Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (16 page)

It was a great life.

Fat was one of a small number of bands that played its own music in clubs all over New England. Our manager also got us jobs opening for bigger bands at large concerts in Boston. That winter, we played with James Montgomery, James Cotton, Roxy Music, and Black Sabbath. The time I spent with them allowed me to meet other musicians, and I got more calls to design things—from more powerful amps to an electric flute.

Old friends like Jim Boughton would come to my shows, but for the most part I was on my own, with a new circle of people around me. I was getting pretty good at adapting to new people and places.

I was even starting to see the world. Every time I had a day off, I took a trip somewhere on my motorcycle. I rode into Vermont, New Hampshire—anywhere I could go in a day’s ride. That April, while the ground in Ashfield was still covered with two feet of snow, the band decided to take a trip to a Caribbean island, and I was included. They had saved up for this vacation, setting aside a few hundred dollars from every show. Personally, my entire net worth was the eighty dollars in my wallet when I left home, but Peter told me this would be an all-expenses-paid vacation. We flew from a dreary winter in western Massachusetts to Montserrat, a tropical paradise, where I would realize that I was kind of different from the typical rock ’n’ roll musician.

The fun started at six in the morning, Easter Sunday, 1976. I was asleep in a villa high on a mountainside, with a long winding road leading from our door to the town of Plymouth far below. According to Peter, the villa belonged to some rich Englishman who liked musicians. The sun was just coming up, the air was clear, and it was a comfortable seventy-one degrees. All around us, the island was quiet. Montserrat has no industry, no highways, and no loud noise. It’s warm and peaceful and very pretty.

You’d think anyone would be delighted to be there. Not me. All the small things I’d come to expect in life were missing. There was no regular American food. No hamburgers. No iced tea. There was nothing to eat but eggs and conch meat. And they said we could have chicken, but only if we killed the chicken, and if we killed it, we wouldn’t have any eggs. But there was plenty of conch. However, I’d never eaten conch meat before and I was suspicious. It’s like a cross between a scallop and a soft, decayed fish.

The truth was, I had no idea how to vacation. This was my first trip far from home with anyone besides my family. I had no money and there was hardly anything for me to do. One thing I learned from that trip was:
Bring money!

Everyone except Willie, our native friend and guide, was asleep. I had taken a liking to Willie as soon as I met him, perhaps because he had a pet iguana that he led around on a leash made from scrap aircraft cable. This morning, the iguana was home and Willie was wild. He burst in the door and ran through the house, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“Wake up! Wake up, mons! It’s a bust! Wake up!”

He ran down the hall, opening the doors and shouting at all of us.

“Wake up, mon, the law is coming!”

I opened my eyes and sat up. I didn’t have any drugs.
I’m not up to anything,
I thought.
Why would I be getting busted?
I walked out onto the porch and looked down the hillside. Four carloads of ragged-looking natives were climbing the steep road to the villa. Each car had two guys riding on its hood and who knew how many guys inside. The ones on the hood had clubs. It didn’t look like a raid. It looked like the natives were attacking.

I ran back inside.

“Fucking natives with clubs!”

“It’s a fucking attack! Wake up!”

A few of the guys began flushing dope, coke, pills, and whatever shit they had down the sink and the toilet. I hoped there was a septic tank. Half these native toilets emptied onto the hillside a hundred feet away. Fine surprise that would be.

It was the girls who had gotten us into this mess. I knew they would be trouble.

When we arrived, they were in the house. They greeted us at the door like they belonged there. Maybe they did.

“Hi, I’m Jen and this is my friend Barbara. Joe told us we could stay here till next weekend.” None of us knew who Joe was, but after a moment’s thought, the guys in the band decided the two girls could stay. Hearing that, the girls became more talkative.

“We ran away from home three weeks ago.”

“My father’s a New Jersey policeman. But he’ll never find me here.”

“You wanna smoke some pot?”

Oh, shit,
I thought.

I didn’t like finding extra people in our vacation home. Arriving to find it populated by two girls made me feel like an intruder. Who really belonged in the house? Us? Them? I found it unsettling. I was actually finding the whole trip unsettling, because I didn’t like changes in my environment. I liked sleeping in the same place and having the same people around.

The other guys didn’t see it that way. Mike turned to Peter and said, “Two free girls, Peter. It’s an omen.” Two of the guys moved right in with them.

I never understood how some guys did things like that. A girlfriend for a week, just like that. I was too shy even to talk to them.

Billy Perry, Chris, and I went into town the first morning. The people all spoke in a rapid musical lilt that I found hard to understand at first but soon became used to. We learned one thing quickly—everyone knew where we were staying.

“Yes, mon, you stay with the girls in the Maxwell place.”

Everywhere we went, the girls had preceded us. I never did find out exactly what they had done, but it seemed those girls had been having quite a party since they came to town a week or two before. And now we were part of whatever scene they had created.

There was plenty of pot in the house, and coke and pills and liquor, too. I drank some beer, but the rest of the stuff just didn’t appeal to me, so I ignored it. Until that morning, when the law arrived.
Jesus Christ,
I thought.
I’m gonna go to jail for someone else’s drugs! It’s not my shit!
I wanted to yell out. But I didn’t say anything.

By the time the raiders made it to the door, we were all awake. I was dressed. Peter opened the door for the law as I stood back and watched. There were no guns in sight, but the two guys out front did have clubs. They seemed respectful, though, and one of them showed us a badge. He looked like a homeless person, but I figured that’s how the law looked in third world countries.

I stepped aside and they swarmed in. Eight of them. Working in teams, they began searching the villa.

I stood in the foyer, watching and listening. Every now and then I heard a shout as though someone had scored a point on the pinball machine in the bar in Plymouth.
They must have found something,
I said to myself. I became concerned about corruption.
Are they planting drugs in my socks or underwear?

Finally, they emerged from the back of the house holding several bags. I couldn’t see inside, but I consoled myself with the thought that the bags weren’t mine. Still, they were grinning. They had something. I couldn’t understand everything they said, but it became clear that we were supposed to accompany them somewhere. I stepped outside, where two more cars had arrived.

Mike turned to me and said nonchalantly, “Well, John, this is it. This is where they take us to jail and throw away the key.” I looked around, but there was no possibility of escape.
Mike doesn’t know anything,
I told myself.
He must be high.

The raiders motioned me into an old Austin station wagon. It was built with seating for five, but eight of us climbed aboard. A native sat in my lap.
If the brakes fail on the way down the hill, he’ll absorb the crash for me,
I thought. He didn’t say a word the whole way down. Another native rode on the hood. I waited for our driver to slam on the brakes a bit too hard and send him flying under the wheels, but it never happened. He must have had practice. He grinned like he was on a roller coaster.

We headed into the town of Plymouth and stopped in front of a stone structure. The jail. A tropical prison, really. It had rough stone walls three feet thick. The natives who raided us turned out to be the island’s entire police force, with a few drinking buddies thrown in for good measure. They were excited. A big bust! Us.

“Stand up, mon! Say cheese for the camera. It’s your mug shot, mon!”

After taking the pictures, they all stood around watching them develop. They were using an old Polaroid Land Camera. My grandfather had one in the 1960s.

The leader said, “I’m Inspector Vincent, okay, gimme your passport, mon!”

“I don’t have a passport. I just have an ID,” I responded.

“Okay, then, mon, gimme your ID!”

I handed Inspector Vincent my Top of the Campus card, which, back home, entitled the bearer to admission to the ninth-floor bar at the University of Massachusetts. I never did get that card back. He copied my name, address, and date of birth in painfully tiny script on an index card, which he carefully filed in a recipe box. Since the spelling of my name and my date of birth were wrong on the Top of the Campus card, the inspector’s card ended up wrong, too. I was pleased.

No one searched me. I realized they had forgotten about that. It made me wish I had a knife or a gun. But the natives were so friendly, I would have hated to stab or shoot one. I tried to edge out the door. Politely but firmly, Vincent’s sidekick grabbed my arm and pointed back inside, to a seat.

“You have to stay inside, mon. This is jail.” And he laughed. Asshole.

After we were all booked, Inspector Vincent led us to a cell. There were no windows, just rusty bars. At least it wasn’t cold.

“Jesus Christ. I hope they don’t have rats in here!” said Mike, the guitar player. Until he said it, I hadn’t given any thought to rats.

“Do they have snakes here?” This was not the time for Mike’s vivid imagination.

There was no way out through those stone walls, so I tugged at the bars.
I could break out,
I told myself,
but it’s going to take some time and some work.
I hoped it didn’t come to that. Besides us, the jail had one resident, an old run-down wife killer.

Our confinement didn’t turn out to be very onerous. Inspector Vincent had some musicians on his crew, and once things calmed down, they unlocked our cell and brought out their guitars. We gave them money to buy food in town, and they served it with Coke in refillable glass bottles. I hadn’t seen bottles like that since I was a child. When they were empty, one of the policemen filled them partway with water and played them like a musical instrument. I would have been impressed if I wasn’t locked in fucking jail.

Peter had a friend who knew someone on the island, and he pledged some land for our bail, and we were released in time for dinner. The next morning, Peter’s friend found us a lawyer, a wizened little specimen with a sharp disposition. He didn’t seem especially enamored with us.
Perhaps he lives here and has daughters,
I thought. After all, he’d heard about those runaway girls.

When we were all together, he said, “Did you young men know certain kinds of drug possession are a hanging offense in a Crown colony?”

None of us said anything.

“Drug penalties in the colonies are, ahem, a bit draconian.”

“Cops love busting musicians. I hope they don’t lock us up forever.”

“Fuck you,” I said. Mike was full of happy thoughts that day.

Seeds seemed to be a big deal to Montserrat’s finest. And that’s what they had us on: some seeds in the bottom of a bag. Marijuana seeds meant
grower.
Dope smokers were okay, just prison time for them, but growers were executed. The coke, the mushrooms, the speed, the acid, all those things were still packed in the luggage in some quantity, despite everyone’s best flushing efforts. They didn’t care about any of it. Seeds were what they had come for, and seeds were what they got.

The trial was set for Wednesday. We all washed up and appeared in court as ordered that Wednesday morning. There didn’t seem to be any other cases except ours, and the courtroom was empty except for us, the judge and court officers, the lawyers, and a few spectators. We had a brief appearance in front of the judge, who was wearing a wig that would have marked him as a transvestite back in New York. However, I felt sure he did not see himself as being in drag.

I couldn’t actually hear most of what was said because the lawyer and the prosecutor and the judge were all huddled together up front, but the whole thing was over in half an hour. Two members of the band were fined five thousand BIWI dollars, which came to about twenty-five hundred U.S. dollars. The charges against me and the girls were dropped. We were free to go in time for lunch. I got the distinct impression that our arrest provided a considerable boost to the island government’s economy.

One of the policemen drove me back to the villa, where I picked up our rental car. It was a Jeep-like rig called a Morris Moke. Mokes are a lot of fun, and a tropical island like Montserrat was the ideal place to have one. Prior to my arrest, I had even gotten a Montserrat driver’s license for the thing. I was kind of proud of it.

It was actually a surprise that I would have any car to drive, given the fact that I was broke. As it happened, though, I hadn’t needed any money when Billy Perry and I walked past the car rental place on our first day on the island. I had looked into their garage, where two mechanics seemed to be struggling to change the oil in an old Morris car.