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

things into the trash.
    “Son, why don’t we build you a work area in the basement?”
    That sounded good to me. There just happened to be a big door leaning against the basement wall. My father got legs, attached them, and the door became my very own workbench.
    Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together. I began by building simple devices. Some, like my radios, were useful. Others were merely entertaining. For example, I discovered I could solder some stiff wires onto a capacitor and charge it up. For a few minutes, till the charge leaked away, I had a crude stun gun.
    I tried it out on the dog, who ran and hid. That was no fun. So I decided to try it on my little brother. I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I’d recently removed from our old Zenith television.
    “Hey, let’s play Jab a Varmint,” I said. I tried to smile disarmingly, keeping the capacitor behind my back and making sure I didn’t ruin the effect by jabbing myself or some other object.
    “What’s that?” he asked, suspiciously.
    Before he could escape, I stepped across the room and jabbed him. He jumped. Pretty high, too. Sometimes he would fight back, but this time he ran. The jab was totally unexpected, and he didn’t realize I only had the one jab in my capacitor. It would be several years before I had the skill to make a multishot Varmint Jabber.
    He ran down the hall, yelling, “Momma, John Elder did Jab a Varmint!”
    I soon moved on to more sophisticated experiments. But I ran into a roadblock: The college engineering textbooks used equations to describe how things worked, but I didn’t understand the math. 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. It was as though I thought in an entirely different language. When I saw a wave in a book, it was printed next to an equation with symbols I didn’t understand. When I saw a wave in my mind, I associated it with a particular sound. If I concentrated hard, I could almost hear the waves. There were no symbols at all. I could not figure out how to relate the two. Yet. Luckily, it was about then that my interests in electronics and music began to converge.
    I had first become interested in music in the fifth grade. I tried playing the French horn with no success. A few years later, while I was in Georgia, I saw my cousin, Little Bob, taking guitar lessons, and I decided to try playing a bass guitar. My grandmother took me to Wallace Reed Music in Duluth, Georgia, outside Atlanta, where I looked at a git-tar with four strings.
    Down South, they don’t say guitar. They say git-tar. And they don’t say violin. They say fiddle.
    “That there’s a bass, sonny,” the salesman said.
    My grandmother asked the salesman if he could play it. He plugged it in to an amplifier, played a few lines, and handed it to me. I had no idea how to play it, but I touched a string and it thrummed in my chest. I was entranced. Thirty minutes and a lot of wheedling later, we loaded the bass, a Fender Showman amplifier, a speaker cabinet, some cords, and some music books into the trunk of my grandmother’s silver Cadillac and headed home.
    I practiced all summer, playing along with the radio and studying my sheet music. I was a terrible bass player, though. I could hear the songs in my mind. I could read the music. But I could not translate the music in my head into movements of my fingers over the strings. The sounds that emanated from my bass were clumsy, just as I was clumsy.
    I eyed my Fender Showman amp. Leo Fender had designed some of the most famous guitars and amplifiers in the world, but I still thought there was room for improvement. Could I take it apart and make it better? Maybe if I couldn’t play the bass, I could make something out of the amp.
    I found a book that might help, Musical Instrument Amplifiers,