Sometimes while I was looking at a painting, my hand would start stimming, and someone would come up to me and smile and start talking, because they thought I was a famous artist, or an art dealer, or a critic. Or because they thought I looked interesting and mysterious. I enjoyed those conversations. The person would be smart and subtle. They would be like an amazing meal, in a quiet restaurant, with golden low light, at a table near a large front window, with a breeze coming in the door whenever someone came and went. But when the person turned to talk to someone else, or to get another glass of wine, I breathed in deeply, filling myself with their flavor, with the flavors of the entire gallery, and with the taste on the cool air against my face as I slipped out.
The worst gray concrete was when I was a student at UCLA. I was taking the bus from Culver City, and Venice, to Westwood. I was talking to palm trees at the bus stop and asking them to shelter my eyes and throat from the burning of smog. I was having one of the hardest times in my life. I knew I was in trouble the minute I got to Los Angeles. I couldn’t find the city. It was too spread out. When I first got there, I wrote on a napkin: There is rubble and ash beneath glitter and streets too wide to cross before the light turns. There is no earth, no green, no softness. Everything is too far, and the brightness of sun off metal and glass is blinding. There are too few trees to filter the light, and so some of it ricochets off the ocean of glass, cars, and rooftops, rises and explodes over the city like a nuclear bomb.
I was working hard to function at UCLA. The campus had as much gray concrete as a small city. Each day I was stranded there. I would hurry up and get to the building where the folklore program was. I would hurry up to get out of the brightness, out of the noise of so many other students, of sirens and engines. I would be listening, but I would never hear any birds. I would be watching and listening for quiet places, but I never found any. I would be going to the folklore building, “the bunker,” as I called it, but inside, florescent lights buzzed and flickered and the small spaces of offices and classrooms were packed with other people. Each day, I was just waiting until it was over and I could go home.
When I was in the gray concrete of UCLA, I didn’t realize it was so prestigious. I was being practical by going there. I was doing what I knew how to do to stay safe and function. I wanted to keep studying folklore, and they had a folklore program. I wanted to have time to keep writing poetry and get published. I wanted to stay in California. And I wanted to make my granny famous by writing about her. But I knew nothing about university rankings. I knew nothing about conferences, networking, or academic professions. I had no sense of the value of a PhD or the difference it made what university it came from. I had no sense of how it might be related to the future. There was no future in my mind. I was like my favorite cartoon character, Mr. Magoo. I was driving my car across a moving steel girder, way up in the air, oblivious to the danger. I was going nowhere in particular, trying to be happy.
All the Green and Blue
Turquoise, or amber?
Light, or bending matter?
“Just be like a white ox in a green field,” the Zen masters say. “Don’t let anything move you.” But everything was always moving me. Every temperature. Every tone. Every color. Every shade. Especially outdoors. My favorite spaces weren’t yellow houses or gray concrete. They were the green and blue of outdoors. I couldn’t live without those colors. They were like touchstones. I could relax my eyes and not see the outlines of things, just the colors, and I would be at home and be happy. When it was perfect, outdoors was where I inhaled and exhaled the best. The problem was, there was almost never any perfection.
Outdoors was full of dangers. First was just the dizziness of walking out of a door, any door, out of spaces with shape and size into the shapeless, out of timid lighting into brightness. But the danger was the other side of what I loved so much. There was no time outdoors. Nothing to lean on. I could never comprehend the fields of objects and light, the mysterious and hypnotic fields of proximity and distance that put me into trance. Words disappeared into those fields, did not exist. Temperatures were the bodies of water that floated other bodies, but temperatures were always “almost,” never truly safe, never “all the time” or even for a certain reliable time like an object in a room. Temperatures were layers of currents that could burn one part of me and at the same time chill another. Outdoors, I knew where I was in the universe, but I didn’t know where I was on earth.
The thing people call “nature” was a danger. I call it the raw earth, the raw universe, the harsh laws of the planet. In Virginia, it meant asthma attacks; the earth attacked my breath. It attacked with insect bites, pollen, mold, dust, animal hair and fur. It attacked with light that was too bright and temperatures that threw my balance off. With cold, and shadows that turned the solid matter of my body into perforated liquid and vapor seeking shelter in the wind and clouds. Nature was a seesaw of a moon pulling tides inside me from side to side, and it was the invisible forces between the moon and the water.
And then the city was a danger along with the other dangers, and it was a danger in itself. The barrage of city noise and other senses. In the city, I became a sense. I became the drunken man at the party, the one with clothes on at the orgy, the blind beggar on the street, the lost dog walking against the current and dodging traffic and people’s feet. The city was too small and too large, all together, changing nature, simulating anchored matter, at once below the everlasting blue of skies and splotched with patterns of green.
But the dangers in California were different from those in Virginia. The light was a different hue. The temperatures of the sun and the wind were different. The tones of the green were lighter. In Virginia, sometimes a bird would burst into something like fury in the sunlight and turn almost white. But it was darkness the forest was mainly after. In California, birds carried light across the sky like redemption songs, like echoes of reeds, vibrating in the treble.
In Virginia, the trees could hardly wait to touch. To close the paths of sunlight so that everything was bathed in shade. The shade was cool. It moved like waves. It radiated like the heat from a potbellied iron stove or from a steam radiator. In California, the trees kept their distances, leaving the sky to open us up, as if we had no limit, as if we belonged to lightness, like marrow belongs to bones. In California, Ruby’s heart beat like a sparrow. I inhaled as deeply as I could, and inside my lungs was nothing but clarity. I laid my burdens down. I was baptized in redwood mist and born again in green firs and eucalyptuses.
My girlfriend, Virginia, bought a white Volkswagen Rabbit, and she drove all the time. I was so happy sitting in the passenger seat. I could look at things in the city. I could look at the yellow and white lines on the roads to see if they were irregular or perfectly straight. I could look at the shapes of tall buildings and measure their angles. I could feel their textures. I rolled around in white adobe like a hippo in a watering hole. I spread my skin around steel and brick and concrete, iron rails and wood. I was mesmerized by the architecture. The shapes and colors of houses were so lively. Their faces had so many little sections, ornaments and designs. Each part was often painted a different shade or color. I could wave my wand at things that were out of place and fix them. Like windows that weren’t perfectly symmetrical, or corners that weren’t exactly forty-five degrees.
I could look at the people. There were so many people doing things outdoors all of the time, in a way I had never seen! The colors and scents of people blended with those of houses and roads, of sidewalks and parks and streets. It was the seventies and eighties, and it was like everyone walked in the same spirit. I could feel it in the Castro or the Mission, Noe Valley, the Fillmore, J-Town or North Beach, Bayview or the Tenderloin, Duboce or the length of Haight. The people were the city. Their bodies were in so many sizes and shapes, and they emitted so many different colors. They dressed themselves in colors, shapes, and textures that were new to me. The asymmetry of clothes sometimes made the streets tilt and t
he trolley tracks scream. Spirits twirled around light poles like children around maypoles. It was like a carnival all the time. Thousands of spirits were walking among the people. Some of them were smiling because they were so happy. Some of them looked somberly out from restaurant windows at people on the streets. It was the first time I had ever seen a jealous spirit.
There were many clusters of green in the city, magic places with their own neighborhoods of spirits. One was Golden Gate Park, a giant stretch of green, over one thousand acres and thousands of species of plants. It had forests and meadows, groves and gardens, and alcoves of shadows and lights. The trees I loved most were the palms, eucalyptuses, and gingkoes. I loved that they had room to spread their branches and how so much light could touch the ground beneath them. Their shadows held me like I was a shadow, like Uncle T and the other old people where I grew up held me. Sometimes I would happen upon spirits while walking on paths through branches and bushes with Jeremiah and Lizzy. They would hover like clouds. I think sometimes when people die, their spirits move into seeds. Sometimes they move into the light and shadows beneath trees. Sometimes they start rising and run into the canopy of leaves, and feel like they’re in heaven, and just stay there.
Then there were the palm trees lining Delores Avenue. The sunlight of spirits flooding the Mission District, dancing off the skins of peppers, plantains, avocados, and lemons on tables along the sidewalks. Other spirits sang in the bougainvillea and washed over our bodies, spewing from the white blossoms of night jasmine along the avenues. Others came alive in the currents of light bulbs, in the multicolored neon and filaments pulsing and holding steady and humming for distances as far as the eye could see. When they saw that I could see them, their colors deepened.
In California I learned to ride buses and trains, streetcars and trolleys, looking out of windows. Somedays, when I was going somewhere, like looking for a job, I walked and walked, tasting scents and spirits in green places. When I lived in Berkeley, I used to walk and look at rooftops. There were some made of red clay tiles on some buildings that hypnotized me. They were like half circles. There were so many different patterns in the tiles, depending on where I stood, or how I turned my head, or how I squinted my eyes. Turning one way, I saw waterfalls. Turning another way, I saw a rippled street, climbing into the hills. Turning another way, I saw the top halves of cups or glasses, turned on the side and stacked and lined up in rows, longing for their other halves like slaves longing for freedom.
I was watching so many people, so many faces and bodies carrying different stories like Little Red Riding Hood or A Tisket a Tasket carrying baskets to their mamas. I was trying to read each story, without staring, without being noticed. I was walking through downtown Berkeley, and then through Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus. Sometimes there were speakers talking about political and social things, and musicians playing flutes and guitars, and people handing out pamphlets. All of the white light bouncing off the surfaces of white skin made me dizzy. Girls were like sparklers on the Fourth of July, as many colors of light exploded from their elbows and shoulders, shoulder blades, knees, and backs of the knees—in ripples—ear lobes, chins, teeth, necks, foreheads, ankles, thighs, toes, fingers, hair, and exposed buttocks. I liked something I got from the people, but I wished I could be invisible and drink it, and taste it, and study it. I had a hunger for it. Sex was a little like that. The other person’s desire gave me desire. The desires of nature, of life, were also like that. The flight of pods and urgency of seeds burying into earth gave me flight.
There were two men on Telegraph Avenue I always remember. One of them wore a paper bag on his head with cutouts for his eyes. He walked with his hand up to his face, as if the light was overwhelming. He wore a suit, though, and I wondered if he was going to a job. If he was going to a job, did he take his paper bag off once he got there? There was another man who stumbled along with a folder of papers up to his face. He looked sideways as he walked, making sure that no one’s glance could touch him and set his face on fire.
Down Telegraph was a spirit city I reveled in. Sometimes I saw the field that had been there before the city came, with apple trees. Sometimes I stepped on ancient grass instead of walking on concrete. Trees on either side of the street talked to each other, and their leaves kept trying to reach across the slowly moving traffic below them and embrace. They were like Romeo and Juliet, except, because they could never touch, they would always have each other.
The spirits under the trees became some of my best friends. They were so old and moved so slowly. One of them was named Javed. Jeremiah saw him first, and called his name, and they hugged in a shadow and light cave beneath the tree outside a sushi restaurant. I walked into the cave as if I was coming home, as if I was walking into a palace. Javed was the gold of mangoes where the green begins to turn red. He had a white beard, and he moved as if moving didn’t matter, a blur, as if however slowly he turned or raised his hand, his body was always a half beat behind some other body. I hugged Javed, and for a while I couldn’t stop myself from crying.
Vendors lined the streets, and some of them were talking with the spirits. They were selling incense, candles, jewelry, Rasta hats and hippie hats, pants and shirts and skirts, buttons, CDs and cassette tapes, oils and essences, art they had painted or cooked in kilns or carved from wood or stone or soldered with metal. They sold posters; stickers; postcards; ethnic instruments; herbs; teas; Guatemalan, Indian, and Chinese blankets and fabrics. They sold African prints and a thousand different pipes and bowls and bongs.
When I was walking through Berkeley, I didn’t feel much danger. It was too small to get lost in. I learned how much outdoors I could take before I lost my focus, and I was sure to get home before I melted down. I learned how much of each street and each cluster of green I could take in what amount of time. And usually, there wasn’t any hurry. I wasn’t trying to get somewhere on time, and so if I lost time or direction for a while, it didn’t usually matter.
Virginia also loved the blue and green. She loved being in nature and camping and hiking. But going camping, I did feel danger. It’s not something most black people would want to be doing. First of all, it’s a luxury. But second, once you leave the city, anything can happen. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in if it’s still in America. A lot of racists live out of the city, even in California. Skinheads, KKK members, survivalists. That’s why on the West Coast black people say, “If you want to stay alive, stay on the I-5.” That’s why when I went camping I never saw another black person. In the city, you have some safety; you have communities and numbers. But once you leave that behind, you’re in the wilderness on your own, and a black man with a white woman in the jungle outside the city might never be heard from again.
But I was usually glad once we got where we were going. The wilderness was welcoming. The redwoods were like some people on the spectrum; they didn’t want to be touched. But I couldn’t always help myself. I couldn’t always keep from leaning in against them and pressing my nose into their scents. From looking up into branches that seemed to rise for miles. From falling in love. We hiked in mountains, in valleys and meadows, through forests. We camped in more places than I can remember, like Mono Lake, Point Reyes, Tahoe, Mendocino, Jenner, Big Basin, Sequoia, and Sierra Nevada. I sometimes took my guitar, a book, and my writing pad. Virginia, and friends we went with, would be setting up the tent, and cooking, and sometimes going on walks. I would be sitting nearby, playing my guitar, or writing, or reading. I could feel Virginia so deeply when she was putting up the tent and getting things ready. She turned the color of purple irises in the filtered light of the trees. Our turning greener than firs, together, in the secluded green light of our campsite, before the orange crackling of fire, was one of our deepest bonds. In those moments, I felt like I was out of danger.
Before anything and after everything else, for me, was the ocean. The Pacific. Standing beside it, I exhaled for days. My past began to come out of me in waves that disa
ppeared into the currents. When I floated across the ocean, I knew what it would feel like to be on my home planet. There would be nothing but blue, the slightest motion, and distance. There would be knowing that no time had really passed and nothing had really happened. I loved the sound of waves sloshing inward, the seagulls and the drifting sailboats, the ships passing slowly in the fog. I loved what the ocean did to time. It slowed time down, suspended it. I liked the way the kelp smelled, but I didn’t like the sand. I didn’t like walking on it or touching it, and I didn’t like the dampness beneath it that tried to tear into my body. If I had to walk across a desert on grass, I could probably make it. But if I had to walk across one on sand, I would throw my arms up and say, “Please, just go ahead now and take me.”
When I was near the ocean, I forgot all dangers, and that was part of the problem.
When I was in Los Angeles, I hungered for the green and blue. But the palms and placid yards beneath the smog-tinted sky were not enough. So I snuck out to be in more, to be in nothing but the wildest blue. I was being like a roommate I had in college who had bipolar disorder. Sometimes she would rebel and not take her meds. She wanted to feel free, normal. But she would slowly become like someone wild. Once we had to hold her down while she was screaming. There were times like that for me at UCLA. I would want to be normal and do things other people did and have fun.
My favorite place to go looking for greens and blues was Venice Beach. Like Telegraph, in Berkeley, it was a carnival, except a much bigger one and at the beach. I fit in at carnivals, along with all the other misfits, along with all the other delicate people with spirits of wonder, the special ones that “normal” people call “weirdoes” or “freaks.” Like people in the film The King of Hearts.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 17