Be Different

  I’ve had pretty good luck with that erasing. I was able to teach myself to ignore small scratchy things. It was a gradual process, teaching my mind to ignore the label and focus on something else, like the sound of the wind in the trees or even a show on television. One thing that helps is focusing my mind inward. First, I listen to the sound of wind if I’m outdoors. I try to relax, and breathe slowly. Then I start a metronome in my head. I imagine a chime sound, like a bell, repeating about once a second. I can imagine it so clearly, it’s almost as if it’s really there, ringing next to me. I focus on that ding and the world recedes a little bit. The more I focus, the less things like scratchy clothes bother me. After a few minutes of concentration, they seem to fade away and I feel more relaxed.

  I’ve minimized my label sensitivity so well that I can even wear rough wool sweaters. I could never do that when I was fifteen. Now, having said all that, I’ll tell you a secret. I wear my underwear inside out, so the irritating seams and the label are on the outside. And I never wear designer underwear, because fancy brands have irritating labels on both sides, and that’s too much for me. Just because I can make myself ignore irritating clothing doesn’t mean I have to actually seek it out.

  After all, I am not a masochist.

  Seeing Music

  I can still remember the first time I saw the music. It happened at a dance in the cafeteria at Amherst Regional Junior High. Ernie Buck and the Machines—a local high school band—were playing “Get Ready,” a hit tune that had been recorded by both Rare Earth and the Temptations. The room was dark, loud, and full of kids. Light washed out from the stage, pushing aside the smell of sweat and socks. Colored shafts of light spun across the dance floor. You’d never guess we ate lunch there during the day.

  “I’m bringing you a love that’s true,” Ernie sang. “So get ready!”

  My neighbor Denny had insisted we go to the dance. He was a few months older than I, and a lot more popular and sophisticated. He even had a girlfriend, a brown-haired ninth grader named Brenda Keyes. I hoped I could learn from him and get a girlfriend of my own. I watched the other kids closely to see how it happened.

  “Gonna start making love to you,” the song continued. Unfortunately, I wasn’t having much luck in that department. Denny had explained the process to me, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. “You just walk up to a girl and ask her to dance. Then she says yes, and follows you out to the dance floor. Afterward you can talk to her and make friends.” I couldn’t imagine how I could ever do such a thing, even as I watched other kids doing what he said.

  I looked at the girls scattered around the room. Some were with guys—I ruled them out because they already had boyfriends hanging around. Even I knew that you didn’t walk up to a girl who was with a guy and ask her to dance. That would be like asking for a fight. What about the girls who weren’t with guys? Quite a few were standing together in packs, talking and laughing with one another. I figured they were out, too, because a pack of girls would tear me to shreds if I walked over and they didn’t like my look. I could already see them laughing, and I didn’t want to be the one getting laughed at. So I stayed away. That left the girls who were standing alone around the room. I didn’t approach them, because I couldn’t think of a single word to say, even though I’d been pondering what to say all day.

  Finally, there was the problem of dancing. I could observe it, and understand intellectually how it worked, but to actually do it … never. I watched the kids on the dance floor, but there was no way I could ever move around like them.

  So that was it. I figured there were no girls I could talk to or dance with. That just wasn’t something I was going to be able to do. Freed from that worry, I retreated behind the stage, where I could watch the scene from a safe hiding place.

  That’s when I saw the music. It was there, in the backs of the amplifiers. Each musician had his own amp, and from my vantage point, I could see into the backs of their cabinets. Modern amplifiers are transistorized, and there’s nothing to see. Back then, amplifiers used vacuum tubes, which glowed dimly and made patterns of light in time to the music. They were like windows to a secret realm, revealing the inner world of the dance hall. I leaned forward eagerly and gazed inside.

  Girls were terrifying. The world of electronics was safe, predictable, and secure. Amplifiers never laughed at me. I had been fascinated—obsessed even—with electronics since my parents gave me a computer kit for Christmas the year before. I spent countless hours studying my computer and unraveling its secrets. As soon as I unraveled them I applied all my newfound knowledge to my other great love—music. By the time of the dance, I had already sacrificed every radio and television in the house to my pursuit of electrical knowledge. I was about to learn a new lesson.

  Each amplifier had a mix of small and large tubes. The little tubes were important, but I knew it was the big ones that did the heavy lifting. They took the weak signals from the preamp tubes and made them strong enough to ring through the speaker cabinets and fill the room. When they did that, they pulsed with a faint blue glow whose shape and brightness changed with the music. I’d never seen that before and I was captivated. I put my face right up behind the bass amplifier—a Fender Bassman—sitting on top of a big black speaker cabinet. At that distance, the pounding of the bass was all I could hear. As I watched, the blue lights in the tubes danced in perfect synchronization with the sounds from the speaker below. At the same time, I felt waves of heat on my face whenever the bass played loudly. Sound poured from the speakers, and heat radiated from the tubes. It was a total sensory experience.

  The longer I watched, the more the patterns revealed themselves. Chords had one shape, while individual notes had another. It felt magical, seeing the light dancing in the tubes as the energy of the music passed through. It appeared as light inside the amp, becoming invisible in the wires. The speakers turned the electrical energy to sound, and it rocked me back on my feet.

  As the night wore on, the band played louder and louder. At times, they played so loudly that the amps overloaded. When that happened I could hear the distortion in the speakers and see bright bars in the blue lights. It was captivating, seeing the change. Undistorted sounds appeared as smooth patterns. Hard distortion made distinct bright bars. I forgot all about the dance, the girls, and the other people.

  As the volume rose, something else happened. The dark metal on the outside of the tube began glowing dull red. The center was supposed to be red, because there was a heater there to make the tube work, but the rest of the tube was usually black. If the outside got red, that could mean only one thing. I was actually seeing metal get red hot as it passed the electricity on its way to the speakers. The thought of those tubes turning the tiny signals from an electric bass into a thunder that filled the room was thrilling. Would they melt? I felt the heat. Now I could smell the hot electronics, too.

  My world shrank down to the tiny area inside those tubes. I watched them all night, until it was time to go home. I didn’t get anywhere with the girls, but I had some revelations when it came to electronics.

  The next day, I told one of the kids on the bus about my experience seeing music in the vacuum tubes. He looked at me like I was nuts. He said, “I almost got to third base with Cheryl Reed last night. With all the girls in that place you looked in the back of amplifiers? What’s the matter with you?” We may have been in the same place physically, but our minds were light-years apart. How did that happen? I started out wanting to meet a girl, and I ended up watching vacuum tubes. Did the tubes distract me from loneliness, or was I so much of a geek that I actually forgot? I really didn’t know.

  I wasn’t even sure what third base meant, though I deduced it involved a sex act. Unfortunately, if romance was a game with bases, I wasn’t even at first. In any case, I did not want to focus on my failures with girls. Music was pure, safe, and immeasurably more promising because it had a logical mathematical foundation. That meant I could figure it out. Girls were not that
way at all. I turned away and pondered the sounds and patterns in silence for the rest of the bus ride.

  In the next few weeks I read everything I could find on vacuum tubes, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Radio Amateur’s Handbook, and the RCA Receiving Tube Manual. I wanted to know what made the blue glow, and why the tubes got red hot at the end of the night. I learned about anodes, cathodes, heaters, and plate current. Tiny signals on the grids controlled huge signals on the plates. That was the secret to amplification. It wasn’t magic at all—it was engineering. The technical terms didn’t make much sense at first, but I kept reading until I understood. I was on my way.

  That was the great thing about electronics. I read about it, and practiced what I read, and got better. January’s insoluble mysteries became child’s play in March. By concentrating and studying, I could unravel any technical problem at all. At least that’s how it felt. People problems … they were a whole ’nother matter. No matter how much we talked about girls, I never did figure them out.

  I sure wanted a girlfriend, but I went with what I knew and where I found success. I may have been lonely, but electronics would soon give me my first real adult success. The complicated and frightening world of girls would have to wait. Meanwhile, I was absorbed, totally lost in the world of music, sound, and engineering.

  Managing Sensory Overload

  I grew up in a world of sensory overload. Every sound was like a fire alarm. The labels on my clothes clawed at me. Bright lights startled and blinded me. And the worst part was that no one seemed to believe me. Noise? What noise?

  Part of the problem was that I could make noise or flash lights as loud or bright as I wanted, with no problems. As long as I was in control, my own light and sound never bothered me. I could shriek at the top of my lungs all day and feel fine, while everyone within a hundred yards wanted to throttle me. But if someone else made half that noise or flashed a light at me, I went nuts. Those dichotomies made people think I was just a spoiled brat. “He can dish it out fine, but he can’t take it” was what my father said. If only they had understood.

  When I was little, I had no way of knowing that I was more sensitive than other people. It would have amazed me to hear that something that was downright painful for me could go totally unnoticed by someone else. But that’s the way it was. And when the grown-ups didn’t notice what was bothering me, they tended to look at me like I was nuts, because I was getting uncomfortable and acting strange.

  “He’s a very sensitive little boy” was how my mother defended me. “He needs to toughen up” was my father’s unsympathetic answer. And you know what? That’s exactly what I did. I grew up to install sound systems and strobe lights in dance clubs and play rock and roll with some of the loudest bands on the planet. How did I go from extreme sensitivity to that level of tolerance?

  At a young age, I was fortunate to stumble upon special interests that captivated me and put my unique sensitivities to use in productive ways, opening a path out of disability. If all my brainpower was aimed at figuring out how a guitar amplifer or a Getrag* gearbox worked, those annoying thoughts and itchy tags could not get a word in edgewise. Without that Aspergian focus, and my aptitude for machines and electronics, my mind might well have been captured by all those stray sensory inputs that tormented me as a kid, and who knows where I might have ended up?

  I wasn’t always able to explain clearly how I managed to control my sensory overload. It wasn’t until later in life that I was able to articulate the secret to my success.

  I remember working on the sound crew at an Iron Butterfly concert shortly after the band got together for the second time. I was eighteen years old. We were playing in a big nightclub, not an arena. The place was packed, the ceiling was low, and the air was full of cigarette smoke. There was a projector throwing psychedelic images on the wall behind the stage, and the noise was blasting through the speakers. It was just the sort of place that could overwhelm anyone’s senses.

  When I recall those 1970s concerts, what I remember most are the patterns: the thumping melody of the bass, the dance of the VU meters on the amplifers, the smells of the hot vacuum tubes. I’ve never forgotten the silhouettes the spotlights cut through the smoke as I looked forward into the lights from behind the stage. The lights would hit the musicians’ faces, and from where I stood, their hair would light up as if their heads had burst into flames.

  What I don’t remember is ever being troubled by the noise at those shows. When I learned about autism and about how many people, like me, have big issues with noises, I began to wonder, How did I get away with that?

  The answer hit me last year, out of the blue, at a fund-raising event for football star Doug Flutie’s autism foundation.

  Every winter, Doug organizes a bowling tournament to raise money for his foundation. His Flutie Bowls (as they are called) are always a good time, with catered food, music, and interesting people.

  That year’s bowl was held at a place called Jillian’s in Boston. Jillian’s is an old New England factory building that’s been turned into an upscale bowling alley they call Lucky Strike Lanes. Doug gets so many people at his events that the crowd spills over onto the lower floors of Jillian’s. But most of the action stays on the top floor, at Lucky Strike. That’s where I was.

  Up there, the bouncers string a velvet rope around the lanes to make a sort of VIP area. It quickly fills up with sponsors and sports figures who come to support Doug’s foundation. When the night gets going, the VIP area is the only part of the establishment that isn’t packed shoulder to shoulder. It’s the equivalent of the backstage area at a sold-out rock concert. Fortunately, the foundation folks had given me a pass so I could escape to its relative calm and tranquillity.

  I was very uncomfortable at first because I couldn’t make sense of anything around me. Everywhere I looked there were people jostling, shoving, and shouting. There was no calm space in the alley. The whole room was packed with glittering socialites, hulking sports figures, and professional and amateur paparazzi snapping pictures. It was total sensory overload. You didn’t have to be autistic to be freaked out in a madhouse like that.

  Still, a fellow has to eat. I decided to wade into the crowd in search of food, which was visible above the sea of people, far across the room. I turned sideways, shoulder forward, and entered the crowd. The closer I got, the better the food smelled, which was good because the crush of people was almost enough to send me running for the exit. But I persevered, and eventually I reached the food tables. (Doug must be a well-respected figure in the Boston food service community, because the assortment of donated edibles was truly remarkable.)

  A few minutes later, fortified by crab cakes, chocolate-covered strawberries, scallops, pizza slices, and small sweet pastries, I waded back past the velvet rope and made my way by the two burly bouncers to the VIP section.

  There were supposedly many sports superstars in attendance, so I decided to see if I could pick them out. The crowd contained Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics, but they all looked like regular people to me. I couldn’t identify any of the pros in the group.

  Failing in that effort, I looked out from the relative serenity of the VIP section. I decided to count girls to ascertain the male-to-female ratio of the crowd. What I found—sixteen girls for every ten guys—gave us males good odds that night. I counted another group of thirty people, just to be sure, and the ratio remained the same.

  Then someone told me that I was expected to participate in the bowling competition. Turning my mind to the game at hand for a while, I discovered I wasn’t half bad and actually scored a few strikes.

  Having searched for sports figures, counted girls, and tried bowling, I was running out of things to do, so I decided to wander to the food again. As soon as I left the safety of the velvet rope, my anxiety returned. Feeling it, I started thinking I should slink out the door and head for home, but Doug saw me and said, “Wait a few minutes. My band is going to play soon.”

  I mille
d around, anxious and fidgety, looking for some distraction. Luckily, Doug’s band chose that moment to start playing. I immediately walked to the rear of the bandstand and began listening. I focused on one instrument at a time, as I used to do back in my music-production days. After a moment I realized my anxiety had vanished. The beat of the music gave my mind something to lock on to. With that focus, I ceased to perseverate and worry.

  Just then, I had a flash of insight. At Doug’s event, of all places, I found the answer to why, at concerts, my sensory overload didn’t kick in.

  When Doug’s band was playing I focused on different instruments one by one, as I had done years ago. It takes quite a bit of concentration to follow a single instrument, but I can do it.

  People tell me that’s an unusual ability, to be able to switch from one instrument to another at will, but those same people seem perfectly at ease in crowds or noisy places that freak me out, so perhaps it’s a trade of one trait for the other. Maybe it’s another Asperger job skill, one I share with every good music producer or orchestra conductor. A good many of them have Asperger’s, too.

  Other people on the spectrum may be different, but for me, the answer to handling crowds, noise, or flashing lights seems to be focus. If my mind is locked onto a target, it’s as if all the distractions vanish. If I lose the target—whether it’s a person I am tracking for a photo or a musician I am tracking for the sound—the sensory input overwhelms me. When I’m locked on, nothing bothers me. I learned that skill unconsciously when I was young, but now that I’m aware of it, I am able to adjust some of my life circumstances to make things go even more smoothly.

  That’s why I never attend concerts where I’m not working. In the audience I am constrained, and I have nothing to do, so I freak out, just as I was starting to do at the Flutie Bowl. I don’t enjoy it, even today. For the same reason, I can’t be alone in a crowded bar. If I have someone to focus on or a book to read, I can ignore the bedlam around me. Take that away, though, and I will be out the door and down the road in two minutes flat. Now that I understand what’s happening, I am able to arrange things to avoid situations like that, and if people wonder why I don’t do certain things, I have a good answer.