Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s

In 1979 KISS embarks on its Dynasty tour with all-new equipment, effects, and costumes. Robison is building two new guitars, and as the start date for the tour approaches, he is still refining the electronics. Working under great pressure, he finishes the job on time and flies down to Lakeland, Florida, the first stop on the tour. He notes somewhat randomly that he is armed and wonders what firearm laws he might be violating. Once he’s checked into his hotel, he tests the guitars. They both work as planned; the tour is set to begin the following day.

The next morning he finds a water moccasin outside his hotel room. Having dealt with poisonous snakes on his grandparents’ farm, he takes no chances. He pulls out his revolver and shoots it six times. When he informs the front desk, the manager is furious and calls the police, but the deputy lets him go, informing the manager that Robison did him a favor by killing the venomous snake.

That night he paces nervously outside the arena, hoping the guitars will function properly. This tour is important for him personally and professionally, and the guitars work to perfection. The crowd goes wild, and Robison is “ecstatic,” feeling all the praise is his alone. After the show, Frehley has more requests: a guitar that shoots rockets, one that shoots lasers, one that flies. Robison is confident that he can create those as well.

Robison muses on how his Asperger’s affects his life on the road. The musicians and crew are surrounded by drugs, alcohol, and sex, and they try to get Robison involved as well. His discomfort with casual sex translates into monogamy with Little Bear. He can’t embrace the one-night stands that are so common on the road, noting that the “idea of having to meet and befriend one person after another was just too scary to me” (166).

Chapter 18 marks Robison’s transition from itinerant lifestyle to steady employment. While on tour with KISS, he lives exorbitantly, charging every expense to the band, but once the tour is over, he returns to Massachusetts, where he lives on macaroni and cheese and foraged pizza. Meanwhile, his father has hit rock bottom, drinking heavily every night and lamenting the loss of his family, while his mother’s mental health is ever more precarious. He finds it difficult to reconcile this disparity in wealth and lifestyle, so he resolves to find a “real job.”

For a time he and Jim Boughton find work installing lighting and sound systems in discos and nightclubs. The pay is meager but “enough to make a living”—and what’s more, “it’s still music.” (174). Robison and Boughton frequent the clubs at night to observe their handiwork, and Robison is again bewildered by the crowds’ behavior, the ease with which they socialize, and the ubiquity of the drugs. Although he spends his days making these places function, he feels utterly removed from them at night.

While the income is fairly steady and he’s still involved with music, the work reminds him too much of life on the road: the drugs, the alcohol, the grit, and the grime. He decides to look for what he considers more legitimate work. He answers a help wanted ad in a local newspaper for electronic game designers. He submits a mostly factual resume and schedules an interview. Donning his Christian Dior suit and mustering his best social skills, he weathers the lengthy interview process and is offered a job. His starting salary is $25,000 a year.

He doesn’t know what to expect from a “real” work environment, but he finds that, apart from management, most of the engineers are “geeks and misfits” he can speak to (178). He is assigned to a team working on talking toys, and his first project is working on an “analog-to-digital converter” (179). Despite his fears, he is more than up to the challenge. He likes the clean environment and the lack of pressure, and within a year, he becomes a project leader.

Robison is now 23 and a design engineer for Milton Bradley, a major manufacturing company. As a manager, he is a salaried employee, but his division is relegated to working in a converted factory attic until the construction on the new corporate headquarters is finished. The attic is brutally hot in the summer, so he retreats to the technicians’ lab, where he befriends Vito, the tech supervisor. Together they devise a scheme to get rid of pesky salespeople. It plays right into Robison’s love of pranks.

One day the technicians are informed that a group of executives will be touring their workspace, so they have to hide all the inappropriate material. With nothing to do, Robison scrapes a Formica countertop with a razor blade, creating a small pile of fine, white powder. He places the pile on a broken piece of mirror with a rolled up $20 bill next to it. He stashes the pile in a corner, not obvious but still visible. The tour passes through, but no one mentions the fake cocaine. Over the next few days, Robison and Vito notice that someone is stealing their “drugs,” so they rig a video camera in the lab to catch the perpetrator. They are shocked to discover that the thief is one of the senior VPs. They confront him about it, and he agrees to pay them $500 to buy their silence.

A few years later, the economy slumps, and Robison leaves Milton Bradley. The VP who had been stealing their phony coke is arrested “on the street with the pimps, whores, and crack dealers” (188). Once again, Robison is confused by the paradoxes of human behavior. He wonders why someone born into wealth with an executive position would climb “into the gutter of his own volition” (188). He concludes that, despite what he has always thought, elite, educated people are not “inherently superior.”