People I Knew #3: Jared
Part of an ongoing series (Names have been changed to protect the innocent, etc.)
Nothing is more terrifying than meeting someone who mirrors you in nearly every crucial way but with greater intensity. Gazing into their eyes is like seeing an alternate history of your own life: if only one or two things had gone differently, you could’ve been them and vice versa. It’s a profoundly disorienting and upsetting experience. Their existence bruises your ego, for th hey represent everything you are but with your flaws dialed up to eleven.
Jared was my mirror. Like Daniel, Jared was autistic and was thus forced into my circle because of perceived similarities; unlike him, however, Jared was a severe asshole. Daniel was certainly prone to inflammatory “jokes” and alienating others, but he was in many ways an innocent. He didn’t do these things because he wanted to piss people off; he was a product of the deep bowels of rowhome Philly and often didn’t know any better. His parents were harried, juggling jobs and taking care of his three other siblings, all squeezed together into a modest house which afforded little privacy. Daniel was truly ignorant and unworldly, and his situation served to keep him that way.
Jared, meanwhile, was from an affluent family living in an upscale neighborhood abutting the Parkway. He was an only child and attended a tony private school before transferring to a public school for the gifted. He had the world at his feet, and still acted like a complete dickhead. His autism was as profound as Daniel’s, but he was malicious. He didn’t make others feel bad by accident, but on purpose. He felt that the world owed him something and if it didn’t recognize his brilliance, he would crush it until it did.
I met Jared at summer camp at a large museum in downtown Philadelphia. I don’t recall if we were introduced by camp counselors because of perceived similarities, or if our first contact arose naturally, but we were almost immediately at odds. We lived in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: we were two planets locked in a Dance of Death which could not be prevented. We survived a number of close calls before the terrible day of impact, an impact of tears and loathing and walls of pubescent fire scorching poor Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst alive.
Jared and I shared a vast number of overlapping interests. We were both especially crazy for dinosaurs, or — as we’d eagerly correct anyone — “prehistoric and extinct animals” (who could be so ignorant as to not know that Pteranodon and Icthyosaurus weren’t dinosaurs? Fools!). This interest is incredibly common among autistics, and is typically outgrown by puberty, save a handful of emotionally stunted types who scribble illustrations of fictitious dinosaurs on DeviantArt (few, if any, eventually study paleontology). We were also into history, astronomy, animals, and reading — in sum, the common obsessions of the young, autistic, and undersocialized.
This should have made Jared and I the best of friends, not sworn enemies. There was but one key difference between us: Jared used his knowledge to bully and shame other people. I later found out he underwent intense bullying in school (again, not uncommon for autistics), and this was his delayed vengeance. The summer camp was full of quirky and awkward kids, kids he knew he could dominate and upset because there was nowhere else for them (or him) to turn to. When years later I first saw the “aktually” guy meme, I did a double-take; he was exactly like Jared, save that Jared was rail thin with a full head of hair, not obese with a combover. But the gestalt was the same: terminally anti-social, odd prosody, and no light shining behind the LensCrafters glasses.
Jared would stop at nothing to correct anyone about nearly everything. He was unable to pronounce “r” and “l” sounds; this was yet another issue I once shared with him; Years of in-school speech therapy annihilated that habit (again, how close we come to being that which we fear…) and so his corrections were especially grating to me:
“Actuawwy, Pwuto isn’t a pwanet….”
“Actuawwy, T. Wex wived in the Cwetaceous, not the Juwassic….”
“Actuawwy, Mawie Antoinette nevuw said ‘Wet them eat cake…’”
I was baffled by my rage at this boy. I was also guilty of info-dumps about arcane topics which were not germane to the discussion at hand. I often neglected to consider whether the other person was actually interested in the American Revolution, or the Pleistocene epoch, or the history of Looney Tunes; I merely took it as a given. Yet I got a free pass and the absolute indulgence of my peers and counselors. I was beloved, not a nuisance. I could not grasp why.
I never realized it until someone told me it was because of my enthusiasm. I wanted people to know what I knew and I wanted to expand their horizons (it at least sounded that way). I answered their questions without condescension. I wanted to help people, not bring them down. On some level — even if I appeared haughty or self-centered — my mission was charitable. Jared’s was merely to shame, avenge, and annoy. He was a hurt person looking to hurt others in turn. To him, not knowing something was a personality flaw which required scolding. The fact that I knew much of what he did on some level upset him; it certainly upset me. Here before me was a creature who was so like me, and yet so unlike me. It felt like seeing your Jungian shadow personified and babbling about the Egyptian gods at you.
Because of our constant clashes, my dad and I came to know Jared’s parents. They could not have had more different attitudes towards their son. Jared’s father was round, Irish, talkative, and somewhat older than his wife; he was quite indulgent of Jared and his interests and most likely on the spectrum himself. His mother, meanwhile, was thin, Jewish, and bewildered by Jared’s behavior. She was the one who corrected him, who saw something off in her son and wanted to help him before it was too late. Jared’s dad was great fun to talk to, but even at that young age I knew Jared’s mom had it right. My heart broke for her, and I could see the sadness in her eyes as she tried to juggle both son and husband at once as the sky crashed down around her.
One day, I finally snapped at Jared. I was joking about Hollywood’s tendency to render history in a completely inaccurate fashion and said that “soon, there'll be a movie where Vikings fight the Spanish Armada.” Jared — who lacked a sense of humor — spun around and proclaimed “Actuawwy, about five hudwed years sepawated the Vikings fwom the Spanish Awmada.”
That was simply too much to bear. I lunged forward and grabbed Jared’s hand. With as much courage as I could summon, I firmly told him that I had told a joke that didn’t need correction. He cried and I think I did too. I drove all my young loathing and fear and anger into that statement. It was exhausting for the both of us. Melancholia collided with Earth, Jane Birkin’s daughter and Lux Lisbon were incinerated, and darkness fell over the land.
Jared’s family eventually white flighted to Bala Cynwyd, while I trundled onwards in the city. I have not seen him for a decade at this point. I found that a shocking number of my high school classmates knew him, and also found him beyond aggravating. He eventually came to work at that same summer camp, and proceeded — to no one’s shock — to make a grand nuisance of himself once again. I don’t know if he went to college and graduated or if he’s marinating in a basement somewhere in Montgomery County, dreaming megalomaniacal plots to bring Allosaurus back to life and conquer the world. On some perverse level, I want to know everything he’s done in the past ten years, but I always pull back. I don’t want to see myself. I’m scared of myself, and what darkness might lurk within my mind. I don’t want to know what the dark part of me is doing. I don’t want to look my Jungian Shadow in the eye again. I don’t want to meet the enemy and see that he was me all along.
You described the feelings I have towards everybody I was "friends" with in middle and high school.