Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

  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.

  Every item that I fixed in those days taught me something new. I learned how to solder the tiny wires to the phonograph needles, and how turntables and needles work. I learned what went wrong with the circuits and how to fix them. Soon I was banging out three and four repairs in an afternoon and, before long, the pile of broken record players was gone.

  “Do you think we can start the kid on tape decks?” Fred said, in the same tone a mother might use to say, “Do you think we can start little Mikey on solid food?” With that, broken tape decks were added to my diet of record players. Within a week, I was fixing all the tape decks for the language lab. These machines had a hard life, going back and forth endlessly as students kept playing phrases and rewinding and playing them again. And it was all a waste: Five years after getting out of high school, I’ll bet 90 percent of those kids couldn’t have made a word of small talk on the streets of Paris or Berlin. But for me, the language lab’s tape decks were a ticket to another world. Soon I was using what I had learned by working on them to make flangers and echo delays—a whole new generation of special effects. Local musicians loved them.

  For the first time in my life, I was able to do something that grown-ups thought was valuable. I may have been rude. I may not have known what to say or do in social situations. But if I could fix five tape recorders in an afternoon, I was “great.” No one except my grandparents had ever called me that before.

  Another thing I found in the AV room was the girl who became my first wife. Mary Trompke was another shy, damaged kid like me. Something about her fascinated me. She was very smart, but she didn’t say much. Still, I was determined to get to know her. We began to talk. She would sit with me as I worked on record players and movie projectors. Soon she started to repair things, too, and we would work side by side on headsets and tape decks.

  I began walking her home every day. She lived in South Amherst and I lived all the way over the North Amherst line in Shutesbury, so I got in a lot of walking in those years. Her parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother, her three brothers, and her sister in a small ranch house. Her father had been a violent drunk like mine. Her mother was overworked, absentminded, and very dubious of me. I was, after all, longhaired, dirty, loud, vulgar, and male. So she didn’t think too much of me when I started walking her baby daughter home after school. But I persisted, because I felt Mary understood me, something I had never felt with anyone before.

  I named her Little Bear. Her mother called her Mary Lee—Lee being her middle name—or Baby Daughter, but those names would never do for me. For some reason, I have always had a problem with names. For people that are close to me, for example, I must name them myself. Sometimes I would call her Baby Daughter to tease her, but she always got mad, and I eventually gave up. Little Bear was what she remained.

  I thought she was cute—short and solid, with dark hair in pigtails. I was totally smitten. She was the first person I had met who could read as fast as me, maybe even faster. And she read exciting things: bo
oks by Asimov, Bradbury, and Heinlein. I immediately began reading them, too. But I was far too shy and insecure to ever tell her how I felt about her. So we just talked and read and fixed tape recorders and walked into town every day.

  That was Aspergian dating, circa 1972.

  8

  The Dogs Begin to Fear Me

  Any child will tell you that even the kindest and gentlest of dogs will bite if you yank its ears and pull its tail long enough. There is a dark side to Asperger’s, and it comes from our childhood dealings with people who do not treat us the way they would like to be treated. As I grew older, it seemed as though there were very few people who made me feel loved. Little Bear was one of them. My father’s parents also stuck by me. I used to visit them every summer in Georgia. They lived in Lawrenceville, a small town about an hour outside Atlanta.

  In my thirteenth summer, my grandparents picked me up at the airport, the way they always did. My grandmother Carolyn was the first person I saw when I walked off the plane. She ran up and grabbed me and I squirmed away. I was getting a little big to be grabbed.

  “Oooooooooh. John Elder! Look at you! You’ve grown so big! You are so handsome!”

  I squirmed some more, but I really liked the way they were always so proud of me and so glad to see me. No one else was.

  “Your uncle Bob is coming up this weekend and he said he was taking you driving! Ooooooooh lordy, my baby boy driving a car!”

  She led me downstairs to baggage claim, and out to where my grandfather Jack’s Cadillac was idling in the no-parking zone at the curb. I climbed in and pointed the air conditioner vents at my face as we drove out of the airport.

  It felt good to be back in Georgia.

  That weekend, Bob and I got in my grandmother’s new car. It was a Buick Electra 225, a burgundy two-door. I was a little nervous, but I moved the power seat forward until I could reach the pedals. I had been driving the farm equipment since I was twelve, but now I was about to drive a car. On a road.

  “If you can drive a tractor, you can drive the Buick.” That was easy for him to say. After all, the car belonged to my grandmother, not him. And as huge as it seemed, it was considerably smaller than my grandfather’s Fleetwood.

  “It’s a lot easier to drive than the tractor. It’s got an automatic transmission and power steering.”

  I drove the big tractor on the roads all the time, when I mowed or raked or did other work. It was a red Massey Ferguson. If my grandmother asked, “Can you get me some fertilizer and number six shotgun shells at the store, honey child?” I even drove the tractor all the way into town. Sometimes I drove to the BaskinRobbins to get ice cream. I parked in the parking lot with the cars and went inside. I had to drive as fast as that tractor would go to get home before the ice cream melted.

  I wasn’t scared of tractors because they didn’t go very fast. But the car was different. I put it in gear and touched the gas very carefully. The car leaped ahead, and I quickly slammed on the brakes. We skidded to a stop on the white sand driveway. Luckily, there was no one there to see us.

  “Gentle, son,” my uncle said.

  Very carefully, I let off the brake. The car started rolling. Very gently, I pushed the brake. The car stopped. My uncle was right. It was easy to steer. And it had a lot of power.

  We made it to the end of the driveway without a crash. I stopped where the dirt drive came out of the woods onto Highway 27, right where I would turn the mower around if I was on the tractor. The pavement shimmered in the heat, and every now and then a car went speeding past. I looked across the street to Matthews Pond, where I caught largemouth bass that my grandmother cleaned and cooked for dinner.

  “It’s okay. Look both ways, and pull out onto the road,” Bob reassured me from the passenger seat.

  We pulled out onto the road. I gave the car a little gas, and all of a sudden the speedometer showed 40.

  “This car’s got the four fifty-five engine and a four barrel. It’s fast,” Bob said.

  My grandfather always got the best of everything. I touched the brakes to make sure I could stop, and the tires gave a little chirp. We headed for my great-grandmother’s house, a mile or so up the road. My uncle and I called her Mamaw. She was ancient and small and didn’t go anywhere anymore. When I was little, I thought she’d fought in the Civil War, which wasn’t true, but she was born only a little while after. She lived in a brick ranch house about two miles up the road from my grandparents. She had snowballs made from aluminum foil in her cupboard, and she fed us goulash and fried okra.

  Mamaw had never seen me drive the tractor and was very impressed that I could drive.

  “Oh Lordy, John Elder, look at you! You’ve grown so big! And now you’re driving!”

  Shit, I thought, she’s just as excited as my grandmother. They even sound the same. She just didn’t show it as much because she was so old. I was pleased and proud, but I was careful not to let on, because I knew by this time that real men did not show emotions over things like this.

  She fussed around in the kitchen, looking for snacks. My relatives down South always fed me when I came around. My grandmother bought ice cream in five-gallon buckets just for me.

  “You’ll be a grown man soon, with your own car! Did you know my daddy had the first car in Chickamauga? He had it shipped in from Chattanooga on the train.”

  I wiggled my ears. All these thousands of cars around me, and my great-great-grandfather had the first one in town. Of course, Chickamauga was a smaller town than Lawrenceville, but even so…Woof. I was impressed. I had a real motorcar pedigree.

  Mamaw stood in the door to see me drive off. I backed out of the driveway and turned the wheel. I lined the car up, ready to shift into drive. I moved forward, but there was a problem. I got confused. The interactions were too much. The brakes. The gas pedal. The steering wheel. The shift lever.

  I failed to properly coordinate the sequential operations of the various controls, and the Buick ended up in the ditch, on top of the mailbox. In Georgia, there was always a ditch at the edge of the road.

  My uncle, who had gotten out of the car and was proudly watching me drive all by myself, quickly jumped back to avoid being flattened.

  “Damn, John Elder! You wrecked the car! You ran over the mailbox!”

  “Ooooooooooh, John Elder!” said Mamaw.

  My uncle stepped over to the car and put it in park. I got out.

  My uncle climbed in and backed the Buick into the street. We looked it over. The chrome didn’t seem damaged. The mailbox seemed all right, too, just bent a little where it had been yanked out of the ground. I tried to put it back, but the hole was way too big and the mailbox just fell over. It seemed ruined. All of a sudden, I was frantic.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Bob said. “We’ll go back and get the posthole digger and fix it.”

  Bob drove us back home. Out behind the house, he had a shed filled with boxes of nuts and bolts, old tools, lawn mowers, and all sorts of nameless junk. Dandy—my great-grandfather—had filled the shed with all manner of wood-handled agricultural tools. Uncle Bob chose a tool with two long handles coming up from a steel bucket.

  I was fascinated. I had never noticed the posthole digger before. It looked like a metal clamshell with long handles. That was a tool that could do a lot more than dig postholes in a farmer’s field.

  I carried it out to the car. My uncle drove. I figured one trip was enough for me for a while.

  “I can dig the hole,” I said. I was anxious to try it out.

  “I better do it, John Elder. We need to get finished before Mama gets home and finds out what we did to her car.” Bob called my grandmother Mama. I called her Carolyn.

  Bob rammed the digger down into the ground and picked up a bite of dirt. In a few minutes, he had a hole almost two feet deep. We replanted the mailbox and packed the dirt around the pole.

  When we got back, I took the posthole digger out of the trunk. I walked over beside the shed and banged it into the ground, ju
st like my Uncle Bob had done. It was hard work!

  Two days later, I had dug a hole as deep as the handles were tall. I had dug as far as I could. There were so many things I could do with my new hole.

  Jump in with a machine gun, and it’s a foxhole.

  Put some paper on top, and it’s a pit trap.

  Drop the dog inside, and it’s a dog jail.

  For the rest of the summer, I dug holes. I wanted to take the posthole digger home, but my grandparents said they needed it there.

  When I went back to Massachusetts, I went to the basement to see what my father had for farming tools. He had a posthole digger, too.

  I went into the front yard and started going at it. Before the hole was knee deep, I was stopped by rock. I moved over a few feet and the same thing happened. Pretty soon I had filled the front yard with rock-bottomed holes.

  I hadn’t hit rock in Georgia. That was just one more reason it was nicer down there.

  We had a large pile of wood mulch to the side of the house. My father had gotten a truckload of the stuff to spread around and make the yard look nice. But he never did it, so the mulch was still there, decomposing, where the truck had dumped it. I decided that would be a good place to dig a deeper hole. There should not be any rocks in the wood chip pile.

  Sure enough, it was easy to dig in wood chips. I hit rock again, but this time the hole was at least five feet deep. I was ready to try it out.

  “Varmint, come outside. We have a hole to test,” I yelled in the window. He was sitting in his room, wrapped in aluminum foil, looking at the pictures in People magazine. Varmint would often go along with my experiments because he had fun sometimes and didn’t usually get damaged.

  Varmint blinked as he emerged from the house into the light. He always stayed inside, in the dark, unless I lured him out. I motioned him over to where I was standing, by one of the smaller holes. I had to be careful not to make him suspicious or scare him off.

  “I want to see how easy it is to get out of these hole traps. Lay down on the ground, and I’ll drop you in. You see how fast you can get out.”