Raising Cubby

  Another cool thing about the RepRap is that it’s self-replicating. The wiki explains: “Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap prints those parts, RepRap self-replicates by making a kit of itself—a kit that anyone can assemble given time and materials. It also means that if you’ve got a RepRap you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend.”

  When Cubby learned about RepRaps, he had to have one. So he and his mom bought a “kit” with some plans for a few hundred dollars. It turned out to be little more than a few gears and rods and the vaguest of instructions. Turning those bits into something that rendered objects you could hold in your hand consumed many weeks and several kitchen tables, and involved the assistance of a small dog, but they did it. The two of them then joined forces with Cubby’s girlfriend and a few buddies from school to form Robison Industries. Now they are creating and selling their own RepRap kits, including instructions that are a marvel of exactitude.

  When I was a kid, a friend and I captured his little brother, stuck him in a mold, and cast him in sand. (Don’t be alarmed, he emerged intact.) With the advent of the RepRap, kid duplication just got a whole lot easier. Now Cubby can take a picture, digitize it, and make a replica from plastic. What a remarkable development. By the time you read this book, you might be able to reproduce your own kid, fully formed, in white polystyrene. After buying a RepRap from Robison Industries, of course.

  When that happens, Cubby will have made the Kid Store of his childhood come true after all these years.

  Cubby’s romance had faded by the time of the trial, and that spring he and Nicole went their separate ways. She headed for college in Oregon, where she remains today. They still talk via e-mail from time to time.

  Cubby was sad to see the relationship end, but he wasn’t alone for long. Kirsten Lindsmith was dating one of Cubby’s friends when they met in the fall of the year before his trial. He saw her again that summer and something clicked. “She’s the first person who really showed an interest in all the things I do,” he said. “Other kids might have thought I was smart, but they looked at me like an exhibit in a zoo. She’s different. To her, I’m just me.”

  Kirsten is currently a biology student at the University of Massachusetts. She’s a talented artist who dreams of being a medical examiner one day. She’s very smart and introspective.

  I enjoy watching them together, because they are so alike. A few months after they started dating, they moved in together, to an apartment Cubby had found in Greenfield. In an effort to better understand my son, Kirsten began reading up on Asperger’s and autism. She soon came to the realization that she probably had Asperger’s too. A formal diagnosis the next spring confirmed it.

  Both of them had been socially awkward in school, and they share many geeky traits. They’re a really cute couple, though he’d be embarrassed for me to say that.

  Seeing my son struggle when he was growing up made me remember how hard being a kid was and gave me a desire to help other children and teenagers who felt like outsiders. That was one of the reasons I began writing—to show younger people that geeks and misfits like me could grow up to have good lives. My first book, Look Me in the Eye, became my way of saving others from the worst of that hardship.

  I’m very fortunate to be invited to quite a few conferences on autism and Asperger’s. Many times I am asked to speak or do workshops for young people. A few years ago, Cubby began accompanying me to some of those events, and last spring he started talking about doing something on his own.

  That surprised me because he was so young, but it made sense. After all, he was the impetus for many of the stories I wrote in Be Different. He and Kirsten began with a talk to a group of middle school students in New York in September 2010. Then they participated in an autism panel discussion at another school. They did those things all on their own, without any input from me. That May, Cubby joined me at the IMFAR autism science conference, where he met up with Alex Plank, another young man with Asperger’s who had founded Wrong Planet, an autism community on the web.

  They became fast friends, and Alex asked Cubby and Kirsten to join him in a project he’d started called Autism Talk TV. The three of them interview people in the autism community and discuss issues that matter to people on the spectrum, then post videos of the interview at the Wrong Planet website. The episodes have a goofy charm.

  “You guys are like the Wayne’s World of autism,” I told them when I saw the first cuts of their work. I meant it as a compliment—the episodes are unpretentious, low-tech, informative, and funny. As of this writing, they have accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

  In December 2011, Cubby and Kirsten did their first all-day workshop. They spoke to Aspergian teens at the Kinney Autism Center, which is part of St. Joseph University in Philadelphia. In spring 2012 they spoke to several autism societies and at the ASPEN conference in New Jersey. They also did a workshop at Y.A.L.E. School in Cherry Hill, outside Philadelphia. And in July 2012 they were the hit of HOPE 2012, Hackers on Planet Earth. There’s no question that many people in that crowd are on the spectrum!

  They talked about growing up different, but most of all they talked about love, friendship, and finding each other. Those were the things all the young people in the audience wanted to know about. You can see videos from their talks online.

  I’m really proud of them all.

  I’m not the only one to take notice of them. In fall 2011, New York Times reporter Amy Harmon called Cubby after seeing him in the Autism Talk TV videos. She was writing another installment in her acclaimed series on growing up with autism, this one focused on young adult relationships. Once Cubby and Kirsten had agreed to participate, Amy and her photographers traveled from New York City to hang out with them five times between Halloween and Christmas. She also interviewed Alex over the Thanksgiving holiday. All told, she spent more than a week following them around, watching, and asking questions. She even attended their talk in Philadelphia and rode home with us in the car. By Christmas Eve I was really wondering where it would all lead.

  The next day we got our answer. On December 26, 2011, her story filled the front page and two inside pages of the paper. Its title: “Navigating Love and Autism.” It was the biggest piece the Times had ever done on autism, and it spread like wildfire.

  In spring 2012, I got a letter from a musician asking me about the light guitars I’d made for KISS back in the seventies. “I got an unfinished light guitar body from Steve Carr’s estate. Could you finish it for me?” I’ve gotten a steady trickle of queries over the years, but that one shocked me. Steve’s estate? The guy was the same age as me!

  I took a look, and sure enough, he had died. Steve Carr was the luthier who had done all the work to make my guitar creations playable. He set up the frets and adjusted the necks and actions. He also refinished the bodies and did beautiful ornamental inlays. The news that he’d died was pretty shocking, but so many of the guys from that era didn’t make it this far. Fast living, drugs, liquor, and AIDS took its toll on us. It was a hard life, I guess, and I was lucky to get out, no matter how fondly I remember it.

  I never patented any of my creations in those days. I always figured today’s design could be replaced by a better one tomorrow, and that patents wouldn’t mean anything anyway. So when I left the music business thirty years ago, I walked away from everything I’d done without looking back. Now, reading about Steve, I was surprised to discover that he’d made replicas of my guitars. Not only that, but he’d claimed to have designed them himself!

  I was annoyed at first, but then I realized it was a kind of honor. I guess I feel the same way today when I see copies of my books pirated online, or in China. (Note to pirates: This does not mean I give you permission to reproduce my book. Random House’s lawyers are vicious, and they will hunt you down.)

  I’d ignored all the earlier queries about those guitars because I felt I’d moved on to other things. Between raising a kid and
running a business, there was no time to start an electronics project. At least that’s what I told myself.

  Deep down, I knew the truth: I didn’t think I could do it anymore. I look at my electronic creations from that period, and they seem totally unfamiliar. Someone else must have made them, I tell myself. Of course, I know that’s not true; I really did design and build all those things. But I’m in a different space today.

  This time, something clicked in my mind. What about Cubby? I thought about his work on microcontrollers, and all the other things he was doing. He was obviously brilliant and creative. Could my son make a light guitar? He’d never really shown interest in them, but of course that phase of my life was way before he was born. Perhaps his mom would help. I called her up, and she jumped on the idea immediately. Actually, they both did.

  I talked to the fellow who wanted the guitar and told him Little Bear and our kid would be doing the work. He was thrilled because she had done the actual wiring of the original guitars, and Cubby was the next generation of me. After handing them his deposit check, I sat back to see what would happen.

  Musing over what they might do, I found myself imagining the guitar-to-be in the mold of 1979. Back then we used incandescent lights, bipolar transistors, and a state-of-the-art Intel 8748 microcontroller. The whole thing was powered by a battery pack beefy enough to jump-start a Cadillac.

  To their credit, they didn’t let the past slow them down. With each of them leading the way in different areas, they designed a guitar for the twenty-first century. In the space of a few months, they developed a whole new approach to the problem of illuminating an electric guitar, beginning with the choice of LED lights—nearly ten times more efficient than the incandescent bulbs I’d used in the original. Little Bear selected a modern microprocessor to control it—an Arduino—and Cubby wrote the code to make it work.

  New technology made everything better. The guitar Cubby and Little Bear built runs brighter, longer, and better than anything we could have done thirty years before. I’d worried about whether they could match what I’d designed before, but they surpassed it! Maybe I underestimated that kid, I thought.

  The best moment was when I picked up and held their creation. At that moment, I knew how Ace Frehley, lead guitarist for KISS, must have felt, holding my original thirty-five years before. The new guitar was far lighter than the original. The original would run for just five minutes before the battery was exhausted, but the new one will play a whole set with energy to spare. When Ace played mine the lights used so much power that the whole guitar got hot, and you could hear the circuitry in the background while he played. The flashing of the lights had to be perfectly synced to the drums, because there was a pop every time the pattern changed. The new guitar is smooth and silent.

  Before sending the guitar to its new owner, Cubby and Little Bear made a video of it in action and uploaded it to YouTube. In a matter of weeks, Ace Frehley’s manager called. He’d lost track of us over the years, but Ace still played the instruments we built him all those years ago. After reconnecting, I drove to New Jersey and brought the original light guitar back for refurbishment. When I opened the back I had to smile. After all those years, it still had our names—John and Mary Robison—and phone number in permanent marker on the inside plate, along with our slogan: Thunder Lizards Rule the World!! Cubby and his mom are working on restoring that very guitar as I write this chapter. I can’t wait to see his name on the inside plate alongside ours.

  Right now, all over the world, several million young people are coming of age with Asperger’s or some other form of autism. Many of them are wondering if they will be able to find love, friendship, and a good quality of life. Cubby’s life shows that such a thing remains possible even today. I did it years ago, and he’s doing it now.

  I can’t believe how far he’s come.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Nowadays one of the first questions people ask memoir writers is “How much of this is true?” The answer is, this story is all true, but it’s my truth. Each of the scenes in this book happened as I describe them, but if you ask the other people who were there, they will have their own slightly different tellings of the story. Each of us remembers differently, and each paid attention to different things at the time. This is a story of family life, not news reporting. Notes were not kept as life unfolded, and few recordings were made.

  For example, I watched Little Bear and Cubby complete a project together and wrote, “My son took the lead.” His mom read the story and said, “That’s not right! I designed it so I took the lead!” So I asked my son, and he said, “She’s nuts! I did all the work!” With me watching and advising, and the two of them doing it, we ended up with three different interpretations.

  But that’s okay. This dichotomy of memory shapes life in any family—yours or mine. Anyone who has raised one or more kids has seen this phenomenon.

  The passages of dialogue from Cubby’s childhood are reconstructed as best we remember, over the span of his life. I certainly can’t guarantee they are accurate word for word, but the essential elements—what we did, where we did it, and with whom—are all true and correct, as best I remember.

  Places and dates from my son’s childhood are described as accurately as possible. All are subject to limitations of recall. I reviewed many of these stories with friends and family, who were often able to fill gaps in my memory.

  In depicting the raid and subsequent court action, I have relied on my own notes, our attorney’s notes, media accounts, and available transcripts of court proceedings. Since I did not have a fully transcribed record of the various legal proceedings at hand, and there is no such record of the raid that I am aware of, much of the dialogue and some of the testimony have been reconstructed from memory and notes. However, dialogue and statements from the grand jury proceedings, my son’s testimony, and the opening and closing statements of the trial are drawn from transcripts and are nearly verbatim. The only changes I have made to material from the transcript is to condense lengthy testimony and delete minor repetitions or filler phrases like “you know.”

  Most people in this book are identified by their real names. This isn’t the kind of story where identities need to be hidden. In most cases, if I made up names for peripheral characters, it was simply because memory failed me. Julie Jones is the real name of Cubby’s Montessori teacher, and I’m happy to say we are still in touch with her today. The same is true for Cubby’s Scout leaders and many of his friends. In the case of Cubby’s first girlfriend, I have changed her name and identifying traits to protect her privacy. It’s possible I have described a few people from the past incorrectly. If you’re one of those people, I apologize.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Before closing, I’d like to thank the supporting cast who made this book possible.

  The list begins with my great-grandfather, Albert G. “Dandy” Robison. Dandy was a lifelong farmer and county agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was the one who told me explosives are a farmer’s best friends and showed me how to use them safely to split rocks, remove stumps, and dig ditches. Then there was Hank Schmel, pyro master for KISS. Together we delivered rock-and-roll thunder to thousands of concertgoers without a single mishap or injury. I guess those experiences set the stage for me to accept my son’s interests.

  Then there is my brother, Augusten. He’s always liked Cubby, but he’s lived far away from us almost all his life, so his role in our day-to-day lives has been limited. I wish he lived closer. Still, he’s always been entertaining, even from a distance. Cubby will never forget the Sack-o-Knives his uncle sent him by FedEx on Christmas Eve, when he was nine. Fifty knives! Each one different! And then there was the time my brother said, “You’re not getting a proper education! I’m going to take you away and send you to boarding school in England!” That never came to pass, but it did give Cubby something to ponder.

  Next I must recognize my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. All have their own memori
es of Cubby and our family, and I apologize that space did not permit fitting all of you into this little book.

  My father deserves a special mention, though he died before this book was written. My stepmother, Judy, is still with us, and I thank her for all she did to raise Cubby, especially for the times when she slept in the basement so he could be safe and warm upstairs, where the monsters could not get him.

  Particular thanks is due to David Hoose, his law partner Luke Ryan, and the rest of their staff. Throughout the book—in the interest of brevity—I refer exclusively to David Hoose as “Cubby’s lawyer.” In fact, as David would be quick to point out, we could not have won the case without the assistance of his staff, and all of them together are the heroes of this story. The monsters Judy kept at bay were imaginary, but the ones Hoose and company defeated were all too real. As my late Uncle Bob would say, They whupped ’em like dogs, and sent ’em out the door with their tails between their legs!

  Luke and David spent countless hours researching past cases and developing the strategies they used so successfully. A lesser pair of lawyers might well have folded under the state’s onslaught, but Luke and David didn’t. They sat together at my son’s side every moment of the trial; you’ll see them in photos if you search them out online. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, as does Cubby.

  Now it’s time to thank the people who actually helped create the work you are reading now. That starts with my literary agent, Christopher Schelling of Selectric Artists. Without him, there would be no book deal. I might even be a fugitive in some foreign country.