Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers (15 page)

Today I meet moms who cut the labels out of their kids’ clothes and trim the seams. The first time I heard that, it sounded great.
What a nice thing to do
, I thought. But when I thought about things a little more, I began to question the wisdom of that. Why? Because removing the irritants doesn’t do anything to decrease our sensitivity. And if clothes tags bother us today, and we don’t address the nuisance head-on, where will we be in ten years? Naked at work?

Instead of fixing my clothes, I fixed myself. I learned to focus my mind so that my sense of touch no longer controlled me.

That statement sounds as if I decided one day to ignore
those irritating labels and move on. That’s not exactly what happened. It began with casual dismissal from my parents. When I complained about an itch, my father said, “Just ignore it. Think of something else.” And my mother said, “John Elder, sometimes wool is itchy.” I’m pretty sure my parents never shared my sensitivity to clothes, and so it never occurred to them to do anything to relieve my own distress. Eventually, I taught myself to think of other things, like my father told me. So how did I do it? As they say, it’s all in the mind.…

I’ve learned that my senses are arranged by a kind of priority system in my head. When I’m awake, first place goes to vision, with sound a close second. Sights and sounds always seem to take precedence over touch and smell, unless the stench is really, really bad. The smell of a dead squirrel will trump an irritating lawn mower every time. But when there’s nothing going on, those other senses perk up, and I begin noticing all sorts of little things that usually escape me. Touch rises to the top, and sometimes the annoyances begin.

I notice touch sensitivity most as I’m lying in bed at night, where it’s dark and quiet. That’s why I can’t wear clothes to bed—the seams would keep me awake. Socks are the same way—I don’t feel them during the day, when
I wear shoes, but late at night, my feet feel like they are wrapped in straitjackets if I go to bed wearing socks.

The older I’ve gotten, the easier it has become for me to ignore things like underwear labels. I’ve worked hard on training my mind in that way. But it’s also easy to slip back, so I have to be careful. If I let myself feel a label’s scratchy surface, it will take only a moment and some other sharp fragment of clothing will be digging at me somewhere else. Right now, it’s a strand of jagged wool in the left sleeve of my sweater. It seems like every itch I feel in my clothes leads to another. If I let myself go down that road I’d have to live in a nudist colony, and I don’t want to do that.

Brain scientists say things like this get stuck in our minds by a process called brain plasticity. Think of the sled runs you see on a hillside in winter. The more times you go down the hill, the more fixed the paths become. After a few days you’ve worn highways into the snow and those are the only places the sled will go. No matter where you start at the top of the hill, you fall into one of the well-worn grooves on the way to the bottom. So you always end up in the same place.

Your brain is the same way. Allow it to fixate on something like an annoying label, and pretty soon you’ll be stuck because you can’t get out of that track. Your brain will have formed a path, and every time your mind goes down it, the path gets wider and more worn in. The more times you go there, the harder it will be to erase. That’s
true for lots of things—not just clothing sensitivity.

Many kids, and indeed people of all ages, are sensitive to touch; it’s not just an autistic thing. However, those of us on the spectrum are particularly susceptible to sensitivities like this because of how our brains are wired. Recent studies have shown that autistic people start out with more plasticity than nypicals, meaning our brains change more easily, and more profoundly, in response to life’s experiences. There are times when this gives us an advantage in life, but touch sensitivity is an area where our plasticity can really work against us. That’s why it’s especially important that we flatten out those undesirable paths early in life. They can be really hard to get rid of when we get older.

I’ve had pretty good luck with that erasing. I was able to teach myself to ignore small scratchy things. It was a gradual process, teaching my mind to ignore the label and focus on something else, like the sound of the wind in the trees or even a show on television. One thing that helps is focusing my mind inward. First, I listen to the sound of wind if I’m outdoors. I try to relax, and breathe slowly. Then I start a metronome in my head. I imagine a chime sound, like a bell, repeating about once a second. I can
imagine it so clearly, it’s almost as if it’s really there, ringing next to me. I focus on that ding and the world recedes a little bit. The more I focus, the less things like scratchy clothes bother me. After a few minutes of concentration, they seem to fade away and I feel more relaxed.

I’ve minimized my label sensitivity so well that I can even wear rough wool sweaters. I could never do that when I was fifteen. Now, having said all that, I’ll tell you a secret. I wear my underwear inside out, so the irritating seams and the label are on the outside. And I never wear designer underwear, because fancy brands have irritating labels on both sides, and that’s too much for me. Just because I can make myself ignore irritating clothing doesn’t mean I have to actually seek it out.

After all, I am not a masochist.

I
can still remember the first time I saw the music. It happened at a dance in the cafeteria at Amherst Regional Junior High. Ernie Buck and the Machines—a local high school band—were playing “Get Ready,” a hit tune that had been recorded by both Rare Earth and the Temptations. The room was dark, loud, and full of kids. Light washed out from the stage, pushing aside the smell of sweat and socks. Colored shafts of light spun across the dance floor. You’d never guess we ate lunch there during the day.

“I’m bringing you a love that’s true,” Ernie sang. “So get ready!”

My neighbor Denny had insisted we go to the dance. He was a few months older than I, and a lot more popular and sophisticated. He even had a girlfriend, a brown-haired ninth grader named Brenda Keyes. I hoped I could learn from him and get a girlfriend of my own. I watched the other kids closely to see how it happened.

“Gonna start making love to you,” the song continued.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t having much luck in that department. Denny had explained the process to me, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. “You just walk up to a girl and ask her to dance. Then she says yes, and follows you out to the dance floor. Afterward you can talk to her and make friends.” I couldn’t imagine how I could ever do such a thing, even as I watched other kids doing what he said.

I looked at the girls scattered around the room. Some were with guys—I ruled them out because they already had boyfriends hanging around. Even I knew that you didn’t walk up to a girl who was with a guy and ask her to dance. That would be like asking for a fight. What about the girls who weren’t with guys? Quite a few were standing together in packs, talking and laughing with one another. I figured they were out, too, because a pack of girls would tear me to shreds if I walked over and they didn’t like my look. I could already see them laughing, and I didn’t want to be the one getting laughed at. So I stayed away. That left the girls who were standing alone around the room. I didn’t approach them, because I couldn’t think of a single word to say, even though I’d been pondering what to say all day.

Finally, there was the problem of dancing. I could observe it, and understand intellectually how it worked, but to actually do it … never. I watched the kids on the dance floor, but there was no way I could ever move around like them.

So that was it. I figured there were no girls I could talk to or dance with. That just wasn’t something I was going
to be able to do. Freed from that worry, I retreated behind the stage, where I could watch the scene from a safe hiding place.

That’s when I saw the music. It was there, in the backs of the amplifiers. Each musician had his own amp, and from my vantage point, I could see into the backs of their cabinets. Modern amplifiers are transistorized, and there’s nothing to see. Back then, amplifiers used vacuum tubes, which glowed dimly and made patterns of light in time to the music. They were like windows to a secret realm, revealing the inner world of the dance hall. I leaned forward eagerly and gazed inside.

Girls were terrifying. The world of electronics was safe, predictable, and secure. Amplifiers never laughed at me. I had been fascinated—obsessed even—with electronics since my parents gave me a computer kit for Christmas the year before. I spent countless hours studying my computer and unraveling its secrets. As soon as I unraveled them I applied all my newfound knowledge to my other great love—music. By the time of the dance, I had already sacrificed every radio and television in the house to my pursuit of electrical knowledge. I was about to learn a new lesson.

Each amplifier had a mix of small and large tubes. The little tubes were important, but I knew it was the big ones
that did the heavy lifting. They took the weak signals from the preamp tubes and made them strong enough to ring through the speaker cabinets and fill the room. When they did that, they pulsed with a faint blue glow whose shape and brightness changed with the music. I’d never seen that before and I was captivated. I put my face right up behind the bass amplifier—a Fender Bassman—sitting on top of a big black speaker cabinet. At that distance, the pounding of the bass was all I could hear. As I watched, the blue lights in the tubes danced in perfect synchronization with the sounds from the speaker below. At the same time, I felt waves of heat on my face whenever the bass played loudly. Sound poured from the speakers, and heat radiated from the tubes. It was a total sensory experience.

The longer I watched, the more the patterns revealed themselves. Chords had one shape, while individual notes had another. It felt magical, seeing the light dancing in the tubes as the energy of the music passed through. It appeared as light inside the amp, becoming invisible in the wires. The speakers turned the electrical energy to sound, and it rocked me back on my feet.

As the night wore on, the band played louder and louder. At times, they played so loudly that the amps overloaded. When that happened I could hear the distortion
in the speakers and see bright bars in the blue lights. It was captivating, seeing the change. Undistorted sounds appeared as smooth patterns. Hard distortion made distinct bright bars. I forgot all about the dance, the girls, and the other people.

As the volume rose, something else happened. The dark metal on the outside of the tube began glowing dull red. The center was supposed to be red, because there was a heater there to make the tube work, but the rest of the tube was usually black. If the outside got red, that could mean only one thing. I was actually seeing metal get red hot as it passed the electricity on its way to the speakers. The thought of those tubes turning the tiny signals from an electric bass into a thunder that filled the room was thrilling. Would they melt? I felt the heat. Now I could smell the hot electronics, too.

My world shrank down to the tiny area inside those tubes. I watched them all night, until it was time to go home. I didn’t get anywhere with the girls, but I had some revelations when it came to electronics.

The next day, I told one of the kids on the bus about my experience seeing music in the vacuum tubes. He looked at me like I was nuts. He said, “I almost got to third base with Cheryl Reed last night. With all the girls in that place you looked in the back of amplifiers? What’s the matter with you?” We may have been in the same place physically, but our minds were light-years apart. How did that happen? I started out wanting to meet a girl, and I
ended up watching vacuum tubes. Did the tubes distract me from loneliness, or was I so much of a geek that I actually forgot? I really didn’t know.

I wasn’t even sure what third base meant, though I deduced it involved a sex act. Unfortunately, if romance was a game with bases, I wasn’t even at first. In any case, I did not want to focus on my failures with girls. Music was pure, safe, and immeasurably more promising because it had a logical mathematical foundation. That meant I could figure it out. Girls were not that way at all. I turned away and pondered the sounds and patterns in silence for the rest of the bus ride.

In the next few weeks I read everything I could find on vacuum tubes, in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the
Radio Amateur’s Handbook
, and the
RCA Receiving Tube Manual
. I wanted to know what made the blue glow, and why the tubes got red hot at the end of the night. I learned about anodes, cathodes, heaters, and plate current. Tiny signals on the grids controlled huge signals on the plates. That was the secret to amplification. It wasn’t magic at all—it was engineering. The technical terms didn’t make much sense at first, but I kept reading until I understood. I was on my way.

That was the great thing about electronics. I read about it, and practiced what I read, and got better. January’s insoluble
mysteries became child’s play in March. By concentrating and studying, I could unravel any technical problem at all. At least that’s how it felt. People problems … they were a whole ’nother matter. No matter how much we talked about girls, I never did figure them out.

I sure wanted a girlfriend, but I went with what I knew and where I found success. I may have been lonely, but electronics would soon give me my first real adult success. The complicated and frightening world of girls would have to wait. Meanwhile, I was absorbed, totally lost in the world of music, sound, and engineering.

I
grew up in a world of sensory overload. Every sound was like a fire alarm. The labels on my clothes clawed at me. Bright lights startled and blinded me. And the worst part was that no one seemed to believe me. Noise? What noise?

Part of the problem was that I could make noise or flash lights as loud or bright as I wanted, with no problems. As long as I was in control, my own light and sound never bothered me. I could shriek at the top of my lungs all day and feel fine, while everyone within a hundred yards wanted to throttle me. But if someone else made half that noise or flashed a light at
me
, I went nuts. Those dichotomies made people think I was just a spoiled brat. “He can dish it out fine, but he can’t take it” was what my father said. If only they had understood.