'A work in progress'

 

By Jennifer Parks

Jerry Newport pauses momentarily when, over the phone, you give him your birthdate. He takes a deep breath and in a casual voice says you were born on a Sunday, you've lived for 10,809 days, 259,416 hours 15,564,960 minutes and 933,897,600 seconds - to the nearest day.

For good measure, he adds that you are 172 days older than his wife's youngest child, and 755 days younger than her eldest.

By now, he's used to the predictable stunned reaction he gets to his human abacus party trick.

He shrugs it off, and you move on with the interview.

Being a savant, you imagine, must be like the sugar coating on a tough pill to swallow for Newport, who lives with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by impaired socialization skills and often above-average intelligence.

He knows what it's like to draw both long and short ends of the stick. While Asperger's made him a math magician, it also erected a barrier between him and the world.

Newport's story was recently made into a soon-to-be-released major motion picture, Mozart and the Whale, starring Josh Hartnett (Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbour and 40 Days and 40 Nights). He will also be speaking at Edmonton's Shaw Conference Centre tomorrow at a two-day conference hosted by Canadian Autism.

"It's really impossible to turn Asperger's people into normal people, but if you make them aware and confident enough in what they can do, normal society will find a place for them," says Newport, 56, who is an author of the book Your Life is Not a Label: A Guide to Living Fully with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome.

In 2002, he co-wrote Autism, Asperger's and Sexuality: Puberty and Beyond with his wife, Mary, who is also a savant.

Aside from being an Asperger's socialization expert, Newport drives a taxi and works part-time as a tax specialist at H&R Block in Tucson, Arizona, where the couple live on an acreage.

"The strongest way in which (the disorder) is influencing my life is a consistent failure to handle social situations at work and in relationships," he says.

Newport relays how, until he learned to modify his behaviour, he used to stalk his wife around the house when she didn't want to talk about something.

"I wanted that instant happy ending," says Newport.

He has a litany of stories about situations in which he has felt socially awkward or failed to pick up on social rules or understand gestures, voice inflections or the give-and-take nature of conversation.

They're only humorous in hindsight - like the time, as a dateless teen, he felt trapped at a party and retreated to a bedroom only to find two couples "commandeering the bunk beds." Unsure of what to do, he plunked himself down on the floor, and waited.

"They just said, 'Jerry, what the heck are you doing in here?' So I left. I didn't know what I was doing in there," says Newport.

He describes living in the darkness of his disorder as "extremely frustrating."

He wanted to fit in and have interactions with others - he just didn't always know how to do it.

But he's learning.

He tells you the way you pronounce Asperger's sounds like "Asparagus." You laugh, and are surprised to be unable to detect his social handicap.

"I'm a work in progress," says Newport, philosophically.

He has been, since the day in 1989 when he realized he wasn't "normal."

He was watching Rain Man, the box-office hit with Dustin Hoffman, when he found himself multiplying 4,343 by 1,234 faster than Hoffman's character Raymond did on screen.

"It was a relief to find out there were reasons for the way I was. By understanding the condition I could make sense of my life," he says. "The more I read about autism, the less autistic I felt."

He says he can pass himself off as normal in a structured situation, but put him in chaos "and you're going to see how unnormal I am.

"My hope is that Mozart and the Whale will do for some people what Rain Man did for me."

 http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/Entertainment/2004/10/22/680256.html

Friday, October 22, 2004