I tried running back and forth with them.
“What are you doing? You aren’t a cowboy!” What? I looked at him, and I looked at myself. Why was he a cowboy and I wasn’t?
I said, “I am too a cowboy!”
“No, you’re not! You’re a monkey face!” And he ran off. As I stood there, Ronnie’s cowboys ran back and forth past me, saying, “Monkey Face!” every time they went by.
They would never let me be a cowboy. I was angry, and sad, and humiliated. I would never fit in. Why was I alive? I ran back to our apartment, crying. My mother picked me up and sat me in her lap.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just don’t know how to make friends,” I sobbed. “No one likes me.”
My mother didn’t know what to say, but she petted me, and I calmed down. I looked out the window at Ronson’s cowboys, and then sat down to work on Chippy, my tractor. Chippy was never mean to me. I always got along with machines. Even back then.
Our time in Seattle was probably the best family time of my childhood, even though I didn’t have much luck making friends. My father took us camping almost every weekend. He showed me how to be a woodsman. We looked at books together, especially the Boy Scout Woodsman manual. I can still remember the pictures that showed how to make a trap, and the correct way to step over a fallen log.
I dreamed about trapping wolves and bears, but garter snakes and frogs were as close as I got. And I’ve never forgotten the woodsman’s log-crossing techniques that I learned at five.
I was happy to discover that there were woods behind our apartment in Seattle. I liked it in the woods. When I was sad, I would go there and sit and think, and I would do woodsman things. That always made me feel better.
The woods seemed vast to me, but they were really only a few hundred feet deep. I know they didn’t seem so huge to my parents, because they always told me not to go all the way through them and get onto Aurora, the big highway on the other side. They told me the highway went all the way to Alaska.
“Don’t you go out by the highway. Someone might steal my baby boy!” I didn’t want to be stolen, so I stayed clear.
There were a few other kids that weren’t part of Ronnie’s pack, and I got to know them slowly. We were the runts of the litter, the misfits. One of the other misfits—mostly due to his small size—was Jeff Crane, who was a year and a half younger than me. Jeff’s mother became friendly with my mother, and we used to go to their apartment and visit. Jeff had big brothers and a big sister, too, but they weren’t interested in us. So we played together.
Since I was older, I knew more than he did. I showed him things, like frogs and plants and how to make forts—all the things a five-year-old knows and a three-year-old wants to learn. Sometimes we caught small snakes and put them in glass jars. Jeff’s older brother came out and helped with snake catching. We had to punch holes in the metal tops so they could breathe.
Doing things with Jeff showed me that littler kids would look up to me as a teacher. I felt good about that. Of course, kids always think they know the answers. The difference in my case was that most of the time, I actually did. Even at five, I was beginning to understand the world of things better than the world of people.
When we moved from Seattle to Pittsburgh the next year, I gave Chippy to Jeff. Chippy was the first valuable thing I owned, and the first thing I gave away, but it seemed right because Jeff was my first real friend. He was younger than me, but he was smart, and he looked up to me, and he didn’t make fun of me like the bigger kids. Besides, I was almost too big to drive Chippy anymore, and my parents had said they’d get me a bike when we got to Pittsburgh. I knew that having a bike was a sign of being a Big Kid. And maybe when I was a Big Kid, the other kids would like me.
2
A Permanent Playmate
“John Elder, we’re going to move back to Pennsylvania,” my father announced one day when he came home from school. I was more interested in the pile of silver dollars I had just discovered in his drawer. They were old and heavy, and some were from the 1880s. But he insisted on telling me about moving. He took the silver dollar out of my hand and said it again.
“John Elder, we’re moving soon!”
Taking the silver dollar away did get my attention. But as I think back on events like this, I realize my parents were not always very affectionate toward me. Did they even want a child? I’ll never know.
With my attention now on my father, I asked, “Are we moving to the same place we lived before?”
“No, this time it’s Pittsburgh,” my father said. He thought he’d found a permanent job. I’d be starting first grade in the Pittsburgh schools, with a new pack of kids. I was sad to say good-bye to my friend Jeff, but I wasn’t very happy in Seattle, so I didn’t mind moving away.
I had learned something from my humiliations at the hands of Ronnie Ronson and Chuckie and all the other kids I’d tried and failed to make friends with. I was starting to figure out that I was different. But I had a positive outlook. I would make the best of my lot in life as a defective child.
In Pittsburgh, I finally started learning how to make friends. I knew now that kids and dogs were different. I didn’t try to pet kids anymore, or poke them with sticks. And at nine years of age, I had a life-changing revelation.
I figured out how to talk to other children.
I suddenly realized that when a kid said, “Look at my Tonka truck,” he expected an answer that made sense in the context of what he had said. Here were some things I might have said prior to this revelation in response to “Look at my Tonka truck”:
a) “I have a helicopter.”
b) “I want some cookies.”
c) “My mom is mad at me today.”
d) “I rode a horse at the fair.”
I was so used to living inside my own world that I answered with whatever I had been thinking. If I was remembering riding a horse at the fair, it didn’t matter if a kid came up to me and said, “Look at my truck!” or “My mom is in the hospital!” I was still going to answer, “I rode a horse at the fair.” The other kid’s words did not change the course of my thoughts. It was almost like I didn’t hear him. But on some level, I did hear, because I responded. Even though the response didn’t make any sense to the person speaking to me.
My new understanding changed that. All of a sudden, I realized that the response the kid was looking for, the correct answer, was:
e) “That’s a neat truck! Can I hold it?”
Even more important, I realized that responses A, B, C, and D would annoy the other kid. With my newfound social brilliance, I understood why Ronnie’s cowboys hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Maybe that was why Chuckie had ignored me, too. (Or maybe Chuckie was just another defective kid, like me. After all, she did like trucks, and she did look at the dirt when I talked.)
After I suddenly got it, my answers made sense—most of the time. I wasn’t ready to be the life of the party, but I was able to participate. Conversations no longer came to a screeching halt. Things were getting better.
In some ways, the grown-ups around me had actually kept me from figuring this out sooner. Adults—almost all family members or friends of my parents—would approach me and say something to start a conversation. If my response made no sense, they never told me. They just played along. So I never learned how to carry on a conversation from talking to grown-ups, because they just adapted to whatever I said. Kids, on the other hand, got mad or frustrated.
How do normal kids figure this out? They learn it from seeing how other kids react to their words, something my brain is not wired to do. I have since learned that kids with Asperger’s don’t pick up on common social cues. They don’t recognize a lot of body language or facial expressions. I know I didn’t. I only recognized pretty extreme reactions, and by the time things were extreme, it was usually too late.
With my incredible new skills, I made friends right away. I met the Meyers girls across the street, Christine and Lisa. I made f
riends with Lenny Persichetti, five doors down. We formed a kid pack, playing hide-and-seek and building forts in the woods. We hung out in the garage behind our house, where some older kids had formed a band. My new friends and I roamed the neighborhood, exploring things without our parents for the first time. Lenny and I found abandoned castles and ruins and ancient machinery hidden in the woods of Frick Park. There were all sorts of things to explore.
That summer, we became Big Kids. We were free. No one was watching us. I loved it, because all of a sudden, I was no longer alone. Then I got another big surprise.
“John Elder, I’m going to have a baby!” my mother said.
I didn’t know what to say. Would it be a sister, I wondered? I hoped not. What good would a little sister be? A brother would be better. Yes. A little brother! For me! I would have my own permanent playmate.
Mom got bigger and bigger and I was able to listen to the baby inside. I was excited.
On the day the baby was born, my mother’s brother Mercer came and stayed with me while my parents went to the hospital. I couldn’t wait to see my new brother. My uncle drove me to the hospital to see him for the first time. He was just a few hours old.
“Christopher Richter Robison. What a beautiful baby boy!”
“Do you want to hold him?” My mother was holding him against her. He was tiny, smaller than I’d imagined.
“Will he get bigger?” Maybe he was a dwarf.
“You were the same size when you were born,” my mother said. It was hard to believe, but if I was that small once he would probably grow up, too.
He was all red and kept his eyes closed most of the time. My mother handed him to me. I expected him to struggle, like when I picked up a dog or a cat, but he didn’t do anything. I couldn’t really even feel him, all wrapped up in a blanket. It was very different from picking up the dog. My own little brother. I was very excited, but I was careful not to show it, so they wouldn’t take him away from me.
He came home wrapped in a yellow blanket, and my mother put him in a crib across the hall from me. I went in and watched him, but he didn’t do anything. I looked at him, and sometimes he looked back at me, but mostly he slept. He was neat.
“Be careful. You have to support his head.” I squeezed him against me so he wouldn’t fall. I was always afraid his neck would break like my mother had said it could. But it never did.
I looked down at him. “Can you say anything?”
He snorted.
“Is that it?” I poked him in the nose the way I’d seen my parents do. He yelled. Quickly, I picked him up and rocked him back and forth. He quieted down, and snorted some more.
“I’ll call you Snort,” I said. Now he had a name.
I built a tall crane with my Erector Set and I lifted blocks up to his crib. I began moving wooden blocks from floor to crib. I was hoping Snort would play with them, but he just stared.
“Look, Snort, I’m lifting blocks for you.” Snort watched them rise and fall.
“Mom, look, I made Snort a crane!” I was jealous, because my mother spent all her time with Snort. She had never ignored me before.
“That’s very nice, John Elder.” My mother followed me to Snort’s crib, and she admired my crane. I even lifted some blocks for her, and she took my picture. But she seemed fixated on his name. “Your brother’s name isn’t Snort. It’s Christopher. Or Chris.” She had not yet realized that I would never call him Christopher or Chris. I didn’t know it myself at that time, but for some reason I had a hard time with names, unless I made them up.
I brought my friends over to see my new brother. “This is my little brother. His name is Snort.” They were impressed. None of them had a baby brother. I couldn’t make him do much yet, but I knew he’d get bigger and then he’d be able to do things. I was proud of him.
A year passed, and he did learn more tricks. I taught him some, and he learned others on his own. At one year of age, he wasn’t really useful for anything yet, but I could see the potential. Meanwhile, our parents were fighting even more, and they were talking about moving. I wished Snort would get bigger so I could talk to him and have him answer back.
“Your father has been looking for a permanent teaching job. We’re looking at two schools. One is in Austin, Texas. The other is in Amherst, Massachusetts.” My father had been looking for that permanent job for a few years now. More and more, my mother was doing the talking. My father was silent.
He was getting meaner, too. He had started drinking something called sherry. I tried it but immediately spat it out. I could not imagine why he wanted to drink glass after glass of the stuff, but he did. He sat by himself at the kitchen table and drank, and got meaner as it got later. I was learning to stay away from him in the evening.
I had never been to Amherst or Austin. But from my reading, I knew Austin was home to poisonous snakes and Gila monsters. It was hot and dry. “Let’s go to Amherst,” I said. My parents agreed.
Once again we moved. This time we ended up in Hadley, Massachusetts, a farming community about six miles from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My parents had both grown up in the country, but all my life we’d lived in cities. Now we were in the country. I was excited. We moved into an old farmhouse.
“It was built in 1743. It’s one of the oldest houses in town, John Elder.” My mother seemed proud of that.
There were cows in the front and crops out back. My mother introduced me to the landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Barstow. They seemed nice. Mr. Barstow was the farmer who owned all the fields around us. And best of all, his brother owned the farm next door, and they had four kids I could play with. With my refined interpersonal skills, I actually made friends in Hadley right away. By the time school started, I even had buddies to sit with on the bus. I had never ridden a bus before, but I didn’t tell them that. I had learned not to reveal anything that might subject me to more ridicule than I already got.
There was a mountain behind us, and the Connecticut River was visible through the trees across the road. It was the prettiest place we’d lived. After school, the Barstow kids and I climbed the mountain and looked for amethysts. “They’re purple. They’re precious stones, like rubies,” Dave Barstow said.
Snort was getting bigger, too. He had learned how to sit up on his own, and he crawled around after me. He lived in a pen with rubber mesh sides. I took him out when he yelled and if he became a pest I put him back. Occasionally, I would flip his pen upside down so Snort was in a jail with a roof. He didn’t like that.
I decided to teach Snort to walk, in the squash field alongside the house. The plowed dirt was soft, so it wouldn’t hurt if he fell. Plus, he was small and didn’t have far to fall anyway. I would hold his little paw and we’d walk down the rows to the end of the field. Then we’d turn and go back. When we started out, I had to lift him by his paws and drag his feet on the ground so he’d get the idea to walk. He had a hard time but eventually I was able to lower his arms and he’d stand on his own. That seemed like progress. I was pleased. Then I started letting go of him completely.
“Go, Snort! Walk!”
The first time I did that, he yelled and sat right down. I nudged him with my foot and lifted him by a paw. He really wanted to crawl.
“Come on, Snort, walk!” He tried sitting down when I let go of him, but I kept pulling him up. Finally, I got him taking steps while I held onto him. He seemed proud of himself, but it was hard to tell because he still just babbled. And I wasn’t sure how much I could expect anyway, because I still thought he might be defective. He showed no interest at all in reading even though I showed him my books and I even read him stories.
Soon I had him walking on his own. He still liked being picked up, and he still resorted to crawling, but more and more he used his hind legs exclusively to get around. When I saw him following on four legs, I would step in the middle of his back and squash him on the floor. Or I would nudge him sideways with my foot, upending him the way you’d flip a turtle. He’d yel
l, but he got the idea to walk, not crawl.
“Two-wheel drive,” I said. “Not four-wheel drive.” Now that I was big, I read Motor Trend magazine, and I felt sure the analogy would be obvious to Snort.
By wintertime, he was toddling all over. He wasn’t talking much yet, but my mother assured me he would. I had my doubts. I expected him to be doing more.
“Your brother is not defective! He’s just a baby. He will be talking just like you in a few years.” My mother continued to stick up for him, even when confronted with the evidence, which annoyed me. After all, he wasn’t talking, and he wasn’t reading.
I tried to show him things, but he didn’t seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.
For some reason, whatever I did to him, Snort still idolized me. I was bigger, and I knew more. I liked having a little brother. It made me feel more mature. “Watch out for your brother,” my mother would say when we went outside to play. I would walk and he would toddle after me, like a pet. I liked feeling responsible and taking care of him. And I did a good job of it. Unlike some older brothers, I never set him on fire, or cut off an arm or a leg, or drowned him in the tub. I took really good care of Snort, and it showed. He got bigger every month, and he continued to follow me around. He was thriving.
Gradually, he stopped snorting and drooling. He began to take my toys and play with them himself. My little brother was becoming a nuisance. It was time for a new name.
“Snort, come here. You are getting bigger. So I’ve decided to give you a new name. From now on, you are going to be called Varmint. Got it?”