Transcript: Episode 2: Sopranos-Flavored Fran Fine

ZACK: Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Autism and all the ships at sea. I’m Zack Budryk and you’re listening to Stim4Stim, the relationship podcast by and for autistic people. Who else is here with me today?

CHARLIE: Hi, my name is Charlie Stern, you may also hear Paris Geller Stern, and we are Jewish Cancers. I am a Philadelphia-based writer, model, depending on who you ask or who you’re talking to, sometimes BDSM historian, sometimes, I don’t know, wrestling-adjacent artist I guess. This is our second episode, but it’s our first official episode after our warmup, and this week we’re talking about being a preteen. We got a question to our Gmail, which is open all the time, and you can submit your questions, concerns, comments complaints. But our question was, what would you tell yourself as a preteen, with the knowledge you have now. I’m not reading it, this isn’t verbatim. So, Zack if you want to… is that the wording?

ZACK: Yeah, I can go ahead and read it, just so we have full context. This is from friend of the show Walda Frey-Bolton: “Hello! I have one question relevant to my interests:If you were giving “the talk” to your pre-teen selves, what is the one piece of information or advice you would judge to be most useful in developing healthy romantic relationships?” And Charlie, do you want to go first on that?

CHARLIE: Yeah. I come from a context where I was raised very secularly and somewhat progressively but I never received sex ed in school and I never had open dialogue with my parents, I never had The Talk, so all of my information growing up came from seeking it out and self-education and that’s a thing I stand by. The messaging from my parents was mostly from my more conservative father, who told my sister and me over and over again, you have to marry someone of the opposite sex. That was kind of the chorus. He wasn’t educating us, he was just making mean comments, and I think that probably a lot of our listeners are overlapping in the queer/autistic/radical circles, so I’m probably talking to peers. My advice to anyone of any age, including myself in a time machine, would be ‘seek out self-education.’ That was long-winded, I’m sorry.

ZACK: Oh no, you’re fine.

CHARLIE: “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” if you’re a person to whom the information applies, and I think they’re starting to update and include all bodies, specifically trans bodies, but I haven’t read any of the more contemporary editions. But it’s such an encyclopedia for the bodies that it covers, and it’s a godsend, it’s absolutely a godsend, and that I would recommend to even an adult. But I think the two most valuable things that I carry even today, from my self-education as a teen, are consent and lube, which are mandatory, I feel. I think straight society is very afraid of lube and, you know, I don’t know if we want to get into talking about WAP, but it’s seen as a failure to need ease, which is really strange, because we should be making everything better than before, better than our last experience, better than who I was a year ago, and so opening up communication and also using something that is just so objectively helpful… I don’t think there should be any shame, and I think that applies to both communication skills and constantly improving those, and learning about tools. Your turn.

ZACK: Yeah, so… and I differ from Charlie in that I was diagnosed in childhood, or around the age of 14, and I had a problem that I feel like a lot of neurotypical kids have as well which is that, in terms of relationships and seeking them and working within them, I didn’t have an actual template that I was working from, I was mostly working from what I had seen in fiction, and that is of course almost never how the real world actually works. And at a certain point I felt like Iw anted a girlfriend because that seemed like where my character arc was going, almost, rather than there being a specific person I had a crush on, and sort of putting the cart before the horse, which as far as that goes I think made things a little more confusing for me, which is not great because that’s already the most confusing time of a lot of people’s lives. And the most — really, the only serious relationship I had before the age of 18 was, there was just this one, and she was also on the spectrum, and I think that combined with again, that thing of all of us faking it on some level at that age, I think hurt our communication. And I’m very grateful for the experience, but I don’t think we were really meant to last.

But I am very grateful that by the time I met my now-wife, I had sort of… and it’s not so much even the active romantic or relationship-building experience so much as knowing to expect that this is going to be confusing. You might not know exactly what you want, your partner might not know exactly what they want, as a unit, you may not know what your collective self wants either, and not rushing through that, not expecting it to follow the coherent structure of a movie or TV show or whatever, I think really helped me a lot in terms of being patient in my relationship and working on it and helping it develop. They say that, contrary to the myth, we have more empathy than the general population, and I think that that’s true but that sometimes we just need the right context to tap into that empathy, and I think that being able to draw on that experience was what enabled me to tap into that and make my relationship last as long as it has. Does that make any sense?

CHARLIE: Yeah. I think we’re both getting to the theme of rejecting “should,” whether societally through scripting and, I don’t know, compulsory heterosexuality, there are a lot of should that are set up, and if we just live in the moment and exercise some patience, I guess, for both of us and our past experiences I think there’s this common theme of figuring it out for yourself. Because, you know, you’re a person and you determine the trajectory of your life to some extent. And yeah, movies aren’t correct, it turns out.

ZACK: 100 percent. And honestly, as much as it can annoy me when neurotypicals go “Oh well that sounds like a problem everyone can relate to,” because no, there are parts of the experience that are exclusive to us, it was pretty liberating to realize just how much neurotypical people are faking it ’til they make it in these relationships as well.

CHARLIE: Yeah. Although they are more easily sponges in terms of like nonverbal cues but also this weird doublespeak that everybody’s supposed to know about, where you talk around a problem.

ZACK: Uh-huh.

CHARLIE: I’m very blunt because I don’t know how else to be, but the sort of… I’m picturing a movie theater date with a yawn and a stretch and then you’ve got your arm around the other person. That’s not really possible with us, but they learn that kind of subtlety, and they don’t have that voice in their head that has alarm bells going off like “wrong, wrong, you did this wrong, you don’t get it.” So that’s the huge difference for me because before a certain age I didn’t know how to touch others, for example.

ZACK: And it’s funny, because… I would not normally feel comfortable speculating about this, but she has speculated about it herself and expressed a desire to come onto the show at some point, but my wife Raychel, when we were — I’m referring to speculating in terms of the extent to which she is neurotypical, because she’s long suspected she’s not — but when we were first starting to get serious in our relationship, we sort of came to this mutual understand that at a certain point it made sense for us to kiss for the first time, but we felt vaguely ceremonial about it.

CHARLIE: Aww.

ZACK: And we were just sort of sitting on my bed in my college dorm and we were wondering if we were building this up too much, because both of us being fairly inexperienced kissers, it was probably kind of gonna suck in a vacuum. And I had my computer open on this iTunes playlist… I don’t even remember if it was a playlist or if it was just generic shit I liked. And the Postal Service’s “Recycled Air” was playing while we talked this out, which is like a perfect awkward young love song, and when we finally decided we were gonna go for it and kiss, the song switched over it and it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Rocks Off” instead and that was when we kissed.

CHARLIE [laughing]: What a time capsule.

ZACK: Uh-huh. And I compulsively sort of collect little details of my memories as well so the sort of vague awkwardness of being so close and yet so far in terms of that moment has really made it stick with me as well.

CHARLIE: That’s incredible. Yeah, the pressure of the first kiss has made it so disruptive to my life sometimes that I try to get it over with, or, I don’t try anymore, but there are times, especially during college when I was meeting more and more people and kissing more and more people and fucking more and more people. There was one time where my date and I had just parked in a parking garage and we were going to walk over to the movie theater, and I made us kiss before we got into things, and before he lit up a cigarette. I wanted to get it out of the way. And then my current hookup, my current COVID hookup, I met a long time ago during college on tour, and his band had just played, he was about to leave, I wanted his number and I wanted something in the future, so I just kissed him and then made him leave so we didn’t have to get that figured out, we already did it. And then we started talking a year later. So I deeply relate. A first kiss is such an opening of floodgates, it’s such a change in dynamics and feelings. I support that.

ZACK: Yeah, and the thing about early in my relationship with Raychel is just that again, because of my relative lack of experience, there was almost like this kind of high school chastity to it as well, like I would just be waiting for her outside the dorm. We didn’t have cars because it was a city campus and we walked everywhere, but if we had, I’d have been sort of leaning against my car. Just to illustrate how long ago this was, back then I was still Catholic and she was independent of me in the process of converting and so we would go to Mass a lot together, just because there was this big, frankly gorgeous cathedral, just right by the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. That’s another thing that I’ve never really thought about how lucky we were, in that that particular city campus there was so much regular, sort of rambling around college-kid stuff to do that it was easy to come up with hashtag-fun date ideas. Because I don’t know how this person and I hang out yet, necessarily, but I know that I know of activities that most people enjoy and assuming she is one of those people, we can just go from there.

CHARLIE: Truly. And I want to point out that we are both talking about our college selves, and the original question was about pre-teen-hood.

ZACK: Oof. You’re right, I’m sorry.

CHARLIE: …but my scope personally is a lot wider. Because I don’t really remember a lot of my childhood, and parts of that are I grew up in a very violent home, and my brain won’t remember and can’t remember, but I definitely feel like my preteen years were through college and the year after, because I still had no fucking idea what I was doing, and no one had opened the door in my mind yet that I’m autistic, so I was just sort of flailing around and un-lucid, unaware, not communicating with myself and therefore not really able to communicate with the outside world. The echo of “Our Bodies Ourselves,” that was my textbook in one of my college courses and so that’s just perennially important to me, I think.

ZACK: And I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense. And I don’t mean to deliberately not grant the premise of the question, which I think is a very good question, but I think that this is another of those things that is regimented without us necessarily agreeing to it, this idea of how, this is what we learn in x part of lives, and this is what we learn in x part of our lives… I’m 31 years old, I feel like I barely know anything, and yet I’m functioning like someone who knows what people are expected to know at 31.

CHARLIE: Yep.

ZACK: So I don’t know, I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense, and our emotional adolescence can be very different from our physical adolescence as well. I spent probably way too long having a lot of the whiny teen bullshit going on that to some extent teens are supposed to have, past the point that I think we’re expected to have it. Maybe some of that’s unfair, but maybe some of it’s not… cut me off, I’m starting to ramble, I’m sorry.

CHARLIE: Oh no. I mean, yeah, growing up I always had a very judgmental adult in my brain so I’ve always expected myself to be an adult and I’ve always scolded myself when I’m not being an adult, even as a young child. Chronological time doesn’t really make the most sense in terms of “at this age, we’re supposed to have this stage of verbal skill, reading skill, blah blah blah.” We know for autistic people, not everybody is going to match up to these prescribed phases. Growing up, my dad was in the military, so my mom was raising us alone and we were kind of raising ourselves and we were kind of raising ourselves with TV and the media we were consuming, and various books from the children’s section of Barnes and Noble but with an asterisk, the novels about kids with problems, like Joey Pigza, coming from a broken home and things like that. So I was an adult as a child and I am currently trying to work myself out of being a child as an adult. And especially 2015–2016 there were a lot of traumatic things that happened to me, and one of those traumatic things that happened to me also happened to you. I don’t know if we want to talk about it. To briefly say it, we had a dear friend die and that’s how you and I know each other. But me suffering that loss and then having to get stable in my life again and having to get properly medicated, that’s when my real life kind of tarted. The person I am today is a grieving person, but the person I am today is a postrealization out, queer trans autistic person, and before a certain point, I was just sort of a brain floating in blood, powering a meat body.

ZACK: Yeah, and I think honestly part of that is why we vibe so well as cohosts on this particular topic because not only did we meet over that particular trauma, but I also had… I’m not trying to one-up or anything but I also had a very difficult 2016, for instance I lost my job later that year and this was sort of my first big-boy job and I feel like that’s sort of shaken my confidence in a way that I’m still dealing with. And that year doing what it did to the both of us, it almost feels like we are — because again, with these fluid definitions of human development, it almost feels like we are almost childhood friends who have grown up together in the intervening years.

CHARLIE: That’s really sweet. I’m like tearing up.

ZACK: Oh geez, I’m sorry.

CHARLIE: No, that’s really true though! I don’t feel like I was the person I am before that year.

ZACK: Right.

CHARLIE: And it’s unfortunate to a certain extent that the person we lost and the other people we lost, I am kind of an unknowable person. I would be unknowable to them if they were still alive and I didn’t go through the grief of losing them, which is really freaky. They are such a part of me, but in this really horrible, fucked-up way, that… I’m this person because of the coping I had to employ when they died.

ZACK: Yeah. No, that’s, again I think you’re spot-on with that. And I think that it’s, to go back to … I had a thought here. I’m getting it, I’m getting, it there it is. To go back to this compulsion to sort of format things like a movie, or a TV show … again to some extent neurotypical people do that too, in terms of expecting this to all be structured, like this part of our life is like this way, and this part of our life is like that way, and of course it doesn’t pan out like that. But that’s another example of a phenomenon that I’m sure there’s a German word for whereby things that autistic people do to cope are considered aberrant when we use them, and less so when there’s the version that neurotypical people do.

CHARLIE: Like even stimming. Apparently everybody… I just found this out that neurotypical people also stim, but it’s not quote-unquote weird, or visible sometimes.

ZACK: Well, remember fidget-spinners, a few years ago?

CHARLIE: Yeah!

ZACK: And another thing we need a term for is when it becomes trendy for neurotypical people to get into something that we use to cope. Like weighted blankets are another thing.

CHARLIE: Oh yeah that’s true, that’s a big one actually. There’s a term in physical disability circles and maybe some mental disability circles, I don’t know, there’s a lot of overlap. But “crip tax,” you know, crip short for cripple, the crip tax is when your insurance won’t pay for a wheelchair or won’t pay for your compression garments and you have to move to a building that has an elevator that might be way more expensive than an apartment where another person could use the stairs. All of these accessibility tools are so expensive and no one is looking out for you, UNTIL the neurotypical and able-bodied society decide that they’re cool, like weighted blankets.

[Music]

CHARLIE: This week, we decided to share with each other our current obsessions slash special interests.

ZACK: So this week I found out there was a plot, shortly after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated to rob his grave. And the masterminds were a counterfeiting gang in Springfield, Illinois, where he’s of course buried, that, their best engraver was in jail and the idea was that they would steal Lincoln’s corpse and hold it for ransom until the guy was released from jail. They didn’t realize they had a snitch in the organization, but it didn’t work anyway, because they realized they couldn’t physically move the casket and they just sort of left and wandered back to their regular watering hole where the cop showed up, having been tipped off by the snitch. And I want a movie about this by Danny McBride or somebody so bad.

CHARLIE: That’s incredible.

ZACK: Mmhmm.

CHARLIE: That’s so fucking weird.

ZACK: I know. I know.

CHARLIE: Wow. Well, mine is also sort of organized crime. I’ve been talking about this for a while so I think I’ve already told you about this, but my sort of ongoing journey as an American Jew, as the child of someone who is so, so hyper-assimilated and so American and patriotic and cop-military-fuckin-Boston Red Sox, my father would rather pretend to be an Italian-American than admit that he’s a Jew and a second-generation American, so for my childhood, he was always watching The Sopranos and trying to emulate Tony Soprano in every way.

ZACK: Oh God.

CHARLIE: It’s insane. And so I’ve been sort of doing… once in a while, I can’t handle a lot of it, but I’ve been trying to do deep dives on mobster media, you know, The Sopranos, Goodfellas, anything in that genre that I can get my hands on, to really piece together my own experience of being a weirdly Italian-flavored Jew in some respects. Because as much as I hate my father I have so many of his mannerisms and culture and when I was growing up also, his closest friends were Lebanese, so I have this pan-Mediterranean identity where my father is trying to be James Gandolfini while speaking Arabic and having Turkish coffee, but he’s only allowing himself to do that because he is passing in general society and in his police department community as Italian. So yeah, that’s my ongoing thing. And I’ll be trying to write something a little more serious in the coming year I guess, of my sort of… because I’m very tacky, I dress really tacky, I dress like sort of a Sopranos-flavored Fran Fine sometimes, and I’m so obsessed with myself and I’m obsessed with my intergenerational trauma that that’s what’s going on for me personally and creatively, and it’s definitely a special interest of mine.

ZACK: So I’m going somewhere with this but have you seen “Drive,” the Ryan Gosling film?

CHARLIE: Yes. I saw that on the first date with the guy who I made kiss me before he smoked a cigarette.

ZACK: Oh wow.

CHARLIE: That was my first date in college ever.

ZACK: That’s amazing. I was just thinking of it because of course the villains in that played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman are Jewish mobsters who are simultaneously obsessed with emulating the aesthetics of Italian mobsters but also deeply resentful of how anti-Semitic the Italian Mafia is.

CHARLIE: Mmhmm. Of course there’s also such a history of Jewish organized crime.

ZACK: Absolutely.

CHARLIE: … hand in hand with Jewish unionization and Jewish anarchists and communists, so there’s a whole history there.

ZACK: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite historical anecdotes of Meyer Lansky just leading his entire Jewish gang into the Bund meeting at Madison Square Garden and busting heads.

CHARLIE: I don’t know as much about that, so I’m sorry, I just kind of went “mm-hmm.”

ZACK: No it’s fine, the Jewish Mafia busted up an American Nazi rally in New York in the early 1940s, is the short version of the story.

CHARLIE: That’s amazing. There’s such a rich history of self-defense violence. And I think sometimes liberals on the Internet… forget.

Zack: Uh-HUH. So I think that is about gonna do it for us for this episode. But we have decided off-mic that we’re gonna try to do this every other week, so we hope to see the rest of you the week of the 25th through the 31st? Spooky week? And also something I was remiss in not doing immediately, but we will be putting up full transcripts concurrent with every completed episode from now on, just because we know that that is an essential thing for accessibility.

CHARLIE: Mmhmm. And I apologize that maybe our listeners thought we would be talking in the vein of like “Pen15” and it would be kind of a fun romp through middle school and then of course we got sidetracked. But you know, it happens.

ZACK: And ideally we will be doing this long enough to have time for more of that too. But thank you so much for the question, and we will have that email address again at the end of the show for anyone who’s interested in sending in more questions. We’ll see you in about two weeks, transcripts for the show are available in our show notes through Medium, and we will see you back here the week of Halloween.

CHARLIE: Yay! Thank you, listeners! I’m really excited, personally. I’m jazzed, I’m stoked.

ZACK: Pumped, even.

CHARLIE: Pumped. What is it, chuffed?

ZACK: Yeah, it’s the British one.

CHARLIE: British people say chuffed?

ZACK: Yep.

CHARLIE: We’re incredibly chuffed. Okay, goodbye everyone.