Raising Cubby (46 page)

Right now he attends classes but does most of his learning on his own, using the resources of the university to educate himself. That’s pretty much what I did as a student. The difference is, he’s likely to get a degree, and I didn’t.

When he started in college his only interest was chemistry. Indeed, he’s taken a few swings at the ball before he could get passing grades in college courses that weren’t chemistry or math. However, in the last two years he’s also become interested in libertarian politics, software, electronics, and mechanical engineering. He’s especially interested in a developing subculture known as the maker movement.
Make Magazine
says makers “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset.” That sums it up pretty well.

Cubby’s interest in chemistry wasn’t merely theoretical; he wanted to make things. He still wants to do that, but today he’s also making things from plastic, metal, and wood. He’s making electronics to run his creations, and writing software to run the electronics.

He recently started designing and prototyping a quadracopter, a four-rotor model helicopter built on a rectangular frame with propellers on each corner. Right away he ran into problems. Parts made from metal were too heavy to fly, and he had no way to make things from lightweight plastic. Enter the RepRap. An open-source wiki on the RepRap winningly describes the device as “humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine.” Put another way, a RepRap is a desktop device that extrudes molten plastic from a print head that moves in three dimensions. A
RepRap can print three-dimensional objects the way a conventional inkjet printer prints pictures on paper. It just takes a bit longer.

Another cool thing about the RepRap is that it’s self-replicating. The wiki explains: “Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap prints those parts, RepRap self-replicates by making a kit of itself—a kit that anyone can assemble given time and materials. It also means that if you’ve got a RepRap you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend.”

When Cubby learned about RepRaps, he had to have one. So he and his mom bought a “kit” with some plans for a few hundred dollars. It turned out to be little more than a few gears and rods and the vaguest of instructions. Turning those bits into something that rendered objects you could hold in your hand consumed many weeks and several kitchen tables, and involved the assistance of a small dog, but they did it. The two of them then joined forces with Cubby’s girlfriend and a few buddies from school to form Robison Industries. Now they are creating and selling their own RepRap kits, including instructions that are a marvel of exactitude.

When I was a kid, a friend and I captured his little brother, stuck him in a mold, and cast him in sand. (Don’t be alarmed, he emerged intact.) With the advent of the RepRap, kid duplication just got a whole lot easier. Now Cubby can take a picture, digitize it, and make a replica from plastic. What a remarkable development. By the time you read this book, you might be able to reproduce your own kid, fully formed, in white polystyrene. After buying a RepRap from Robison Industries, of course.

When that happens, Cubby will have made the Kid Store of his childhood come true after all these years.

Cubby’s romance had faded by the time of the trial, and that spring he and Nicole went their separate ways. She headed for college in
Oregon, where she remains today. They still talk via e-mail from time to time.

Cubby was sad to see the relationship end, but he wasn’t alone for long. Kirsten Lindsmith was dating one of Cubby’s friends when they met in the fall of the year before his trial. He saw her again that summer and something clicked. “She’s the first person who really showed an interest in all the things I do,” he said. “Other kids might have thought I was smart, but they looked at me like an exhibit in a zoo. She’s different. To her, I’m just me.”

Kirsten is currently a biology student at the University of Massachusetts. She’s a talented artist who dreams of being a medical examiner one day. She’s very smart and introspective.

I enjoy watching them together, because they are so alike. A few months after they started dating, they moved in together, to an apartment Cubby had found in Greenfield. In an effort to better understand my son, Kirsten began reading up on Asperger’s and autism. She soon came to the realization that she probably had Asperger’s too. A formal diagnosis the next spring confirmed it.

Both of them had been socially awkward in school, and they share many geeky traits. They’re a really cute couple, though he’d be embarrassed for me to say that.

Seeing my son struggle when he was growing up made me remember how hard being a kid was and gave me a desire to help other children and teenagers who felt like outsiders. That was one of the reasons I began writing—to show younger people that geeks and misfits like me could grow up to have good lives. My first book,
Look Me in the Eye
, became my way of saving others from the worst of that hardship.

I’m very fortunate to be invited to quite a few conferences on autism and Asperger’s. Many times I am asked to speak or do workshops for young people. A few years ago, Cubby began accompanying
me to some of those events, and last spring he started talking about doing something on his own.

That surprised me because he was so young, but it made sense. After all, he was the impetus for many of the stories I wrote in
Be Different
. He and Kirsten began with a talk to a group of middle school students in New York in September 2010. Then they participated in an autism panel discussion at another school. They did those things all on their own, without any input from me. That May, Cubby joined me at the IMFAR autism science conference, where he met up with Alex Plank, another young man with Asperger’s who had founded Wrong Planet, an autism community on the web.

They became fast friends, and Alex asked Cubby and Kirsten to join him in a project he’d started called Autism Talk TV. The three of them interview people in the autism community and discuss issues that matter to people on the spectrum, then post videos of the interview at the Wrong Planet website. The episodes have a goofy charm.

“You guys are like the
Wayne’s World
of autism,” I told them when I saw the first cuts of their work. I meant it as a compliment—the episodes are unpretentious, low-tech, informative, and funny. As of this writing, they have accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

In December 2011, Cubby and Kirsten did their first all-day workshop. They spoke to Aspergian teens at the Kinney Autism Center, which is part of St. Joseph University in Philadelphia. In spring 2012 they spoke to several autism societies and at the ASPEN conference in New Jersey. They also did a workshop at Y.A.L.E. School in Cherry Hill, outside Philadelphia. And in July 2012 they were the hit of HOPE 2012, Hackers on Planet Earth. There’s no question that many people in that crowd are on the spectrum!

They talked about growing up different, but most of all they talked about love, friendship, and finding each other. Those were
the things all the young people in the audience wanted to know about. You can see videos from their talks online.

I’m really proud of them all.

I’m not the only one to take notice of them. In fall 2011,
New York Times
reporter Amy Harmon called Cubby after seeing him in the Autism Talk TV videos. She was writing another installment in her acclaimed series on growing up with autism, this one focused on young adult relationships. Once Cubby and Kirsten had agreed to participate, Amy and her photographers traveled from New York City to hang out with them five times between Halloween and Christmas. She also interviewed Alex over the Thanksgiving holiday. All told, she spent more than a week following them around, watching, and asking questions. She even attended their talk in Philadelphia and rode home with us in the car. By Christmas Eve I was really wondering where it would all lead.

The next day we got our answer. On December 26, 2011, her story filled the front page and two inside pages of the paper. Its title: “Navigating Love and Autism.” It was the biggest piece the
Times
had ever done on autism, and it spread like wildfire.

In spring 2012, I got a letter from a musician asking me about the light guitars I’d made for KISS back in the seventies. “I got an unfinished light guitar body from Steve Carr’s estate. Could you finish it for me?” I’ve gotten a steady trickle of queries over the years, but that one shocked me.
Steve’s estate?
The guy was the same age as me!

I took a look, and sure enough, he had died. Steve Carr was the luthier who had done all the work to make my guitar creations playable. He set up the frets and adjusted the necks and actions. He also refinished the bodies and did beautiful ornamental inlays. The news that he’d died was pretty shocking, but so many of the guys from that era didn’t make it this far. Fast living, drugs, liquor, and
AIDS took its toll on us. It was a hard life, I guess, and I was lucky to get out, no matter how fondly I remember it.

I never patented any of my creations in those days. I always figured today’s design could be replaced by a better one tomorrow, and that patents wouldn’t mean anything anyway. So when I left the music business thirty years ago, I walked away from everything I’d done without looking back. Now, reading about Steve, I was surprised to discover that he’d made replicas of my guitars. Not only that, but he’d claimed to have designed them himself!

I was annoyed at first, but then I realized it was a kind of honor. I guess I feel the same way today when I see copies of my books pirated online, or in China. (Note to pirates: This does not mean I give you permission to reproduce my book. Random House’s lawyers are vicious, and they will hunt you down.)

I’d ignored all the earlier queries about those guitars because I felt I’d moved on to other things. Between raising a kid and running a business, there was no time to start an electronics project. At least that’s what I told myself.

Deep down, I knew the truth: I didn’t think I could do it anymore. I look at my electronic creations from that period, and they seem totally unfamiliar. Someone else must have made them, I tell myself. Of course, I know that’s not true; I really did design and build all those things. But I’m in a different space today.

This time, something clicked in my mind.
What about Cubby?
I thought about his work on microcontrollers, and all the other things he was doing. He was obviously brilliant and creative.
Could my son make a light guitar?
He’d never really shown interest in them, but of course that phase of my life was way before he was born.
Perhaps his mom would help
. I called her up, and she jumped on the idea immediately. Actually, they both did.

I talked to the fellow who wanted the guitar and told him Little Bear and our kid would be doing the work. He was thrilled because she had done the actual wiring of the original guitars, and Cubby
was the next generation of me. After handing them his deposit check, I sat back to see what would happen.

Musing over what they might do, I found myself imagining the guitar-to-be in the mold of 1979. Back then we used incandescent lights, bipolar transistors, and a state-of-the-art Intel 8748 microcontroller. The whole thing was powered by a battery pack beefy enough to jump-start a Cadillac.

To their credit, they didn’t let the past slow them down. With each of them leading the way in different areas, they designed a guitar for the twenty-first century. In the space of a few months, they developed a whole new approach to the problem of illuminating an electric guitar, beginning with the choice of LED lights—nearly ten times more efficient than the incandescent bulbs I’d used in the original. Little Bear selected a modern microprocessor to control it—an Arduino—and Cubby wrote the code to make it work.

New technology made everything better. The guitar Cubby and Little Bear built runs brighter, longer, and better than anything we could have done thirty years before. I’d worried about whether they could match what I’d designed before, but they surpassed it!
Maybe I underestimated that kid
, I thought.

The best moment was when I picked up and held their creation. At that moment, I knew how Ace Frehley, lead guitarist for KISS, must have felt, holding my original thirty-five years before. The new guitar was far lighter than the original. The original would run for just five minutes before the battery was exhausted, but the new one will play a whole set with energy to spare. When Ace played mine the lights used so much power that the whole guitar got hot, and you could hear the circuitry in the background while he played. The flashing of the lights had to be perfectly synced to the drums, because there was a pop every time the pattern changed. The new guitar is smooth and silent.

Before sending the guitar to its new owner, Cubby and Little Bear made a video of it in action and uploaded it to YouTube. In
a matter of weeks, Ace Frehley’s manager called. He’d lost track of us over the years, but Ace still played the instruments we built him all those years ago. After reconnecting, I drove to New Jersey and brought the original light guitar back for refurbishment. When I opened the back I had to smile. After all those years, it still had our names—John and Mary Robison—and phone number in permanent marker on the inside plate, along with our slogan: Thunder Lizards Rule the World!! Cubby and his mom are working on restoring that very guitar as I write this chapter. I can’t wait to see his name on the inside plate alongside ours.

Right now, all over the world, several million young people are coming of age with Asperger’s or some other form of autism. Many of them are wondering if they will be able to find love, friendship, and a good quality of life. Cubby’s life shows that such a thing remains possible even today. I did it years ago, and he’s doing it now.

I can’t believe how far he’s come.