He wears his blue New Balance sneakers and the black socks with the Nike Swoosh on them, camouflage shorts, and a T-shirt. And his G-Shock watch. Always his G-Shock watch, the kind that’s chunked up with cool functions and you can really beat it up. That is one of Gabe’s hobbies: G-Shock watches.
With his hands in his pockets, he walks along a curve in the road on his way to the farm shop a mile away. They sell coffee and sandwiches and stuff there. Gabe doesn’t drink coffee, and he is not especially hungry just now, but he walks there anyway, like he does most days. Not every day. But most days. It’s private, just him, the way other people do. And it helps make the days go by until the next day, which might be better than this day.
Fwap, fwap. Fwap, fwap. Fwap, fwap. Gabe’s sneakers against the pavement, the only sound except for the singing birds. He’ll order a muffin. They have good blueberry muffins. The women working behind the counter will say, “Hey, Gabe. Howya doing.” It’s nice at the farm shop.
He turns left down a long road with no sidewalks, only bright-green lawns that slope down to the street. Big, mostly older houses. Robins tweet as they peck at seeds in the grass of the big yards. Gabe’s eyebrows are slightly raised and his chin is puckered. He looks a little bored but also receptive to the world around him. He looks ready, in case anything happens, but he knows that it usually doesn’t.
He is the only person walking along the road, so there’s no one to compare himself with, none of the people who are all the same. Most people are the same as one another, which makes Gabe different. On this road he sometimes even forgets, but only for a few seconds. He thinks all the time about the fact that he is different. It’s stuck inside him—that’s how he puts it. He thinks about it in the shower, he thinks about it while he’s watching Indiana Jones movies, and he thinks about it while he’s cooking eggs on the stove, which he is getting better at. “Sssomeone told me that before,” he says, the S sound extending for a syllable. “That I’m different. Down syndrome is not a sickness. There’s no vaccine for it. If there was, I would take it.”
Fwap, fwap. Fwap, fwap. Fwap, fwap.
Gabe in his bedroom, wearing a favorite G-Shock watch. Behind him are signed pictures of his heroes and memories of football and film shoots.
“Can you set up the tripod?” Gabe is in a stairwell at the theater now. For eleven years he has worked two days a week at the Prospector, a movie theater in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a couple towns over from where he lives. Most of the people Gabe works with have some kind of disability because that’s mostly who the Prospector hires, not as a side project but as its main reason for existing. Its mission is to provide meaningful, well-paying jobs for adults with disabilities. Some have Down syndrome. Some have other challenges and aren’t able to walk or talk. But everybody does a job. When you see a movie at the Prospector, disabled people will greet you, sell you a ticket, sell you popcorn and soda, give a short introduction to the film (the audience always claps), and collect your trash on the way out. There’s a commercial kitchen where they make the flavored popcorn for sale in the lobby and online, to raise money.
The employees are called Prospects, and the theater helps them find their “sparkle.” Gabe got the job after he went to see the movie American Sniper here. In his interview, he asked if they offered worker’s comp.
There are different expressions of Down syndrome, different ways of being, different kinds of capacities and limits. Gabe doesn’t talk much about the cans and can’ts. You can’t generalize about it, and why would you want to?
He sees the differences within his differentness at the Prospector. There is a whole language that people like him use, kind of like people in Paris have their own language. Within the language are dialects and accents and nuances. When Gabe speaks, to his ear, his voice sounds like everyone else’s voice. Sometimes he has trouble understanding people who talk the way he does, and other times he understands them as clearly as he can understand his parents, or Matt Damon in a Jason Bourne movie.
In the stairwell, Gabe kneels over a duffel bag of camera cables and extension cords. He does video production for the Prospector. He and his friend and coworker Ian Foss produce and film short movies—ads that play during the previews mostly, starring Prospects talking about their work at the theater and reminding people to turn off their cell phones. Gabe likes working with Ian, partly because Ian is just a great friend and partly because Ian is like most people, different from Gabe.
“Gabe, you wanna set up the tripod?” Ian asks again. “I gotta go grab the card for the FX9, and I have to go get the audio cord because I’m gonna mic you up before we come back up.”
Working with camera gear at the Prospector.
Gabe makes an “mmm” sound and begins unsheathing the tripod’s legs. He sees a birthday party of little girls gather around a balloon bouquet downstairs in the lobby. All the girls are the same as most people. Gabe can look around as he sets up the equipment because he’s done it so many times. A few years ago he took classes in television production at a community college. At home, in his room, he spends hours looking up so many YouTube videos about how his favorite movies were made, behind-the-scenes footage showing how scenes were shot. “Comes to Hollywood, they always shoot more than one shot. They do more than a thousand takes,” he says. “They can spend eight or nine or ten hours for one clip. Here, we do the same thing but it’s a bit different. Here, no way—nnnot a lot of takes.” The Prospector owns Sony Red cameras and all kinds of cinema-grade equipment, and Gabe hopes—and believes, even—that his work might get noticed one day. Sometimes famous actors come to the theater. Ryan Reynolds lives nearby and has been in. Maybe one day one of them will tell Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg or George Lucas about the preshow videos Gabe Kavookjian shoots for the Prospector and he will get to work in Hollywood.
Sometimes his old friends from New Canaan High School, class of ’11, come to the Prospector with their wives and kids. His buddies. They hug and backslap and laugh. It’s fun to see them, but it’s also hard sometimes. He loves kids, and he thinks about how much he wants the life his buddies have. Sometimes it feels like they’re coming to see him because he works at this place, like he’s on display or something. That’s not the way high school was. In high school, everyone was so good to him, and he didn’t feel so different at all. He was on the football team. The coach put him in for a play in his senior year, and Gabe ran so hard on the field, and all the other players were swirling around him running and tackling, and afterward everyone ran up to Gabe and smiled and slapped his helmet and told him how great he was out there.
Before that, when he was little, school wasn’t always great. Kids can be mean.
“They can call you a ‘puff face,’ ” he says. “For people who have Down syndrome, you have stuff with the way your face looks, or your stomach, right? And for me, I originally had a puff face. And now, I don’t have that anymore. I don’t know how it comes down, but I don’t have that anymore.”
He’s got the tripod set up now. He uncoils one of the cords for the camera.
Gabe loves people, but he’s okay with not having other people around. He likes being alone sometimes.
“I would say half my buddies are married and have children. And I’m not. And I’m still looking,” he says.
Thirty-five is still young, I tell him.
“Well, there’s someone I’m trying to find, and I don’t know where it will take me.”
Someone special right now?
“No. There’s one person. I’m not going to say her name. When you have Down syndrome, it’s so hard to date someone. I’ll keep going at it. I won’t stop or fail. You just want to go for it. I want to meet someone different. When you see someone, you want to go for it. Don’t be afraid when you find someone. It’s hard to go first.”
Do you get nervous?
“I don’t get nervous. The problem is, she might say no to you. She might shoot you down. I don’t drive. That’s tough because you can’t take her places. You can’t go anywhere.”
It’s good that you have that spirit, to not give up.
“You can never ever give up,” Gabe says.
Are there people who have taught you that?
“Yeah. Tons of them. And the number-one person is Val Jensen.”
Here at the Prospector? She’s the owner?
“Yyyup. She has pink hair. It’s so easy to find her.”
Gabe and his friend produce short movies about other Prospects. He hopes his work might one day get noticed, maybe even by one of the famous actors who live near the theater.
In his parents’ big white house, he sits in the basement on the overstuffed pink chair by the doors to the backyard with his socked feet on the pink ottoman watching 24. It’s a weekday, and he’s not working today. Gabe owns every season on DVD and has watched all of them. Every episode ends in a cliff-hanger. He also owns The Jason Bourne Collection, every season of Two and a Half Men, every season of SEAL Team, most of the Harry Potter DVDs, all the Pirates of the Caribbeans, Daddy’s Home, Daddy’s Home 2, Grown Ups, Grown Ups 2, American Sniper, the American Pie: 3 Movie Pie Pack, several Fast & Furious DVDs, Jurassic World, and 8 Mile because Gabe is a big nut for Eminem. He is obsessed.
The room is full of gray October light. Rectangles of sun through the windowpanes overlap with Kiefer Sutherland’s face on the flat-screen. Gabe breathes in, then breathes out lazily, the air fluttering his lips. He is half-watching the show and half-holding the remote in one droopy hand. He loves 24, but this is nnnnot that fun. He moves a pillow and pushes himself out of the chair, then thuds up the stairs to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Cereal is easy. Milk, that’s all you need.
Gabe loves people, but he’s okay with not having other people around. He likes being alone sometimes. And sometimes being surrounded by people can make him feel lonely. It’s confusing because he’s happy too. With people. Gabe has two parents who love him. He has two brothers and a sister who love him, and they have kids, his nieces and nephews—the loves of his life. He has friends at work, and he has his buddies. He loves and is loved. Maybe tomorrow he’ll meet someone.
The happiness he feels when he’s with the people in his life is real—so real and so happy that it lets him dream about what life would be like if he were even happier.
The way he thinks they are.
Maybe he’ll walk down and get a muffin. Say hi to everyone at the shop.
Gabe in one of the Prospector’s four auditoriums.
Carhartt is another of Gabe’s hobbies, and he’s head-to-toe right now. He had to get out of the house, but he can’t drive, so he had to get an Uber to Gemstone, the other place he works for pay. Val, who owns the Prospector and has the pink hair, also owns this 160-acre farm with ponds and woods and a rambling mansion. The place was sitting empty for something like forty years, and Val bought it out of foreclosure and turned it into Gemstone, a working farm with chickens, turkeys, vegetable gardens, fish, and a forest that’s been colonized by local wildlife.
“Even on my day off, I come here. Be here when I want and enjoy myself. Before I’m gonna get myself a girlfriend,” Gabe says.
A dozen or so people are working within sight of the mansion, which is the Gemstone headquarters. Val’s here, and Gabe joins the small crew in the kitchen making chicken Caesar wraps for everyone for lunch. This house can feel as much like home as his parents’ house, and these guys are his buddies. Just now they are talking about how to enclose the top of the chicken yard with wire so hawks can’t get at the chickens.
“That’s a bit hurtful for someone to say that to someone who has Down syndrome.”
Gabe remembers something and it just comes out, ending the chicken-wire discussion.
“Someone told me, You’re not gonna date no one because you have Down syndrome.”
His buddies stop grating cheese for a second and look at their friend.
Val scowls. “Who told you that?” she asks.
Gabe shakes his head and says, “Don’t want to say names.” He pauses, looking around the kitchen with his eyebrows up. “That’s a bit hurtful for someone to say that to someone who has Down syndrome.”
Knife chops and the fridge door opening and closing are the only sounds in the kitchen for a few minutes. Gabe opens and closes a drawer, then says, “In 2014, I found someone and lost my chance. She got married and I was waiting, waiting, waited for a while, and in 2022 something interesting happened. I walked into a place and, boom, love at first sight. And I cannot ask her out because she might say no to me. She might shoot me down. Because one, I don’t drive. How can I take her places and I don’t have a car? You think a guy is supposed to take a lady, and she would be in the car.”
Gabe and his father, Haik, get ready to go for a bike ride.
“You could Uber,” Val says.
“Wwwwell, Uber doesn’t sound sexy on a first date.”
I ask Gabe if having kids of his own is part of why he wants to find someone.
“More people say to me, ‘Gabe, you don’t want to have children.’ I want to have one, because my high school buddies have one. They’re married.”
Val turns to me and says, “We do have a friend at the Prospector who has Down syndrome and is married.”
“And he talks about it nnnon . . . stop,” Gabe says. He groans. “Twenty-four seven.”
“Gabe can’t stand people with Down syndrome,” Val says. “And my sister, who also has Down syndrome, hates people with Down syndrome.”
“Why’s that?” Gabe says.
“I think because she gets away with a lot, and then when she sees somebody doing her same tricks, she wants none of it.”
Gabe leans against a counter and puts his hands in his pockets.
“Most people don’t understand Down syndrome well,” he says. “It’s ‘down.’ Down syndrome means down. You’re down on yourself.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Val says.
“Yes, it does!”
“It’s the name of the doctor who discovered it! Doctor Down.”
Gabe folds his arms over his Carhartt shirt and looks over at his boss.
“Well why is your sister so good with me?”
“She does like you, but—”
Val smiles, looks up, and shakes her head, searching for the end of the sentence. Gabe, his voice loud and soft at the same time, continues what he was thinking about.
“My whole childhood, I had friends with Down syndrome. You become friends with them when you are little. But eight, nine, ten years old, not really. Comes to the theater, though, it’s different.”
There are people with all kinds of disabilities at the theater, I point out. Does he have friends with disabilities there? Does he fit in?
“The thing about Gabe himself, he’s amazing,” Gabe says. “I’m a comedian. I can be a goofball.”
“I fit in with them because I have it. It’s so hard to get yourself out of that.” He fits in at the theater—but in a way that he doesn’t like to fit in.
Val says, “You’re here, aren’t you? You’re the only one with Down syndrome here, and you get along with everyone. Your Down syndrome doesn’t matter here.”
Gabe says that he likes it best at the farm when there are no other Prospects there, just him and the workers who don’t have a disability.
“Yeah, because we do have Prospects come here sometimes, so they’re mixed in. Today, right now I feel fine because they’re not here.”
They’re not here to remind him that he’s different.
Val turns to me and says, “When we do have a group of Prospects come to the farm, Gabe prefers to be off with his guys and his crew. And I can understand that.”
Gabe cuts in, rewinding the conversation. “And also as someone who’s talked about dating, I’m not gonna say his name—”
“Nobody talks about dating more than you, Gabe.”
After lunch Val assigns him and two other workers to clear some tall grass and brush near one end of the lake so kids who visit can get closer to the water. Gabe likes working with these guys best. They are like everybody else.
Gabe and his mother, Lynn, look through his baby book.
Gabe’s parents, Haik and Lynn Kavookjian, heat water for tea in their sunny, open kitchen. Gabe empties two packets of instant hot chocolate into a mug. His parents have been encouraging him lately to think about moving into an apartment with a roommate. There’s a coworker at the Prospector who lives just a few blocks from the theater. Gabe could walk to work.
“He’s a lovely guy,” Haik says. He’s wearing slippers and leaning against the counter. “And he’s looking for a roommate, trying to cover his lease for the next four or five months. He could help with rides, and they’d walk into town—he said just come by and give it a try. Gabe always worries what’s going to happen when we’re not around, which is a natural thing. And although he’s got loving siblings, this is a chance to try and be independent.”
What do you think about it? I ask Gabe.
“I really don’t know,” he says quickly, in a monotone.
“And that’s what I said—we don’t know,” Haik says, upbeat. “But I wanted to just go by and see.”
Does it seem a little scary?
“No.”
“Having a roommate . . . ” Lynn says, a mother’s hope in her voice. She smiles first at me, then at Gabe, who is stirring his cocoa.
“I’m not really that close with him.”
“I think it’s a little overwhelming,” Haik says.
“I tell him half the people in the world have no car and no driver’s license,” Lynn says to me. “It’s no big deal.”
It’s not that they don’t love having their son around. They love having him around. He waters the plants and takes out the trash and does all those things. He makes them laugh. And they can see how he’s doing. (When I first asked Gabe about his relationship with his parents, he sounded like a teenager: “Comes to my parents, it’s not interesting. It’s really nothing to tell there. Yeah. I’ve lived with them for thirty-five years of my life, right? Most people get along with their parents; some people don’t.”) It’s their love for him that makes them want him to be happier—or rather makes them wonder if he could be happier. Gabe wonders the same thing: whether it’s possible for him to be happier.
Part of him worries that if he moved out, he might not see his sister’s kids as much, who live not far from his parents. When they visit he teases them, they back-talk him, he chases them in the yard, they hug him. He is Uncle Gabe, and he loves being Uncle Gabe. “The thing about Gabe himself, he’s amazing,” Gabe says. “I’m a comedian. I can be a goofball. Most people say I’m a comedian, I’m a goofball, I’m great. I have two nephews. I got one little niece.”
And you make them laugh?
“Oh, constantly.”
Gabe probably spends about half the money he makes at his jobs buying presents for his nieces and nephews. “Every single dime of it, to them and to myself,” he says. He kicks his chin up when he says it. “Comes to Christmas, birthdays, or Easter, you always want to think about the people around you more than yourself. That’s me right there.”
Gabe on the walk to the farm shop near his house, where he likes the muffins.
He takes his hands out of his pockets and holds one in the other, in front of him.
“That’s Gabe right there.”
They’re coming over later today, in fact. His sister, her husband, and their three kids, including the new baby. His sister and his mom will sit with the baby while everyone else helps his dad with the maple syrup. It’s a family activity Haik started when the kids were little, tapping sugar maples in the yard and boiling the sap for syrup, which they eat, give as gifts, and sell at the farm shop. Gabe and the kids will trudge around the yard, crusted with hard, slippery snow, checking the sap buckets but mostly goofing around. Haik will boost his grandchildren up so they can see into the tall boiler in which the sap cooks down. Gabe will wear sneakers and skate around on the icy yard, looking at his feet, calling out to his niece to be careful or she’ll slide into a tree, threatening to drink all the hot chocolate when they go inside. Wishing he had his own children but loving that he has these.
That’s Gabe right there. Trying every day to love his life and every day wanting one part of it to be different. That’s all of us right there.
“I’m trying to figure out what Gabe wants in life,” he says. “You still want to fight it. You still want to find who you are. It’s like you’re walking into a storm. And you can pick up my hand and we can walk through the storm, warm or cold. You keep going. You always want to keep on going. Just do it. Find who you are. Find your passion. Comes to the Prospector, they say you want to find your sparkle. For me, it’s to find something I love.”
You don’t like being told no, I tell him.
“Some things, I can say no; some things I cannot say no to. If someone’s going through something, I don’t say no, comes to that. Having a bad day? Give him a hot chocolate or something.”
Are you good at knowing when someone needs help? When they’re sad?
“Oh!” His voice jumps, as if he’s been waiting for this question. He looks up, opens his mouth to speak, and takes a second to find the words. There are times when you’re with Gabe when he needs to explain to you something he thinks you can’t understand, and the only way he can say the things he needs to say is to give you a metaphor or to speak like a poet, like a storyteller. “Oh, I’m spot-on with that. You feel what that person is going through in life. That’s me. That’s Gabe right there. Don’t be afraid to guide someone through the storm. The storm doesn’t stop. If it stops, it just finds a new place. You start your day over and over, every, every day.”
In the cold, dim late afternoon, when the yellow streetlights flicker on and the trees look black but the sky is still a little bit blue, his sister’s family will leave, and he will again be with his parents in the big white house. He’ll watch a movie in the basement, then wash up in the bathroom next to his bedroom. He’ll climb into his bed beneath his two framed posters of Eminem, his framed photographs of actors and football players, the G-Shock watches that he has nested in their felted Lucite cases, his team photo of the 2009 New Canaan High School Rams football team. In the photo he’s sitting second-row center, just behind the captains. As he pulls up the sheets, the storm that sometimes enters his mind will quiet, and he’ll sleep until six-thirty or seven. He’ll wake up in the morning the same Gabe he was yesterday, believing in the possibility of his life, over and over, every, every day, the same as us. He’ll shower and get dressed and put on his sneakers and walk to get a muffin. That’s Gabe right there.