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Before getting into the column itself, a bit of news. My very first published story, “Love, Dad,” which appeared in the March 1992 Analog, has been republished online. It is now available for free to anyone who wants to read it, or reread it without having to dig through back issues of this magazine perhaps consigned to boxes in the garage.
I have Analog regular Michael A. Burstein to thank for this. Recently Michael was given the opportunity to edit the April 2009 issue of the online SF magazine Apex, and one of the things he wanted to do was to republish my story, which, for assorted reasons, has a special place in his heart. But you can read his comments in the magazine, which can be found at http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/, and my story at http:// www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/2009/04/short-fiction-love-dad-by-jeffrey-d-kooistra/.
This was my first experience with e-publishing, and it was a good one. I know many—perhaps most—of you are already familiar with the e-pub world, so I won’t discuss the specifics of it here. But I have been doing quite a bit of my own investigations of late, and along the way I met an e-book editor who had an interesting trait that caught my attention. She wrote on her webpage that she has Asperger Syndrome, and in her brief bio, mentioned to friends from high school that the syndrome, which had only recently been diagnosed, explains why she was so “weird.”
I’m a writer. Interesting people interest me, and I have a degree in psychology and I didn’t know what Asperger Syndrome was, though I recalled at least hearing the term. So I Googled it and soon found out it is on the autism spectrum. Those of you familiar with my Dykstra stories know there is an autistic savant in that universe named Arie Hague. Now Arie Hague is a savant in the area of advanced technology, and in my readings I soon discovered the book Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison (Crown Publishers, 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-39598-6). Robison also has Asperger Syndrome—this book is the story of his life with the condition and, as it turns out, he is something of a savant with electronic technology. Those of you my age will recall the splash the rock band KISS made when they first hit the scene, with the face make-up, the over-the-top shows, and the pyrotechnic guitars. Robison was responsible for those guitars.
It’s not necessarily an easy thing to diagnose a person with Asperger Syndrome, but there are several traits that most of them share and that are considered when a diagnosis is being made. Among them are things like a lack of inborn social skills, and a failure to develop an ability to read body language and facial expressions. They often dislike any change in routine, and can appear to lack empathy. Many cannot recognize meaningful speech nuances like inflections and tones, and thus may take even an obviously sarcastic comment as if it was meant literally. On the flip side, their own speech may lack tone and accent and sound flat. Oftentimes they avoid eye contact (which is what prompted Robison to entitle his book after a phrase he heard frequently), but then they might also be prone to stare inappropriately. They may affect unusual facial expressions and posture, and find it impossible not to rock in place or to sit still, all the while being unaware that they are moving around.
Those with AS often become absorbed in one or only a few interests, in which they then become unusually proficient and knowledgeable. Many children are interested in dinosaurs, but an AS child may memorize reams of data about size, habitat, location, and presumed habits of hundreds of kinds of dinosaurs. He might also be impossible to shut up on the subject and may have a very long, one-sided conversation with you on it, unable to notice that you have long since lost interest, or were just being polite when you expressed interest. Adult AS persons may also move from special interest to special interest, spending an enormous percentage of their time on a specific hobby or subject, and then after a few weeks or months, dropping it entirely.
The above having been said, it is very difficult to pin any one AS person down to any one or even most of the recognized symptoms, and your experience with a specific Aspergian may be wildly different face-to-face than it is, say, online. For instance, I would never have guessed from my online experiences with her that my editor friend has AS. From what she tells me, it might be more recognizable to me if I meet her in person. But then, adult Aspergians over time often learn how to behave pretty much “normally,” so I might never have noticed in any case. As Robison recounts, he has learned how to interact with people in a more acceptable way as he’s grown older and more experienced.
He details this in his remarkably readable and straightforward style on page 20 as he tells us about his “life-changing 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’:
‘I have a helicopter.’
‘I want some cookies.’
‘My mom is mad at me today.’
‘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:
‘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 . . . .”
This brief account encapsulates exactly the nature of the problem most with Asperger Syndrome have. Like aliens from space who learn English entirely from the printed page, they lack the internal understanding for how the words make others feel in a conversational context. Ordinary people (who are called neuro-typical, or NT) are so used to how they’re supposed to interact with each other verbally, that anyone who violates those expectations immediately strikes them as strange, or as having something wrong with them, and therefore someone they don’t trust or don’t want to be around. It is only natural that if you say to someone, “Look at my new car,” and he replies, “That tree is an oak,” you will probably feel confused, slighted, maybe even insulted, and will look at him funny.
Unfortunately for Robison, in addition to being born with AS, he was also born into a dysfunctional family. His mother suffered from mental illness, and his father was an alcoholic. They also moved around quite a bit, and John, who could crank out high scores on tests of achievement but could not get a passing grade in his classes, dropped out of school at the first opportunity.
So it is heartwarming and inspiring to read the story of how this man started with so many strikes against him yet went on to be remarkably successful. In chapter 13 he recounts the tale of how he walked up to a sound guy at a Sha Na Na concert because he saw they were having trouble with their Phase Linear amplifiers. He said he could fix them, asked for bench space, and within a few days had repaired fifty of them. And they all worked perfectly.
Then he was asked if he could build a five-way crossover. A five-way crossover divides the output sound signal into five bands, sending the low frequency signals to the big bass speakers, and the higher frequencies to additional speakers best suited to reproduce those sounds. Robison designed his own circuitry, etched his own circuit boards with the help of his girlfriend in the kitchen sink, and assembled it on the dining table. He took it to the show and it was immediately put to use at a sold out Meat Loaf concert when that artist was riding high. And it worked perfectly.
One day in 1978, and just 21, Robison met up with KISS. Guitarist Ace Frehley was trying to fit a smoke bomb into his guitar, and when asked for his opinion, Aspergian Robison replied, “This is a fucking mess.” (p. 134) After a bit of conversation, Ace directed his assistant to have Gibson overnight one of their Les Paul models (the gold standard) to him. Only then did Ace ask Robison for his name, only to immediately dub him “Ampie” since he knew Robison built amplifiers. Being renamed is a cute irony since Robison, like many Aspergians, himself renames everything (his girlfriend was always “Little Bear,” and his younger brother, “Varmint”). It isn’t long before Robison had delivered a smoking guitar, and, over the next few years, guitars with lights bright enough to illuminate a football stadium, and even a guitar that shoots rockets.
This isn’t a particularly good book to learn about Asperger Syndrome in general, which is why I originally bought it. But, my God, this was without a doubt one of the most interesting and purely entertaining autobiographical books I have ever read! Off the top of my head, only “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” was as good.
The rest of the book covers how Robison coped with life after his rock and roll years—how he worked at various companies, designed popular toys in the ’80s, and accounts of his practical jokes (the story of the vice president who kept stealing their stash of “coke” which was really plastic shavings is priceless). He was finally diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome at 40, and today it would be easy for a person to get to know him and not notice he has AS at all.
Get it and read it—you’ll enjoy it. I promise you that.
I began this piece with something personal and I will also end it that way. During the writing of this column I was diagnosed with ADHD by our family doctor. I had suspected I might have it by comparing notes with other adult sufferers, and was frankly relieved to discover that I did. It explains so much. Though not the same as Asperger Syndrome, I can identify with Robison and others like him, who discovered late in life that a “personal shortcoming” was actually an untreated condition. It’s like a monkey is off my back.
And given how much easier it now is to focus on writing after less than a week of treatment, the future looks bright indeed.
Copyright © 2010 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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