More on Assholeperger's Syndrome

I have read the rather sterile explanation that people with Assholeperger's, I mean, Asperger’s syndrome, “suffer from an inability to interpret other people’s intentions and feelings in social situations.”  Although this might seem like a minor obstacle to deal with, I have seen first-hand how the results can be devastating to personal relationships.  I recently realized how a one minute incident that happened 15 years ago may have profoundly affected my life.  In 1997 my wife and a group of her peers were in a business meeting when I stopped by on my way home from work.  I decided to interrupt briefly to touch base with her about something.  When I looked into the room to try and get her attention my wife’s mentor and best friend looked up and said, “Everything is falling right into place today.  Here’s our plumber!”  She turned to me and said, “We have a stopped up toilet for you.”  Everyone looked at me and broke out in laughter.  I was caught off-guard and I started to panic.  She had made a curious statement that seemed to amuse everyone but I wasn't sure what she meant by it.  In that moment I was in the spotlight and I didn’t get the joke....or had she asked me a question?   Everyone was waiting for my response. 

As my autistic brain attempted to take her words literally it occurred to me that since I was in fact a plumber, everyone must have thought I had shit on me.  The joke was that a toilet was stopped up and in walked the guy who had shit on himself already.  “I don’t DO toilets” I said.  “I do construction.  I don’t even have a plunger.”  The woman replied, “We have a plunger you can use.”  Still puzzled I said, “But I can’t operate a plunger any better than anybody else.”  Motioning up and down with my hand I said, "You just go like this."  Everyone stopped laughing and looked down at the table.  It got real quiet.  I was so bewildered by what was happening that I left the building.  My wife followed me outside and, after scolding me for embarrassing her, returned to the meeting.

I immediately began to realize that I had made a mistake but I couldn’t figure out what had happened until I recalled the previous incident that had made me so self-conscious that day about being a plumber.  I had stopped at a store after work and saw a man from church that I thought of as one of my best friends. When I reached out to shake his hand he recoiled from me and said, “I’m not going to shake your hand until you explain what that IS all over you.”  I looked down at myself and realized how dirty I was.  I began to explain: “The greenish color on my hands comes from handling copper.  I washed them already but it takes a lot of scrubbing to get it all.  The black on my shirt is from the tar that coats the cast iron pipe that we install.  The mud on my pants is just...well...mud.”  My friend relaxed and said, “Oh, okay” as he stepped closer and shook my hand.  I didn’t take any offense at his misunderstanding but it did make me think.  I had noticed times in the past when professional people that I knew from church didn’t acknowledge me when I said hello to them.  This only seemed to have happened when I was on my way home from work and I had suspected that my ‘Sunday’ friends just didn’t realize that they knew anybody that got dirty at work so they hadn't actually looked at me closely enough to recognize me. 

That day when my friend refused to shake my hand, I began to be conscious of the fact that some people might think I work in sewage and it made me feel bad.  I began to think that people were either embarrassed of me or embarrassed for me so they just tried to avoid me when they saw me in my work clothes.  That was one reason I felt so uneasy stepping into that meeting after doing plumbing all day.  When I was told: “We have a stopped up toilet for you.”  What I heard was: “You have shit on you anyway.”  I thought that was the punch-line that made everyone laugh at me.  When I said: “I don’t DO toilets.  I do construction.”  I thought it was clear that I was trying to find the polite way of saying, “I don’t have shit on me. It’s just dirt.”  The words I chose didn't convey what was in my slightly autistic head very well and in hind-sight I'm sure that I came across as uncooperative and “too good” to plunge a toilet.  I had what I now recognize as an “Assholeperger’s” moment.  For lack of a few minutes to process what was being said, I had just damaged my relationship with the entire group of people that were to become my only friends for many years to come.

 By the time my wife came out of the meeting, understandably upset with me, I had decided that I was going to make an apology.  I explained to her how I had totally misunderstood what was being said and how bad I felt about my reaction.  I told her that I wanted to come by the next day and apologize to all of them together and explain what was going on with me.  My wife softened her attitude, hugged me and said, “You don’t need to apologize Guy.  I told them the whole story and they understand.  They said they are sorry too.  Everyone likes you Guy so just forget it.”  So I never apologized and I let it go.  I was relieved to escape the ordeal it would have been for me to address a group of people that I did not know very well and explain what had gone on in my head.  I didn’t know anything about Autism or Asperger’s at the time but I knew that my brain didn’t quite work the same as everyone else.  I think that is why it was always so hard for me to “fit in” or feel like part of a group.  I was thankful to have my wife, my only close friend, to help me repair the damage when I made a fool out of myself.  If it weren’t for her intercession, I might never have truly felt like I was an accepted part of this group either.  I had no idea what had really just happened though.  It would be years before I understood how this incident defined who I was in the eyes of these people.  It will be a while before I can tell the rest of this story.  It's just too painful to actually post here.  Let me just conclude for now by saying that I was never really "part of the group" in part because I hurt someone's feelings so badly that day.