Car Sales Confidential

Chapter 1 The Early Years

THE EARLY YEARS

"Let me out of here...you know I hate being in the dark! I can't breathe. Let me out...I'll do anything you want, just let me out of here!" were Luke's screams enhanced by his pounding on the door and hitting his head on the sides of the walls, searing the typical silence in the middle of the night on what began as a quiet evening on the cusp of a new moon—on a sultry night in July, so black, so dark that Moonbeam, our family's white Siamese, didn't even scratch the screen to prowl.

The living room was in a shambles; a banister broken, holes in the plaster walls, a busted-up dining room chair, as a result of Luke's latest tantrum, but this was so much more than a normal child's frustration at not getting something they wanted...right away.

"Luke...first you have to calm down. Do that and we'll open the closet door," his father challenged, hoping for the best but having learned the hard way to always expecting the worst.

Mathew was our family's first child, born in the 60s to second generation Italian and German immigrants. My father came from a large family of ten and yet our family, though Catholic, thought better of that size a clan and settled at four—Mathew, then me, Lara, and my twin sister, Lana, and last came our special boy, Luke, two years later.

From birth we all could see that Luke was different. He was frightened of loud, strange sounds, so he could hear and yet did not seem to respond to our voices when we tried to speak to him. Over the months he seemed to be developing physically in a normal enough manner, but recoiling from our touch proved to be the another defining symptom telling our family that this was a special child.

One day when Luke was out in the backyard playing by himself, he was lining up a series of rocks in different formations—arranging and rearranging them, over and over and over, the family had a meeting to discuss Luke's future.

"When summer is over Luke is supposed to start school. How will he ever get by there?" his concerned mother, Gloria, posed.

His father, Dante, spoke right up, "Back when I was a boy there were a few kids in the neighborhood who just didn't fit in. As I recall one was hustled off to an institution and we never saw him again. Then, there were rumors of another family who kept their strange boy in the attic under lock and key. Well, Luke is the son God gave us and as far as I am concerned we're going to give him the best life possible, keep him here with us, send him to school, and let the chips fall where they may, so everyone, I expect you to help him however and whenever you can...is that understood."

Dad had just given us our marching orders, and he didn't put his foot down that often, so we knew this was how things were going to be moving forward. And it wasn't as if Dad had been spared the periodic violence and verbal assault that the rest of us routinely endured. Luke was just a boy, but he was strong for his age and when bipolar rage was fueled by adrenalin it took all of us to hold him down or keep him from destroying everything in the house if he hadn't been restrained.

Luke, though autistic, was very high functioning, and so after walking him to school on the first day, Lana and I went to our classes. We were entering Grade 5, Dad had left early as usual to tend to his landscaping business, while our mother was home dreading a call from the principal.

It didn't take much to set Luke off on one of his temper tantrum tirades which were impossible to manage. As a result of them not being checked early on they just kept getting worse and worse. Apparently, though, since they had only occurred at home, when Luke found himself out in public, in school, with other students, his peers, looking at him and ready to judge him for perhaps being different should he meltdown in class or in the hallway, Luke found a way to hold it together.