My Autistic Son, the Unleashed Dogs of Manhattan, and Me

My young adult son Jason and I are crossing Riverside Drive to get to the park on the other side.

This part of Riverside Drive comprises four lanes separated by a median that’s too narrow to make for a good stopping place; the whizzing cars and buses make you feel like either your toes or your heels or even both might get grazed as you wait for the light to change in your favor. I thus always plan to make the journey in one go.

However, Jason has nonspeaking autism, and we don’t know why he does some of the things he does. Sometimes we’ll get to the other side, and just as I breathe a sigh of relief, he’ll turn and run back into the middle of the street.

Today, we manage to complete the crossing safely.

Jason’s brand of autism includes sensory dysregulation. One day, the vroom of a motorcycle might cause him to collapse, screaming and clutching his head. The next day, the same unmufflered chopper elicits no response.

He can talk, but most of what he says — “Hi! Hi!” and “Duck in the water” — tends not to be functional speech. He will, however, scream the word “loud” when a noise bothers him. And when he’s afraid something might hurt him, he will yell, “Hurt you!” (He mixes up pronouns.)

Dogs, a common trigger for many autistics, elicit the “hurt you” response. Fluffy or fanged, it doesn’t matter. Back when we lived in Rhode Island, he bit an aide after merely seeing a dog on the street — from inside the house.

When Jason was 12, we moved to New York. He had better schooling options, but we worried about the increase in possible triggers, including dogs.

I wonder if city dogs are different. Friends who have moved from the suburbs to Manhattan report that their dogs paradoxically mellow in their new surroundings. Instead of having to guard a house and a yard dark with bushes and their mysterious rustlings and smells (“a perimeter,” as one friend describes it), dogs in New York apartments have to concern themselves with only a single entrance and no perimeter: Being high in the sky absolves Spot even from squirrel surveillance.

Since our move to the city, Jason has generally stopped reacting to dogs if they’re on a leash, which provides him with an easy visual reassurance that they won’t run up on and touch him unexpectedly.

When the pandemic hit, Riverside Park was a godsend. I started running there to burn off stress, and one day I decided to have Jason go with me. A win-win: He could get some exercise and Karl, my husband, could get some work done.

Unlike Central Park, with its winding paths and vehicle lanes, Riverside is straight, visually simple and closed to cars. But the first time Jason accompanied me on a run, he bolted when we reached our turnaround point. Karl was with us for this maiden outing, and he had to sprint to catch him. We learned that if I had Jason run maybe 10 feet behind me, he would stay the course.

Today is cold and overcast. Three in the afternoon, within the 9 a.m.-to-9 p.m. hours when leash laws are in effect in the park. It is 2021, and the mass return to the office is months in the future.

Jason, at 21, has had a resurgence of his dog phobia. Part of the problem is that, despite the generous off-leash hours and four dog runs in the park, a number of dog owners have started letting their dogs run wild.

My son attracts attention when we’re on our runs. He has an unusual gait. He wears basketball sneakers, jeans, a baseball hat tipped at a jaunty angle and industrial-grade noise-muffling headphones.

When we enter the park, a woman allows her unleashed dog to go up to Jason, but he doesn’t react, not even a “Hurt you!” So I let it go. But five minutes later, I look back and don’t see him. In a moment, I see him at the place where we had encountered the dog. I run back to him.

“Want to run?” I ask.

I start jogging again, hoping he’ll follow. He doesn’t.

“Want to go home?”

I move toward the apartment. He doesn’t follow this way, either.

I don’t know when the noise starts, but it takes me a second to realize it’s coming from Jason. When in extremis, he can emit an earsplitting screech. Once, at a zoo, he set a pack of lemurs howling.

As we stand in the park, he is also crying and clutching his ears over his headphones. Is there a plane overhead? He once bit my hand when we were crossing a street beneath a low-flying jet. I look around but can’t figure out what is causing his reaction.

He snatches the headphones off his head. I tell him that he needs them to protect his ears. He bends them until they snap. Then he starts screaming.

He holds the broken pieces with visible grief. Then he drops them, runs up to me and grabs me by my hair. He tries to bite me, jaws snapping an inch from my face.

It takes a lot to get New Yorkers’ attention, and now people begin to gravitate toward us. Some have their phones out. I can’t tell if they’re trying to help or if they’re making videos they plan to post on TikTok with the caption “Person goes crazy in the park!” Or maybe they’re gathering evidence to show the police. Thinking about the police, I begin to panic.

There have been too many stories of autistics violently arrested and even killed by law enforcement. In Rhode Island, someone in a Whole Foods parking lot once called the police on us when Jason was mid-tantrum. A bystander would have seen a white-presenting teen attacking a small Asian woman.

In the park, I explain that Jason is my son and that he is having an autistic meltdown. Covering his ears, he runs to the nearest tree and starts bashing his head against it, bloodying his forehead. I call my husband.

I realize that we’re in the middle of a path where people are walking their dogs — several of them off leash. I stand in front of Jason like a hockey goalie. I try to deflect the unleashed dogs while shouting at the owners to take them away.

I herd Jason toward a bench, hoping he can sit for a moment and pull himself together. I’m growing terrified that he might grab or hit a passerby.

By the time Karl arrives, Jason has calmed down. Thankfully, no one has called the police. But his forehead is bleeding and his headphones lie broken on the ground. In his fist, he holds a hank of my hair.

With sensory dysregulation, delayed reactions are common. The dog owner who failed to leash her poodle probably has no idea that she caused a meltdown. Leash laws protect people (and other dogs) as well as wildlife, but only if dog owners abide by them.

After that day in the park, I buy a rebounder, a kind of jogging machine, for Jason to use in the apartment. Our runs together in the park have sadly come to an end.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel “The Evening Hero” and other books.