The Prodigy's Cousin (12 page)

In the late 1970s, the family received a letter from Laurence A. Becker, then a graduate student in Maine interested in gifted education. Laurence, a man who bursts with stories and tells them with a faint southern twang, had seen a short documentary about Richard and asked to borrow a copy of it. Soon afterward, he asked if he could exhibit Richard's pictures at a mini-conference he was organizing on creativity for the gifted and talented. “My evil mind thought, wouldn't it be neat to have an art exhibit by someone who missed the club by 100 points, because, to be gifted and talented, you have to have 130 IQ?” Laurence recalled.

Ted saw an opportunity. He packed up fifty or sixty of Richard's pictures and hopped a transatlantic flight. He showed up at the New York conference, and Laurence exhibited Richard's drawings. No one guessed that the artist was (technically speaking)
not
among the gifted and talented.

The next year, Laurence and his wife visited the Wawros in Scotland. Their house was stuffed with Richard's artwork. There were pictures in the bedrooms, the living room, the dining room, and even in the stairway. There were hundreds more stashed in the attic. Ted eventually cut a small door into the wall in Mike's room to access another portion of the attic where they could keep more pictures. “
I can't get over the number of 'em,” a filmmaker later said while sifting through piles of Richard's pictures.

Within minutes of meeting Richard, Laurence was convinced that his diagnosis was wrong: Richard wasn't mentally retarded. He
was
gifted. He
was
talented. He was
autistic
.

Autism became the official diagnostic stamp on Richard's condition. It was the label used in news articles; it was the label eventually used in
his obituary. It accounted for his repetitive behaviors, his insistence on sameness, and his communication difficulties, and it meshed with his passion for drawing. The family even thought they could identify a contributing factor:
Olive had contracted rubella during pregnancy, which can impact fetal development and may increase autism risk.

But there was another set of behaviors—a whole other side of Richard—that Mike thought didn't fit with the popular conception of autism. Richard loved to socialize and dance (he could boogie: while listening to music
at his brother's flat in Glasgow, he bounced, swung his arms, snapped his fingers, and rocked out on an imaginary drum set). He enjoyed the social aspect of weekly Mass and developed a thirty-year friendship with a clerk at the local bookstore. He was warm and charming and had a great sense of humor; he was a big hugger.

He was also very emotional, and he often channeled his feelings into his art. When Richard's mother, Olive, died, Richard drew a seaside landscape,
Pembrokeshire Coastline, England
. It's an image of a small white lighthouse perched on the edge of a cliff. The bright blue sea is mostly peaceful, though the surf kicks up a bit at the base of the cliff. The lighthouse is dark, but the sun, somewhere, barely out of sight, shines through a hazy sky.

Laurence's visit with the Wawros in Scotland changed his life. Richard's talent, he realized, was amazing; it was almost shocking. The night he got home, he had a dream that he was walking with Richard and his mother down a sidewalk at the University of Texas. In his dream, Richard took off running—something Laurence had never seen him do—then launched into acrobatics. “I screamed, ‘Do you see that?' And nobody in the whole place saw it but me, but I knew what I'd seen, and I knew I had to tell what I'd seen,” Laurence recalled. After that, Laurence and a team he put together made a documentary about Richard,
With Eyes Wide Open
.

Laurence estimates that he organized ten U.S. exhibition tours for Richard over the course of two decades. He and Richard, accompanied by either Ted or Mike, jaunted across the country to shows in
Louisville, Austin, Orlando, New Haven, Houston, and Atlanta. At these events, Richard could sometimes be found gazing out the window with his binoculars or closely examining photographs or pictures. Other times, he basked in the attention. “He would revel in the moment. People were coming up to Richard and shaking his hand, ‘I like it, I like it very much,' taking photographs with him, and all this kind of stuff. He was acting the star, and he liked it. He'd be smiling his head off,” Mike said. “Although he wouldn't be able to say a whole lot or communicate particularly well, he was clearly enjoying it.”

Signs of his autism persisted. He still sometimes walked in tight circles. He still loved routine. Every year, he drew a picture of a sunrise as an optimistic symbol of what was to come. Annual milestones like Christmas, Easter, and the summer holiday were very important to him; if his routines were altered, Richard grew agitated.

He never learned to read or write much; for most of his career, when someone asked him to autograph a picture, he flipped it over and drew a sketch on the back. He knew how to form letters, but when he drew signs in his pictures, he often used squiggles in place of words.

His parents handled his daily living needs. Richard was diabetic, and his father gave him his insulin shot every morning and tested his urine twice a day for sugar.

But exhibitions built Richard's social skills, and the recognition he received as an artist built his self-esteem; he eventually began calling himself “an international artist.” After a demonstration in New Haven, he held up his drawing and declared it a “
world champion picture.”

At home, Richard attended an adult learning center. Every day, he put on his coat, loaded up his crayons, and waited for the bus. The bus driver, a person Richard got to know well over the years, was a special figure in his life. But as time passed and the adult learning center lost funding, the programs and facilities deteriorated. Eventually, Richard
stopped going. He spent his days at home with his father and his stepmother, a Polish woman who spoke little English. Richard's world shrank further as travel grew difficult for Ted and he could no longer escort Richard to distant exhibitions.

The quality of Richard's drawings deteriorated. He applied layer after layer after layer of crayon—more layers than he had ever used before—until the wax began flaking off the paper. Eventually, he stopped drawing. In 1998, the year Richard turned forty-six, the family stopped naming and numbering each of his pictures.

In 2002, Ted died of cancer. Richard's life, for the first time in years, grew tumultuous. Mike, long convinced that Richard was more capable than anyone realized, fought to have Richard live in a primary care facility near his own home. After a few visits, Mike helped Richard move in. For Richard, it was a massive lifestyle change: the staff expected Richard to exercise much more independence than he had in years; he was called on to decide which clothes he wanted to wear and to help make decisions about his future.

Something inside of Richard opened up again. For a brief time, he returned to drawing. He produced beautiful, rich, intricately detailed creations. He drew a haunting night scene in which a lone boat, illuminated from within, drifts on the water. It's a darker piece than most, done almost entirely in shades of blue, but in the corner the water glistens, reflecting the moonlight. When Richard finished the piece, he returned to his celebration ritual, clasping hands, this time with Mike's daughters, and raising them high.

In November 2005, Richard was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors said they didn't expect him to last through the night, but Richard, who had already survived another bout with cancer at age five or six and a life-threatening blood infection in the United States, lived another few months. “Despite what appeared to be a very frail soul, he just had this tremendous life force,” Mike said.

He died in February 2006. He was fifty-three years old.

The mysteries surrounding Richard Wawro are many. Richard couldn't perform simple calculations—if you asked him to add two and three, the answer eluded him—but if the calculation had to do with the calendar, like how old someone would be in a given year, he could answer almost instantaneously. If you gave him a date, he could tell you what day of the week it fell on.

He had a stunning visual memory. He never used reference material when drawing; he relied solely on memory to craft intricately detailed scenes—some of these images or landscapes he had seen recently, some he had seen months before. If you pointed to any flag, Richard could tell you which country it belonged to.

His auditory memory was no less impressive. He could differentiate between the patterns of sound made by different trains traveling on different tracks and reproduce the various rhythms by beating them out on a table. He loved music, and when Mike bought him a CD with 1960s pop songs on it, Richard could name the tune, the singer, and the year the song was released after hearing only a few notes. He could do the same with countless other recordings.

No mystery was as great as that of his artwork. He had limited vision and drew with the upper half of his body hunched over a table, his eyes inches from the paper. He'd never taken a formal art lesson, yet he produced vivid pictures, stunning portrayals of light and shadow. Richard saw doctors and psychologists in Europe and the United States, but no one could explain how it was possible. His family and close friends had their own theories. Laurence thought that drawing set Richard's spirit free. Mike thought it was amazing. Ted thought it was nothing short of a miracle.

During one of the early tours, Richard appeared as the featured artist at the 1979 Special Olympics in Brockport, New York, about a
thirty-minute drive from Rochester. He prepared a piece,
Superman,
for the event. In the darkly colored picture, Superman flies through a night sky punctuated by searchlights; lumps of color hint at the emblematic
S
on his chest, but his body is distorted.

Richard could remember precisely when he completed his pictures, but he generally couldn't articulate their meaning, so the viewer is left to wonder: Is this Superman a superhero
in spite
of his mangled form? Or does his unusual body—misshapen at first glance—
help
him do what no one else can?

Richard was technically a savant; he had an extraordinary spike in artistic skill accompanied by disability.

His passion for his specialty was intense and long lasting. By his family's count—a number that is surely short because they didn't begin cataloging Richard's work until he was seventeen—Richard completed 2,453 pictures during his fifty-three years and sold more than 1,300. His brother believes his work was featured in more than a hundred exhibitions in North America and Europe. Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II both owned Richard Wawro originals.

Such powerful interests have long been associated with autism. Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger both remarked upon this characteristic in their first descriptions of the condition. One of Kanner's patients, Alfred L., for example, had “a marked tendency toward” such obsessions. As Alfred's mother put it, “
He talks of little else while the interest exists, he frets when he is not able to indulge in it (by seeing it, coming in contact with it, drawing pictures of it), and it is difficult to get his attention because of his preoccupation.”
Asperger, too, noted a tendency toward strong, relatively narrow interests among his autistic patients, including a child enraptured with numbers (he loved complicated calculations), a child fascinated by complex machinery (his persistent questions were “impossible to fend off”), and another child enamored with chemistry (he used all his money to fund his experiments).