Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (7 page)

To date, Asperger’s syndrome is the only illness confirmed to be contagious through the transmission of HTML.

According to the Nemours Foundation’s primer on autism for parents, “Asperger’s syndrome (AS) is a neurobiological disorder that is part of a group of conditions called
autism spectrum disorders.
” It is a form of high-functioning autism that in many cases allows the sufferer to operate in and interact with the world around them on a fairly normal level. It is a real illness that can be crushing for individuals and parents.

It is also fast becoming the antisocial nerd’s number one scapegoat.

For many Internet users Asperger’s syndrome (pronounced “ass-burgers”) has become almost synonymous with “asshole.” It could be that the telltale symptom of the autism-like disorder is a lack of empathy, which would make someone with Asperger’s syndrome seem an awful lot like an asshole. Then again, it could be that approximately 500,000 assholes have self-diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome on the Internet.

These “Internet Aspies” wear the unofficial diagnosis like a badge that absolves them of any responsibility for bad behavior. This diagnosis excuses their strange obsessions and hostile outbursts. It is validation of their lives as unique and beautiful dorks and it pre-exonerates them for any stupid or disgusting behavior they might exhibit.

Tell your mom to fuck off? Asperger’s caused it! Refuse to do anything other than play video games, eat pizzas, and go to the bathroom for a solid month? Asperger’s! Spend more than 25 percent of your income on Legos when you live in a trailer? Asperger’s!

A careful look at the list of symptoms related to Asperger’s can demonstrate why antisocial nerds turn to the syndrome as their favorite “get out of responsibility free” card.

The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, or DSM–IV, lists the following six criteria for diagnosing Asperger’s:

 

1. Qualitative impairment in social interaction
   
2. Restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped behaviors and interests
   
3. Significant impairment in important areas of functioning
   
4. No significant delay in language development
   
5. No significant delay in cognitive development, self-help skills, or adaptive behaviors (other than social interaction)
   
6. Criteria are not met for a specific pervasive developmental disorder or schizophrenia
   

 

It might seem like the diagnosis of a normal mental disorder at first glance, but let’s pause to consider how each of those criteria might manifest outside the austere pages of the DSM–IV. Let’s throw out all that technical terminology and boil each down to its essence. Allow me to rewrite them as, say, an adult child really into Legos and Linux might see the list.

 

1. I’m not going to prom because I want to level my gnome.
   
2. I draw Sonic the Hedgehog with breasts and dicks for nipples.
   
3. I don’t know how to do my own laundry.
   
4. I type at sixty-five words per minute.
   
5. I took an online IQ test and I am 5 points below Einstein and also Charmander is my PokePersonality.
   
6. I only threaten suicide when I want something worth over $100.
   

 

“Ah!” you might exclaim as you read the revised list. “Why, I have trouble getting along with people and have never had a girlfriend! It must certainly be Asperger’s syndrome. I have unusual hobbies that might be considered ‘nerdy’ or ‘obsessive’ or ‘creepy’ and that must be a case of the Asperger’s! I am way smarter than these other people! Must be Asperger’s!”

Just like that, you have convinced yourself that you are an Internet Aspie. That you are “spergin’.” You are a special dude, with special problems, and special explanations for your total dickhead behavior. Blaming Mom and Dad is old hat; these days you’ve got a new and magical invisible friend to blame for all of your bad behavior and questionable life choices.

It’s easy to sit in judgment based on my Internet observations, but I had to meet an Internet Aspie. It turned out to be a lot easier than hooking up with the aspartame ladies.

I’ve been friends with one for the past eight years.

Andy Ferris is nearly seven feet tall, with a big potato-shaped head and apple cheeks faintly scarred by acne. The corners of his red-lipped mouth are perpetually twisted downward into a frown. Even when he smiles he looks to be sneering uneasily, like the director’s cousin cast to play the villain in an exploitation movie.

Andy was twenty-two when I met him. His hair was already thinning. By twenty-six he looked like he asked his barber for “the windswept Hitler.” He is an unfortunate victim of bad genetics compounded by aggressively bad hygiene.

Andy is pudgy and doesn’t really have a firm grasp on how to dress, resulting in T-shirts that fail to cover his stomach. His facial hair is so unpredictable that I have always assumed he times himself while he’s shaving. Irregular patches of dark hairs sprout randomly from his cheek or his chin depending on the day.

I once invited Andy to a party and he literally stood in the corner. At that event he was a gentle giant cowed by the crowds and intimidated by strangers, but he mingled easily with friends and was capable of conversing at length about any number of his hobbies. Once Andy decided you were his friend, he was generous, loyal, and gregarious.

Near the beginning of the process of writing this book, I had an instant messaging conversation with Andy during which I let slip that I was devoting part of a chapter to self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome. He seemed irritated by the notion.

“WTF wrong with that?” Andy asked.

“It seems like a pretty marginal disease to self-diagnose,” I replied. “It takes a doctor to really diagnose something like that.”

“Doctors don’t know shit,” Andy argued. “I know I got it.”

The antisocial
World of Warcraft
–obsessed cat was out of the Lego bag. Although Andy remained hostile to my premise that there was something possibly wrong with self-diagnosing Asperger’s syndrome, he agreed to meet in person and discuss the issue.

Andy lived alone, finally, in a small one-bedroom apartment in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had spent the preceding twenty-eight years living with his mother. As I pulled up in the parking lot outside his apartment building, I have to admit I was a little nervous. It was two years since I had seen Andy and I was not sure what to expect.

Andy answered the door to his apartment wearing an ill-fitting
Animaniacs
T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants with a couple of really suspicious holes in the knees. His usually patchy facial hair was replaced with a thin mustache that drooped over his upper lip and a scraggly goatee.

He was holding a paper plate with a steaming microwave burrito in one hand and in the other he was holding a half-empty two-liter bottle of Dr Pepper. It was a wonder how he managed to turn the doorknob with his hands full. Then my gaze drifted behind his shoulder to the apartment.

The apartment was a plain white-walled series of boxy rooms with stained off-white carpets. These rooms were chaotically filled with junk. Toys, computer equipment, DVDs, books, empty pop bottles and cans, socks, bags from fast-food restaurants, and basically every other sort of debris you could imagine a jobless homebound nerd amassing.

I only saw the mess in the living room at first look, but it continued throughout the apartment, worsening near the bathroom and Andy’s filthy bedroom. He didn’t give me a tour, but the door to his bedroom seemed unable to close. This permitted me a glimpse of heaped clothing, a bare mattress, and a poster for an anime called
Bleach
that appeared to center on a man with red clown hair, a very sharp face, and a giant sword. I noticed several fist-size holes in the bedroom’s drywall.

“Thanks for cleaning up,” I joked.

“No problem,” he replied humorlessly.

He explained that he emptied half of the dishes out of the kitchen sink and the garbage out of both industrial-size trash cans.

“There was some stuff in the bottom of one I couldn’t get out, but I got these scented garbage bags so you can’t smell it,” he said.

I did not plan to test his claim.

I sat down with Andy after the whirlwind tour of what he referred to as “Andy HQ.” He hunched over his paper plate and noisily gulped down his burrito, pausing whenever he got an especially hot bite. When that happened, he would sit up straight and breathe loudly through his mouth in an attempt to cool off the steaming meat and cheese. When he had finished his last bite, he gulped Dr Pepper straight from the bottle, emptying most of the remaining liquid.

He punctuated the Caligulan display with a wet-lipped belch that reeked of reconstituted beef paste and “hot” flavored ketchup. He wiped the orangish-brown residue from the corners of his mouth with the paper plate.

“You eat like a monster,” I observed.

Andy thought that was funny, although I stand by the comment. We had known each other long enough that he was not shy or inhibited around me. We fell easily into conversation and I enjoyed catching up on his life.

He wanted to talk about my new hand that I kept hidden beneath a black leather glove.

“Can you crush things with it?” He wanted to know.

I offered to break a pencil, but he insisted I smash an egg over the sink. When I pointed out that anyone could smash an egg in their hand, he shrugged and insisted again.

There was a mechanical pop as the mechanism in my hand overcame the shell of the egg. My leather glove was covered in the oily egg white. I held the yolk and pieces of shell in my cupped hand before letting it slip into the sink.

“That is fucking awesome as shit, dude,” Andy observed.

I rinsed off the glove and towel-dried it before we returned to Andy’s couch to discuss his living situation.

I learned that Andy was still jobless, relying on his mother for his rent and frozen burritos. He was unashamed of this arrangement, but said he wasn’t sitting idle.

“I put my résumé out there,” he said. “Got some good hits, too. And my mom knows a temp agency that’s hiring. I could do some data entry.”

In the meantime, Andy was inspired by the news of my book and had started on his own Great American Epic.

“It’s based on
GoldenEye
,” Andy said.

“The movie?” I asked.

“No, it’s based on the Nintendo Sixty-Four game,” Andy said. “The plot is what if double-oh-six had the
Moonraker
laser from multiplayer and instead of faking his death in the Arkengelsk chemical facility level he kills James Bond and then escapes. But James Bond is really alive only he is burned by the laser and James Bond works with the Russians to get revenge on double-oh-six who has been promoted to double-oh-seven—”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” I interjected.

“Whatever,” Andy said with irritation. “He could still be a double-oh-six. The point is it’s like
GoldenEye
from the Nintendo Sixty-Four, but played through in reverse by double-oh-six with James Bond as the bad guy. And you know what the coolest part is?”

“That isn’t the coolest part!?” I laughed.

“No, no,” he said. “Check this out. The James Bond dude who wrote the books never even wrote a
GoldenEye
book. They just made it up for the movie! So now I can be the guy who wrote
GoldenEye.
”

“That’s borderline retarded, Andy,” I said.

“You can think that, but you won’t be the one making that face when I am in your face after selling a million copies of my book. How many copies do you think your book will sell?”

“I do—”

“Five hundred if you’re lucky.” Andy cut me off. “Five fifty tops, maximum. Mine will sell fifty-eight times that number.”

Andy was becoming breathlessly agitated at the one-sided argument he was having. I changed the subject to games. He was looking forward to the then-upcoming Conan MMORPG and he mentioned several times that it would “incorporate nudity and extreme violence.” These two qualities were what Andy sought most in all forms of entertainment.

I can only imagine the bared “hooters” and decapitating
Moonraker
laser headshots that featured prominently in his alternate reality
GoldenEye
novelization.

Once Andy calmed down, I steered him carefully away from any more flashpoints for his temper. Being friends with him for most of a decade, I had learned what topics sent him over the edge. His libertarian politics were a particularly sore point between us.

Libertarianism is a subject I have observational reasons to suspect is shared among many self-diagnosed Internet Aspies.

I could never prove one is the cause of the other, because there are a number of demographic issues to consider. Both groups are populated by predominantly young, white, affluent males. These same people seem to enjoy nerd rap songs and retro gaming.

An obsession with video game tits and bloodshed fit the profile. Writing a dorky novel about
GoldenEye
seemed right in the wheelhouse of an Internet Aspie, although I suspect a person suffering from real Asperger’s syndrome would have written something in private code that was completely incoherent to the average person.

I decided I had collected enough observational material and it was time to risk Andy’s wrath by asking directly about his self-diagnosis. That was a fatal mistake.

“Can we talk about your Asperger’s syndrome?” I asked tactlessly.

“What?” Andy looked at me and ran fingers through his thinning, greasy hair.

“Your self-diagnosed As—”

“I heard ya the first time,” he groused. “I thought we agreed no talking about that.”

“No. No, Andy. That’s the whole reason I came here.”

“Oh, the whole reason?” Andy was getting pissed. “You came here just to talk to me for your book? No other reason? You didn’t want to hang out with—”