TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR

Alex Irwin, 19, diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome last year, trains for employment at the Hawkins Institute’s Café Niche on Queen St. W.

Working with Asperger's

NOTE: This has been edited from a previous version that incorrectly stated people with Asperger's Syndrome have difficulty reading. People with Asperger's Syndrome typically do not have difficulty reading.

The CN Tower is 553.33 metres tall and, at the base of it, as you exit the elevators into the gift shop, stands Jamie Higgins, who spent four decades trying his heart out at one thing and another until he was finally diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.

Now he knows why he couldn't tie his shoes as a child or ride a bike or ski like his siblings, and why he has failed at so many things despite trying so hard for so long.

His trying took him from Montreal to London, England, and now Toronto. He has been a theatre usher, a retail associate and a data-entry clerk. When he couldn't get work, he volunteered at Oxfam and helping elementary schools stage plays.

Now he greets bowing Japanese tourists and French women with luscious accents as they pile out of the elevator of the tower into the True North section of the CN Tower gift shop.

He offers to take their picture in front of the life-size polar bear and select the perfect souvenir, whether it's $5 CN Tower novelty pens or Inuit carvings or tea cozies for $85.

"Each piece is an individual piece that will never be reproduced again," says Higgins, 44.

He speaks carefully. There is so much to remember. Maintain eye contact. Don't talk too loudly or too low. Don't veer off on a tangent. Don't drone on.

He learned these things at the Hawkins Institute, an employment training program founded as Mission Possible in 1995, the first agency in North America to specialize in employment services for people with Asperger syndrome.

In the indie movie Adam, the character with Asperger's receives as a gift a book called How to Find Work That Works for People With Asperger Syndrome – passages of which are also the source of a lengthy montage in the movie Adam, released last August.

The book was written by Toronto resident and Hawkins Institute founder Gail Hawkins, who had no idea it would be featured in the movie.

"It was a combination of surprise, because I didn't know, and absolute delight," she says.

Hawkins, 44, is not a physician or a psychologist. She is a classical guitarist who, after working at Kerry's Place Autism Services, was asked to design an employment program for people with autism.

"I have always been a private person, an introvert," she says of her affinity for people with Asperger's, a condition on the autism spectrum first named in 1944. "And yet I look like an extrovert. I have worked at that and I'm good at it, but it exhausts me, and it's an effort. If I had my choice, I'd probably be a hermit. It has put me in a position of empathy."

The offices of the Hawkins Institute are on the Danforth near the Greenwood subway. Hawkins also founded the upscale Niche Café on Queen West, where students at the institute train for employment. She calls them "not-for-much profit" organizations.

In 1994, Asperger syndrome was entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – one of the tools psychiatrists use for diagnosis – and has lately exploded into pop culture. Characters with Asperger's have appeared in Amazing Race, Grey's Anatomy, America's Next Top Model and Degrassi: The Next Generation.

"I think that things go in cycles," Hawkins says. "At different times, there's a different `in' diagnosis and Asperger's has been one of those in recent years.

"We're also seeing a growing population of autism and Asperger's. Not to mention that it's a very interesting disorder. It reminds people of the idiot savant. It's kind of magical. People are amazed."

Asperger syndrome is the term applied to the mildest and highest functioning end of the autism spectrum.

People with Asperger's have normal to superior intelligence. Some of them hold multiple university degrees. Higgins, for example, has a BA from Concordia University in Montreal.

They have peculiar, idiosyncratic areas of "special interest" that can be anything from cattle chutes to astronomy, sex, the Bible, parrots, or Toronto's public transit system. They are often gifted in math or have an interest in numbers. They typically do not have difficulty reading. They may have motor skills impairment, which can range from mild to severe.

They have difficulty understanding social and physical cues. They may have trouble making eye contact or they may ramble on about their area of interest. They may not consistently adhere to basic rules of personal hygiene when it comes to their teeth, hair, clothes or bathing.

They often suffer harsh and crippling rejection from their peers and live lives of isolation.

Yet they can make great employees. They arrive early for work. They're reliable, hard-working and honest.

Michael Maetche, associate manager of the CN Tower retail store, says Higgins is a wonderful employee, a pleasure to work with.

"He's always attentive to customer needs," Maetche says. "That's huge, as customer-service focus here is huge."

Hawkins says it's dangerous to generalize about people with Asperger's because each person is unique. In fact, the syndrome can be so subtle that it goes unrecognized or ignored for decades.

Higgins went undiagnosed until his sister-in-law, Erinn, brought a fresh perspective to an old family problem. Erinn Higgins, 35, grew up with a sister who has Down syndrome. She knew immediately that there was something special about Jamie.

She insisted he be assessed, even though he had been tested as a child, without meaningful result. At the time, Asperger's wasn't as well known as it is today.

"I feel like he was abandoned by the world for most of his life," Erinn Higgins says. The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome in the summer of 2007 was a relief to everyone.

"I think it has inspired more compassion in his family," she says.

As a teenager, Higgins boarded at Brewster Academy, a school in New Hampshire for students in technology. His classmates called him Piggy, after the intelligent but clumsy fat boy with glasses in the novel Lord of the Flies.

"It has been my experience that teenagers can be the most malevolent, cruellest people," says Higgins, who wrote an open letter in February to the alumni of his school about people with Asperger's. It read:

"I am not writing this letter in order to blame anyone for the way I was treated at Brewster. I just want people to understand that how I behaved, and what I did was not my fault. I knew that I was different but never could explain it; perhaps, if we had known about Asperger's then, things would have been better."

Alex Irwin, 19, went undiagnosed until last year. Irwin has an interest in morbid topics, including school shootings.

"It's like a puzzle," says Irwin, describing his interest in why people do terrible things.

His classmates in American Sign Language at George Brown College read something more ominous into his interest. Irwin arrived at a class one day to find it cancelled. He went home for a nap. The next thing he knew, his father was waking him to tell him he was going to be questioned by authorities.

Irwin was devastated. A year later, his eyes still widen with hurt when he describes the experience.

"Because of my interest in school shootings, they thought I was going to do something terrible. All I was interested in was talking about it."

Like Higgins, Irwin was tested as a child but the testing was inconclusive.

Today, Higgins lives independently, in his own one-bedroom apartment, decorated with theatre posters and bookshelves lined with books about theatre. Once he played the jury foreman in an amateur production of Trial By Jury. He is saving to see The Boys in the Photograph at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

"I've just always had this love of theatre," he says. "I guess it gives me a certain feeling of freedom."