Cubby didn’t seem to mind; after all, we were building him his own room in the new house, and meanwhile the Interim House was a lot nicer than the cabins at Chesterfield Boy Scout Camp. He was fine right up until the weather turned cold, a month or so after we moved in. That was when the rodents invaded.
Some rodents are bold, breaking down doors and taking over kitchen counters. The creatures at the Interim House were subtle and sneaky. So much so that I hadn’t even known they were there until Cubby told me.
“Dad!” he shouted. “There’s someone in here!” I ran to his room, ready to confront an attacker. There was no one there.
“Did you have a bad dream,” I asked? He’d had dreams before, and woken up when the monsters grabbed him.
“No,” he said. “Listen!” I stood still for a moment, and I heard it: a slow scraping, as though something was moving against the wall. I shone my light in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing but bare floor. Yet the sound continued.
Was it coming from outside? Perhaps someone or something was breaking in. Or perhaps one of the upstairs tenants had fallen out a window and was crawling around drunk on the ground. Quickly, I ran across the room, down the hall, out the back door, and into the night. I crept quietly around the house, until I had Cubby’s room in sight from the yard. I hit the switch on my flashlight and lit up the area, expecting to catch someone or something in the act. Nothing. I walked up to the house. There were no burglars, no drunks, and no footprints or tracks. Puzzled, I went back inside.
“There’s nothing there,” I told Cubby. But that didn’t satisfy either of us; we’d both heard the noise. Then it started again. I put my ear to the wall. I opened the window and looked out from there. Whatever it was lurked within the wall.
Cubby dragged his bedding into the other bedroom, and we all went to sleep.
The next day we went exploring. It didn’t take long to find the answer. Squirrels. I showed Cubby the evidence. “It’s rodent central in the wall. They’ve eaten a hole through the siding, and they’ve tunneled into the house. There could be a whole rodent empire, right on the other side of your bedroom Sheetrock. Cool, huh?” Cubby was not impressed. He remembered my tales of superpowered squirrels living in the woods around our Chicopee house, and he had never been quite sure whether or not they were true. “You called them Pine Demons,” he said accusingly. Then an idea hit him. “You should shoot these squirrels,” he said with great certainty.
Most times, I was willing and able to accommodate his requests, but that time I couldn’t. “Sorry, Cubby, it’s a rented house and we can’t perforate the walls with gunfire. We won’t have a problem unless they eat their way through and into our space. But I don’t think that will happen. Look at this hole. They’ve obviously been in there a long time. And there’s no sign the inside walls have been invaded. I’m pretty sure we are okay. I think they know enough to stay on their side of the wall.”
“Also, squirrels are not carnivores. They eat nuts, not kids. You should be perfectly safe, unless these squirrels are mutants. Then you could be in trouble, so maybe you should sleep with a hammer next to your pillow.”
He still wasn’t reassured, but I had another idea. “Let’s go to work and get a big piece of steel plate. We’ll use your mattress and some boxes to press it against the wall. That way, if they eat through the wall, the steel will stop them. Even New York City rats don’t eat through steel plate! You’ll be the only kid in town with an armored bedroom wall.”
Cubby liked the idea of the plate, but he still didn’t like the house. “How soon can we move out of here?” he asked. I wasn’t too afraid of carnivorous vermin, but I was eager to leave too. “Soon,” was all I could say. Building a house was turning out to be a bigger job than I’d imagined, and winter had set in. The short days and cold nights really slowed us down. Three months turned into six, and six months turned to seven.
We reached an uneasy truce with the rodents—one that lasted through winter. They did not eat through the walls and attack us, and we did not shoot the house full of bullet holes to suppress them. They agreed to keep the noises in the wall to a minimum, and we did not explore what they were really doing in there. No one called the cops. As I told Cubby, some questions are best left unanswered.
Christmas came and went, and the days started getting longer. Construction of the new house was almost done, and Cubby had settled into the new school system. I had anticipated the beginning of school eagerly, with its promise of peace and quiet at night, as Cubby studied quietly and went to bed. Unfortunately, he didn’t share my enthusiasm for school. For him, the resumption of school meant more adults telling him what to do, and schoolwork instead of chemistry and games. I just hoped we’d see the end of Cubby staying up till three in the morning and sleeping till noon.
Unfortunately, we were not progressing too smoothly toward that goal. For a whole month before school started, we’d been struggling to get him to bed on time and to wake him up at a reasonable hour. We’d sat down at the dining room table and had mature discussions about healthy sleep habits and responsibility. Unfortunately, translating that understanding into practice proved to be very difficult for my child. We went through the same ritual night after night. It began with me saying, “Cubby! It’s time to turn the lights off!”
“Okay,” he’d answer. “Just a minute.” A minute would come and go, and the light would remain on. We would go back and forth five or six times, but that “lights out” minute never seemed to arrive. On rare occasions, he would actually shut down the computer, shut off the lights, and go to sleep. However, those nights were the exception, not the rule. Most nights we went around and around, with the talk getting more and more acrimonious, until one or the other of us gave up.
On the nights his mom had him, she didn’t do any better. She tried a different tack to get him to sleep, but Cubby promptly turned it around on us. “Mom says I can stay up as late as I want, as long as I get up and go to school in the morning.” When we tried that, he woke up at ten, halfway through the morning. A few weeks later, the notice came from the school: He had come in late too many times, and half the times he was late, he’d been with Mom.
Clearly, neither one of us knew what to do. Yet it seemed like such a simple problem. “Establish a bedtime,” the parenting books said. Why couldn’t we do that?
Cubby was turning out to be highly resistant to authority, and the situation got worse as he got older. He was so difficult, he actually reminded me of myself. Some nights I just got fed up and shut off his computer. That produced horrible howls of protest, but they usually subsided and he eventually settled down to sleep. Or else I fell asleep and didn’t know what actually happened. After all, I had to work in the morning. He seemed to think school was optional. I knew work wasn’t. I wished he’d learn that school wasn’t optional either, but we didn’t seem to be getting too far in that direction.
Cubby knew I’d had a hard time at Amherst High, so he would look at me and say, “You dropped out of school. Why do I have to go?” It was hard to come up with a compelling answer, though I knew his life would be better if he graduated. From his perspective, I’d thumbed my nose at school and done just fine. He didn’t see how many doors had been closed to me as a young adult for lack of a high school or college diploma.
I tried to focus on the problems without getting mad and solve them one at a time, rationally. The first problem was figuring out whether he had really gone to sleep. When he was little, I just tiptoed into his room and looked. Now he hunkered down behind a closed door. The problem with bigger kids is that they want privacy. Ever since he turned thirteen, Cubby had insisted on closing his door. This made sleep verification next to impossible. I could not tell if his light was off and his computer put away unless I looked inside. However, he objected to my looking, even briefly. In fact, he began locking the door, which provoked a series of arguments that culminated in a standoff. I would not remove the door, and he would not lock it.
I would knock before entering, and he would not jam things in the doorway to block me. That wasn’t very conducive to nighttime sleep monitoring. Finally, I realized I had to give up. I had to trust that he was going to bed, and if he wasn’t, I had to leave him to face the consequence of being tired.
For someone who was accustomed to being King of the House, Wondrous Dada to his son, it was a sorry turn of events, and a fateful shift in the balance of power. I told myself that’s what happens to all parents. The kids get bigger and stronger, until one day, you throw them out.
In the midst of our tug-of-war with Cubby, spring arrived and our new house was finally finished. The rodent army was still alive and well in the walls of the Interim House, and we were more than ready to leave. The very day that the building inspector gave us a certificate of occupancy for the new home, we split, hauling mattresses and clothes across town on my utility trailer. A week later, after a lot of hard work and a little professional help, we were settled into our new home among packing material, boxes, and furniture.
The dog spent the day walking around, sniffing his new place. He hadn’t liked the Interim House at all, because the upstairs tenants’ noises woke him up constantly. He was getting old and cranky, and I hoped he’d be happier here, because he barked when he woke, and that aggravated all of us.
The one thing we did not bring with us was the vermin. In fact, we took secret special steps to make our new home as resistant as possible to unwelcome envermination.
Cubby had never been in a brand-new house before. It was a unique experience, sleeping in something we had just created—sort of like being a dog, nesting in a freshly dug burrow, except we weren’t dogs, and our burrow had heat, light, and running water. We spent several contented hours walking around and exploring our new yet familiar home.
The following Monday, Cubby and I walked together to the bus stop. I had high hopes that he’d like Amherst High School better and get on a good schedule in this new place, but that was not to be. The fight to get him up and moving continued. As the school year progressed, Cubby won the battle of bedtime by default. I was tired out from working, moving, and the stress of argument. I left him in his room, door closed, and went to sleep. All I could do was warn him that wake-up time would be coming soon. And that was the next battle.
Six o’clock would come, and I would wake to the sound of Cubby’s alarm, beeping away through the closed door. “Cubby! Get up!” I’d pound on his door, but he had practiced ignoring both the alarm and me. I don’t know if he ignored those alarms consciously or he just slept like the dead. We bought him every loud and obnoxious alarm we could find, and none woke him up. Most days, I faced a choice of going off to work and leaving him asleep with a blaring alarm, or going in and waking him up. Eventually, with the threat of a bucket of cold water, he would acknowledge me.
“Out,” he said, as he waited for me to leave the room before he would get up. I’d learned that was often a trick. If I went away and didn’t follow up, he might just go right back to sleep. I tried everything I could think of to change this ritual, to no avail. Some said, “Make it his responsibility. Let him suffer the consequence of missing school.” The trouble was, he did not care about the consequences of missing school. He was like me in that regard. The older he got, the less use he had for adults telling him what to do and trying to make him study boring dreck when he had his own topic in mind: chemistry.
If I’d left him alone, he would have happily slept till noon, and then woken up and studied chemistry and done experiments until two in the morning. More and more, I was seeing my own Aspergian traits in him … his obliviousness to other people, his rigidity, and his all-consuming obsessions. The psychologists who had examined him earlier had never suggested he had Asperger’s, but of course Asperger’s wasn’t in the diagnostic lexicon when we started working with him and the school. And each report just built on the one before, which meant that we talked about ADD tendencies or problems with visual processing. All the while, the root cause—autism in the form of Asperger’s—was right there under our noses.
When I look back on those years, I’m shocked I didn’t see it sooner. He was so stuck in his routines, and his behavior was, in retrospect, totally Aspergian. It was his way or no way. Very regimented, and sometimes seemingly nonsensical. Like the fight over the bus on our first school day in the new house.
“I can’t ride the bus. You have to drive me.” He knew we expected him to ride the bus, just like every other kid. And he surely knew what I’d say when he objected.
“When I was a kid, I walked to school. You should walk too. It would be good for you.”
“Dad! It’s three miles! I can’t walk!” I just looked at him. It was six miles from my parents’ house in Shutesbury to the same school he was attending now.
“Of course you can. You’re a kid. Kids are full of energy. Pretend there’s a pack of monsters chasing you.”
“Dad!” He was getting to the age where monster threats were more aggravating than scary. As we argued, he became more and more agitated, and meanwhile, the bus came and went. That left me with no choice but to drive him or leave him home. Abandoning him did not seem like a good way to help him succeed in his first year in the new school, so off we went.
That experience seemed to establish the pattern for much of the school year. We would argue, the bus would pass us by, and I’d take Cubby to school. Then I turned south and headed for work. At least he was going to school, I thought, even if he didn’t ride the bus. I hoped he was going to class.
I always wondered whether there was some reason he didn’t want to ride the bus. Was he being bullied? When I asked, he said no, he just didn’t like it. I finally concluded there was nothing more to it. Who wouldn’t prefer to be driven? I wished I had the parenting skills to get him onto that bus every day, but judging from the line of cars dropping off kids, I was far from alone in that predicament.
Cubby wasn’t doing extraordinarily well academically, but his ability to make friends was wonderful to behold. I’d been a total social failure, but he was downright popular! He didn’t say much about friends to me, but I couldn’t help noticing that when I picked him up at school he was always with other people. And once we were in the new house, he even started bringing friends home. By the time the school year ended, he was hanging out with friends at our house or in town most every day. First there was one, then two, and ultimately a whole pack. There were even girls. They’d come over and shoot paintball guns at the trees, or watch movies, or just sit in the living room and talk.
Of course, being Cubby, he also led his friends in some novel activities. “Check out what I just built,” he told his assembled audience one summer afternoon. I observed the scene as I stood by my toolbox, across the garage. Cubby was pointing to a large white pipe on a wood frame, with wires leading from the pipe to a homemade box.
“What is it?”
“It’s a cannon,” he said proudly. “I built it from leftover plastic drain pipe, and I made my own black powder. It’s fired by this electrical detonator, which sends a signal down these wires to a model rocket squib that I bury in the powder charge.”
My friend Neil saw that and encouraged him further, sending my son a magazine with plans for a hair-spray-propellant-powered potato cannon that could shoot spuds a quarter of a mile. Or so the designers claimed. Cubby immediately set to work building his own, which he assured us would be even better.
His friends looked at him with a combination of amusement, skepticism, and disbelief. Their expressions changed when he rolled his creation outside and set it off. With a roar and a great cloud of smoke, a plastic ball was launched across the yard. It was truly remarkable, the amount of firepower a chunk of common plastic sewer pipe could deliver.
Over the next few months, he refined his homebuilt artillery until he could shoot holes in plywood sheets from halfway down the driveway. Even my friends were impressed. I questioned him about safety, but he reassured me and pointe
d out how many other young people were involved in black powder competitions, potato cannon making, and even pumpkin chucking. “We should do that,” he said excitedly. He got the idea that he’d like to compete in the world championship, and I almost went along until I found out it was held four hundred miles away, and the winners used homebuilt guns the size of the army’s medium-size field artillery.
I looked at Cubby’s experiments and marveled, and so did his friends. It seemed to me that I had a potential inventor on my hands. I thought of the sound effects and special effects I’d dreamed up in the music world, and envisioned him doing something similar with this. Never in a million years did it occur to me that his experiments would end up landing him in such hot water a few years later.
Impressed as I was by my son’s ingenuity and newfound social skills, I still had worries about his academics. Indeed, his problems had already surfaced with a warning from the school: “Jack is not doing his assignments, and he loses or forgets them all the time.” Those were the same sort of warnings he’d gotten in South Hadley; it was one of the problems we’d hoped to escape. With a dull sense of dread, I imagined my own high school failure playing out with my son. I never did my homework as a kid, and his homework load was far greater than anything I had known. We tend to look back and think we had it harder as youths, but when it comes to homework I know the reverse is true.
The note didn’t surprise me; I’d been primed to expect trouble. What did bother me was the news that he wasn’t doing his work. In anticipation of the upcoming high school workload, we had gone out and gotten him binders for all his classes. We’d set up colored dividers to organize things and purchased a little book that he could use to jot down notes. Could all of our organizational assistance have failed him?