree most memorable to me was what happened after—Cubby decided to move to Amherst full time. The school year was about to start, and he didn’t want to shuttle from house to house anymore. Needless to say, Little Bear was very unhappy about that. I had mixed feelings myself. As much as I loved having my son around, it was nice having a quiet house once or twice a week. That never happened when he was there.

Still, I had to agree it made sense. Cubby was enrolled at Amherst High School now, and his mom lived half an hour away in
South Hadley. In years past that had been fine, because she was in school there too, at the university. Now she’d graduated and gone to work teaching school. She couldn’t spend two hours a day driving him around. In any case, he wasn’t thinking of his parents. He was interested in his new girlfriend and the new circle of friends he’d made.

All we parents did was provide money, transportation, and food. And we paid the cell phone bill.

The next milestone of Cubby’s teen years was a big one: getting a driver’s license. He’d been driving for years, but not legally, and not on public roads. All that changed when he turned sixteen. “Dad,” he said, “you need to take me to get a learner’s permit.”

When I didn’t respond to his demand fast enough, he called his mom. “Can you take me to get my permit? Dad won’t do it.” Since he had started staying in Amherst, his mom felt she hardly ever saw him, so she grabbed every chance when he called. The following afternoon, when I was at work, Cubby and his mom drove to the registry and emerged a few minutes later with a crisp new permit.

I discovered his new status that evening, when he volunteered to accompany me to the gas station. “I’ll drive,” he said confidently as we walked to the car. Then he took out his permit and handed it to me proudly. I looked at the road and back at him. Why not? He had been driving for years, in the woods. How much different could driving on a road be?

A lot, as it turned out. For one thing, speeds were higher. Before getting the permit, Cubby had practiced driving our John Deere garden tractor around the neighborhood. Most people don’t think of
a lawn mower as something that speeds and slides on the corners, but Cubby drove the thing like a dirt-track racer. Unfortunately, he misjudged his momentum and dirt-tracked my tractor right into the side of Martha’s car. Seeing the damage, I wondered if Cubby would be able to navigate the roads. “Maybe he’ll be more careful, having had his first accident,” Martha suggested hopefully. I wasn’t so sure. Those worries were foremost in my mind as I got into the passenger seat for his first foray onto a public highway.