"Your Door is Always Shut." A Perfect Analogy for Autistic Confusion with Neurotypical Social Rules

One of the things that is difficult to explain is the difficulty many autistic people have understanding things that "neurotypical" people comprehend instinctively: social rules, social cues, facial expressions, unspoken meanings. We eventually learn, but it takes us longer. Think of us as strangers in a strange land.

That might be why I love being in strange lands, far from home. It feels normal to me, but a more interesting form of normal.

When I joined Peace Corps in 1980, I moved to the West African nation of Togo and fell in love with the people and culture. But it took several months for that love to really take hold. I was infatuated instantly, but then fell into a dark place, because, as usual, I found myself very much alone, despite my best efforts.

And then an "aha!" moment. I learned a simple rule of local behavior--a social rule that Togolese understood automatically but that I and most foreigners were oblivious to. 

It is a perfect analogy to an autistic person's life before trial, error, and painful missteps teach us the rules everybody else knows.

Here's an excerpt from my book, My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll:

I am determined to make friends.

During our training, a departing second year volunteer dispensed some good advice. She encouraged us to seek out important people in the village and do our best to make friends with them. 

“These people will really help you when the time comes that you need some help. So, when you meet them, invite them to visit. And be ready for them. Have some beer or soft drinks and some snacks.”

I try. I have just finished three years where I was more alone than I ever have been or ever will be, but suddenly I am Monsieur Sociabilité. I walk through town like the stranger in an old western. Eyes follow me everywhere. Babies see my bizarre skin tone and hair and burst into inconsolable shrieks of terror. I shake many, many hands. I ask about people’s jobs, wives, homes, and children. I buy rounds of beer and pamprankou—a fermented drink made from raffia trees that smells to me like Cheerios left too long in a bowl of milk but that has advantages beyond the gentle buzz it provides. 

“Ça fait bien pisser!” says the elder Mr. Dando, with a happy smile.

The remark is as befuddling to me as when Terri showed me her contraceptives. I smile, nod, and finish my calabash, confused but at least confident in the knowledge that I will “piss well” tonight.

Lots of people introduce themselves to me. Lots of people accept my offers of drinks. I like to watch them pour a drop for the ancestors before taking their first sip. I learn the pleasure of sodabi, the homemade gin distilled from palm wine.

The two villagers who are friendliest to me are the Dando brothers. Both Dandos have children in the school where I will teach. One of the Dandos is the “catechist”—the man who guides the Catholic congregation through Sunday services when a visiting priest isn’t available to say an actual mass. I will learn that in addition to being a devout Catholic, he is a firm believer in the local gods. He gives me some hope when he asks if I speak the local language. I tell him no. “You’ll learn it. When you play with the girls, they will teach you!” I listen with interest. Maybe the future government minister was wrong about the girls. I invite both Dandos to my house. “How about Sunday, after mass?” I ask the catechist. 

“I will come!” he responds dynamically.

I prepare for the visit. I buy soft drinks and beer, peanuts and cookies, and even a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whisky, which, like Quaker Oats and Marlboros, is available tax free everywhere in Togo, including Death is Better.

I wait. He never comes. I crack open the bottle of Scotch and follow a shot with a slug of warm beer from the bottle.

This sad scenario repeats itself a dozen times. I invite various teachers and “fonctionnaires.” Ils ne viennent pas. I invite the Dandos again and again. They don’t come. 

In Seattle I had been alone for a reason. I invited no one. Here I am doing everything I can to be more sociable. The foreign language and culture somehow free me to do so. I am becoming a new person, but with the same old result.

Even the teachers at my school don’t visit. They are friendly at work, but aside from my school director (friend of the future minister) they never come by, despite my invitations, and even the director only stops once or twice to say hello and check on me. So even though I am learning to reach out to people, it is not working. It’s like the pretty young woman I invited to the basketball game, but 100 times over, and makes no sense to me.

I decide to finish the school year and go home. In letters home I call Death is Better “Better Off Dead.”

Then one day some newly minted teachers are assigned to our school. I see them congregating with the other young teachers in front of a house on the main road where several teachers live. I decide to make one last effort to be friendly with my colleagues.

One of the new teachers is an excitable man named Dadjo. Dadjo has an almond shaped face, facial scars, and heavy duty black-framed, Bo Diddley-style glasses. He shakes my hand with gusto and snaps my middle finger as he lets go.

“And do you all hang out with Monsieur Pita?” Dadjo asks the other teachers.

A quiet, polite teacher who has been around since the start of the year shakes his head and gazes at me.

“Mr. Peter likes to stay by himself.”

This pisses me off. How can he say that after all the efforts I’ve made, for the first time in my life, to meet people? How can he say this after I’ve waited, time and again, for him and others to respond to my invitations.

“I like to stay by myself!” I repeat, nearly hissing. “That’s not true. I invite you to my house all the time! You never come!”

I think these are the first angry words I speak in Africa—but I’ve had it.

The professor looks as befuddled as I feel, and a bit sad at being so maligned.

“I come to your house every day,” he responds, shaking his head. “The front door is always closed.”

And then I see it—a vision of startling clarity—how so many doors in the village are wide open so much of the day, with only beads or a sheet of light cloth to keep out the hot sun and flies. 

How visitors approach those open doors clapping their hands to get the attention of people inside. 

And how I, like any good American, go home every day and shut and lock my front door.

I understand, for the first time, that I simply haven’t known or understood a cardinal rule of Togolese sociability.

I return home and leave my front door open. All afternoon and evening I am besieged by visitors. The teachers. My neighbors. Children from school. The Dandos. Dadjo.

And it is like that every day for the remaining two and a half years I live in Death is Better. 

After learning about autism and the difficulty many autistic people have understanding neurotypical social rules, social cues and facial cues, I see this as a nearly perfect parable. My inability to understand how the social world works has had definite consequences. I failed with girls in college not because I didn’t care, and not because I didn’t want to be with them, and not even because they didn’t want to be with me. Each of the young women I’ve described here obviously did, at least for a time. I just didn’t understand the rules. I didn’t understand how things work.

But little by little I am learning, not only the rules in Africa, which are new for me, but the general rules of sociability, which are more universal—and Africa and its people will be a huge part of that education.

"Wing it, boys!" (My Struggles With Autistic Inflexibility.)

There's a wonderful story told by Keith Richards in Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, a movie about my oddball hero, Chuck Berry. The story includes what might be the first rock and roll instant replay.

We first see the scene play out live. An all star band is backing Chuck at his sixtieth birthday celebration in St. Louis. Things are going great when a happy Chuck finds Richards, mid-song, leans into his ear, and says something. Richards laughs and shakes his head, No! Chuck, surprised, laughs, shrugs, and moves away to continue the song. Although the band never misses a beat you can hear a minor musical fender bender when Chuck hits a bad chord during the encounter.

After the show a drunk and exhausted Richards explains that Chuck told Keith mid-song that he was switching keys. Richards says something like, "After weeks of rehearsals, he wants to throw it all out the window and say, 'Wing it, boys!'"

It's something I loved about Chuck Berry. On stage he was constantly winging it, often with musicians he'd never met before climbing on stage. (But he'd rarely been told "no" before.)

I bring this up because I often have trouble winging it. It's one of the many, many ways I'm no Chuck Berry.

I never knew much about autism until I began researching it when I was "diagnosed" (hate that word) at sixty-five. But I remember once, with my very first band, learning something important about many autistic people. 

We were a lousy but enjoyable little band--two older guys, two attractive young women, with a song list to die for. I started playing music on stage in my mid-fifties and I was still at the stage where every song we played felt like a minefield. We had tons of fun, but things often fell apart. Our fender benders were train wrecks.

One day our singer got us a job filling in for an established "gypsy jazz" band at a local club. The band we replaced was headlining the show. We were not established and did not play anything approaching jazz, gypsy or otherwise.

When we arrived we learned that the booking agent put us in as headliners and expected an excellent touring band to open the show. These folks had records! They played four or five shows a week at bars and clubs all across North America. They were amazing. We were not.

We told the booker, "Hey, we should open. These guys are way better than us."

He refused. The more we argued the more adamant he became. We were replacing the headliners so we would be the headliners.

Later, our singer, who knew the show booker, explained.

"He's autistic," she said.

I didn't know then that many autistic people have trouble with flexibility. We don't necessarily like surprises and sometimes need to mentally prepare for change.

I didn't suspect this of myself, because I often love to be surprised, and love to be in new places. I also prided myself on being able to instantly adapt to major changes in my former work as an attorney. Minutes before my very first trial was to begin a very experienced attorney for Ford objected to every one of the exhibits I planned to use in my opening statement. But I knew the facts better than him. I walked over, grabbed several of his exhibits (we hadn't objected) and used them to tell my story.

I was an expert attorney in my field--due in part to autistic strengths that trumped my autistic "deficits." 

As a musician it's a different story. I have some humble musical gifts, but I have definite, less humble limitations--and when someone tries to change things at the last minute, I get thrown for a loop.

Sometimes it's easy. If a singer turns to me and tells me to keep soloing beyond whatever we'd agreed to in practice, I can manage. But once I had a full meltdown because, the day before a Halloween show we had spent a couple of weeks preparing for, two of the band members insisted on adding two difficult new songs. When I tried to object they began berating me, and when one said I didn't want to play the new songs because "They're not Chuck Berry songs," I lost it. (Editors note: I don't play Chuck Berry songs, so it was doubly mean.)

For what it's worth, I learned both songs for the show, and even made a chart so that the bass player could follow on the more difficult one--but that was my last show with those three.

Today it happened again. Our drummer had to cancel a date a month or so from now. We had plenty of time to agree on a replacement for the show, and I know an excellent drummer who'd played with all of us in the past, but the band's newest member--an actual pro musician-- signed someone up without consulting me. 

I appreciate the hop-to spirit. I also know that it will create a frightening minefield for me that night. I will have to deal with unexpected new twists to the songs and a new person, unknown to me, on stage in front of a hundred or so people.

Maybe it's a good thing. If I had aspirations of becoming a real professional musician it would definitely be a good thing.  (But I have no such aspirations!)

I'm turning seventy soon. Music is not my true metier. I'm autistic. and I feel a bit like that autistic show booker who panicked when we asked him not to put us at the top of the bill.

But I will get through it. It's what autistic people have to do every day.

Is It "Late" Diagnosis When You're Over Sixty? (I Don't Think So.)

                                             

I have sometimes smiled when I've read someone was "late-diagnosed" as autistic at the age of twenty-five or thirty. I smiled because I was first "diagnosed" as autistic when I was sixty-five and a half! (The half year is oddly important to me. It makes my late identification seem even nuttier and more extreme.

But I've come to realize that I'm likely the norm for autistic seniors, and that my diagnosis, though late in life, was pretty much right on time.

I also realize that the twenty-five and thirty year olds are right. They probably should have been identified earlier.

Very few people in their sixties or seventies today would have been identified as autistic as children or as young adults--especially those of us who would for a time have fit best under the Asperger's label: autistic people with verbal skills and normal intelligence. 

We weren't seen as autistic--we were just a little odd. Two friends who have known me for decades told me exactly this. "I didn't think you were autistic. I just thought you were weird!"

Like most autistic people of my generation, I went through life with some painful mysteries and some mysterious strengths and successes. In love I figured I was just unworthy. At work, in my accidental legal career, I figured I had some sort of nearly magic power. Neither thought was true, but my odd life, my odd interests, and my oddly successful career sure made a lot more sense once I began to autistically study what being autistic means. (If you're currently on the same quest, may I recommend my book, My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.)

Anyway, I think I finally figured out how to make this blog visible to search engines, which had been studiously ignoring it. (My Chuck Berry blog, GoHeadOn! [goheadon.blogspot.com] remains on fire nearly fifteen years after I stopped posting. Same platform. I figure the magic there is Chuck.)

But since I've figured out how to make My So-Called Disorder visible, I'll be posting more often, throwing things into the void, and hoping they catch an eye like yours.

A Review of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll by Chuck Berry (and Mathematics!) Scholar Dietmar Rudolph

There was a time when I couldn't get the web browsers to find this blog, but I may finally have cracked the code, which means I have some catching up to do!

Some time ago Chuck Berry scholar Dietmar Rudolph reviewed My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll. You can find his review by clicking here. 

Dietmar is the author of a website called A Collector's Guide to the Music of Chuck Berry that was indispensable to me when I was doing GoHeadOn and, indeed, would be indispensable to any autistically inclined Chuck Berry fan. 

But I'm only now learning that Dietmar is, of course, a lot more than a Chuck Berry scholar. HIs rather remarkable CV can be found HERE.

Thank you Dietmar!

An Autistic Person Meeting Folks for the First Time, Fifty Years Later

My wife and I once participated in a 10k run at the last of the five universities I attended to get my BA. It was the first time I visited the campus with her, and I felt nostalgic. 

"There was a giant, wall-sized photograph of the entire United States in that building," I told her, (forgetting that that satellite images of the entire Earth can now be summoned on any phone). 

But as we marched along I realized how different my nostalgia was from the memories of those around me. Hundreds of alumni were converging to participate in the race. Many wore school colors. They were laughing and talking with lifelong college chums or a person they met on campus and later married. They were remembering frat parties, dances, football games, sex in the dormitories, wild times on and off campus. 

Me? My fondest memory was giant, black and white composite photograph of the United States. 

I loved my college years, but they were different. I spent my college years alone. I explored the libraries and bookstores. I went to plays and movies. I visited art museums and galleries. I read. I listened to music. I taught myself guitar. I wrote. I went to class. I worked. I went home--early on to a dorm room, and later to apartments, where I saw no one and received no visitors.

I suppose I shouldn't exaggerate. I made one good friend during my freshman year. And on a year abroad program I got to know the names and faces of a hundred fellow students but at three other schools I attended I never met or talked to a soul for more than a few minutes.

I was undiagnosed autistic. School was easy. The social life was impossible.

In those days I wrote lots of letters to my family and to my high school friend, Greg. In those letters I described the people around me as dummies and snobs. I tried to be funny about it, but my bitterness was palpable. I had no explanation for why I found myself alone in large groups of happy people.

There's no way for me to mend relations with people at four of my five colleges because I never learned their names. But for a decade now I've been attending reunions of the year abroad program that I attended in the mid-1970s.

The year abroad program was different. It was a small group. We flew abroad together. We travelled together. We studied together. We lived together in small rooming houses. A lot of us drank together. I wrote about the experience HERE. In some ways I knew those people like the back of my hand. I knew their names and faces, the way they talked and laughed.

But I didn't actually know them, and they didn't know me. They saw me as inexplicably quiet (except in my own rooming house, where I was inexplicably loud.) I tried for a while to fit in, and to some extent tried to join in, but without much success. For the most part I simply observed.

When I began to attend the reunions, forty years later, I inherited a batch of photographs taken by others. I only appear in a handful, accidentally, and off to the side. Once, looking at them, I teared up. 

It's been interesting to meet the other students forty and fifty years later, now that I have the skills to interact properly. I feel like I've met many of them for the first time. They are interesting people, with interesting lives. (Our year abroad was undoubtedly a factor; most of us have continued to travel and explore throughout our now long lives.)

I wish it had been easier to get to know each other then. 

I'm glad it's possible now. 

A Review by Joe Martin in Post Alley

A review of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll by Joe Martin in the Seattle online newspaper Post Alley (someday the puzzle motif will disappear!) If you've read the book, I'd love for you to leave a comment about it under the review! At any rate, thank you, Joe.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/12/23/a-new-book-autism-and-a-fulfilling-life/

Trop Parler C'est Maladie, Spark Launch, (and a Little West African Music)

I want to thank Chaya Mallavaram and Mike Cornell for having me on their wonderful Spark Launch podcast, which focusses on neurodiversity. (Find it HERE, or look for it on YouTube or other places podcasts are found.) In our discussion I talk a bit about my very autistic way of preparing for my first visit with a therapist--scripting and rehearsing every word I wanted to say. I didn't do that for Spark Launch, but I'm afraid that writing my book, writing several articles, and scripting several speeches about the value of neurodiversity had me overly prepared. (My dad would have called the result "diarrhea of the mouth;" my friend Dando Gabi would have said "Trop parler c'est maladie!") I talked too much, and should have settled in for more of a conversation. But in the end, good stuff was said by all.

By the way, I only learned recently that Gabi's wonderful phrase, "Trop parler c'est maladie" (too much talk is an illness) was from a song by Benin's Polyrthmo--a song I'd probably heard ringing in the background a hundred times--or may even have danced to a few times. Music was (I'm sure is) ever present in Togo in those days. 

(And speaking of Togo, I tell a good story from Togo in the podcast about when I learned the value of open doors--a nearly perfect analogy to like as an autistic person who doesn't understand the rules of the neurotypical world.)