You know I used to work with these autistic kids and those motherfuckers were crazy as shit. Johnno used to eat cigarette butts off the ground and then sprint away with his hips bent forward at 90 degrees, his head staring at the ground, arms trailing behind like a blind super-ostrich.
Kevin was the 130 kg, 16 year old who loved to eat. No I mean loved to eat. He once escaped from his teachers, broke into the staff room and ate an entire 4L tub of ice-cream. He'd been gone no more than 5 minutes. Another time he scaled the 12ft fences and 'ran' to the nearest KFC. From there he jumped the counter, grabbed as much chicken he could stuff in a box and headed off down the Western Ring Road on foot. The cops pulled him soon enough but I pity the poor 15-yr old KFC employee who had to encounter this brute charging them, screaming like the proverbial autistic-kid-bumrushing-a-KFC and pounding his forehead with both fists like it was the only thing between him and his non-retardation. Oh yeah, sorry but I forgot to mention that if Kevin encountered any obstacle during the day, his first response was to beat against his forehead to the point where he had developed an obscenely prominent calluse in the middle of his forehead over the years. His side-on profile really did resemble that of one of Wile E. Coyote's stray boulder victim's.
Kane would call out the names of each street as you drove past them as he new them by name; your very own kiddie singsong GPS. He also used to steal my mix cassettes from the van (which I made in a vain effort to impress a girl) and tape over them with Craig 'Huggy' Huggins from Gold 104.3, who-ever the fuck he is (curse his soul).
Max farted blood into a doctors face once but we are going to have to get really, really high before I can let that one out (pun intended).
The thing is these kids didn't really get the consequences of what they were doing, they just did stuff. The world didn't exist outside of their head so they'd better make sure that crazy movie happening out there is nice and interesting. They just did things for themselves. Sometimes it kinda made sense, sometimes it really didn't. Maybe all we do is the same and hope that what we do doesn't result in anyone getting covered in poo and blood and please let that be all. I remember I met a lady who classified herself to me as 'a bit autistic' and she looked and sounded just like anyone else. Then one time she reached across me and grabbed a glass of water from my hand and started drinking it without hesitation before a cursory glace in my direction stopped her dead. She explained that she was sorry but she only realised that the water not for her to drink after my face looked shocked. She didn't recognise it as 'mine' but she was thirsty and it was water. She only knew it was 'mine' because when people look at her like that when she had a drink, that's what must have just happened.
There is a theory that we all fit somewhere on 'the autism spectrum'. I like that theory. If I'm thirsty why can't I drink that water? We're always working for ourselves anyway, just some of us can manage to do it while affecting less people negatively. Shit, do we ever do anything truly altruistically? Don't you just give money to charity to make yourself feel better? Is it empathy or the satisfying of guilt? Won't that even up the karma scales given I wear Nike and don't give a fuck about the kids that make them?
We're all on that spectrum somewhere.
Time to hear from the greatest spazmo of them all...
Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Spasticus Autisticus mediafire download
Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Reasons To Be Cheerful pt. 3 mediafire download
*Note: all the names have been changed for this story, obviously
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