Be Different Page 3

  For some of us, that may mean sitting at a table, stacking and unstacking the same four pencils for hours on end. It may mean repeating a phrase or passage from a song endlessly, until everyone in earshot is ready to explode. And the interests … they can run the gamut from knowing the name of every saxophone player in the world of jazz to calculating all the prime numbers with fewer than five digits, to total mastery of Warcraft or another online world. Like everything in the world of autism, these rituals and routines come in all shades and degrees. Some rituals hold you back; others are merely annoying. Routines and fixations that are annoying in children can turn into gifts, if you can find employment that uses the particular need for routine.

  In these next stories, I’ve tried to bring that dry diagnostic passage to life with some examples from my own youth.

  For the Love of Routine

  I sure love routine and ritual. It’s the way of my world. Everything has to be just so. As a toddler, I lined up my blocks a certain way, and, in my mind, that was the only possible way those blocks could be laid out. Any other arrangement of blocks was simply wrong and had to be corrected. It never occurred to me that other kids could have their own ideas about block arranging. Maybe that’s one reason I didn’t have too many friends back then.

  Even today, when I can intellectually grasp the idea that blocks can be stacked and lined up in many different ways, and even heaped or piled, there is still just one way for me. I know other people have their own ideas, but that doesn’t make them right. At least, not to me.

  But I learned a secret along the way. I learned to accept the way other people do things even when I’m sure that they are wrong. By learning to let other people make their own choices, and their own mistakes, I avoided antagonizing them and I stopped making enemies for no good reason. It took a while, but I finally came to see that block piling was not something worth fighting over. Most of the time.

  There are equivalents to that in adult life, too, and I’ve learned to treat them the same. I know you should never unplug your computer by yanking the cord, but I’ve learned to keep quiet when my friend George does it. For that reason, and a few others, he has remained my friend through many years and countless power cords. All that time, he has remained blissfully ignorant, and indeed he’s come to accept that six months is a long life for an electrical cord. For him.

  Growing up, I always assumed that other kids were like me, that they saw the wisdom in my rituals as much as I did. There was big trouble if anyone tried to change my routines. I’d holler and yell and cry. Now I know better—each person wants to make his or her own decisions about how to act. Some people have rituals like I do, and others don’t. I still get uncomfortable if someone questions or disturbs my habits, but I’m able to avoid a meltdown.

  I continue to have little rituals today. Some of them make sense to other people, while others seem nutty. But now that I’ve gotten older and have made a place for myself in the community, people don’t usually criticize me for them. For example, I’ll go to the same restaurant, sit in the same seat, and order the same food every day. To me, that’s perfectly normal and comforting. No one at the restaurant ever complains. In fact, they think it’s great. They even have a term for people like me—“regular customers.” If I had done that when I was a kid, though, people would have called it weird. So which is it, weird or regular?

  One thing I have noticed about restaurants is that the staff never criticizes your rituals, even if they are rude. You can eat with your fingers or even pick your nose, and no one will say anything. If you’re a kid who has lived with a lot of criticism, that can be very liberating. However, it can also leave you with a false sense of security, because you get comfortable with some behavior and it comes back to kick you in the teeth in a different setting. That happened to me when I dined with my friend Amy when I was eighteen and new to living on my own.

  I met Amy Margulies just after I’d moved in with the guys from Fat, the rock-and-roll band I joined when I left home in the mid-1970s. The musicians in the band and I occupied a big communal house in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts. Amy was a college student who rented a room in a house up the street. I can’t imagine what she saw in me, but there must have been something there, because she invited me out to dinner. It’s possible she believed that my life with a bunch of traveling musicians was exciting. I was sure the reality would disappoint her, but it was still a date with a real live girl, so I seized the moment. We headed to the Whale Inn, a grand but rundown old place about five miles from where we lived.

  By that time, I had been eating out for years. It had started in high school, when I went to the Hungry U or Pizza Rama for lunch every day. As my family situation got worse and my income grew, I began eating dinners out, too, mostly pepper-and-onion pizzas with cherry cola. I didn’t have much experience with fancy places like the Whale Inn, but I wanted to impress Amy, so off we went.

  Amy’s father worked for the government and she had traveled all over the world. She was from a respectable family where—according to her—everyone was polite and well-mannered.

  We ordered dinner, which included vegetables served “family-style.” Family-style is a way of piling all the stuff on a single plate to save the cooks the effort of sorting and arranging individual portions. On this fateful night, the pile included asparagus, potatoes, and some silver-dollar-sized slices of whitish plant matter with a waxy-looking yellow outer covering.

  Perhaps my quizzical look was obvious, because Amy said, “Those are squash. They’re good!” I did not say anything, but I watched closely to see if she ate any of the so-called squash, and if so, how. Some foods with outer coverings, like sausages, hot dogs, and chocolate-covered raisins, are eaten whole. But then there are other foods like fancy cheese where the covering has to be removed. Looking at the strange white disks on the plate, it was hard to tell if the yellow covering was natural or ornamental plastic. And even if it was natural, it still might not be edible. I had previously made that mistake with the covering on shrimp. The outer shell of a shrimp is nasty—nothing like the chocolate covering on a raisin.

  I knew this was a potential trap, one where I might either eat something totally repulsive or do something completely ridiculous. So I did nothing but watch. She didn’t eat any squash, which led me to question whether the whole thing was a joke. Chinese restaurants do stuff like that. They put brightly colored plant garnishes on top of your Oriental Delight, but if you eat the colored stuff it’s like you just ingested cherry-and-spearmint wood chips.

  Suspecting a trick, I decided to take the safe way out and eat the asparagus. I’d eaten asparagus for as long as I could remember, and I liked it, especially when it was fresh. I had a system for consuming the stuff: I’d pick up a piece with my thumb and forefinger, holding it about two inches from the base. If it stayed rigid, it was okay to eat. If it flopped over, it was rotten or overcooked. Pieces that failed the test were discarded.

  This asparagus stayed firm, so I moved it toward my mouth. With a quick snap I bit off the tip, which is the best part. Asparagus is best when it’s minced, so I worked my teeth like a gasoline-powered hedge clipper as I continued to slide the stalk into my mouth. In a single smooth motion, I ingested the stem down to my fingers. That’s the point where it gets tough and stringy, so I dropped the stub on my plate and moved on to the next piece.

  When I get rolling, I can clean up a pound of good asparagus in no time at all.

  There are some foods that are really best when chopped finely. By that time, I had many years of practice using my front teeth for that. I had mastered the art of mincing, biting just hard enough to get the job done but not so hard that my teeth chattered. My teeth moved fast enough that nothing but the smallest bits made it into my mouth. In that fashion, I’d convert a long stringy food like asparagus to something with the consistency of creamed corn.

  I made it through eight or ten pieces before glancing at my date. She was looking at me with an expression
of such horror that I quickly spit out the last unchewed bite. Had I just eaten a bug or a worm? If so, I couldn’t taste it, and the uneaten asparagus looked perfectly fine. But no, the problem was something else entirely.

  “We don’t eat asparagus with our fingers! If my mother saw you, she would go ballistic.” Luckily, Amy’s mother was far away. But the way Amy looked, I was unable to continue eating. It was obvious that I had committed a serious food-ingestion blunder, and I was horribly ashamed and embarrassed.

  Some guys would have tried to bluff their way out of the situation: “Everyone in Flat Rock eats asparagus with their fingers.” However, I knew better. With a sick feeling, I realized I had committed a major social faux pas that any well-domesticated child should have been trained to avoid. I was now an adult. Sophisticated grown-ups were not supposed to make mistakes like that.

  But what, exactly, was my mistake?

  I had developed particular food-eating rituals that gave me comfort. I separated everything on my plate so different dishes didn’t touch; I ate foods in order of best to worst; and I minced my vegetables. By adulthood my system of mincing asparagus was firmly embedded in my psyche. None of the people in my life had ever paid any attention to it, so I’d come to assume it was a harmless and comforting behavior. That night, when I saw Amy’s reaction, I saw how wrong I was. It was awful. I was totally humiliated.

  That is one of the big problems with rituals, and it’s a reason to be really careful with them as you get older. You can find something comforting, and it makes you feel good—until the moment you realize how the rest of the world sees it. At that moment, you realize you look like some kind of freak; your security falls apart and you are left with nothing but embarrassment.

  There are other issues with rituals when it’s time to get a job. That’s when you are expected to conform to other people’s nutty ideas and processes, or else you get fired. It’s not an Asperger thing at all. It’s what people call “corporate behavior,” something immeasurably worse. I learned this when I took my first real job, at Milton Bradley, and they handed me a thing called the employee handbook. What I found inside was nothing more than a bizarre set of rituals, each backed up with a threat. Do this, in exactly this way, or get dismissed! Strange as my rituals were, theirs were worse. But they were the bosses, so their rituals mattered and mine didn’t.

  I still find it’s easy to get into ritualized behavior. For me, it often seems easier and safer to repeat something I’m comfortable doing than to try new things. That’s how I end up doing the same stuff over and over again. Most things I do are totally innocuous, like going to the gym and walking on one particular treadmill in the same program every visit. But I just never know how others will perceive my nonstandard but innocent actions. As the asparagus experience showed, I can never tell when some long-invisible ritual will rise up to bite me just when I least expect it.

  It’s funny that I have learned to be wary of my ritualized behaviors while I’ve observed that nypicals do many of the same things, yet they just laugh and call them habits. Which is it? Habit or ritual? There are days when I feel like I started life marginalized and I’ll never escape that trap. Nypical behavior is the subject of innocent joking, while mine is discussed by serious-looking psychologists with long-stemmed pipes.

  So what do I do about it?

  I try to pay attention to what I do and watch how people perceive it. I’m really sensitive to stares, snickers, and snide remarks. I’ve learned to break up and vary my routines, and it’s made life much better for me. Instead of ordering an iced tea every day, I sometimes order a soda or sparkling water. But not too often … I’ve decided some rituals, like ordering iced tea most of the time, are harmless, and I’m content to leave them alone.

  Here’s a good rule of thumb: Your own rituals are okay as long as they don’t interfere with your responsibilities in daily life, or make you the subject of teasing or ridicule. Rituals become a problem whenever they prevent you from doing the stuff you’re supposed to do, or when they get you in trouble. And it’s not a two-way street, because certain of other people’s rituals—often called laws—must be acknowledged and obeyed, or else.

  If you’re lucky, you’ll figure that out early and with minimal embarrassment.

  What’s in a Name?

  For as long as I can remember, people have commented on my strange names for things. Like Varmint, my little brother. Or Bugle, the beagle dog. Or Small Animal, our cat. Well, those names aren’t strange to me. My names are all based on logic, reason, and knowledge. It’s not my fault if others can’t follow my thinking.

  I have always named the people and pets in my life. Perhaps it began as one way a powerless toddler could exert a measure of control over his environment. My mom said, “This is Clarence, our new dog,” and I said, “Hi, Poodle,” from that moment on. Maybe my choice of Poodle as a name meant more to me than the abstract Clarence. Or perhaps it’s some mechanism I don’t understand. Whatever it is, it’s pretty widespread. Many people—kids and adults—share my naming habit. For example, my friend Bob Jeffway does this, too. He renamed all our colleagues when we worked at Milton Bradley. We ended up with a mix of names, his and mine. Our names became part of the flow of our conversation, totally supplanting the names our colleagues had arrived with. We used his names with total ease and comfort.

  “Where’s Mister Chips?”

  “He’s in a meeting with The Snout and Johnson Omni.”

  In a sense, the names became a sub-language, shared by a few geek engineers. For Bob and me, naming started in childhood and it continues today. But it’s unpredictable; not everyone gets a name, and name choices can vary widely. One person will always be George, while another is forever The Plankster. In addition to many people, I sometimes name things and parts of things.

  Hind legs are a good example. “People do not have hind legs!” My fourth-grade teacher was very firm on that matter. But she was wrong, I explained. People do have hind legs. We walk on them! Dogs walk on all four legs, and we’re more evolved than dogs, so we walk on hind legs alone. But we still have four. We just call them something different. We call our forelegs “arms.”

  And then there are the things at the end of the legs. “Paws” is a universal descriptor for them. Every four-legged animal I know has something you can rightly call a paw at the end of each leg. It’s only us humans that call the things at the ends of our forelegs “hands.” Well, maybe us and some chimps, too. Actually, we don’t know what chimps call anything, because we can’t speak their language. It’s just us calling the things at the end of chimp forelegs hands. It’s actually kind of presumptuous, if you ask me. When I was a kid, though, no one asked me. They just told me I was wrong. Well, I wasn’t. Just because some people call the things at the end of our forelegs/arms hands does not make “paws” a wrong term. It’s just different.

  That was a very frustrating situation for me. I knew I was right, but my teacher persisted in claiming I was wrong. And everyone knows the teacher always wins. Even when she is shockingly, obviously, horribly wrong.

  I used to think “fur” was another troublesome word, one where my usage was right and all my teachers were wrong. “Scratch my fur,” I’d say when I wanted to get my head scratched. I assumed fur was the hairy stuff covering all mammals to a greater or lesser extent.

  However, I subsequently learned that I was wrong. All mammals have hair, but they don’t all have fur. When the hair grows in a mix of short, medium, and long fibers for the purpose of providing better insulation or weather-proofing, we call that multilayered hair fur. When hair grows in one length until shearing—like it does on humans or poodles—we call it hair. And when it emerges in oily, curly form from sheep, we call it wool. That, in a nutshell, is why mink coats, wigs, and sweaters look different. They are all made of hair, but they are not the same as my hair, though they may be similar to yours.

  Today, I can admit to that innocent oversight or misinterpretation without shame
. Humans do not have fur. But dogs have hair. However, I’ve been calling the stuff on my head fur for so long that I’m not about to change now, even if it is technically incorrect. So fur it stays.

  Sometimes I surprise people with the names I give places, too. The Repair Center is a good example. We have one here in our town. The sign on the door says, UNIVERSITY HEALTH SERVICES. Some people call it that. They say, “I have a cold. I’m going to head over to Health Services and get something for it.”

  To me, that whole passage is nonsensical. First, they are not heading over there to get something for the cold. They are heading over there to get something to do away with the cold. Their goal for the cold is not betterment, as “get something” implies. It’s eradication. Elimination. Extermination. Why don’t they come out and say so?

  Second, the idea of going to anything called Health Services sounds funny. The term doesn’t describe what the place does. I’ll bet fewer than one percent of the people who walk into that place do so in search of health service. The other ninety-nine percent are seeking repair. Cure of disease. Stitching of wounds. Setting of broken limbs. Removal of warts. To me, those are all repair operations. That’s why my name for the place makes perfect sense. It is a Repair Center.

  I knew that from the moment I first walked though the doorway many years ago. Why can’t other people see it that way? Instead, nypicals often choose an arbitrary or incomplete name for the Repair Center. They say something like “doctor’s office.” It is a mystery to me how anyone could look at a three-story structure that obviously houses a few hundred people and call it a mere doctor’s office. After all, the word “office” usually refers to a single room. At best, it’s a small structure containing a few rooms, one of which is the office proper.