The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  They would give me a different kind of drug there. They might strap me down so I wouldn’t harm myself. I would sleep, and sleep, and sleep. Sometimes I would feel hands under my covers at night, under my gown, and a voice in my mind would say, “Just let them have it,” and I would be back in the barn or the nurse’s office when I was a child. I would hear deep breaths, like the breaths of the horses when they had been running. I would be relieved not to have energy to care. In the morning, I would have to go to group meetings, and the talking sounded like a choir was singing. I would try not to sing or to laugh. I wouldn’t know anything from anything else. People from plants or pillows. Day from night. Myself from other patients or spirits. The bathroom from the living room. Food from medicine. My hands from pieces of leather. Paper from metal. I wouldn’t know how I got there, or where “there” was, until later when I had gotten out.

  Sometimes I went to gray concrete to stand in front of a classroom. Like when I was eighteen and I taught poetry in a room without windows in the Virginia State Penitentiary. It was in the Richmond Poet-in-the-Schools program. Every week, I rode a city bus there. I held on to myself and pretended I was going somewhere exciting, instead of passing through gray, noisy streets filled with smoke. Smoke like that which hovered in the yard back on the plantation where I grew up. And there was nothing soft in prison. Nothing soft, except clothes. It was a nightmare of dark concrete hallways, dimly lit with a blood-colored light. Every night I dreamed of being trapped beneath the rubble of prison concrete, its weight pressing down on my chest until I couldn’t breathe. The inmates’ sweat followed me into my dreams. The shotguns the guards held. The batons. The pistols. The jangling of their large circle of keys.

  Or, when I was in my thirties, I rode the bus in Oakland, California, to gray concrete, to stand in front of more classrooms. Here and there in the city. I was a substitute teacher. Sometimes I changed buses. And changed buses again. I tasted crowds of people packed into trembling seats or standing and holding on for dear life to metal rails and poles. Trying desperately not to see each other or to see themselves. I took deep breath after deep breath when the bus put me off, and I stood before red bricks mortared over concrete. I tried to buffer my ears against the schoolyard noise. I walked down halls where sulfur-colored crowds shimmered in silhouettes, while bluish light tried to splash through windows in the doors at the end. The music of the shadows was a familiar joviality. But the humming of the shadows was a pain I had never known.

  I would enter classrooms and light would split my head. I would sit behind desks and be invisible as the wind. Nothing soft. Nothing soft. The talking around me would never seem to stop. There were so many different voices. So many different tones. So many different pitches, cadences, and anxious sounds like foot tapping, and shuffling, and one hand pinching the skin of the other hand, or hands tugging on elastic socks or waistbands all at once. It would make me dizzy. I would be drowning in the scents. Grease and burnt toast. Scrambled eggs and beans. The mix of soap and water, urine and foot funk, shower mold, sweat and underarms. Powder and cologne. Deodorant and perfumes. Peppermint and lotions. Listerine. I had to hold onto myself to keep from vomiting. I would have to put my hand on the back of my head to keep my head from exploding. I would have to hold tightly to the corner of the desk and the chairs and look straight ahead to keep from having a seizure. I would be holding it together so people would think I was normal. So they would think I was one of them. And then, the loud bells would ring.

  I would be so confused about the rules. They were nothing like the ones I had learned for school. None of the rules I had learned about classrooms in gray concrete seemed to apply. Sometimes students just all got up and started leaving. I tried to talk to them, but no one seemed to hear me. I followed them out to the playground, calling, but no one turned around. I watched them fanning out, disappearing past cars and down sidewalks in different directions. When they had all vanished, everything was so quiet. I could hear a bird singing. I stood there for a little while, waiting to see if they would come back. But they didn’t.

  Sometimes teachers would lock themselves in classrooms at recess, afraid to come out. Or they would be afraid that if they said anything to certain students, someone would slash their tires. Students would be doing so many things they shouldn’t have been doing in a classroom. And I would be helpless to stop them. Playing card games at the back of the room. Playing their boom boxes. Dancing or getting into fights. I couldn’t stop them from doing anything. I couldn’t suspend anyone. I couldn’t even send them to the office. I couldn’t bring them out of their shock. I couldn’t make them believe in another world. I couldn’t scream, even when I felt like it.

  And if I could have gotten their attention, what should I have told them? Maybe it helps at times if you don’t have autism when you’re a teacher. If life seems to make sense to you. If society makes sense. Of if you believe in God and Jesus. Then you would have words to help you talk to lost black children about living in the world.

  But why did I keep going to gray concrete if it made me feel so bad? If it was so hard? You must be wondering. I was going so I would have money and wouldn’t have to live on the street. I was going because as long as I followed some routine in the normal world, I could keep from blowing away, like a tissue in a strong wind. And this world was familiar, or at least there were familiar things about it. And besides, everything wasn’t always bad. There were lots of good moments. Tender moments. Precious days with my students. So I was going because I wanted to help people, especially black children, and this was the only thing I knew how to do.

  So after I was a substitute, I was a regular teacher with my own classroom. I was at Golden Gate Elementary, teaching sixth grade. That’s where you would have found me, five days a week, for over six years. Most of the children there were black. Some were Southeast Asian. Only a few were white. The gray concrete building was like the prison that the refugees on The Walking Dead holed up in for a while. Like them, we had a sense of being a family. The gray concrete kept the children safe for a few hours of daylight. The drugs and crime, the horror and pain of the outside world, would be pushing against the tall chain link fence all day. Day in and day out, it would be trying to come crashing in.

  Because the rules didn’t seem to apply, I would be breaking them, left and right. Just like everyone else. The principal and some of the other teachers seemed like they were living in a make-believe world. The principal, a black woman from Louisiana, would be pretending we were normal people doing normal things, when everyone knew we were not. The school board would be pretending that all things were equal. That the schools in poor neighborhoods and schools in rich neighborhoods were just alike. Then the teachers would be pretending to pretend, so the principal wouldn’t bother them. So I would make my own rules. I would teach my students to write, and read, and do math. But not with the books they gave me. And not on the district’s schedule. The principal would stand outside my door a lot of the time, listening and looking in. And then she would “write me up” for being insubordinate.

  And I would learn to wear my professional man blackness like it was who I was. Like it was me, although it wasn’t. I would be trying as best I could to be the black man role model. I could tell that’s what the principal and other teachers wanted. They wanted to feel good and proud having a decent black man around. I would try to deepen my voice. To wear the habit of black man-ness. But I’m not so sure that I fooled anyone. Some days I would stand beside my desk and feel my mask running down my face like wet watercolors. I would start stimming, rapidly curling my fingers, and not be able to stop. Some days Ruby would come out and just sit there, listening to the buzzing of florescent lights, not hearing a word the children said.

  Sometimes I would yell. Sometimes I would learn to “cap” and “play the dozens” with my children, a language they were speaking to each other all the time, jostling each other in words, back and forth. And every day I would have a hard time making it
to the end of the day. After lunch, I would start shaking and want to fall asleep. So I would have to stay on my feet and walk around the classroom the whole time to stay awake. Or take my class outside to the playground, even if it wasn’t time for recess. Or play lively games with the class that helped to teach them spelling or things about math. Sometimes I would be a better teacher because I had to try extra hard just to stay present and awake.

  Every day, after all of the students were gone, I would stand in the middle of the classroom and close my eyes. I would take a deep breath and exhale for a long time. Sometimes I wanted to cry, but there was no time for crying. I would stand there and become a giant butterfly. Me in my red sannyasin shirt and pants. Me and my beads and mala. Me with my giant red wings. I would feel my soft wings unfolding and touching against the hard walls, the hard desks and chairs. Jeremiah, Lizzy, and Beulah would be holding on to me. I would feel my wings trying to put the color back into things. To brighten them. And each day I would feel myself getting heavier, getting further and further away from being able to lift off.

  Sometimes I would be going to gray concrete to sit at a desk and listen to professors. Sometimes I would take a bus to get there. Like when I lived in Berkeley. I would wait for the temperature of the sunlight to be just warm enough before I walked to the bus stop. Other times, I would walk to get to the gray concrete. I would follow the streets and sidewalks with the right light and shadows at the right time of day. I followed the quiet paths, behind someone’s garden or yard, beside a blue building. Beside a cedar fence. Beside a green mural. Behind a balcony with an old white porcelain milk canister. In front of a yellow house. Along a brick walkway. I would come through groves of trees where squirrels played and spirits danced in shade. They would be putting their breaths in me. Playing with my skin. Beside a stretch of green grass and onto a concrete sidewalk on campus.

  Sometimes I would be running late. And I would have to go down streets bustling with people and quiet noise. Streets where nobody yelled and horns seldom blew. Car engines hummed and the metal beneath their hoods slowly grinded. Sparrows followed me, chirping. I would follow a girl who always wore red rain boots, and a yellow vinyl rain jacket, and carried a children’s lunchbox, although she was a college student. She would turn, though, and go into another building, and I would have to walk the rest of the way all alone. She would remind me of sunshine in the yard back in elementary school.

  At Berkeley, I was such a famous student, famous to myself. Famous to the desks and chairs and tables and lights and walls. When I sat for hours in empty classrooms and lecture halls, they almost smiled. When I sat in library cubbies or on quiet stone stairways after the building shut down, locked, and everyone had gone home. They almost missed me and Jeremiah and Lizzy on holidays and summer breaks when we weren’t around. I liked being a student, at times. I liked talking to quiet people. I liked seeing all of the other people coming and going.

  I liked having teachers and learning new things. I had the greatest teachers everywhere I went, not just in classrooms. Famous teachers. Philosophers and mystics, scholars and poets. I met teachers on the way to school and on my way back home. I met them at the back of the bus and on the street corners, in stores and restaurants. I met them at bus and train stations, in homeless shelters, in the lobbies of fancy hotels and halls. I met them under trees in the park, in gardens, in beds of linen and cotton and flannel and down. I must have been doing something good in another life to have such great teachers in this one. All my teachers nurtured and took care of me as if my mama and granny had called them up and said, “Can you please look after our child?” They passed me invisible things. They helped me to keep my dignity.

  But once in a while, I got tired of feeling like I could only survive if I was in gray concrete. It was like living my life in a biosphere. That’s what I loved about it, but at the same time, that’s what made me want to get out. So I would try to escape, but not like someone wanting to escape from prison. But instead, like someone looking in the mirror and thinking about their mama and daddy and whispering, “Please don’t let me be like them.” I was looking in the mirror when I first came to California. I was hoping I could live a regular life.

  I would take the train across the Bay every morning to do carpentry on a job in Berkeley. I liked making things, and I was good at it. I could see angles and how things should fit together. I could make small measurements without a tape measure. Carpentry was one of my birthrights. It was handed down for centuries among slaves on our plantation. The way I learned to cook by holding on to Mama’s apron, I learned to do carpentry by watching Daddy from a close distance. I liked the way I disappeared but there I was still, when I worked with my hands. It was relaxing. I didn’t just enjoy making things myself, though. I also loved watching others. I could spend the whole day watching construction. It was like being hypnotized. Watching bulldozers and dump trucks. Watching tall cranes rotating slowly and lifting pieces of brick or metal. Watching the patterns the men made, moving about. Tasting the rich scent of opened-up earth. Tasting the scents of hot and cold metal. Tasting the flavor of bricks and all the shades of wood.

  For a while, I was feeling so good about escaping. I was feeling so excited about being in a different kind of place. But one day I got lost in pine scent and stepped off a scaffold, falling two stories down. I can still feel the weight of my body, crashing. For eight weeks after that, I was nursing broken bones. I was spending days watching the whites of seagulls against the green grass of the marina. Just like that, my escape was over. I had flown into the sky and fallen hard back to earth.

  Then I would start taking the same train I used to take to work, but this time to a gray concrete building at Berkeley, called Lowie Hall. It was the home of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, and it was like something out of a horror movie, the cheap kind, where the spirit of a murdered tribe comes back seeking revenge for their genocide. It was packed with stolen objects from people across the globe. First Nations, Africans, Pacific Islanders, Indians, and Japanese. Some objects were behind glass in display cabinets so people could look at them. But thousands more were in boxes and crates somewhere in the basement storage. I never wanted to be in the building after dark. It was too full of longings. The shadows started to mourn and move about.

  I liked my classrooms, though. They had windows that opened outward on an angle. You just pushed down on them at the top, and they swung open with a creak. At first, I would sit near the window, with my tongue out, panting like a dog in a car, when the car moves out of the city and into the country. My first class was with a famous scholar, who was a funny man, but he wasn’t trying to be funny. He smoked a pipe like he was back in an English country house, or standing beside a group of Africans in an anthropology photograph. He was trying to prove that black people had a culture. I know. I couldn’t believe it either. In 1978!

  I would often lose myself exploring random gray concrete at Berkeley. I had favorites, like the main library. Being in there was like being in an ancient temple. So many men and women had put their minds into it. The design. The patterns. The materials. The angles. So many fingers had put it together, shaped it, planed it, polished it, hammered on it. The stones held so many drops of sweat. The high rotunda-like ceilings drew my breath upward; the space and light drew my body, making it taller.

  I got lost in the dark alleys of “the stacks” and in the subterranean and attic cubbies where bits of light filtered in through low-lying clouds. It was so quiet. Gothic. All of the metal shelves and cages. The thick, painted concrete floors and flickering fluorescent lights. The sheer weight of it in my mind almost gave me a hernia. Now and then, a clanking sound echoed through the dimly lit, gray space. It was like being on a spaceship in a science-fiction movie. Moving through space. Listening to the soothing, low bass drone of the engine. Everyone I passed was so focused on their papers or their books; I was like a wind they didn’t notice. I walked along the long hallways, around stacks of shelves, tryin
g not to laugh out loud. I lost days and weeks pulling books about folklore and anthropology, art and photography, off metal shelves and thumbing through them, drinking words and photographs.

  At times, I perched at a window so that I could look out at all the people, all the characters. So I could have my cake and eat it. Looking out was one of my favorite things. I thought that I was whatever I saw. That all those other worlds were me. I could watch me until nothing else existed.

  I didn’t know it then, but being in gray concrete at UC Berkeley was one of the highlights of my life. I was feeling like I had security. “Security” meant not having too many things to think about or to do. It meant having everything done at the end of the day, and no anxiety, and no guilt. It meant not having to worry about money. Having people helping me, and having a place to live with a nice bed. Having the perfect routine, a routine like a room with the perfect light, and a window opened just the right amount, with just the right amount of breeze, of green leaves and sunlight, at just the right temperature.

  When I was in gray concrete at Berkeley, I was often relaxed. I was writing poetry. I was meeting people, and having friends, and trying to have relationships. There were days when my mind didn’t show up, and I would stay home and cover myself with blankets and pillows. Most days were a series of small disasters, as far as my body went. As far as being overwhelmed by sunlight and noise, and something, somewhere aching. But that was my life. Most days were pretty good. Now and then I went out. I sometimes went to movies at the Pacific Film Archives. I went to museums and symphonies, concerts and plays.

  I sometimes wandered into receptions at art galleries and stood in the corner and sipped a glass of wine, even though I didn’t like drinking. There would often be black spirits trapped in white spaces at events like those. They would be in the music. They would be in the uppermost corners or floating through the crowd, turned down low, but I could still hear them screaming. Blues. Jazz. White people couldn’t live without them, but they would never say “please” to the spirits. They would just say, “OK. Play. Sing. Sing good like you know you can do.”