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

by John Elder Robison

  One day, for some reason, she decided to try petting my arm, and I immediately stopped rocking and fidgeting. The result was so dramatic, she never stopped. It didn’t take long for me to realize the calming effect, too. I like being petted and scratched.

  “Can you pet me?” I say when I sit next to her.

  I also say, while tilting my head, “Scratch my fur.” I have observed dogs tilting their heads like this, and it often works for them. She will scratch my head or rub my ears. Sometimes she rubs my forehead or my shoulders. And she scratches my back.

  “Scratch lightly, with claw tips,” I say. Light scratching with somewhat sharp nails is best. For a while, I worried that the fur scratching would cause all my hair to fall out, and that the ear rubbing would give me floppy ears, like a beagle. But that didn’t happen. I just got calmer. I believe it calms her, too. Psychologists have done studies of people petting animals. They’ve proven it has a calming effect on the people, lowering their heart rate and blood pressure. I wonder why they haven’t done studies of people petting people. Normal people haven’t caught on to the benefits.

  While I went through life as a pettee, I watched the dogs and cats around me, and I realized something: The pets that get petted the most have the thickest fur. Petting does not make your fur fall out. I am now sure of that. And you will never see a well-petted cat with floppy ears, either. The dogs with floppy ears all started out that way.

  And the final thing is, we sleep in piles.

  When I was little, I used to like hiding in small spaces. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I can still become unsettled lying down by myself on a bed. If I lie down by myself, I will pile pillows on top of me, but the best situation by far is to have my mate lie down, too, and pile herself up against me.

  Every night, when we go to bed, she puts an arm or a leg on me, or lies up against me until I fall asleep.

  If she doesn’t, I complain.

  “Come on,” I say. “Put a paw on your mate!”

  “Can you pet me?”

  “Can you scratch my fur?”

  I am always calmer and more relaxed in a pile, being petted. Nowadays, for the first time, I fall asleep quickly and I seldom have bad dreams.

  If I wake up, she puts a paw on me and I go back to sleep. I put a paw on her, too. Sometimes I wake in the night, and find we have rolled apart. We’ll be sleeping on our sides, facing in opposite directions. I’ll slide over until our backs are touching, and I’ll slide my bent legs back toward her. She’ll awaken enough to reach her own foot over, and our feet will touch. I fall back asleep, content and warm.

  I feel safe sleeping in a pile. I’m not sure why that would be, since I am the bigger and stronger one, but it’s true. Ever since I was a child, I knew that lying under a pile of pillows was a lot better than just lying on top of the bed. Sleeping in a pile is a lot better than that, though. It’s the best of all.

  I like married life a lot.

  28

  Winning at Basketball

  I never did well at sports as a kid, and I was never a sports fan. A childhood of being the last one picked and the first one tossed hadn’t left me with very fond feelings about school sports. I came to be a fan rather late in life, and in a somewhat circuitous fashion.

  In 2003, my son was about to enter high school. Since Little Bear and I had gotten divorced, and I had gotten remarried, Cubby had lived half the time with us in Chicopee, and half the time with his mom in South Hadley. We always chose one school for him to attend, and until then he’d been in South Hadley. But the school there wasn’t very good, and we began searching for alternatives. We looked at private schools, but they were very expensive. There were Internet sites that ranked school districts, and the top ones in our area were Longmeadow, Wilbraham, and…Amherst. South Hadley and Chicopee were right next to one another, at the bottom.

  With some trepidation, Unit Two and I decided to look at Amherst, where I had grown up thirty years before. Although my family had lived in the tiny town of Shutesbury, it was part of the Amherst school district, and Amherst was where I had gone to school, where I’d hung out, and where I had met Cubby’s mother.

  I called Jim Lumley, an Amherst Realtor who’d helped my parents years ago. He drove a Land Rover, and I saw him whenever it broke. He brought a list of Amherst homes down to my office right away, and we set out that afternoon to check them out.

  As we drove around Amherst looking at houses, I began to feel that it was where I belonged.

  It’s true that Amherst was the setting for some of the worst times of my life. Other kids hassled me. The school system wanted me gone. The police wanted me in jail. And my parents had fallen completely to pieces. All right there, in Amherst.

  Even in my most Aspergian days, I knew I had many of the qualities needed to be popular. I was smart. I was gentle. I was funny. I even looked pretty normal, in a geeky sort of way. But my behavioral oddities had hidden those qualities from others, and had caused me to hide myself in shame. Everywhere I’d lived, until now, I had carried the burden of Asperger’s with me.

  When Unit Two, Cubby, and I moved out of Chicopee, I left that burden behind.

  So why would I return? Because I’d finally have the chance to turn a failure into a success. Moving to Amherst with my new knowledge of Asperger’s would give me a chance to start my life over again. A new me, in a new house, in a new town.

  Jack would start high school in Amherst, just as I had. But unlike me, he was going to pass.

  The move was a smashing success. The bad people from my youth had all vanished. The teachers who wanted me gone had long since retired. Most of today’s police force hadn’t even been born when I had moved away in the 1970s.

  More important, people I had hardly seen in thirty years welcomed me with open arms. Why are they doing this? I wondered. Then I understood. They welcomed me because I didn’t do anything to drive them away. I had learned how to be friendly.

  It was remarkably simple, but it had taken so, so long to figure out.

  My friend Paul Zahradnik had dropped out of school the same year I had, and now lived just half a mile away. Thirty years later, he was an accomplished metal sculptor and real estate developer living at the end of a quarter-mile driveway. Gordy, the longhaired kid who had worked in the junkyard, lived in a beautiful home across the road. He still worked in the junkyard, but the yard had grown by twenty acres, and now he owned it. What a long way we had all come.

  Like me, my brother had left home as soon as he could. He had stayed far away, working at advertising jobs in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. I hardly ever saw him in those years. When he wrote his first book, Sellevision, he decided to get back in touch with his family up here. I helped him find a small house in Northampton, and he started coming up here on weekends. He stopped drinking and doing drugs, and he met Dennis. His life started to turn around.

  As soon as he heard I was moving to Amherst, my brother said, “Is there another building lot over there? Dennis and I can build a house next to you!” And they did. We built new homes next to each other, on a little cul-de-sac. His is gay and frilly, and mine is Aspergian and functional. I am sure mine is better engineered, but he doesn’t care. His is prettier. Even though the plumbing fell apart and left him ankle deep in water right before Christmas that first year.

  When he walks his weirdly misnamed French bulldogs past my house, Cubby sets off a homemade bomb in the yard, and the roar and smoke tell him he’s finally home. In the winter, when it snows, I clear the street with our father’s farm tractor. And when his house floods, I rescue his furniture with my Land Rover and trailer and dry it in my garage.

  Who would have guessed? After all those years, the success of my brother’s book Running with Scissors made me feel good about my condition and proud of who I was. And it brought us back together, in the town where we’d started, so long ago.

  Appearing as a character in my brother’s books taught me something about mysel
f. For most of my life, my history as an abused child with what I saw as a personality defect was shameful and embarrassing. Being a failure and a high school dropout was humiliating, no matter how well I subsequently did. I lied about my age, my education, and my upbringing for years because the truth was just too horrible to reveal. His book, and people’s remarkable acceptance of us as we are, changed all that. I was finally free.

  When I returned to Amherst, everywhere I went it seemed I recognized someone. And I recognized the places. But the bad associations from my childhood were gone.

  “You have to come to a UMass basketball game,” Paul and Gordy said one day. I had never been to a college basketball game in my life, but I somewhat reluctantly tagged along.

  “Before the game, there’s a reception upstairs. Come up with us,” Paul said.

  There were probably a hundred people in the room when I walked in. Thirty years earlier, that crowd would have terrified me, and I would not have known what to say. I would have hidden in the corner like a trapped animal, waiting to escape.

  But now, with my knowledge of Asperger’s and my new confidence, nothing bad happened. I wasn’t scared and I didn’t hide. And something remarkable occurred: People liked me. People came up to me, shook my hand, and made me feel welcome. Just a little bit of knowledge of what to say and how to act made all the difference in the world.

  It was incredible! I found myself making friends everywhere I went, and to my amazement, they looked out for me. For example, my friend Dave said, “Let’s get seats together!” A perfectly ordinary suggestion, but it was something I had never done before. I would hear the referee’s whistle, and Dave would lean over from his seat next to me to explain what had happened. Even if I was ignorant, the games were fun. And so were the people. They all knew more about basketball than me, but no one cared.

  Not only did I make friends everywhere I went, but nothing bad seemed to happen. No one called me a Monkey Face. No one threatened me. No one threw me out. The last time I had been here, no one wanted me on their team. Now, it seemed everyone did.

  Even my lifelong feeling that I was a fraud began to vanish. At a party at the coach’s house, one of the athletic department staffers sat down with me.

  “You know, I dropped out of school, too,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I wondered how he knew I had dropped out of school. I realized he must have taken the time to ask someone else about me.

  “You’re as much a part of this school as any other alumnus,” he continued. “You’re always welcome here.”

  I almost cried.

  I began attending all the games. Even though I was never a “real” student, I had acquired most of my education in those buildings. And it felt good to be back, among friends, in a place that felt like home.

  I didn’t have to know everything. Other people could tell me the answers. I didn’t have to notice everything. My friends would look out for me. Suddenly, I had a revelation: This is what life is like for normal people.

  I joined the UMass Athletic Association, and began supporting the school. My school. The team picked up speed. With me on board, the team hired a new coach, and headed to the play-offs for the first time in years. My past was finally behind me. Whatever happened with our basketball team, I knew that I had won.

  29

  My Life as a Train

  I have always liked trains.

  One day when he was about six, Cubby and I drove to the Conrail freight yard in West Springfield. The tires crunched with a pop-popping sound as we rolled over the gray stone that covered the yard and filled the space between the train tracks. My father had taken me to see the trains when I was little, and thirty years later here I was, doing the same thing with my own son. My father let me drive a train when I was five, at the museum in Philadelphia. I would soon do the same with Cubby.

  I guess a fascination with trains runs in my family. When my father was little, his grandfather took him to watch the steam engines passing his drugstore, back in Chickamauga, Georgia. And here we were, over fifty years later, doing the same thing up here in Massachusetts.

  Cubby looked out the window, scanning the lines of boxcars. He was a fifty-pound kid, bouncy, with a blue striped train conductor’s cap on his head. If he were a dog, he would have been wagging his tail.

  We had driven forty-five minutes to see trains, and we were ready for action. We clumped across a few lines of track and parked next to the yardmaster’s shack, an old wood building that had faded to the same shade of gray as the stone ballast on the ground. The train dispatcher was watching us through the dirty plate-glass windows, and we waved. Oily smoke curled from a rusty pipe chimney. Everything was drab and dirty because it was dusted with years of soot from the diesel engines in the locomotives, which at that time ran twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

  This train yard has been there since the days of steam engines, fifty years ago, so even before the soot from the diesel engines there was a pretty thick layer of coal dust. Cubby likes being clean, so it’s good he didn’t know any of that. When he got bigger, he would develop the same compulsive hand-washing habit as his grandfather and his uncle, but even then he hated getting grease on his clothes or on himself. I tried to keep him out of the worst of the dirt.

  “Look, Dad—F types!” Cubby shouted as he pointed to two long silver FP40 locomotives on the far side of the yard. He’d picked out an Amtrak passenger train that stood out among the freight cars filling the yard. It’s unusual to see Amtrak trains idling among the trash and squalor of a freight yard.

  We walked over to check it out. As I was about to cross a few lines of tracks where fifty old boxcars were quietly rusting away, Cubby shouted, “Stop!” At six years of age, Cubby already knew to stop and look carefully before crossing the tracks. After watching the parked train cars for the slightest sign of movement, we quickly jumped over the tracks. We stepped over some crack vials left by last night’s visitors.

  “Look Cubby, do drugs, lose your mind, and get run over by a train,” I said.

  “How come there aren’t any pieces of people on the tracks?” he asked.

  “Maybe they got dragged farther into the yard.”

  Cubby lost interest in drug addicts as we approached the FP40 locomotives, which rumbled at idle and hissed occasionally as excess air popped the safety valves.

  Why were we there? Because Aspergians are driven to learn all they can about subjects that interest them, and one of my favorite subjects has always been transportation machinery. When I was learning to read, my favorite topics in the encyclopedia were trains, ships, and airplanes. And my favorite books for a time were High Iron: A Book of Trains and Automotive Technology.

  As we walked around the engines, Cubby spotted a little pile of beach sand in front of the wheels on the front locomotive. He asked what it was. “It’s sand from the train engine’s sandbox,” I said. Cubby was skeptical. He was used to being tricked. He had a sandbox at home, one that he and I had built. But trains should not need sandboxes. His ears twitched.

  We moved closer.

  “Look Cubby, that’s the sand pipe, and that’s the box where the sand is stored on the engine. The train engineer pushes a button to dump sand on the wheels when his wheels are slipping. Trains shovel sand in front of their wheels to get traction.”

  I felt comforted knowing this exposure to the practical application of technology at an early age would benefit Cubby for the rest of his life. Especially with respect to understanding traction issues. As I pointed out, “Cars use sanders, too.” Cubby would nod sagely at tidbits of knowledge like that. Later, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I would catch him explaining traction to the other little animals at his school.

  I felt very proud of him at times like that. A little engineer.

  As Cubby grew bigger, so did the engines. Conrail was making a change from the older General Motors locomotives with DC traction motors to the newest GE units with AC traction. On later vis
its, I would explain the advantages of AC traction motors to Cubby, and I even showed him the inside of one of the new cabs with its sophisticated control panels. The big new engines were impressive to watch, especially pulling heavy loads. After watching the trains in the yard, we decided to go out and see them on the road. And I knew just the place.

  One spring day, we drove to Middlefield, where the railroad crosses a pass in the Berkshires on the way to Albany, New York. We turned off the highway and followed a country road up into the mountains until we passed over the railroad. Shortly after, we turned in to a wooded road that ran about a mile to the tracks.

  Up there, the air was fresh and clear. The sky was a brilliant blue, a shade you never saw in the city. Water was running in a little waterfall down the rock face where the railroad line had been blasted through the mountainside. The tracks hugged the side of the mountain, with a drop of at least a hundred feet into the Westfield River on the other side. There were two tracks side by side, with a service road next to them. We walked up the service road and waited for a train.

  “Look, Dad!” Cubby threw rocks and watched them hit the water far below. He looked around for wildlife. “Think we’ll see any bears?” Cubby sounded hopeful. “You can get a gun and I’ll shoot it. Mom will skin it and we’ll eat it. Let’s find a bear, Dad.” Cubby was bouncing up and down at the thought of catching a bear for dinner.

  But we didn’t see any bears.

  Pretty soon we heard the rumble of an approaching train. Over the next few minutes, the noise got louder until the ground began to shake. Cubby and I moved closer to the edge, away from the tracks. The tracks began to sing and we saw the headlights come around the bend. Even from a few hundred feet, we could feel the engines as they struggled to pull the train up the hill. By the time they reached us, they were moving at a brisk walk, which was all the speed 15,000 horsepower could muster going up that hill. They struggled past us as we stood on the gravel road and watched.