3

Rough Landing in School

What bugged me about school? Not being able to focus on what the teacher says . . . kids throwing up . . . mean teachers who hated me . . . mean kids . . . new faces . . . random people . . . getting out of the car just in time to get to class . . . strange classrooms . . . no beach all day . . . getting tested . . . being looked at like I was a freak . . . Maybe I liked a few things, but then I was over it. I couldn’t surf when I was in school.

 

The only thing I liked was the music. I had good music teachers. They were nice, and encouraged me to get into music. I liked to sing and dance. I could feel it, like I could feel waves when I surfed. The feeling of music . . . I still always rub my hands together when I hear good music. Some music, like the hip-hop I listen to and even classic rock, has the beat of the wave, like a thick slab—Ba-doom! Ba-doom! Ba-doom! Then it goes silent, the same sound when you’re in the barrel, just waiting to shoot out and you hear the noise again.

 

When the national media descended on Maui in late 2009 and early 2010 to interview Clay, one production crew member thought to ask, “What did you like about school?”

Since Clay is generally uncomfortable with all media people (they aren’t his family or friends, the only safe harbors to whom he openly expounds on what he thinks or feels), he keeps his answers short and tight, then forgets about them until he rereads or hears them. However, he remembers his answer to the school question as though he delivered it yesterday. It had taken him back to the humid Lahaina classrooms where he languished with teachers who couldn’t solve the mystery that played out inside his brain:

“Nothing. Maybe I liked a few things, but then I was over it. I couldn’t surf when I was in school.

“There were other things too,” he says while staring out the car window at King Kamehameha III Elementary School, the beachfront school in Lahaina where he spent most of his elementary school years. “Not being able to focus on what the teacher says . . . kids throwing up . . . mean teachers who hated me . . . mean kids . . . new faces . . . random people . . . getting out of the car just in time to get to class . . . strange classrooms . . . no beach all day . . . getting tested . . . being looked at like I was a freak . . .”

This combination of feelings and experiences would serve any school district well as a checklist on how not to handle or teach a student who is wired differently from everyone else.

His fear and trepidation started on day one. Two mornings a week Jill took Clay to Holy Innocence School in Lahaina for preschool. Jill never wanted him to attend, owing to his already obvious discomfort in new settings and groups, especially those as noisy and hyper as a roomful of preschoolers. However, with Gino working construction all day and the new job she’d taken on as a snorkeling boat tour guide so they could continue living the dream, she had no choice. Every time they arrived at the school, Clay sat in the car . . . and kept sitting, petrified by the other kids running around like ants on a kicked-over hill. When the bell rang, he opened the door and walked or ran directly to the classroom.

It didn’t get any better in kindergarten. Jill moved Clay to Sacred Heart School, on which she’d received many good reports from fellow parents in Puamana. Like most parochial schools, Sacred Heart combined a standard education with indoctrination into the Roman Catholic faith. While the Marzos weren’t Catholic—or religious in any way—Jill and Gino felt that moving through his elementary school years with the same friends and familiar faces would give Clay the best chance to focus on academics rather than his growing trepidation over the external environment.

Sacred Heart School is attached to the back of Maria Lanakila (Our Lady of Victory) Catholic Church, a Hawaiian architectural treasure that adds to Lahaina’s sweetness and historical legacy and shows any visitor a healthy dose of kama’aina, the “local way.” The stone-built church, which has served parishioners since 1873, has a set of bells that were custom-made in France and paintings reputed to have been gifts from either King Lalakaua or his sister, Queen Lili‘uokalani. Before that, it consisted of grass huts and adobe buildings that formed the faith-based hamlet of Maria Lanakila, which has long since been annexed into Lahaina’s north side. Every Sunday morning locals and tourists walk into Mass beneath royal and coconut palms, the grounds scented with pikake, jasmine, and plumeria, wearing aloha shirts, shorts, and sandals. Not their parents’ attire, to be sure. Locals also know the church as the Cradle of Faith.

As it turned out, Sacred Heart became a place where Jill placed all her faith when it came to Clay, and where he found his last safe cradle as a student.

Unfortunately, that safety wasn’t found in kindergarten. Clay loathed the teacher, who saw him as a petulant troublemaker rather than a child slow to pick up his ABCs. Interestingly, Clay’s daily apprehension about walking into class dissolved once he actually stepped inside. Then he was transformed into a socializing, talking machine more concerned with what the other kids thought of him than with completing schoolwork. That didn’t sit well with the teacher, which Clay noticed. “She was mean, always made me sit down, made me feel dumb if I didn’t get the right answer,” he recalls. “So I never answered anything. I had to sit in the corner a lot.

“The only thing I liked was the music. I liked to sing and dance. I could feel it, like I could feel waves when I surfed. The feeling of music . . . I still always rub my hands together when I hear good music.”

The best part of Clay’s day, the music that filled his ears most gloriously, was the final bell. He’d jump into the car when Jill arrived, sometimes talking, sometimes not, eagerly anticipating what waited at the end of their two-mile drive—Puamana Beach. He’d grab his board, surf out front, and then walk over to the driftwood fort he’d built. Sometimes he was joined by Gino or Cheyne, sometimes by neighbor kids. Often he sat in the fort alone.

Kindergarten finally ended, but not without a report card comment that spelled out a behavioral cycle most parents of five-year-olds would rather not see right out of the academic gate:

 

Needs improvement in all work habits—turning in work on time, using time wisely, keeping things in order, and working without disturbing others. Clayton is very social. We need to learn to focus on tasks and complete work. I don’t want to see Clayton get frustrated with school, but without basic skills, he will have a tough time.

 

Jill and Gino had an equally tough time stomaching the way Clay was often singled out for disrupting the class. When several meetings failed to produce suitable answers, Jill decided to transfer Clay a half-mile away to King Kamehameha III Elementary School. It sat on Lahaina’s beachfront, a block away from the world’s largest banyan tree, which provided that same cradling sense Jill had noticed about Sacred Heart. She thought the presence of more kids in a public school setting would relax Clay and enable him to focus more on learning.

Kam III looks like most other elementary and middle schools built in sunny, warm climates in the 1950s and 1960s—a combination of one-floor buildings tied together by sidewalks and hallways. Eaves provide the only protection from rain. Kids walk outdoors to and from classrooms, taking fresh breaths of the humid, scented Maui air, glancing at the recess grounds, the chain-link fence, and, just on the other side of it, the boats, docks, and waves of Lahaina Harbor.

The waves of Lahaina Harbor. Jill and Gino transferred Clay from Sacred Heart so he would focus more on academics. How was that going to happen when the view from the window of Clay’s classroom and from the playground was Lahaina Harbor? “I saw boat docks and the harbor mouth,” he says. “Just past that, the waves broke. Why study when you see waves all the time? I closed my eyes and rode those waves . . . the teacher got mad because I didn’t pay attention. A few years later, I started hiding my board in the bushes outside the school’s fence.”

By the time Clay was in second grade, he’d found the perfect secondary outlet for his growing obsession with waves—drawing. If he couldn’t ride them during the school day, he’d depict himself riding them. “When I couldn’t be on the waves, I drew them. All the time. Waves are home to me. I didn’t want to sit in school; I wanted to be home. So I drew barrels, tubes, slabs,” he says. “Later, when I knew how to surf barrels, I drew myself deep inside them, where I was the happiest.

“The teacher didn’t like it. Mom and Dad got mad at me. ‘Why are you always drawing waves?’”

He smiles, his eyes instantly summoning that sense of mischief from the past to the present, and folds out his hands, palms up. What are you going to do? Then he rubs his hands together.

While Clay’s disinterest in academics and newfound love of drawing annoyed Jill and Gino, it cast a deeper shadow in the classroom. Clay was pulled more and more often into the principal’s office, where Jill would be waiting after receiving calls from the school. “They kept wanting to meet with me, or me and Clay, and they started asking me if I’d had him tested,” Jill recalls, the wear and tear of those calls still resonant in her voice. “They started telling me there was something different about Clay, that he was different from all the other kids. Or that he was ‘special,’ and not said in a positive way. It’s not like they flat-out told me, ‘There’s something wrong with your kid,’ but that’s exactly what they meant.”

A single incident inflamed the situation and exposed other, deeper issues: a kid threw up in the classroom. Normally, that would stir up the entire class, perhaps making a couple of them queasy or triggering a shout-out of “gross!” Normally. For Clay—whose brain picks up anomalies or points of specific interest and hard-wires them as situations either to indulge or avoid as if his next breath depends on it—the episode unleashed a long-standing phobia toward nausea.

“He started having phobias of throwing up,” Jill says. “Throwing up was a huge, huge trigger. He would have panic attacks. Someone threw up at school one time, and it became a major phobia of his until he was about sixteen. Cheyne or Kai [Barger, a friend and fellow competitive surfer] would say, ‘Hey, Clay, I’m feeling sick, I’m going to throw up,’ and they would harass him about it. He’d be in sheer panic mode. He ran home from school once, a couple miles to Puamana, because someone had thrown up. He had full-on anxiety over it.”

Another pattern that established itself was the “one friend” ­dynamic. While Clay had plenty of casual friends (actually quite a few for someone with Asperger’s), he focused on one friend alone each school year—a practice that continues to some extent today. “I didn’t like being around other kids every day and having to give answers to the teacher with them staring at me,” he recalls. “So I started finding a friend, my one friend for the year. I still do that, I guess—I like to surf with one other person. Sometimes it’s my friend Johnny, or my friend Derek, who lives on the north side of Maui. I surf with my brother when he’s here, or my friend Fruit Bean, who’s a little older, a legend at Windmills. I go longboarding at Launiupoku with the Schweitzer brothers, Zane and Matty, when they’re around. Or I’ll paddle out with Casey Brown, who’s really good. One friend at a time.”

As she watched this strange dynamic develop, Jill began to realize not only that school administrators were on to something about Clay’s eccentricities but that she needed to watch his one-friend practice to better understand how he created and shaped his environment.

“Socially, he talked with others okay, but he would only have one friend per year. One. Not multiple friends,” she explains. “The one friend was his to kind of control; he did everything Clay wanted to do. That became more and more the case as he got to eight years old and older. Clay wasn’t a bully, but he wanted to control what his friend did. And he didn’t want to share his friend. Now that I look back on it, he was already closing his environment, shrinking it down to the things he could control and feel comfortable with. He would also like to see a reaction out of people—not always a positive reaction. He would do little things and watch to see what happened.”

Clay sees it another way. “I like it when I make people happy. That’s why it’s fun to go surfing with someone who’s not used to watching me, to see what they think. When they give me shaka-brah signs, hoots, whistles, or raise their arms, I’m so stoked that my barrel ride or maneuver made them happy,” he says.

This description played out as though scripted during a session at a secret Maui spot. He, his friend Johnny, and a visitor met at the top of a bluff, checked out the surf, grabbed their boards, meandered down the steep cliff-side path to the pile of rocks that passed for a beach, waxed up next to a dilapidated lean-to hut built of bamboo and driftwood, and paddled out.

A half-hour after watching another aerial and tube ride display, Johnny rode in and sat on the rocks. “You know, right now, Clay’s staying out there in this shitty surf because he’s putting on a show for you. He always wants people to get stoked about what he does in the water. And the things he does? Through the roof. There are a lot of days where you won’t find surfing that good anywhere else in the world. I mean, this is really shitty surf today, and he looks like an Olympic gymnast. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been about doing his thing and seeing how others would react. Especially the one person who goes out there in the water. It’s all about impressing and making his friend happy to be with him.”

By the time Clay was eight, he could intuit when he was in the presence of other kids who, like him, saw the world differently and were seen differently than others. “He was really attuned to handicapped kids, especially kids with Down syndrome,” Jill says. “He loved them, and they loved him. I always said, ‘Clay will work with those kinds of people.’ There was one boy, Mickey. Clay would be like, ‘Mickey, Mickey!’ He would have this little connection, and Mickey would put his arms around Clay—physical touch, which Clay usually didn’t like. I think he was picking up that pure, innocent, nonthreatening love that comes from Down syndrome kids.

“He was always obsessed with people that were different. He would stare at them, really stare. I would go, ‘Don’t stare,’ and he would anyway. They were safe to him; they weren’t threatening. He found them interesting, because they were wired differently.”

 

Meanwhile, Jill began to fight a pair of battles: pitting her innate love and protectiveness toward her son against the school district’s constant attempts to test him, and fighting Clay to get his work finished. Another battle on the home front was brewing as Gino focused almost entirely on work and sports while removing himself from the day-to-day of Clay’s growing academic and social struggles. “He was the kind of guy where everything had to be black-and-white and simple, and none of this was black-and-white or simple,” Jill says. “Gino had a hard time handling things that weren’t clear-cut. He’d just tell Clay, ‘Get in the classroom and listen to your teacher and do your work.’”

As Clay continued struggling to sit quietly for six straight hours, comprehend course materials and teacher’s instructions, hold on to his supplies, and not break pencils, Jill began to hear the phrase “learning disability” more and more from administrators. “In first grade, his processing seemed slow,” she says. “In the first quarter, I started hearing, ‘He isn’t really focusing, he might be ADD, he’s twirling, we’ll give him silly putty—let’s get him tested.’ We got him tested, and they said he had a learning disability. He was a C student, just getting by.”

Once home, Clay always raced for his surfboard and the beach. Jill had something else in mind: using the safe, secure home environment to spend extra time helping him finish his homework and gain a greater comprehension of the subjects. She thought that by working it through at home he would be fortified to deal with the classroom environment where he was required to pay attention and sit still for longer time periods than was natural to healthy, energetic six- or seven-year-olds.

“I used to ground him if he got into trouble or came back from school with notes that his work was not completed,” she says. “I tried to take away his surfing, but it backfired on me. He wouldn’t do his homework or stay out of trouble unless he went surfing. I learned quickly that keeping him out of the water was not a punishment for him, but a prison sentence.”

 

The bigger picture was beginning to look just as dark and foreboding. Following the first barrage of tests, sessions, and appointments, the school doctor and psychologist recommended that Clay take Ritalin. This recommendation came during the 1990s, the height of Ritalin’s explosive growth, when doctors and schools were dispensing Ritalin to deal with everything from hyperactivity to attention deficit disorder (ADD) to behavioral outbursts in class—whatever it took to calm down the first generation of kids raised in the super-connected world of video games, electronic devices, and countless TV choices. During the 1990s, Ritalin usage spiked to more than 8 million children in the United States. It became not the last resort for classroom behavioral issues but the first.

“I was on Ritalin as a kid, well before it became such a designer drug for parents of supposedly hyperactive children,” remembers Jill, who was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). “My mom said it was like a miracle. They kept me on it for three months; in retrospect, it probably would’ve helped me in school, because I continued to have trouble focusing.”

She saw things differently when it came to Clay. “I just didn’t see why he needed Ritalin. He wasn’t hyper, and outside of talking too much in class now and then, he wasn’t disrupting anyone. So I refused to give it to him.”

Her other reason involved yet another pattern she was starting to notice, known in the autistic and Aspergian world as “the stare.” Jill’s first experience with “the stare” came one day when she asked Clay to tie his shoe. He gave her a blank look: his eyes made physical contact, but his mind was a million miles away, focused on something more familiar and comfortable and completely lacking in comprehension of the question. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” he said.

“There was this delay, and he didn’t understand,” she explains. “I’d told him so many other times. It was something he knew how to do, but just didn’t understand what I was saying at that moment. I remember thinking that night, it was really random how he would just go blank. It scared me a little. Then it started happening more. To this day, sometimes if you’re talking to him, he just misses it. I think he’s watching your mouth move and . . . sometimes there’s a blank, a little skip. Then he does that staring thing.”

Music remained his elixir. One teacher, Wendy Keanini, picked up on his innate attraction to music, which worked for her, since she’d been an amateur musician. “I would wait all day for music to start,” Clay recalls. “That was the best part of every school day. That and the final bell ringing, so Mom could pick me up and I could surf. I liked Mrs. Keanini. She wasn’t mean like the kindergarten teacher. I would write for her and do my work, just so she would be happy. And she always gave us music.”

“Mrs. Keanini taught a lot with music, and Clay has good musical timing,” Jill adds. “To this day, when he’s watching a movie, it’s very common for him to say a line before it comes, like he’s anticipating the musicality of that line. He’s very tone-sensitive. When he’s in his room, you sometimes hear him say, ‘Hey, you guyyyys!’ It’s from The Goonies, and it sounds just like the movie.”

 

The difference of opinion between Jill and Gino over Clay’s performance and placement in Kam III threatened to open a chasm between them. Jill wanted to enroll Clay in a Waldorf school, where music and rhythmic learning were intrinsic parts of the curriculum. Another foundational teaching of Austrian cultural philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the inspiration for Waldorf, was the notion that we perceive and relate to our inner and outer environments with twelve senses rather than the standard five. Steiner believed that the senses of thought, mind, I/other, balance (equilibrium), movement, warmth, and one’s relationship to the world were every bit as vital as touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. In a Waldorf school, learning was individualistic and teachers routinely spent one-on-one time with students, focusing on their individual strengths and talents while promoting their relationship with an entire life environment, not just the prescribed academic subjects or other students. Put more simply, Waldorf encouraged holistic, 360-degree learning. And it could explain Clay’s view of the world as well as any other approach.

To Jill, Waldorf seemed a perfect fit for Clay, but Gino saw it as a cop-out. “Gino didn’t see the need or point of it, but I always thought that was a better learning environment for him—even when he was five,” Jill says. “If he had continued to learn like that, I think he would’ve done a lot better in school.”

“I thought then, and I think now, it’s all about paying attention,” Gino explains. “No matter what kind of school it is, if you pay attention, you learn. If you don’t, then you have problems. So I didn’t understand why we had to look at all these alternative types of schools when, to me, it was an attention thing that was in Clay’s hands to improve.”

Gino’s attitude also perplexed Clay, especially when it led to disputes between his parents. “My dad sometimes thought I was lazy and didn’t try hard enough, and I needed to focus more and work harder,” he recalls. “Then he would tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter that much. I barely made it through school, and look at me! We live in Maui and own a house on the beach.’ He worked a lot and didn’t ask much about school. He was always working. Or surfing with Cheyne and me.”

When Gino talks about the discussions and battles about Clay’s early schooling, both his adherence to traditional elementary education and his frustration over what he perceived as Clay’s half-baked efforts rise to the surface. He may look like a laid-back, deeply tanned surfer, with leathered face and scruffy dark blond hair finally showing hints of gray in his late fifties, but deep down he’s nearly as hard-nosed as his father, who grew up in Brooklyn. It’s not so much about feeling a need to be “right,” he says, as about a deeply rooted belief in traditional values. What can be more traditional than going to school, listening to the teacher, and doing the work? Whereas Jill believes in the power of change, Gino believes in the security and comfort of maintaining the status quo. If it worked for our parents, it can work for us.

“What did I think when Jill, and sometimes I, had to go into school for this disorder or that problem? He’s not paying attention in class,” Gino says. “To me, the whole point of learning as a young kid is to pay attention to what the teacher tells you. I didn’t think he was focused, or even trying to be focused. I see now that there were probably other circumstances, but then, I didn’t see any real issue, like a learning disability or something more challenging. Jill took him for all this testing, but I was always in the backseat. I didn’t buy a lot of it. I’m only now coming to an acceptance that Clay is wired differently and for that reason, the way he approaches everything he does, and his capabilities, are different in some ways than our own. Just now accepting it.”

Jill offers up a sad smile when discussing Gino’s worldview. “Gino needs everything to be in order, the old-fashioned way—he’s a Leave It to Beaver kind of guy. If anything is out of place, or a little different, he can’t deal with it. He’s meat-and-potatoes. Clay was a little different, extremely sensitive. From the very beginning, Gino had problems with that.”

“I feel that Jill overprotected him from the beginning,” Gino says. “I thought he was fine, that he needed to bear down in class. I didn’t see any problem besides his lack of focus in class. I mean, look at him once he got in the water. It was obvious my son knew how to focus—sometimes well beyond the rest of us. When you see him surf, you see what I mean. Not only does he surf at a world-class level, but he focuses better than anyone else in the water. Why couldn’t he do that in class? It took me forever to understand that.”

Jill, Gino, and school administrators weren’t the only people battling over the best way to move forward. “I didn’t get why she was having him do all this testing, even in first grade—there was nothing wrong with him,” says Cheyne. “I used to really get mad at her, like, ‘Can’t you see he’s just as normal as I am?’ He was a typical little brother, except he surfed better than everyone else his age.”

Disappointed with the diagnosis and prescribed course of treatment, Jill decided to take matters into her own hands—a pattern she has followed to this day, for better and sometimes for worse. She enrolled Clay in the Brain Gym program, which emphasized the relationship between the brain hemispheres, the creative right side and the logical left side, to attain intellectual, creative, and emotional balance and harmony. “You hook up one side of the body to the other, like hooking your arms together,” she explains. “They call it ‘crossing the midline.’ They say that when babies don’t crawl, they miss the midline connection, and it shows when they get older.

“I was searching for whatever it took to get Clay to focus more. So I told Clay, even when he sat in a circle in class, to do the hookup. At least it gave him something to do with his hands. And the fact of him thinking it was making him smarter when he did it . . . he did it a lot.”

The family’s mood and Clay’s results began to improve when he was regularly practicing the “hookup.” He had a teacher he liked, Amy Kennett, who openly praised his improving work and ­encouraged him to push further. He consistently scored “excellent” in art, “probably because she liked my wave drawings,” he says. He also began to score above average in speaking, physical education, and reading, a subject that had troubled him since kindergarten. However, his old bugaboos, attention span and a sense of personal order, were popping up, as Kennett’s midterm report card notes point out:

 

Clay has difficulty learning about time, calendars, and measurement. He has a hard time learning new concepts, listening to directions, and applying new concepts when his attention wanders.

 

Shortly after Jill and Gino signed that report card, Clay turned in a report on the ocean and Maui. He received strong compliments for his writing, understanding and presentation of the subject, and drawings (which he was adding to his assignments more and more often). Not many second graders anywhere turn in two-media assignments, and when Jill and Gino recognized that, they began to relax a bit. Their comfort level only increased when they saw Kennett’s end-of-year comments:

 

Clay continued to progress in all areas. It has been fun watching his growth. He has become more responsible and showed more initiative and interest in learning. I hope Clay feels proud of his accomplishments this year.

 

It was the first truly good news of Clay’s school years.