Diplomatic plates for the differently-abled.
Surely we all reach a point — in the day, in the year, in the life — when the rules we’ve always been taught to live by stop applying. From the basic decorum of restaurant etiquette to agreeing that dollar bills have meaning in society, somewhere, at some point, I think for all of us it necessarily breaks down. You use bad words around an important stranger, you slip restaurant flatware into your purse, you buy a book and tear it apart when you get home, you have sex, and take pictures, and show them to others. You do and say things that are what once, maybe, distantly, someone called wrong, and in the doing suddenly it is right for all of us, because you’ve blown a little more air into that bubble of collected knowledge, and expanded by degrees the volume of What We Know.
It’s liminal and out-there and makes you feel lonely and new and really on some frontier, out and away from the pack, and I think this is certainly the case, this liminal thing, when you have someone differently-abled in your immediate world. But I think this is not just true of mental retardation or autism; I think people find themselves in these in-between spaces when they live with someone with an addiction, or cancer, or a non-native speaker, or Daniel-Day Lewis. In other words: Life itself creates the environment for discarding the rules. I’m reminded of diplomats who park their cars up on sidewalks or church steps, protected by their license plates. I hope you will think of all this, sister of the autistic, or father of the crippled child, or friend to the brilliant, and you will tell me your liminal story. Here’s one of mine.
The Boy is easily distracted. It makes talking to him difficult sometimes. When we’re driving he may not answer when I ask him, say, what he did that day or how he liked so-and-so or that movie or dinner from last night. His attentions flutter, and in order to pin them down, I use my gift with impressions as the butterfly net. So the clinical response I’ve discovered — the way to get him to listen and answer — is one that has yet to be synthesized in pillform, but I just suspect that once Merck gets wind of this … Lordy Lordy.
What I do is: talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look, don’t ask me why or how — there’s no scientific literature to my mind that offers any kind of insight. But anyway when I adopt the harsh garbled patois of CA’s governor, when I threaten to crush his tiny baby skull or call him a puny nothing, then he gives with an answer. Because now, you see, he’s interested in the conversation. He wants more Arnold, which places him in yet another minority. As a communication tool it’s about as subtle as brushing your teeth with a baseball bat. And if I have to bring it out in public, it becomes just another of the many things I do with The Boy that make the couple sharing the Orange Julius in the next booth look over and wonder where the handlers for those two retarded boys got off to. This phenomenon of becoming altogether more bizarre for the purpose of interfacing with/entertaining the FX/autistic individual — is a bubble that sort of absorbs people nearby, creating a Social-Contract-Free Zone in which standard rules of behavior and decorum cease to apply.
To give just one example of the reality-altering abilities of this bubble: Years ago when I was living at home it gave The Boy no end of joy to pretend to shoot people and things and have them react in a manner which you can probably guess. Bang bang and you fall down, he howls, you get up; repeat.
Being in Texas, this extended to local fauna as well; we once were driving along a stretch of country road in the long-shadowed quiet of early evening and came across a cluster of deer, just emerging from the thorny scrub. My father pulled slowly up, rolled down The Boy’s window, and bang bang — the deer scattered.
When the deer reconvened in the settling dust of our departing truck, one deer, checking for gunshot wounds, said to another, “I think he damn near got me.”
“You know you’re in Texas when they’re giving guns to retarded kids,” said the other.
But so another time we’re in the car with my mother, The Boy behind me, and he’s “on” as they say in the show biz, and a car pulls up full of very serious-looking young black men. The Boy spots them and starts shooting them through the backseat car window. The guys in the car look over at us, at him, all kind of puzzled for a beat, and then bang bang they start flinging themselves all over the inside of their car in dramatic reenactments of death, laughing as we pull away.
And thus in that one story here and now I’ve managed to assemble such unpopular topics as sport hunting, gun violence, a joke on both Texas and the mentally disabled, plus a sprinkling of racial tension (the implications of which encounter are convoluted beyond even Spike Lee’s reach). Which proves that the bubble of social liberation has a radius of uncommon length, and a surface tension of impressive strength.
Oct 11th, 2009 3:40am
