When it comes to self-respect, autistics often lack a certain margin for error. So, I worry about this: my father was a good driver and I’m not. Behind a wheel I’m paralyzed. Because I’m autistic, I say. But my father was autistic and especially when it came to operating simple mechanisms. Blenders and coffee machines were major hurdles that he could eventually master. Stuck windows and the toaster oven—they remained untouched, as did most other small tasks involving manual coordination and/or mechanical sense. At his memorial service a friend recalled fondly, “Lawrence just didn’t do those things.” My mother told me he treated that stuff as not worth noticing, at least not by him. He wouldn’t recognize it as being his business, and the underlying reason was that he couldn’t do any of it.
But driving was fine. My father drove like it was his one way of being physically competent, which it was. His tremulous face was set, fastened with a look that said all his doubts had been tidied out of sight for this little while. Shoulders rested back on his seat, he surveyed the road: his chin was lifted, his face was lifted with it, and his eyes had been raised up because his face was raised up, and all of them together aimed past the windshield as he monitored the arena of his responsibility. Hands on the wheel (always held lightly), he’d been given a passport out of his usual existence. He had a chance to visit being competent, and while there he basked. He weightily registered gaffes by other drivers. “Poor,” he’d say—headshake.
Being inside the rules, doing what people expect other people to do, was important to him. Here he got to do it. But not everyone else did, and I suspect that some people’s infractions left him feeling like he’d been chumped, that following the rules didn’t put him inside something that everyone did, that instead he was inside something that chumps did. My mother says he drove hard into the side of another motorist’s car just to scar the paint. Damage to his own paint didn’t matter, since he’d been driving that particular car forever and it was now a heap.
But he could drive, so how do I explain my own ineptitude? I want it to be my brain’s fault, meaning the fault of my brain’s physical design. But maybe it’s mine, meaning my personality’s. A quietly explosive uncertainty arises and I don’t even know how to bring it up. “Not my fault!” isn’t something I can say unless I’m sure all the potential blame will be pulled away all at once (as when a pitcher of lemonade’s been spilled and I wasn’t in the kitchen). Otherwise, I hear myself taking on a bleating sound, a child’s sound. Just to make that wish, blame-be-gone, makes me a loser. Anyway, I feel like it does. Non-losers don’t have their noses tied by string to other people’s reactions, so they don’t feel themselves overtaken by blame. Non-losers don’t decide what’s up with their world depending on how bystanders react to them. Such is my belief anyway, and by this belief I’m a loser and should probably keep quiet in socially loaded circumstances.
My father couldn’t manage a toaster oven, but he got to be the one who can drive. It bothers me.