The Tragedy of Autism by John Bruce

I’d just gone through the security rigamarole – only half an hour in line that afternoon – and was sitting in the bar near the departure gate having a couple of stiff ones. The guy next to me looked like he had to fly a lot, too. He glanced at me and shook his head. “It isn’t really new,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. The body scans and pat-downs were just the latest, and if you wanted to make your flight – which is to say, if you didn’t want to get fired for not showing up at the client on time – you went along. And it wasn’t just security. You went along with everything, from the airline, too.

“Once I almost got thrown off a flight ,” I told him, “because, in the check-in line, I complained that the flight was obviously going to be hours late, and the crew didn’t seem to care. One of the gate people pulled me out of line and told me to shut up.”

“Or ComfortJet,” said the other guy. “Their gate attendants can decide you’re too fat to fly. It has nothing to do with security. They seem to think they have a mission to put everyone on a diet.”

“Oh, god, yes. I knew a guy – he had a few extra pounds, but then 60 percent of us have a few extra pounds. He said something the person checking his bag didn’t like, and all of a sudden she decided he was too fat to fly. He asked for the supervisor; showed the supe his frequent-flyer card, explained he flew on ComfortJet all the time, and nobody’d ever said he was too fat before. She backed the agent up. He had to buy another seat to get on the plane. No appeal. The agent had full discretion.”

“Well,” the guy said, “earlier this week I was on a flight. It was almost full. Right behind me there was a family, the parents and a bunch of kids. They took up that row, and also the one across the aisle. The kids were some of the worst screamers I’d ever seen.

“And the parents were the enlightened kind, the ones who won’t tell the kids what to do – instead, they negotiate. The little bastards wouldn’t sit down and fasten their seat belts, so the mother called a flight attendant.

“‘Would you please explain to my children why they need to sit down and fasten their seat belts?’ she asked. She wouldn’t even take the responsibility to tell them that.

“So the little girl behind me, once she finally sat down, started kicking the back of my seat. I turned around and looked at her hard; then I looked at her mother. Nothing. Then I spoke up. ‘Do you think you could ask your daughter to stop kicking the back of my seat?’ I asked.

“‘Jennifer,’ she said, ‘try to stop kicking the back of that man’s seat.’

“‘Not try,’ I told her. ‘Just stop.’ But it was a long flight, Logan to SFO, and those kids wouldn’t stay quiet or sit still. And the parents just didn’t care. They were plugged into their earphones. I was trying to get some sleep, but it was no good. The kids were zooming up and down the aisle, knocking into me and everyone else, grabbing my arm as they went by.

“Finally I’d had it. I turned around again, looked over the back of my seat, and caught the attention of both the parents. ‘I just want to say,’ I told them, ‘how much I admire you and sympathize with your struggles in dealing with the tragedy of autism.’

“You wouldn’t believe how shocked they were. All of a sudden, they started shushing their kids. It was probably the first time they’d been shushed in their miserable little lives. The mother actually made the kids sit down, covered them with blankets, and told them to go to sleep. You could see how embarrassed she was. But even more than embarrassed, she was mad.

“She got up, went to the back of the plane, and started talking to a flight attendant. She was waving her arms and pointing back at me. Then the flight attendant came my way. She was very stern. ‘Sir,’ she said. ‘We have an extra seat in the back of the plane if you’d care to move.’ It was plain that I’d done something unspeakable. If she could have, she’d have declared me too fat to fly or something.

“‘What?’ I asked her. ‘I just told these parents how much I admired them. What’s the problem?’

“‘The problem doesn’t seem to be with them,’ she said. ‘The problem seems to be with you. You seem to be having a difficulty with being seated near that family. If you’ll come with me, I’ll place you in a different seat.’

The lady had gone and tattle-taled to mommy, of course. The hell if I was going to let mommy order me around because I’d actually found a way to deal with the screaming kids. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘it seems to me that this admirable couple has found a way to minimize any difficulties that may exist.’ The kids were, in fact, finally asleep. ‘I’m not sure why I should move if there’s no real problem here.’ The flight attendant didn’t like that, but she couldn’t push it at that point. I stayed where I was for the rest of the flight, and the parents kept their damn kids quiet.

“‘Daddy needs a latte,’ the father said to his wife on the way out of the plane at SFO. ‘Daddy needs a cigarette and a latte.’”

John Bruce’s writing has appeared in numerous literary zines, and he’s received a Pushcart nomination. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and USC and lives in Los Angeles.