The sad, brilliant strangeness of the man we called Petya Golden was clear to everyone from the first day, when in the failing winter afternoon light he planted himself alone on a bench in the Gardens, a big man, like an enlargement of his father, large and heavy-bodied with his father’s sharp, dark eyes that seemed to interrogate the horizon. He wore a cream suit under a heavy herringbone tweed greatcoat, gloves and orange muffler, and there was an outsize cocktail mixer and a jar of olives beside him on the bench and a martini glass in his right hand, and while he sat there in his monologic solitude and his breath hung ghostly in the January air he just started talking aloud, explained to nobody in particular the theory, which he ascribed to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Bu?uel, of why the perfect dry martini was like the Immaculate Conception of Christ. He was perhaps forty-two years old then and I, seventeen years his junior, approached him gingerly across the grass, ready to listen, instantly in love, as iron filings are drawn to the magnet, as the moth loves the fatal flame. As I approached I saw in the twilight that three of the Gardens’ children had paused in their play, abandoning their swings and jungle gym to stare at this strange, big man talking to himself. They had no idea what the crazy newcomer was talking about but were enjoying his performance anyway. “To make the perfect dry martini,” he was saying, “you must take a martini glass, drop an olive into it, and then fill it to the brim with gin, or, according to the new fashion, vodka.” The children giggled at the wickedness of this alcohol talk. “Then,” he said, jabbing the air with his left forefinger, “you must place a bottle of vermouth close to the glass in such a position that a single shaft of sunlight passes through the bottle and strikes the martini glass. Then you drink the martini.” He took a flamboyant gulp from his glass. “Here’s one I prepared earlier,” he said, clarifying for the benefit of the children, who now ran away, laughing with delighted guilt.
The Gardens were a safe space for all the children whose homes had access to them, and so they ran about unguarded. There was a moment, after the martini lecture, when some of the neighborhood mothers grew concerned about Petya, but there was no need for them to worry about him; children were not his vice of choice. That honor was reserved for the booze. And his mental condition was a danger to nobody but himself, though it could be disconcerting to the easily offended. The first time he met my mother he said, “You must have been a beautiful young woman but you’re old and wrinkly now.” We Unterlindens were strolling in the morning Gardens when Petya in his greatcoat, muffler and gloves came up to introduce himself to my parents, and this was what he said? This was his first sentence after “Hello”? I bridled and opened my mouth to scold, but my mother put a hand on my arm and shook her head, kindly. “Yes,” she replied. “I see that you are a man who tells the truth.”
“On the spectrum”: I hadn’t heard the term before. I think that in many ways I have been a kind of innocent, and autism for me was not much more than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and other cruelly named “idiot savants” reciting lists of prime numbers and drawing incredibly detailed maps of Manhattan from memory. Petya, my mother said, was certainly high on the autism spectrum. She wasn’t certain if what afflicted him was HFA, high-functioning autism, or AS, which was Asperger’s. Nowadays, Asperger’s is no longer considered a separate diagnosis, having been folded into the spectrum on a “severity scale.” Back then, just a few years ago, most people were as ignorant as I, and Asperger’s sufferers were often put into the dismissive box marked “mad.” Petya Golden may have been tormented, but he was by no means mad, not even close to it. He was an extraordinary, vulnerable, gifted, incompetent human being.
He was physically clumsy, and sometimes, when agitated, clumsy too in the mouth, stammering and stuttering and being infuriated by his own ineptitude. He also had the most retentive memory of anyone I ever met. You could say a poet’s name, “Byron,” for example, and he would do twenty minutes of Don Juan with his eyes closed. “I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.” In search of heroism, he said, he had tried to be a revolutionary Communist at university (Cambridge, which he left without his architecture degree because of his affliction), but admitted he didn’t try hard enough to be a good one, and besides there was the disadvantage of his wealth. Also, his condition was scarcely conducive to good organization and dependability, so he would not make a good cadre, and anyway his greatest pleasure lay not in revolt but in argument. He liked nothing better than to contradict everyone who offered him an opinion, and then to bludgeon that individual into submission by using his apparently inexhaustible storehouse of arcane, detailed knowledge. He would have argued with a king over his crown, or a sparrow over a crust of bread. He also drank far too much. When I sat down to drink with him in the Gardens one morning—his drinking began at breakfast—I had to pour the booze into a plant while his attention was distracted. It was impossible to keep up with him. But the industrial quantities of vodka he put away appeared to have no effect whatsoever on that faultily wired but still prodigious brain. In his room on an upper floor of the Golden house he was bathed in blue light and surrounded by computers and it was as if those electronic brains were his real equals, his truest friends, and the gaming world he entered through those screens was his real world, while ours was the virtual reality.