So I never did. But I thought about it. Many nights.
Eventually, he would put on his belt, cinch up his pants, and leave.
In the daylight, I would go out into the yard and smash my little brother’s Tonka trucks with rocks. Big rocks. The biggest I could find. It was all I could do.
One night, he called my brother instead of me.
“Commere, little Chris,” he said, slurring his words.
My brother was too small to mistrust him. Stupid kid. He went closer, and my father grabbed him. Set him on his knee.
It looked so harmless. Just a brainless, smiling toddler, sitting on daddy’s lap. He sat there a few minutes and nothing happened. I relaxed a little. Snort was smiling. Then daddy reached down and mashed his cigarette out. In the middle of Snort’s forehead. My little brother screamed. He struggled. As I write this, forty years later, I can’t remember whether he got away.
Like dogs that had been kicked, we were wary of him after that. But we would never admit it to anyone else. Getting abused or beaten up or bullied is humiliating, even more so when it happens at home. It took many years for me to gather the strength to tell the stories in this book.
Still, for some inexplicable reason, I did well in school—better than I had ever done, or would ever do again. When I graduated from sixth grade, our class had seven achievement prizes. I won six of them. I was used to hearing my father predict that I would end up pumping gas. That night, though, he said, “Son, I am really proud of what you’ve done.” But then we went home, where he returned to his bottle of sherry, alone in the kitchen. And by nine o’clock, his proud feelings were long gone.
None of my teachers knew or guessed that my parents fought every day in those years. Loud, ugly fights. And my father began to fall apart. First, he got psoriasis: nasty white scabs all over his body. I had thought the cigarettes were disgusting, but those scales were worse. They fell off constantly, clogging the drain in the tub. He left a trail of white flecks wherever he went. On the floor. On the rugs. On his clothes. The worst concentrations were in his bathroom and his bed. I kept well clear of those places.
My mother had to wash our clothes separately, because if any of mine got mixed up with his, they came out with little white bits of scale on them and I wouldn’t wear them. It would take three or four washings to get them clean enough to wear again.
The way he acted, though, he didn’t get much sympathy from me.
And then there was the arthritis. And his knees—fluid, and pain, and gold shots, and cortisone shots, and who knows what else. He was only thirty-five and yet he was falling apart. No one knew why then, or so they said. But now I know. He was miserable beyond belief. Both my parents had gone from bad childhoods to a bad marriage, and now I was living with the result.
Our father would have been enough for any family, but we had my mother, too. By this time, she had begun the slow slide into madness that would eventually send her to the Northampton State Hospital in restraints. She started seeing things overhead. Demons, people, ghosts…I never knew who or what she saw. They were in the light fixtures, in the corners, or on the ceiling. “Don’t you see them?” she would ask. I never did.
Some of the things she said were so disturbing, I blocked them from my mind and can’t repeat them today. My memories of that time are like blinding flashes of harsh, actinic light. They hurt to recall.
My parents drove each other crazy, and they almost drove me crazy. Luckily, the Asperger’s isolated me from the worst of the insanity until I was old enough to escape.
My mother would say, “John Elder, your father is a very smart, very dangerous man. He’s too smart for the doctors. He fools them into thinking he’s normal. I’m afraid your father is going to try and kill us. We need to hide. We need to get away from him until the doctor can get him under control.”
For a long time, I believed her. My brother was littler, and he believed her longer. Now I know. It was all madness, or meanness. On both of their parts.
By the time I turned thirteen and my brother was five, my mother had found the Dr. Finch that my brother wrote about in Running with Scissors. I remember going to see the doctor for the first time, with my whole family. I was dubious, because my mother had been sending me to therapists, playgroups, and counselors for a while, trying to find out what was wrong. Nothing had worked. But even back then, I could see one thing that was definitely wrong.
“We have the wrong parents, Varmint. I’ve watched my friends’ parents. They aren’t like ours.” Varmint didn’t really know. He was too little.
My parents often left me to watch the Varmint while they were out. But this time I was going, too. So I spoke to him before we left.
“Varmint, we’re all going out to talk about you with a shrink. I can’t stay with you because they want to ask me what to do. Come down here. We’ll chain you to the heating oil tank so you’ll be safe till we get back.”
“John Elder! Don’t you scare Chris like that. We have a babysitter for him.”
We left Varmint and set out for the doctor’s office, on the top floor of one of the old buildings that lined the main street of Northampton. We rode an antique elevator, the kind that looks like an open cage, to the third floor, exiting into a large waiting room filled with threadbare furniture, with a girl who turned out to be the doctor’s daughter at a schoolteacher’s desk against the wall.
The doctor’s office was behind an old wooden door with his name stenciled on a frosted glass pane, just like the door to the private detective’s office in the movies. Inside, the office was very hot and stuffy. The steam heat hissed all the time, and I smelled it in the air. The windows looked like they had never been opened. The office smelled of old carpets and tired people.
The doctor came out to meet us. Or maybe we went in to meet him.
“Good afternoon. I’m Doctor Finch!” he boomed at us.
He was old and chubby, with white hair and a vaguely foreign accent. Apparently, my mother and father had made a few visits already, and my father had told my grandfather about them.
“Watch out for that Doctor Finch,” my grandfather said on the phone, when I told him we were going to see him. “I had him investigated.”
Why he would investigate the doctor was a mystery to me.
“They ran him out of Kingsport, Tennessee, on a rail, I heard,” he said.
I had read about running people out of town on rails in my history books.
“Did they tar and feather him, too?” I asked. Lots of times, angry mobs did that as part of the running on a rail ceremony. At least according to what I had read.
“I don’t know. Just watch him.”
So I watched him. Closely.
One at a time, my mother, my father, and I went in to talk to the doctor, and then at the end we went in together. I can’t remember what we talked about in that first visit, but shortly after we started seeing him, Dr. Finch did two things that changed my life: He told me I could call my parents anything I wanted, and he told my father that he could not smack me around. And, unlike the suggestions of every shrink in the past, Dr. Finch’s suggestions took hold. My father never hit me again. For this, I will always be grateful to Dr. Finch, despite his bizarre behavior later.
“John has decided on new names for both of you,” he said, calling them in after meeting with me alone. “I have encouraged him in this, as a sign of his free expression. John…?” He paused and turned to me.
“I have decided to name you Slave,” I said, looking at my mother.
“And your name is Stupid,” I told my father.
“Yes, John Elder,” said my mother. Anything to humor me.
“I don’t really like that,” said my father.
“Well, you have to respect John’s choices,” the doctor said.
Dr. Finch may not have known about Asperger’s, but he was the first person to support and encourage my naming of things on my own.
“And whatever he says, you can’t hit him.?
?? This was repeated for my father’s benefit. My mother never beat me up. And from that day on, my father didn’t, either.
I began accompanying Slave and Stupid to regular sessions with Dr. Finch. And my parents went to more sessions by themselves. Varmint was too small to attend therapy with us at first, and my mother was reluctant to adopt my suggestion that we chain him up in the basement. Mrs. Stosz, the grandmother of one of my classmates, volunteered to babysit the Varmint.
As we got to know the doctor’s family, they kind of adopted us. I began hanging out with his daughter Hope and another patient, Neil Bookman. There was no denying that Dr. Finch was eccentric. He lived in a big old Victorian house near the center of town that was always swarming with friends and patients. They all seemed to worship him. I was a little dubious of that, but he’d gotten results for me, so I left it alone.
My grandfather never stopped telling me, “Watch out for that Finch…,” and I heard rumors about him from people in town, but he was the first shrink with whom I’d had a positive experience, and he did right by me in those early years. It was a shame things went so wrong a few years later.
7
Assembly Required
Until my thirteenth Christmas, I studied rocks and minerals, dinosaurs, the planets, ships, tanks, bulldozers, and airplanes. That Christmas, I got something new: an electronics kit!
My parents gave me a RadioShack computer kit with forty-two components, including three transistors, three dials, and a meter. In a black plastic case. Easy assembly. Batteries not included.
The word computer meant something very different in the late 1960s than it does today. My new computer was really an electronic slide rule, for those who remember slide rules. To use it, you turned the two left dials until their pointers were lined up over the two numbers you wanted to multiply. You then turned the third dial until the meter read zero. When that happened, you looked at that third dial and it showed the product of the two numbers.
Before I could turn the dials, though, I had to build the computer. I had a bag of resistors, transistors, potentiometers, a battery holder, and a meter.
“How do I build it?” I asked.
“I don’t know, son. What do the directions say?”
“It says ‘easy assembly,’ whatever that means. We need pliers, wire cutters, a soldering iron, and rosin core solder.”
“Well, we have solder here. To solder the plumbing.” Sometimes my father imagined himself a handyman.
“The manual says we need rosin core solder. It says acid core plumber’s solder will ruin it.”
The nighttime version of my father could turn ugly in the blink of an eye, but the daytime version was actually pretty nice. He almost never said anything nasty about me before dark, and at times like this he actually worked with me on my projects.
How I struggled with that computer! It probably had no more than twenty parts inside, the rest of the “forty-two components” being the terminal strips those parts were mounted on, and the nuts, bolts, dials, scales, meter, and case that everything else lived in. Simple as it was, I arranged and rearranged pieces for two weeks before I got it working.
My parents bought me books they hoped would help: Basic Electronics and 101 Electronic Projects. My favorite, The Radio Amateur’s Handbook, was recommended by the salesman at RadioShack. By reading those books, I figured it out. On the way, I learned to solder, and I began to understand what the different electronic components were, and how they worked. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes all became real to me—not just words on a page. I was feeling proud of myself, and I was ready for more.
I decided to sign up for an electronics class at the high school. Maybe I’ll do well in that, I thought. I had gotten straight As in sixth grade, but my grades had gone steadily downhill once I started junior high, and electronics sounded a lot more interesting than biology or German or gym.
Since electronics was a high school class and I was still in junior high, I had to see the teacher and take a quiz of sorts.
“What is ohm’s law?” Mr. Gray began.
“E over I and R,” I answered. “E is volts, I is amps, R is ohms.”
Twenty more easy questions, and I was in. I already knew more than the basic textbooks had to offer. Mr. Gray had an office in a closet filled with vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, wire, connectors, and all manner of other parts. I was fascinated. He thought I had already learned enough to skip Electronics I and go directly to Electronics II, but I was so driven that I completed the course material for Electronics II in my first few weeks. Then I began nosing around the university and learning what I could on my own.
My mother suggested that I go see Professor Edwards, the husband of a friend. Dr. Edwards taught electrical engineering at UMass, and he opened the door for me to a whole new world. He got me into the labs in Engineering East, the university’s engineering building, and introduced me to the brand-new Research Computing Center, where they had a Control Data 3800 computer system in a huge air-conditioned room.
They adopted me as a pet in the engineering labs. I studied there after school almost every day, continuing with an aggressive home study program at night.
I began eyeing the TVs and radios in the house. They were getting old anyway, and I was itching to take them apart so I could figure out how they worked. I decided that my parents should turn over all the household electronics to me, right then.
“Okay, you can have the old Zenith radio. But not the new one!”
My parents began handing over the radios. The old TV followed a few weeks later and I began to amass a considerable inventory of parts on top of the chest of drawers in my room, and on the dining table.
“Clean these parts off the kitchen table!”
“Ow! I just cut my foot on some old radio part!”
The complaints became more frequent, and my father decided to take matters into his own hands. Luckily for me, this happened in the afternoon. Later that night, drunk, he would have just thrown my things into the trash.
“Son, why don’t we build you a work area in the basement?”
That sounded good to me. There just happened to be a big door leaning against the basement wall. My father got legs, attached them, and the door became my very own workbench.
Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together. I began by building simple devices. Some, like my radios, were useful. Others were merely entertaining. For example, I discovered I could solder some stiff wires onto a capacitor and charge it up. For a few minutes, till the charge leaked away, I had a crude stun gun.
I tried it out on the dog, who ran and hid. That was no fun. So I decided to try it on my little brother. I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I’d recently removed from our old Zenith television.
“Hey, let’s play Jab a Varmint,” I said. I tried to smile disarmingly, keeping the capacitor behind my back and making sure I didn’t ruin the effect by jabbing myself or some other object.
“What’s that?” he asked, suspiciously.
Before he could escape, I stepped across the room and jabbed him. He jumped. Pretty high, too. Sometimes he would fight back, but this time he ran. The jab was totally unexpected, and he didn’t realize I only had the one jab in my capacitor. It would be several years before I had the skill to make a multishot Varmint Jabber.
He ran down the hall, yelling, “Momma, John Elder did Jab a Varmint!”
I soon moved on to more sophisticated experiments. But I ran into a roadblock: The college engineering textbooks used equations to describe how things worked, but I didn’t understand the math. I could visualize the equations in my head, but the ones in my head seemed to have nothing in common with those on the page. It was as though I thought in an entirely different language. When I saw a wave in a book, it was printed next to an equation with symbols I didn’t understand. When I saw a wave in my mind, I associated
it with a particular sound. If I concentrated hard, I could almost hear the waves. There were no symbols at all. I could not figure out how to relate the two. Yet. Luckily, it was about then that my interests in electronics and music began to converge.
I had first become interested in music in the fifth grade. I tried playing the French horn with no success. A few years later, while I was in Georgia, I saw my cousin, Little Bob, taking guitar lessons, and I decided to try playing a bass guitar. My grandmother took me to Wallace Reed Music in Duluth, Georgia, outside Atlanta, where I looked at a git-tar with four strings.
Down South, they don’t say guitar. They say git-tar. And they don’t say violin. They say fiddle.
“That there’s a bass, sonny,” the salesman said.
My grandmother asked the salesman if he could play it. He plugged it in to an amplifier, played a few lines, and handed it to me. I had no idea how to play it, but I touched a string and it thrummed in my chest. I was entranced. Thirty minutes and a lot of wheedling later, we loaded the bass, a Fender Showman amplifier, a speaker cabinet, some cords, and some music books into the trunk of my grandmother’s silver Cadillac and headed home.
I practiced all summer, playing along with the radio and studying my sheet music. I was a terrible bass player, though. I could hear the songs in my mind. I could read the music. But I could not translate the music in my head into movements of my fingers over the strings. The sounds that emanated from my bass were clumsy, just as I was clumsy.
I eyed my Fender Showman amp. Leo Fender had designed some of the most famous guitars and amplifiers in the world, but I still thought there was room for improvement. Could I take it apart and make it better? Maybe if I couldn’t play the bass, I could make something out of the amp.