Raising Cubby (2 page)

Ten feet in front of me, my son sat at the defense table between his lawyers. To his right, the prosecutor shuffled her papers and looked toward the empty jury box. The judge gazed down on all of us from her bench, and armed bailiffs guarded the flanks. My son looked so young and vulnerable among all those serious-looking adults. He wore a grown man’s suit, but underneath he was still my little boy, skinny as a rail, with only a wisp of beard. My heart hurt for him.

Meanwhile, I had my own deliberations going on. I wanted to understand how my kid’s science experiments had led to felony criminal charges. My son was still a teenager, with no history of breaking the law. He’d never even been in a fight. He wasn’t in trouble in school. He wasn’t any kind of renegade. Everyone who knew him was struck by two things: his kindness and his intelligence.

So why was he on trial? Had he really done something terrible, something I did not comprehend? Could it be that I was blind to the true nature of my only child? Was he in trouble because of the way I had raised him, as some commenters had suggested in the local newspaper’s online forum?
Perhaps it all came down to being different
, I thought.
Now we might have to pay a high price for our nonconformity
. My Asperger’s had made me feel like a social isolate, and I knew my son felt the same way. Both of us wanted to be a part of society; we just didn’t always know quite how.

Sitting there in court, neither of us had any idea how the jurors felt or what they might do. Would they protect an eccentric but harmless member of the community or fall for the prosecutor’s fear-mongering? As I waited anxiously for the verdict, I could not help but reflect on my choices as a dad and our tumultuous father-son journey of the past eighteen years.

The story began thirty years ago, before there was even the idea of a Cubby. I was twenty-some years old, a newly minted adult with a serious girlfriend. We were talking of marriage and possibly even a family.

I might have flunked out of high school a few years before, but I’d truly graduated from teenager to grown-up. Having made such a momentous change, I figured I should stop doing the kind of things kids did and start doing what adults did. I looked around for some sample adults, to get a sense of what came next.

I knew that having kids was something most grown-ups do. But when should we embark on that journey, and how? I was still new to dating and sex. To me, kids were a feared consequence, as in,
Uh-oh … do you think you might be pregnant?
Fatherhood, for young adults like me, was the unwanted result of the ultimate dating success. Luckily, I was not introduced to parenting via that pathway.

I followed the more traditional route, starting with dropping out of school. It began when my girlfriend, Mary Trompke, left me in tenth grade. “I don’t ever want to speak to you again,” she said one day, and I didn’t even know why. At the same time, my home life
turned nasty. “You’re never going to amount to anything,” my father would shout at me in drunken rages. “You’re going to end up pumping gas or sweeping floors!” At the time, none of us knew that I had Asperger’s, so I had no way of understanding my difficulties fitting in and doing well in school. I was inclined to believe what the grown-ups said—that I was just lazy and no good. Depressed and angry, I quit school and went out on my own. Luckily, I had a marketable skill—electronics—and a plan for putting myself to work. My teenage fascination with music and circuitry turned into a budding career as local musicians began looking to me to repair their broken instruments and amplifiers. To me, the choice was clear:
I was a failure in school, but I had a future in music
. I decided to go where I was wanted.

Of course, not everyone agreed with my decision to quit school, and they didn’t embrace my choice of career either. “Dropping out isn’t going to lead you anywhere, boy,” my grandfather, Jack, told me. His own father had been the first Robison to graduate from college, so school meant a lot to him. “Those musicians are all starving freaks,” my father added. “How can you expect to make a living from them?”

I don’t know what my mother thought. After a recent psychotic break and a violent and endless divorce from my dad, she had her own problems to deal with. Once I left home, she and my father were so wrapped up in their own worlds, they hardly paid any attention to me at all. It cut both ways; after a rough and tumultuous childhood, I didn’t want much to do with either parent. It would be some years before my feelings toward them changed.

So there I was, a sixteen-year-old dropout in need of a job and a home. I jumped at the chance to become the newest crew member of Fat, a local rock and blues band. For eighty bucks a week and a room in the rambling farmhouse where they lived, I set up and took down their equipment. I even drove the truck back and forth to the clubs where we played. We worked five nights a week and spent
the other two days fixing anything that broke. In my spare time I continued to repair amplifiers and instruments for other musicians and I kept studying as much as I could.

Over the next few years, as my skills developed, the nature of my work changed. Instead of fixing old equipment, more and more of my time was spent making old designs better, and building new things I dreamed up from thin air. It felt good, creating things and seeing them work. I was on my own, on my way up, and feeling proud and defiant because my family’s threats hadn’t come true.
I’d show them!
The bands I worked for got bigger and bigger, as performances in barrooms morphed into concerts in stadiums. Even my father grudgingly conceded I’d done okay.

Over the next few years, two girlfriends came and went, and then I got back together with Mary. But I didn’t call her that. I’ve always had a tendency to make up my own names for the people, pets, and things I especially like. Growing up, I called my little brother Varmint because he was such a pest, and when I got to feeling sick, I called University Health Services the Repair Center. I don’t know why, but I’ve often had trouble with the names other people have chosen. My girlfriend’s mother called her Mary Lee, just the way my own parents used my middle name, John Elder. I called her Little Bear because she was stocky and tenacious, at times even belligerent. I liked her a lot. She was my best friend.

We always had a lot in common, and what we shared often seemed pretty weird to other people. Trains had always been one of my great loves, and she walked the tracks with me, collecting stray insulators from abandoned telegraph poles. I’d climb twenty feet up the poles, unscrew the old insulators, and lower them carefully so she could stow them in her backpack. If I said, “Let’s sneak into the passage under the university’s student union and explore the steam tunnels,” she would be right there with me. Instead of asking if I was crazy, she would say, “Do you think we’ll need extra batteries for the flashlight?” No challenge was too strange.

We were both logical and sensible, though that wasn’t always obvious by our actions. Both of us loved to read, especially science fiction. We never ran out of things to say to each other. Sometimes we talked about our families and life at home. We didn’t do that too often, though, because growing up hadn’t been much fun. Both of us had left home in a hurry, and we weren’t moving back.

Seen from the perspective of middle age, it’s obvious how messed up and crazy both our childhoods were. At the time, however, neither of us knew any other way of growing up. The best thing you could say was that our parents showed us what we didn’t want in a family, and we took that lesson to heart, especially when it came to liquor. Our dads were both drinkers, the kind that seem real nice to their friends but are actually mean as hell to the kids. My only brother was eight years younger and lived in a commune with my mother’s crazy shrink. Mary’s brothers and sister were all older, and they’d gone as far from home as they could get. Big sister was in Florida, getting divorced. Brother Ted was in Oregon, contemplating law school. Paul had joined the navy and headed for the Philippines on a submarine. Danny had gone the farthest. I was shocked and saddened when he froze to death in the winter of 1976, camped out alone in the woods.

While I was establishing myself in the music business, Little Bear enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. If she was going to stay in school, that seemed like the most practical choice. It was right in town, and she’d grown up prowling the campus, so she knew her way around. The school assigned her to a dorm, but after her first year she moved to an apartment about ten miles north, in Sunderland. There were two roommates in the apartment already—fellow science fiction aficionados. One was into insects, and the other was a jolly nearsighted gnome whose entire world revolved around comic book artwork, imaginary creatures, superheroes, and a sometime girlfriend.

The most charitable word I could use to describe the apartment
structure itself would be
deteriorated
. An abandoned Volkswagen sat on four flat tires in the front yard. Inside, the halls were lined with rotten, peeling plasterboard, and the thin walls were insulated with vast stacks of paperback books. When I moved in after we got back together, the place went from crowded to untenable. The sink was already overflowing with dirty dishes, and the shelves in the bathroom sagged from the load. There was no room for my stuff, and when I used their towels and soaps, they complained. After a month, Little Bear and I rented a house of our own in South Hadley and worked harder to pay for it.

By that time I had parlayed my love of music and electronics into something pretty substantial. I’d left the local music scene for New York City and an engineering gig with Britannia Row Audio, the sound company Pink Floyd had formed a few years before. The Floyd owned a vast array of sound equipment, and when they weren’t touring they rented it out to other touring bands. They had a big studio on 45th Road in Long Island City that was filled with gear they’d shipped from England. My job was to keep it all running and build whatever esoteric devices we could think up to keep our sound systems the best in the world. It was a heady job for a twenty-one-year-old geek, for sure. I’d drive there and work a few days, then bring home with me whatever I couldn’t finish.

Little Bear was floundering at UMass, and she seized the chance to jump into electronics. We made a good team; I designed the circuits and she assembled them. In addition to being my girlfriend, she became a technician and a partner in the stuff we created.

Our first musical collaboration was for the Canadian supergroup April Wine. We spent a few weeks with them crisscrossing eastern Canada as we patched together a reliable sound system for their First Glance tour. That was followed by a whirlwind of shows back in America as we set up sound systems for the Kinks, Roxy Music, Phoebe Snow, Rick James, Dan Hill, Talking Heads, and Blondie. The next year I got hired by KISS, where we made Ace Frehley’s
signature fire-breathing, rocket-firing, and disco-lighted guitars. It was a good life, but unpredictable. We’d be busy and flush with cash one month, and idle and destitute two months later. It seemed like everyone in the music business lived hand to mouth, and I wanted more than that.

I thought I’d find it in a regular job, and I was incredibly lucky to find one for which I was truly the perfect candidate, at toy and game maker Milton Bradley, just half an hour’s drive away in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My experience designing sound systems for musicians landed me a role creating special effects for their newest electronic games. I became a staff engineer, a pretend executive commuting from the suburbs. It looked like easy work: I had designed circuits on napkins when I worked for bands; Milton Bradley was offering a lab, reference books, and even state-of-the-art computers. All I had to do was look the part.

The superficial change from grungy rock and roller to corporate drone was virtually instantaneous. I trimmed my hair a full six inches, bought a new Oxxford suit, and reported for work at the required hour. But though my appearance was dramatically altered, I was exactly the same person I’d been before. So was Little Bear. A few months earlier, we’d been freaks in an overcrowded apartment in a college town. Now I was supposed to be a responsible executive, building a family in the suburbs of Springfield. It was only fifteen miles by road, but it was light-years away from anything I had known before. The transformation looked successful to me, but there must have been chinks in my armor. I knew that because the older redneck engineers called me a hippie freak.

A few years passed as we practiced looking like a nice, middle-class suburban couple. It worked. The rednecks stopped calling me names. I drifted away from music, and did my best to be the young executive my managers wanted me to be. Pretending made me miserable, but I had to do it—I wanted to be accepted by polite society. I wanted a job where I felt safe and secure. It was a means to an end:
I saw families all around me, and I knew I eventually wanted one of my own.

Little Bear found a job as a technician at a local electronics firm and pondered her own future. After a lot of thought and discussion she decided to become an anthropologist, specializing in colonial New England. The following fall she returned to college. She was determined that at least one of us was going to get a legitimate education. She had flunked out the first time, but the second time around she was earning top marks.