Raising Cubby (18 page)

Some people call that kind of sudden self-directed learning a savant ability. People with autism often have an unusual ability to concentrate. Sometimes we get fixated as a result, and that’s a disability. Other times, we lock in on something that captures our interest, and then our concentration can be an extraordinarily powerful advantage.

No one knew how that kind of learning could be possible when Cubby and I were young, but neuroscientists are getting a glimpse of the answer now. Advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging allow us to see the activation of tiny chunks of brain matter as we think and perform tasks. Recent studies have shown that one hundred hours of concentrated study and practice can change brain activation patterns enough that researchers can pick up the differences using fMRI. Even better, they are correlating changes in brain imagery with tangible improvements in skills. Other studies have shown that the brains of people with autism are more plastic, or changeable, than those of ordinary people, so some of us may have a unique advantage when it comes to acquiring skills.

If only we knew more about how to harness this ability! Even
so, as the experiences of my son and I show, we autistic folks may be able to reconfigure ourselves in ways others find incredible.

That’s surely what happened for Cubby. When the school year finished he was several years behind his classmates in reading. By the time that summer ended, he’d passed them all and moved close to college level. And it didn’t stop—he was improving every day. It was almost as though someone from Hogwarts had waved a wand.

It wasn’t just Hogwarts, though. Cubby’s progress at the Montessori school was almost miraculous. To this day I don’t know if it was the method, the people, or both. I do know that Cubby has stayed in touch with Julie to this very day. She’s one of those teachers who’s made lifelong connections with a small army of kids, one at a time.

In an ironic twist of fate, her assistant, Karen, would be called for jury duty years later when Cubby was on trial. She was actually interviewed as a potential juror, but excused when she revealed their Montessori connection.

Cubby’s reading breakthrough wasn’t the only momentous thing that happened that spring. While Cubby and Little Bear were in Mexico, my “partner” came back from Florida, looked at the books, and said, “I can’t believe it. You paid me back fair and square.” I almost choked at his seemingly casual comment, but the meaning was clear. I was done with my obligation to him. I had already been looking for a new home for my business, but now my search kicked into high gear. With my servitude done, I wanted out of that place as fast as possible. I found a promising building less than two miles away and signed a lease for fifteen hundred dollars a month. I had twice the space of my old shop, in a nicer building, for less money. I was psyched.

I rented the new building, hired workmen to get it ready, and went there every day after work. Each day for a month, I brought over more parts and tools. When the last weekend of the month arrived, I moved everything else and swept the floor clean. I called the customers who had cars at my shop and told them where I was going. That weekend, I called everyone with appointments for the following week and told them the same.

I never went back to the old shop. At first I worried that my former partner would try and muscle in on my new business, but he left me alone.

My new landlord could not have been more different from my old one. He was cheerful, accommodating, and did not interfere in my business. Freed of my former partner’s negative energy, my business boomed. Soon I was hiring more technicians and adding more space. For the first time in my life, I felt like a success.

Best of all, I was the ruler of my own domain. Customers came to visit and stuck around. Some even became my friends. I’d had a lot of trouble making friends when I was younger, but that seemed to be changing. Was it maturity, commercial success, or the way I looked? Whatever the reason, in the past year I’d started receiving invitations to lunch, and even the occasional dinner. People were treating me more like a friend and less like a workman or servant. Things felt pretty good.

One of my new friends was a therapist who worked with troubled teens at a local private school. He was a great big bear of a fellow, always cheerful and full of interesting insights. He had taken to stopping by near lunchtime, sometimes alone and other times with his wife. She worked with kids too, as a special ed teacher in a local school system. We’d go to a restaurant and talk while the guys fixed his car. I had hired a receptionist, which freed me to spend time with customers, something that was becoming a bigger and bigger part of my job.

One day the three of us went to lunch at a place in downtown Springfield that was owned by a couple of our customers. We sat down at a booth, with me on one side and my friend and his wife on the other. “There’s something important I want to tell you,” he said. “Therapists learn not to diagnose their friends, or else they don’t have any friends. So I thought about whether to tell you this for a long time. This is a condition people are talking about more and more. It fits you to a tee. In fact, you could be the poster boy for it. It’s called Asperger’s syndrome.”

With that, he handed me a small blue book. The title was, not surprisingly,
Asperger’s Syndrome
. It was written by a psychologist named Tony Attwood.

My initial response wasn’t very favorable. I set the book on the table and looked at it, then looked at him. “What the hell is this?” Over the years, I’d had plenty of experience with so-called friends and teachers and counselors sitting me down and telling me what was wrong with me. They always said the same thing, “I’m telling you this for your own good.” I knew there were people who said things that sounded critical but were truly meant to help me, but they were in the minority. Over the years, different “well-wishers” had assured me that I was a sociopath, a potential serial killer, or at least a career criminal in the making. None of those predictions had come true yet, but as the predictors would say, there is still time.

When I was a kid, I believed those ugly suggestions and concluded I was defective. As an adult, I became wiser and more cynical. I realized some people built themselves up by knocking others down. I also learned that people criticized me for having traits they had themselves. They might say, “You are tricky and dishonest,” because they were tricky and dishonest. If I called them on that, they’d feign anger or say something like, “It takes one to know one.”

Attacks like that often came when it was time for customers to pay their bills. Some thought they could make me feel bad about myself in order to get our work for free. It took a while for me to catch on about that, but once I did, I stood my ground, to my critics’ surprise and dismay.

All those thoughts swirled through my head as I considered what I’d just heard. I realized there was an important difference. There was no bad event or forbidden action precipitating this unexpected and startling diagnosis. That set it apart from the critiques I had received as a kid. Back then, I would hear something like, “You broke into the closet because you are a bad kid.” Not only that, my
friend was not seeking anything from me at all, and when I looked at him, he seemed serious and earnest, as opposed to mocking and nasty.

“Look,” he said, taking the book and opening it to a section he’d highlighted in the middle, “the book talks about how people with Asperger’s develop special interests in things and are driven to learn everything they can about them. That’s how you are, with cars.”

I had to agree with him. I could not see a bad side to that. Later, after I’d had a chance to think about it, I realized other people might call those special interests “obsessions” or something else even less complimentary, and they were not always good. But I still took his point. In the context of what I did for work, being obsessed with every small detail of Land Rover cars gave me a big competitive advantage over less focused service managers.

He then turned the page and showed me other traits of Asperger’s: difficulty reading nonverbal cues from other people, the tendency to say inappropriate things at inopportune moments, difficulty in making and keeping friends. The more I read, the more I agreed he was probably correct. By nightfall, I had read the whole book and I was certain. He was right. I’d been given a wonderful gift of insight. This had never happened to me before. Even so, it was a big shock. I knew I’d need some time to process what I had just learned.

I had, and still have, mixed feelings about my Asperger’s. On the one hand, it’s a relief to have an innocent, neurological explanation for some of the behaviors that got me into trouble as a kid. It was proof that I wasn’t just a “bad kid.” Now I understood that it was my Asperger’s that caused me to look at the ground or into space when I answered a question. I wasn’t being tricky or evasive or deliberately disrespecting the other person by refusing to look at him or her. Until I read Attwood’s book I had not really understood what was going on.

That was the good part—the insights into why I was the way I was, and the knowledge that those differences were not my fault. The bad part is, those differences were part of me. If I was just “acting bad,” I could presumably choose to “act good” and change what I was doing. But if I were wired differently, I might just be stuck in an undesirable way of being. That made me a bit sad. That’s especially how I felt when I read the words
there is no cure for autism
.

My mother and brother were quick to embrace the concept of Asperger’s, though the idea that it was a form of autism was rather startling. To my surprise, my brother Augusten said he’d always wondered why I acted strangely. I’d had no idea he was thinking those thoughts. My mother had lived with unspoken shame over my lack of “normal” responses as a baby, always wondering if my logical and unemotional demeanor was a result of bad mothering on her part. The Asperger diagnosis put much of her guilt and worry to rest.

When I told Little Bear about Asperger’s, she said, “There’s no way you have anything like that!” To her, Asperger’s was nothing more than a figment of the imagination. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that her quick denial might have been because the diagnosis hit a little too close to home for comfort. The discovery that she, too, has Asperger’s was still some years in the future.

Then there was Cubby. As much as my Asperger diagnosis meant to me, it made no difference at all to my son. He and I still interacted the same way. But I had read that there was a genetic component to Asperger’s, and I wondered if Cubby might be touched by it too. At that time, I still saw Asperger’s as “what was wrong with me,” and I was none too eager to envision my only son carrying the same burden.

Consequently, I made mental lists of Aspergian traits and convinced myself that they didn’t fit Cubby. For example, I told myself that he didn’t have Asperger’s because he had friends. He didn’t share my all-consuming interest in electronics either. In addition,
we had taken Cubby to several evaluations and the psychologists had never mentioned Asperger’s. They had told us of his problems reading, paying attention, or translating what he saw on the blackboard. Nothing they told us really had a name; they just illustrated the issues.

Some were subtle, but others were obvious, even to me. Like compulsive grooming. Cubby had taken to brushing his hair for fifteen minutes when he got dressed in the morning, until he brushed it right out of his head. I didn’t know why, but the thought of a bald-headed grade schooler was unsettling. I’d never done anything like that as a kid. Or if I did, I’d long since forgotten.

Yet there was no escaping some parallels to my own life experiences. He was struggling in school, just as I had. His teachers said many of the same things about him that mine had said about me. There were the squabbles with other children over sharing, and the way he showed them the “correct” ways to play. I recalled his fixation on Beanie Babies, and his intense desire to know every single bit of minutiae about them. The only thing that could distract him from Beanies was the arrival of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, which replaced Beanies in his mind.

In the end, I wrote his behavioral aberrations off to geekiness.
The doctors must know best
, I thought.
He’s just eccentric. He’s not Aspergian like me
.

The alternative was too unpleasant to contemplate. At that time, I still saw Asperger’s as a disability. I had yet to embrace it or connect it to my successes, and it certainly was not a source of pride. I was still trapped in that “defective child” shell. Admitting Cubby had Asperger’s would put him in there with me, and that was something I could not do.