I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (33 page)

As Kyle got older, more and more of his condition became more and more evident. Instead of talking until he was out of breath, he became much quieter and shier. He wasn’t able to be a good liar, either. An autistic person will tell a woman, “Yes, those jeans do make you look fat,” and then be genuinely clueless as to why she starts crying. Kyle didn’t really have the
capacity
to lie, which makes it horrible to be a black man.

At the same time, I couldn’t really joke with him because everything I said he could only take literally. A friend of mine took his
autistic nephew to an event one evening, and his nephew was very worried that the celebrity wouldn’t show up. “She’s here,” my friend insisted. Sure enough, the celebrity was there and the event went off without a hitch. At the end of the event, my friend turned to his nephew. “See?” he said. “I told you she’s here.”

“Yes, you did,” the nephew replied matter-of-factly (it’s
always
matter-of-factly with them). “Why do you bring that up now?” That’s what it’s like talking to someone who is
literally
completely literal-minded.

Where LaDonna’s instinct was always to step in and to protect Kyle, I hoped to raise him to the point where he wouldn’t
need
our protection. I couldn’t always be there to look over his shoulder, and one day I wouldn’t be there at all. When Kyle was on the set of
The Hughleys
as a teenager, some other boy started an argument with him. Soon it escalated into shoving, and then they were fighting. By the time it was over, Kyle had whupped that boy’s ass. Though I didn’t say so in front of everybody else, it made me very, very proud that he could stand up for himself.

When he was going to turn sixteen, it was time for Kyle to learn how to drive—just as for every other boy his age. I didn’t want to be impatient with his driving, so I figured I’d pay a professional driving instructor. He had to go through two different courses and take his driver’s license test four times. It was like JFK Jr. trying to pass the fucking bar exam. And just like JFK Jr., eventually he got it right. For his sixteenth birthday, I bought him a brand-new red Mustang.

Yet Kyle wouldn’t drive his new car, and he always asked his mother or me to take him places. He was too scared. I finally just said, “You either go where you want to go—or you don’t. But we’re not taking you anymore.” That’s how he started driving, and another ordinary milestone was passed.

Chauffeuring Kyle around had gone on for
years
. Part of the reason was that my wife and I consciously fight very hard to make sure that our family remains close. I invited my father-in-law to come live with us, for example, and he’s been living in my home for fifteen years. These feelings run in both directions. Kyle
adores
his mother and his sisters, and nothing upsets me more than when he doesn’t get along with his sisters.

Occasionally, like a typical female, his sister Tyler would be impatient with him when they were growing up. Kyle would be talking, telling her something in that specific cadence that all people with autism have, and she’d snap at him. “Hurry up with the story!” It was almost crippling to me, it really was, because I couldn’t be defending him against a
girl
.

Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and I sat Tyler down. “I can provide the shelter and safety,” I told her. “But when you and your brother argue like that, or are indifferent to each other like that, it hurts me so bad it’s almost palpable. It’s almost causing me physical pain. The only reason I’ve ever worked this hard was to have my children be close. That’s the one thing I always wanted, because I never was close to
my
siblings.” To some extent, that message did get through with her.

Okay, that’s enough with the cornball family-values shit. Let me talk about pussy.

There’s a tendency among parents of kids like Kyle to think of their children as precious angels that God has sent to them. I didn’t look at my son like that, for one simple reason:
Angels don’t fuck
. To sweep the sexuality of autistic children under the rug is to deny a central part of regular human experience. Dehumanizing these
children is supposedly a very bad, horrible thing and precisely what many of their parents are fighting against. I wanted my autistic boy to grow up to be an autistic
man
.

Like a lot of dads, I sat my son down and gave him some advice about getting laid. I was under no misconception that Kyle would be a pussy-later dude instead of a pussy-now type. But I just wanted to make sure he wouldn’t end up being a pussy
-never
motherfucker. Autistic people are very blunt. It’s hard to flirt when everything you say—and everything you
hear
—is taken literally. That could be disastrous.

I knew from experience that any time I had given him advice, I had to be overly simple. I thought for a while about how best to help him out. It dawned on me that Kyle was actually in the best situation possible when it came to speaking with women. “You don’t talk that much anyway,” I told him, “so pretend like you’re interested. Don’t say much; just listen. Then, when
she
says something, repeat the same thing she just said but in a question. If she tells you that she likes her job, you say, ‘So, you like your job a lot?’ ”

Eventually my advice paid off. Kyle came home one day and told me that he had gotten some for the first time. He was with an older woman who was just trying to be friendly. I told LaDonna, and to her great credit, she didn’t freak out in any way. LaDonna even said that I needed to call that woman and say thank you. I know people could look at it all kinds of ways, but I certainly took it as a very loving thing to do. It’s a loving act to give somebody your body, knowing that it’s going to be their first time, and to shepherd a dude through an incredibly awkward time.

When it came time for Kyle to go to college, my wife and I had a big argument. She wanted him to go away to school. Part of her being protective is pretending like he’s just like everybody
else. Well, he’s
not
. “He’s not going away to school,” I told her. “A dude goes crazy when he gets a certain amount of freedom at that age. Until he can prove that he can interact with people, and come home, and do all the regular things—have a social life, get laid, and not go crazy—he’s staying here. To have that freedom with no kind of structure or guidance is putting him in a situation where he is more prone to fail than to succeed.”

I understood that most black men gotta get the fuck out when they reach a certain age. But I wanted Kyle to stay until he was
ready
to go. He ended up staying home and got his college degree. He got a job. He went out on road trips, by himself. Every father wants his son to grow up to be an athlete, a scholar, and a ladies’ man. I got a wonderful human being, one who has already accomplished more than many of the people that I grew up with have.
I
didn’t go to college. I don’t know Krav Maga, the fancy Israeli kung fu—but my son does.

Throughout all the things that he’s gone through—and that we as his parents have gone though—Kyle has always been somewhat protected. People might have thought he’s weird, but they invariably liked him. As a result, he never really got the brunt of the nasty things that people can say. That will come now, when people don’t know him, when he’s not in school among friends or at home among family.

My daughter Ryan wrote a paper last year that perfectly laid out my perspective. She wrote about how LaDonna would try to stop the kids from touching the hot stove, while I would stand there while they did it. In other words, I wasn’t going to let them hurt themselves—but I
was
going to let them get burned a little. Now that Kyle is twenty-three, I
want
him to get bloodied a little bit. I don’t mean some heinous injury where he would get irreparable
damage. I don’t want my son to lose a limb or get a skull fracture. But I do want him to be prepared for a world that is often unkind. My wife has even come around to my perspective a little bit. She moves out of the way when I deal with Kyle. She knows there’s only so much she can do right now.

This is why the recent anti-bullying movement is something I do not agree with. I’m really in a position to speak on this issue. If there’s
anyone
who would be a victim of bullying, it’s autistic kids like my son. I am not defending bullying in the sense that I think it should be encouraged. I’m simply saying something that is often impossible for people in this country to understand, let alone agree with:
Sometimes horrible things have positive consequences
.

Bullies are kind of like Los Angeles smog: It’s there and it can hurt you, so you just have to watch yourself. Sometimes the threat is really high and they give you warnings, so you’ve got to be even
more
careful. But just like Los Angeles smog, bullies are a fact of life. They are always, always,
always
going to be there. The mentality now is to purge us of bullies, and I don’t know if there’s any way that you can do that.

I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it wasn’t for a bully.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, this dude named Clifford used to take my lunch money from me all the time. Every day, he came to me and told me the same thing: “Give me your quarter or I’m gonna whup your ass.” He was bigger than me and he was stronger than me, so every day I gave him that twenty-five cents.

At that time, the kids had a rule for dealing with bullies. You either fought the dude that was messing with you or you fought your father when you got home—and you had to do that in front of the
neighborhood. A lot of us fought bullies because we didn’t want to fight our old man.

The next time Clifford asked me for my lunch money, I refused. “Nah,” I told him. “You’re going to actually have to kick my ass.” Then and there, we fought—and Clifford did, in fact, kick my ass. He gave me a bloody nose—but I didn’t give him my quarter.

Getting my ass kicked every day was not going to be a better situation. When I told my father what had happened, his advice was very simple. “Darryl,” he said, “you fight that bully until you win.” I knew that sticks and stones can break a bully’s bones just as easily as they can break anyone else’s. Clifford could say whatever he wanted, but if he put his hands on me I’d have to pick up a stick and knock the hell out of him. I decided that I was going to listen to my dad and fight Clifford until I won.

Every time I saw Clifford, I would start fighting him. If he was coming out of the school bathroom and I happened to be in the hall, I would run at him. If he was coming out of the liquor store with groceries for his parents, I started a fight. If we were at the playground, I started a fight. Unfortunately, there never happened to be any sticks or stones for me to use, so it was an uphill battle for me. But I knew if I was meaner than Clifford, I could win. I also couldn’t become bigger and stronger, so I just became faster.

By about the seventh or eighth fight, it started to get inconvenient for Clifford to deal with me. The last two times Clifford and I fought, I ended up winning. And the
second
time I won, I won in front of
everybody
. Clifford and I eventually even became friends. I learned as much from the bloody noses that Clifford gave me as I ever did from any book.

Now, let me be clear: Bullies are horrible. I’m not denying that. But people are saying that horrible things are avoidable when they’re
not. There will always be
something
horrible out there. There will always be cold weather, there will always be traffic, and there will always be STDs. Has denying the inevitability of horrible things made us better? Has it made us have fewer enemies in the world? Are people getting along better—or are they better at pretending that they’re getting along?

A lot of what people are calling “bullying” is just people being insulting. Bullying means someone putting their hands on you, not just calling you a name. Nowadays students can get “bullied” on their phone or on their e-mail. How are you getting “bullied” on your computer? Turn it off! How can you get “bullied” on Facebook? Unfriend the motherfucker! Cyberbullying is not when someone sends a nasty e-mail and the screen chirps, “You’ve got hate mail!” Cyberbullying is when someone beats your ass with a computer.