Switched On Read online

  Lindsay had told me she had done her doctoral work with V. S. Ramachandran. As it happened, I’d just finished reading about Rama and his groundbreaking work with phantom limbs in a book called The Brain That Changes Itself, by Dr. Norman Doidge. Lindsay’s former professor was a legend in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and I was duly impressed.

  Rama had a fascination with autism too, and Lindsay had said she discovered her own interest while studying in his lab. When I considered her lack of electrical engineering knowledge, I reminded myself that you don’t have to know how the hardware in a computer works to be a star programmer. The next time I saw her, I made a point to ask her what she thought of the comparison. “I’m not sure anyone in the field truly knows how brain circuits work,” she said, “at least not at the level of a computer chip.” I would soon discover how incredibly complex the brain is, orders of magnitude more intricate than any circuit.

  Yet I couldn’t help trying to relate what she had said to my own experience with electronics. When I worked as an engineer in rock and roll, I created custom instruments but I never learned how to play them except in the most rudimentary way. The fact that I could create a custom guitar without much musical knowledge and then a musician could pick it up and make beautiful melodies with no idea how it worked inside had always fascinated me. Perhaps Lindsay was like a musician of the mind.

  That reflection led me to an unsettling thought: if she was the musician and I signed up for her study, that would make me the instrument! I remembered all those nights at concerts watching rock and rollers hammer their guitars till the strings came off, and I hoped that wasn’t what was in store for me. When a musician gets a hit record, his guitar doesn’t generally jump for joy.

  Still, the conversation had gotten my hopes up. TMS sounded like a doorway to a fascinating new world, one I very much wanted to enter. I just hoped my natural rudeness hadn’t chased Lindsay away.

  The Value of Detachment, Circa 1978

  A PAIR OF LEGS stuck out from beneath an old Ford Torino on the lower road from West Springfield to Holyoke. The guy they belonged to was clearly dead because the legs weren’t moving, and when I walked closer, the car on top of him was still and quiet, its engine cooled. He must have been there awhile. There was another guy in the road about six feet away, sitting with his legs crossed, slowly rocking back and forth, not saying anything. When I called out to him he just ignored me. I wasn’t sure what his connection was to the scene—whether he’d been in the car or what. He didn’t look injured, and first aid wasn’t going to help the guy under the car. It was about 4:30 on a Sunday morning when I came upon them, driving home after a long night’s work.

  I’d come around a gentle curve and seen the car and a person in the road. From a hundred yards away, it looked like a wreck with someone maybe thrown from the vehicle. My workday ended well after the bars closed, and I seemed to pass drunk driving carnage almost every night on my way home. When people crashed before last call, the cops and the ambulances tended to show up immediately. But the roads were empty by three A.M., and if you wrecked in the hours before dawn it could be a while before anyone found you.

  Today you just dial 911 on a cellphone, but this was the 1970s, and cellphones didn’t exist. There weren’t as many people on the roads either.

  I looked back at my car to make sure it was secure. Sometimes you stopped for a crash or a breakdown and some lowlife hopped in your rig and sped away. There was no one else in sight, which was just as well by me.

  I’d never known what to say to people in casual conversation, but that didn’t matter at accident scenes and emergencies. In these situations, I always knew what to do—I followed the rules I had learned as a boy. My great-grandfather had been the county agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and his first cousin was the sheriff in nearby Carroll County. They never succeeded in teaching me any manners, but I had always been pretty good around machines, and they taught me what to do in a crisis.

  The first thing I did was stop my car right in the centre of the road. I pointed my low beams at the Torino and turned on the hazard flashers. Lots of drivers on the road at that time of the night, drunk or asleep at the wheel, might have run that second guy right over. I was sober and alert, and my car would protect him.

  Sometimes the wrecks I encountered were bloody and noisy. Not this one. It was strangely clean and silent. The guy was pinned under the car from his waist up, but there was no blood. He wasn’t breathing or making a sound. Of course, you wouldn’t be breathing either, with three thousand pounds of car on your chest. It was that time of the night when most of the drunks were already home in bed. The crickets were done chirping, and the birds weren’t ready to herald sunrise. That was at least an hour away.

  The only light on the scene came from the headlamps on my car, which I’d left running to keep the battery charged. Street lighting hadn’t yet come to this part of town, and there was no telling how long I would be there. Once you stop, you’re committed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the guy on the ground a second time, but he still didn’t answer, just rocked back and forth. I’d seen some people act that way when they were high on drugs, and if you touched them they blew up, all crazy and violent. I’d seen other people look like that because they were in shock. This guy didn’t seem to want anything from me, so I let him be and looked around.

  Today I realize that most people would be horrified by what I was seeing, but I was not affected that way. That’s one way autism has shaped me and set me apart from the majority of humanity, even though I didn’t know it then. The sadness or horror of the accident simply didn’t register with me. I didn’t pick up on emotional cues from other people, and the two men at this crash scene were both strangers to me. Why should their plight mean anything to me? That’s what I’d have said at the time, but I still acted to secure the situation and protect the survivor in the road. Even without feeling the expected emotions, I did the right thing.

  Being emotionally blind isn’t the same thing as being uncaring or amoral. My sense of right and wrong was quite well developed, and I did the best I could for other people. It’s just that my senses and abilities were limited, so I didn’t always do what they expected.

  A brief flash of fear washed over me, but I quickly realized there was no threat. A walk around the car told the story. The left front tyre lay on its side just outside the wheel well. At first I thought it had been torn from the car in a crash, but I quickly realized that was wrong. A rusty old bumper jack lay where it had fallen, on the ground next to the front bumper. This guy hadn’t had a wreck at all. He’d just had a flat tyre. But for some reason, he crawled under the car, the jack slipped, and that had proved fatal.

  “Never climb under a car unless it’s on a safe stand,” my grandfather said the first time we changed a tyre, and I never forgot his words. Turning back to the guy in the street, I said, “You okay?” There was still no answer. I looked a little closer at him and saw no sign of injury. No need to risk moving him and maybe starting a fight. There weren’t any pipes dripping fuel or wiring making sparks. The scene was stable, and that was all I could ask.

  I stood there motionless, breathing the crisp night air and pondering my next move.

  Pop! The tinny bang of metal on metal might not have been very loud, but in the predawn silence, it sounded like a gunshot. I jumped a foot into the air and spun around to face the noise. A slight rattle showed me the source—a lug nut that had been sitting on the hub had fallen off and landed in the hubcap that lay on the ground by the front bumper. As I watched it roll back and forth in the dish of the hubcap, I wondered what other things might be slithering around unseen in the dark.

  Stuff settles, I told myself, but I still felt a creepy chill, and the hairs on the back of my neck bristled. The darkness felt thick, like it was closing in, and I knew it was time to do something.

  But what? For a brief moment I considered leaving, but
I was wary of getting arrested for driving away. Better call the police. I walked down the road to the nearest house, about a hundred yards away. No one answered the door of that house or the next one. A grizzled old man with a bathrobe, a baseball bat, and a strong smell of liquor opened the third door.

  The denizens of lower Holyoke are known far and wide for their pugnacity, and this one was no exception. Luckily he was slow moving in his freshly awakened state. “Call the cops,” I told him. “There’s a wreck out there, and someone’s dead.” He looked at me, looked down the road, and shut the door in my face without a word.

  A more assertive man might have kicked the door down at that point and repeated the request. But I’d looked him in the eye—like my grand-daddy had told me to do—and now I trusted him to make the phone call. Anyway, I’d banged on enough doors. I walked back to my car and sat down to wait, hopeful that he’d do what I’d asked. Ten minutes passed, and my confidence was starting to waver. Then I saw the blue lights coming. Climbing out of my car, I stepped to the side of the road. Cops are skittish late at night. You have to move slow and be out in plain sight. Criminals run. Law-abiding citizens and people with good political connections stand their ground. As soon as the cruiser stopped, I raised my arms to signal a greeting and show I didn’t have a gun. There was just one officer in the car, and he got out and approached me warily. I explained the situation.

  The cop walked over to inspect the scene. He reached down to touch one of the dead guy’s legs, perhaps to see if it was hooked to a real person. To me the answer had been pretty obvious, and my cousin the sheriff had always told me never to touch anything that might be part of a crime scene. The cop stood up quickly and walked over to the guy sitting in the road. He didn’t get any more out of him than I had. “Wait here,” he told me, and went back to his cruiser. There were some barks of voice and static from the radio, and a few minutes later police cars arrived from both directions. An ambulance showed up, and the attendants scooped the live guy out of the road and drove away. Another ambulance arrived and sat there, waiting for a wrecker to lift the Torino off his friend.

  No one paid any attention to me, but I knew better than to drive away. Right then I was a witness, but if I snuck off I’d become a suspect, which was a lot worse. It was pretty clear to me that the jack had fallen and the guy had been crushed, but how that came to be remained a mystery. Maybe the other guy had been jacking it while his buddy was underneath. Why was he under the car anyway? You don’t have to crawl under a car to change a tyre. It was all just speculation for me, but it was an investigation for the cops.

  Half an hour passed, and a part of me was thinking I should never have stopped in the first place. The affair wasn’t any of my business. But sometimes a person who’s able to help makes all the difference. I’d wrecked my motorcycle a few years before, and I’d have been in a bad way if strangers hadn’t stopped, blocked the road, and kept me from getting run over by the oncoming traffic.

  The first cop on the scene came over to question me with another, more senior officer. I told my story—what little story there was—and showed them my licence. Then I mentioned the tyre and the jack and what I figured had happened. “Did you touch or move anything?” the older cop asked me. “No,” I said, “I didn’t touch a thing. I tried to talk to the other guy who was sitting there, but he wouldn’t answer me. He never said a word or moved from the moment my headlights hit him to when you guys took him away.”

  The other cop was writing it all down.

  “What were you doing out here?” We were at the edge of a rough part of town, and the older one must have thought I looked suspicious. “Going home,” I answered. “I install sound and lighting systems in clubs and I work late some nights. Tonight I was at the Arabian Nights, setting up a new illuminated dance floor.” The cop looked at my car—a blue Cadillac Eldorado convertible—but he didn’t say anything. He could tell I hadn’t been drinking, and I wasn’t acting aggressive.

  Many of the city’s biggest nightclubs were owned by connected guys, or guys in the rackets. There was a lot of money in a popular place, and all of it in cash. But I wasn’t in the mob and I didn’t own a club. I just worked in one.

  And I didn’t live in their town. My destination lay across the river, in South Hadley. In Holyoke a car like mine might signal a pimp or a drug dealer. In my town, Cadillacs belonged to insurance agents or doctors. I probably didn’t seem like either of those things. Mostly, I was just tired, and I’m sure I looked it. “You got a phone number in case we need to call you?” I gave it to him, but I never heard from those cops again.

  That’s what life was like for me as a young adult. People made fun of my stilted manner, my pedantic speech, and my detachment from other people. I didn’t see anything wrong myself—I was just logical. But the people who knew me seldom saw that as a gift. That made me sad, but my logical disposition still protected me when I stumbled into bad situations. And that happened a lot, working in bars and concert arenas. At a time of the morning when most guys my age were asleep in their college dorms I was working, by myself, in a nightclub. In those places I was often surrounded by pretty girls, good liquor, and great drugs. I’d have partaken of all of that and more if only I’d known how. But most evenings all I went home with was broken sound equipment, and my company that night was a Yamaha power amplifier. I had no clue how to chat someone up at the bar, even as I watched others do it with what looked like no effort at all.

  It’s funny how that turned out. I’d always known I was different. Kids used to tease me about my special interests and fixations. Now musicians and nightclub owners paid for my insights into sound and lighting. Unfortunately, that only went so far. Technical prowess had bought the Caddy and nice clothes, but it hadn’t won me many friends.

  Why was I that way? At the time, I didn’t know. Some people called me robotic; others said I was disconnected or uncaring. Why did I remain cool as a cucumber at the kind of accident scenes that would have rookie cops staring in horror?

  All I knew was that I was a good guy in a crisis because my logical mind took charge. Today I know that it’s because I am autistic, and autism has given me a mixture of disabilities and gifts. Being blind to the emotional cues of other people can be crippling, but my sense of logic and order has also been a great benefit.

  I walked through the scenes of my life like an outside observer, stepping carefully over the rubble and staying out of trouble. There was very little happiness in my world. Luckily I had a natural gift for understanding machines and making things work. But people were a complete mystery to me. I wanted desperately to have friends and be popular, but the closest I could come was working with them to do a job. Even there, I was more of a lone wolf.

  That kept me on the fringes of society. The few friends I had were fellow freaks and misfits. The people I worked for in those years were mobster club owners and crazy musicians. My dream was to have a real job, one where I put on nice clothes and worked in a clean office, but I was light-years away from anything like that.

  I wasn’t a popular kid growing up either. There were times I didn’t have any friends at all. Other times, I had a few. My childhood was mostly lonely, but maybe that was just as well. Looking back, I think my oblivious nature protected me. Other kids called me names and insulted me, but most of it rolled right off. I heard their words clearly but the true meanings escaped me. Today, when I recall some of the bad things people said, I realize (with the benefit of adult hindsight) that there must have been a million other almost-as-bad things that didn’t penetrate my awareness. My only joy came from reading and building things. I had Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and finally a real Erector set. That was where I found my first success. I may have been a social failure, but I was an extraordinary child engineer—at least in my own mind.

  Unfortunately that hadn’t translated to academic success. Teachers said I was smart but lazy. I might not have been into my schoolwork, but I got better and better at understanding
machines, and then I discovered electronics. That was my ticket to success. At sixteen I left home and got a job. School wasn’t taking me anywhere, and my home life had become pretty ugly. My mother was descending into mental illness and was briefly institutionalized when I was a teenager. Meanwhile, my father drank and became violent most nights. The combination was enough to drive anyone away.

  Some people remember a girl from their childhood. For me, it was a Massey Ferguson 135 tractor that taught me the secrets to making my way in life. Engines and machines were my first great love, and they were what saved me. I’ve come to realize that my aptitude for machines is pretty unique. The average person stands next to a running motorcycle and hears nothing but noise. Their main interest is to shut the thing off, so it will be quiet. Not me. I hear the individual pops of the combustion gases and all the other noises from the engine as a mechanical symphony.

  The joy I got from communing with engines pointed me toward my next great interest—electronics and music. By the time I was in my twenties I had found a home in the music business, where I made a good living doing weird technical stuff no one else could do. My first gigs were with local bands, who gave me an entrée to working bigger and bigger shows. By the mid-1970s I engineered a lot of the big productions at the University of Massachusetts, where my parents taught. That was where I met the crew from Britannia Row Audio, fresh off the boat from London. The guys at Pink Floyd’s sound company hired me to fix a mountain of broken gear they had shipped to America. When I did that successfully, they gave me the chance to create some really kickass special effects. A few years later, I went on to design the fire-breathing and rocket-launching guitars that became a KISS trademark. My engineering skills made me a lot of money, but I was still alone, and I was keenly aware of that fact. That put me in a strange position. My technical accomplishments were fairly visible, and countless young people dreamed of having a job like mine—building gear for famous musicians and seeing my stuff play in the big concert venues like Madison Square Garden. Folks would say things like “Boy, I wish I could be you!” I thought they were nuts, because none of that mattered to me—I’d have traded all that I had to feel popular and loved.