While I was establishing myself in the music business, Little Bear enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. If she was going to stay in school, that seemed like the most practical choice. It was right in town, and she’d grown up prowling the campus, so she knew her way around. The school assigned her to a dorm, but after her first year she moved to an apartment about ten miles north, in Sunderland. There were two roommates in the apartment already—fellow science fiction aficionados. One was into insects, and the other was a jolly nearsighted gnome whose entire world revolved around comic book artwork, imaginary creatures, superheroes, and a sometime girlfriend.
The most charitable word I could use to describe the apartment structure itself would be deteriorated. An abandoned Volkswagen sat on four flat tires in the front yard. Inside, the halls were lined with rotten, peeling plasterboard, and the thin walls were insulated with vast stacks of paperback books. When I moved in after we got back together, the place went from crowded to untenable. The sink was already overflowing with dirty dishes, and the shelves in the bathroom sagged from the load. There was no room for my stuff, and when I used their towels and soaps, they complained. After a month, Little Bear and I rented a house of our own in South Hadley and worked harder to pay for it.
By that time I had parlayed my love of music and electronics into something pretty substantial. I’d left the local music scene for New York City and an engineering gig with Britannia Row Audio, the sound company Pink Floyd had formed a few years before. The Floyd owned a vast array of sound equipment, and when they weren’t touring they rented it out to other touring bands. They had a big studio on 45th Road in Long Island City that was filled with gear they’d shipped from England. My job was to keep it all running and build whatever esoteric devices we could think up to keep our sound systems the best in the world. It was a heady job for a twenty-one-year-old geek, for sure. I’d drive there and work a few days, then bring home with me whatever I couldn’t finish.
Little Bear was floundering at UMass, and she seized the chance to jump into electronics. We made a good team; I designed the circuits and she assembled them. In addition to being my girlfriend, she became a technician and a partner in the stuff we created.
Our first musical collaboration was for the Canadian supergroup April Wine. We spent a few weeks with them crisscrossing eastern Canada as we patched together a reliable sound system for their First Glance tour. That was followed by a whirlwind of shows back in America as we set up sound systems for the Kinks, Roxy Music, Phoebe Snow, Rick James, Dan Hill, Talking Heads, and Blondie. The next year I got hired by KISS, where we made Ace Frehley’s signature fire-breathing, rocket-firing, and disco-lighted guitars. It was a good life, but unpredictable. We’d be busy and flush with cash one month, and idle and destitute two months later. It seemed like everyone in the music business lived hand to mouth, and I wanted more than that.
I thought I’d find it in a regular job, and I was incredibly lucky to find one for which I was truly the perfect candidate, at toy and game maker Milton Bradley, just half an hour’s drive away in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My experience designing sound systems for musicians landed me a role creating special effects for their newest electronic games. I became a staff engineer, a pretend executive commuting from the suburbs. It looked like easy work: I had designed circuits on napkins when I worked for bands; Milton Bradley was offering a lab, reference books, and even state-of-the-art computers. All I had to do was look the part.
The superficial change from grungy rock and roller to corporate drone was virtually instantaneous. I trimmed my hair a full six inches, bought a new Oxxford suit, and reported for work at the required hour. But though my appearance was dramatically altered, I was exactly the same person I’d been before. So was Little Bear. A few months earlier, we’d been freaks in an overcrowded apartment in a college town. Now I was supposed to be a responsible executive, building a family in the suburbs of Springfield. It was only fifteen miles by road, but it was light-years away from anything I had known before. The transformation looked successful to me, but there must have been chinks in my armor. I knew that because the older redneck engineers called me a hippie freak.
A few years passed as we practiced looking like a nice, middle-class suburban couple. It worked. The rednecks stopped calling me names. I drifted away from music, and did my best to be the young executive my managers wanted me to be. Pretending made me miserable, but I had to do it—I wanted to be accepted by polite society. I wanted a job where I felt safe and secure. It was a means to an end: I saw families all around me, and I knew I eventually wanted one of my own.
Little Bear found a job as a technician at a local electronics firm and pondered her own future. After a lot of thought and discussion she decided to become an anthropologist, specializing in colonial New England. The following fall she returned to college. She was determined that at least one of us was going to get a legitimate education. She had flunked out the first time, but the second time around she was earning top marks.
As we both got more settled, the notion of fatherhood appealed to me more and more. It seemed like the right thing to do sometime in the future. But the operative word remained future. I always wanted a kid, just not then. At twenty-one, my excuse was simple and socially acceptable: I wasn’t married. That excuse evaporated when we tied the knot after three years of living together, at the age of twenty-five.
Even then, I still wasn’t ready to rush into parenthood. I felt like I was just getting started at working life, and I didn’t have any safety net. There was always the risk of getting laid off or even fired. After all, jobs in electronics were far from stable. My job at Milton Bradley had only lasted two and a half years. By the time we got married, I was with a company called Simplex Time Recorder in Gardner. The new job paid more but came with even more pressure to conform, and a three-hour round-trip commute. When I took the job, I thought I’d made a smart move, with a 50 percent increase in pay and a fancy new title. Once I got there, I realized I’d traded the laid-back atmosphere of a fast-growing toy company for a management grind in a stodgy old factory. I’d gone from an airy cubicle and lab in a brand-new building to a windowless work space filled with ancient furniture on the fourth floor of an old New England mill. As I trudged past security and climbed the stairs to my office, I could feel the rumble of machinery from the factory floors below.
It was a world totally alien to anything I had known. My grandfather Jack had the best advice for the situation. “Son,” he said, “just keep your mouth shut, look serious, and watch close.” Jack was glad I’d left the music world behind, but I wasn’t so sure this corporate job was really a step up. In my new workplace, the factory boss was king, and music and sound effects were something to be discussed after hours, if at all.
There was no way I was ready for a kid during the first year I worked at Simplex. “We’re the world leader in time clocks and fire alarms,” my new boss said, beaming. I just winced. Compared to Milton Bradley, the Simplex factory felt like a blacksmith shop. For the first year, all my energy was directed toward fitting in and making a success of myself in The Big Corporation. The second year, I went into debt to purchase the trappings of executive life, so I still couldn’t afford a kid. I did have a closetful of (to me) shockingly expensive suits, and after learning that the factory boss kept a baseball bat behind his desk, I’d gotten myself a more cultured head cracker: a spiffy walking stick with a heavy brass knob on top. But everyone around me had kids, and none of my possessions would play with me in the sandbox. Still, I held off. I don’t remember what the third year’s excuse was, but that fall I got laid off, and I surely could not consider having a kid while collecting $199 a week in unemployment and drowning in debt. Fine clothes weren’t much help to me then either.
When I’d worked in music I’d had plenty of experience with feast and famine. I assumed I’d left that behind with my so-called executive job. Boy, was I wrong! All it took was someone a bit hig
her up the corporate food chain to nod his head, and I was on the street. What am I going to do now? I wondered. Whatever it was, I knew I had to act fast. Otherwise I’d go broke and lose everything.
Luckily, I had a backup skill: automobile repair. I’d actually supported myself for a short time by fixing cars, and I still tinkered with them even while working for the electronics firms. It was a fun weekend activity that made money too. Not only that, my efforts allowed me to drive neat old cars. My colleagues had always admired my vintage Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche chariots as they parked their practical but boring Camrys and Tauruses in the company parking lot. As I pondered my newly unemployed status my thoughts kept circling back to the thousand dollars I could make selling a ten-year-old Benz. That cash would double my unemployment income for five whole weeks. What if I could do that regularly?
Till then, I had been buying old, tired cars and fixing them up because I liked to tinker, but I decided to treat car sales as a job, not as a hobby. Looking at the car dealers around me, I concluded I should be buying newer and nicer merchandise. I sifted through the listings in the Boston Auto Trader and settled on a five-year-old Mercedes 300SD.
It was a big leap, buying a car like that. For one thing, it cost a lot more than any of the old beaters I’d purchased before. It was a full decade newer than my last Mercedes, top of the line and much more sophisticated.
To my surprise it was easier to get that car ready for sale than any of the old junks I’d been messing with before, and once I’d cleaned it up, it sold right away. I bought another as fast as I could, and another after that. My new business was off and running.
Just then, I found a new job. That was a big relief, but it meant I had to push my fledgling business into the background just as I was getting it moving. I was back on the treadmill, commuting three hours each day to a management job at Candela, a big laser manufacturer in suburban Boston. Once again, I was an electronics executive, or so my employers believed. This time, though, I had a backstop—an income stream of my own. The car business was turning into a profitable little sideline with the potential to be a whole lot more.
My thirtieth birthday came and went, another milestone. The older I got, the more I was torn by a combination of fear and anticipation. My focus was still on attaining financial security, but I knew the clock was ticking, and I didn’t want to end up with a toddler at the age of fifty. And it seemed like all my coworkers had kids. Not only that, their children were five, six, even ten years old. I realized I had missed the boat in terms of timing. Everyone else must have faced the same threats and worries as me, but somehow they had found the time or courage, or perhaps the babies “just happened.”
And then there was Little Bear. Throughout the ups and downs of married life, she expressed a steady and increasing desire to become a mother. So I felt pressure everywhere I turned, from within and without. The closer I got to taking the plunge, the more scared I became. Would I get a good kid? Could I be a good dad? Could I afford to raise a child?
I tried to break down the situation and evaluate it logically, as I am wont to do. When you look at kid acquisition from the outside, the hidden joys of parenthood may escape you. I strongly suspected there would be a good and fun side to raising a child, but I could not be sure. At the same time, there was no avoiding the stories my colleagues told of private school costs, uninsured doctor visits, and even more esoteric expenses like toddler yoga.
Then there was the risk of birth defects. I figured the odds were high that my kid would be all right, but what if he wasn’t? What if he was born with brain damage, a bad heart, or three arms? One-in-a-thousand odds sound long and safe in a casino, where all you can lose is the cash in your pocket. In the kid lottery, a thousand-to-one long shot might condemn me to something I could not even conceive of, beyond the vague suspicion that life could become really hard for a very long time. I wondered whether that was a legitimate worry or an irrational one.
And of course there was the memory of my own bad childhood. No one could deny the reality and ugliness of that. No one who knew, at least, because I kept that shameful secret carefully hidden. Could I be a good dad despite the example of my own father? I tried to break that down logically too, and when I did, it always came down to the influence of liquor. My dad drank, and when he got drunk, he turned mean. I didn’t drink. Still, I could not be sure that I would not be mean too. Perhaps meanness was inherited. That’s what my grandmother said.
“Them Robison boys all have a mean streak, they surely do,” she’d say. I was never certain if that applied to me, or just the generations before. If it was true, it was scary.
All those fears kept me firmly committed to later, whenever Little Bear and I talked about having a baby. Yet we were getting older; I knew something had to happen soon, if it was going to happen at all. Sure enough, it did. In the summer of 1989, I resigned from my electronics job to focus on my fledgling automobile company. A few weeks later, Little Bear found out she was pregnant. She had gotten pregnant a few times before, but each time, the pregnancy ended just as soon as it began. That made me wonder if this one would last, but as the weeks passed, it became clear that it would.
Little Bear went to work preparing a nest. We decided the baby could live in the rear bedroom, which I’d been using for an office. We moved my desk and papers to the basement and she began decorating the room for our kid. The traditional white walls vanished, to be replaced with train wallpaper. Magazines and books on parenting appeared. I even read some of them.
I was both terrified and excited. The idea of being a dad sounded really fun. The notion of running my own business was pretty attractive too. At the same time, I wasn’t sure I could do it all. I had to get my company moving, and fast. There would soon be a tyke to pay for.
I’d always loved cars, and I was now testing the notion that I could turn that love into a living. A few weeks before, I’d been an engineering manager at a high-tech laser manufacturer. Now I was a one-man show. I was the buyer, the mechanic, and the salesman, traveling New England, buying high-end cars, fixing them up, and selling them to anyone I could. My former colleagues thought I was crazy, but I just couldn’t handle the corporate life anymore.
If you’d asked me at the time, that’s all I could have said by way of explanation. Today, I realize that my autism made the complex social dynamics of a corporate workplace nearly impossible to navigate. People were forever saying one thing and meaning another and expecting me to follow subtle social cues that I did not even know existed. I’d been a star engineer, but I was a failure as an executive, because I was blind to what I needed to see. In retrospect, starting my own small business was probably the smartest thing I could have done.
My new business needed a name, and I wanted something clever. The problem was, carmakers trademarked their brands, so I couldn’t call myself John Robison, Mercedes Magician or John, Lord of Land Rovers. When I looked at dealerships, which set the standard for respectability in the car business, I saw that many were named after their owners, like Bob Baker Motors. After careful consideration, I decided to do the same and my company became J E Robison Service. Armed with a brand of my own, I told everyone who would listen that my company was the best place in all of New England to buy or repair a used Mercedes, Jaguar, or Land Rover. I hadn’t started with much, but I was determined to make the words true. After hearing me talk, my first clients may have been a little shocked to find me operating out of the garage behind our little South Hadley home.
There were some unexpected benefits from going out on my own. While I worked the corporate job, my asthma had become almost uncontrollable. It had gotten so bad that I was using up a one-month albuterol inhaler every seven days, and the drug was making me jumpy, shaky, and tense. My inhaler wasn’t enough anymore—I’d made four or five trips to the emergency room over the past few years. The last time, I couldn’t even walk, and Little Bear had to roll me in from the car with a wheelchair.
My doctor looke
d at me like a disobedient child and said, “You have chronic asthma. You have to stay on the regular medicine and take the steroids when you feel worse. It’s not going away.” He was wrong. When I removed the stress of a job I hated and stopped trying to be someone I wasn’t, my asthma receded. The inhaler I had in my pocket that final day at work lasted a month, and the next one lasted three months. I was on the road to recovery. I knew I’d need the energy, because that kid was looking more real every day. Little Bear had expanded, and her doctor said the baby was coming along fine.
As she got bigger, I worked harder. I didn’t know how much time a baby would take, and I didn’t know how much money a baby would cost. Plenty of both, I thought. So I was buying as many cars as I could find and selling upward of twenty a month. Unfortunately, simply selling cars wasn’t enough. I had to do it profitably. That was proving a lot harder than I had expected. Our bank account was dwindling despite my best efforts.
The problem was, the economy had taken a nosedive in the fall of 1989, just as I was going out on my own. Lots of businesses were hurting, but I hadn’t really noticed the decline because I was new on the scene. With the economy in free fall, the changes became painfully obvious as cars I bought for ten grand sold a few months later for seven.
I was just about busted, and I hadn’t even completed my first year in business. I was on the edge of panic. With the baby’s arrival getting closer every day, I didn’t know what to do. When I complained to Little Bear, she just told me what a hard time she was having with the pregnancy. Things had started smoothly enough, but the longer the pregnancy went on, the sicker she became. Finally, the doctors decided she had stomach ulcers. When I heard that, I got scared that she wasn’t really pregnant at all! Maybe there was something else growing in there—cancer or worse. The stress I thought I’d left behind returned with a vengeance. Nothing was going right.