Update: 4/13/24

Seventh Grade! Things were gonna be better; they had to be. But… as it turned out, not so much. A different classroom, different kids, different teachers, lockers that all look the same for all the damned books; holy shit! And to make things really interesting, I had to take a class in Latin?!? I say “had to” because I come from a long line of inventors, and my entire family (parents, grandparents, aunts & uncles) all determined that I was going to be at least an engineer; maybe a scientist, and knowing Latin was a prerequisite.     

      Latin? No.Joke.

From 7th grade through 12th, I had no say in what classes I took; everything was chosen for me. No electives, no study hall.

      It Sucked!

Halfway through my second year of “first year” Latin (the reasoning behind making me sit through that BS eluded me), we moved again. This was now halfway through 8th grade. Back to the town where this hot mess of a life all started. All of the asthmatic history now needed to be explained to a school system that had assumed I was dead. Around this time, the thought of being dead started to make sense to me, as an alternative to whatever this life held in store for me. No friends in school, and no inkling on how to change that. This is the point where being an autistic made the teen years just insufferable. This is when I started to get healthy… I actually had some muscles. They served me well when it came to handling most bullies. Bullies love autistics; we make the quintessential target. The anxiety of trying to make a suitable autistic mask was constant. I knew I was still the weird one no matter  how hard I tried to be something I wasn’t. The only saving attribute I had, was now I wasn’t so sickly looking. I actually looked “normal”. I thought it was gonna work. But I still didn’t know how to make friends from strangers. It was different in the previous town we lived in. There were neighborhood kids that eventually accepted me as I was. It was where I met my friend-for-life, Dave. I’m still in touch with David. He’s still my “best friend”, and my only friend. The 600 miles between us makes any face-to-face contact unrealistic.

Junior High School in the new town wasn’t any better than the one I left. All the same issues. Now, it felt like I had a whole new set of social inadequacies. A couple of kids remembered me, most didn’t. I don’t think I was a very memorable kid. The only redeeming aspect of being in this school was that there wasn’t a Latin teacher.

I think it was about this time that I realized that there were unseen benefits to taking part in Phys Ed. That was where all the guys got to know each other… very well! They excerised together, belonged to teams/squads (shirts vs. skins), practiced sports, kidded around and playfully “broke each other’s balls”, and… they showered together. I mean how much closer can a bunch of guys get? Not ever getting this bonding just exacerbated the autism “odd man out” problem. All these guys were in the beginning stages of becoming men. The thought of being a part of all that was unnerving, but I wanted in. I needed to be part of that uncomfortable experience. I wasn’t. I even tried to con a coach into letting me do something, as part of a team. But even the school wouldn’t let me partake in these things; they didn’t want the liability of having a physically distressed, dying, or dead, asthmatic on school grounds. It now became a matter of money, and that followed me for the rest of my time in the public school system. The autistic kid retreated into himself; isolation. Zero physical contact or camaraderie, and most important was not learning what it meant to be “just one of the guys”. I was ostracized, left out, still being “that weird kid”. If I had taken part in any of that important personal growth process, I would at least been accepted as being a bit “off”, but I would have been accepted. Now, there was nobody to comfortably “hang with”.  What I did get was every bully in school. But I had a secret weapon: I could act like the most angry & crazy mother fucker in school. I managed to turn that into a sport. Two physical “altercations” were all it took from 8th grade through 12th. And I walked away, unscathed, from both. There was blood in the dust, but it wasn’t mine. At the time, that was all that mattered to me.

Tenth grade… High School! In the “last stretch” of public school. It was the pits. Being a sophomore in HS was like starting at the bottom of the hierarchy again. The Juniors & Seniors in my HS took great pleasure in harassing the 10th graders. My HS had 1200 students, and was the only HS in the town. This meat grinder of a school was fed by the 2 separate Junior HS in town, so I only recognized less than half the kids. This was exacerbated by my autistic prosopagnosia. I didn’t know why I had such a problem. It was embarrassing when a kid would come up and say “Hey Fred!”, and I would have no idea who they were. Cliques were a big thing in this HS, as were “Frats”. The Frats were usually the “bad boys” of the school. Many had been held back in earlier grades, so they were physically bigger and more developed. But most of the Frat Boys, Juniors, and Seniors, in my HS took great pleasure in harassing the 10th graders. Passing between classes was sometimes problematic; there were three floors and two major wings. If the class you were just in was on the 3rd floor and your next class was on the 1st floor and in the other wing, there was no time to waste getting there. This was the Frat Boys and upper class boys second favorite time for knocking into, shoving, and tripping, the 10th graders. The whole hot mess was like some sort of a “right of passage” that nature designed for boys. There was always some kid with a black eye or bruises. With 1200 students, there weren’t enough teachers to watch & protect the 10th graders. Even if they saw a kid getting “messed with”, they would just come over and say something really scary to the older boys, like “keep it moving”. When this would happen to me, teachers I hadn’t seen before knew my name; “Alright boys, that will do. Fred, just keep walking”. I was, truly, mystified. How? I can only speculate why every adult in midst of that soul-crushing, meat-grinding crowd of kids seemed to know my name. 

Being autistic while trying to survive this “Lord Of The Flies”-like structure was like nothing I had experienced, nor was I socially prepared for. My only defense was my “angriest, craziest, mother fucker in school” mask. I was strong enough now that if I got harassed, I could “shove” back. I would proceed to start yelling, call him whatever degrading name that came to mind while allowing any saliva I could work up to come out like wet words. Stuff like “don’t even think of fuckin’ with me cuz I will fist your throat and bite your fuckin’ ear off!” That seemed do it. I would walk away muttering to myself. This act was only needed twice for the rest of my incarceration in this 9th circle of Hell. I think this mask may have earned me a reputation; it was how I managed to just survive for the next three years. I had no other way to exist there; the difficulty in understanding anything about this society, because I was autistic, left me feeling desolated. This bullshit society was impossible for this autistic to understand. Most other kids managed to work them selves into cliques in order to survive. Autism kept me out of such cliques.I found solace in joining the AV organization. The administration allowed this to happen only because there was a whole lot of technology involved in our little closed-circuit television station. There were no attendance checked, or nobody cared if you were there in the TV studio, because the dweebs that really got into it, spent every free moment in that studio. The only reason I went there was when a very attractive girl was working there as a camera operator. Being autistic, I had no idea how to flirt, and I had difficulty recognizing any flirtation that was aimed at me. I think the pretty girl might have flirted a bit with me, but at the time I had no clue how to respond.

To be continued…