Today I would like to introduce Jeff Stimpson to all of you. Jeff is 47 and lives in New York with his wife Jill and their sons Alex (11) and Ned (9). Jeff maintains a blog atjeffslife.tripod.com/alextheboy, and is the author of “Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.” He also blogs for many other sites around the Net.
I would like to thank him for his contribution to this blog. I hope all of you will enjoy it.
Great Escapes by Jeff Stimpson
By far the loudest “Ooooo” I usually get from audiences when I tell them about Alex is from the bit about his leaving the apartment.
This hasn’t happened in a long while, but, like breaking a tooth on food, when it happens once it’s over fast but lives long in memory. Basically, Alex, 11, semi-verbal and PDD-NOS, had been zipping out of our apartment and down the hall as far as the elevators for maybe a few months, usually when nobody was watching.
“Go get Alex!”
“Can’t you watch him!”
Alex left the apartment – in his underwear and a T shirt; it was sort of cute – once or twice during the daytime. We would search our building for several minutes, which was really a waste of time since all we had to do was go to the basement storage room in front of our lockers, where ages ago we stashed an Elmo video. “Elmo?” Alex said as my wife Jill dragged him back upstairs.
But that was a whole lot different than when the phone rang at 4 a.m. Please God let it be some drunk guy, I thought.
“Alex is in Marie’s apartment!” Jill said.
We bolted into the living room, where the lights were on and Alex sat in front of the TV, watching Elmo with the volume low. He must have unlocked our front door and left our apartment soon after I’d gone back to sleep.
Marie, our neighbor, said Alex came in and turned on all the lights, including one she herself didn’t know how to work. Then he left.
I hung my head that morning and prayed I was still asleep and dreaming. Jill said little, but dove onto the Net to Google locksmiths and door alarms. “Alex, you CANNOT leave the apartment!” we took turns saying. We snapped off Elmo. Jill continued to tap the keyboard. Marie has daughters at home, I thought into my hands. It’s one thing for an 11-year-old boy to do this. But what happens when that boy is no longer 11 and maybe isn’t so cute anymore, either?
That morning I learned the word “elopement.” It’s something that autistic people and victims of Alzheimer’s do. I know of one boy who did this a lot. He’s 14 now, I think, and his parents have put him in some kind of facility.
So. Locks. Marie pointed out that Alex could lock us out with chain locks and deadbolts, even if they’re installed high (he’ll simply stand on a chair the same way he once, when he was two, stood on the open door of the dishwasher to reach Pringles). We’ve often thought of a more sophisticated lock on the inside of our door, but NYC fire regs forbid inside-facing key locks. Through this day we discovered that we’d need a variance from the fire department — no, the fire department told us, we’d need it from the city Department of Buildings, which didn’t answer its phone — to get a combination lock installed what amounts to backwards. “You want it how?” the clerks said in hardware store after hardware store, turning the locks upside down to show that they can’t be installed that way no matter how hard two parents stared at the Medeco displays like a couple of RCA/Victor dogs with red-rimmed eyes.
Can Alex figure out an alarm? We buy three: two tiny white jobs that stick to the jam and to the door and that when separated while ON! send their sound right through your skull like Elmo’s voice. We put one on the front door and another on the door of the boys’ bedroom, and I tell Jill to use the latter during my upcoming few nights on a business trip. We also get an alarm that looks like a micro-cassette recorder; it hangs from the knob of the front door and goes off when jiggled. Alex laughs at the sound.
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