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a random walk with asperger's syndrome

my developmental journey

Later Teens


In secondary school, my understanding of the quantitative lessons was as crystal clear as my understanding of fiction and literature was opaque. When my teachers were good, I enthusiastically embraced all of the exciting new ideas I was learning in math and science.

I didn't want the spell to break. Like most children, I believed that life was for having fun, and I was simply having far too much fun. I quickly discovered, however, that cognitive receptivity and tendencies toward precociousness are bound to wax and wane at any time and can even shut down completely.

Sometimes I felt like a cork on the ocean. On the one side, I was at the mercy of schools, teachers, curricula and other forces far beyond my control, and on the other, of the rapid and unpredictable opening and closing of my constantly growing and changing mental pathways.

As it is for many teenagers, change, both internal and external, was the only constant in my life.

Fortunately for me, however, once you internalize a mathematical concept, it's yours forever. It's like riding a bicycle.

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Yet social issues continued to bedevil me during those years. After the early-grade-school perfume-on-the-front-porch caper, my next meeting with a female came in the eleventh grade. My parents were out of town, and I had to spend the weekend at the home of a couple who were friends of my family.

As fate would have it, they also ran a local ballet school, which my sister had attended. They asked me if I had a date for Saturday night. I didn't have the nerve to tell them that I had never before been on a date. They made a few calls to their ballet-student friends and arranged for a date.

By a lucky coincidence, I had already bought a couple of tickets to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet that night at the McCarter Theater. I guess that music is a good way of bringing people together. Bud and Audrey drove Brooke Jones and me to the concert. If I remember correctly, she was a ninth or tenth grader at Princeton High School. She was cute; she turned out to be the only blind date I've ever had at whom I'd look more than once. Beginner's luck, I guess.

The musicians, who hadn't seen each other for several months, got carried away in the extended jam part of the program. It was clear that Brooke wasn't much of a jazz fan. Neither was I — I just happened to like Brubeck. She didn't complain, however.

While we were at the concert, Bud and Audrey saw the latest James Bond film, possibly Goldfinger, which they hated. That was around the time that the Bond films started to get cartoonish, outlandish, and self-mocking. The earlier ones had followed the Ian Fleming novels more closely and were intended to be semi-serious thrillers or spy-intrigue films.

In the company of young women, I was a cum laude graduate of the Cro-Magnon School for Grunt-Man Communications. I don't think I said more than five or six intelligible words to Brooke all night. This turned out to be about my average for most of the rest of my youth. I didn't feel comfortable enough with myself or with the situation to say much. On the contrary, I was scared out of my mind.

Years later, after I had gotten in touch with my inner loquaciousness and developed quite an obsession with all things self, they couldn't shut me up, but that's another story. That's a deadly combination, by the way, loquaciousness and love of self. Being a little cagier in my old age, I now know that if you want to get anywhere, you have to at least pretend to be interested in her. Even so, having this knowledge and putting it into successful practice are two different things.

We arrived at Brooke's house, and she got out of the car. I didn't know that protocol called for me to walk her to her doorstep. (I must have been absent the day that particular topic was covered in our Dating Behaviors of the Native Sapiens seminar at school.) The loud silence in the car, however, made me feel uneasy.

You can't say that I had no feelings or awareness of others at that stage of my development. The light finally went on in my head. I bolted out of the car and walked Brooke the remaining distance to her door. I don't recall what, if anything, I said to her before we parted ways, but I do remember the episode as awkward and unpleasant.

I never saw Brooke again. The good news is that you only have to go on your first date once, and you only have to suffer the sinking feeling of initial inadequacy in the bottom of your stomach once. The bad news is that it hasn't gotten much better since.

Later that year, a childhood friend invited me to her coming-out party. Christina was about sixteen, a year younger than me. Our parents had lived in the same apartment building in northern New Jersey when both couples had small children. I have few recollections of playing with her, but I gathered that the adults thought we were cute together. You know how adults get sentimental about such things. They want you to suffer marriage and children as they have suffered.

In any case, Christina asked me to be one of her escorts. I guess that was her way of reaching out to a friend she hadn't seen in years. I showed up at her house, which was about an hour from Princeton, and off we went to the ball. I didn't know anyone there except for her and her father. I spent the evening standing alone in my stiff, rented tuxedo, trying to disappear into the woodwork, wondering how I'd gotten myself into such a mess, and wishing I were dead.

After the ball, Christina, one of her other escorts and I drove back to her house. I sat silently in her living room as she conversed with the other guy for what seemed like an eternity. I felt about as animated as the stuffed chair I was slowly sinking into. The situation had freaked me out so badly that I was unable to say anything.

That was the last time I ever wore a monkey suit.

I stayed overnight at Christina's house, and the next day she and I went to a party at the home of one of her friends. All I can remember about it was wishing I could get out of there and forget I'd ever heard of social activities. I don't think I said more than two or three words to anyone, including Christina, the whole weekend. I failed then, and continue to fail today, to understand why people torture themselves with these kinds of events, especially when they could just as easily be living separate lives, unmolested and unharassed.

At that point in my development, I had mastered such conversational tools as "hello" and "goodbye," and "please" and "thank you." The hard part, however, was the unscripted part, the moment in a conversation when the pleasantries were over. It was then that you needed to pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues and improvise or feel your way through the encounter. It seemed that I always panicked and my mind always went blank.

I learned, however, not to voice my feelings on this subject, as people who were older and wiser than me would quickly shout me down. Everybody knew that social events were, by definition, fun, not to mention critically important in the ordering of human affairs. Why would anyone assert otherwise, unless he were simply trying to cause trouble?

Christina sent me a letter a few days later saying in part that her friends thought that I was okay and that I was a nice guy. I think she sensed my awkwardness and was trying to give my ego a boost.

Having no idea what to say or how to account for my feelings or behavior, I never responded to Christina's letter and haven't heard from her since. Sometimes I think I might have been better off marrying a woman like her, someone with whom I shared a little history. That is, the equivalent of an arranged marriage. Perhaps my life would have had a little more stability, meaning, and purpose.

I know better, of course. The worst thing you can do when you're having emotional problems is to expect a relationship to cure you or save you. That usually has disastrous results.

It was clear that formal social events weren't going to be my cup of tea, so I skipped the proms at school. In any case, I wouldn't have known whom to invite. Having attended all-boys schools from the eighth grade through the twelfth grade, I had yet to make any female friends on my own in or out of school. I didn't want anyone, especially not my parents, to interfere with something so personal as my social life.

It often seemed that no one was there to help me with my problems. No one in my family or at school ever spoke to me about what was going on, and I was too embarrassed and ashamed to bring it up myself.

To her credit, however, my mother did notice that I wasn't going to the proms. She assured me that girls liked to attend these kinds of events and would likely be receptive to an invitation. I appreciated the feminine perspective, as it had never occurred to me to think about the subject of dating from any perspective other than my own. I was too wrapped up in my own problems. I was also convinced I had little going for me and was unlikely ever to become a desirable mate.

My mother never asked me why I felt awkward in social situations. It's a good thing, because I was just as bewildered as anyone else, and wouldn't have known how to answer. I'm old now, and I still don't know why relationships are so hard.

True to stereotype, my father remained oblivious to the matter. We never talked about love, sex, or marriage. Not that I've ever had much practical use for such knowledge. Maybe he knew I was already too far gone.

It was clear from an early age that certain pleasures in life, such as socializing, reading fiction, or physical activities that required a sense of rhythm, would be unavailable to me.

Despite my troubles, I wasn't yet done with my teenage social activities. I did have one more dating experience while still in school. The following year, my senior year, I dated the same girl twice — a first. Katy Kennedy lived on the same street as my family and her parents were friendly with mine.

I'm proud to report that I placed the phone calls myself, another first. They didn't kill me, as I'd once feared. I was moving up the ladder of social adaptability — not rapidly, but moving. I was becoming much more socially sophisticated and adept. Katy and I went once to the movies and once to an event at school. I don't think we had much in common, however, as I haven't seen or heard from her since.

I'm glad you only have to grow up once, go to school once, and go through teenage emotional turmoil once. Once is enough.

As I said, it never occurred to me that life was about anything other than following adult instructions. That is, until about midway through my senior year. Someone once jokingly suggested that the external part of my life fell apart because Bob Dylan had gone electric, dashing the hopes and dreams of a generation of folk purists. (That had happened the previous summer, the summer of 1965.)

Insofar as external events may have been involved, it's more likely that, at my eighteenth birthday, I was now old enough to be drafted into a shooting war. In a tangible way, I'd become an adult.

(This is no joke. According to statistics derived from government archives, twenty-seven US servicepeople who share my birthday and birth year died in the Vietnam War. They were among the 837 dead who share the same birth month and year as me. Well over half [56%] of the dead were fellow first-wave Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1949.)

I discovered that you didn't need to spend your life trying to meet others' expectations. This is a valuable piece of knowledge they'll never teach you in school. The problem in my case, however, was that I had no fixed goal or set of goals of my own with which to replace others' goals.

It came as a surprise that, for the first time, I had something approaching a normal social life over the summer after I graduated from prep school. I had had no regular social life while in school; neither would I have one during my first years of maladjustment to college. The summer between the two, however, was different.

You might say that I was in transition, belonging neither to the world of the naive schoolboy nor to that of the more sophisticated young adult. For two or three long, carefree months, all things social seemed possible.

My parents were out of the house for much of the summer, and I fell into a group consisting mostly of boys and girls who were around my age and the ages of my brothers, two and four years behind me academically.

Recreational tennis was my favorite sport, though I've never played competitively. One important aspect of sports like tennis, golf, or bridge is that they're good socially — you meet people. Don't let anyone tell you that love means nothing in the sport of tennis.

I had a brief dalliance that summer with another recreational tennis player, a rising junior at Princeton High. Judi had recently returned with her family from Nairobi, Kenya, where her Dad had been an officer in the Agency for International Development. He was in Princeton to do some advanced study in international relations, before moving on to his next assignment in Washington, DC.

Judi's home life, however, was troubled. Her Mom was undergoing treatments for a nervous condition, and was largely out of commission as a functioning parent. Electric shock was then the standard treatment for a variety of conditions that would probably be treated today with drugs. Meanwhile, Judi's Dad was bravely soldiering onward as the primary caregiver for her and her younger sister.

Looking back, I think that both Judi and I may have been depressed.

I tried to kiss her, my first kiss. This was my big moment, the one you'll never forget. My heart was beating so fast, and I was so clumsy with her, that she became frightened and ran. I had panicked at a time when remaining cool was the most important thing. I was having a great deal of trouble managing my heavily conflicted feelings about love and sex. That was the first time I had had any feelings to speak of toward a girl, and I'd found them to be quite overwhelming and unmanageable.

As I was getting ready to leave for college, my mother asked me to be sure to have some fun while there. That's right, that's a parent who's encouraging a child to attend more parties while in college.

I corresponded occasionally with Judi that year, but by then the thrill was gone. I was clinging unhealthfully to a relationship that was already over, a bad habit I struggle with today.

Nevertheless, I wanted to believe that I'd eventually outgrow my awkwardness. After all, everybody knew that when you grow up, you become much more mature, you gain a wealth of experience, and you leave behind your childish and adolescent behaviors.

I believed that the cure for my social ills would be repetition. Sure, I was uptight on my first few dates — everyone is to one extent or another — but I was convinced that by my millionth date, everything would be old hat, and I'd be fine.

I was wrong.

Although I have trouble with all relationships, the romantic ones remain the most difficult. To this day, I have trouble reading and understanding the signals associated with flirting and love. Signs that are universal and unmistakable across all cultures, we are told, not to mention fundamental to the process of ordering human society and giving meaning to our lives.

I've always hated it when people touched me. I'm not referring here only to physical touch. I hate any kind of intimacy. It should be obvious that this state of affairs has its consequences in relationships.

Some misguided friends denied my feelings, saying that I couldn't or shouldn't have felt what I felt. It's hard to decide which is greater, the arrogance of assuming you know what someone else is feeling, or the indifference about the effects that one's words, however well-meaning, may have on others.

I think that most people with any kind of disability or different ability will tell you that the misunderstanding, condescension, and denial you get from others is often worse than the disability itself.

As a teenager I had trouble relating to the world outside the home. I often wanted to say, "Explain it to me as if I were from outer space." Take the fact that women who have multiple partners are routinely referred to as prostitutes. To me, having sex out of desire or out of love (that is, with feeling) is the opposite of having sex for money (that is, without feeling). Not to mention that it's only women, and never men, who are so reviled. I'm not socially conscious or socially sophisticated enough to understand the ridiculous biases and bigotries of the outside culture.



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