Despite having autism and the mental health problems that went with that,
I had several minor jobs during college including several stints as a messenger and a couple as a phone interviewer for market research firms, so I thought I’d have no trouble after graduation, but college was a problem. I started with a computer science major, which I thought would get me a great job, but I wasn’t as good at it as I’d have hoped. I kept failing the advanced courses and rescuing my grade point average with English courses, which I loved. Finally, my mother, who was paying for college, laid down the law. “You are an English major. Make it official or forget about graduating”. I was really afraid an English degree would take me nowhere, but I thought it was better than not graduating at all, so I took it, graduating with a bachelors degree in English literature, a minor in math, and a plethora of computer courses.
After graduation, I tried teaching, but found out the hard way, I was terrible with kids. My license was lifted after three years of substitute teaching. I also went back to messengering. I worked for Zoom Messenger Service and found it boring and insulting. As a college grad, I didn't think I belonged in a job that included an ex con, a guy with intellectual limitations, and a migrant who could barely speak English.
I spent several years in several programs for the mentally disabled, getting into a terribly depressed state before finally finding a minor job at the gift shop of the hospital where I was being treated, South Beach Psychiatric Center. It was a ridiculously simple job. I showed up, signed in, and sat on the couch in the hall outside the shop, while the shop did it’s business for three or four hours. When it closed, I did my job of counting sales and profits, and entering them into a notebook, which took me five minutes of the hours I was hired for.
About then, a man came to South beach, looking for a crew for a new screen printing shop that was opening and would only hire mentally disabled people. The director of this shop, Thomas siniscalchi, had a revolutionary idea. This shop, which we would call Special Tees, would hire the mentally disabled, but it would not be a shop for the mentally disabled. It would not be a sheltered workshop. There would be no piece work and the only training we would get would be on the job. It would be a real job, with real job responsibilities (be on time, clean, ready to work, no smoking till break time, etc) and we would get a real wage of $7.25 an hour. No pay by the piece here. We still would be accommodated for our various mental conditions. As a rule, we would be given time off for psychiatric visits and care each week.
“You mean I would get a job because I’m mentally disabled?” I loved it and was happy to share my butterscotch candy with my new boss, which I’m sure helped me get the job.
Tom was as new to the trade as any of us, so, in that first year, we spoiled as much of our product as we made. We also got quite filthy with the plastisol ink we printed shirts with, so, for a while, Tom would occasionally declare that our shirts were too filthy to wear, take out a pair of scissors and cut the shirts off us as we wore them. Then we would get new shirts from the spoiled pile. This practice was ended when he started to cut off a girl’s shirt, when she screamed and ran into the bathroom. She had nothing on under that shirt!
Our first shop was all one room, so, when we had to develop a screen, which is a photographic process, we had to completely close down the shop and close and lock the outer gate, which was the only way to get the shop dark enough to develop the screens. Our future shop would have a separate developing room.
My position at Special Tees varied over the years. I started out as the shirt designer, but I got too anxious about it, not having the artistic or design experience to know what I was doing, so I was put in the production line. This bored me to tears, and I kept crying, "Why is a guy, who managed to get a degree despite serious mental disabilities, left to do such menial labor?". Toward the end of my time there, my arthritis got so bad that I couldn't stand anymore. I had to sit and clean tools alongside a guy with an intellectual disability who wished he was smart like me. I reminded him that despite my wonderful intellect, I was still sitting next to him, doing the same job. I hope it made him feel better because I felt miserable!
By September 2008, I went into the hospital for some elective surgery and couldn't bare to go back and started to look elsewhere. By this time, my former boss, Tom Siniscalchi, had become disgusted with Community Resources, the company that owned Special Tees, so he had started a new place with a similar mission, for developmentally disabled and autistic people, like myself, which he called PossibiliTees. I spoke with Tom and he assured me that I would never have to touch a plastisol covered squeegee ever again. Instead, he put me at the computer, where I found and listed customer leads. I also did some publicity work, getting us written up in several magazines devoted to autism and to the textile industry. As usual, Tom made the business lots of fun. He’s a pro wrestling fan, so during down times, he had informal wrestling with some of the other men there. Unfortunately, this ideality couldn’t last. The mission of the Immaculate Virgin, which owned Possibilitees, wasn’t satisfied with our production and sales numbers, so they closed it last December.
I shortly found work as an intern at Fine Art Fotos photo studio. My boss, Flint, hired me almost immediately because I had impressed him with my computer skills, and this time, I didn’t even have to offer him any butterscotch candy. I laughed at my wages. When I was in Special Tees, I earned $286 a week. At Possibilitees, I only worked ten hours a week, so never earned more than $72.50 a week. Now I was a fifty six year old intern and my compensation was $10 a day, just enough for travel and lunch. It seemed as I got older and more skilled, the less I made.
Since I am in my fifties and most of the people there were other interns in their twenties or teens, I was the old man there. I loved listening to the guys as they discussed their young culture and I enjoyed telling about the history I had lived through. I was especially overjoyed that this was the first for profit business I had ever worked for, Flint and the guys knew little about autism or chronic depression and didn’t care that I had this. This was something I had always been told was impossible. I had even made a sales ad and been told to write sales scripts and make sales calls myself, something I thought was impossible for autistics like me.
As I said, what work I could do was quite rewarding, but I couldn’t do much. Because of the land lords stinginess, I couldn’t get a dependable internet connection at work. I could barely get an hour’s work done in my five hour day, so Flint sent me home to work on my home computer, but that, for me, defeated the purpose of having a job. I was there for the company of the guys, so, by March, I decided to leave.
After some help from my psychologist, I got back into Sky Light Center, a clubhouse for people with psychiatric problems which I joined twenty years earlier. work biography sent to Outsider Press, 235 Arbor Dr NE, Rockford, Michigan 49341, or outsiderpress@gmail.com
