Raising Cubby Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN ELDER ROBISON

  Look Me in the Eye

  Be Different

  Copyright © 2013 by John Elder Robison

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robison, John Elder.

  Raising Cubby : a father and son’s adventures with Asperger’s, trains, tractors, and high explosives / John Elder Robison. — First edition. Summary: “The comic memoir of an Aspergian father raising his Aspergian son, by the bestselling author of Look Me in the Eye”—Provided by publisher.

  1. Asperger’s syndrome—Patients—Family relationships. 2. Asperger’s syndrome in children—Patients—Life skills guides. 3. Asperger’s syndrome in children—Patients—United States—Biography. 4. Parenting. 5. Robison, John Elder. I. Title.

  RC553.A88R6355 2013

  616.85′8832—dc23 2012033979

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88486-2

  Jacket design by Oliver Munday

  Jacket photograph: Comstock Images

  v3.1

  For Little Bear, Cubby’s mom

  I may be the one who wrote this book, but Cubby’s mom deserves credit for much of the hard work of kid raising, especially when he was small.

  I worked to support our fledgling family, took Cubby on many fun adventures, and taught him useful skills. Meanwhile, Little Bear nursed him, changed his diapers, carried him to the doctor, and escorted him to school. She was the one who was there for all those firsts in his life: walking, talking, and peeing on a parent. Later, when he floundered in school, it was Little Bear who grabbed hold of the school system, shook hard, and made them accommodate our kid.

  Lest you think I was the only one who did fun things, she also took him to Mexico, won awards with him at science fiction conventions, introduced him to fireworks and rockets, and served as a leader for his Cub Scout troop.

  Even though we have not been married to each other for many years, her achievement in raising our son is not to be minimized. To the extent that he is a prizewinning specimen, she is in large part responsible.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare

  2. From Dropout to Executive

  3. An Incipient Bear Cub

  4. Names

  5. Hatching Time

  6. A Proud, Scared Dad

  7. The King of Everything

  8. Two-Wheel Drive

  9. Tell Me What You Want

  10. The Aerial Child

  11. Monsters

  12. Child Support

  13. The Best Kid in the Store

  14. Wondrous Dada

  15. Tuck-in Time

  16. Role Models

  17. Elves

  18. The Oxbow Incident

  19. The Old Boy

  20. The Power of Wizards

  21. Becoming Owners

  22. Cubby Versus the School

  23. Reading

  24. An Official Geek

  25. Divorce

  26. Dreaming Cubby

  27. Child Protection

  28. Bulldozing Off

  29. The Strolling of the Heifers

  30. From Stockholder to Chairman

  31. Gymnastics

  32. Geologists

  33. Learning to Drive

  34. Power Generation

  35. Boom!

  36. Amherst

  37. Pine Demons

  38. A New Nest

  39. In the High School Groove

  40. A Different Animal

  41. Nicole

  42. Declaration of Independence

  43. Blowing Up

  44. A Visit from the ATF

  45. The Raid Begins

  46. The Locus of the Investigation

  47. The Circus Must Go On

  48. The DA

  49. Arraignment

  50. Asperger’s and Cubby

  51. In Limbo

  52. The Trial Begins

  53. The Crime of Inquisitiveness

  54. Defending Cubby

  55. The Verdict

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Closing the Circle

  About the Author

  Anyone who willfully, intentionally and without right, by the explosion of gunpowder or of any other explosive, unlawfully damages property or injures a person, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.” [Massachusetts General Laws; Felonies 266.101]

  That’s the state’s definition of “malicious explosion,” the destruction of property with an explosive device. It’s a serious felony, on a par with armed robbery or deadly assault. My teenage son was charged with three counts. If convicted, he would face up to sixty years in state prison. The charges made him sound like a pretty scary guy.

  Just in case that wasn’t enough, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had also charged him with one count of “possessing explosives with the intent to harm people or property.” I guess that was their backstop—if they couldn’t prove he harmed people or destroyed property, they wanted to prove he meant to. That was worth a few years in prison if the first charges weren’t enough to send him away forever.

  Until that point, people charged with malicious explosion in Massachusetts had mostly been outlaw bikers, Mafia hit men, drug dealers, or vicious thugs. Their explosions were obvious and unmistakable: pipe bombs in clubhouses, firebombs in churches, car bombs under Cadillacs, maybe a hand grenade tossed through a window. Most of the time, someone was killed, or at least seriously injured. The idea that my son would be lumped together with people like that was just crazy. He wasn’t a violent criminal; he was a bright, geeky teenager who’d dropped out of high school so he could study chemistry in college at age sixteen. Now he was fighting for his life over one question: Was he a budding scientist or a mad bomber?

  All this had happened because Jack, whom I call Cubby, had gotten interested in the physics and chemistry of explosives at a time when most kids are still learning multiplication and division. He had made experimental explosive compounds from common and legal chemicals and set them off on the ground in the woods where we live. No one was hurt. No property was damaged. No one even complained. He just wanted to see if his concoctions would really explode, and they did. Sometimes. He’d filmed his experiments and put them on YouTube for others to see and discuss.

  To me, he was just a smart kid with a love of science. When Cubby’s interest in chemistry turned serious at age twelve, it was no surprise he had explored homemade explosives. I could not expect him to be interested in industrial chemistry at his age, and he knew about fireworks from the time he had spent in Mexico, where his mom was studying for her doctorate. I was proud of his knowledge, though I wasn’t too happy about where it had led us.

  My son’s explosions hadn’t looked very scary to me—not much more than firecrackers tossed on the ground. Ten-second videos showed capfuls of explosive blowing half-cups of dirt into the air. A few of the blasts were larger, but they were still in the big-rock-tossed-in-a-pond category. Unfortunately, they were enough to set the DA on the warpath.

  “It’s the scary times we live in,” people told me. I remembered my own childhood on a farm in Georgia, where I’d go to the local hardware store, buy dynamite, and use it to blow up stumps and rocks in our fields. I’d done that wh
en I was Cubby’s age, and no one had cared at all. Farm kids everywhere did the same back then. I did not fully understand how much things had changed—how fearful and jumpy people had become in the wake of 9/11.

  And of course we didn’t live on a farm anymore. My parents had moved from rural Georgia to western Massachusetts when I was a little boy. When I grew up, I stayed in the area and Cubby had spent his life in the suburbs around Amherst.

  A different teenage boy might have hidden his newfound hobby, but Cubby was proud of what he achieved, and it never occurred to him that anyone would question his intent. You see, Cubby’s brilliant, but he has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, which makes it hard for him to see how others might perceive his interests. I’ve got Asperger’s too, so I know firsthand what it means. Everyone who knows my son would tell you how gentle he is, but because of the Asperger’s, he’s often oblivious to what’s going on around him. Unfortunately, that obliviousness made him an easy target for a narrow-minded, publicity-seeking prosecutor. When she heard about his home chemistry lab and his experiments, she went after him with everything she had, quickly securing a grand jury indictment. My son could not believe anyone would prosecute him for his interest in chemistry. He had no idea what to do, or why he was under siege. You can imagine how I felt, with my only child being attacked by a public official who had never even spoken to either one of us.

  Now we were in the superior courtroom of the Hampshire County Courthouse, in Northampton, Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, superior court is reserved for the biggest cases; everyone else is processed in district court or the magistrate’s office. The year before, of the thousands of cases in our county’s court system, only fifteen made it all the way to superior court trials, and most of those ended in conviction. The room was air-conditioned, but sweat beaded on my forehead as I pondered my son’s odds. I rocked back and forth on the hard courtroom bench, thinking and worrying. All the witnesses had come and gone. Closing arguments were over, and the judge had finished reading the instructions to the jury. A few minutes before, I had watched them file slowly out of the room, to begin their deliberations. It was all up to the jury. They were eleven women and one man, strangers to one another and to me. What would they decide?

  Ten feet in front of me, my son sat at the defense table between his lawyers. To his right, the prosecutor shuffled her papers and looked toward the empty jury box. The judge gazed down on all of us from her bench, and armed bailiffs guarded the flanks. My son looked so young and vulnerable among all those serious-looking adults. He wore a grown man’s suit, but underneath he was still my little boy, skinny as a rail, with only a wisp of beard. My heart hurt for him.

  Meanwhile, I had my own deliberations going on. I wanted to understand how my kid’s science experiments had led to felony criminal charges. My son was still a teenager, with no history of breaking the law. He’d never even been in a fight. He wasn’t in trouble in school. He wasn’t any kind of renegade. Everyone who knew him was struck by two things: his kindness and his intelligence.

  So why was he on trial? Had he really done something terrible, something I did not comprehend? Could it be that I was blind to the true nature of my only child? Was he in trouble because of the way I had raised him, as some commenters had suggested in the local newspaper’s online forum? Perhaps it all came down to being different, I thought. Now we might have to pay a high price for our nonconformity. My Asperger’s had made me feel like a social isolate, and I knew my son felt the same way. Both of us wanted to be a part of society; we just didn’t always know quite how.

  Sitting there in court, neither of us had any idea how the jurors felt or what they might do. Would they protect an eccentric but harmless member of the community or fall for the prosecutor’s fear-mongering? As I waited anxiously for the verdict, I could not help but reflect on my choices as a dad and our tumultuous father-son journey of the past eighteen years.

  The story began thirty years ago, before there was even the idea of a Cubby. I was twenty-some years old, a newly minted adult with a serious girlfriend. We were talking of marriage and possibly even a family.

  I might have flunked out of high school a few years before, but I’d truly graduated from teenager to grown-up. Having made such a momentous change, I figured I should stop doing the kind of things kids did and start doing what adults did. I looked around for some sample adults, to get a sense of what came next.

  I knew that having kids was something most grown-ups do. But when should we embark on that journey, and how? I was still new to dating and sex. To me, kids were a feared consequence, as in, Uh-oh … do you think you might be pregnant? Fatherhood, for young adults like me, was the unwanted result of the ultimate dating success. Luckily, I was not introduced to parenting via that pathway.

  I followed the more traditional route, starting with dropping out of school. It began when my girlfriend, Mary Trompke, left me in tenth grade. “I don’t ever want to speak to you again,” she said one day, and I didn’t even know why. At the same time, my home life turned nasty. “You’re never going to amount to anything,” my father would shout at me in drunken rages. “You’re going to end up pumping gas or sweeping floors!” At the time, none of us knew that I had Asperger’s, so I had no way of understanding my difficulties fitting in and doing well in school. I was inclined to believe what the grown-ups said—that I was just lazy and no good. Depressed and angry, I quit school and went out on my own. Luckily, I had a marketable skill—electronics—and a plan for putting myself to work. My teenage fascination with music and circuitry turned into a budding career as local musicians began looking to me to repair their broken instruments and amplifiers. To me, the choice was clear: I was a failure in school, but I had a future in music. I decided to go where I was wanted.

  Of course, not everyone agreed with my decision to quit school, and they didn’t embrace my choice of career either. “Dropping out isn’t going to lead you anywhere, boy,” my grandfather, Jack, told me. His own father had been the first Robison to graduate from college, so school meant a lot to him. “Those musicians are all starving freaks,” my father added. “How can you expect to make a living from them?”

  I don’t know what my mother thought. After a recent psychotic break and a violent and endless divorce from my dad, she had her own problems to deal with. Once I left home, she and my father were so wrapped up in their own worlds, they hardly paid any attention to me at all. It cut both ways; after a rough and tumultuous childhood, I didn’t want much to do with either parent. It would be some years before my feelings toward them changed.

  So there I was, a sixteen-year-old dropout in need of a job and a home. I jumped at the chance to become the newest crew member of Fat, a local rock and blues band. For eighty bucks a week and a room in the rambling farmhouse where they lived, I set up and took down their equipment. I even drove the truck back and forth to the clubs where we played. We worked five nights a week and spent the other two days fixing anything that broke. In my spare time I continued to repair amplifiers and instruments for other musicians and I kept studying as much as I could.

  Over the next few years, as my skills developed, the nature of my work changed. Instead of fixing old equipment, more and more of my time was spent making old designs better, and building new things I dreamed up from thin air. It felt good, creating things and seeing them work. I was on my own, on my way up, and feeling proud and defiant because my family’s threats hadn’t come true. I’d show them! The bands I worked for got bigger and bigger, as performances in barrooms morphed into concerts in stadiums. Even my father grudgingly conceded I’d done okay.

  Over the next few years, two girlfriends came and went, and then I got back together with Mary. But I didn’t call her that. I’ve always had a tendency to make up my own names for the people, pets, and things I especially like. Growing up, I called my little brother Varmint because he was such a pest, and when I got to feeling sick, I called University Health Services the Repair
Center. I don’t know why, but I’ve often had trouble with the names other people have chosen. My girlfriend’s mother called her Mary Lee, just the way my own parents used my middle name, John Elder. I called her Little Bear because she was stocky and tenacious, at times even belligerent. I liked her a lot. She was my best friend.

  We always had a lot in common, and what we shared often seemed pretty weird to other people. Trains had always been one of my great loves, and she walked the tracks with me, collecting stray insulators from abandoned telegraph poles. I’d climb twenty feet up the poles, unscrew the old insulators, and lower them carefully so she could stow them in her backpack. If I said, “Let’s sneak into the passage under the university’s student union and explore the steam tunnels,” she would be right there with me. Instead of asking if I was crazy, she would say, “Do you think we’ll need extra batteries for the flashlight?” No challenge was too strange.

  We were both logical and sensible, though that wasn’t always obvious by our actions. Both of us loved to read, especially science fiction. We never ran out of things to say to each other. Sometimes we talked about our families and life at home. We didn’t do that too often, though, because growing up hadn’t been much fun. Both of us had left home in a hurry, and we weren’t moving back.

  Seen from the perspective of middle age, it’s obvious how messed up and crazy both our childhoods were. At the time, however, neither of us knew any other way of growing up. The best thing you could say was that our parents showed us what we didn’t want in a family, and we took that lesson to heart, especially when it came to liquor. Our dads were both drinkers, the kind that seem real nice to their friends but are actually mean as hell to the kids. My only brother was eight years younger and lived in a commune with my mother’s crazy shrink. Mary’s brothers and sister were all older, and they’d gone as far from home as they could get. Big sister was in Florida, getting divorced. Brother Ted was in Oregon, contemplating law school. Paul had joined the navy and headed for the Philippines on a submarine. Danny had gone the farthest. I was shocked and saddened when he froze to death in the winter of 1976, camped out alone in the woods.