“Varmint?”
He said the word a few times and toddled off to tell his mother the news.
The crushing loneliness that I had felt as a five-year-old was mostly gone. Now I only felt lonely on special occasions, when I would be reminded of my inferiority. When I had a birthday, my parents would bake a cake and get me some presents and everyone ran around looking jolly. But every now and then I got invited to birthday parties for other kids, and at those parties there would be ten or twenty kids, all running around laughing. Those were the good parties, I thought. Mine were crummy.
I was seldom laughing and happy, and I was never surrounded by kids. I didn’t fully understand the reasons why, but I knew their situation was better than mine, and it hurt to see what I was missing.
As I moved through school as another marginal kid, my dad and my teachers started forecasting my future. They told me I would never amount to anything. They said I was headed for a career pumping gas or jail or the Army—if they would take me. I was contrary and I would not apply myself.
But I’d show them.
3
Empathy
By the time I was twelve, I had progressed from “If he doesn’t get better, he may have to be institutionalized” to “He’s a weird, screwed-up kid.” But although my communication abilities had developed by leaps and bounds, people had ever higher expectations for me, and I began having trouble with what the therapists called “inappropriate expressions.”
One time, my mother had invited her friend Betsy over. I wandered in as they sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and talking.
Betsy said, “Did you hear about Eleanor Parker’s son? Last Saturday he got hit by a train and killed. He was playing on the tracks.”
I smiled at her words. She turned to me with a shocked expression on her face. “What! Do you think that’s funny?”
I felt embarrassed and a little humiliated. “No, I guess not,” I said as I slunk away. I didn’t know what to say. I knew they thought it was bad for me to be smiling, but I didn’t know why I was grinning, and I couldn’t help it. I didn’t feel joy or happiness. At the time, as I approached my teenage years, it was hard to figure out exactly what I did feel. And I felt powerless to react any differently.
As I left, I could hear Betsy. “What’s the matter with that boy?”
My mother sent me to therapists, all of whom focused on the wrong things. Mostly, they made me feel worse than I already did, dwelling on my so-called evil and sociopathic thoughts. They were all full of shit. They didn’t make me better. They just made me feel worse. None of them figured out why I grinned when I heard Eleanor’s kid had been run over by a train.
But now I know. And I figured it out myself.
I didn’t really know Eleanor. And I had never met her kid. So there was no reason for me to feel joy or sorrow on account of anything that might happen to them. Here is what went through my mind that summer day:
Someone got killed.
Damn! I’m glad I didn’t get killed.
I’m glad Varmint or my parents didn’t get killed.
I’m glad all my friends are okay.
He must have been a pretty dumb kid, playing on the train tracks.
I would never get run over by a train like that.
I’m glad I’m okay.
And at the end, I smiled with relief. Whatever killed that kid was not going to get me. I didn’t even know him. It was all going to be okay, at least for me. Today my feelings would be exactly the same in that situation. The only difference is, now I have better control of my facial expressions.
The fact is, from an evolutionary standpoint, people have an inbred tendency to care about and protect themselves and their immediate family. We do not naturally care about people we don’t know. If ten people get killed in a bus crash in Brazil, I don’t feel anything at all. I understand intellectually that it’s sad, but I don’t feel sad. But then I see people making a big deal over it and it puzzles and troubles me because I don’t seem to be reacting the same way. For much of my life, being different equated to being bad, even though I never thought of myself that way.
“That’s terrible! Oh, I just feel awful!” Some people will cry and carry on, and I wonder…Do they really feel that, or is it just a play for attention? It is very hard for me to know. People die every minute, all over the world. If we tried to feel sorry for every death, our little hearts would explode.
As I’ve gotten older, I have taught myself to act “normal.” I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.
Ten years ago, I got a call from the state police. “Your father’s been in a car accident. He’s being taken to the Greenfield hospital.”
“Shit, that’s terrible,” I said.
I immediately felt anxious, almost nauseous. I was worried. I was frantic. Would he die? Within moments, I had dropped what I was doing and I was speeding toward the Greenfield hospital.
As it happened, my father didn’t die. He and my stepmother both recovered from that accident. But the sick, anxious feeling did not leave me until I had reached the hospital, seen them, talked to the doctors, and satisfied myself that they were going to be all right.
I contrast that in my mind with hearing the news that a plane just crashed in Uzbekistan. Fifty-six people are dead.
“Shit, that’s terrible,” I say.
To an observer, my reaction to those two events was the same. But to me there is a night-and-day difference. Caring—or pretending to care—about other people is a learned behavior. It’s one of several kinds of empathy, I suppose. I have true empathy for my family and close friends. If I hear of something bad happening to one of them, I feel tense, or nauseous, or anxious. My neck muscles cramp. I get jumpy. That, to me, is one kind of empathy that’s “real.”
When something sort of bad happens, I don’t have the physical reaction but I still react to the news. When the bad news does not involve danger, my immediate thought is, What can I do to fix things?
When I was fourteen, my mother came home one day and said, “John Elder, the car’s on fire!” I went downstairs and out to the car. The inside was full of smoke. I have to fix this for her, I thought. And I have to do it before my father gets home.
I opened the windows and disconnected the battery. When the smoke cleared, I crawled under the dash and found a wire from the cigarette lighter that was melted and burning. I cut it out and repaired it, and I removed the penny that my mother had dropped into the lighter socket. I did all that despite the fact that the car was filthy and full of cigarette butts and old paper matches, the most disgusting things in the world to me. I did it for my mother.
That’s another kind of empathy. I didn’t have to fix the car. I could have played dumb and she’d never have been any the wiser. I would not have fixed it for anyone besides my mother. But I felt a need to help because a family member was in trouble.
I have what you might call “logical empathy” for people I don’t know. That is, I can understand that it’s a shame that those people died in the plane crash. And I understand they have families, and they are sad. But I don’t have any physical reaction to the news. And there’s no reason I should. I don’t know them and the news has no effect on my life. Yes, it’s sad, but the same day thousands of other people died from murder, accident, disease, natural disaster, and all manner of other causes. I feel I must put things like this in perspective and save my worry for things that truly matter to me.
As a logical thinker, I cannot help thinking, based on the evidence, that many people who exhibit dramatic reactions to bad news involving strangers are hypocrites. That troubles me. People like that hear bad news from across the world, and they burst into wails and tears as though their own children have ju
st been run over by a bus. To me, they don’t seem very different from actors and actresses—they are able to burst into tears on command, but does it really mean anything?
Often those same people will turn to me and say things like, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not saying anything. Don’t you care that all those people got killed? They had families, you know!”
As I got older, I found myself in trouble more and more for saying things that were true, but that people didn’t want to hear. I did not understand tact. I developed some ability to avoid saying what I was thinking. But I still thought it. It’s just that I didn’t let on quite so often.
4
A Trickster Is Born
About this time, I figured out one way to capitalize on my differences from the mass of humanity. In school, I became the class clown. Out of school, I became a trickster. I made quite a few trips to the principal’s office in those years. But it was worth it.
I was good at thinking up tricks. When I did, the other kids laughed with me, not at me. We all laughed at the teachers or whomever else I poked fun at. As long as my pranks lasted, I was popular. It felt great, having other kids admire me and like me.
I didn’t even have to ask the other kids to join in. They did it on their own. And even if they didn’t, they never made fun of me over my tricks.
Of course, once I figured that out, I kept doing it. And I got better with time.
I read all the time, and I was learning all sorts of new things. In fact, I kept the more interesting volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica next to my bed. I knew my tractors or dinosaurs or ships or astronomy or rocks or whatever else I was studying at that moment.
People began looking at me and listening to me as if I was a prodigy. This was especially true of my family, my few friends, and my parents’ close friends. They were a good audience, because they always seemed to like me, even when other people didn’t. They saw how intently I studied things. They saw how often I was right, and they heard the certainty in my voice when I said things. It seemed to be a case of “say it and it must be so.”
I had an idea: Perhaps I could create my own reality. My first experiments were relatively simple. When I pointed out stars and constellations in the night sky to my grandparents, I added one.
“There’s the Big Dipper,” I said. “See, over there. And over there, that’s Orion.”
“You just know all your stars, John Elder!” My grandmother was impressed.
“And that bright star—that’s Sirius, the Dog Star. And that one there, that’s Bovinius, the Cow Star.”
“Are you pulling my leg, John Elder? I never heard of the Cow Star.” My grandparents were skeptical.
“I read about it in my book of mythology. The one you bought me. Cows are sacred in India, and that’s their star. Wanna read about it?”
“No, son, I’m sure you’re right.”
The trick was weaving enough truth into the story to make it plausible. I pointed out stars and constellations they knew, and then I showed them a new one. All the elements of my explanation made sense. Maybe there was a Cow Star after all.
And so Bovinius began to shine over Georgia. My grandfather continued to spread the legend.
“Hey, Jeb, look up there. You see that star? That’s the goddamn Cow Star. My grandson told me about it. Kid read about it in a book.”
“Cow Star, huh?”
“Yeah. Goddamn Indians. Named a goddamn star for a cow,” my grandfather said.
“Indians?”
“Yeah, real Indians. From India.”
“Cow Star.”
As I got older and smarter, my pranks became better, more polished. More sophisticated. Sometimes my stories would acquire a life of their own.
I started out tricking my family. When my grandfather found out he was being tricked, he thought it was funny. He encouraged me. My father was mean, and he was dangerous to trick. But it worked with my mother and brother all the time. The vanishing kid trick became a staple. I worked endless variations for many years.
The first time was when our mother left Varmint and me together at the petting zoo at Look Park in Northampton. Look Park was a supposedly safe place close to home. She went off to the bathroom, and to get us some snacks. She was gone less than five minutes. Varmint was six, and I was fourteen. I had a sudden flash of inspiration.
“Quick, Varmint, hide in that shed before Mom gets back. We’ll trick her.”
I pointed to a small building where they stored maintenance tools and supplies. Varmint slipped in and pulled the door shut, but opened it a crack so he could see what would happen.
When our mother came back, I was leaning on the rail, reaching out to pet a deer.
“John Elder, where is your brother?”
Without even looking around, I said, “He went to find you.”
She headed back the way she came, looking for Varmint. So far, so good. I glanced over to the shed and grinned at Varmint.
Soon she was back. “John Elder, I don’t see your brother.”
“Well, he’ll turn up.”
Looking unconcerned, I wandered off. My mother followed me. I continued to act indifferent, which got her even more agitated.
“John Elder, where is Chris?”
“He’s fine. And anyway, he’s just a Varmint.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about your brother like that.”
Now ten minutes had passed with no sign of the Varmint. I was proud of him, staying quiet in the shed all that time. He was doing very well. Our mother was getting really upset. It was time to spring the trap.
“John Elder, I’m getting worried about your brother.”
Yes, it was definitely time.
“Why are you worried? He’s with your friend Paul. He’s fine.”
My mother did not have a friend Paul. She turned white.
“John Elder!! What are you talking about?”
“Varmint went with Paul. They went to find you and ride the train.”
We had her now. She was panicked.
“I don’t know any Paul. Who is he?”
“How should I know? He’s your friend.”
That was just the right thing to say. I was getting really good at thinking on my feet.
“Oh my God. Wait here.”
She ran off.
I decided we might have trouble if she came back with the police and they went looking for Paul. I motioned Varmint out. He was grinning. Even though all he’d done was stand still, he was still proud of his part.
“Okay, Varmint, you have to keep a straight face now. Can you do it?”
“I think so,” he said.
Our mother returned with two policemen. She saw the Varmint. She ran and grabbed him.
“Christopher Robison, where have you been?”
The police saw this, lost interest, and wandered away. Before Varmint could say anything, I said, “Paul brought him back, just like I told you.”
Varmint rose to the challenge.
“We rode the train, and got an ice cream.” He made that up all on his own. I could see it then. One day, he might be as good as me at telling stories.
Our mother was suspicious, but she wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t want to scare him unnecessarily. She had no idea the whole thing was all a trick, and we were in on it together. She was afraid to say more about this mysterious Paul, since Varmint was, after all, seemingly back in one piece. It was time to distract her.
“Varmint, let’s go get a paddleboat and ram the other boats and sink them.”
She never figured out who Varmint had gone off with, but we were on to something else as we headed for the paddleboats.
I didn’t stop there. I tricked the neighbors, too, and my teachers. I had a particularly disagreeable high school biology teacher. His ideas of the work I should do, and how and when I should do it, were far removed from my own. He tormented me during my weekly lab, holding up my “sloppily dissected frog” for everyone to ridicule. He al
so singled me out in class, asking questions he knew I couldn’t answer.
“What’s this?” he would ask, pointing to a spitball-sized bit of frog spoiling on my tray. How should I know? I thought, but I fumed and said nothing. I could not close my eyes for a moment in his class, because he’d pounce. It was exhausting and humiliating. I pondered how I might respond.
I decided he needed reading material to distract him. Something to take his mind off harassing nice kids like me.
So I went to Burtle’s, the local newsstand. I headed for the magazine racks. They had by far the best selection of smut in town. They had magazines like Playboy and Penthouse on an upper shelf in back, but the serious stuff was under the counter, by the cash register. I needed those magazines, but I could not see any way to get my hands on them. I didn’t need to take them from the store. After all, I only wanted the subscription forms. But how would I get them?
There was only one answer. I would have to buy them. That called for some groundwork, because I didn’t have any money.
The next day was a Saturday. I went into town with a metal camping plate and a sign. I swiped two milk crates from behind Eddie’s, the town grocer. I set up across the street, in front of the Quicksilver Bar and Grill. In that location, everyone walking through town would see me and my sign. The sign, which I had made with my mother’s art supplies, read:
CHILDREN’S AND ORPHANS’ RELIEF
HELP US HELP THEM
YOUR DONATIONS COUNT
SAVE A CHILD
It was remarkably easy. Amherst was a great town for panhandling. In just a few hours, I had thirty dollars in change and sixteen dollar bills. My pockets were bulging. Many people just walked by and dropped money into my pan. Often they looked away from me while doing so. Surprisingly, no one questioned or challenged me. I was glad no one I knew walked by. That would have been embarrassing for me. Although, for them, it might have been inspirational. If some of my friends had seen my panhandling success, they’d have been out there the next day themselves.