“No, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry, Daddy, but I don’t. I want the world to live in me, beside the other worlds. But don’t worry, I’ll be all right.” There were tears and deep sighs in his breathing, and I could tell by the way he held me that he didn’t think I would survive. I could tell he wanted to make sure he hugged me in case he never got another chance.
After that, I would keep looking for my yellow house. I had no idea how I would ever find it, but I knew I had to. The yellow house would be safety. It would be filled with love and goodness. Once I got inside the yellow house, I would seldom have to come out. It would have staircases and a pantry like the one at my granny’s. It would have big windows that let in lots of light.
I had a girlfriend the last year of college, but she didn’t live in a yellow house. She was white, and her building was red brick. It was not the red of flower blossoms, though, and so I hesitated to go in there. I had to make it a yellow house in my mind. I had to paint it. Some nights I stayed at her house, in the “capital of the Confederacy,” with all the white people with Confederate flags and tattoos filling the city around us.
Inside her house, with her and her two roommates, was like being in a family. Sometimes her sister came over and we had meals together and talked about the day. But in the morning, I was running home to my attic apartment as fast as I could, after looking outside to see if any Ku Klux Klan members had been watching. When I got halfway home in the stillness of pre-sun, the spirits of the city would start to dance with me. They would come out of the cobblestones and grates, gutter downspouts, bricks and stones. They would come out of alleys.
There was the spirit of an older black man with a horse and wagon in one alley. He was from before there were streets. He would take an apple from a branch and feed it to his horse, patting him on the head. Watching him made me feel less lonely. It was like watching the black janitors and servers at events I went to, like receptions and conferences. When I went to those things, I always moved toward the black “help.” I could talk to them and feel more human. They were always the most beautiful and interesting people in the rooms. Watching a woman or a man holding a tray and looking so out of place was like looking at pictures of myself.
So, I was walking to my girlfriend’s house one night. Walking up Monument Avenue, in the shadows of all the giant metal statues of Confederate generals on their horses. I was holding the moon in my left hand and the North Star in my right hand when a pickup truck passed and a shower of beer bottles crashed around me, one of them shattering against the side of my head. The shouts of “nigger” and loud laughter crashed into me like stones and continued to echo, mixing with the roars of the truck’s engine as it careened off down the street. I froze. And then I shook. I shook like I was coming apart. I tried to cover myself with darkness, the way Adam and Eve tried to cover themselves with leaves.
When I could finally move, I tried to pick my humiliation out of the pieces of broken glass on the sidewalk. I got down on my knees, cutting them, cutting my fingers, trying to clean the glass up, to undo it all. I heaved. I tried to tear the rage out of the streetlights. I wanted to kill the men in the truck. I wanted to annihilate any memory of them ever having existed. I went home to my room and tore my clothes off. I cried. I showered. I sobbed until my body didn’t belong to me. I lay awake into the next morning.
By the time I was getting used to things in college, it was over. Then I was lost. I had gotten used to a routine, to the buildings and streets. I knew every angle of the houses on the streets. I knew every step and every crack in the sidewalks. I knew every shrub, every tree, and every angle and patch of sky through branches in all of the seasons and every spirit that lived beneath them. I knew the decibel of sound on every street, alley, foyer, hallway, stairway, auditorium, and classroom. I knew the birds and their songs. I knew where they built their nests. I knew the scents of every place. I didn’t know the colors of all of the cars or buses or trucks and when they passed, but I knew the surges of their sounds, the waves, the ebbs and the tides.
But now the streets all turned blue, glowing like luminescent waves of seawater in the dark. I was afraid to walk on them, but I had to. And when I did, my mind was swept away. I would stand for an hour in one place, or try to find a familiar chair in a familiar place and just sit there. Overnight, everyone had disappeared. They had abandoned me. The city had already forgotten me, and I hadn’t even left yet. The charcoal-colored rooftops. The tin grates and vents and air ducts. The tall brick chimneys. The cobblestones of Monument Avenue. They wouldn’t look at me. They wouldn’t talk to me. And then the blossoms were coming. The dogwoods were coughing blood and laughing. The cherry blossoms were floating my arms up to the sky, like wings, but I didn’t want to fly. I fought to stay grounded. The magnolias dripped their syrup into my dreams, and when the wind blew, the fleshy petals curled around my naked chest and I became nothing but scent. There was a shroud around me, a thin gown that scrambled patterns and distorted things. The music of the cars and trucks became metal noise. The birds were like randomly dripping faucets at midnight. People’s voices were all shouts, commands, and arguments. Sunlight burned me like it had when I was a child.
I had gone to college like I was supposed to. But what happened now? Where did I go now? Where could I find joy? I didn’t understand the process for finding a job, and I didn’t really want one. I knew I couldn’t work nine to five; I couldn’t hold up. I would flop over like a canvas sack. I would end up banging my head against things or cutting my thighs. I needed bright spots in my mind. I needed good things to think about; otherwise, I would get deeper and deeper into the forest, just standing in one place. Anxiety and shame would eat me up from the inside, like giant tapeworms. I would become nothing more than a host. I needed good things to think about to have good feelings. Without good feelings, I would not survive.
My new girlfriend, Virginia, was a bright spot. I had just broken up with my old girlfriend because I didn’t know what else to do. We talked about marriage, but she didn’t want to marry me. Marrying out of your race back then was like going up against the world. I couldn’t have survived it. The world wasn’t just outside; it was inside too. In rooms. In furniture. In scents. In our heads. When I thought about what we would do next, nothing came up.
The word “Virginia” was hibiscus. It was a blue lake and a blue sky and a blue robin’s egg. It was the bright spot I had been looking for. So I started writing her poems and love letters, and we started holding each other quietly in the evenings. Virginia was going to California to do an internship, so I said to her, “Why don’t I come? Why don’t we just move there together? Why don’t we find a yellow house?” And like that, the decision was made.
When I told my family that I was moving to California, no one believed I would really go. I was the one they thought would never leave home. They thought I would never leave because I needed to be taken care of. But I was rebelling against being taken care of. I wanted to show them that I could take care of myself. I wanted to be free, to get out of my daddy’s shadow, and get outside my mama’s second sight. I wanted to have a direction, so I could move instead of just standing or sitting in one place or hiding in secret places the way I had been doing. I wanted to see new places and things.
From the Greyhound bus window, I saw stretches of yellow, brown, and green that lasted for hours. But I didn’t see much red or pink, or blue or indigo. The bus stank and the people on it were strange. I listened closely to them talking to each other, and I lay my head against the window most of the time, because it was cool, like a washcloth.
Sometimes the bus pulled off the freeways and wove around abandoned and haunted streets with wide splotches of grease and oil, dried blood and vomit. There were often boarded-up buildings with broken faces and nearby fields with pieces of car metal, glass, old couches, and tin cans. When we pulled into the stations, I never wanted to get off, but sometimes we had to, because we had to change drivers and buses. I worried about th
em losing my suitcase. I worried about leaving something on the bus. I worried about leaving something in a bathroom or on a seat in the station. I clutched my things to me like a bag lady, hunching over so that my chin could help to hold them. Outside the doors of the station were often pimps looking for tender and frightened bodies. They were like the witches in fairy tales, giving candy to children. In the bathrooms there were often men who tried to take my things or sweet talk me into giving them blowjobs, or when that failed, to wrestle me into stalls.
After three days, the bus reached water, and me and Virginia couldn’t stop hugging. We moved into a big yellow building on the Duboce Triangle, right near Market and Castro Streets. Living together looked like it should be easy, but a lot of times it wasn’t. There was so much going on all the time outside the window, and I wanted to explore everything, to taste everything. And then, being around someone else all of the time was hard. I couldn’t let go and dissolve. Studies say people with ASD have trouble with romantic relationships. The studies say that some of us can’t love, but from what I’ve seen, the people who can’t love aren’t autistic. I have been fortunate to love, and be in love, and to have relationships. Virginia and me bonded and loved the way outcasts do, when all they have is each other. But I kept having trouble being a stable partner, being the man. I saw men partners on television and in movies, on the streets or in restaurants. They were so at ease. They knew how the world worked. But I could never get the hang of it. I could be a good friend. I could be the best of friends. But the rules of friendship are green. And the rules of relationship are purple.
Me and Virginia were together for seven years. Some of it was stormy, and some of it was calm. But I was the storm maker, the twister, the hurricane. When I was with Virginia, I wanted to have everything, but I didn’t know that that’s not the way life is. I wasn’t good at sharing some of my most personal thoughts or feelings, partly because I seldom knew what they were. It would not have crossed my mind to share about my friendships with spirits. And the regular things, like what I did in school or whom I talked to or what they said were forgotten by the end of the day. I wanted to do everything I could imagine doing. I didn’t know that it wasn’t possible. I wanted to meet everybody, as long as they couldn’t see me. I wanted to study love and sex and take notes in my body. I wanted to see how different scents turned me into different people. I wanted to keep going on my adventure. Virginia wanted the things that are considered normal, but I couldn’t give them to her.
And then there was the race thing we never talked about. It never seemed to come up. And so, even if I had been “normal,” I don’t know how things would have worked. Our first Christmas in California, we flew home to visit our families. We planned to stay for a few days at her family’s house in Northern Virginia and then for a few days at my family’s house on the plantation. But when we got to her family’s house, they wouldn’t let me in. They didn’t want her going out with a black person. It was cold outside, not just from the weather. Her brother had to take us in. I don’t have words for how bad I felt. Sometimes I don’t cry when things happen, not until a long time afterward, because it takes a while for anything to sink in. And most of the time, so many other things come up before the first thing sinks in that when I do cry, I’m not sure which thing I’m crying about. I didn’t cry about that night for a long time. By the time I cried about it, I was in another yellow house, with another girlfriend, and we were about to move.
The Purple Time
Religion is a dream the body sends the mind.
In the purple time, I forgot the things they say you always have to remember; at least, I forgot them with my mind. I forgot that I was a man. I forgot that I was black. I forgot that I came from a plantation in the South and that I was close to my family. I forgot about my family. I forgot to call or write. I forgot that I had gone to graduate school and gotten an MA and a PhD, and I forgot that I was supposed to have ambition and be doing things in the world. I forgot that I was a poor person, an inch away from the streets. And I remembered things I had been forgetting most of my life. I remembered what made me happy. I remembered how hard it was, in the world, and that it had never been my world in the first place. I remembered how to let go, and laugh, and smile. I remembered how much I loved listening to the birds and looking at the clouds. I remembered how good it felt, how necessary, to sit in a room alone and do nothing and talk to no one. In the morning, I remembered the people in my dreams, the colors, the places we went, the things we did, the deliciousness. I remembered how, when I was a child, I had started on a golden path to find my own answers, to find peace.
It was 1980, and I was living in a house with my girlfriend, Siri Narayan, in a two-story yellow Victorian in Berkeley. I had finally found my yellow house. I had met Siri at UCLA, and we had fallen in love. We had moved from LA to Berkeley and found a house on Harmony Street (that really was the name). The house had front and back yards with trees, and birds that sang every morning and throughout the day. It had a spirit of a woman around thirty years old who would come into the kitchen in flannel pajamas and sit with me while I was eating breakfast. We put a sign on our front door that read, “Please Do Not Disturb. Meditation and Creation in Progress,” and we withdrew from the world. I was writing poetry, painting, and playing music, and she was painting and choreographing dances. What could have been more perfect? If I had been a Christian, I might have said the Lord was blessing me. But I wasn’t. I thought it was the universe, the planets and the stars aligning. I thought the universe was like me; it had forgotten who I was for a while, but now it remembered.
Our house was a block away from the Ashby BART station, the commuter train that ran throughout the Bay Area. Every Saturday there was a giant flea market in the parking lot of the station. It was a festival and a carnival with table after table, and booth after booth, and many kinds of music in the air. A drumming circle, reggae, blues, jazz, and new age. There were clothes and crafts of all kinds, new and old. There were different kinds of furniture, woodcarvings, weaving, macramé, pipes, bottles, dishes, ceramics, instruments, books, pieces of scrap metal, food, tools, carpets, artsy creations you might never find anywhere else, and small appliances. There were some booths with antique stuff, and some with new, and some with handmade, and some with manufactured, and some with ethnic, and some with brand names. There were booths of artisans, painters, yogis, spiritual groups, massage therapists, incense makers, and crystal healers.
I loved crystals and collected them, the way I had loved and collected special pieces of wood and bark, flower petals, and seashells. Almost everyone I knew had amethyst and quartz and believed in energy fields and chakras. At the psychic school I went to, called Heartsong, we compared our crystals and held them and sat in purple circles and opened our chakras as delicately as whispering to butterflies. We held them in our palms as we read auras and moved them over each other’s bodies to heal damaged energy. We sat them in front of us, in lotus postures, as we read each other’s past lives.
At home, I burned sage bundles to purify space, and I let my body become sage smoke and enter the cities pulsing in amethyst and rose quartz crystals. I found peace in the cities there, solace. I rested in the stillness of purple and pink light that almost seemed frozen. But it wasn’t. It just pulsed slowly, as things often do that have lived for a long time beneath earth. I burned the hardened gum of frankincense and myrrh and washed myself in the scents until Solomon’s temples of cedar surrounded me. I played reggae with David. We loved each other’s dreadlocks and washed them in the river and sunned ourselves on rocks. We talked and laughed until it was almost evening and his father called him home. I watched candle flames for hours, like I watched the petals of flowers. I conjured spirits I didn’t know, and sometimes they got loose in the house and broke things or threw things.
Sometimes a couple of our Rasta friends dropped by our house. They were old Rastas with thick locks and beautiful smiles. They always smelled of frankincense and gre
eted us with “Give thanks.” I would often see Rastas around Berkeley, and sometimes I hung out with them. Some of them were musicians and poets and were usually eager to talk. I would listen to the smooth and punctuated rhythms of their sermons, manifestos, and liturgies and taste the spirits that emanated from them and their words. I was a Rasta myself by then. I had given myself to its vibe. Rastas would say that I was a Rasta from a time before I was born in this body.
When I first saw dreadlocks, I thought, “Oh yeah, now I remember,” and I fell in a love I would never fall out of. When I started growing locks, I was at UCLA. I loved the way it felt, the earth growing out of me. The rawness. But back then, in 1977, black Americans hated dreadlocks. It embarrassed them. It reminded them of homeless, “pathetic bums” who were holding the race back. When I was at my bus stop near my house in Culver City, black schoolkids would make fun and throw rocks at me. On the bus, they would laugh and shoot spitballs. The white people would sit so still, looking out the windows, their jaws clenched, almost shaking, pretending not to notice. When I went home to Virginia, my mama would fuss and almost break down in tears. She wanted me to go to church with her on Sundays, but she was so embarrassed that she let me stay at home.
Growing dreadlocks for me was like a monk shaving his head, wrapping himself in an orange robe, and humming “oms.” They were like a womb in which I was nurtured, out of which a new me was being born. When I lied down on the floor and closed my eyes and listened to reggae, spirits would drift out of the radio and into my dreadlocks. Spirits of old Jamaican hill folk. Spirits would move into me and take over my eyes. I would be a root and a bone. Solomon and David would shake their dreadlocks and whisper wise secrets. I would lay my head in Queen Sheba’s lap and listen to her hum as her long locks fell around my face and sheltered me from the cruelty of the world. I would be a black scent and a wind wrapped in cotton, in burlap. I would be a watcher on a hill drinking fresh water. I would be singing along with Bob Marley, “Grow your dreadlocks / don’t be afraid of the wolf pack” and “Come we go chant down Babylon, one more time.”
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 12