Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (5 page)

He was getting meaner, too. He had started drinking something called sherry. I tried it but immediately spat it out. I could not imagine why he wanted to drink glass after glass of the stuff, but he did. He sat by himself at the kitchen table and drank, and got meaner as it got later. I was learning to stay away from him in the evening.

I had never been to Amherst or Austin. But from my reading, I knew Austin was home to poisonous snakes and Gila monsters. It was hot and dry. “Let’s go to Amherst,” I said. My parents agreed.

Once again we moved. This time we ended up in Hadley, Massachusetts, a farming community about six miles from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My parents had both grown up in the country, but all my life we’d lived in cities. Now we were in the country. I was excited. We moved into an old farmhouse.

“It was built in 1743. It’s one of the oldest houses in town, John Elder.” My mother seemed proud of that.

There were cows in the front and crops out back. My mother introduced me to the landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Barstow. They seemed nice. Mr. Barstow was the farmer who owned all the fields around us. And best of all, his brother owned the farm next door, and they had four kids I could play with. With my refined interpersonal skills, I actually made friends in Hadley right away. By the time school started, I even had buddies to sit with on the bus. I had never ridden a bus before, but I didn’t tell them that. I had learned not to reveal anything that might subject me to more ridicule than I already got.

There was a mountain behind us, and the Connecticut River was visible through the trees across the road. It was the prettiest place we’d lived. After school, the Barstow kids and I climbed the mountain and looked for amethysts. “They’re purple. They’re precious stones, like rubies,” Dave Barstow said.

Snort was getting bigger, too. He had learned how to sit up on his own, and he crawled around after me. He lived in a pen with rubber mesh sides. I took him out when he yelled and if he became a pest I put him back. Occasionally, I would flip his pen upside down so Snort was in a jail with a roof. He didn’t like that.

I decided to teach Snort to walk, in the squash field alongside the house. The plowed dirt was soft, so it wouldn’t hurt if he fell. Plus, he was small and didn’t have far to fall anyway. I would hold his little paw and we’d walk down the rows to the end of the field. Then we’d turn and go back. When we started out, I had to lift him by his paws and drag his feet on the ground so he’d get the idea to walk. He had a hard time but eventually I was able to lower his arms and he’d stand on his own. That seemed like progress. I was pleased. Then I started letting go of him completely.

“Go, Snort! Walk!”

The first time I did that, he yelled and sat right down. I nudged him with my foot and lifted him by a paw. He really wanted to crawl.

“Come on, Snort, walk!” He tried sitting down when I let go of him, but I kept pulling him up. Finally, I got him taking steps while I held onto him. He seemed proud of himself, but it was hard to tell because he still just babbled. And I wasn’t sure how much I could expect anyway, because I still thought he might be defective. He showed no interest at all in reading even though I showed him my books and I even read him stories.

Soon I had him walking on his own. He still liked being picked up, and he still resorted to crawling, but more and more he used his hind legs exclusively to get around. When I saw him following on four legs, I would step in the middle of his back and squash him on the floor. Or I would nudge him sideways with my foot, upending him the way you’d flip a turtle. He’d yell, but he got the idea to walk, not crawl.

“Two-wheel drive,” I said. “Not four-wheel drive.” Now that I was big, I read
Motor Trend
magazine, and I felt sure the analogy would be obvious to Snort.

By wintertime, he was toddling all over. He wasn’t talking much yet, but my mother assured me he would. I had my doubts. I expected him to be doing more.

“Your brother is not defective! He’s just a baby. He will be talking just like you in a few years.” My mother continued to stick up for him, even when confronted with the evidence, which annoyed me. After all, he wasn’t talking, and he wasn’t reading.

I tried to show him things, but he didn’t seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.

For some reason, whatever I did to him, Snort still idolized me. I was bigger, and I knew more. I liked having a little brother. It made me feel more mature. “Watch out for your brother,” my mother would say when we went outside to play. I would walk and he would toddle after me, like a pet. I liked feeling responsible and taking care of him. And I did a good job of it. Unlike some older brothers, I never set him on fire, or cut off an arm or a leg, or drowned him in the tub. I took really good care of Snort, and it showed. He got bigger every month, and he continued to follow me around. He was thriving.

Gradually, he stopped snorting and drooling. He began to take my toys and play with them himself. My little brother was becoming a nuisance. It was time for a new name.

“Snort, come here. You are getting bigger. So I’ve decided to give you a new name. From now on, you are going to be called Varmint. Got it?”

“Varmint?”

He said the word a few times and toddled off to tell his mother the news.

The crushing loneliness that I had felt as a five-year-old was mostly gone. Now I only felt lonely on special occasions, when I would be reminded of my inferiority. When I had a birthday, my parents would bake a cake and get me some presents and everyone ran around looking jolly. But every now and then I got invited to birthday parties for other kids, and at those parties there would be ten or twenty kids, all running around laughing. Those were the good parties, I thought. Mine were crummy.

I was seldom laughing and happy, and I was never surrounded by kids. I didn’t fully understand the reasons why, but I knew their situation was better than mine, and it hurt to see what I was missing.

As I moved through school as another marginal kid, my dad and my teachers started forecasting my future. They told me I would never amount to anything. They said I was headed for a career pumping gas or jail or the Army—if they would take me. I was contrary and I would not apply myself.

But I’d show them.

3

Empathy

B
y the time I was twelve, I had progressed from “If he doesn’t get better, he may have to be institutionalized” to “He’s a weird, screwed-up kid.” But although my communication abilities had developed by leaps and bounds, people had ever higher expectations for me, and I began having trouble with what the therapists called “inappropriate expressions.”

One time, my mother had invited her friend Betsy over. I wandered in as they sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and talking.

Betsy said, “Did you hear about Eleanor Parker’s son? Last Saturday he got hit by a train and killed. He was playing on the tracks.”

I smiled at her words. She turned to me with a shocked expression on her face. “What! Do you think that’s funny?”

I felt embarrassed and a little humiliated. “No, I guess not,” I said as I slunk away. I didn’t know what to say. I knew they thought it was bad for me to be smiling, but I didn’t know why I was grinning, and I couldn’t help it. I didn’t feel joy or happiness. At the time, as I approached my teenage years, it was hard to figure out exactly what I did feel. And I felt powerless to react any differently.

As I left, I could hear Betsy. “What’s the matter with that boy?”

My mother sent me to therapists, all of whom focused on the wrong things. Mostly, they made me feel worse than I already did, dwelling on my so-called evil and sociopathic thoughts. They were all full of shit. They didn’t make me better. They just made me feel worse. None of them figured out why I grinned when I heard Eleanor’s kid had been run over by a train.

But now I know. And I figured it out myself.

I didn’t really know Eleanor. And I had never met her kid. So there was no reason for me to feel joy or sorrow on account of anything that might happen to them. Here is what went through my mind that summer day:

Someone got killed.

Damn! I’m glad I didn’t get killed.

I’m glad Varmint or my parents didn’t get killed.

I’m glad all my friends are okay.

He must have been a pretty dumb kid, playing on the train tracks.

I would never get run over by a train like that.

I’m glad I’m okay.

And at the end, I smiled with relief. Whatever killed that kid was not going to get me. I didn’t even know him. It was all going to be okay, at least for me. Today my feelings would be exactly the same in that situation. The only difference is, now I have better control of my facial expressions.

The fact is, from an evolutionary standpoint, people have an inbred tendency to care about and protect themselves and their immediate family. We do not naturally care about people we don’t know. If ten people get killed in a bus crash in Brazil, I don’t feel anything at all. I understand intellectually that it’s sad, but I don’t feel sad. But then I see people making a big deal over it and it puzzles and troubles me because I don’t seem to be reacting the same way. For much of my life, being different equated to being bad, even though I never thought of myself that way.

“That’s terrible! Oh, I just feel awful!” Some people will cry and carry on, and I wonder…
Do they really feel that, or is it just a play for attention?
It is very hard for me to know. People die every minute, all over the world. If we tried to feel sorry for every death, our little hearts would explode.

As I’ve gotten older, I have taught myself to act “normal.” I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.

Ten years ago, I got a call from the state police. “Your father’s been in a car accident. He’s being taken to the Greenfield hospital.”

“Shit, that’s terrible,” I said.

I immediately felt anxious, almost nauseous. I was worried. I was frantic. Would he die? Within moments, I had dropped what I was doing and I was speeding toward the Greenfield hospital.

As it happened, my father didn’t die. He and my stepmother both recovered from that accident. But the sick, anxious feeling did not leave me until I had reached the hospital, seen them, talked to the doctors, and satisfied myself that they were going to be all right.

I contrast that in my mind with hearing the news that a plane just crashed in Uzbekistan. Fifty-six people are dead.

“Shit, that’s terrible,” I say.

To an observer, my reaction to those two events was the same. But to me there is a night-and-day difference. Caring—or pretending to care—about other people is a learned behavior. It’s one of several kinds of empathy, I suppose. I have true empathy for my family and close friends. If I hear of something bad happening to one of them, I feel tense, or nauseous, or anxious. My neck muscles cramp. I get jumpy. That, to me, is one kind of empathy that’s “real.”

When something sort of bad happens, I don’t have the physical reaction but I still react to the news. When the bad news does not involve danger, my immediate thought is,
What can I do to fix things?

When I was fourteen, my mother came home one day and said, “John Elder, the car’s on fire!” I went downstairs and out to the car. The inside was full of smoke.
I have to fix this for her,
I thought.
And I have to do it before my father gets home.

I opened the windows and disconnected the battery. When the smoke cleared, I crawled under the dash and found a wire from the cigarette lighter that was melted and burning. I cut it out and repaired it, and I removed the penny that my mother had dropped into the lighter socket. I did all that despite the fact that the car was filthy and full of cigarette butts and old paper matches, the most disgusting things in the world to me. I did it for my mother.

That’s another kind of empathy. I didn’t have to fix the car. I could have played dumb and she’d never have been any the wiser. I would not have fixed it for anyone besides my mother. But I felt a need to help because a family member was in trouble.

I have what you might call “logical empathy” for people I don’t know. That is, I can understand that it’s a shame that those people died in the plane crash. And I understand they have families, and they are sad. But I don’t have any physical reaction to the news. And there’s no reason I should. I don’t know them and the news has no effect on my life. Yes, it’s sad, but the same day thousands of other people died from murder, accident, disease, natural disaster, and all manner of other causes. I feel I must put things like this in perspective and save my worry for things that truly matter to me.