John Elder Robison

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Published in 2008 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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This edition published 2009
First published in the USA by Crown Publishers in 2007

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For my brother, who encouraged me to write the story, and most especially for Unit Two and Cubby

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Foreword by Augusten Burroughs

Prologue

Acknowledgments

Reading and Resources

About The Author

Author’s Note

IN THIS BOOK, I have done my very best to express my thoughts and feelings as accurately as possible. I have tried to do the same when it comes to people, places, and events, although that is sometimes more challenging. When writing of my time as a small child, it is obvious that there is no way for me to remember the exact words of conversations. But I do have a lifetime of experience with how my parents talked and acted, how I talk, and how I have interacted with other people over the years. Armed with that, I have recon structed scenes and conversations that accurately describe how I thought, felt, and behaved at key times.

Memory is imperfect, even for Aspergians, and there might well be passages in which I have mixed up people or chronologies. However, this isn’t a story with timesensitive components. In most cases, I’ve used people’s real names, but in cases where I do not want to embarrass someone or where I can’t remember someone’s name, I have used a pseudonym. In the case of characters that appeared in my brother Augusten Burroughs’s first memoir, Run ning with Scissors, I have used the same pseudonyms he used.

I hope all the people who appear in my book feel good about my treatment of them.There are a few who may not feel good, and I hope they at least feel I was fair. I thought very hard about

my portrayals of everyone, and I tried to treat the tougher scenes with sensitivity and compassion.

Above all, I hope this book demonstrates once and for all that however robotic we Aspergians might seem, we do have deep emotions.

Foreword

by Augusten Burroughs

MY BIG BROTHER and I were essentially raised by two different sets of parents. His mother and father were an optimistic young couple in their twenties, just starting out in their marriage, building a new life together. He was a young professor, she was an artistically gifted homemaker. My brother called them Dad and Mamma.

I was born eight years later. I was an accident that occurred within the wreckage of their marriage. By the time I was born, our mother’s mental illness had taken root and our father was a dangerous, hopeless alcoholic. My brother’s parents were hopeful and excited about their future together. My parents despised each other and were miserable together.

But my brother and I had each other.

He shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run.

I loved him and I hated him, in equal measure.

When I was eight, he abandoned me. At sixteen, he was a young, undisciplined, unsupervised genius, loose in the world. Our parents didn’t try to stop him from leaving. They knew they couldn’t give him whatever it was he needed. But I was devastated.

He would be away from home for weeks, then suddenly appear. And he didn’t just come home with dirty laundry, he came home with stories about his life out there in the world. Stories so shocking and outlandish, so unspeakable and dangerous, they just had to be true. Plus, he had the scars, broken nose, and stuffed wallet to prove it all.

When he returned from one of his adventures, the tension at home evaporated. Suddenly, everyone was laughing. “What happened next?” we had to know. He entertained us for days with tales of his fantastical life, and I always hated to see him leave, to let him slip back into the world.

He was a natural and gifted storyteller. But when he grew up, he became a businessman, not a writer. And this always felt somewhat wrong to me. He was successful, but none of his employees or customers knew, would even believe, the stories the man contained.

In my memoir, Running with Scissors, I devote only one section to my older brother, because I saw him even less frequently during the years in which those events are set. In the chapter “He Was Raised Without a Proper Diagnosis,” I describe some of his fascinating behavior as a young man who would later be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. Much to my amazement, when I embarked on my first book tour, people with Asperger’s showed up and introduced themselves. Running with Scissors contains (among many indignities) a crazy mother, a psychiatrist who dresses like Santa, toilet bowl readings, a woman I mistook for a wolf, and a Christmas tree that just would not go away. And yet without fail, at every event, somebody approached me and said, “I have Asperger’s syndrome, just like your brother. Thank you for writing about it.” Sometimes parents asked questions about their Asperger children. I was tempted to dispense medical advice while I had their attention, but I resisted.

Aren’t there any proper books for these people? I wondered. To my amazement, I discovered there was not all that much out there on the subject. There were a few scholarly works, and some simpler though still clinical texts that made people feel the best they could do for their Asperger children would be to buy them a mainframe computer and not worry about teaching table manners. But there was nothing that could even begin to describe my brother.

I wrote about him again in an essay in my collection Magical Thinking. And more people came forward. I began toying with the idea of writing a book about him. It would be fascinating, he would love the process, and all I’d really have to do is start him talking and type really, really fast. I could keep the essay’s heartwarming title (“Ass Burger”) and add the subtitle “A Memoir of My Brother.” Though I enjoyed designing the cover in my head, I wasn’t going to be free to write the book that went inside it anytime soon.

IN 2005, our father became terminally ill and my brother became distraught, confused, and fully human. For the first time in my life, I saw him weep openly as he sat at our father’s hospital bed and stroked his head.

It had the outward appearance of a touching moment between father and son. But I’d never seen my brother behave like this before. People with Asperger’s don’t access or show feelings, certainly not to this extent. I’d never seen such an unbridled display of raw emotion.

I felt conflicted. On the one hand, it was a breakthrough. On the other hand, it’s a bit of an understatement to say there is a history of mental illness in our family, so I was worried that it might be less breakthrough than breakdown.

After our father died, my normally animated and “tail up and activated” brother was depleted and sad. He started to worry about his health and consider, perhaps for the first time, his own mortality.

Not knowing what else to do, I sent him an e-mail about our father’s death with the instruction “Write about it.” He responded with a question. “What am I supposed to write?” I explained that it might release some of the sad feelings he was dealing with, and I gave him the oldest rule in writing: Show, don’t tell.

A few days later, he sent me an essay about our father, about visiting him in the hospital as he lay dying, and the memories— most of them dark—that arose from the past. It was stunningly honest and undeniably beautifully written.

I knew he had a story to tell, I thought, but where the hell did that come from?

The essay went up on my website and quickly became the most popular feature. Gratifyingly yet humblingly, about as much mail started to come in about him as about me. Will you publish more of his work online? Has he written anything else? How is your brother doing now?

So, in March 2006, I said to him, “You should write a memoir. About Asperger’s, about growing up not knowing what you had. A memoir where you tell all your stories. Tell everything.”

About five minutes later, he e-mailed me a sample chapter. “Like this?” was the subject line of the e-mail.

Yes. Like that.

Once again, my brilliant brother had found a way to channel his unstoppable Asperger energy and talent. When he decided to research our family history and create a family tree, the document ended up being more than two thousand pages long. So once the idea of writing a memoir was in his head, he dove in with an intensity that would send most people straight into a psychiatric hospital.

In a very short period of time, he’d completed his manuscript. It goes without saying that I am swollen with pride over the result. Of course it’s brilliant; my big brother wrote it. But even if it hadn’t been created by my big, lumbering, swearing, unshaven “early man” sibling, this is as sweet and funny and sad and true and heartfelt a memoir as one could find—utterly unspoiled, uninfluenced, and original.

My brother, after thirty years of silence, is a storyteller again.

Prologue

“Look me in the eye, young man!”

I cannot tell you how many times I heard that shrill, whining refrain. It started about the time I got to first grade. I heard it from parents, relatives, teachers, principals, and all manner of other people. I heard it so often I began to expect to hear it.

Sometimes it would be punctuated by a jab from a ruler or one of those rubbertipped pointers teachers used in those days. The teachers would say, “Look at me when I’m speaking to you!” I would squirm and continue looking at the floor, which would just make them madder. I would glance up at their hostile faces and feel squirmier and more uncomfortable and unable to form words, and I would quickly look away.

My father would say, “Look at me! What are you hiding?”

“Nothing.”

If my father had been drinking, he might interpret “nothing” as a smartaleck answer and come after me. By the time I was in grade school, my father was buying his Gallo wine by the gallon jug, and he had made a pretty big dent in a jug every evening before I went to bed. He kept drinking long into the night, too.

He would say, “Look at me,” and I would stare at the abstract composition of empty wine bottles stacked behind the chair and under the table. I looked at anything but him. When I was little, I ran and hid from him, and sometimes he chased me while waving his belt. Sometimes my mother would save me, sometimes not. When I got bigger and stronger and amassed a formidable collection of knives (about age twelve), he realized I was becoming dangerous and quit before coming to a bad end over “Look me in the eye.”

Everyone thought they understood my behavior. They thought it was simple: I was just no good.

“Nobody trusts a man who won’t look them in the eye.”

“You look like a criminal.”

“You’re up to something. I know it!”

Most of the time, I wasn’t. I didn’t know why they were getting agitated. I didn’t even understand what looking someone in the eye meant. And yet I felt ashamed, because people expected me to do it, and I knew it, and yet I didn’t. So what was wrong with me?

“Sociopath” and “psycho” were two of the most common field diagnoses for my look and expression. I heard it all the time: “I’ve read about people like you. They have no expression because they have no feeling. Some of the worst murderers in history were sociopaths.”

I came to believe what people said about me, because so many said the same thing, and the realization that I was defective hurt. I became shyer, more withdrawn. I began to read about deviant personalities and wonder if I would one day “go bad.” Would I grow up to be a killer? I had read that they were shifty and didn’t look people in the eyes.

I pondered it endlessly. I didn’t attack people. I didn’t start fires. I didn’t torture animals. I had no desire to kill anyone. Yet. Maybe that would come later, though. I spent a lot of time wondering whether I would end up in prison. I read about them and determined that the federal ones were nicer. If I were ever incarcerated, I hoped for a mediumsecurity federal prison, not a vicious state prison like Attica. I was well into my teenage years before I figured out that I wasn’t a killer, or worse. By then, I knew I wasn’t being shifty or evasive when I failed to meet someone’s gaze, and I had started to wonder why so many adults equated that behavior with shiftiness and evasiveness. Also, by then I had met shifty and scummy people who did look me in the eye, making me think the people who complained about me were hypocrites.

To this day, when I speak, I find visual input to be distracting. When I was younger, if I saw something interesting I might begin to watch it and stop speaking entirely. As a grownup, I don’t usually come to a complete stop, but I may still pause if something catches my eye. That’s why I usually look somewhere neutral—at the ground or off into the distance—when I’m talking to someone. Because speaking while watching things has always been difficult for me, learning to drive a car and talk at the same time was a tough one, but I mastered it.

And now I know it is perfectly natural for me not to look at someone when I talk. Those of us with Asperger’s are just not comfortable doing it. In fact, I don’t really understand why it’s considered normal to stare at someone’s eyeballs.

It was a great relief to finally understand why I don’t look people in the eye. If I had known this when I was younger, I might have been spared a lot of hurt.

SIXTY YEARS AGO,the Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger wrote about children who were smart, with above average vocabulary, but who exhibited a number of behaviors common to people with autism, such as pronounced deficiencies in social and communication skills. The condition was named Asperger’s syndrome in 1981. In 1984, it was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by mental health professionals.

Asperger’s has always been with us, but it’s a condition that has flown under the radar until quite recently. When I was a child, mental heath workers incorrectly diagnosed most Asperger’s as depression, schizophrenia, or a host of other disorders.

Asperger’s syndrome isn’t all bad. It can bestow rare gifts. Some Aspergians have truly extraordinary natural insight into complex problems. An Aspergian child may grow up to be a brilliant engineer or scientist. Some have perfect pitch and otherworldly musical abilities. Many have such exceptional verbal skills that some people refer to the condition as Little Professor Syndrome. But don’t be misled—most Aspergian kids do not grow up to be college professors. Growing up can be rough.

Asperger’s exists along a continuum—some people exhibit the symptoms to such a degree that their ability to function alone in society is seriously impaired. Others, like me, are affected mildly enough that they can make their own way, after a fashion. Some Aspergians have actually been remarkably successful by finding work that showcases their unique abilities.

And Asperger’s is turning out to be surprisingly common: A February 2007 report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 1 person in 150 has Asperger’s or some other autistic spectrum disorder. That’s almost two million people in the United States alone.

Asperger’s is something you are born with—not something that happens later in life. It was evident in me at a very early age, but, unfortunately, no one knew what to look for. All my parents knew was that I was different from the other kids. Even as a toddler, an observer would have thought that I was not quite right. I walked with a mechanical, robotic gait. I moved clumsily. My facial expressions were rigid, and I seldom smiled. Often I failed to respond to other people at all. I acted as if they weren’t even there. Most of the time, I stayed alone, in my own little world, apart from my peers. I could be completely oblivious to my surroundings, totally absorbed in a pile of Tinkertoys. When I did interact with other kids, the interactions were usually awkward. I seldom met anyone’s gaze.

Also, I never sat still; I bobbed and weaved and bounced. But with all that movement, I could never catch a ball or do anything athletic. My grandfather was a track star in college, a runner-up for the United States Olympic Team. Not me!

If I were a child today, it is possible that an observer would pick up on these things and refer me for evaluation, thereby saving me from the worst of the experiences I describe in this book. I was, as my brother said, raised without a diagnosis.

It was a lonely and painful way to grow up.

Asperger’s is not a disease. It’s a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one. There is, however, a need for knowledge and adaptation on the part of Aspergian kids and their families and friends. I hope readers—especially those who are struggling to grow up or live with Asperger’s—will see that the twists and turns and unconventional choices I made led to a pretty good life, and will learn from my story.

It took a long while for me to get to this place, to learn who I am. My days of hiding in the corner or crawling under a rock are over. I am proud to be an Aspergian.

1

A Little Misfit

It was inconceivable to me that there could be more than one way to play in the dirt, but there it was. Doug couldn’t get it right. And that’s why I whacked him. Bang! On both ears, just like I saw on The Three Stooges. Being three years old was no excuse for disorderly play habits.

For example, I would use my mother’s kitchen spoon to scoop out a ditch. Then, I would carefully lay out a line of blue blocks. I never mixed my food, and I never mixed my blocks. Blue blocks went with blue blocks, and red blocks with red ones. But Doug would lean over and put a red block on top of the blue ones.

Couldn’t he see how wrong that was?

After I had whacked him, I sat back down and played. Correctly.

Sometimes, when I got frustrated with Doug, my mother would walk over and yell at me. I don’t think she ever saw the terrible things he did. She just saw me whack him. I could usually ignore her, but if my father was there, too, he would get really mad and shake me, and then I would cry.

Most of the time, I liked Doug. He was my first friend. But some of the things he did were just too much for me to handle. I would park my truck by a log, and he would kick dirt on it. Our moms would give us blocks, and he would heap his in a sloppy pile and then giggle about it. It drove me wild.

Our playdates came to an abrupt end the following spring. Doug’s father graduated from medical school and they moved far, far away to an Indian reservation in Billings, Montana. I didn’t really understand that he could leave despite my wishes to the contrary. Even if he didn’t know how to play correctly, he was my only regular playmate. I was sad.

I asked my mother about him each time we went to the park, where I now played alone. “I’m sure he’ll send you a postcard,” my mother said, but she had a funny look on her face, and I didn’t know what to make of it. It was troubling.

I did hear the mothers whispering, but I never knew what they meant.

“. . . drowned in an irrigation ditch . . .”

“. . . the water was only six inches deep . . .”

“. . . must have fallen on his face . . .”

“. . . his mother couldn’t see him, so she went outside and found him there . . .”

What is an irrigation ditch? I wondered. All I could figure out was, they weren’t talking about me. I had no idea Doug was dead until years later.

Looking back, maybe my friendship with Doug wasn’t the best omen. But at least I stopped whacking other kids. Somehow I figured out that whacking does not foster lasting friendship.

That fall, my mother enrolled me at Philadelphia’s Mulberry Tree Nursery School. It was a small building with kids’ drawings on the walls and a dusty playground enclosed with a chain-link fence. It was the first place where I was thrown together with children I didn’t know. It didn’t go well.

At first, I was excited. As soon as I saw the other kids, I wanted to meet them. I wanted them to like me. But they didn’t. I could not figure out why. What was wrong with me? I particularly wanted to make friends with a little girl named Chuckie. She seemed to like trucks and trains, just like me. I knew we must have a lot in common.

At recess, I walked over to Chuckie and patted her on the head. My mother had shown me how to pet my poodle on the head to make friends with him. And my mother petted me sometimes, too, especially when I couldn’t sleep. So as far as I could tell, petting worked. All the dogs my mother told me to pet had wagged their tails. They liked it. I figured Chuckie would like it, too.

Smack! She hit me!

Startled, I ran away. That didn’t work, I said to myself. Maybe I have to pet her a little longer to make friends. I can pet her with a stick so she can’t smack me. But the teacher intervened.

“John, leave Chuckie alone. We don’t hit people with sticks.”

“I wasn’t hitting her. I was trying to pet her.”

“People aren’t dogs. You don’t pet them. And you don’t use sticks.”

Chuckie eyed me warily. She stayed away for the rest of the day. But I didn’t give up. Maybe she likes me and doesn’t know it, I thought. My mother often told me I would like things I thought I wouldn’t, and sometimes she was right.

The next day, I saw Chuckie playing in the big sandbox with a wooden truck. I knew a lot about trucks. And I knew she wasn’t playing with her truck correctly. I would show her the right way. She will admire me and we will be friends, I thought. I walked over to her and took the truck away and sat down.

“Miss Laird! John took my truck!”

That was fast! “

I did not! I was showing her how to play with it! She was doing it wrong!” But Miss Laird believed Chuckie, not me. She led me away and gave me a truck of my own. Chuckie didn’t follow. But tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow, I would succeed in making friends.

When tomorrow came, I had a new plan. I would talk to Chuckie. I would tell her about dinosaurs. I knew a lot aboutdinosaurs, because my father took me to the museum and showed me. Sometimes I had scary dreams about them, but overall, dinosaurs were the most interesting thing I knew of.

I walked over to Chuckie and sat down.

“I like dinosaurs. My favorite is the brontosaurus. He’s really big.”

Chuckie did not respond.

“He’s really big but he just eats plants. He eats grass and trees.

“He has a long neck and a long tail.”

Silence.

“He’s as big as a bus.

“But an allosaurus can eat him.”

Chuckie still didn’t say anything. She looked intently at the ground, where she was drawing in the sand.

“I went to see the dinosaurs at the museum with my dad.

“There were little dinosaurs, too.

“I really like dinosaurs. They’re neat!”

Chuckie got up and went inside. She had completely ignored me!

I looked down at the ground where she had been staring. What was she looking at that was so interesting? There was nothing there.

All my attempts to make a friend had failed. I was a failure. I began to cry. Alone in the corner of the playground, I sobbed and smashed the toy truck into the ground again and again and again, until my hands hurt too much to do it anymore.

At the end of recess, I was still there, sitting by myself. Staring into the dirt. Too humiliated to face the other kids. Why don’t they like me? What’s wrong with me? That was where Miss Laird found me.

“It’s time to go back inside.” She grabbed my little paw and towed me in. I wanted to roll up in a ball and disappear.

RECENTLY, ONE of my friends read the passage above and said, “Shit, John, you’re still that way now.” He’s right. I am. The only real difference is that I have learned what people expect in common social situations. So I can act more normal and there’s less chance I’ll offend anyone. But the difference is still there, and it always will be.

People with Asperger’s or autism often lack the feelings of empathy that naturally guide most people in their interactions with others. That’s why it never occurred to me that Chuckie might not respond to petting in the same way a dog would. The difference between a small person and a medium sized dog was not really clear to me. And it never occurred to me that there might be more than one way to play with a toy truck, so I could not understand why she objected to my showing her.

The worst of it was, my teachers and most other people saw my behavior as bad when I was actually trying to be kind. My good intentions made the rejection by Chuckie all the more painful. I’d watched my parents talk to other grown-ups and I figured I could talk to Chuckie. But I had overlooked one key thing: Successful conversations require a give and take between both people. Being Aspergian, I missed that. Totally.

I never interacted with Chuckie again.

I stopped trying with any of the kids. The more I was rejected, the more I hurt inside and the more I retreated.

I had better luck dealing with grown-ups. My disjointed replies didn’t bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. And I tended to listen to them more than I listened to kids, because I assumed they knew more. Grown-ups did grown-up things. They didn’t play with toys, so I didn’t have to show them how to play. If I tried to pet a grown-up with a stick, he’d take it away. He wouldn’t humiliate me by yelling and running to the teacher. Grown-ups explained things to me, so I learned from them. Kids weren’t so good at that.

Most of the time, I played by myself, with my toys. I liked the more complex toys, especially blocks and Lincoln Logs. I still remember the taste of Lincoln Logs. When I wasn’t chewing them, I made forts and houses and fences. When I got a littlebigger, I got an Erector Set. I was very proud of that. I built my first machines with the Erector Set.

Machines were never mean to me. They challenged me when I tried to figure them out. They never tricked me, and they never hurt my feelings. I was in charge of the machines. I liked that. I felt safe around them. I also felt safe around animals, most of the time. I petted other people’s dogs when we went to the park. When I got my poodle, I made friends with him, too.

“Look what your grandpa Jack sent you, John Elder!” (My parents named me John Elder Robison to honor my great-grandpa John Glenn Elder, who died before I was born.) My dad had brought home a wooly, ill-tempered, and probably genetically defective dog, most likely a reject from some dog pound. But I didn’t know that. I was fascinated. He growled at me and wet the floor when my father put him down.

I wasn’t scared of him, because he was considerably smaller than me. I had not yet learned that sharp teeth can come in small packages.

“Poodles are very smart dogs,” my father told me.

Maybe he was smart, but he wasn’t very friendly. I named him Poodle, beginning a long tradition of functional pet naming. I didn’t really know what to do with a dog, and I was always squeezing him and grabbing his tail and yanking in an effort to figure that out. He bit me whenever I yanked too hard. Sometimes he bit hard enough to make my arms bleed, and I would cry. Years later, I told that story to my mother, who said, “John Elder, Poodle never bit you hard enough to make your arms bleed! If he had, that would have been the end of Poodle in our house.” All I could say to that was “Little bites are a big deal to little people.” And that’s how I remember it.

Once, I locked him in my room and he got out. He chewed a dog-sized hole in the bedroom door. We found him lying in the sun in the backyard.

Seeing that, I tried chewing the door myself. My teeth barely made a dent in the paint. I didn’t even manage to bite a splinter out of the wood. I realized that Poodle had very sharp teeth. I learned to put my toys away before I went to bed every night. If I forgot, Poodle would come in during the night and eat them.

My parents didn’t like Poodle because he ate their furniture. Despite that, Poodle and I slowly became friends. I was always a little wary of him, though, because I never knew what he’d do.

Our home wasn’t very happy. The dog ate my toys and snapped, and my parents always fought. One night, I awoke to them yelling at each other in the next room. They often fought at night when they thought I was asleep. It was always stressful and unsettling to me, but this time was different. My mother was crying in addition to yelling. She didn’t usually cry.

“Momma!” I yelled loud to make sure she heard me.

“It’s okay, John Elder, go to sleep.” She came in and patted me on the head, but she went right back out.

I didn’t like that at all. Usually, she sat with me, and petted me, and sang to me till I fell asleep. Where did she go? What’s going on?

The loud fights were disturbing because I was sure they were fighting about me, and I knew if they got tired of me they could just leave me somewhere to fend for myself. I thought, I have to be really good, so they won’t get rid of me.

So I tried to be very quiet and act asleep. I figured that’s what they expected.

“He’ll go back to sleep,” my mother said, quietly. Hearing that, I was wide awake, and even more scared.

“No, he won’t,” my father cried. “He’ll remember this night when he’s forty.” And then he started sobbing, too. Anything that made both of them cry must be very, very bad.

“Daddy! Don’t make Momma cry!” I could not help myself. I wanted to hide under the bed but I knew they’d find me. I was terrified.

My mother came back in and sang softly to me, but she sounded funny. After a few minutes, though, I fell into a troubled sleep.

Much later, I learned that my father had been having an affair with a secretary from the German department at the university where he was studying. My mother told me she looked just like her. I guess the affair unraveled that night, and my parents’ marriage unraveled some more, too. That was when my father started to turn mean.

When I woke up the next morning, he was still in bed. He wasn’t at school. “Your father is tired,” my mother said. “He’s resting.” I walked over to him. He smelled normal, and he was snoring. I left him alone and my mother walked me to school like she always did.

When I got home from school, my father was gone. And that night, he didn’t come home.

“Where is my dad?”

“Your father is in the hospital,” my mother said, in a strained voice.

“Like when he broke his arm?” I asked hopefully.

The year before, my father had fallen on the icy sidewalk in front of our house. Luckily for us, the University of Pennsylvania Hospital was just a few blocks from where we lived. I didn’t like the smell of the place, though, and I was already suspicious of the doctors there because they gave me shots. It was bad that he was in there.

“Yes, it’s like when he broke his arm. We’ll go see him tomorrow. He’s gotten exhausted by his schoolwork and he needs to rest.”

That left me feeling anxious, since I got tired and took naps every day. What if I wake up in the hospital? I was almost too scared to take a nap again. I was scared to go to sleep that night, too.

When my mother took me to see him, a nurse with a key let us into his room. I had not realized they could lock people up in a hospital. I resolved to be even more careful whenever my mom took me to the doctor. The visit was unsettling, because he didn’t smell right, and he didn’t act quite right.

My father did smile when he saw me. He said, “Hey, son, come here!” He grabbed me and picked me up, which made me very anxious. He squeezed me and his face was all scratchy. “I’ll be okay. I’ll be home soon,” he said. He put me down and I backed away.

He ended up “resting” for a whole month. He still looked tired when he came home.

Shortly after my father came back, my mother took me on a vacation to see her parents in Georgia. I didn’t like it much down there. The house smelled like old wooden matches, and the water tasted funny.

“It’s the sulfur in the water,” they said, but no one could tell me why they put sulfur in the water down there.

When we got back from Georgia, my dog was gone.

“Where’s Poodle?” I asked. I was alarmed.

“He ran away,” my father said. But he didn’t sound right. I wondered what had really happened.

“Did you do something to Poodle?” I asked him.

“No!” he shouted. “Your dog ran away!” His sudden yelling scared me.

I knew then that my father had done something bad to my dog, but I didn’t know what, and I was afraid to ask. I was much more afraid of my father after that. That fear lasted until I became a teenager and was able to defend myself.

As my parents fought more, my father got meaner. Especially at night. He was nastiest then, because he had started drinking wine. If he got mad at me, he’d spank me. Really hard. Or else he’d pick me up and shake me. I thought my head might come off.

After my father graduated, it was time for him to find a job.

The one he picked was all the way across the country, in Seattle, Washington. It took us a whole month to drive there, in our black VW Bug. I really liked that VW. I still have a picture of myself standing by the front bumper. I used to crawl into the well behind the backseat to hide. I’d look out the back window at the sky and imagine I was flying through space.

It’s been many years since I could fit into a space that small.

I liked squeezing myself up tight in a tiny ball when I was little, hiding where no one could see me. I still like the feeling of lying under things and having them press on me. Today, when I lie on the bed I’ll pile the pillows on top of me because it feels better than a sheet. I’ve heard that’s common with autistic people. I was certainly happy back there in the VW, curled up in a little ball on that scratchy gray carpet.

It was a great time. There were no other kids to hurt my feelings. My mom and dad talked to me all day. Best of all, there was no fighting at night. And there were fun new things to see all the time, like Mount Rushmore. I was impressed by the presidents carved in the side of the mountain, but I was even more excited when I found there was an Indian reservation at the base.

“Can we see Doug?” I asked.

“This isn’t the reservation his parents moved to.” My mom had a sad look. “They moved to Montana, and this is South Dakota. They’re a long way from here.”

When we arrived in Seattle, we moved into an apartment complex that was full of more kids than I had ever seen. As soon as I saw them, I wanted to go outside and join in, to be part of the kid pack. But it didn’t work out that way.

The leader of the kid pack was a six-year-old named Ronnie Ronson. He was almost two years older than me, a really big kid. Ronnie and his kid pack played cowboys and Indians. They would run back and forth across the grassy square in the middle of our apartment complex, shouting, “Gitty up, gitty up, Ronson’s cowboys.” They waved lariats and shot cap guns as they ran back and forth. It was very exciting. I wanted to be part of it.

I tried running back and forth with them.

“What are you doing? You aren’t a cowboy!” What? I looked at him, and I looked at myself. Why was he a cowboy and I wasn’t?

I said, “I am too a cowboy!

” “No, you’re not! You’re a monkey face!” And he ran off. As I stood there, Ronnie’s cowboys ran back and forth past me, saying, “Monkey Face!” every time they went by.

They would never let me be a cowboy. I was angry, and sad, and humiliated. I would never fit in. Why was I alive? I ran back to our apartment, crying. My mother picked me up and sat me in her lap.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just don’t know how to make friends,” I sobbed. “No one likes me.”

My mother didn’t know what to say, but she petted me, and I calmed down. I looked out the window at Ronson’s cowboys, and then sat down to work on Chippy, my tractor. Chippy was never mean to me. I always got along with machines. Even back then.

Our time in Seattle was probably the best family time of my childhood, even though I didn’t have much luck making friends. My father took us camping almost every weekend. He showed me how to be a woodsman. We looked at books together, especially the Boy Scout Woodsman manual. I can still remember the pictures that showed how to make a trap, and the correct way to step over a fallen log.

I dreamed about trapping wolves and bears, but garter snakes and frogs were as close as I got. And I’ve never forgotten the woodsman’s log-crossing techniques that I learned at five.

I was happy to discover that there were woods behind our apartment in Seattle. I liked it in the woods. When I was sad, I would go there and sit and think, and I would do woodsman things. That always made me feel better.

The woods seemed vast to me, but they were really only a few hundred feet deep. I know they didn’t seem so huge to my parents, because they always told me not to go all the way through them and get onto Aurora, the big highway on the other side. They told me the highway went all the way to Alaska.

“Don’t you go out by the highway. Someone might steal my baby boy!” I didn’t want to be stolen, so I stayed clear.

There were a few other kids that weren’t part of Ronnie’s pack, and I got to know them slowly. We were the runts of the litter, the misfits. One of the other misfits—mostly due to his small size— was Jeff Crane, who was a year and a half younger than me. Jeff ‘s mother became friendly with my mother, and we used to go to their apartment and visit. Jeff had big brothers and a big sister, too, but they weren’t interested in us. So we played together.

Since I was older, I knew more than he did. I showed him things, like frogs and plants and how to make forts—all the things a five-year-old knows and a three-year-old wants to learn. Sometimes we caught small snakes and put them in glass jars. Jeff ‘s older brother came out and helped with snake catching. We had to punch holes in the metal tops so they could breathe.

Doing things with Jeff showed me that littler kids would look up to me as a teacher. I felt good about that. Of course, kids always think they know the answers. The difference in my case was that most of the time, I actually did. Even at five, I was beginning to understand the world of things better than the world of people.

When we moved from Seattle to Pittsburgh the next year, I gave Chippy to Jeff. Chippy was the first valuable thing I owned, and the first thing I gave away, but it seemed right because Jeff was my first real friend. He was younger than me, but he was smart, and he looked up to me, and he didn’t make fun of me like the bigger kids. Besides, I was almost too big to drive Chippy anymore, and my parents had said they’d get me a bike when we got to Pittsburgh. I knew that having a bike was a sign of being a Big Kid. And maybe when I was a Big Kid, the other kids would like me.

2

A Permanent Playmate

“John Elder, we’re going to move back to Pennsylvania,” my father announced one day when he came home from school. I was more interested in the pile of silver dollars I had just discovered in his drawer. They were old and heavy, and some were from the 1880s. But he insisted on telling me about moving. He took the silver dollar out of my hand and said it again.

“John Elder, we’re moving soon!”

Taking the silver dollar away did get my attention. But as I think back on events like this, I realize my parents were not always very affectionate toward me. Did they even want a child? I’ll never know.

With my attention now on my father, I asked, “Are we moving to the same place we lived before?”

“No, this time it’s Pittsburgh,” my father said. He thought he’d found a permanent job. I’d be starting first grade in the Pittsburgh schools, with a new pack of kids. I was sad to say goodbye to my friend Jeff, but I wasn’t very happy in Seattle, so I didn’t mind moving away.

I had learned something from my humiliations at the hands of Ronnie Ronson and Chuckie and all the other kids I’d tried and failed to make friends with. I was starting to figure out that I was different. But I had a positive outlook. I would make the best of my lot in life as a defective child.

In Pittsburgh, I finally started learning how to make friends. I knew now that kids and dogs were different. I didn’t try to pet kids anymore, or poke them with sticks. And at nine years of age, I had a lifechanging revelation.

I figured out how to talk to other children.

I suddenly realized that when a kid said, “Look at my Tonka truck,” he expected an answer that made sense in the context of what he had said. Here were some things I might have said prior to this revelation in response to “Look at my Tonka truck”:

a) “I have a helicopter.”
b) “I want some cookies.”
c) “My mom is mad at me today.”
d) “I rode a horse at the fair.”

I was so used to living inside my own world that I answered with whatever I had been thinking. If I was remembering riding a horse at the fair, it didn’t matter if a kid came up to me and said, “Look at my truck!” or “My mom is in the hospital!” I was still going to answer, “I rode a horse at the fair.” The other kid’s words did not change the course of my thoughts. It was almost like I didn’t hear him. But on some level, I did hear, because I responded. Even though the response didn’t make any sense to the person speaking to me.

My new understanding changed that. All of a sudden, I realized that the response the kid was looking for, the correct answer, was:

e) “That’s a neat truck! Can I hold it?”

Even more important, I realized that responses A, B, C, and D would annoy the other kid. With my newfound social brilliance, I understood why Ronnie’s cowboys hadn’t wanted to talk to me.Maybe that was why Chuckie had ignored me, too. (Or maybe Chuckie was just another defective kid, like me. After all, she did like trucks, and she did look at the dirt when I talked.)

After I suddenly got it, my answers made sense—most of the time. I wasn’t ready to be the life of the party, but I was able to participate. Conversations no longer came to a screeching halt. Things were getting better.

In some ways, the grown-ups around me had actually kept me from figuring this out sooner. Adults—almost all family members or friends of my parents—would approach me and say something to start a conversation. If my response made no sense, they never told me. They just played along. So I never learned how to carry on a conversation from talking to grown-ups, because they just adapted to whatever I said. Kids, on the other hand, got mad or frustrated.

How do normal kids figure this out? They learn it from seeing how other kids react to their words, something my brain is not wired to do. I have since learned that kids with Asperger’s don’t pick up on common social cues. They don’t recognize a lot of body language or facial expressions. I know I didn’t. I only recognized pretty extreme reactions, and by the time things were extreme, it was usually too late.

With my incredible new skills, I made friends right away. I met the Meyers girls across the street, Christine and Lisa. I made friends with Lenny Persichetti, five doors down. We formed a kid pack, playing hide-and-seek and building forts in the woods. We hung out in the garage behind our house, where some older kids had formed a band. My new friends and I roamed the neighborhood, exploring things without our parents for the first time. Lenny and I found abandoned castles and ruins and ancient machinery hidden in the woods of Frick Park. There were all sorts of things to explore.

That summer, we became Big Kids. We were free. No one was watching us. I loved it, because all of a sudden, I was no longer alone. Then I got another big surprise.

“John Elder, I’m going to have a baby!” my mother said.

I didn’t know what to say. Would it be a sister, I wondered? I hoped not. What good would a little sister be? A brother would be better. Yes. A little brother! For me! I would have my own permanent playmate.

Mom got bigger and bigger and I was able to listen to the baby inside. I was excited.

On the day the baby was born, my mother’s brother Mercer came and stayed with me while my parents went to the hospital. I couldn’t wait to see my new brother. My uncle drove me to the hospital to see him for the first time. He was just a few hours old.

“Christopher Richter Robison. What a beautiful baby boy!”

“Do you want to hold him?” My mother was holding him against her. He was tiny, smaller than I’d imagined.

“Will he get bigger?” Maybe he was a dwarf.

“You were the same size when you were born,” my mother said. It was hard to believe, but if I was that small once he would probably grow up, too.

He was all red and kept his eyes closed most of the time. My mother handed him to me. I expected him to struggle, like when I picked up a dog or a cat, but he didn’t do anything. I couldn’t really even feel him, all wrapped up in a blanket. It was very different from picking up the dog. My own little brother. I was very excited, but I was careful not to show it, so they wouldn’t take him away from me.

He came home wrapped in a yellow blanket, and my mother put him in a crib across the hall from me. I went in and watched him, but he didn’t do anything. I looked at him, and sometimes he looked back at me, but mostly he slept. He was neat.

“Be careful. You have to support his head.” I squeezed him against me so he wouldn’t fall. I was always afraid his neck would break like my mother had said it could. But it never did.

I looked down at him. “Can you say anything?”

He snorted.

“Is that it?” I poked him in the nose the way I’d seen my parents do. He yelled. Quickly, I picked him up and rocked him back and forth. He quieted down, and snorted some more.

“I’ll call you Snort,” I said. Now he had a name.

I built a tall crane with my Erector Set and I lifted blocks up to his crib. I began moving wooden blocks from floor to crib. I was hoping Snort would play with them, but he just stared.

“Look, Snort, I’m lifting blocks for you.” Snort watched them rise and fall.

“Mom, look, I made Snort a crane!” I was jealous, because my mother spent all her time with Snort. She had never ignored me before.