In Gabe Kavookjian’s Life, Most People Are the Same. But Not Him.

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.Jack Flame SorokinGabe 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.”Jack Flame SorokinWorking 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.”Jack Flame SorokinGabe 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