Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

There was no denying that Dr. Finch was eccentric. He lived in a big old Victorian house near the center of town that was always swarming with friends and patients. They all seemed to worship him. I was a little dubious of that, but he’d gotten results for me, so I left it alone. My grandfather never stopped telling me, “Watch out for that Finch …,” and I heard rumors about him from people in town, but he was the first shrink with whom I’d had a positive experience, and he did right by me in those early years. It was a shame things went so wrong a few years later.

That Christmas, I got something new: an electronics kit! My parents gave me a RadioShack computer kit with forty-two components, including three transistors, three dials, and a meter. In a black plastic case. Easy assembly. Batteries not included.

My new computer was really an electronic slide rule,

Dr. Edwards taught electrical engineering at UMass, and he opened the door for me to a whole new world. He got me into the labs in Engineering East, the university’s engineering building,

They adopted me as a pet in the engineering labs. I studied there after school almost every day, continuing with an aggressive home study program at night.

Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together.

I could visualize the equations in my head, but the ones in my head seemed to have nothing in common with those on the page.

When I saw a wave in my mind, I associated it with a particular sound.

my interests in electronics and music began to converge.

I was full of ideas for integrating my stash of former television pieces into the Showman amplifier my grandmother had bought me. My ideas worked. My Fender amp got louder, a lot louder, and it began to sound hotter.

I started modifying amplifiers for local musicians, and they told other musicians. I also started fixing broken equipment.

Soon the musicians and I moved from changing the sound of the amplifier to creating entirely new sound effects. In those days, reverb and tremolo were the only effects available to most musicians. I began to experiment, producing new effects, new sounds. I also began experimenting with transistorized circuits.

I spent my free evenings at local concerts, and became part of the scene. Club owners, bouncers, and even bartenders began to recognize me; musicians talked to me and everyone seemed to respect me. I felt good about myself, and I felt even better when I discovered that many of them were misfits like me. Maybe I had finally found a place I’d fit in.

“Your mother has had a psychotic break,” the doctor told me.

Another thing I found in the AV room was the girl who became my first wife. Mary Trompke was another shy, damaged kid like me. Something about her fascinated me. She was very smart, but she didn’t say much. Still, I was determined to get to know her. We began to talk. She would sit with me as I worked on record players and movie projectors. Soon she started to repair things, too, and we would work side by side on headsets and tape decks. I began walking her home every

I named her Little Bear.

As I got older, my practical jokes grew more sophisticated. When I was fourteen, my guidance counselor said, “John, some of your tricks are sick. They are evil. They indicate deep-seated emotional problems.” It was true that some of my pranks had taken on a nasty edge. My sadness at how other kids had treated me all my life had turned to anger.

After a few days’ “vacation,” we returned home. While we were gone, the police had arrested my father and locked him in the Northampton State Hospital for observation. When they let him out a week or so later, he was subdued and seemed to have less potential for violence.

the ambulance arrived to take my mother to the state hospital

The school had such a strong desire to be rid of me that they stepped up to the plate with a solution. “If you take the GED and score at least seventy-five percent, we’ll treat you as a graduate and you can leave.”

It was nice living in the Shutesbury woods with my friend Paul,

Little Bear told me she never wanted to speak to me again, and she wouldn’t even tell me why.

my parents finally separated. Varmint stayed with my mother, who moved to an apartment in town. Then, a few months later, my father moved to an apartment and my mother and Varmint returned to the house. The dog and I remained at the house through all of that, except for periodic forays into the woods. Now that my parents had split, my mother decided she was bisexual. She took up with a woman her own age for a while, but then she got involved with a woman a year younger than me.

the doctor’s medical license was revoked in 1986.

After one show, Peter Newland, the lead singer and flute player, came to talk to me. “You could move in with us and do music all the time,” he said. “We could even pay you. Eighty dollars a week.” With that, I joined Fat and had a home. The band members lived together in an old farmhouse in Ashfield, up in the Berkshires.

“Stand up, mon! Say cheese for the camera. It’s your mug shot, mon!”

some seeds in the bottom of a bag. Marijuana seeds meant grower.

She told me that she’d left me when one of her friends made up an ugly story about me. She later learned it was all a lie, but by then it was too late. We both regretted the lost time.

I got another big break two months later: a job with a national sound company. One with big equipment. The kind used in stadiums, not barrooms. The first to hire me was Britannia Row Audio, the sound company that Pink Floyd had formed to rent out their equipment when they were not on tour.

Ace had carved a hole in the front of the guitar and embedded a smoke bomb. He had the idea that he’d set the bomb off and the guitar would vanish in a cloud of smoke while he played his solo. It was a good idea, but the implementation was less than optimal.

I had a girlfriend and I had a car. I had escaped my deranged parents. I was working for one of the hottest bands in the world. I was even making good money, when I worked. I’d gone from eighty dollars a week with Fat to eighty dollars every few hours. At long last, I was really making it. At least, that was how I felt when things went well for me. When they didn’t, I heard the little voices in my head. You’re just a fraud. This stuff will never work. What will they say when they come to get it and it’s in a million pieces on your bench? Sometimes, working on the KISS guitars, I would get all tense and worried. But I would just work harder.

Many people with Asperger’s have an affinity for machines. Sometimes I think I can relate better to a good machine than any kind of person. I’ve thought about why that is, and I’ve come up with a few ideas. One thought is that I control the machines. We don’t interact as equals. No matter how big the machine, I am in charge. Machines don’t talk back. They are predictable. They don’t trick me, and they’re never mean.

It was probably the proudest moment of my life, seeing the audience respond to my guitar like that. It was the hit of the show, and it was on the TV news that night. I was ecstatic. For once, everyone loved me. Backstage after the show, Ace was all over me with questions about the guitars. “Ampie, can you make one that shoots rockets? Can you make one shoot nine-millimeter pistol ammunition? Can you make a laser guitar? Can we make the smoking guitar fly? Can we blow it up at the end of the song?”

By the end of the 1970s, despite my success with KISS, I was barely making a living.

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS BE PART OF THE TEAM DESIGNING NEXT SEASON’S HOTTEST ELECTRONIC GAMES That was the job for me.

“Milton Bradley’s electronics division is pleased to offer you the position of Staff Engineer in our Advanced R&D Group. Your starting salary will be $25,000 per year.”

my group was racing to introduce the first talking game, and I had been given the task of designing a system to collect speech and turn it into digital data. I designed the analog parts of the system, and Klaus did the digital work. We used one of the first microcomputers—an IMSAI 8080—to collect and store the data. It was a Rube Goldberg kind of contraption, with hundreds of parts tied together with wire wrap and cables, spread across a bunch of breadboards on a workbench in my lab.

I’m sure my solution to Microvision’s static problem saved the company hundreds of thousand of dollars,

By 1988, I had moved through two more jobs, and I had swallowed all I could take of the corporate world. I had come to accept what my annual performance reviews said. I was not a team player. I had trouble communicating with people. I was inconsiderate. I was rude. I was smart and creative, yes, but I was a misfit. I was thoroughly sick of all the criticism. I was sick of life. Literally. I had come down with asthma, and attacks were sending me to the emergency room every few months.

I don’t think I’m a savant, just a highly intelligent Aspergian. But I suspect I was on the edge of becoming a savant when I was a small child, and my later ability to visualize mathematical functions and the operation of circuits was savantlike.

I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.

there was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them. Some of my designs were true masterpieces of economy and functionality.

I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others.

In the corporate world, I had started out as an engineer, making $25,000 a year. Back in the 1970s, that was pretty good money. As I moved up, the pay increased. Staff Engineer, Manager of Advanced Development, Assistant Director of Planning, Director of Engineering. And, finally, General Manager of Power Systems. After ten years, I was making $100,000 a year.

Ten years later, my job was managing people and projects. I enjoyed the status and respect, but I wasn’t good at management, and I didn’t like it. The problem was that if I wanted to be an engineer, I’d be looking at a 50 percent cut in pay and a job in some other company.

In 1989, I quit my job and became a car dealer. That meant taking out a second mortgage against my house.

I started to buy secondhand European cars, fix them, and sell them. In addition, I serviced what I sold. My first acquisition was a five-year-old Mercedes 300SD, which I cleaned up, serviced, and sold for a profit of $1,500. It seemed I was off to a great start.

I chose to work on high-end cars like Rolls-Royces and Land Rovers

After almost twenty years in business, Robison Service now employs a dozen people.

“John,” he said, “I was hoping you would be willing to join the Board of Corporators of the Bank.” I was stunned. Me? On the board of the bank? “I would be honored”