Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers (7 page)

I even polished my motorcycle, in case she wanted to go for a ride. The bike and I were the spiffiest we’d been in years. The guys in the band noticed, and to my surprise they knew just what it meant. “Check it out … John has a hot date,” they said. I hadn’t realized the change would be so obvious, nor had I expected them to divine the reason for it right away. But it was okay. All that mattered was that I looked good for her. I could handle a little teasing from the guys.

It worked. “Would you like to go out after you finish work?” I couldn’t believe it—I had just been asked on a date.
That never happened before
, I thought. Was it the clean
clothes, or the hair, or something else? I didn’t know, and I was afraid to ask. Cathy Moore became the first girlfriend of my adult life. We dined at the Whatley Truck Stop, and then we went for a ride. “Let’s go somewhere and look at the stars,” she said. We spent the night far out in the country, looking up into the predawn sky. She, me, and my black Honda motorcycle.

I’m sure I was clumsy and a little robotic that first night, and indeed most nights back then. Despite all that or maybe as a result of my inimitable geek charm, things worked out. We held hands and cuddled and talked until the first light of dawn. Whatever she expected of me, I was way too shy and scared to try anything else. After she fell asleep, I lay there thinking, wondering if she would still like me the next day. To my amazement, she did. As the days and weeks passed, we got to know each other better, and I became more confident. She had a car, and we began going places together.

She talked about her own time at St. Brigid’s High School in Leominster. Unlike me, she had graduated with honors and then gone on to college. She asked me where I had learned about electronics, and I said UMass, but I changed the subject before I had to admit I was never a real student. I began to wish I had stayed in school. I was starting to feel that dropout stigma. I never admitted leaving school to anyone in those years, but I knew, and it ate away at me.

Now that I had a girlfriend, I began to understand that my behavior and appearance did matter to other people. I
hadn’t really grasped that before, perhaps because I’d never had a strong enough connection to someone else.

Now I could see it, and I really did my best, but I was hampered by a lifetime as a feral child. My parents had not done much to socialize me, since they were wrapped up in their own problems, and I had rejected whatever advice others had offered. My problems were compounded by Aspergian oblivion, though I didn’t know that at the time. I did my best, but I wished I’d paid attention and gotten an earlier start.

I was almost nineteen years old. I’d left my family, dropped out of school, and joined a band. I’d lived my whole life with little to no regard for what anyone else thought or said. All of a sudden, my world had changed. I had an answer to that cynical question I’d been asking all those years: Why bother? I bothered because I’d learned that having someone to love and cherish was the most important thing in the world to me, and I had to look and act and feel like I was someone she would want to love and cherish back. That was why I had to bother, as much trouble as it seemed.

Years later, Cathy is long gone from my life, married to someone else; but the feeling she brought has never left me.

W
hen I was little we lived in Philadelphia, where the museum was one of my favorite places. Trains and dinosaurs were two of my special interests, and they had both at the Franklin Institute. They had a huge model train layout and several real steam locomotives. They even allowed kids to go up in the cab and work the levers, just like real train engineers. Another room was full of dinosaurs, or dinosaur skeletons. I really liked to wander through the big dinosaur room, but it was different from the train room. With the dinosaurs, I had to be brave, especially when I looked at the teeth on some of those monsters. One of the skeletons they had on display was a plesiosaur, a gigantic meat-eating aquatic dinosaur. “They were fierce,” the museum guides said, “but they’ve been extinct sixty million years. There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

I heard his explanation, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that scientists weren’t always right when they claimed something was extinct. Take the coelacanths; they were
supposed to have been extinct for millions of years, too, but a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa a few years before I was born. The books I read said that most of the deep ocean was unexplored and unknown—we knew only 10 percent of what lived there. To me, it was obvious that there could be living dinosaurs in the deep sea. There might still be plesiosaurs.

That’s the problem with being what grown-ups call a “bright kid.” You learn stuff, and some of it is scary. And no one understands why you’re frightened.

When my family went to the beach at Atlantic City, in New Jersey, I was brave and went in the ocean anyway, because there were a lot of people there and my parents assured me no one got attacked by dinosaurs. But I stayed in shallow water where plesiosaurs and other aquatic monsters could never get me.

Shallow water also kept me safe from undertows, riptides, killer seaweed, and all the other stuff that lurked at the deep water’s edge.

Even with that knowledge I never had bad dinosaur dreams until I read about the Loch Ness Monster. That story got me really worried. I saw pictures of something big swimming in Loch Ness, which was someplace in Scotland. It looked a lot like the plesiosaur from the museum. And it was alive.
Could one appear here? Or up the road at Lake Wyola?

Sometimes in my dreams a plesiosaur stuck its head in my bedroom window, ready to eat me.
But they live in water
, I told myself.
They can’t be in our backyard
. Could I be sure?

“There are no monsters out there. It’s okay.” My mother would reassure me when I woke up from the bad dream, and eventually I’d fall asleep. But I did worry, and with good reason.

My father was a philosopher, and I tried to tackle the problem the way he did in his classes, by asking myself questions.

People like my mom didn’t believe in monsters, because they’d never seen one. With no evidence, why should an ignorant person believe? Mom wasn’t a scientific thinker like me. She was just a mom, trying to quiet me down. Any kids who had seen a monster got eaten, so they weren’t around to tell the tale. Kids vanished every now and then, and monsters might well be the cause
.

What’s the downside to a belief in monsters?
If they are real and you believe, you are wary and therefore less likely to get eaten. If they aren’t real and you believe, you waste time being afraid of an imaginary threat. On the other hand, if they are real and you don’t believe, you could come to a really bad end. So the risk of not believing monsters are real is huge, whereas the risk of believing when they’re not is minimal.

After long and careful reflection, I concluded that monsters may be real and I was wise to be wary.

My father liked that. “A famous scientist used that same argument as a reason to believe in God.”

Faced with a world of threats, what is a tyke to do? I pondered that question long and hard. I kept my window shut at night so dinosaurs and monsters couldn’t smell me or find a way in to get me. It got hot sometimes, but the safety was worth the discomfort. I read about kids who vanished and the only clue was an open window.
Nessie?

With my window safely closed, my second line of defense was the bed. Before getting in, I always checked underneath to make sure nothing was hiding down there. Then I made sure my toes were always covered, because you never knew what might grab them if they were exposed in the dark. My head stuck out, but there was nothing I could do about that because I knew I’d suffocate if I buried my head in the blankets.
Sometimes
, I figured,
you just have to take a chance
.

I knew some kids covered their heads, but that was really dangerous. We breathe oxygen, but air contains a bunch of other gases besides the oxygen we need. That’s why people say things like, “Give me some fresh air.” They want air that is full of oxygen, not recycled air that other people have already breathed, where the oxygen is all used up.

That’s the problem with burying yourself alive in blankets. You have stale breathed air on the inside and fresh life-giving air on the outside. So covering my head might well be a form of suicide, where I just passed out and died from lack of oxygen. According to my mother, that’s what happened when you put a plastic bag on your head. She warned me about that, lots of times. I didn’t
want to die, so I didn’t cover my head with plastic bags or blankets. But I did cover every other part of my body with a blanket, and did everything else I could think of to protect myself from something that would sneak into my room late at night and eat me.

And dinosaurs weren’t the only things I decided to be leery of. Everywhere I looked, there were threats. The kids around me were unpredictable. Teachers were just waiting to pounce on me, and punish me for fun. Strangers were worse—they lurked outside the school, waiting to kidnap unwary kids. Whom could I trust? It seemed like my parents were safe, and maybe a few kids, but that was about it.

With all that, you might think I was a scared little kid, but I really wasn’t. I was just cautious. Cautious and wary. And prepared.

I don’t fear monsters anymore. Even if Nessie is real, she’s not going to get me in Amherst, Massachusetts, ninety miles from the ocean. Yet my fear of covering my head with blankets seemed so rational and sensible that I carried it into adulthood. I actually stopped thinking of my wariness to put my head under the covers as a fear. It was like jumping off a bridge—something you just don’t do.

I was firm in that belief until I got into an innocent conversation with my friend Diane. We were talking about wintertime when she said, “I like to get completely under the covers where it’s nice and warm. I pull the blankets right over my head!” I was shocked to hear that. Maybe an ignorant child would do such a thing, but her? Even as an adult, I am always aware of the dangers of insufficient oxygen. I looked at her as she uttered that amazing and reckless statement.
She doesn’t look brain damaged
.…

I broached the subject gently. “Aren’t you afraid of suffocating with a blanket on your head?” She looked at me like I was nuts. “No,” she said, in that firm voice teenagers use when addressing total fools.

“Aren’t you worried that there won’t be enough fresh air under the blanket?” I persisted even though her obvious dismissal of my idea made me think there just might be a flaw in my reasoning.
She is a grown-up, after all, so it didn’t kill her. And she raised three kids that I know of, and none of them suffocated … or did they? Maybe she started with five and these three are all that’s left.…

When Diane challenged me, self-doubt arrived like a bolt out of the blue. I had not thought about heads and blankets in years—I just didn’t do it—but I began thinking about it then, quickly and quietly.

Have I ever heard of anyone suffocating under a blanket? I’ve never heard of one, but maybe they call it crib death or something innocuous. How well do the gases in the air mix through a blanket? I don’t know. The warmer it is under the blanket, the less the air is diffusing through the covers, and the more dangerous it
must be. A blanket over the head is surely different from a plastic bag over the head. Yes …

I decided to be cautious. “I don’t know how safe hiding your head under a blanket is. There’s more than the risk of suffocation. If the house caught fire you might not see or smell it until too late—” I began elaborating my reasons, but she interrupted me. “You have a lot of irrational fears,” she said. I immediately thought of my fear of heights and edges.
Were my fears really irrational?
I was shocked, because her comment wasn’t nasty or condescending. It was just matter-of-fact. She was suggesting that the irrationality of my fears must be obvious to everyone.
Could that be true?

Diane’s view was clear, but I wasn’t convinced. I’ve always been a firm believer in that old adage Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. To me, my fears were well thought through and reasonable.

I took a moment to ponder my fear of edges. I am wary of getting too close to the edge when I’m on top of a building or at a cliff side while hiking. Edges can crumble, and I don’t want to be standing on them when they do. If you doubt that for a moment, ask yourself where the talus pile at the base of any cliff comes from. The dictionary definition says it all: “A talus is a sloping mass of rocky fragments that has fallen from a cliff.” And when it comes to tall buildings … they may not crumble, but microbursts and strong air currents are ever-present dangers. The same air currents that launch a hang glider could launch me, if they came at the wrong moment.

“I don’t think my fear of edges is irrational,” I began,
but I guess she could hear the hesitation in my voice. “Okay,” she said, “the edge
can
crumble and wind
can
sweep you off, but the chance of that is so remote, it’s still irrational.”

All I could think of was,
Not to me, it’s not
. I reminded her that hikers found bodies at the base of the cliffs at Mount Tom—a popular local hiking spot—with some regularity. They had to get there somehow. Either the edge crumbled, or winds came, or the people just got dizzy. Or maybe they got pushed. However it happened, if they had stayed a little farther from the edge, most of them would still be alive today.

And I wasn’t ready to give up on putting my head under the blanket, either. “Maybe you have been fine under light blankets,” I conceded. The emphasis was on the “have been.” “But with heavier blankets there’s got to come a point where you suffer lack of oxygen.” Visions of people swaddled in those heavy felt mats movers use flitted through my mind. She didn’t say much, but I could see she remained unconvinced. I am sure she will continue to put her head under the blanket in the future, and I just hope she survives undamaged.