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

by John Elder Robison

  It’s a Friday night in June, eighty-five degrees outside. Before the show, the road manager said there were ninety-two thousand people on the floor, and the line to get in looks half a mile long. Inside, it’s supposed to be air-conditioned, but the air is hot. You’re sweating, and you can smell the crowd. You’d like to take a walk, but wading five hundred feet through that crowd to get to the door is not an appealing prospect. You shudder to think what would happen if there was a fire.

  The longer the lights stay off, the edgier the crowd gets. The only lights you can see are the exit signs and the work lights where you’re standing. You’re vulnerable. If they riot, you know they’ll go for you first.

  You think about that while you wait.

  You, the lighting director, the sound guy, the road manager, and the fire chief are standing up there. The crowd is getting restless, and after a few minutes they begin to chant. It’s almost time. The red LED flashes in front of you. The lighting director leans forward, keys the mike on the headset he’s wearing, and says, “It’s showtime, kiddies.” You reach forward and fire the lights. The first time you hit the button, you feel it in your stomach…What if nothing happens? What if they don’t work?

  But then the light washes back from the stage and rolls over you. They do work. Your lights.

  It’s like magic, how it’s all come together, though you don’t think of it as magic because you understand how every single piece works and you know there’s no magic involved. Just basic engineering principles. You’ve taken thousands of lifeless individual parts—lightbulbs, reflectors, circuit breakers, dimmer packs, power cables, clamps, and trusses—and turned them into a living thing. And you are its master.

  You’ve designed it and built it, and now you’ve become a part of it. It’s come alive. Electricity is its food, and you are its brain. You have become one with the machine. As long as you remain part of it, it’s alive. Without you, it will revert to its component parts. But if it burns up while you’re running it—maybe because you pushed too hard or made a mistake—that’s death.

  Becoming the brain of the lighting system takes intense focus and concentration. It’s easy to say, “Push the button and the lights come on,” but the reality is much more complex. The lights need to be brought up gently to keep them from burning out. To turn up all the lights, you must do a dance over the keyboard, bringing up first one, then another, because if you move too fast you could overload the system and blow a breaker, and you’d be left with nothing at all. Darkness. Your worst nightmare in the middle of a show. Darkness is when they riot, and you must never, never let that happen. You must develop a sixth sense for your system, to feel how it’s doing, to be really great.

  And now you’re doing it. Cones of colored light are reaching down from the ceiling to the stage, washing over the scenery. The cones are moving and changing as you switch from light to light in a constant dance that follows the music. Fog machines behind the stage are generating clouds, and your lights are making patterns in the mist.

  The faces of the crowd are visible, and they are all staring at the stage. There is action up there, and it’s loud. And you’re like the wizard of Oz. You’re right there in the open, and no one sees you.

  You feel a chill as the lights change in response to your commands. You’ve brought a million watts of lighting to life by leaning forward and moving two fingers. Just a gentle push and you’ve moved enough power to light a whole neighborhood. For now, all of your mental energy is focused on that lighting system. Once the show has started, there is no time for daydreaming. You know the color and focus and aiming point of every one of the three hundred lights that hang from your truss. Now you concentrate and pick out each one, one at a time, and you make small adjustments as you scan them.

  Now that you’re working, your concentration is so intense that you don’t even hear the show. You don’t see the crowd. Instead, you’re seeing each of those hundreds of lights as individuals, and it’s all you can do to keep them following the music. It’s just like playing a huge musical instrument, and your hands never stop moving on the dimmers.

  If you had been backstage, near the electrical panels, you’d have heard the hum as the power surge hit the panel when the lights came up. Fifty feet above the floor, three hundred lights came on and a wave of heat rolled off them like someone just opened the door to a furnace.

  When the show started, everything happened at once. The lights came up, the cannons fired, and the band started playing. From up high in the back of the hall, the follow spots—ten-foot-long spotlights with powerful xenon lamps—came on and picked out the musicians with long fingers of white light. Next to you, the sound engineer watches his meters as they turn from green to red. The fire chief holds up his sound pressure meter and frowns and waves it in front of the road manager. It’s too loud to talk. It shows 124 decibels, about the level of jets taking off at the Detroit airport. It’s too loud to be legal, but no one hears the chief. The crowd roars and the music gets even louder.

  And it’s never enough. You can always have brighter lights, bigger amplifiers. These are machines that run at 100 percent, every show. One million watts of power, right there under your finger. There’s nothing like it in the world.

  17

  Rock and Roll All Night

  The Return of KISS tour hit the road in the summer of 1979. The first concert was scheduled for June 15 in Lakeland, Florida. I would be there.

  I had been working since spring, building a new collection of special-effects guitars for Ace. Tex and I had worked with luthier Steve Carr to make my electronic creations playable. Carr had done the fretwork and final finishing, and Tex had test played the guitars. I had designed and built the electronics. The band had just released Dynasty, and their songs were once again climbing the charts.

  For this tour, the band would be using all new equipment. The stage was new. The effects were new. The costumes were new. And all the special guitars we had created were new. All that new stuff would be very exciting except for the worry—would it really work?

  A week before the first show, the rest of the crew had arrived in Florida to set up, and I was down to the wire. It seemed like I was working twenty-five hours a day. Tex and the road manager were calling me daily, asking what was taking so long, and I was in a state of high anxiety.

  “We’re all here waiting, Ampie,” Tex would say. “The tour is starting!”

  Back home, we were building and refining right up to the last minute. Would it really work? At a real concert? In front of an audience? I sure hoped so.

  I finally arrived at the Orlando airport on a bright, hot Thursday morning two days before the show. With my cutoff blue jeans and long hair and beard, I looked more like a biker than a Florida tourist, but there I was. I had a bag of clothes, a box packed with explosives, tools, parts, and weapons, and two guitar cases. As I trooped off the plane, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of moms and kids headed for a big weekend at Disney World. They were loud, they were rude, they smelled funny, and most kept a respectful distance from me.

  We all rode the monorail from the gate into the terminal building. Stray kids climbed over the luggage as I waited for my bags to emerge. I tried to remember what I’d read about the Florida gun laws and wondered which ones I was violating.

  Outside the terminal, it was like a steam bath. I had flown first class, and now I rented a Lincoln, the most air-conditioned vehicle they had. I charged it all to the band. If those guitars worked, they would pay any bill I handed in. If they didn’t work, a new life in the Caribbean was just a one-hour plane ride away.

  I headed for the hotel, a sprawling two-story structure with peeling stucco, mold, and a faintly foul smell at the edge of a swamp. Everything in Florida was at the edge of a swamp. It was all swamp, except where people had drained it and paved it or built something. They gave me a room on the first floor in back with two beds and a TV.

  The hotel was not what I expected in an upscale chain.
Everything was run-down and cheap. The beds were hard, the chairs were flimsy, and there was a bottle opener bolted to the counter in the bathroom, within easy reach of the toilet. It was the sort of place where you didn’t put your hands anywhere you couldn’t see. The kind of place where even the grown-ups peed in the pool. But I figured it would do; I was only planning to be there two nights.

  After I shut the door, I unpacked the guitars and laid them on one of the beds, carefully, so nothing would get scratched. They both used the Frezzolini rechargeable battery packs, so I plugged the guitars into their chargers and made sure the ready lights were lit. Nothing seemed to have broken on the ride down.

  The guitars needed to charge for at least an hour before they could be used. While I was waiting, I retrieved my revolver and tour pass from the bottom of my suitcase. I got the bullets out of another bag—even then, it was against the law to carry a loaded gun on a plane—and filled the revolver’s chamber, then stuck the gun under the false bottom of my Halliburton briefcase.

  When the guitars were ready, I picked up the light one and gave the speed knob a quick twist. It came to life, with stripes of light moving over the face of the guitar. All 750 little lamps seemed to be working. I could feel the heat from the lamps on my hand, under the clear plastic face. I shut it off to save the battery.

  I picked up the smoker and worked the mechanism. I hit the light switch and watched the lamp come on for a few seconds. I looked inside.

  There was nothing left to do. I was as ready as I was going to get. I carried them to the car.

  When I arrived at the arena, most of the setup work was done. Some of the guys were standing around a buffet, eating catered food. Another fellow was flying a model airplane over the seats, and two carpenters were behind the stage, doing line after line of coke. They asked if I wanted some. The coke could keep you moving, but I was zippy enough as it was. With all my worries about whether my stuff would work, I didn’t need any drugs to keep me going.

  I carried the guitar cases past the coke line and back into the dressing rooms where we’d set them up. Most of the people on the crew had never seen them before, and a crowd filled the room and spilled into the hall. Tex and Paul—the two crew members who handled the guitars—moved in close to check them out for the first time.

  Everyone broke into grins when Tex turned on the light guitar and stripes of white light began running up and down the body. The light on the wall was like ripples swimming across a pond, but bright.

  “That is incredibly cool, Ampie!”

  A crowd gathered. No one had ever seen anything like that before.

  “Damn, Ampie, that thing is bright!”

  Someone shut off the ceiling lights and we all watched it for a moment. It was starting to feel like a winner.

  Ace arrived. He picked the guitar up and turned it in his hands. Carefully, as though it were alive and might bite. I could understand that. When you held it, you could feel the heat from the lamps sweep up and down your skin as the patterns changed. It actually felt alive. With your hand on the face, it brushed your palm as it ran.

  “Far out. Fuckin’ Ampie. This is wild!”

  We carried the guitars to the stage and plugged into Ace’s stack of six Marshall amplifiers. The sounds filled the empty civic center. He loved them, and I was so proud and relieved. There was one more night before the show.

  KISS played on custom-built staging, and I needed to have some stuff welded to the aluminum frames on Ace’s side of the stage to hold pieces for one of the guitars. I told the head carpenter what I needed, and he said he’d have it done that night. “But that’s a big favor. You owe me a full gallon of Tanqueray gin,” he said. What could I do but agree? After all my anxiety about those guitars working, I was too cranked up to sleep, but eventually I went back to my room and passed out.

  When I woke up, the sun was shining brightly through my windows. I had a ground floor room looking out onto a lawn that sloped down into tall marsh grasses. The view was kind of pretty, marred only by the sign on the lawn about ten feet from the door:

  WARNING

  REPTILES

  DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT

  I hadn’t noticed the sign before, but I hadn’t paid much attention to anything but those guitars when I arrived. Thinking I would take a picture of it, I opened the door and almost stepped on a large black water moccasin sunning himself on the concrete patio. My concrete patio.

  He was three feet long, and fat. Almost as thick as my leg. Nasty looking. The snake saw me, and he quickly reared back and opened his mouth, ready to strike. The inside was all white with a little bit of pink. I had seen snakes like him before, on my grandparents’ farm. Rattlesnakes would run away if you gave them the chance, but water moccasins would stand their ground or even attack. This one must have been thinking attack. I quickly closed the door and considered what to do next.

  The first time I saw a poisonous snake I was probably eight years old. Even then, I knew just what to do. I went into the house. I went to the encyclopedia and turned to snake. I read all about them. Water moccasins were bad, and so were rattlers and copperheads, but I learned there were far more dangerous snakes elsewhere in the world. I decided then and there not to visit those places.

  As a child, I had read that the risk of death from a snakebite was less than the risk of drowning in a swimming pool, or being killed in a car accident. But those statistics didn’t apply today. Today I had an angry venomous snake two feet away, with just a flimsy steel motel door between me and him. I had to do something. If I went back to sleep, housekeeping would arrive to clean the room, and they’d let him in. I certainly didn’t want him crawling in with me. If I wanted a chance to drown in the pool or die in a car accident, I would have to remove the snake or make it past him alive. The odds had turned.

  People up North say, “Why do people kill them? Snakes are okay. They won’t hurt you unless you provoke them.” Down South they don’t say things like that. They know better. On my grandparents’ farm, Gerald—a hired hand—jabbed a water moccasin with a stick, thinking it would slither away. It didn’t. Quick as lightning, it climbed the stick and bit him. His hand turned purple and he almost died.

  When I was fifteen, one dropped off a branch into a rowboat I was paddling, and I shot it six times, clubbed it with an oar, and it still tried to bite me. The rowboat almost sank, too. My great-grandfather Dandy had long ago told me the best answer to any snake question.

  “Number six shot.”

  That’s what he loaded into the sawed-off shotgun that he carried in the high grass and swampland.

  I didn’t have a shotgun, but I had the next best thing. I went to my briefcase and took out my revolver. Dumping the hollow points onto the bed, I quickly loaded it with snake shot. Snake shot is like steel gravel, encased in a cartridge. Why would I have snake shot on a rock and roll tour, you ask? Don’t. I was always armed, and I spent my summers in the South. I knew plenty about what lived in the Florida swamps.

  I was ready. I opened the door, stepped out, lowered the gun, and shot that snake twice before he had a chance to collect his thoughts and bite me. The first shot knocked him down. The second shot blew him back about ten feet into the grass. I stepped out and shot him four more times, just to be safe. As the sound of the shots faded away, I looked around.

  The cloud of gun smoke was dissipating. The snake was in two pieces. The tail was twitching. The bathers at the pool had all dived for cover. Some were in the water, some under the chairs. No one was moving.

  “It’s okay, folks. Just a snake!” I smiled and waved the gun reassuringly.

  Still, nobody moved. I realized I was standing outside, next to a pool full of kids and sunbathing parents, in my underwear, waving a smoking revolver. I turned and went back into my room.

  I looked under the beds to make sure that snake didn’t have a brother that had sneaked in while I was outside. Then I reloaded the gun and put on some pants and a shirt. There is nothin
g more useless than an unloaded gun in a motel room.

  I called the front desk and asked for the manager. When he came on the line, I said, “There was a water moccasin just outside my door, but it’s okay because I shot it. Can you send housekeeping up to clean the patio?”

  I expected him to thank me, but didn’t. He went wild.

  “You shot a gun in my hotel! Are you crazy? You are in big trouble, mister! You’re going to jail! Don’t you go anywhere. I’m calling the police!” Moments later, he appeared in my doorway, looking deranged and red in the face, shattering my tranquillity.

  The sheriff’s deputy came by in a few minutes. He was big, at least 250 pounds, with the mirrored sunglasses the police down South liked to wear. He didn’t look too friendly, but I knew that was just for show. I had talked to him earlier when he’d stopped by the civic center to see the security arrangements for the show. He’d been in the service, in Vietnam, and we’d talked about the LAWS antitank rockets he’d used over there and how I wanted to use them in stage effects here. I had shown him some of the pyrotechnic devices we used in the shows. I was just beginning to work on rocket guitars.

  “What happened here?” he said, in a slow drawl.

  “I opened my door and that snake was there, waiting to bite me. So I shot him,” I said. “Lucky for me I had a gun and I was alert. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I could have been bit bad.”

  The deputy nodded his head. He observed that the first chunk was shot out of the concrete no more than two feet from my door, easy biting distance for a bad-tempered cottonmouth. He turned to the manager and said, “Goddamn, Fred, you’re lucky this here boy was prepared. You’d a had a real mess on your hands if that snake woulda bit him or some kid.”

  The manager quivered a little and nodded. It was clear he didn’t share the sheriff’s point of view. I’m sure he would have preferred that the snake had slipped into someone’s room, bit them, and left. Housekeeping would have found the body, dead and purple, and the undertaker would have hauled it away. Quietly. No gunshots. No disturbance. After all, dead people were a fact of life in Florida hotel rooms. Gunshots weren’t, at least not in Lakeland.