Fandom, The Saving Grace of Nerds, Geeks, and Aspies

Chapter 1

One characteristic of people on the autism spectrum, like aspies, is obsession with interests that nobody else cares a wit about. One great thing about being a fan is that there are plenty of people who are just as obsessive as you are – and they want to talk about it. They want to talk about it a lot. Even the geekiest geek can have friends if they all geek out over the same thing. It can, however, take some time to build interests into real relationships. That was especially true pre-internet.

Being born in 1952, I had a lot of pre-internet time. I started with Roy Rogers at a very young age. He might have been a bit of a father surrogate, but not entirely. I was definitely jealous of his wife Dale Evans. When I was about eleven I wrote a letter to Roy asking how I could start a fan club. I eventually got a letter from his agent's secretary saying that since his show was off the air, they no longer had active fan clubs. I was over the moon to get any answer at all. I would still be over the moon if I got an answer tweeting a celebrity now. However, it seemed a bit of an end. I moved on.

My next object of my affection was David McCallum who was playing Illya Kuryakin in “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”. I had a huge poster over may bed that I would kiss goodnight. I added an extra kiss every night. After a while, the ritual got pretty long. I dressed my dolls every week to reflect what went on in the U.N.C.L.E. Episode. David made instrumental albums. I saved up and bought them. I bought U.N.C.L.E. board games and U.N.C.L.E. Books. I still own all the U.N.C.L.E. Books. I bought U.N.C.L.E. comic books. I still own those too. I remember that when Kennedy was shot, the show was not aired. I was very inappropriately furious. When I was twelve, I wrote a novella where a character remarkably like me rescued Illya after he was taken down in an alley. Nothing makes writing go so fast as wish fulfillment! Of course, I was more realistic than the TV show, or any TV show. When my hero was clobbered he didn't wake up and immediately spring into action. He was sick. Having had a serious conk on the head myself, I knew how things actually worked and wrote accordingly. David had my heart for quite a while, surviving a move to New York City. My new room was christened “McCallum Palace.” And then at age thirteen came a fateful day in ninth grade. I heard about Star Trek!

Chapter 2

I was working with a boy I had never talked to before on the NY Times crossword puzzle. We were not doing well. Conversation turned to TV. He told me about Star Trek, which had just started its first year. I watched once and was hooked. I was especially taken with Mr. Spock. I can't say that I particularly liked Captain Kirk.

Normally we kids had to wait outside of school until it was time for homeroom. On days when there was inclement weather, we were allowed to sit in the auditorium. I sat next to a girl named Janie. We struck up a conversation and found that we were both into Star Trek. She asked me who my favorite character was. If I had said that it was Captain Kirk, the conversation would have been over. By saying that it was Mr. Spock, a wonderful friendship was formed.

My friendship with Janie led to becoming part of a Star Trek fan club. It was not a fan club in the classic sense, but more of an improvisational acting group. We picked characters that we wanted to play opposite as a love interest, bu Janie already had Mr. Spock and usually Scotty as well, so I picked Dr. McCoy and fell in love as fast as I could. Eventually I ended up as one of less than 300 members of DeForest Kelley's Yeomanry. I still have the card, which I imagine is a bit of a collector's item.

My character was Salinda Sonevar. She was a doctor, but also a hereditary high priestess and heir to the ruler of the planet Torina Torina was hot, although humid, not dry like Vulcan. Salinda tended to fall unconscious if it got too cold, but was, of course, quite tolerant to heat. Unlike me, she was beautiful with startling green eyes. She also had some telepathic powers but they didn't factor much into the stories we did or the ones that I wrote.

The club met as often as possible after school at the apartment where Janie lived with her mother. I usually played Spock and/or Kirk and/or Scotty along with my Salinda character. I still do a pretty good Shatner cadence. We called what we did playing a game. Even though we never did anything wrong or even remotely racy, we never did it within adult earshot. I think that adult presence would have had a very inhibitory effect on our imaginations.

Star Trek started out on Thursday nights. It became my habit to start writing a Star Trek story, featuring our club characters, as soon as each episode was over. These usually ran about 25-26 pages longhand and I finished them before I went to bed. Sometimes I brought them to school for Janie or other kids to see. One day, one of these stories was intercepted by my core (English and Social Studies)

teacher. She started reading it to the class but did not have time to finish before the bell rang. Captain Kirk had just collapsed unconscious. To my surprise, kids who normally never talked to me came up to me to find out what happened. Being a Star Trek story, the captain survived, of course. You might imagine that I might have gotten in trouble for bringing my story to school. I didn't. I assume that the theory was that spontaneous writing should be encouraged. I got the English medal that year.

My fan Nirvana continued through the year. Then I graduated from ninth grade to go to The Bronx H.S. Of Science. Janie was an eighth grader, so we were separated to an extent. Science High is one of the special high schools in New York City. Enrollment is free, but by exam only. Graduation required almost twice as many credits as a normal high school. I really loved the program, but it was a lot of work. I got up at 5:20 A.M., got in some studying, got on the subway, went through nine periods and got on the train home. I usually stayed up doing homework until 11:00 P.M. to get up early and start all over. There were also many clubs and activities, including the Science Fiction Club of which I was secretary. There was a lot less time for game playing. I did keep writing and expanded the amount of detail regarding Torina. By senior year, Torina had geography, a calendar, a religion, a language with its own alphabet, and music. I made pictures and paintings and even paper dolls of the clothing Salinda wore. I sang and prayed in Torinian. Salinda wore a particular dress when off duty. It was gathered at the neck, sleeveless and draped softly down in assorted lengths. I bought remnants and made several Salinda gowns.

Right at the beginning of the Star Trek years, I took the Mensa test. This was a matter of self defense. My mother and sister were both members and if I had not made it I would have been eternally humiliated. At the time, one could take test at age fourteen and I took it three weeks past my fourteenth birthday. Aside from being a great place to be a freak or a geek, the gender ratio in Mensa was terrific for a girl. Officially there were three males for every female, but for those of us in the younger age group, it was even better. The first time I went to a meeting I had six boys in a circle around me. It was heady stuff. In addition, many of the boys either went to Bronx Science or had done so. I had a ready made gang, separate from my original Star Trek group but interested in science fiction nonetheless.

The Young Mensa gang was not privy to much of my Torinian stuff, other than being somewhat aware of its existence. That was saved for the boy I fell head over heels for at Bronx Science. CAF and I were in many ways the same kind of crazy. We both opted for creative writing and drama English and AP biology, strange as the combination may have been. I first saw him in my creative writing class. It was an amazing class, taught by a professional writer who was married to a really famous professional writer. I spent a lot of my time there staring across the room at CAF. It took a long time for CAF to show real interest in me. He went for a much prettier girl first and I can't say that I blamed him. She was both pretty and nice. While the two of them were together, the three of us linked arms and went dancing down the street singing “We're Off to See the Wizard”. It was her idea. Eventually that relationship fizzled and CAF did ask me to go out with him. My heart was so firmly on my sleeve that I was hugged by every girl at my lunch table. He wrote my phone number on the inside front cover of his copy of Hamlet. Some years later I told him that it was there and he was quite surprised to find that I was correct.

I showed all my precious creations to CAF. He took my English to Torinian glossary and started to build one that was Torinian to English. We sat next to each other as well as being lab partners in AP Bio. I wrote to him in the margins of my class notes, sometimes in Torinian. I dissected a fetal pig while sitting on his lap. I think that kind of behavior in the lab was tolerated because the teachers thought we were cute. It was also a perfect dissection. Never was the laboratory so much fun.

CAF and I sang together. We learned music for an audition together. We put on a play for an outside organization together. Unfortunately, the shards of my heart ended up all over the floor of the AP Bio lab. CAF broke up with me while the two of us were leaning over a stereo microscope together. In a room full of people, almost no one had a clue that anything was going on. I couldn't even cry until I got to the subway train afterward.

I was devastated. Cry I did, once I could. It was a nice slow local train. I cried all the way home. I cried most of the night. I put on a Salinda gown. I sang prayers to the Torinian god Partentheles. When morning came, I sat in an auditorium chair of the drama homeroom with my legs pulled up under me. The walls seemed to waver as if someone had put LSD in my morning tea.

I suppose that I had learned my acting lessons well. In economics class one of the girls told me that I seemed to be a pretty happy person. That was truly incredible because I was contemplating suicide at the time. When I finally made it to AP Bio, I still had to be next to CAF. He also asked me why I was smiling. I told him that I had to do something to dry out the upholstery. I don't know if he believed me. He did try his best to be kind, but I was truly wrecked, whether it showed on my face or not. What was left to me was Star Trek, Torina, and the Young Mensa gang.