Precisely 28 weeks had
passed since Jerry Newport had met Mary Meinel. He had been waiting for this
very moment to pop the question. Twenty-eight, after all, is his favorite
number.
"First," he said, "it's a
perfect number--the sum of its factors equals 28. Twenty-eight is also the
sum of the integers from one to seven and I'm seven years older than her."
Looking back at their
April, 1994, engagement, Jerry's obsession with numerical perfection is both
amusing and disturbing. And for good reason: It is a gift that comes at a
terrible cost.
Jerry has Asperger
syndrome, a neurological disorder that isolates those who have it from other
people, even while sometimes bestowing unusual talents.
Mary has it too. And while
her gifts lie in art, she may be the only person who has ever fully
appreciated his delight in numbers.
Who else but Jerry could
have found such significance in the landmark fig tree in West Los Angeles
where Mary said she wanted the magic moment to occur? The tree, you see,
just happens to be 119 years old.
"If you divide seven into
the age of the tree," he said, "you get 17, and that's one of the numbers
you can make a polygon out of in a circle. But if you square 17, you get 289
and we met on the 289th day of the year."
Clearly, this couple's love
story--involving everything from an exorcism and an obsession with whales to
a compulsion to read license plates backward for fun--is no ordinary
romance.
It is a story of triumph in
the face of a potentially devastating but often unrecognized affliction.
Asperger syndrome is often
described as a social communication disorder that is similar to a mild form
of autism. Patients have trouble understanding subtle gestures that convey
what others are thinking or feeling. As a result, they are often
characterized as rude, selfish or just plain weird.
Jerry, 47, and Mary, 40,
spent most of their lives as social outcasts, feeling intensely alienated
from others without knowing why.
Their wedding on Aug. 19,
1994, was a poignant turn in the lives of two people who had always assumed
they were too odd to find mates and who, until they found one another, had
resigned themselves to live out their years on society's fringes, lonely and
alone.
Their union has shown that
it is possible for people with Asperger syndrome to find the kind of
companionship and fulfillment that other people take for granted. And
despite their communication difficulties, the Newports have become forceful
advocates, as well as symbols of hope, for adults with autism or Asperger
syndrome.
"They are superstars in the
world of autism," said Linda Demer, chief of cardiology at UCLA and a former
board member of the Autism Society of Los Angeles. "They've been a source of
inspiration for a lot of people."
Syndrome a Mystery
Scientists have had so
little success in unraveling the mysteries of Asperger syndrome that almost
everything about it is in dispute--including its definition.
Many psychologists consider
it a mild form of autism. But it was given its own category just last year
in the standard manual of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Like autism, Asperger
syndrome is identified in the manual as a "pervasive developmental
disorder," affecting social interaction and communication and marked by
repetitive behaviors and interests. While those who have the disorders are
sensitive to sound and touch, people with Asperger syndrome show curiosity
about their environment and eventually develop language and self-help
skills.
In practice, however, the
categories are harder to define--mostly because there is so much overlap
between Asperger symptoms and those of the "high functioning" end of autism,
psychologists say.
"It's not like cancer or
blindness where you can at least identify who has got it," said Gary Mesibov,
director of North Carolina's statewide program for people with autism. "What
makes this so difficult is we don't even agree on the essential
characteristics that allow you to say who the people are."
Nor is there agreement on
its prevalence--although more men than women have the disorder. Some
researchers say Asperger syndrome affects as many as 1 in 250 people, while
others set the figure at 1 in 650.
And although researchers
agree that Asperger syndrome stems from a genetically caused malfunctioning
of the brain or central nervous system, no one has determined what part of
the brain is affected.
There is no cure, although
patients--especially children--can be coached in socially accepted behavior.
But first they have to be diagnosed--a task that requires psychologists to
rely on mostly subjective judgments.
Some cases are easy to
spot. A man with relatively normal speech who exhibits repetitive behaviors,
strange speech affectations and extreme social awkwardness may easily
suggest a diagnosis, psychologists say. But what about the gawky man with
slicked-back hair and shirt buttoned to the neck who irritates his
acquaintances with Civil War trivia? Or the "absent-minded professor" who is
too absorbed by his studies to heed the social conventions of hygiene?
"There are many, many
people with Asperger's who lead productive lives and are really just
considered nerds," said Peter Tanguay, a professor of child and adolescent
psychiatry at the University of Louisville, Ky., who plans to publish his
study of Asperger syndrome this year.
But he added, "Unless there
are fairly major disruptions of friendships and interpersonal relations with
others, it shouldn't be labeled Asperger's."
Whales and Numbers
Even on first appearance,
there is something noticeably odd about the Newports.
Both have a stiff gait and
a maddeningly monotonous way of speaking. Jerry sounds hauntingly like a
real-life version of Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt, an
autistic savant, in the movie "Rain Man."
Mary is a tall, big-boned
woman who favors long skirts and tie-dyed shirts. One day, she wears a cap
from India over her long red hair--which turns out to be a wig. She shaves
her head for her non-speaking role as a blue-tinted Bolian on the television
series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."
Jerry, who is tall and
heavyset, keeps his longish blond hair in a tousled mop. He almost always
wears jeans and a blue T-shirt featuring silk-screened dolphins and whales.
He is so enamored of whales that two Halloweens ago he used chicken wire and
newspaper to construct a killer whale costume that he keeps next to the sofa
and strokes during conversations.
Today, the Newports sit in
the living room of their tiny, cluttered apartment in West Los Angeles and
talk about their first date on Nov. 28, 1993, at the Los Angeles Zoo. They
had met a few weeks before at a Halloween party hosted by Adult Gathering,
United and Autistic, a self-help group for adults with autism or Asperger
syndrome.
Jerry recalls feeling
instantly at ease with Mary. She was the first woman he had ever met who
didn't make him feel self-conscious.
"We could do silly things
together, like reading billboards backward and guessing what it said," he
said. "Or I would turn license plate numbers into dates. Like if I saw the
number 20,013, I could tell you that Oct. 17, 1955, is the 20,013th day of
the century."
Mary was charmed by his
mathematical abilities: "I liked it. It was a different version of what I
could do with my music and art."
But they soon found they
had more than their share of problems, too. Their inability to read each
other's emotions made the normal adjustments that new couples face even more
difficult.
Mary had to learn not to
take it personally when Jerry shrank from her touch in pain. He had to learn
to keep his voice down during disagreements to keep her from "emotional
shutdowns" that render her speechless.
"The kinds of problems they
have makes it much more difficult . . . mostly because of the difficulty
{people like them} have with empathy," said B. J. Freeman, director of the
Autism and Developmental Disabilities Program at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric
Institute. "But they do very well together. . . . It's wonderful to see."
In fact, their relationship
is one neither of them ever imagined possible. The lives they led before
they met are case studies in the kind of personal devastation that Asperger
syndrome can wreak--especially when it goes undetected.
Turning Point
Jerry grew up in Islip,
N.Y., knowing he was different.
He didn't walk until he was
nearly 2 and only learned to talk at 3 by imitating his brother's pet crow,
Blackey. He never looked people in the eye, constantly chewed on his
clothing and nails and had a fascination with watching paint dry.
He was 7 when his
mathematical abilities began to surface. He could add up a long column of
three- and four-digit numbers in his head. Other calculations--like finding
square roots--quickly followed.
At school, his talent with
numbers, combined with his tendency to talk incessantly in a monotone, set
him apart as odd. Most of the time he was shunned, except, he says, when his
classmates wanted to dazzle some newcomer with his abilities. Then they
would trot him out like a circus freak and bombard him with math problems.
"I remember being in the
center of all these people asking me to do stuff and answering their
questions so they would go away," he said. "For me, it was a case of either
getting no attention at all or . . . having to perform."
Although he came to regard
his gift as a burden, it saw him through in other ways. He was accepted to
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and received a bachelor of arts in
math.
By the time he graduated,
he was capable of doing extraordinarily complex calculations in his head. He
could change numbers from one base to another and could compute logarithms
by knowing the sine or cosine. He could usually get the correct answer
within a dozen decimal places. But when it came time to find a job, he was
at a loss.
It never occurred to him to
find work that would make use of his abilities. Instead, he drove a cab for
nearly 20 years. During that time, he hardly dated. By his mid-30s, he was
suicidal. He tried to kill himself by overdosing on pills, but changed his
mind and got his stomach pumped.
"Rain Man" was a turning
point. He identified with the main character so deeply that he contacted
Bernard Rimland, the founder of the Autism Society of America. He found his
way to UCLA's autism clinic, where he was told he probably had Asperger
syndrome.
He began attending autism
conferences and soon earned a role as a spokesman for adults with autism and
Asperger syndrome. He helped coordinate the first adult self-help group and
chairs the National Autism Society of America's ad-hoc panel of adult
advisers with autism.
Although he regards the
previous 20 years as "a waste," he considers himself "one of the fortunate
ones."
"You can't compare me to
others, not even to Mary," he said. "She had a much harder life than me."
Maelstrom of Pain
Mary is eager to talk about
her childhood, but during a conversation in a noisy cafeteria, she gazes
upward and begins slapping her hand against her arm. There are too many
conversations going on at once, she says, and she cannot filter them out of
the discussion.
She has been prone to
sensory overload all of her life.
As a child in Phoenix, she
often responded to stress, loud noises or strong smells by spinning in
circles or rocking.
Although she walked and
talked at a normal age, she had a penchant for imitating sounds over and
over. One teacher suggested she might be mentally retarded.
She did relatively well in
school--until she reached puberty. Then, inexplicably, she fell apart.
"My brain turned to
Jell-O," she recalled. "I couldn't make heads or tails out of anything."
She dropped out of high
school and went to Europe to live with one of her sisters in a religious
cult, she said. There, cult leaders arranged a marriage between the
16-year-old Mary and an 18-year-old boy who she says couldn't stand her. The
couple had a son. But she soon left the cult with her baby and moved to
America, where she had a son with a man she no longer sees.
The next two decades were a
maelstrom of psychic pain. Without a diagnosis for her condition, she only
knew that she felt profoundly alienated from other people. While she could
usually find work as a piano tuner, she was socially naive and often became
a target for exploitation.
In 1986, she rediscovered
talents she had lost touch with: drawing and composing music.
Her methods are unusual.
She draws without looking at the page, allowing her hand to follow its own
course. Only later, she says, does she find hidden images that she had no
idea she was creating.
She composes by waving a
pencil in circles over a score sheet until a sensation tells her where to
put each note. She says she has no idea how it will sound until she programs
the score into her keyboard and plays.
David Quaschnick, an
Emmy-award-winning makeup artist who works with Mary for "Star Trek,"
describes her as "a very creative artist" whose art and music is "intensely
creative."
"She doesn't have any
formal training in art, but she somehow has a natural understanding of depth
and focus," he said. "Her music is the same way. It comes from pure
creativity."
But her art didn't always
draw such praise. In the late 1980s, relatives and friends who were
convinced Mary was doing "the devil's work" persuaded her to burn her art
and music--and to undergo an exorcism.
The next few years were
punctuated by deep depressions and two nervous breakdowns.
With her two sons, Mary had
moved 14 times in 10 years, each time changing states and jobs. In between,
there were bouts of homelessness, including time at a Los Angeles Skid Row
shelter.
In 1991, she was so
desperate for work that she shaved her head and attended an open audition
with Central Casting. They agreed to represent her and landed her a job
doing guest appearances on "Star Trek" the following month.
In 1993, a UCLA
psychologist finally helped her make sense of the painful turns her life had
taken. The psychologist told her she had "autism/Asperger syndrome" and
referred her to Jerry's self-help group.
Jerry told her about the
Halloween party. She came as Mozart. He came as Willy the whale. She thought
he was strange. He thought she was weird.
It was, they would soon
discover, the first stirrings of love.
'Spiritual Synchrony'
Jerry and Mary were married
the following year on Jerry's 46th birthday at St. John's Presbyterian
Church in Westwood. Mary's adult sons were the only guests. After the
ceremony, the four rode the bus to Santa Monica and ate ice cream and carrot
cake at a park.
A year later, the Newports
celebrated their first anniversary. Mary made the invitations, which
featured killer whales in the shape of a heart. Jerry wore his whale costume
part of the time, ostensibly to entertain some children.
Almost all of the guests
were support group members, their relatives or professionals who work with
people with autism or Asperger syndrome.
Marshall Weeks, 26, who
describes himself as "the autistic Steve Martin," thrilled people with his
extensive knowledge of music trivia. Dean Beuerman, 23, who regularly combs
the newspaper for weather-related stories, grilled a woman who had just
returned from a trip to June Lake about the depth of the snowpack.
"I think that was the first
party I ever enjoyed," Mary said. "Everyone was conversing and being social
in their own way."
Clearly, there was a lot to
celebrate. Jerry had finally left his job as a driver to work as an
administrative assistant in UCLA Medical School's financial department. Part
of the job requires him to proofread accounting spreadsheets--he can look at
a column of numbers and know if one is out of place. The only difficult part
for him is operating the copying machine.
Meanwhile, Mary passed the
high school equivalency exam and is planning to enroll next March at the
Gemological Institute of America to study jewelry design. She also was
recently invited to exhibit her art at a soon-to-be-opened gallery in
Ventura County.
Mary says she feels more
comfortable in the world than ever. And Jerry, who spent years wishing he
were more "normal," once again takes pleasure in his talent for numbers. For
the first time in years, he believes the future holds some
promise--including yet another perfect number.
You see, on July 31, 2016,
it will have been 8,128 days--or 1,161 weeks and one day--since Jerry
proposed to Mary. Of course, 8,128 is a perfect number.
Said Jerry: "I had never
dreamed that I could live in such spiritual synchrony with anyone. What else
matters? That we are both . . . savants and perhaps other labels is not the
point. We are just meant to be together."
© Los Angeles Times 1995
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Some
are the melody, some are the rhythm, some are the harmony