“No, she can’t,” he sighed. He took my hand and led me upstairs. It was time for a bath.
—
Seven years after she left, I finally understood that the reason my mother left me was that I was not one of her Favourite Things. It wasn’t that I was autistic. She didn’t leave because of what I was. She left because of what I did. The things I did were driven, to some extent, by my autism, but that was just an accounting entry in the ledger of my life. In the end, it was me that did them. It wasn’t the autism. My mother was sure of that.
“Don’t say he’s autistic,” she told my father weeks before she left. She yelled it, actually, loud enough that I heard them from my bedroom.
“Balls to that,” he replied, and he had been drinking. His tone was rougher, the hard consonants harder, the soft consonants softer. “He’s autistic.”
“No, he is someone with autism,” she said. “He is Freddy. Dammit, Bill, it’s about how people see him. Do they see him as autistic first, or as someone first?”
He slammed his glass on the kitchen table. “Holy Christ, we’re the ones in control of how other people see things? All we have to do is make a couple of grammatical backflips with our sentences, and whammo, they see Freddy different?”
“It’s about how you frame it.”
“I don’t want to frame it,” he yelled. “Why do I have to accommodate the world? Why can’t it accommodate me?”
“It’s not about you!” she yelled back.
THE BEATING INFLECTION
There are inflection points in my life. The slope of my personal arc changes direction, and things begin to get better, or things begin to get worse.
Arcs rule my life. The first arc was ten years ago, when the slope became negative, the day my mother left me on the train platform and was gone from my world. My life didn’t get much better after that. I moved schools, I left Excalibur House, and I left Saskia Stiles.
The second arc began when four boys in thick winter jackets put me in the hospital. My life had been in descent until that moment, a litany of misspoken words, misinterpreted intents, and conversations that exploded in my face.
But the beating was the trough of my arc. It was the lowest point, the final culmination of everything I had done wrong and continued to do wrong. It was the beating that began the change, the point where things started getting better. A new arc began.
It went like this:
I opened my eyes and I was fourteen. A cold wind blew. Four boys stood looking at me. Each one at least two inches taller than me. One, in a red hoodie under a green jacket, stepped forward, for I had been looking at him—trying to look through him—for almost a minute.
“Could you not stand there,” I said to him, and they stopped what they were doing. They came over. I watched the one with the hoodie.
“What are you looking at?” he said and pushed me.
“I was looking at the wall, but you were standing in the way,” I said.
“So what?” he said.
“Your jacket is fat.” I tried to step around him and stand on the other side of the bus stop.
“What is wrong with you?” He blocked my path.
There were more than a few answers to that question, but I settled for the most immediate problem.
“I’m here against my will,” I said.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I’m not comfortable right now.”
“That’s why you want me to move?”
I nodded.
“Because I make you uncomfortable?”
I nodded again.
“Because I’m black?”
“You’re not black,” I said.
His hands dropped to his side. His eyes widened slightly. “What are you talking about now?”
“You’re not black,” I said and immediately realized that he heard me already and therefore didn’t understand what I had said. So I rephrased. “Your skin is not coloured black and your jacket is green.” I looked at his hands, then at his face. “Your skin is a shade of brown. HTML Colour Code #663300.”
He pushed me on my shoulder. I tried to walk around him, but he blocked my way again. “Are you serious?” He pointed to his friend, who also had a thick green jacket, but a black ball cap. “What about him? What is he?”
I was about to answer that he was a teenage male, but stopped, realizing he was asking if I knew his name. I was momentarily confused, because I had never met this boy before, and quickly searched my memory for any occurrence of a meeting with him in the past.
The other boy pushed me hard on my shoulder again.
“Well?” he demanded. “I’m asking you a question, kid.”
Whenever my father spoke in that tone of voice it was because I wasn’t answering a question quickly enough, and the situation was about to change to a Time Out for Not Listening. The solution: answer quickly, without spending any more time analyzing for the correct response. So I answered and told him what his friend was.
“Nigger,” I said, and both of the boys took a step backward, their jaws dropped, eyebrows raised. That was evidence that I had surprised them.
I hoped that it was because I was correct in my guess.
—
I called his friend Nigger because that was the thread I was resolving at the moment the first boy urged me to answer. Earlier, I had observed the first boy call the second boy “Nigger.”
He said, “Nigger, just shut up. You don’t know a thing about football.”
When someone addresses someone else, they may begin the sentence with the name of the other person. My father often says, “Freddy, did you remember to brush your teeth?” and then he will say, “Freddy, go brush your goddamn teeth,” and sometimes he will say, “Freddy, either you brush your teeth now or I will brush them for you and believe me, you don’t want that.”
It is also common that some people who share the same relative skin colour will speak to each other and preface their comments with “Nigger,” for instance in the movie Mississippi Burning.
This was the state of my thread when it was interrupted. If allowed to continue, I would have reasoned that people preface remarks with other common words, such as “Jesus Christ,” but I shouldn’t infer that the person is Jesus. Proof of this is that my father frequently addresses me as Jesus Christ, but we both understand that my name is Freddy. “Jesus Christ!” he will shout. “I swear, the next time you spit toothpaste all over your shirt, I’m going to make you wear the damned thing all day!”
If the boy had not alarmed me, my thoughts would have taken their normal course and closed the thread as illogical, and I would have answered, “I don’t know his name.” Instead, the first boy interrupted me, and I said the first answer that was at the top of my stack of possible answers.
“Nigger.”
It turns out that neither of the two boys in green coats were named Nigger. One of them stepped forward and pushed me hard. Another boy pushed me from behind.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the boy with the black cap said.
“I’m Freddy,” I said. “My last—”
“Shut up,” explained the first boy and he punched me in the jaw.
“Stop that,” I said.
“I said shut up,” he repeated and punched me in the eye. He punched me hard, and I realized that he was not trying to correct me.
Sometimes my father corrects me by hitting me. The difference between these boys and my father is that my father slaps me on the top of my head with an open palm. Both of these boys closed their hands into fists.
Another difference is that my father never asked me what I thought of his performance while he struck me.
“What do you think of this,” said the boy in the black cap, and then he hit me across the nose with The Twentieth Century in Review.
—
The nose is made of cartilage. Shark bones are made of cartilage as well. The nose makes up eleven percent of the front of your face. The front
of my face is eleven percent shark material.
It didn’t make a difference.
—
I opened my eyes and I was lying on my back. Rain fell on my face. Blood streamed from my nose. A gash, from the fall to the sidewalk, lay open on my head. My left eye was swelling, closing. My ribs ached and, when I breathed too deep, a sharp piercing pain ran up my side.
I tried to speak and closed my eyes again.
A man shuffled by, pushing a shopping cart full of empty beer cans. “It’s time for you to be a man now,” he said and kept pushing the cart. “Get up and get moving on with your life, son.”
THE DAY AFTER THE BEATING
I stayed at the hospital until the next morning for observation. All night, I sat straight up in my hospital bed, green blankets bunched into a ball in my lap, staring at a blank TV screen that hung above the end of my bed. I stared into the screen and saw a movie of myself, moving through time. I narrated dispassionately the events of my life.
I told the moments when things went wrong, or when they did not go as expected. I told the mornings when the quote-headmaster-unquote demanded I hurry up. I told the afternoons when the gym teacher called me an idiot. I told the evenings when my father yelled at me. Sometimes, those were also mornings. And on weekends, there would also be afternoons.
I thought about these things, and the threads asked me the same thing over and over again.
What’s the same with these pictures? they demanded.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I stared at the wall, but the clock never came.
—
The next day, we drove home from the hospital. The four boys still clattered and clammered around my mind. “I don’t understand why they hit me,” I said to my father. He glanced at me, then turned the radio off.
“What did you say to them?” His voice was less steady than it usually is. It carried the tenor and cadence of a person who is trying to control what they are saying because they are concerned that they are unable to say it effectively. I had observed this with my mother, who sometimes spoke like this before she began to cry.
“I said many things to them,” I replied.
“Did you make them angry?”
“One of them was angry. He hit me because he was angry. He wasn’t angry when I first saw him. He was laughing with his friends.”
“How many of them were there?”
“There were four. They were laughing. The one that hit me the hardest wore a green coat over a hoodie. He had the hood over his head, so he couldn’t see to the side effectively. I think he may have been angry that he couldn’t see to the side effectively.”
Bill turned the radio back on. “I don’t think so, Freddy,” he said and changed stations. “I don’t think so.”
MY FATHER AS AN
OBJECTIVELY GOOD MAN
Over the years, my father has risen to and fallen from my list of Favourite Things, depending on my mood and circumstance. I don’t think I’ve been on his list of Favourite Things for a long time.
My father doesn’t like me. He swears at me a lot. When a person swears, it’s at people they don’t like. This doesn’t alarm me; why should life alarm me? I live it every day. He dislikes me for the correct reasons. They’re the same reasons every father dislikes his teenage son who keeps dropping hand grenades into his life. That’s how he often explains it.
“Teenagers are idiot kids who do stupid things,” he tells me. “Glad to see you’re fitting in.”
“You’re welcome,” I always reply.
My father is, objectively, a good man. I know that because I have googled “what is a good man,” and an argument can be made that my father meets sufficient criteria.
My old behaviour interventionist said that all of this was true, but not quite. “It’s not just criteria,” she told me. “You need to feel it in your heart.”
“I don’t want to feel it in my heart,” I replied. “I don’t want to visit a doctor.”
“Soon, Freddy,” she sighed. “Soon, we’ll work on metaphors.”
“I don’t want to work on metaphors,” I said.
Later, I googled “feeling something in your heart.” I learned that it’s a metaphor for feeling something significant. A feeling in your heart is synonymous with a heart attack, which is a life-threatening event. I concluded that the act of feeling love is also a life-threatening event.
I told my interventionist this, and she said that love doesn’t threaten your life like a heart attack does. Love can only change your life, but sometimes the pain associated with it feels like a heart attack, and the change in life feels like a death. Three days later, she quit her job and moved to a town in Indiana. I know this because I heard two staff members at Excalibur House talking about it.
“It was a painful divorce,” the first receptionist said to the other.
—
My father has goodness with statistical significance. He is not cruel, although he has hit me. He slaps the back of my head, but only to encourage me when I’m going too slow at home. My father says it’s to remind me I’m being stupid.
But fitting in, right? say the threads.
He’s a good man because he taught me how to brush my teeth. This is an example of a larger set of things he has taught me, and the act of mentorship is an act of goodness.
He taught me how to wipe my bum. This indicates he is willing to instruct me in areas he finds distasteful. The last time my father wiped my bum was when I was seven years old, on May 9, 2005. He instructed me that, from now on, I was to wipe it myself, for he had Had Enough of My Shit.
Later that same evening, just before I went to bed, my father told me his statement was a double entendre, and I would appreciate its depth when I was older. I am older now and still don’t understand its depth. I will review it again in a year.
He tells me that I am a good person. He is consistent with this: he never tells me that I am a bad person, although he has frequently told me I am an idiot. But idiots can be good people, too.
He’s the first person I see in the morning, the last person I see at night. In the hospital room, he sat in the chair all night and kept vigil while I slept. My sleep was fitful, and I awoke many times. Each time, I saw him slumped in his chair, eyelids drooping, but still awake. Sometimes, he saw me awake and drummed up a weak smile.
THREE DAYS ALONE ON THE TRAIL
After the day the four boys left me on the street, I began to walk the trails alone each day. On the day of my liberation, it was raining, and I was on patrol.
Halfway through my walk, I stopped below the cliffs and stared up at them. I stood for ten minutes, while the rain came down, and my mind wandered across a dozen different things, hopping from thread to thread. I was oblivious to the outside world, as I stared up the hill and thought about everything and nothing.
At the eleven-minute mark of being motionless, I surfaced, because I was shivering. The rain had changed from a drizzle to a downpour. The temperature dropped, and the icy cold water found its way through a tear on the right shoulder of my jacket.
A noise. I heard a noise, and that is what pulled me out of my own mind, back to the tapping of the rain on my hood, and cold breeze blowing. I suddenly realized how cold I was.
What was that sound? the threads asked. But I couldn’t tell. I stood still for another full minute, but I heard nothing else.
I began the walk back home. As I walked, I saw how much of a slave I was. I had stared up at the cliffs until I was almost frozen stiff, because staring up at the cliffs was one of my Favourite Things. I held no control over my life. But my list did. It always called, relentlessly demanding, altogether irresistible. And I always answered, enslaved by my Favourite Things.
I realized this and knew that there was nothing I could do to change it. But in this defeat I saw that there was a way back again. There was a way out. True, my body decides which Favourite Thing it will pursue. But I always control what’s on the list. It’s my list of Favourite Th
ings. I’m the one who places an item on the list, and I’m the one who moves if off the list.
A thing never randomly appears. I always make a conscious choice to connect with it. I always make a conscious choice to say This is now a Favourite Thing.
That was my moment of clarity. This was my liberation. I couldn’t control my impulses, but I could control the things I was impulsive about.
I could control my list of Favourite Things.
THE BOOK PRISON
I opened my eyes and I was fourteen, standing on the lip of my life.
I stood inside my bedroom, the door open before me, and I was uncertain. In my hands, I held The Twentieth Century in Review. I gripped it as if it might suddenly spring away from me and dart down the hall.
“Freddy!” my father called from the bottom of the stairs. “Let’s go! You’ll be late.”
I didn’t know what to do. Let’s go, said some of the threads, we’ll be late. And other threads said, You can’t leave.
I’ve got to think.
—
Listen: I finally knew the source of my difficulties. Me. The problem was how I was viewed by everyone else. I wasn’t on anyone’s list of Favourite Things. It was because of things I did.
And this book was one of the things that kept me off their list. I had to stop carrying it around, I knew.
I can’t change, I thought.
The better half of me said I didn’t have to. That I only needed to change who other people thought I was. That much, at least, was within my control. I could at least appear to be like everyone else.
I needed to stop flipping pages back and forth when I sat on a bus. In fact, I had to stop a lot more than that. I had to stop repeating—over and over—lines from a movie I saw last night. I would have to listen to more than the one song over and over and over again in a month. Stop talking about non-parallel lines, bad parking jobs. In fact, it might be best to stop talking about anything at all.
I didn’t know why these were the things I needed to stop doing. I didn’t want to stop doing these things. The world, however, wanted me to stop.
Do You Think This Is Strange? Page 9
