Free Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison

I build it?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, son. What do the directions say?”
    “It says ‘easy assembly,’ whatever that means. We need pliers, wire cutters, a soldering iron, and rosin core solder.”
    “Well, we have solder here. To solder the plumbing.” Sometimes my father imagined himself a handyman.
    “The manual says we need rosin core solder. It says acid core plumber’s solder will ruin it.”
    The nighttime version of my father could turn ugly in the blink of an eye, but the daytime version was actually pretty nice. He almost never said anything nasty about me before dark, and at times like this he actually worked with me on my projects.
    How I struggled with that computer! It probably had no more than twenty parts inside, the rest of the “forty-two components” being the terminal strips those parts were mounted on, and the nuts, bolts, dials, scales, meter, and case that everything else lived in. Simple as it was, I arranged and rearranged pieces for two weeks before I got it working.
    My parents bought me books they hoped would help: Basic Electronics and 101 Electronic Projects. My favorite, The Radio Amateur’s Handbook, was recommended by the salesman at RadioShack. By reading those books, I figured it out. On the way, I learned to solder, and I began to understand what the different electronic components were, and how they worked. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes all became real to me—not just words on a page. I was feeling proud of myself, and I was ready for more.
    I decided to sign up for an electronics class at the high school. Maybe I’ll do well in that, I thought. I had gotten straight As in sixth grade, but my grades had gone steadily downhill once I started junior high, and electronics sounded a lot more interesting than biology or German or gym.
    Since electronics was a high school class and I was still in junior high, I had to see the teacher and take a quiz of sorts.
    “What is ohm’s law?” Mr. Gray began.
    “E over I and R,” I answered. “E is volts, I is amps, R is ohms.”
    Twenty more easy questions, and I was in. I already knew more than the basic textbooks had to offer. Mr. Gray had an office in a closet filled with vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, wire, connectors, and all manner of other parts. I was fascinated. He thought I had already learned enough to skip Electronics I and go directly to Electronics II, but I was so driven that I completed the course material for Electronics II in my first few weeks. Then I began nosing around the university and learning what I could on my own.
    My mother suggested that I go see Professor Edwards, the husband of a friend. 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, and introduced me to the brand-new Research Computing Center, where they had a Control Data 3800 computer system in a huge air-conditioned room.
    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.
    I began eyeing the TVs and radios in the house. They were getting old anyway, and I was itching to take them apart so I could figure out how they worked. I decided that my parents should turn over all the household electronics to me, right then.
    “Okay, you can have the old Zenith radio. But not the new one!”
    My parents began handing over the radios. The old TV followed a few weeks later and I began to amass a considerable inventory of parts on top of the chest of drawers in my room, and on the dining table.
    “Clean these parts off the kitchen table!”
    “Ow! I just cut my foot on some old radio part!”
    The complaints became more frequent, and my father decided to take matters into his own hands. Luckily for me, this happened in the afternoon. Later that night, drunk, he would have just thrown my