Authors: Ron Suskind
She told all of this to a realtor for the apartment she saw a month ago in late July in Bethesda. They had already agreed to the rental. They were talking logistics for the paperwork, when she said it would be three autistic young adults and a supervisor. Sorry, no. End of discussion. Cornelia explained they won’t even be sleeping there most nights. It’ll be a place they’ll be working on skills, like cooking and cleaning, traveling on buses and subways. Sorry, we can’t have “a group” here.
She was beside herself. “But how is it functionally any different than three guys sharing an apartment?” She got no response. The matter was not negotiable.
At the next apartment, when they said it was against policy, she demanded to see where this prohibition is found in the lease. We’ll get back to you, was the evasive response.
The third apartment was less ideal. But it was mid-August, so she couldn’t be choosy. The landlord said he had nothing against autistic people, but he’d need to check with the owner. When that “no” came back, we did some online research and found that the building was owned by a rabbi. I spent half a day digging up Talmudic references in drafting an impassioned letter. He turned us down—the Talmud says nothing about rental properties in multiunit structures—prompting me to write a terse follow-up letter, beginning, “And you call yourself a Rabbi?”
We’ve already begun paying Tyler. The kids are ready. I said I’ll give over my office/studio behind the house. It’s one big room—tight for four people—but it would suffice. I can see about renting an office elsewhere or working in the house.
The morning after seeing the rental sign, Cornelia and I go out for breakfast, out of Owen’s earshot.
“We can’t get turned down again,” she says after we order.
I tell her I’m willing to offer my office. She swats that away. “That’s utterly ridiculous. You’re finishing a book. Where are you going to do it? On the front lawn.”
“No…I’ll manage.”
This is a typical exchange. Call it “The Sacrifice Games.” Who can sacrifice more. It’s difficult for both to sacrifice simultaneously—so there are strategic issues, of move and countermove. No prize money attached. But the deification points are redeemable for periodic gifts and regular trips to the moral high ground. Cornelia generally crushes me here, but I’m making a run with the office.
She dismisses the whole subject—it’d be a disaster—and switches tact.
“Today’s basic question,” she says, “is do I lie?” For her this is a massive moral sacrifice—
nice move
.
Cornelia hates to lie and isn’t very good at it. But these are special circumstances. We begin to work through rationales. I spend a fair amount of my life trying to understand the “good enough reasons” for why sources or subjects do what they do. It helps me to better render them “in full context”—that’s what I tell them—in a way that undercuts judgment.
Cornelia has firm codes of conduct. She wants me to try to help her get around them. So, the problem, I tell her, are the misimpressions people have of autism. The unknown scares them and, even if they know someone with autism, the spectrum is so wide they can’t be sure what they’re getting. At noon today, you just don’t tell them that these four young men—the three guys, plus Tyler—are any different from any other group. Tyler can speak for the quartet.
Eventually, when they meet the other three and recognize they’re mildly challenged, they’ll also see that they’re gentle, happy, and compulsive rule-followers. The owner will never have better tenants and she’ll have met her first autistic spectrum people. It’s ignorance that causes fear. That’s how it’ll be conquered.
“Ends justifies the means,” Cornelia says, ruefully, as the omelets are served.
“We could also do breaking eggs and omelets,” I say, drawing a small laugh, but enough to seal it.
Three hours later, she’s completed the house tour. The owner, an African American woman in her fifties is beginning to ask if Cornelia has questions, including does the house fit her needs. It’s perfect. Three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, backyard. Not cheap—$2,500—but manageable, split between the families. She then starts to ask a few questions about the guys. Cornelia’s ready. She’s rehearsed.
Three college guys, one just out of college and…
“Listen, I have to tell you, it’s three autistic guys and a supervisor.” She describes them, how they’re really no trouble, and that she’s been turned down at three different places.
The owner pauses for a long minute. “Because you told me the truth, it’s yours.”
Based on a series of bargaining agreements over the decades between Actors’ Equity and The Broadway League (producers), New York stage actors tend to be off from Sunday afternoon until the Tuesday evening performance.
It also so happens that Halloween in 2010 falls on a Sunday.
The combined result of this virtuous confluence means that Owen, sitting in his corner nook of Maureen’s artist’s den, drawing a picture of the Genie in a wild pastel montage, has the voices in his head replaced by something more real.
“Owen, are you in here…?”
“Oh my gosh, it’s Jonathan Freeman!”
Owen leaps up, arms out and looks quickly at me, Freeman’s chauffer today—I nod a yes, hugging is fine—before he throws his arms around a smiling, well-coifed baritone, who took a personal day for his Sunday afternoon’s performance and caught an early-morning train.
Of course this touches off celebration in the matriarchy. Owen effusively introduces “one of the greatest actors of all time and my good friend” to Maureen and all the girls.
This is exciting for all concerned: the female artists having witnessed many versions of Jafar drawn over the past year, as well as for Jonathan, an actor meeting an appreciative audience. He does not disappoint, turning the praise after a moment on Owen, and queuing him gently. “Owen, isn’t something happening tonight?”
It takes him just a second. “Yes, I’m having a Halloween party tonight at my clubhouse and everyone’s invited.”
That’s what the rented house is called—“the Clubhouse”—which is fitting in that the young men rarely sleep there. It’s officially named Newfound Academy, after the New Hampshire lake that’s next to Walt’s summer camp, and—in ways both conscious and subconscious—there’s a desire to bring to Owen’s life some of the self-reliance that has been instilled in his older brother.
Tyler, the program director, carries the camp’s old-world, energetic optimism (the cultural norm during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency) to great effect. The three young men, after all, are without cynicism, the attitudinal currency of much of the developed world. It simply doesn’t exist in autism, like lying, but with fewer attendant complications. Take away jaded, world-wise appraisals, distancing and disdain, and you’re left with appreciation and participatory vigor. Tyler directs this readiness to tasks, like lessons in cooking and balancing checkbooks, travel training (riding subways and busses), and bike outings or regular hikes on woodland trails. There’s a lot of role-playing in the house, with Tyler acting one day like a distracted job interviewer, and the next like a frustrated customer. If the young men are to succeed in the workplace, they’ll have to deal with the uncooperative and the impatient.
Ben already had a job working at a local supermarket—a place where Owen is now trying to get a part-time job. So, in the week leading up to Halloween, Tyler worked with Owen in the clubhouse’s kitchen on speed, technique, and customer courtesy while bagging groceries.
A “practice bag”—filled with dry goods like cans and cleaning supplies—is still on the counter as Owen and Jonathan string cobwebs in the kitchen and then move to the living room to prepare for the party.
Once the room seems well webbed, the two of them sit on the couch. Owen says he just wants to look at the room, make sure the webs are hung just right. After a moment, Jonathan suggests they keep moving—it’s already late afternoon, and there’s much to do for the event—but Owen says just a couple more minutes.
When asked a few years later what he was feeling that day, he mentioned that time on the couch. “It was Halloween and Jonathan Freeman was there. It was the greatest day of my life and it all was going so fast. I wanted to slow it down. To just be in this day for as long as I could.”
We wake up, little by little, throughout our lives. There are signature days that are like thresholds crossed. They reveal a before and after.
This was a day like that for Owen.
After several years, when he was told high school kids don’t dress up for Halloween, he wonders why the edict is lifted now that he is of college age. As we unload food from the car, he asks me why. I have no real answer. College Halloween parties, I tell him, are the stuff of legend.
“I’m glad Halloween’s back,” is all he says, and soon he’s slipping into the costume of Jack Skellington, the treacherous and romantic Pumpkin King from
Tim Burton’s
The Nightmare Before Christmas
. We all worked on it with him in the late afternoon, stitching rubbery bones on his dark gloves. Once he’s snug in it, Jonathan—with a hand seasoned by decades in theater—deftly applies the makeup in the bathroom of the clubhouse.
For so many years, it was Owen and his autistic friends, often dressed as Disney characters, who carried later than most the magical realism found in small children, as they knock on each door with a smile that says, “Look, who I am tonight. I am what I imagine.”
They ran into the high school prohibition and, as for Owen, he didn’t understand why. The reason kids don’t dress up and knock on doors when they’re in the tenth or eleventh grade is because those are the years their basic architecture—the foundations of their personality—begin to settle. Their inner, private selves start to take shape, as does their sensibility of how everyone—parents and teachers, included—offer a face to the world. They begin to feel deeply the divide between how they feel and how they behave, and are forced to recognize the consequences, for better or worse, that rest on drawing that line just so.
Once kids get to college, they’ve come to accept that our inner life—a place of restricted access—is where we live and love, and that we all wear masks in public; masks they joyously discard for a grown-up Halloween and replace with some mask of their choosing, also crafted for presentation and effect.
How much Owen senses these shifts is not clear. Though tonight, much is reversed: the masked people come to Owen. Girls from his art class come—Maureen, too, and her husband—mixing with his clubhouse mates, their families, and friends from school: Connor, of course, but quite a few others from high school, too. Laura, Owen’s same-aged first cousin, and now a Georgetown University freshman, also stops by with her friends.
The three-bedroom ranch, with its tag sale furniture, is soon filled with people from many parts of Owen’s life, enjoying each other’s company, drinking, eating, and listening to music. In the center of the swirl is Jonathan, greeting an array of kids from Owen’s school, who know quite a bit about him, and not just from Owen.
Certainly, he’s deeply appreciated by a fellow Movie God like Connor, who treats him with giddy deference. But Owen tells everyone who he is, and even the unaffiliated already knew the movie and the character, if not who did the voice work. He also claims another IMDB credit, favored by a certain subset of aficionados: he was the voice of Tito Swing, the jazz piano player in the band that lives inside a jukebox on PBS’s
Shining Time Station
. Brian, dressed as Jack Sparrow from
Pirates of the Caribbean
, is at his side much of the night, having a cathartic moment not unlike Owen’s first sighting of Freeman at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Jonathan welcomes the attention—“now Brian, which episode was that, number 162”—as, hour by hour, he wades into this upside-down world. Here, he leads the marquee. Special needs kids mix easily among their so-called “typical” peers.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christ
mas
runs in one room, rock and roll—and rap—blares from another, and a gangly autistic young man in skeletal whiteface moves about with an affectionate attentiveness and flexibility that runs counter to his neurological profile.
He just wants to make sure everyone has a good time.
The next morning, Jonathan—sleeping in Walt’s bedroom—awakens to a thrumming on the door.
“Who’s there?” he calls several times. No answer. It’s the wagging tail of our dog, Gus, who’s nose-up to the door of Owen’s bedroom as his heavy tail pounds Walt’s door. The reason Owen can’t hear him is that “A Whole New World,” the inspirational ballad from
Aladdin
, is blaring in his room.
A few minutes later at breakfast Jonathan asks, “Did you play that for my benefit, Owen?”
Owen looks up quizzically from his bowl of cereal. “No, I play that every morning.”
Why?
If he was able to articulate it to Jonathan, he’d say that it clarifies and nourishes his inner self, and helps him navigate the threshold between how he feels and how he behaves. Basically, it grounds him, like so much of the Disney fare he carries, giving him the strength to face the world—a whole new world it seems each morning—which is particularly difficult when it’s hard to read how people see you.
But he’s managing it. He’s recognizing—and accepting—who he is, both in his own eyes and the eyes of others
We didn’t really understand what was going on until he explained it to us a few years later. Not surprisingly, he did it by using a scene from a movie. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a Disney movie. He’d periodically use a non-Disney movie as archetype, relying on the architecture of plot and character to tease some truth from himself.
In this case, it was
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. It was one of the live-action films he seized upon in his senior year in high school. The 1975 movie by the Monty Python troupe spoofs King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It’s a cult classic, quite durable over the decades. It was one of my favorites. I’d watched
Monty
Python’s Flying Circus
, a BBC import that was a hit on PBS in the mid 1970s.