Kyle’s blog

Rain Man Memoir First Draft

Rain Man

By: Kyle Boyd

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 thinking right before I danced in dream land. But 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 my experiences now. I have picked it up over time. And I can’t explain why, but it doesn’t seem odd to me that I count. I have to count. I’m not going to sit here and say that I can’t go a day without counting, but I just don’t. It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder, and it’s not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (though I have often referred to it as such). This is not a fixation, it just happens.

At 20, I don’t remember a life I’ve lived that didn’t involve counting. It started with phone numbers, billboard ads, television ads, license plate numbers, the number of tiles on the floor, 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 new found hobby. So much that I extended my repertoire to counting letters in words, phrases, or even sentences. (As I said before, I don’t remember this happening or when this all started.) If I had a lot of time, such as a long car ride on the highway, I would assign each letter a specific numerical value. A equaled 1, H equaled 8, and U equaled 21, and so forth. That way, license plates had a more solidified total for my summations.

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 occupied with 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; group them in a way to make it easier and faster for my response.

“39”, I said quietly, but with enough brawn to make it known I mean business, and business is good.

“Huh?”

“Nothing”, I said, still so covert in my operations. Maybe even a bit mortified of my “problem”. This was no problem, folks. This was, and still is, me.

++++++

I think the first person I ever told was my girlfriend, Melanie. She understood me. She understood why I liked poetry, or why I listened to death metal, or why I wore ugly sweaters from the ARC. She knew I wasn’t normal. When I told her my secret, she tested me, and 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 a moment; let me get that straight right now. 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, “18.”

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.”

++++++

And 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 at thwarting me, but my skills were much too hearty for their tests. Whether it be shirts, words, phrases, or tiles on the floor; I was relentless in my efforts. There came the occasional smart-ass, asking the 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 ask, knowing they had prevailed. Oh, you silly, silly man. Everyone who has ever attempted to stump me has tried this word, and they, too, were surprised by my remarks.

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

And that soon became my definitive goal: to make people think I was Rainman, essentially. But I was not. I just had a lot of practice.

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 the observed can count very fast, or the observed, otherwise known as me, doesn’t have to count at all.

The thing about it all is this: My gift isn’t limited to numbers or letters. I’ll find myself breathing the syllables of a phrase from my mouth, and hoping they add up to a total equal to a multiple of five or ten. This is where I imagine that this may, in fact, be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I will change the ampersand in to “A-N-D” to help the cause, or I’ll add spaces. And 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 the way my ability takes a turn on me, stabs me fiendishly in the back. Bleeding. 8.

I’m beginning to control it not. Not that I wasn’t in control of it before. Not like I wasn’t able to drive down a street without counting every single letter that my eyes laid upon. Not that I couldn’t walk down a hallway after classes got out and not calculate every letter of every shirt that brushed by mine. It’s just there.

The same that we’re all just here. Just going through the motions and living our normal lives, keeping our secrets, hiding our talents, then exposing them, reading our stories, then writing our own for no reason at all. We all have these talents, these buried truths. We hold these truths dear to us, and we want to show them. Our need to bleed them out of our fleshy, temporary souls is natural, and necessary.

I have come to terms with this skill, and I am proud of it. I will never hide what I once kept locked in its cage. I am still eager to illustrate my world to listeners, as I have displayed. And next time, I will not hesitate to expose a part of who I am.