It is scary, but what if I did move? I asked myself that question at least once every day. But I didn’t have confidence that anyone would keep me around. Nothing else in my life had lasted. I had dropped out of school. My family had fallen apart. The thought of starting a new life two thousand miles away was overwhelming.
I was also afraid to leave my parents. As much as I disliked them, I didn’t want to go away and find they had just crawled into holes and died. And there was my brother, too. So long as he was living with Dr. Finch, I felt as though I needed to remain in the vicinity, on standby. I wouldn’t find out until years later exactly what he had gone through, but instinct told me I needed to stick around.
My father called every week.
“Son, I’m sorry I’ve been a burden to you. You won’t have to worry about me anymore.” His words were slurred, but it didn’t matter; he always said the same thing. He’d call me, drunk, from the floor of his apartment, then drop the phone on the floor. I’d have to drive over there and see what he was doing. Was he dead or just passed out? Wine, cigarettes, and trash were everywhere. It was like taking care of a child.
“Get off the floor or I’m calling the cops. Get up! Now!”
“I’m sorry, John Elder, it’s just so hard.” He was drunk and wallowing, but he got off the floor. In just five years, he’d gone from beating me up to being a blubbering baby. I guess he had hit bottom. He was broke. His house was gone. His family was gone. He had a fifty-dollar car and he worked a second job as a security guard at Hampshire College to pay the bills.
Visiting my mother was worse. She had moved into an apartment in town and was still seeing women. She had a girlfriend who could have been my aunt. It just seemed unnatural. And some of the other females I saw over there were more like acolytes than girlfriends.
Sometimes it got even weirder than that. “This is my daughter, Anne. She’s your new sister,” she told me. Did she really believe some girl she took in was my sister? She was losing her marbles. Again. Soon enough she was back at Northampton State Hospital, and my new sister had thrown my mother’s stuff in the backyard and taken over the house.
I was too ashamed ever to tell a stranger—or even a friend—what my parents were really like. “My parents teach at the university,” I said. “My father is in philosophy,” I would tell people. I made them sound clean, tweedy, and nice, not shackled to a wall, frothing like rabid dogs, behind four layers of locked doors, which was closer to the truth.
At least I had Little Bear. She knew what they were really like.
My friends had parents who sent them to college at places like Dartmouth and McGill. They had homes to return to, and they were in college. Not me. I rode my motorcycle back to Sunderland (a small town next to Amherst), to the three-room apartment I shared with Little Bear and her two roommates. I was on my own and I needed a job, now.
So I decided to do something about it. Jim Boughton and I started installing sound and light systems in local nightclubs. We started in the Amherst area and expanded south to Springfield. Then we went farther, to Boston and Hartford. The jobs didn’t pay much, or we didn’t know enough to charge much, but we had steady work.
Going into a discotheque at noon to install sound equipment is very different from entering the same place at midnight. It’s completely quiet, and there is no natural light, because the windows and doors are painted flat black to keep people from looking in. Fluorescent work lights that are never on in the evening make the interior a uniform shade of gray. The place reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled liquor everywhere except the bathrooms. There, the stench of piss and vomit is stronger. A thin film of congealed smoke, sweat, and grease covers everything in the room. Wipe any surface with a white towel and it comes up the color of fresh iced tea.
That was our new workplace. We spent our days installing colored neon lights along the ceiling and subwoofers in corners that hadn’t seen daylight in forty years. We put turntables and a mixer into a newly built DJ booth, looking down onto the dance floor.
It’s enough to make a living, I told myself. And it’s still music. We started returning at night to admire our creations. Little Bear seldom came with us to those places. It was usually just Boughton and me. We’d drive to one club, stay thirty minutes, and head to another. The VIP. The Viking. Infinity. The Arabian Nights. Marc Anthony’s. The doormen all knew us, so we got in free. If we were lucky, the bartenders knew us, too, and we’d get free drinks. Not that I ever drank much anyway.
I’d watch the girls in dresses, girls in skirts, girls with hardly any clothes at all. They arrived alone and in groups. Sometimes they left the way they came. Sometimes they got lucky and left with a guy. At least, I assumed they were lucky.
I didn’t leave with any girls, although I often wished I were as brave as some of the people I saw. I wished I could walk up to strangers and engage them in conversation. I don’t know what I would have said or done. It would have felt good, though, having that confidence and making friends. I watched the people talking at the bar. I watched people dancing on the floor. I saw them in freeze-frame in the light of my strobes. They glowed red in the light of my lasers, and they glittered with the lights from the mirror ball. The DJs always used the mirror ball for the slow dances.
I knew everything there was to know about lighting the dance floor and lighting the people, but the people themselves remained a mystery to me. I could not figure them out.
I never set foot on the dance floor unless I was fixing or adjusting something. I couldn’t dance. I was clumsy, and I was sure I would look incredibly stupid. I had learned by then not to put myself in situations where people would laugh at me. Anyway, I was too shy to ask anyone to dance, and too self-conscious to accept if anyone asked me. I watched people doing lines of coke and popping pills at tables, in plain sight of the sound booth. Sometimes I’d see people shooting up on the steps in the alleys out back.
Heroin was scary. I’d read how you could become addicted with a few pricks of the needle, and I saw how the addicts lived. In Dumpsters, and passed out in doorways. No way am I going to do that, I thought. That was even worse than my father’s drinking.
I watched it all with the same detachment I had learned to feel when I was excluded from playing with kid packs when I was five. No one made fun of me, but I still could not integrate myself into the groups around me. I wanted to make friends, but I didn’t want to engage in the activities I saw them doing. So I just watched. And I worked. And I stayed, convinced that it was better to be destitute in Amherst than in New York City.
The trouble was, the effects I wanted to design were getting more and more complex. I was starting to use microprocessors in my designs, and I couldn’t afford the equipment to make and test my circuits at home. I needed a lab, but I was reluctant to go back to the university because they’d want to enroll me in some kind of organized school program, and I’d had enough of that. I needed the resources of some still-nameless corporation.
I realized it was time to get a real job. Everyone else had jobs, except the lowlifes sitting in doorways downtown. I didn’t want to be one of them. I started reading the help wanted ads, looking under “Electrical Engineer.” I wondered if anyone would hire me. Most of the ads were faceless, boring ads for boring companies. One ad caught my eye, so much so that I still remember it:
MONEY PROBLEMS?
WOMAN TROUBLE?
RUNNING FROM THE LAW?
YOU CAN FIND A HOME IN THE FOREIGN LEGION.
I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. The Foreign Legion was actually advertising for mercenaries. It was a shame I wasn’t looking for what they had to offer: adventure, discipline, male companionship, and the chance to fight battles far from home.
I focused on local ads. Process Control. Jet Engine Testing. Quality Assurance Engineering. Field Service Rep. Sales Engineer. CNC Programming. But I could not imagine myself doing any of those things. I didn’t even know what most of them were. Then, at the bottom of the last page in the
Sunday paper, I saw it:
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS
BE PART OF THE TEAM DESIGNING NEXT SEASON’S HOTTEST
ELECTRONIC GAMES
That was the job for me. I called immediately, and was told to drop off a résumé. Résumé? I had never made one. So I started reading up on how to write one. By the next day, I had made up a fine-looking résumé, and the majority of the stuff on it—everything but my age and education—was actually true. I guess I did a good job, because Catherine from Personnel called the next day to schedule an interview. She also told me a little more about what they were looking for.
They were designing sound effects. They wanted to make games that talked and listened. They wanted people with experience in audio and digital design. “I can do those things,” I said confidently.
My Aspergian ability to focus and learn fast saved me. Between Sunday, when I read the ad, and the interview eight days later, I became a passable expert in digital design. My head was spinning, but I had absorbed the contents of three engineering texts from the Graduate Research Center library.
When interview day arrived, I put on my suit and drove down. Actually, I was lucky I even had a suit. I had bought it the previous summer when KISS was interviewed for a TV show while touring in the South. It was light gray rough silk, from Christian Dior in Charleston. It was bought on the expense account, so I could thank KISS for my natty appearance at my first job interview.
It was a long day of questions and answers. I started with Paul, the manager of the R&D group. Then I met with Klaus, the senior engineer. Then I talked to Dave, the mathematician who was designing the speech synthesis system. Finally, I talked to Jim, the group vice president. It was an incredible piece of luck for me that the things they wanted were the things I knew the most about. And, even better for me, they had not found one single applicant with any knowledge of sound effects.
Of course, I made it sound like I designed my sound effects devices in a real lab, as they did—not on my kitchen table, or in a motel room, or on the floor in some civic center, the way it really happened. At the time, I was very worried by my lack of legitimacy, but now I realize it didn’t matter where I created those things. What mattered was that I had done it. I had done it for KISS and I could do it for them.
“What do you know about digital filters?” they asked. Nothing, but I learn fast, I thought. “What do you know about sound effects?” I was on solid ground with that one. “I’ve designed filters to modify the sounds of musical instruments, and I’ve designed all manner of signal processors for sound reinforcement and recording. I’ve also designed circuits for monophonic and polyphonic synthesizers…” Once I got going on that topic, I didn’t stop.
The letter arrived in the mail two days later. It began: “Milton Bradley’s electronics division is pleased to offer you the position of Staff Engineer in our Advanced R&D Group. Your starting salary will be $25,000 per year.”
I couldn’t believe it at first. Then I felt proud, and also scared. Could I do it? I was about to find out. I called right away and agreed to start work the following Monday. I figured I’d better start quickly, before they had a chance to change their minds.
When I reported to work, I was pleased to find other geeks and misfits I could talk to. Most of the engineers were about my age. They had just spent four years in college; I had spent four years on the road. Since I had grown up around the university, I fit in fine. Several of the guys at work had even graduated from UMass and we knew some of the same professors.
We had a few senior engineers who were quite a bit older, and they were supposed to watch over the rest of us. I was assigned to Klaus, whom I had met during my interview. He was old and cranky but extremely sharp. We got along well.
I had never worked in an organization before, so I watched carefully to see how it worked and where I fit in. At the top of our organization, we had the senior VP, a blond German fellow who wore suits and did not speak to underlings like us. He had a large office at the other end of the building and a pair of secretaries guarding it.
The next level down was another VP, an ex-marine we called the Juice. He’d been given the name by Bob and Brad, two of my fellow engineers, and it stuck. He said, “What you assholes need is some military discipline!” That pretty much spelled out his attitude toward me and the other engineers.
The next level in the corporate food chain was occupied by Paul, the manager of our group. Paul believed he should smile and talk nicely to us, and he smiled all the time. If Juice had the stick, Paul had the carrot. I didn’t trust him. I wasn’t very good at reading people’s expressions, but I knew people smiled when they were happy. Well, he couldn’t be happy all the time. I wasn’t happy all the time. I wasn’t even happy most of the time. I certainly didn’t smile all the time. Why did he? He didn’t seem to be on drugs. Something was up with him.
And then there was us. The engineers. One of the first guys I made friends with was Bob Jeffway, who worked across the hall in product development. Bob was a prototypical geek: tall, thin, with signs of future baldness. He had a white dress shirt and a pocket protector filled with three pens and a small screwdriver. I quickly discovered that everything was a joke to Bob. I may have been the class clown in high school, but he was the company prankster here.
“So, I hear you’re working for Little Ugly.” Bob had nicknames for everyone I saw. The Juice. Mister Chips. Hooligan. The Snout. And Earth, Wind and Fire.
I smiled. Little Ugly, I thought. It did fit. But I learned an awful lot from Klaus. And I never called him Little Ugly, except in conversation with Bob.
Our group was designing the first talking toys, and Klaus assigned me to work on an analog-to-digital converter he had been developing. The converter would be used in the lab to study voice and sound patterns. It sounded right up my alley. Right from the beginning, people were impressed by my designs, and they worked. I was off and running.
I had been terribly afraid of what I’d find in a real job. But when I got there, it was easy. No one stood over me with a whip. I never once heard, “Come on, Ampie, move your ass. We need this stuff now!” They seemed willing to pay me to think up new designs at my own speed, in my own space. It was unbelievable.
The air was clean. There was no haze of sweat and cigarette smoke anywhere. The heat worked. No one carried a gun, at least not as far as I could see. There were no drunks passed out in our doorways, and our washroom sinks were never used as toilets. We didn’t have any coke dealers or hookers in the parking lot, and it was always safe to walk to your car when work was done.
I realized that my coworkers had no idea how lucky they were. They took it all for granted. During that first week at work, I resolved that I would never again return to life in the gutter.
Within a year, I was responsible for projects on my own. I seemed to have made it into the normal world at last. If I was careful, I thought, no one would find out about my past.
19
A Visit from Management
Now that I had a real job, I figured the time had come to act like a grown-up. After all, I was almost twenty-three years old. I was a design engineer at a big manufacturing company. And I had a lab of my own, with state-of-the-art test gear even better than what I’d used at the university.
For the first time in my life, I put on a nice button-down shirt and a tie each morning. I was even on time, most of the time.
The strange thing was that I found myself reporting to work in a factory. The electronics division had sprung up overnight, it seemed, and there was nowhere else to put it. Eventually, we would work in a nice new wing of corporate headquarters, but at that time it was still under construction. So they gave me a photo ID that identified me as a member of management, and I trudged in through the factory entrance alongside fifteen hundred injection molders and printing press operators every morning. At least the salaried people like me didn’t have to stand in line with the laborers and punch a time clock.
I don??
?t know what I expected life as a professional to be like, but it wasn’t walking through a factory, in between two-story-high plastic molding machines, jumping aside when one of the machines decided to spit fifty pounds of hot plastic into the path in front of me and spatter my new Bally loafers with little balls of molten plastic.
I collected some of the smaller plastic turds, five-and ten-pounders, and laid them in my backyard like products of some chemically treated cow. Yellows, reds, blues, and an occasional one in mixed colors. Visitors to the house looked at them, but no one had the courage to ask what they were.
“You’ll be out of the factory soon,” our boss, Paul, said. The Juice and the other higher-ups were already over at headquarters. But until the new wing was finished, we were stuck in the factory. And R&D, of which I was a new member, was located above the injection molding machines in an overheated garret in what used to be the attic of the factory.
Just imagine the scene—seventeen engineers, plus one secretary, a manager, and an intern, up in the attic, all designing as fast as we could. In the summer, it was brutal up there, because all the heat from the factory floor rose to the top floor and the sun roasted us from above, cooking the black tar roof. Black spots—bits of hot tar from the roof—began peeking through the nice hung ceiling that August. I retreated to our technicians’ lab in a cooler part of the factory.
Vito was in charge of the technicians and, as a staff engineer, I was in charge of Vito. Sort of. Vito was really ungovernable. But he and I worked together well. Like a good sergeant in the Army, Vito showed us engineers how things really worked. For example, Vito showed us how to get rid of a pesky salesman with real flair.
The salesman gambit took two people. Vito always did the intro. Here’s how it worked: When a salesman made a bad impression on Vito, he would say, “When you meet my boss, ask him about his sister. She just won the NCAA swimming championship at her college. He’s really proud of her.”