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

by John Elder Robison

  “Your father has snapped,” my mother declared on one of those occasions. “He’s homicidal. He’s planning to kill us all. We have to hide until the doctor can have him committed.”

  I had heard my mother say that before, and indeed I would hear it several more times in the year to come, but I still wasn’t sure who was telling the truth. She might have been right, I figured, given my previous experience with my father. In retrospect, though, I suspect it was merely my mother’s paranoia, fueled by her mental illness and Dr. Finch’s increasingly bizarre behavior. He renamed his office the Institute of Maturation, and on sunny days, he paraded around town with an umbrella, towing a passel of balloons. He said he was drawing attention to his causes.

  At times, when my mother posed a difficult question, he would use a technique called “Bible dipping” to arrive at an answer. He’d say, “Margaret, open the Bible and put your finger on a passage.” She would do that, and he would read the passage and we’d discuss what to do. I don’t mean to disparage the Bible, but, frankly, it does not strike me as the place to look for answers to questions like “Should we leave home and go stay in Gloucester for a while?” I want a professional to tell me what to do, I thought. I can go home and read the Bible some other time.

  It was hard to object to even his most dubious techniques, though, because he and his family were always really nice to me, and he made me feel better.

  After a few days’ “vacation,” we returned home. While we were gone, the police had arrested my father and locked him in the Northampton State Hospital for observation. When they let him out a week or so later, he was subdued and seemed to have less potential for violence. I watched him carefully because of his prior history, but I had always judged the probability of his murdering us to be low. When he got drunk, he was mostly just belligerent, and I doubted he would actually hunt us down and kill us while sober. Also, thanks to his talks with the doctor, he no longer attacked me, no matter how much he might have wanted to.

  Dr. Finch was in some ways the least predictable variable in the whole equation. Sometimes it seemed like he calmed things down and other times it seemed like he fired my parents up.

  Looking back, I can see that my father was seriously depressed. At the same time, my mother was becoming genuinely crazy. She would tell me about the demons that were watching her, interrupting herself periodically to howl like a wild animal. My brother has described it very well: She would get a glint in her eye, and she would become manic. She would talk nonstop and smoke nonstop and go faster and faster and faster and then surprise you by doing something totally outlandish, like eating cigarette butts in the middle of a conversation. Is it hereditary? I wondered. Will it happen to me? The terrifying threat of mental collapse followed me long into adulthood.

  My brother and I lurched from one parent to another, with my parents’ friends and the doctor’s daughter Hope popping in to take care of us when both parents were down for the count. My mother’s friend Pat Schneider sticks in my mind as helping more than most in that time, but many other people whose names I have forgotten pitched in. I don’t know what would have happened if they had not been around. I guess we’d have ended up in foster homes or something even worse.

  When the ambulance arrived to take my mother to the state hospital a few months after our “vacation,” I agreed with Dr. Finch that she needed to be there. I dimly remember going to visit her. We had to go through several locked doors, as in a prison, and my mother looked like an inmate. She seemed to be in a zombielike state from whatever medication they had put her on. I wondered if she would ever get out.

  That was a very hard time for Varmint and me, because we didn’t know whom to believe. It seemed like everyone told us a different story.

  “Your mother has temporarily lost her mind,” our father would say when she wasn’t around. “It runs in her family.” This was said in a perfectly calm voice. And when she was gone, he didn’t get drunk. Why can’t he be that way all the time? I thought. Our mother, meanwhile, prepared us for the idea that our father was planning to hunt us down and kill us someday. At least until she herself was locked up.

  One of the toughest things about living with my parents was the way they changed at the drop of a hat. Some days, my father would just lie in bed, mumbling nonsense like “The bats are flying all around…I have to go get the sink.” “He’s just acting out,” my mother would rage. Was he? I could never tell. The next day, it would be as if nothing had happened.

  To my grandfather Jack, it seemed pretty black and white. “Your mother’s family is just no damn good! All those Richters are crazy! Look at them!” I did look at them, and they seemed okay to me. Jack’s comments really worried me, though. For a long time, I wished I could move down to Georgia and live with Jack, but I never did.

  “Your parents are really good people, and they mean well. They’re just having a hard time.” Pat Schneider and Dr. Finch’s daughter Hope would try to reassure us, but they were not the ones whose parents were raving or locked in cages.

  I tried to look out for the Varmint, but it was hard.

  With all the chaos, there wasn’t much chance of my being an A student ever again, or even passing my courses. I had too many family problems and too many defects. I have already mentioned my problems looking people in the eye. There were other issues, too. Apparently, I was also guilty of bobbing and bouncing and weaving. And the stress was making it worse.

  “Why are you bobbing your head like that?”

  I heard that line a lot from teachers and other grown-ups when I was little. I still hear a variation of it today.

  “Dad, stop being autistic!”

  That’s what my teenage son says when I rock back and forth in a restaurant.

  Both comments—snivels, I would call them, since no harm is being done—refer to my tendency to move in some kind of regular pattern without knowing it. I might be lying on the sofa, moving my foot back and forth. Or I might be reading a menu, gently rocking from side to side. Or I might just be bobbing my head up and down. Whatever I am doing, it feels perfectly normal to me. But I guess “normal” people don’t do it. I don’t know what causes me to start; in fact, I seldom notice when I do start. It just happens.

  Then someone says, “Stop bobbing!” and I come to a halt.

  “What’s the matter with you! I told you about that head bobbing five minutes ago and now you’re doing it again! Are you trying to make me mad?”

  Reactions like that would just reinforce the feeling that I did not belong in school.

  Along with bobbing and weaving, I was also frequently criticized or ridiculed for inappropriate expressions. These attacks seemed to me to come out of the blue, and they usually made me want to run off and hide.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “Wipe that stupid expression off your face! Right now!”

  “You’re scary! You’re staring at me like a specimen in a jar!”

  When I was in tenth grade, I heard the increasingly unwelcome “specimen in a jar” crack one time too often from my English teacher, Mrs. Crowley. “What are you staring at?” she would say. It was not a polite question but a rude demand. So one day I answered her rudeness with sweetness and light.

  “Oh, Mrs. Crowley,” I answered, in my nicest voice, “I was just imagining you chained up, in a deep hole, with a heavy steel grate on top. And rats. Lots of rats. Crawling all over you.” Then I made a smile, baring my teeth the way dogs do when they’re ready to bite.

  That got me a trip to the principal, and then the guidance office, and then the school psychologist. But it was worth it. Mrs. Crowley never once made a crack to me again.

  I don’t recall any grown-up ever trying to figure out why I was staring. I might have been able to tell them if they had asked. Sometimes I was thinking of other things and just gazing their way absentmindedly. Other times I was watching them intently, trying to interpret their behavior.

  My parents decided on a
last-ditch effort to keep me in school. They enrolled me in a group for troubled kids. We would meet each week in an old farmhouse owned by the university and talk about our problems getting along. There were six of us, and a facilitator, who was a psychology major. They didn’t teach me to get along, but I did learn that there were plenty of other kids who couldn’t get along any better than me. That in itself was encouraging. I realized that I was not the bottom of the barrel. Or if I was, the bottom was roomy because there were a lot of us down there.

  In the first sixteen years of my life, my parents took me to at least a dozen so-called mental health professionals. Not one of them ever came close to figuring out what was wrong with me. In their defense, I will concede that Asperger’s did not yet exist as a diagnosis, but autism did, and no one ever mentioned I might have any kind of autistic spectrum disorder. Autism was viewed by many as a much more extreme condition—one where kids never talked and could not take care of themselves. Rather than take a close and sympathetic look at me, it proved easier and less controversial for the professionals to say I was just lazy, or angry, or defiant. But none of those words led to a solution for my problems.

  It would take more than a discussion group to fix my school troubles. So when my next report card showed straight Fs, I realized it was time to go. There hadn’t been much keeping me there anyway beyond the vague idea that being a legitimate high school graduate was better than being a dropout. There was only one problem. I was just fifteen, and it was against the law to quit school before the age of sixteen.

  The school had such a strong desire to be rid of me that they stepped up to the plate with a solution. “If you take the GED and score at least seventy-five percent, we’ll treat you as a graduate and you can leave.” My guidance counselor presented this to me in the same tone of voice he’d use to sell some punk a two-hundred-dollar Cadillac in his second job as a used car salesman. I took the test and got a 96 percent. They offered me a diploma, “for a small recording fee.”

  “Only twenty dollars,” the clerk said with a smile.

  I smiled back. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t need your diploma.” And I never looked back. My parents hardly seemed to notice.

  It was time to figure out what to do, now that I was a fifteen-year-old grown-up. It was a little scary. I retreated to the woods to think, just as I’d done as a little boy in Seattle.

  I had always loved the outdoors, and once I wasn’t in school it felt as though I had all the time in the world. It was spring, and I spent a lot of time alone, thinking about what I should do next. I would venture out from home for days at a time, living under trees and in falling-down cabins that I found in the forest.

  One day I was walking through a glade of young pine trees, several miles from home, when a voice boomed out of nowhere.

  “Stop right there!”

  I ducked under some pine branches. There shouldn’t have been anyone for miles in any direction.

  But there was. Twenty feet in front of me, a shaggy-haired guy in army camouflage sat tending a coffeepot over a small fire.

  What the fuck!

  I stopped.

  The guy was camped in the middle of a small clearing. I saw a green tent behind him. There were no guns in sight. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

  “You’re just a kid. What are you doing out here?”

  I didn’t think of myself as “just a kid,” but he was older and bigger and appeared to be living in the woods. I considered running away, but there didn’t seem to be any threat. I decided to answer.

  “I live here,” I said. “About two miles away. What are you doing here?”

  “I live here, too,” he said. “Right here.”

  “Here in the woods?” Grown-ups were not supposed to live in tents.

  “For now. I’ve lived in worse places,” he said. “Have a seat.” I sat down and he began to talk.

  Paul told me he was a disabled Vietnam veteran. He had been shot, and his leg didn’t work very well anymore. After getting out of the service, he’d been hitchhiking around the country, living off the land. I was fascinated.

  “Want a drink?” he asked. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was offering, but I nodded. He opened a small glass bottle filled with what looked like fizzy water. Canada Dry was all the label said. I took a sip and would have spit it out if I weren’t on my best behavior.

  “What is it?” I asked. I knew whiskey was nasty to swallow, but that drinking it was a sign of being grown up. Maybe this stuff would be the same.

  “Quinine water!” He said it brightly, as though anyone should know what it was, and know it was good. By that point in my life, I had heard of all the most common types of liquor. Vodka. Whiskey. Rum. Tequila. Bourbon. None of them sounded anything like quinine water.

  “I acquired a taste for it in ’Nam,” he said. “It keeps you from getting malaria.”

  I had never heard of anyone in New England coming down with malaria. Maybe it’s one of those rare diseases, like meningitis, I thought. So it’s like medicine water. I took another drink. I had read about how they had to conquer malaria in order to build the Panama Canal. I looked around as I sipped my quinine water, comparing the Shutesbury woods to the Central American jungle.

  Paul was living in a glade, far from roads, with nothing more than an army tent and a duffel bag. He had made a seat from a log, and he had a small ring of stones with a fire that warmed an old coffeepot. Where was his food?

  “I live off the land, and I forage in town,” he told me. Whatever he was doing must work, I figured, because he looked healthy.

  “Why don’t you build a shelter?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to settle down,” he said. “I need to be able to move out on a moment’s notice.” In fact, he never did build a shelter. He seemed impervious to weather.

  I had always thought I knew my way around the woods, but Paul showed me how much I still needed to learn. Paul could snare rabbits for a stew. He caught trout for breakfast. And to round it out, he knew how to forage in dumpsters for fresh baked goods and vegetables. Until I met him, I never knew the bounty that could be fished from a dumpster in a town like ours.

  It was from Paul that I learned how to catch fish with a BB gun. It’s surprisingly simple, provided you’re a good shot. You sit at the edge of the pool, gun at the ready. Ideally, you sit in a tree branch so that you are eight to ten feet off the ground, looking down into the pool. Then you throw bread crumbs onto the pond’s surface. When the fish swim up to eat them, you shoot them. It’s a lot easier than fishing, but it does take a steady hand.

  “I use a shotgun with slugs,” Paul said. “That way, you don’t have to hit the fish. They get stunned when the slug hits the water, and you just scoop ’em up. The only easier way to get fish is to toss a grenade in the pond and go in with a big net,” he told me. I soon heard he’d done that, over at Smith College. The shore was lined with dead fish when I walked over to check it out.

  Thanks to Paul, I learned to walk silently through the woods. I learned to flow around and under the brush, so as to pass without a sound and without a trace. I learned to live in the woods, not just visit.

  I also learned to watch where I stepped.

  “Watch that wire!”

  Wire? Paul had rigged a perimeter of trip wires around his camp to prevent someone walking in and surprising him. They were virtually invisible.

  “If that was rigged to a claymore mine, you’d be dead now!”

  As a kid in the Shutesbury woods, it never would have occurred to me to watch for trip wires and land mines. Thirty years later, though, I still remember what he showed me, and I watch where I step.

  He told me stories of his time in the Army. I expected a Vietnam vet to tell me of combat in faraway places, but that wasn’t what I heard. He told me about being ambushed by tigers in the jungle. He told me about loading bales of drugs and contraband aboard DC-3 airplanes. He told me of setting booby traps for the enemy, and impaling
them with sharpened sticks. His stories bore no resemblance to my previous notions of war, which were formed watching Vic Morrow in the TV series Combat.

  Paul stayed in his camp all through that summer. I walked up to visit him almost every day, and I stayed several days on many occasions. It was a nice place to pass the time. There was no family trouble, no pressure to get a job, and no one to give me a hard time. The skills that had enabled Paul to hide in the Asian jungle allowed him to remain perfectly hidden in Shutesbury. Whenever I was there, I was invisible, too.

  It was nice living in the Shutesbury woods with my friend Paul, but anytime I wanted to go to town I faced a six-mile walk. I never wanted to be a hermit. I always imagined myself being around other people, even though I had a hard time interacting with them. I realized that I needed some unique talent that would make people interact with me. That way, I wouldn’t have to initiate any interactions—I’d just have to respond, which was easier for me. Luckily, I was going somewhere with my talent for fixing and improving and innovating musical equipment. I seemed to be able to make it sing in a way that few others could. More and more, musicians began seeking me out.

  With every passing week, I was growing up. I had learned to avoid land mines and had started imagining a future for myself in music.

  That September, when the nights began getting cooler, Paul began talking about going south to Florida. One fall morning, I walked up to see him and he was gone. No trace of him. The camp had been swept clear. I could have walked through a few days later and I would never have known that someone had lived there for two months. No trash, no disturbed ground, no evidence of any kind.

  I never knew where he went, and I never told anyone about him or what he taught me. Years later, I saw a news story about Paul testifying at a Boston antiwar hearing and discovered that he was a war hero, a highly decorated Green Beret.

  It was time to come out of the woods and join society.