[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 2 -- His Biscuits Ain't Quite Done

I was fortunate that the school I attended in West Covina, California, was an exceptionally good school. At the time, California had the best school system in the country. This was in the sixties, long before California slipped into the dismal state it’s in today.

Sometime around the second grade, the school noticed I was learning a lot slower than the other students, especially when it came to reading and writing. I was examined and probed by a number of men who made me feel like a lab rat.

“You’re autistic.” Adjusting for my mother’s Brooklyn accent, I thought she’d said “artistic.” I stopped drawing one of those intricately detailed scribbles I used to occupy myself with, to say, “I know I’m artistic,” which was my way of expressing how pleased I was with the diagnosis.

Over the next seven years I was also diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), MBD (minimal brain damage), ASD (autism spectrum disorders), BD (behavioral disorder), and a few other alphabet soup combos I can’t remember now.

They had no idea how I’d gotten that way. After all, mother had followed all the medical advice she’d been given. I was born in the most modern manner, fed the most modern food, vaccinated against all the diseases of the day, and raised with the latest techniques proven to enhance development, according to the experts that wrote the books. I should’ve been as close to perfect as a human could get. It was a complete mystery.

My parents must have been beside themselves to learn this, but it must have also been a relief to them that I at least had a medically approved and defined diagnosis. This sounded better than “well, the boy’s just strange,” and held a promise, no matter how far off or ill conceived, that help from experts was on its way.

My parents then explained to me what they really meant was I was “different,” which also had no effect on me as I was already understanding that. Their diagnosis confirmed what I’d suspected all along, and that the rest of the world was working hard and slow to discover what seemed painfully obvious. Their explanation of the analysis of my condition and what it meant went in one ear and out the other. I continued to see the world as I chose and grew less patient with those who defined my perceptions as a problem.

What they called symptoms, I called “So what?” Yeah, sure I would go absolutely “mental” if anyone touched me behind the ears or tried to make me wear a tie or carelessly plopped food onto my plate. I also “suffered” from some other odd ailments, such as insomnomania, which is when one wakes up insanely violent, especially when woken up by someone else. I say “suffered” because that’s how all this was described, but for me, the solution was simple: Stop touching me, stop putting ties on me, stop mixing my food, stop waking me up, just stop doing stuff I hate!

Why, my seven-year-old brain pondered, are adults so demanding and stupid? To the rest of the world I was, I suspect, an inveterate, incorrigible monster of a child.

To this day, I have the same “why are adults so stupid?” reaction when I hear about ridiculous, nutty arguments ranging from gay sex to the war on drugs, or war on terrorism, or really, just war itself, and I am even more convinced that these homophobic warmongers, using them as an example, have serious mental health problems. The fact that they are elected to office downright terrifies me.

One consideration I did enjoy was having my food served on plates with separators. I seemed to have won one battle; still, I had no patience to endure their seemingly pathological attempts to persuade me to be more “normal.” I knew what “normal” was, and it wasn’t my problem that no one else did.

I refused to look people in the eyes, had little interest in things I was supposed to be interested in, had only one friend, was delayed in learning to talk and walk, and refused to touch anyone in public, even holding hands, until I was in my late twenties.

I definitely had many of the symptoms of Asperger’s and autism, even though I refused, then and now, to accept all of them as problematic. These “disabilities” were so unknown back then that being labeled as such did little more than get you a seat on the short yellow bus. Today these people are “in the spectrum of autism.” Back then, they were just “retarded.”

It’s said that verbal instructions don’t work well with people with Asperger’s or autism. This was certainly the case for me. More often than not, I would hear a person talking and it made little more sense than random noise. They may as well have been reciting random words from the dictionary. All I heard were individual words, each with its own meaning, but strung together they had no relationship to one another. Very quickly I learned to give little to no priority to what people were saying, because it made no sense. When I did understand what was being demanded of me, I often thought it to be an invalid instruction, and I responded much like a computer today when you try to tell it to do something it considers null and void. The computer tells you “No,” and if you insist, it crashes. They’ve invented a new disorder for this type of behavior called oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), characterized by negative, disobedient, and often hostile behavior toward adults and authority figures.

My apparent lack of willingness to do what I was told, especially in school, resulted in the classic “You’re not trying,” which really seemed to mean “You’re not trying to do it my way.” I often found no reason why I should do it their way, assuming I even understood what they wanted from me. Whether it was “Clean your room” from my parents, or “Give us half of all the money you make” from the IRS, or “Inject your children” from the school system demanding my children get vaccinated, I was, in fact, trying very hard not to do it their way.

I was an unwitting pioneer in “neurological diversity.” I had so many disorders that they had no idea what to do with me. In an attempt to do something, anything, they classified me as “legally blind,” which afforded me special attention, such as getting all my schoolbooks on vinyl records from the Library for the Blind in Washington D.C. It was the snail-mail version of the Internet. Of course, I didn’t listen to my schoolbooks. I ordered material that actually interested me, like Jack London stories.

The school recognized I was part of a new wave of learning-disabled children. They didn’t know why this was happening, but to implicate the American lifestyle, on which my generation was weaned, in a crime against humanity would’ve been commie talk. All they could do was slap labels on these children, put them into The System, and hope for the best.

Life continued this way for the next two years. I learned that all I needed to do was withdraw from and avoid all things unpleasant as best I could and, hopefully, everything would be just fine.

To give a more real-world example of the kind of bubble that I, like most spectrum children to one degree or another, lived in, was when I was six years old. I’d joined the church choir. I enjoyed singing very much, though I had no interest or connection with whatever we sang about. Music was just harmonic sounds to me. The choir sat behind the minister during his sermons. When we weren’t singing we were expected to sit, motionless and quiet. I would quickly become bored, but there was little I could do to entertain myself. One thing I could do was turn my hand into a gun, hold it out in front of me, and point it randomly into the sea of well-dressed WASPs. I would pull the “trigger,” making the necessary sound effects with my voice, then move on to the next random target. I had absolutely no concept of the hundreds of faces staring back at me; they were not people. They could have been mannequins or statues or bags of potatoes. Their response to my actions, their thoughts or emotions, never penetrated my bubble. WASPs that they all were, I’m sure none of them said anything to my parents beyond, “My, my, what a spirited child you have there,” rather than what they were really thinking, which was probably more like, “Your kid’s a fucking nutjob and will probably grow up to be a psycho killer!”

I was gently removed from the choir. Consequently, I had to sit in the pews with the rest of my targets. It was intolerably boring; it felt like torture. Maybe that’s why I used to sit next to the window and catch flies, tear off one of their wings, and drop them into the window-well, where their frantic attempts to fly would create an amplified echoing buzz. All those unfortunate enough to be seated near me would have to listen to this buzz-of-suffering-and-death throughout the one-hour sermon on (I assume) peace, love, and Jesus. I was generally not prone to torturing animals and insects, but I did it during church service because I felt I was being tortured, and anything that entered my tortured bubble suffered the same fate as me.

In this way my bubble was a “magic” bubble. Whatever penetrated my bubble, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, would be magnified back into the world. This is not exclusively an autistic spectrum quality; this is true for everyone, as everyone’s reality is a reflection of their perceptions and experiences. The difference is, the bubbles of normal folks are less dense.

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The concept of a spectrum, in fact, applies perfectly here in terms of the bubbles we all live within. On one end of the spectrum there’s a bubble so hard, so dense that nothing can get through. On the other end of the spectrum there’s a bubble so thin and undefined that is doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes. Imagine this spectrum spread across a bell curve. The apex in the middle is what we call “normal.” To the right of the curve, which is on the denser side of the bubble spectrum, is Asperger’s syndrome, a bit more, high functioning autism, more, classic autism, more, severe autism, more, and then the curve dips below the threshold of viability for people to exist in this reality.

On the other side of the apex, moving slightly left of the less dense side of the spectrum, we have Williams syndrome; slightly more, histrionic personality disorder, followed by, possibly, narcissism and megalomania, or other conditions that result from one’s inability to disassociate one’s identify from their surroundings. Too far left and that too dips below the threshold of viability.[1]

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The traditional techniques of using blame, shame, fear, judgment, and guilt were the primary ways adults dealt with these “problem children” in those days. Of course, that only made things worse. If I felt someone was disrespecting me, I removed them from my reality, even if they were a teacher, or, later in life, an officer of the law and even the law itself. My inability to cooperate with the irrational expectations of socially defined normalcy, combined with my attempts to retain some dignity and autonomy, labelled me as “defiant.” At first this was of little consequence, but because my defiance was born out of a shamed sense of disconnection, a feeling of being unheard, and a sense of unjust isolation, its seeds had fertile ground into which its roots could grow deep and strong.