John Elder Robison - A Complete Correct Human

 

 

Well, there I was years before, 15 years old, I didn't have any friends. I was failing every one of my classes at Amherst High School. I was in the western part of the state. You know, I never knew what to say or do. I couldn't tell what other people were thinking. I always seemed to say the wrong thing and I thought I said something nice to make them smile, and instead I pissed them off. 

 

It was the same with my schoolwork. My teachers would give me work to do, and either I didn't understand it and I couldn't do it at all, or I understood it all too well. And frankly, it was stupid. You wouldn't do it either. [audience laughter] I told them that. They just did the only thing they could and they flunked me.

 

Anyway, I could see I wasn't getting anywhere, and I resolved to drop out of school and do something else. This was the 1970s, and I had a guidance counselor. And in his supportive way, he says to me, “Boy, you drop out of school. Even the army isn't going to take you, because Vietnam's coming to an end and they won't take high school dropouts and losers.” And so, encouraged by that advice, [audience laughter] I decided that I would do what millions of other people did. Running off to the circus is what they did in the last century. But in the 1970s, kids like me, we dreamed of joining a rock and roll band. 

 

Well, millions of young people dreamed of being that guitar player, being a singer up on stage. I didn't have any friends. There's no way I was going to be friends with a million people out there in the audience and I didn't have a dream of being the singer and the star on stage. Instead, what I had was an interest in electronics. I had taught myself how to fix and repair and modify and eventually build guitar amplifiers and sound effects. So, where all those other kids thought they could become the rock and roll superstars and they ended up waiting on tables, I thought I'd be the engineer that would make their amplifiers work. 

 

I never didn't have a job, and I joined local bands and I started working for bigger and bigger bands. I got hired by a company called Britannia Row, who was back then Pink Floyd's sound company. And that brought me out here to Boston playing what I thought was big rock and roll. I was right down the street here at the Orpheum Theater with the Kinks and with Talking Heads and Roxy Music and one English act after another. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

So, one day in the studio down there, this fellow comes in-- We're doing some work with him. He comes in, takes out a guitar and he starts digging at it with a chisel. I had always been unable to deal with other people, but I had a great love of machinery and I couldn't stand to see him destroying that guitar. I wondered what was the matter with him. I went over and I asked him, and he told me he wanted to make the guitar blow fire. I just was thinking, well, I better get it out of his hands before this crazy musician destroys it. I said, “Well, I could do that, and I could do it professionally.” [audience chuckle] 

 

I couldn't ask a girl the time of day, but somehow, I could tell this famous musician that I could fix his guitar professionally. The fellow was Ace Frehley of Kiss. He turns to his roadie after talking to me a few minutes, and he says, "Tex, have Gibson send this guy a guitar right away." [audience chuckle] And so, they did. I took it home. And me and some of my friends, because I had a few friends by then, we got together and we made that guitar blow fire. We went on to make every guitar Kiss put on a stage back then, that shot fire, shot rockets, lit up and exploded, we made them all in Amherst, Massachusetts. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

So, anyway, there I was. I was in my early 20s, and I'd been a total loser in school, but the world of musicians had welcomed me. It didn't matter what I looked like or what I sounded like. I could say the craziest, dumbest things at all. It didn't matter if I couldn't talk to girls, if I could talk to guitars, that was good enough. Because if you could make beautiful music, you were welcome in that world. People started inviting me to do other stuff. They invited me to start making stuff for movies. I got asked to go interview for a job as director of research at this new company back then called Lucasfilms. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I looked to see where they are, and they're in Los Angeles. And there I was in western Massachusetts. [audience chuckle] I thought to myself, these people do not know that I'm a high school dropout. They don't know that I've been lying about my age since I was 16, because the drinking age was 21 to play bars, and I'm going to go get a job out there, and they're going to discover that I'm just a high school dropout and a loser and a total fraud, and they're going to fire me and I'll starve to death out there in California. [audience chuckle] 

 

I know to tell you that today it seems crazy, but that's what I believed. And I thought to myself, well, boy, you can't keep this going. You're just total failure. You've blown it in music, and I better start doing something else. I started a business fixing cars, because I figured fixing automobiles, nobody cared where you came from. I could just do what I wanted. And so, I started doing that. And fixing cars actually gave me something. It gave me the ability to talk to people, because the first time in my life, I had to talk to somebody nicely enough that they would want to come back a second time, [audience laughter] because that's the nature of being in business. 

 

I got to know some of the customers who came in, because our car business prospered. I turned out to have a sort of a touch with automobiles, just like I did with guitars and electronics. I got to know this one fellow who came in over a few years who was a therapist with a Land Rover. [audience laughter] I would say to him, while the Land Rover was in being fixed, I would tell him, “A lot of times, customers come in, and I don't know what to say.” And they say things to me like, “Don't you know how to talk to somebody like me? Don't you realize the customer's always right?” I would think to myself, what kind of crazy shit is that? [audience laughter] The customer is not always right. If you knew the answer, you wouldn't be here. [audience laughter] And so, I thought I was truthful. 

 

He would explain to me that sometimes customers didn't see things the same way I did. [audience laughter] I told him about being sort of lonely and isolated. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. And after a few years of these conversations, he comes in one day and he says to me, “John, I've been thinking about this. I thought about it for a long time, because in therapy world, we got this saying that therapists shouldn't diagnose their friends or pretty soon, they won't have any left.” [audience laughter] But there's this thing everyone's talking about in the mental health community. This is in the 1990s. And he says, “You are the poster boy for it. I thought for a long time about telling you, because you're a successful guy, but you have told me about being lonely and all. And it's this thing called Asperger syndrome, and it's a form of autism.” I was stunned. I had no idea. I had no idea what autism was.

 

I took this book he gave me, and I looked in it and it was like, people with Asperger's can't look other people in the eye. All my life people said that to me. People with Asperger's can't read body language, and they get too close to people and scare them or they turn away when they're talking. People think we're rude and, and people with Asperger's, we say inappropriate things, because we don't have any filters in our heads. Even if we are right about whether the customers are experts, [audience laughter] people don't like to hear that. I read that book of his and I thought to myself, I'm going to, by God, teach myself to act different. I'm going to make myself normal.

 

Well, of course, today a disability community won't say things like that, [audience chuckle] but this was a different time. [audience laughter] So, I resolved to teach myself. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

I resolved to teach myself how to behave. And the difference was like magic. I began to have friends and to be invited places and I started speaking out, because I knew that there were millions of young people growing up who had crummy childhoods just like me, because people told us we were losers and retards and morons and all the other ugly things people said to me. When I started speaking out, people began inviting me to speak out more. People began asking me if I wanted to get involved in research.

 

So, some folks from Harvard Medical School right here in town came to me and they said, "We'd be interested in your autistic perspective in a study that we want to do, to use a new tool to see if we can help autistic people read emotions in other people." They were just looking for me to endorse it. But I heard that and I thought, boy, that's the thing that's been wrong with me all my life. Of course, they didn't know that. And I said, "Where do I sign up?" They brought me into the lab, and they sat me down in front of a computer and they said, "We're going to show you these faces on the screen. And you just have to push the buttons. Were they happy? Are they sad? Are they jealous or are they angry?"

 

The faces flashed in front of me, and I had absolutely no idea what I was seeing. I thought I flunked it before we even started. And they said, "Not at all. What we're going to do is we're going to stimulate you with this machine. It was a thing called TMS that we're going to fire pulses of electromagnetic energy into your head with this. And afterwards, we're going to test you again. We're going to see if the responses change.” They sat me in a chair and they fired this TMS into my head for half an hour. And my brain was just in neutral the whole time and then it stopped. And it's like, "Hurry, come on. We got to get you in, and we got to test you before it wears off."

 

And so, I go over and I sit down and they show me the faces again. It's exactly the same. I got no idea what I'm seeing. [audience laughter] And I thought, what kind of a crazy fool was I to think I could go to a hospital and these mad scientists could do something to me and it would change me? Now, it was Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School. They're really good mad scientists, but even still. [audience laughter] So, I get in my car to drive home. And driving home, I always would listen to old music. I put on this recording of Tavares. Some of you might remember Saturday Night Fever. It was a huge movie back in the 1970s. And Tavares sang More Than a Woman and a number of the other songs on that. 

 

But before they sang in that movie, they sang in clubs right here in Boston, because they were guys from New Bedford. I played a recording of them. It was like I was back in 1977 again. It was like all the years just fell away. It was so real, it was like I could smell a cigarette smoke right there in my car. All the years, I engineered rock and roll. People told me I did such a great job of delivering beautiful music. I could never feel it. It didn't make any difference to me what we played. And that night, as that music played, I could feel it, that these were love songs. They were stories written for real people. I could feel it for the first time. 

 

I got home and it made me cry. It didn't make me cry, because what didn't make me sad didn't make me happy. It just was like overwhelming. I wrote to the scientist and I said, "That's some powerful mojo you got in that machine." [audience laughter] It really was like a dream come true. I thought I could see and I could feel emotions in people. I thought, it's going to be magical. It's going to be beauty and sweetness and light. And of course, it wasn't. It was fear, and anger, and jealousy and all the bad emotions that fill the world. I thought, well, shouldn't I have known? They say the news is nothing but bad news and that's what life is. And yet, the thing that I had wanted had come true.

 

As I learned to live with being different, and this happened all to me eight years ago. As I learned about that, I realized that it was being different. It was being that freak that didn't have any friends, but could talk to guitar amplifiers. That was the thing that made me special in the world. I always thought what I want most of all is to be normal. But my wish to be normal, it was just like a crazy fantasy. It was like, "I want to be like everyone else." And of course, being that way is throwing away the one thing in my life that made me successful. It was really, that was the thing I learned from my time with those scientists was that people like me are complete, functional humans. We are not broken versions of someone else as normal. And we're okay like we are. So, thank you.