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

by John Elder Robison

  By the time the raiders made it to the door, we were all awake. I was dressed. Peter opened the door for the law as I stood back and watched. There were no guns in sight, but the two guys out front did have clubs. They seemed respectful, though, and one of them showed us a badge. He looked like a homeless person, but I figured that’s how the law looked in third world countries.

  I stepped aside and they swarmed in. Eight of them. Working in teams, they began searching the villa.

  I stood in the foyer, watching and listening. Every now and then I heard a shout as though someone had scored a point on the pinball machine in the bar in Plymouth. They must have found something, I said to myself. I became concerned about corruption. Are they planting drugs in my socks or underwear?

  Finally, they emerged from the back of the house holding several bags. I couldn’t see inside, but I consoled myself with the thought that the bags weren’t mine. Still, they were grinning. They had something. I couldn’t understand everything they said, but it became clear that we were supposed to accompany them somewhere. I stepped outside, where two more cars had arrived.

  Mike turned to me and said nonchalantly, “Well, John, this is it. This is where they take us to jail and throw away the key.” I looked around, but there was no possibility of escape. Mike doesn’t know anything, I told myself. He must be high.

  The raiders motioned me into an old Austin station wagon. It was built with seating for five, but eight of us climbed aboard. A native sat in my lap. If the brakes fail on the way down the hill, he’ll absorb the crash for me, I thought. He didn’t say a word the whole way down. Another native rode on the hood. I waited for our driver to slam on the brakes a bit too hard and send him flying under the wheels, but it never happened. He must have had practice. He grinned like he was on a roller coaster.

  We headed into the town of Plymouth and stopped in front of a stone structure. The jail. A tropical prison, really. It had rough stone walls three feet thick. The natives who raided us turned out to be the island’s entire police force, with a few drinking buddies thrown in for good measure. They were excited. A big bust! Us.

  “Stand up, mon! Say cheese for the camera. It’s your mug shot, mon!”

  After taking the pictures, they all stood around watching them develop. They were using an old Polaroid Land Camera. My grandfather had one in the 1960s.

  The leader said, “I’m Inspector Vincent, okay, gimme your passport, mon!”

  “I don’t have a passport. I just have an ID,” I responded.

  “Okay, then, mon, gimme your ID!”

  I handed Inspector Vincent my Top of the Campus card, which, back home, entitled the bearer to admission to the ninth-floor bar at the University of Massachusetts. I never did get that card back. He copied my name, address, and date of birth in painfully tiny script on an index card, which he carefully filed in a recipe box. Since the spelling of my name and my date of birth were wrong on the Top of the Campus card, the inspector’s card ended up wrong, too. I was pleased.

  No one searched me. I realized they had forgotten about that. It made me wish I had a knife or a gun. But the natives were so friendly, I would have hated to stab or shoot one. I tried to edge out the door. Politely but firmly, Vincent’s sidekick grabbed my arm and pointed back inside, to a seat.

  “You have to stay inside, mon. This is jail.” And he laughed. Asshole.

  After we were all booked, Inspector Vincent led us to a cell. There were no windows, just rusty bars. At least it wasn’t cold.

  “Jesus Christ. I hope they don’t have rats in here!” said Mike, the guitar player. Until he said it, I hadn’t given any thought to rats.

  “Do they have snakes here?” This was not the time for Mike’s vivid imagination.

  There was no way out through those stone walls, so I tugged at the bars. I could break out, I told myself, but it’s going to take some time and some work. I hoped it didn’t come to that. Besides us, the jail had one resident, an old run-down wife killer.

  Our confinement didn’t turn out to be very onerous. Inspector Vincent had some musicians on his crew, and once things calmed down, they unlocked our cell and brought out their guitars. We gave them money to buy food in town, and they served it with Coke in refillable glass bottles. I hadn’t seen bottles like that since I was a child. When they were empty, one of the policemen filled them partway with water and played them like a musical instrument. I would have been impressed if I wasn’t locked in fucking jail.

  Peter had a friend who knew someone on the island, and he pledged some land for our bail, and we were released in time for dinner. The next morning, Peter’s friend found us a lawyer, a wizened little specimen with a sharp disposition. He didn’t seem especially enamored with us. Perhaps he lives here and has daughters, I thought. After all, he’d heard about those runaway girls.

  When we were all together, he said, “Did you young men know certain kinds of drug possession are a hanging offense in a Crown colony?”

  None of us said anything.

  “Drug penalties in the colonies are, ahem, a bit draconian.”

  “Cops love busting musicians. I hope they don’t lock us up forever.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. Mike was full of happy thoughts that day.

  Seeds seemed to be a big deal to Montserrat’s finest. And that’s what they had us on: some seeds in the bottom of a bag. Marijuana seeds meant grower. Dope smokers were okay, just prison time for them, but growers were executed. The coke, the mushrooms, the speed, the acid, all those things were still packed in the luggage in some quantity, despite everyone’s best flushing efforts. They didn’t care about any of it. Seeds were what they had come for, and seeds were what they got.

  The trial was set for Wednesday. We all washed up and appeared in court as ordered that Wednesday morning. There didn’t seem to be any other cases except ours, and the courtroom was empty except for us, the judge and court officers, the lawyers, and a few spectators. We had a brief appearance in front of the judge, who was wearing a wig that would have marked him as a transvestite back in New York. However, I felt sure he did not see himself as being in drag.

  I couldn’t actually hear most of what was said because the lawyer and the prosecutor and the judge were all huddled together up front, but the whole thing was over in half an hour. Two members of the band were fined five thousand BIWI dollars, which came to about twenty-five hundred U.S. dollars. The charges against me and the girls were dropped. We were free to go in time for lunch. I got the distinct impression that our arrest provided a considerable boost to the island government’s economy.

  One of the policemen drove me back to the villa, where I picked up our rental car. It was a Jeep-like rig called a Morris Moke. Mokes are a lot of fun, and a tropical island like Montserrat was the ideal place to have one. Prior to my arrest, I had even gotten a Montserrat driver’s license for the thing. I was kind of proud of it.

  It was actually a surprise that I would have any car to drive, given the fact that I was broke. As it happened, though, I hadn’t needed any money when Billy Perry and I walked past the car rental place on our first day on the island. I had looked into their garage, where two mechanics seemed to be struggling to change the oil in an old Morris car.

  “Need some help?” I was half-joking, but they took me seriously.

  “He’s a great mechanic. From the U.S.” Billy pointed at me and they looked impressed. I ended up staying there two hours, helping them fix cars.

  “You could make a great living if you wanna stay here, mon,” they said.

  They didn’t have any money to pay me, but I didn’t have a car. So we had the basis for a good trade. I fixed some Mokes and Austins, and I got wheels.

  I drove my Moke back to the jail to ferry the crew home. When I got there, though, the plan had changed. It seemed we were now celebrities. Drinks were on the house at the local bar, and that’s where we went.

  When it came time to leave, we were all pretty drunk. I decided to
go for a ride on the beach, which was only a short ride away. When I got there, I raced down the sandy straightaway, swerving around people as they lay on the sand. I headed to the end, into the little sand dunes. Mokes don’t go very fast, but I had this one moving pretty good as I popped over a dune, and just like that, I was in the ocean.

  The Moke sank, and I quickly discovered the tide was coming in. Soon the Moke was gone from sight.

  Standing on the shore, I felt sick and drunk. My friends had wandered off. And I had lost my transportation. The only sign of my Moke was the little red flag that was on a pole sticking up from the back bumper. Every time there was a trough in the waves, the flag popped out of the sea.

  Shit, I said to myself. I’d better get it out of the water.

  There was no sign of the people I had been riding with. I trudged back to the bar to get help removing the car. When I went inside, a band had set up, and two guys were playing steel drums. It was magical, the way they played those trilling melodies on instruments made from old oil drums. One of the guys from the jail was there, too. He’d changed from a policeman to a musician. Looking at him, you’d never have guessed. I was tempted to stay at the bar all night, but I knew we had to get that Moke back. I couldn’t afford to buy the rental agency another one.

  I rounded up five guys and we walked back to the beach. The tide was still high, and we had to swim out to the Moke and stand on its hood and seats.

  “All together, now, let’s dive down, grab it, and drag it back. One…two…three…dive!” Shit, that was hard work! But we did it. Once the Moke was back on the sand, I removed all its filler caps and we flipped it on its head to drain. I got a ride home while it sat and dried out.

  The next morning, I got up early and got a ride to the rental agency. As soon as I arrived, I heard, “Hey, I heard you sank our Moke in the ocean, mon!” It seemed news traveled fast on Montserrat.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll have it running in a few hours.” I got some gas, some oil, and a fresh battery, and then I trudged back to the beach with two guys from the rental place as assistants. We flipped the car back on its feet. I filled it with fresh fluids, changed the battery, and cleaned out the carburetor and the ignition. I pulled the plugs and shot oil into the cylinders. Amazingly, it ran. We drove back to the rental agency, where I rinsed it with a hose and pronounced it good as new.

  The next day, our vacation came to an end. I said good-bye to Willie and his iguana, and we flew home on a World War II surplus DC-3 with no door and with chickens in cages stacked in the aisle. Skimming a thousand feet above the ocean, we headed back to the snow, the spring thaw, and the mud. And our next show, Friday night at the Rusty Nail. A few years later, most of Montserrat vanished when the volcano erupted. The villa, the jail, the roads…all gone.

  I didn’t end up staying with Fat very much longer. I had a hard time living with all the people in that house. I never knew what to say or do, and I often felt lost. But I had made a lot of contacts and become a lot more confident, at least with respect to engineering issues. Interacting about technical things had become comfortable, and the more I did it, the more I knew and the easier it got. I wouldn’t hesitate at all to walk up to a sound man at a concert. But I was still terrified of walking up to a girl.

  13

  The Big Time

  Good things started happening to me as the winter of ’78 came to an end. That March, a long dark period of loneliness came to an end when I ran into Little Bear at the university one day. I was amazed to find that she was now a student there. We had not spoken in a very long time, but we reconnected right away. She told me that she’d left me when one of her friends made up an ugly story about me. She later learned it was all a lie, but by then it was too late. We both regretted the lost time.

  We spent that spring walking the old railway lines around Amherst, collecting old railway spikes and glass telegraph insulators that had been abandoned in the grass. We talked about ourselves, our dreams, science fiction, electronics, cars, and motorcycles. I was in love.

  I got another big break two months later: a job with a national sound company. One with big equipment. The kind used in stadiums, not barrooms.

  The first to hire me was Britannia Row Audio, the sound company that Pink Floyd had formed to rent out their equipment when they were not on tour. Britro, as they were called in the United States, was headed by Mick Kluczynski, an English fellow who had been with Pink Floyd for years. I met Mick when he came to Amherst, doing sound for the university’s spring concert. Sha Na Na was playing, and their amplifiers were breaking down. I could see they were having trouble as I wandered in during the sound check.

  “Having troubles with those Phase Linears?” I asked. Maybe this will be my chance, I thought.

  “Fookin’ right we have trouble. I’m Mick, and this is Seth. Who are you?”

  Mick was a short, chubby fellow with a strong English accent. “I run the main system,” Mick continued, “and my mate Seth runs the monitors.” The main sound system is the one that the audience hears—the system whose speakers flank the stage in huge piles. It’s sometimes called the house system. The monitor system’s speakers face the stage. Monitors allow the performers to hear themselves sing over the noise of the instrument amplifiers and everything else on stage.

  “I’m John Robison. I’m an engineer. I know about Phase Linear troubles.” That sounded impressive. At least, I hoped it did.

  And it was true. At the time, Crown and Phase Linear were the two main companies making large amplifiers for big sound systems, and I had fixed several Phase Linears for local bands. They had an unfortunate tendency to explode when you played them too loud. But all I had ever seen till then were sound systems with one, or at most two, Phase Linears. These guys had a mountain of them, at least twenty that I could see at a glance. I had never seen anything like that before. I was very impressed.

  “Well, come up look at these, Mister Engineer.” Mick invited me up onto the stage and took me over to an area on the side that was filled with racks of auxiliary electronics. They had more equipment than I’d ever seen in one place, but I didn’t let on.

  I asked for a screwdriver, and they handed me a complete Xcelite tool kit. At the time, Xcelite was the Rolls-Royce of hand tools. I had one or two myself, but an entire kit was a luxury. I looked at the fuse panels. The DC fuses were blown, and the glass was black. The black coloring meant a dead short. The output transistors had fried. I could fix them, but not there. I needed a shop.

  “Where do you guys come from?” I asked.

  “We’re from the U.K.,” he said. “But we’ve just opened an office here in the States. In Long Island City.” It took me a moment to figure out what “from the U.K.” meant. For some reason, British musicians I spoke to were never “from England.” They were always “from the U.K.” “The Floyd sent me here to run the place,” said Mick, “and Mr. Goldman here”—pointing to Seth—“is my number two.”

  “I could fix these amps for you, but I’d need bench space to take them apart. Do you have space down there?”

  It turned out they had a big radio studio with all the room I would need. We made a date for the following week, and I loaded my tools into the car and headed for New York. I had never been to Long Island City before. I was a little scared. Could I really do this?

  I arrived in front of a nondescript building on a side street, one of a hundred identical buildings. Had I made a mistake? There was nothing to give any clue what might be inside.

  Seth opened the door when I rang. I stepped into a foyer that opened up into a huge studio. Sound and light gear covered the floor, and speaker cabinets were piled against a wall.

  “You guys have a lot of gear,” I said.

  “We’ve got half the Floyd system here, with some stuff we’ve added,” Seth answered. “The Floyd have the biggest sound system in the world, you know.”

  Just as they were “from the U.K.,” they worked “for the Floyd.” Only ou
tsiders said “Pink Floyd.” I caught on to that pretty fast even with my limited social skills. I also hadn’t known that Floyd had the biggest sound system, but I nodded knowledgeably.

  “Where are your broken amps?” I asked, anxious to prove myself.

  Seth led me to a back room, where a long bench lined a wall and skylights provided illumination. There were probably fifty Phase Linear amplifiers piled up against the wall. The mound of broken equipment was at least ten feet wide, and taller than me.

  “Are all of those broken?” Surely that wasn’t possible. I was expecting one or two broken amplifiers, not a truckload.

  “Fookin’ right,” he said. “Have at it.” And with that, he went back up front.

  It took me three days, several trips to the parts store, and two overnight shipments from Phase Linear, but I fixed all but two of them. And those two I stripped for parts. When I was done, we hauled the repaired amplifiers onto the soundstage. One by one, we hooked them into the PA. Seth ran each one up to full power, playing tapes of Judas Priest and Roxy Music he’d made on the last tours.

  All fifty-two of my amps passed the tests.

  “Fookin’ incredible,” said Mick.

  I was very proud of myself. It was the biggest and fastest repair job I had ever done. And they had more. Piles and piles of broken equipment. They had ideas, too.

  “We’ve got a three-way system now, but we’d like to go five-way. No one has that on tour. Think you could build a five-way crossover?”

  “Of course,” I said, determined to sound confident. Then I headed home to think about it.

  I told Little Bear about my plan.

  “What’s a five-way crossover?” she asked.

  “It divides the sound into bands. So you have the low bass notes, your bass guitar sounds, going to the biggest speakers. Then you have upper bass, the low range on the guitars and piano, going to the next biggest speakers. You have your low mids, vocals mostly, going to their own speakers, Your high mids, the saxophones and horns, go to another set of speakers. And, finally, your highs, the high hats, the cymbals, go to special high-frequency speakers.”