Their Iranian Crisis Triggers My Autistic Trauma from Cuba 1962.
I feel exactly like I did as a child during JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis. We didn’t know if we’d live through that weekend.
It was deeply traumatic for this autist. Which means all I got for you are memory flashes… and I won’t swear all the details are perfect.
Flash #1: Thursday night, October 25, 1962
My parents… Young Republicans who voted for Nixon… send my 4-year-old brother to his room to play. Then, they sit me down at the dark faux-maple table in the dining room.
“You’re old enough to understand,” my dad begins. He was a great believer in sharing adult experiences with me. Expanding my horizons, he called it.
He explains Russia and America may be going to war. Just like the Japanese and the British in Bridge over the River Kwai. He was big on exposing me to adult movies, too. But the only adult “horizons” I remember being exposed to in that movie are the intense explosions. And crying when the soldiers died.
He probably makes a snide comment about President Kennedy. Then, he clicks off his next point.
“No one can know what happens in a war,” he said. He pauses. Looks out the window. Continues, “And your mother and I can’t know what could happen in this one. It’s possible people will die. It’s possible we as a family could be hurt.”
He adds a few more details. I sit absolutely silent… inside and out. Then I probably go crash in my bedroom. I dunno. That memory just goes black.
I have always NEEDED to know what’s going on… Being lost on a car trip… without a map? Instant panic attack
Flash #2: The Friday before THE Day
Right now, I’m flashing on my second-grade schoolyard. Friday, October 26. The Day before Black Saturday. The day we all held our breath.
Until Walter Cronkite finally announces the Russian ships have turned around. And we learn the World maybe isn’t going to end.
In my mind, I’m back in that Catholic parish school in Johnson City, New York. Run by the Sisters of Charity… the nuns with the White-Wing Hats? They had just shown us Operation Cue… the famous Civil Defense movie featuring “Doom Town” footage.
Sure, I’d seen the Bert the Turtle cartoon before. And faithfully practiced sticking my head between my knees under my desk. Over and over since kindergarten in 1958.
But this new film is not cute, not cuddly, not an animated cartoon. This film is sirens and white flashes and exploding homes… in a darkened room with screaming kids. This film is real… to me.
Then they send us out to recess on the playground… where kids share the crazy shit their parents told them
We’re gonna die.
The commies are gonna die.
They wanna take Jesus away from us.
So we’ll all go to Hell…
Scene after scene that blows my brain right into terrifying sensory, emotional, autistic overload. But I don’t scream. I get silent. I turn solid ice… for days.
Then the nightmares start.
They last at least 10 years, off and on…
I’m in my second grade classroom.
Everything’s in stark black and white.
Exaggerated shadows.
I hear a wind.
I stand up.
All the kids point at me, silently.
I scream, “Look!” pointing out the window…
At something unnameable.
They just stare.
But on the other side of the green glass, there’s a blinding flash.
Then a howling wind.
A tree is torn up.
The classroom windows explode inward.
I feel the wind blow my hair and face back…
Then I wake…
into screaming blackness.
Over and over. Every so often. For 10 years… maybe more. Same dream. Same nausea.
Can I explain why this was traumatic?
Sure, the sensory nightmare. But I wonder if you can feel the crushing weight of the naked uncertainty? Not knowing whether my family would live or die? Or end up in the hospital? Maybe go to Heaven… or Hell?
I don’t know about other autistics. But I have always NEEDED to know what’s going on. My wife could tell you. Even as a 70-something, being lost on a car trip… without a map? Instant panic attack.
This experience of world politics did not expand my horizons. It drove me deep inside my mind…
Now, flash forward 64 years… Trump risks WW III
I’m sitting with my wife, Wednesday night. Just the day before, Trump had ignited the cheesiest action movie cliché of them all… the countdown timer to explosion.
Even seeing through the surreal mind game of it all… I can’t help myself. Maybe… this time… he means it.
Cuz influencers… and even newscasters… were all over YouTube saying, “This could be WW III, Jane.”
I’m getting physical chills. Nausea. Cold hands… but my face is hot. It ain’t the Norovirus.
Hello, Darkness, my old friend… Traumatic panic.
And I just can’t take it. Yet again… So, I all but jump out of my chair.
“Hon, I gotta go,” I manage to tell my wife in an even tone. We had canceled everything else to watch the news. We both felt if the world was ending at 8 pm, we wanted to be together. Like Dodge & Penny at the end of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
“I know we want to be together,” I push the words out. “I’ll be back way before 8. I promise… But I keep thinking of my dogs. What if this is the last walk I can ever give Gussie… give Stripey?”
My wife’s great. Her eyes widen. She stares a second. Then she quietly says, “I get it. I’ll be right here.”
So I walk out the door. Into the evening with Gussie… carrying the trauma… and the fear… and the question an old man asks himself…
What if we do die tonight?
And I find myself thinking an old autistic man’s thoughts. Whatever happens tonight… tomorrow night… the next time they call a crisis…
I want to do whatever it takes so none of us… autistic or not… ever feel this way again.
Because there is no “end” to my trauma. No resolution. No cure. Only acceptance and incorporation.
I still feel the shape of this trauma. Deep and wordless, inside me. It is distant now. But I feel the shape of that same silence, that ice.
I choose to break the silence.
I escape into love.
Love of my wife.
Love of my dogs.
Love of Nature.
So long as I can hold it.
Which became this piece…
The Night They Held Their Crisis
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. — Donald J. Trump
I find my life
Simplifying.
Words I can’t find…
Maybe I don’t need.
Memories I can’t recall…
Maybe I can’t tolerate.
People I can’t love…
Maybe I can never be with.
Ever again.
Old & autistic,
It’s okay…
I can die with that.
An earlier version originally published at https://johnnyprofaneknapp.substack.com.
More autistic lived experience: If this resonated for you, I share more pieces like this on AutisticAF Out Loud.
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I’m an autistic poet and spoken word performer, diagnosed at 63. Now in my 70s. I’ve been publishing AutisticAF Out Loud since 2019… work that refuses to be packaged.
My spoken word piece , every clock is a handgun pointed at my head, was published in Wordgathering, a journal of disability poetry & literature. In 2022, I spoke at the UN World Autism Acceptance Day about my illustration work rooted in autism & ADHD.
I live in a rural Indiana trailer… across the courtyard from my wife’s trailer… with my 2 dogs & cat. Occasionally I shave… to face Walmart.
The algorithms hate me. I must be doing something right.
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