Godspeed: a memoir

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Genesis

Winter 1991

Fall 1989

Winter 1991

Spring 1992

War

Summer 1992

Fall 1992

Spring 1993

Fall 1993

Requiem

Divertimento

Interlude

Olympus

1995

1996

Prelude

Acknowledgments

GODSPEED

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER LINDBERGH

Casey Legler is an artist, restaurateur, model, and former Olympic swimmer. Born in France to expatriate American parents, Casey grew up in Provence, and went on to swim for France in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The first woman signed to Ford Models to exclusively model men’s clothes, Casey has been featured in Vogue, Le Monde, and Time. They are a member of Phi Beta Kappa, graduated cum laude from Smith College, and currently divides their time between New York and Sydney with their wife, Siri May.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

Published by Scribe 2019

Copyright © Casey Legler 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

9781925713992 (paperback edition)

9781925693638 (ebook)

A CiP data record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

For all the young ones struck with lightning.

For their friends and for the families.

Author’s Note: A Small History in Autism Spectrum Disorder

When you die, Casey, and they open your brain, that’s when they’ll see that it’s not built like the rest of ours. That’s what my lawyer was saying to me as I sat across from him in his corner office in a building on the Avenue of the Americas, topmost floor. I had gotten arrested a few nights before, following a failed attempt to put up a large art installation on my favorite empty lot on East Thirteenth Street—a story for another book. I understand now that he didn’t mean this based on my eccentricities but maybe because of something else he picked up on.

When I wrote this book, I wrote it as my story of girlhood, growing up across cultures and languages, a story of resilience in the midst of the unusual circumstances that came along with being a young professional athlete and young addict. Somewhere between the final draft and the book you have now, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (formerly known as Asperger’s—also now known fondly in our family as Aspie).

So—along with the drugs, the Olympics, the abuse, the general disregard for authority or other people, and the ways I coped with my struggled youth—I also inadvertently wrote the story of a young girl child who was on the spectrum.

My hope in disclosing this last bit is that this memoir remain for all the young ones touched with lightning, and that it also bring comfort, understanding, and companionship to those who love them while they find their way.

Yours in friendship,

Casey

Genesis

Winter 1991

Stockholm, Sweden

MY EYEBALLS WAKE UP SIGHING. I’m in bed and don’t move. One blink—fourteen—I’m fourteen, I say to no one. Light filters through every small square weave of the thick industrial orange hotel curtains. I turn my head away from them and stare at the ceiling. I’m stuck on another team trip. It’s 7:00 a.m. The only alarm clock in the hotel is the television, set to MTV, and the music that woke us, and that’s playing right now, sucks. My roommate gets up to brush her teeth, and I hear her pajamas walk into the bathroom. I hate her. I look back to the window.

The music changes, and I lift my head from its pillow and stare at the screen. Without taking my eyes off the TV, I reach for the remote next to my bed and turn up the volume. I can hear my teammates down the hall doing the same. They’re opening their hotel room doors to let the sound out, and I hear it seep into the hallway carpet and now my whole body sits up and I watch it: anarchic cheerleaders slowly moving back and forth like they’re underwater, arching their backs in a slow-motion dirty school gym, their hair waving rhythm from their long necks down to their tight waists; the boys in loose jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers, on bleachers and head-banging a slow-moving mosh pit; and those four notes I’ve never heard before are playing over and over and over again. I’m seeing my people. I’m seeing home. Nirvana.

My brain clicks. My eyes tunnel to the gym in front of me and I hear it from far away, background noises to my sentences: I have to swim today; I’m at a swim meet; I am wearing sweatpants. Through the sound I look down at my arms and I can’t believe they are mine—fast and quick. I flex a muscle in my forearm without thinking and stare at it, flexing and unflexing. I have to wait until tonight to smoke. I have to wait until tonight to drink. Teen Spirit lands on all of me, and the cheerleaders arch their backs and show off their tight tits, and my back slouches toward them, hungry from under its t-shirt. My arm drops to its side and my body howls music arms tits on a television and I have to stand it while it does. Blink. I look back up to the screen and what I want is to make the fact that I’m not them go away. I want to be in Their somewhere, not mine, like Them, head-banging away the hollow from the inside.

Stockholm clicks back into focus. Silence. I turn my head and stare with disgust at my roommate, who’s just come out of the bathroom. She has a toothbrush in her mouth and white toothpaste on her lips. She is staring at the television too.

Fall 1989

Mont Robert, France

WE HAD MOVED BACK TO FRANCE TWO YEARS AGO into one of the two big white houses on Mont Robert in late summer. The sun would set soft gold over our house, the vineyards behind it and down into the hills, becoming a haze. Our house smelled of clean and freshly painted walls and the long windows full of sky opened out to the gravel driveway. The hill behind it would cool my heated insides and dry a god on my lungs: calm me. The air high into the house ceilings reminded me of going to church in Louisiana, where we had just come from, and the wind came more easily for my lungs when I breathed and looked up. In that wideness there, emptiness would heave cliffs from far away in my body and make it heavy.

I got very sick that year. Too sick to go to the doctor so he had come to us and like kings and queens and pearls on earlobes, his leather satchel walked into my large wide room and leaned over me. I sat up when he did and looked over at my younger sister Sue on her bed and told her that the rocket ship to the moon was ready for our trip. The walls looked red and yellow again and white light was coming through the long windows.

The bigger house on the domaine belonged to a family who wore pearls around their necks and their daughter wore navy sweater vests and white blouses buttoned all the way up to her throat. Off the side of the kitchen, she had a maze made of shrubs higher than my head. The month before school had started, Sue and I had been invited over for tea. We’d sat in large tall chairs with straight backs in a large burgundy living room and afterward, standing erect like ladies at Versailles, had walked through the shrubbery maze. I didn’t go back but once after that, when it was really cold and no one was out and no one could see me, lonely in the green walls with the sky as my ceiling trying to stop hearing everything.

We didn’t see Dad anymore that year but heard him coming home late at night and, sometimes, his car leaving early in the morning, the wheels making crunch on the gravel drive. The air grew thick in our house: I could slice through it sometimes, making a thin space through which I could just squeeze. More often it just lay on me like an opposite magnet, raising the flesh off my bones—making space that shouldn’t be there, and now that I was floating, my skin widened off its body like that—it was even harder to breathe through the rushing sound in my ears.

Mom spent her time crying, tears caught in the eyes that she wiped away when we walked into the new small white kitchen. We knew to pretend it wasn’t happening. Sometimes when another stranger-wife would come over, the wife of one of Dad’s partners, we were made to go out for a walk with the new children and we would, awkwardly keeping quiet from each other from opposite sides of the road. Ahead of us, strolling wide-hipped next to each other, the mothers would joke that they were going to put widow’s walks on top of all their houses: the better to wave good-bye to their husbands who were always gone. Once, with the other kids farther behind us, I asked them what they meant and Mom and the stranger woman bitter laughed and didn’t answer. The gravel would crunch the truth under my feet, the linden trees on the path would flit their last leaves before fall and would wave underwater from their branches as we walked by, and everyone would pretend that nothing was happening. I didn’t understand anymore why she didn’t just leave him, since everything seemed worse for her. I breathed in the sharp fall air full of questions.

Some afternoons, Mom would wait for Dad to come home because it was Sunday and when he did he never brought flowers and my older sister, Polly, and I would pretend we weren’t sitting next to each other on the couch in front of the TV and, through the thick white wall in the dining room, hear Mom walk up the stairs to their room and Dad not follow. I’d look down at my hands and the couch would give under me and the lining of the seat cover would become a microscope and I could see the fuzz of each fiber until the light snapped me back and I could hear the high-pitched voice of a song by Mylène Farmer and I could see flickering bright and loud in my eyes the bass screen thumping of another song pump up the jam pump it up while the beat is thumping pump pump and I didn’t understand why she didn’t just get them herself if she liked flowers so much, and my insides would drop out from under me in a gasp chased by the neon television.

Winter 1991

Stockholm, Sweden

SO THAT MORNING, TWO YEARS LATER IN STOCKHOLM, a fast