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

by John Elder Robison

  I had always loved cars. I had continued to buy old cars, tinker with them, drive them, and sell them as long as I’d been on my own. I began to seriously consider the idea of abandoning electronics to become a mechanic or car dealer. I broached the subject to some of my friends and colleagues at work.

  “I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t stand the bullshit, being in a company like this. It’s just no fun anymore.”

  They either didn’t believe me or thought I was just depressed. “You’re going to quit electronics to become a car mechanic? You’ve got one of the top jobs in the company! Don’t you know how many people would give their right arm for a job like yours?”

  Or they would say, “You’re full of shit. You can be straight with me. I’m your friend. If you’ve got a good job at a competitor, tell me. Maybe I can go, too!”

  Everyone thought there was some angle, some trick. But there wasn’t.

  “If you leave the industry it’s going to be very hard to get a job again in a few years. Look at Tom.” Tom was one of our technicians. He had been an engineer until he quit work in order to build houses with his brother-in-law. When he wanted to return to engineering, the only job he could find was as a technician, a big step down from where he had been.

  But my mind was made up.

  “I got into this business because I wanted to be creative. I wanted to design things. Now, I’m just an administrator.”

  Everyone I talked to at work seemed to think I was nuts, but in the end it didn’t matter what other people thought about my job. What mattered was what I thought about my job. And I didn’t like it.

  It was time to take my chances on my own. In 1989, I quit my job and became a car dealer. That meant taking out a second mortgage against my house. That $30,000 was my seed money, and it was all I had, so it would have to last. I started to buy secondhand European cars, fix them, and sell them. In addition, I serviced what I sold. My first acquisition was a five-year-old Mercedes 300SD, which I cleaned up, serviced, and sold for a profit of $1,500. It seemed I was off to a great start.

  I knew fixing up cars and selling them was not creative like designing sound effects, but it had much to recommend it. There was no long commute to work. I could be myself. I would no longer live in fear for my job. There would be no one to fire me. I would no longer feel like a fraud. Selling cars and doing car repairs would be whatever I could make of it. No one would question my qualifications or ability.

  If only it were that simple. By the time I realized there was more to it, the $30,000 was lost, and I was an additional $50,000 in debt. Somehow, the $1,500 profit I’d made on each of my first cars had turned into $2,000 and $3,000 losses on later ones, as the economy slid into recession and I made bad decisions. But there was no turning back. I had to succeed. I still remembered mixing my thirty-cent macaroni dinner with water because I couldn’t afford milk, and I had vowed never to return to that state.

  The thing that saved me was my technical skill, fueled by my Aspergian need to know all about topics that grabbed my attention. And cars certainly had my attention. I may not have made money selling them, but I had the knowledge to fix them when no one else could, and people paid me for that. Even more, their praise made me feel good about myself and gave me the courage to go on in the face of my financial losses. And the electrical problems that had other mechanics scratching their heads proved trivially simple for me.

  For ten years, I had listened to my bosses tell me that I could not communicate or work with other people. Now the stakes were higher. And I seemed to be communicating successfully. How could I tell? Because people were coming back. And some of them were even visiting with me while work was done.

  I had found a niche where many of my Aspergian traits actually benefited me. My compulsion to know everything about cars made me a great service person. My precise speech gave me the ability to explain complex problems in simple terms. My directness meant that I told people what they needed to hear about their cars, which was good most of the time. And my inability to read body language or appearance meant—in an industry rife with discrimination—that I treated everyone the same.

  I lost money at first because I had to learn the business, which was to some extent a lesson in humility. Before going into the business of fixing cars, I had always looked at car repair as fundamentally simpler than, say, engineering. Having now done both, I know that isn’t true. If anything, running an automotive repair business is harder for me because it uses a different kind of brain-power—a kind that I had never developed during my engineering days. I had to acquire a broad range of new skills, and fast. Chief among them was the ability to deal with people in a friendly way that would make them want to return. In the past, I had not done very well with that, but circumstances were different now. Perhaps in my new setting, I could learn to succeed in dealing with people and leaving them feeling happy, or at least reasonably satisfied.

  My choice of car made a difference, as it turned out. I chose to work on high-end cars like Rolls-Royces and Land Rovers because I loved the way they were put together. I appreciated the way a Rolls-Royce interior was made: like a piece of fine furniture. Each Rolls-Royce is a unique work of art, something a machine aficionado like me can really appreciate. And I loved the rugged simplicity of the Land Rover Defenders. From the first time I saw a Land Rover—in the pages of National Geographic—I had been drawn to them. One day, I told myself, I will own one of my own.

  The cars I worked on tended to belong to affluent and better-educated people. Such people were better able to connect with an eccentric Aspergian like me, and they had an incentive to do so. There were not many people willing to fix a Rolls-Royce or a Land Rover in my area. In many cases, the only service alternatives were in Boston or Hartford—an hour’s drive away. So an owner of one of those cars had an incentive to make a relationship with me work, whereas a Chevrolet or Toyota owner had service alternatives everywhere he turned.

  At first, I did everything—repairs, billing, scheduling, and planning. As the business grew over its first few years, I added a technician to work on cars with me, then another, and another. After almost twenty years in business, Robison Service now employs a dozen people.

  When I worked as an administrator for a big company, I was in the position of bending my staff to the whims of my employer. Yet I often felt my employer’s desires and wishes were ill-conceived or just plain wrong, which made it very hard for me to feel good about imposing those wishes on others. As an owner, I imposed only my own wishes on my staff. And I only did what I believed in. I felt a lot better about that.

  Before opening my business, I had only interacted with a few people at one time: other engineers, people from marketing, family, and a small circle of friends. They were almost all people who knew me, or knew of me. All of a sudden, my new line of work put me in front of the general public. Anyone with a car and a problem might call, and I had to talk to them. I had never been exposed to such a variety of humanity.

  This was beneficial to me in a number of ways. First, my ability to interact with people improved tremendously over the first few years I was in business. People who watched me during that time noticed a change. My friends remarked on how “polite and nice” I had become.

  I also learned a lot about how to succeed in life from the people who patronized my business. My clients taught me about real estate management, banking, investing, and general business principles. That education has been priceless, and I could never have gotten it from any school.

  For the next fifteen years, I built myself a world of machines, a world in which I was securely positioned in the center. We worked on better and better cars, and we solved tougher and tougher problems. We became the repair shop of last resort—the place people went when no one else could figure it out. My Aspergian understanding of machines made our company unique in the auto service world. People began shipping Rolls-Royce, Land Rover, and Mercedes cars hundreds and even thousands of miles to our service
department. I had finally made myself a place where I could feel safe and secure.

  And then I got the call. I was driving back from lunch when my phone rang. “Hello, Mr. Robison? This is Teri at Chicopee Savings Bank. Can you hold a minute for Mr. Wagner?” Bill Wagner is the president of the bank I do business with.

  I pondered what might be wrong for ten long seconds. Then Bill came on the line. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Nothing,” Bill said.

  “John,” he said, “I was hoping you would be willing to join the Board of Corporators of the Bank.” I was stunned. Me? On the board of the bank?

  “I would be honored” was all I could think to say. And I realized that for the first time I had become legitimate, a part of the local community and not just an outcast.

  23

  I Get a Bear Cub

  In the spring of 1990, in the midst of starting my company and losing all my money, I acquired a son. His mother was Little Bear, so of course I called him Bear Cub. Cubby for short. The name on his birth certificate was Jack, in honor of my grandfather, and his mom used that name, but for me he’s always been Cubby, right to this day.

  Although I was excited and looking forward to his arrival, Cubby came along during a stressful time in my life. After living together for a few years, Little Bear and I had gotten married in 1982. But things started going bad between us four years later, after her older brother Paul died in a car crash. I was hoping things would improve with Cubby’s arrival. In the months before he was born, I was anxious. Little Bear was sick all the time while she was pregnant, and I was afraid Cubby would be born sick, too.

  I was also afraid he’d be born with two heads or three arms.

  He was born in the Hatchery at the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. I drove Little Bear to the hospital on the evening of April 11 in an old gray Jaguar. We parked and checked in at 11:45, and he was born at 12:15. I was in the delivery room for the event. I had read a number of books on the topic and I pretty much knew what to expect. Everything seemed normal. I was surprised at how little he was, though.

  I’d been timing him since we learned of his mom’s pregnancy, eight months back. According to what the doctors had told us, Cubby was hatching a week early. I’d done a lot of reading, and I knew hatchlings put on quite a bit of weight in the three weeks before being born, so I was expecting him to come out somewhat small, but he was even littler then I expected.

  He weighed only six pounds and six tenths of an ounce.

  “He’s little but he’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “No need for the incubator for him.”

  Of course, they had no idea if he would be fine. They were just saying that to reassure us. They had not done any tests. They had, at that moment, done nothing more than a cursory external inspection. But I had studied the infant mortality statistics and I knew this hospital gave us better than average odds.

  If all went well, we wouldn’t be there long. One night in the hatchery and they’d be sending mom and Cubby home. That first day, I discreetly measured him on my forearm and noted his size and appearance. He didn’t really do anything at that point, but I looked at him closely to try and remember what he looked like so I could tell if I had the right kid the next time I saw him. I was afraid I’d fail to recognize him the next day, which would be both embarrassing and humiliating.

  His mom was pretty excited, and so were our parents.

  I made sure he was tagged with a nylon serial number plate on a ring around his leg before I allowed him to be released into the general population of hatchlings. They had a big room where all the babies lay behind glass and grew under heat lamps, just like the baby chick display at the State Fair. Some were in incubators but most were just on trays. I was glad he was tagged, because despite what they say about moms knowing their kids, you could not tell the one-day-old babies apart except in the most general way, like whether you had a boy or girl. And I suppose if yours had an extra arm or missed a leg he’d be recognizable, but most of the babies in there looked whole and virtually identical.

  The next morning, my parents came to see him, separately, since they had been divorced for many years, and my father had remarried. My mother came in first, followed by my father and stepmother. Little Bear’s father and stepmother came, too. Her mother and second husband lived in Florida, and they weren’t there. But they called. We had a regular parade of visitors that first day.

  “Oooooh, just look at him. He’s so sweet.”

  “Hey there, baby boy!” This with a jab in his belly.

  “Ooooooh, he looks just like you.”

  Standard baby drivel, I figured, especially the part about how much he looked like me. How could a six-pound baby with misshapen features and a head the size of an apple look “just like me”?

  I was glad I’d noted the numbers stamped on the bracelet. I didn’t really think someone would intentionally swap him for another child, but mistakes do happen. I had also tagged him with a waterproof felt-tipped marker in case the bracelet went missing.

  That second day, my recognition fears from the previous night proved to be unfounded. When I arrived, Cubby and mom were together in her bed. And just to be sure, I checked his tags and marks. They matched. After going home that day, Cubby never returned to any hospital overnight. So, as a result of my initial marking and caution, I have a very high level of confidence that the baby that emerged from his mother seventeen years ago is the same kid living in my house today.

  We brought him home that second afternoon. I had bought a basket that doubled as a car seat to transport him. Little Bear wrapped him up and strapped him in. She carried the baby basket in her lap as they rolled her out of the hospital in a wheelchair. As we were leaving, I realized the hospital hadn’t given us very much for the $4,400 hatchery fee. No accessories. No clothes. No toys. Just the kid.

  I never did figure out why they insisted on rolling Little Bear out the door in a wheelchair. After all, she came in on her own two feet, walking and talking. She wasn’t sick, and she was twenty pounds lighter. Their insistence on rolling her out made me think of an auto repair shop where the cars drive in under their own power and get towed home on wreckers a few days later. Sort of backward.

  Cubby was so small he could stretch nose to tail and not reach the length of my forearm. When we got him home, we lined a small laundry hamper with soft fabric and nestled him inside. Within a few weeks, he’d outgrown the little hamper. We moved him into one of Little Bear’s big hampers, where he lived for most of the next year.

  When he was three days old, I took him to work and carried him around the neighborhood to show him off. Everyone praised and admired him. He didn’t say much, but I’m sure he was taking it all in.

  We continued to carry him around wherever we went, thinking he would be better socialized the more he was around people. I had not yet learned about Asperger’s when Cubby was born, but I knew I had a hard time with people, and I wanted Cubby to get along better than I had. I thought long and hard about how to accomplish that, and one of my ideas was to show him as many interesting people as I could. He was easy to carry around when he was small, and he looked closely at everyone and everything. I’d zip my windbreaker halfway, and drop him in the opening. With his little arms sticking out and the zipper holding tight, he was securely wedged in place. But just to be sure, I always tied the string at the base of my windbreaker, so he couldn’t fall out the bottom. I often saw people staring at Cubby, zipped up like that, but they seldom said anything.

  “This is Cubby,” I would say, while pointing at my jacket, from which he gazed serenely. I was very proud of him. I couldn’t wait for him to get bigger and do more tricks. I even daydreamed of a time when he could actually be put to work—mowing the lawn and washing the car. Sadly, that day never came. He was destined to get bigger, but it proved extremely difficult—virtually impossible, in fact—to get useful work out of him. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  When Cubby was little, I tried to show
him all the things grown-ups did. When I worked on a car, I took him out with me and set him in the shade, under the hood. He never said much in those early days, so I don’t know what he made of it all.

  In the beginning, he wasn’t very interesting because he didn’t do anything, but then he began to yell. I took him out of the hamper and let him sleep on my chest. I had read that hearing a parent’s heartbeat calmed a baby. If he continued to yell, I held him tightly against me.

  I had a mantra for him: “Calm and docile animal. Calm and docile animal. Calm and docile animal. Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaalmmmmmmmmmm and dooooooocillllllle animal.” Eventually, if I squashed him hard enough and murmured to him long enough, he would stop struggling and go to sleep.

  I liked it when he slept on my chest, except when he drooled, peed, or threw up on me. But I always worried about him, too. I was afraid I’d roll over and suffocate him, but I guess parents have instincts about those things, and I never did.

  When he got bigger, he started to crawl. Cubby’s laundry hamper proved its worth, as I turned it over to form a storage enclosure within which he could crawl to his heart’s content. He grew fast, and in no time at all he could upend the hamper. At that point, we got a crib.

  Then he started talking. He would come up to me and say, “Baby Toss, Baby Toss,” until he got my attention. He stuck his arms up, too, to make sure I understood. I would pick him up and toss him in the air and catch him time and time and time again. He never tired of Baby Toss. He had the most remarkable confidence in my ability to catch him. If I were him, I’d never have done Baby Toss. I’d have been afraid the tosser would miss and I’d go splat on the floor.

  We began reading books together. He loved Dr. Seuss. I read those books so often I could turn the pages and say the words from memory. I became bored with repetition, and I began to make subtle alterations. The story turned into: