Kyle’s blog

Rain Man Final (memoir)

Rain Man

I wore holes in my sheets, tossing in an attempt to bring ease to my brain. My thoughts were still fluttering, wide awake. I tried to cradle them in my arms, lull them to sleep. It always interested me that I couldn’t remember the last moment of conscious thought right before I danced in dreamland. I often spent ten to thirty minutes lying swallowed whole in my tiny sack, drifting not into sleep, but rather into previous thoughts or events of my life. I knew I wasn’t the only ten-year-old who didn’t go to sleep right away, but I also knew there was something else to it.

There is no one event, no horrible memory, no tall tale that tells of how I became who I am now. I have picked up the story over time. And I can’t explain why, but it doesn’t seem odd to me that I count. I have to count. I won’t say that I can’t go a day without counting, but I just don’t. It’s the constant adding of anything that can be summed. It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and it’s not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), though I have often referred to it as such. This is not a fixation. It just started happening.

At twenty, I don’t remember my life without addition. It started with phone numbers, billboards, television ads, license plates, tiles on the floor, or anything with multiple digits. The gates lifted, and my brain was off to the races, completing the work of a second grader. But it was a bit more subterranean than simple arithmetic.

I felt comfort in my ability -- so much that I extended my repertoire to counting letters in words, phrases, or even sentences. If I had a lot of time, such as a long car ride on the highway, I would contemplate license plates and assign each letter a specific numerical value. A equaled 1, H equaled 8, U equaled 21, and so forth. That way, license plates could be better summed up.

I wanted people to know. I wanted nothing more than to share this gift with my friends and/or strangers I would meet. Every so often, I’d be in a car, or in a room that was full of witnesses. I would see the phone number on the billboard, television ad, or poster. 1-800-435-9225. I go over the numbers in my head, grouping them to make the math easier and faster for my response. Quickly, the numbers are added, and then the response.

“Thirty nine”, I would say quietly, but with enough volume to be heard that I meant business.

“Huh?”

“Nothing”, I would say, still somewhat covert in my operations. Maybe even a bit mortified of my “problem.” This was no problem. This was, and still is, who I am.

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I think the first person I ever told was my girlfriend, Melanie. She understood me. She understood why I liked poetry, and why I listened to death metal, and why I wore ugly sweaters from thrift stores. She knew I wasn’t normal. When the time came to tell her, she challenged me. I was obviously up for the challenge.

“How many letters are on my shirt?” she asked, shielding her chest after a brief moment of examination. I didn’t need that moment. Her shirt read “Air Academy Lacrosse,” a phrase I had been calculating for the past four years, through Junior Varsity, three different coaches, and state playoffs. Without hesitation, I looked up and said “Eighteen.” She looked down at the sweatshirt that she had been tugging on to eliminate creases. She counted aloud as her finger bounced from letter to letter like a small red ball in a children’s song on television. When she found out I was right, she acted impressed, and I played the modest card.

“I’ve been doing it since I can remember.”

(35, including punctuation and quotes)

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So my secret was out. Everywhere we went, she tested me in front of my spectators. It wasn’t long until most everyone I had some kind of relationship with knew about my gift. They all tried their best to thwart me, but my skills were much too hearty for their tests. Whether it involved shirts, words, phrases, or tiles on the floor, I was relentless in my efforts. The occasional smart-asses would ask an absurd question that not even I could answer, and they knew it. So, I outmaneuvered them, and found out for myself.

“Ok, ok. How many letters are in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” they would ask, knowing they had prevailed. “Oh, you silly, silly person,” I would think. All those who have attempted to stump me have tried this word, and they, too, were surprised by my reply.

“Thirty four” I utter with pride as their grins turn to baffled stares.

And that soon became my definitive goal: to make people think I was Rain man, essentially, though I did not actually try to be Rain Man. Rain Man was a movie made in 1988 about an autistic savant that could count the most ridiculous of sequences, such as toothpicks that spilled on the ground, etc.

I have a photographic memory in the sense that I can glance at a word, and odds are I have calculated that word before, so I know how many letters it contains. This is a benefit to my sport, because the observer thinks either I, the observed, can count very fast, or I don’t have to count at all.

It is almost like the letters and syllables are a different language to me. The letters have a connection with numbers, and they all meet in my thoughts.

It soon became not just limited to numbers or letters. I would find myself breathing the syllables of a phrase from my mouth, and hoping that the syllables add up to a total equal to a multiple of five or ten. I will sometimes get nervous if I cannot somehow get it to equal a digit of five or ten, or I will get anxious if I feel like I can count a phrase, and I am un able to because I am in a hurry. This is where I imagine that I actually do have OCD. This is the way my ability takes a turn on me, stabs me fiendishly in the back. Bleeding.

Eight.

It still always happens without letting me know. I am not able to drive down a street without counting every single letter that my eyes laid upon. I can’t walk down a hallway after classes got out and not calculate every letter of every shirt that brushed by mine. I don’t seem to mind because it has no effect on me. It has no actual impact on the life that I live outside of numbers.

There is not some kind of profound impact that this has had on my life. There is not one single event that stood out in my memory and made my life different from that moment on, or changed my life forever. But then again, I have a feeling that this isn’t just some phase. I think that this will be sitting on my brain eternally. I will continue to toss and turn in my sleep, trying to dance in dreamland, counting anything and everything in my bedroom, once moreover. That’s the way it will stay, and I take comfort with it staying with me. The thought of adding forever is reassuring. Everyone has their quirks, and this is mine. This is what makes me.