My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled “See me!” broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:
Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.It is an unconventional but hardly unobservant report. In truth, I didn’t care one bit about Boston on that spring day in 1963. Instead, I wanted to learn about Warrenville, a village a few miles northeast of the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, where we were then living. I had memorized the map of Mansfield, and knew all the school-bus routes by heart—a litany I would sing out to anybody I could corner. But Warrenville was in the town of Ashford, for which I had no guide, and I remember the blissful sense of resolution I felt when I certified that Route 44A crossed Route 89 in the town center, for I had long hypothesized that they might meet there. Of such joys and pains was my childhood composed.
I received a grade of “Unsatisfactory” in Social Development from the Mansfield Public Schools that year. I did not work to the best of my ability, did not show neatness and care in assignments, did not coöperate with the group, and did not exercise self-control. About the only positive assessment was that I worked well independently. Of course: then as now, it was all that I could do.
In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to “think outside the box.” Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these “boxes” were—why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them. My efforts have been only partly successful: after fifty-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.
From early childhood, my memory was so acute and my wit so bleak that I was described as a genius—by my parents, by our neighbors, and even, on occasion, by the same teachers who gave me failing marks. I wrapped myself in this mantle, of course, as a poetic justification for behavior that might otherwise have been judged unhinged, and I did my best to believe in it. But the explanation made no sense. A genius at what? Were other “geniuses” so oblivious that they couldn’t easily tell right from left and idly wet their pants into adolescence? What accounted for my rages and frustrations, for the imperious contempt I showed to people who were in a position to do me harm? Although I delighted in younger children, whom I could instruct and gently dominate, and I was thrilled when I ran across an adult willing to discuss my pet subjects, I could establish no connection with most of my classmates. My pervasive childhood memory is an excruciating awareness of my own strangeness.
Despite their roseate talk, my parents and my school put a good deal of effort into finding out precisely what was wrong with me. It was obvious that I was not “normal,” especially by the straitened standards of the early nineteen-sixties. I have sometimes wondered whether the I.Q. scores with which I was credited were nudged upward by my father, who was both a professional educator with a keen interest in gifted children and the person who administered my most triumphant examinations. Whatever the case, while my younger brother and sister soared through school, academically and socially, I was consistently at or near the bottom of the class, and decidedly out of control—half asleep or aggressively assertive—much of the time.
And so, between the ages of seven and fifteen, I was given glucose-tolerance tests, anti-seizure medications, electroencephalograms, and an occasional Mogadon to shut me down at night. I suffered through a summer of Bible camp; exercise regimens were begun and abandoned; and the school even brought in a psychiatrist to grill me once a week. Somehow, every June, I was promoted to the next grade, having accomplished little to deserve it. Meanwhile, the more kindly homeroom teachers, knowing that I would be tormented on the playground, permitted me to spend recess periods indoors, where I memorized vast portions of the 1961 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.
A brown carton in my basement contains most of the surviving documents of my childhood, and they present a pretty fair portrait of my pre-teen obsessions. There are meandering and implausible stories, none with happy endings; intricately detailed street maps of makebelieve cities on which I worked silently for hours; and countless crayon drawings of grinning girls with shoulder-length hair and U-shaped smiles, their stick figures fleshed out only by exaggerated biceps. Other children collected coins or baseball cards; I tore obituaries of Sophie Tucker and David O. Selznick from the Hartford Courant and pasted them sloppily into a scrapbook.
In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Asperger’s syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality. And I learned that there were others like me—people who yearned for steady routines, repeated patterns, and a few cherished subjects, the driftwood that keeps us afloat.
The syndrome was identified, in 1944, by Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, who wrote, “For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.” Yet Oliver Sacks makes a clear distinction between full-fledged autism and Asperger’s syndrome. In The New Yorker some years ago, Sacks wrote that “people with Asperger’s syndrome can tell us of their experiences, their inner feelings and states, whereas those with classical autism cannot. With classical autism there is no ‘window,’ and we can only infer. With Asperger’s syndrome there is self-consciousness and at least some power to introspect and report.”
In his 1998 book “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals,” Tony Attwood observed, “The person with Asperger’s syndrome has no distinguishing physical features but is primarily viewed by other people as different because of their unusual quality of social behavior and conversation skills. For example, a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome described how as a child she saw people moving into the house up the street, ran up to one of the new kids and, instead of the conventional greeting and request of ‘Hi, you want to play?,’ proclaimed, ‘Nine times nine is equal to 81.’ ”
David Mamet, in his recent book “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” discerned redeeming qualities in the condition. Considering filmmakers past and present, he stated that “it is not impossible that Asperger’s syndrome helped make the movies. The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence, and difficulty with transitions, married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutia of the task at hand.”
The Asperger’s spectrum ranges from people barely more abstracted than a stereotypical “absent-minded professor” to the full-blown, albeit highly functioning, autistic. Symptoms of Asperger’s have been attributed ex post facto to successful figures, but these are the fortunate ones—persons able to invent outlets for their ever-welling monomanias. Many are not so lucky, and some end up institutionalized or homeless. (In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations.) For some—record collectors with every catalogue number at hand, theatre buffs with first-night casts memorized, children who draw precise architectural blueprints of nineteenth-century silk mills—a cluster of facts can be both luminous and lyric, something around which to construct a life.
We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally—except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts—and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire. (I remember the deliberate decision to appropriate one teacher’s mischievous grin and darting eyes, which I found so charming that I thought they might work for me, too.)
So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for piñatas at birthday parties, those papier-mâché donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance.
Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make genuine connections with people—much as I desperately wanted them—was a bewildering process. I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed. Or, to adapt another hoary but useful analogy, not only did I not see the forest for the trees; I was so intensely distracted that I missed the trees for the species of lichen on their bark.
When I was ten, I became fascinated by silent films, the visual complement to my old records. I spent hours at the library of the University of Connecticut, a few minutes’ walk from home, researching the lives of actors and actresses on microfilm, and recall the genuine sense of mourning that came over me when I saw Barbara La Marr’s sad, youthful face on an obituary page from 1926. Not surprisingly, “Sunset Boulevard” was my favorite “talkie” (I actually called them that—in 1965!), and I’d regularly set the alarm and wake in the middle of the night to watch Chester Conklin or Louise Dresser take on minor roles in some B movie that the Worcester, Massachusetts, UHF station put on when nobody else was watching.
“I despise the Beatles and their ilk,” this remarkably Blimpish young man proclaimed in a school paper shortly after the first Ed Sullivan show, when other boys my age were growing their hair long and learning to play the guitar. My favorite pop musician then was the Scottish comedian Harry Lauder, a star in vaudeville and music halls at the beginning of the last century, who told obscure jokes in brogue and sang through exaggerated hiccups in a state of pretend intoxication. The depth of my admiration for Lauder now baffles me as much as the steady diet of horehound drops I adopted as snack food, or my insistence, much of one autumn, that I wear a rabbit’s foot in each buttonhole of my shirt, which I kept tightly fastened up to the neck. But nobody could have persuaded me to abandon these quirks, and any attempt to do so would have been taken as a physical threat and reduced me to hysteria.
A friend published a sweet autobiography entitled “Thank You, Everyone,” in which she expressed gratitude to everybody who had influenced her, ranging from Woody Allen to my sister Betsy. If I were to create a similar book, I would call it “Sorry, Everyone,” and apologize for my youthful cluelessness: To the girl in seventh grade with the protruding jawbone (it never occurred to me that she would not share my enthusiasm for her unusually simian features). To the boy who came over to my house in the middle of my Caruso phase and endured a precious weekend afternoon comparing recordings of “Celeste Aida.” To the perplexed young women from early adolescence who might have become lovers had I understood that their sudden friendship and proximity had any sort of physical impetus. Instead, I chattered on about this and that, rarely making eye contact, and soon they vanished, in search of more game and grounded potential partners. Sorry, everyone. I didn’t understand.
It was hard for me to be touched. I froze when I was hugged by anybody who was not a relative, and I made love like the Tin Man until I was well into adulthood. Like many children before and since, I recoiled when fundamental facts about the reproduction of the species were explained to me (there was, typically for the time and the place, no suggestion that new pleasures might be involved, and the physical act, examined through an anxious, pre-sexual eye, sounded bizarre). Shortly after this enlightenment, my parents threw a party, attended by their closest friends. I watched their athletic, fortyish bodies, properly clothed, in mortified amazement, and then took a recount of their children. Oh, my God, I thought. They did that three times!
Anything related to the human body seemed to me bad news. In the fourth grade, when my affliction was most intense, I would be herded out to play kickball during our physical-education classes. Teams were chosen, and I was embedded among the strongest kids, to provide some chance of even battle. In memory, it is forever bases loaded with two outs when my turn at the plate comes, and I am as well suited as a giraffe to meet the big red ball that rolls toward me with frightening speed.
Still, for a moment the same people who generally disdained or bullied me became my friends, cheering me on to hitherto unsuspected athletic glory: “You can do it, Tim!” If I could make the ball lose its gravity, as my best pal, Annie, did so effortlessly with those balletic whomps from her long legs, I might redeem myself. Our gym teacher, Miss B.—scowling, beefy, and, after four decades, the only person in the world I just might swerve to hit on a deserted road—had no such illusions and waited for the inevitable, with her festering contempt and ready whistle. Grinning stupidly, shirttail out and flapping, underwear pulled halfway up my back, I would lope toward the ball, which would eventually collide with my ankle or heel and then bounce off into the woods or into the waiting arms of the catcher. My chance was up, and I was a freak once more.
“So?” I wanted to scream. “There are things that I know; things that I can do. Can you name the duet from La Bohème that Antonio Scotti and Geraldine Farrar recorded in Camden, New Jersey, on October 6, 1909? What was the New York address of D. W. Griffith’s first studio? How many books by David Graham Phillips have you read? Who was Adelaide Crapsey? I learned to play the entire Chopin Prelude in E Minor in a single night!” And then tears, of course, and the taunts redoubled.
When I was ten, I became fascinated by silent films, the visual complement to my old records. I spent hours at the library of the University of Connecticut, a few minutes’ walk from home, researching the lives of actors and actresses on microfilm, and recall the genuine sense of mourning that came over me when I saw Barbara La Marr’s sad, youthful face on an obituary page from 1926. Not surprisingly, “Sunset Boulevard” was my favorite “talkie” (I actually called them that—in 1965!), and I’d regularly set the alarm and wake in the middle of the night to watch Chester Conklin or Louise Dresser take on minor roles in some B movie that the Worcester, Massachusetts, UHF station put on when nobody else was watching.
“I despise the Beatles and their ilk,” this remarkably Blimpish young man proclaimed in a school paper shortly after the first Ed Sullivan show, when other boys my age were growing their hair long and learning to play the guitar. My favorite pop musician then was the Scottish comedian Harry Lauder, a star in vaudeville and music halls at the beginning of the last century, who told obscure jokes in brogue and sang through exaggerated hiccups in a state of pretend intoxication. The depth of my admiration for Lauder now baffles me as much as the steady diet of horehound drops I adopted as snack food, or my insistence, much of one autumn, that I wear a rabbit’s foot in each buttonhole of my shirt, which I kept tightly fastened up to the neck. But nobody could have persuaded me to abandon these quirks, and any attempt to do so would have been taken as a physical threat and reduced me to hysteria.
A friend published a sweet autobiography entitled “Thank You, Everyone,” in which she expressed gratitude to everybody who had influenced her, ranging from Woody Allen to my sister Betsy. If I were to create a similar book, I would call it “Sorry, Everyone,” and apologize for my youthful cluelessness: To the girl in seventh grade with the protruding jawbone (it never occurred to me that she would not share my enthusiasm for her unusually simian features). To the boy who came over to my house in the middle of my Caruso phase and endured a precious weekend afternoon comparing recordings of “Celeste Aida.” To the perplexed young women from early adolescence who might have become lovers had I understood that their sudden friendship and proximity had any sort of physical impetus. Instead, I chattered on about this and that, rarely making eye contact, and soon they vanished, in search of more game and grounded potential partners. Sorry, everyone. I didn’t understand.
It was hard for me to be touched. I froze when I was hugged by anybody who was not a relative, and I made love like the Tin Man until I was well into adulthood. Like many children before and since, I recoiled when fundamental facts about the reproduction of the species were explained to me (there was, typically for the time and the place, no suggestion that new pleasures might be involved, and the physical act, examined through an anxious, pre-sexual eye, sounded bizarre). Shortly after this enlightenment, my parents threw a party, attended by their closest friends. I watched their athletic, fortyish bodies, properly clothed, in mortified amazement, and then took a recount of their children. Oh, my God, I thought. They did that three times!
Anything related to the human body seemed to me bad news. In the fourth grade, when my affliction was most intense, I would be herded out to play kickball during our physical-education classes. Teams were chosen, and I was embedded among the strongest kids, to provide some chance of even battle. In memory, it is forever bases loaded with two outs when my turn at the plate comes, and I am as well suited as a giraffe to meet the big red ball that rolls toward me with frightening speed.
Still, for a moment the same people who generally disdained or bullied me became my friends, cheering me on to hitherto unsuspected athletic glory: “You can do it, Tim!” If I could make the ball lose its gravity, as my best pal, Annie, did so effortlessly with those balletic whomps from her long legs, I might redeem myself. Our gym teacher, Miss B.—scowling, beefy, and, after four decades, the only person in the world I just might swerve to hit on a deserted road—had no such illusions and waited for the inevitable, with her festering contempt and ready whistle. Grinning stupidly, shirttail out and flapping, underwear pulled halfway up my back, I would lope toward the ball, which would eventually collide with my ankle or heel and then bounce off into the woods or into the waiting arms of the catcher. My chance was up, and I was a freak once more.
“So?” I wanted to scream. “There are things that I know; things that I can do. Can you name the duet from La Bohème that Antonio Scotti and Geraldine Farrar recorded in Camden, New Jersey, on October 6, 1909? What was the New York address of D. W. Griffith’s first studio? How many books by David Graham Phillips have you read? Who was Adelaide Crapsey? I learned to play the entire Chopin Prelude in E Minor in a single night!” And then tears, of course, and the taunts redoubled.