When I first sat down to write, it was after decades of hearing – “You should write a book!”

This was usually in reaction to some story I told, more likely as not, one from my years in the Philadelphia PD.

From my first day when an instructor said, “We expect great things from this class!” lauding us for having the highest level of education of any class to attend the academy to date, yet at the end of our stay saying, “We’ve had more mischief and trouble from this class than any before!”

One of our more vocal classmates answered for us, “That’s what you get, when you start hiring smart people!”

And the story from our field training days, before I even left the academy, wrestling a peacock that had escaped from the oldest and most famous zoo in the country, from a local who thought he had caught a pheasant for his dinner.

I tell stories of people who attempted to shoot me, a few who bit me and one who successfully stabbed me.

There are stories of:

• Things I thought were long in the past, from a horse chase down a busy city street to a modern-day speakeasy.
• Times when the decision to shoot or not occurred with sufficient time to think-it-through, to when it relied on muscle memory, instinct and training.
• Funny events, crazy events and some that might keep you awake at night.
• What makes a big city cop tick.

I had them all written down and ready to go when I realized that the real story was that all this had been done by someone walking around with a devastating social handicap. And – the way my unique neurological wiring colored those stories.

I sat back down and wrote: Aspergers. What’s Your Excuse? – to provide a view of life from my side of the glass and to set the stage for the understanding of why I experienced police work the way I did. Uninformed as I was about the social contract, its rules and norms, and the implications and effects on my journey through life in general – police work in particular.

Aspergers. What’s Your Excuse? starts with Mom and me – busy getting me born while at the same time brain scientists on the other side of the globe are busy setting off one of the largest nuclear explosions on record; prompting the theory the EMT they created that morning was somehow responsible for my unique brain wiring.

I walk you through 1950s Philly with my first grade of 100 classmates generated by the largest birth year in our country’s history. I’ll recount, through the magic of an eidetic memory, surviving parochial school in the ’60s and the unpleasant realization that one should not be smarter than their teachers in high school and college in the early ‘70s.

And, because the social contract was something of which I had no awareness; how I met numerous celebrities and squandered opportunities which being a member of that social contract may have provided.

You see I didn’t know: being a member of a social group has advantages beyond parties, not everyone tells the truth, not everything people say is meant to be taken literally, empathy is a tangible thing to normal folks and that routine can sometimes be taken too far.

I’m still musing the concept of: The Utility of Falsehood – beyond “How do I look in this dress?”

I chronicle my battle through pedestrian jobs, yet also provide a glimpse of some of life’s treasures, like a conversation alone on a couch with Marian Anderson!

I end the first book with a segue to the PD where my life takes on a whole new direction.

Social rules have more impact when surrounded by fire, flood and blood – the three elements with which the police commonly interact. The police world is already complicated by an order of magnitude beyond the civilian world. I entered it with an unknown anomaly – complicating it beyond what normal cops experience.

Conversely, I was able to identify areas where my special skills, perception or lack of same were absolute benefits and set me above my peers!

The story about my adventures as a uniformed cop are in the final stages of editing and I hope to have them out in book form early in 2025. Aspergers. What’s Your Excuse? is intended to give you an idea of what the person was like who stepped into those stories.

I also hope others like me will read it and see possibilities.