The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  But when I got off the bus at Venice Beach, there were so many scents. There were so many textures, sounds, and tastes that I was dripping them as I walked. My pores were getting showered. Getting bathed. I became dripping, of burnt garlic and lemon. Of grilled chicken skins in black pepper. Of green peppers, parsley, and cilantro. Of ginger, turmeric, and cumin. Kielbasa and ketchup. Seaweed and crabs. Hotdogs and burgers. Of a thousand body scents. Of ylang-ylang oil and frankincense, myrrh, rose, and amber lotions, shampoos, detergents, incenses, and sweat.

  I was hypnotized watching skaters dance to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” In a large holy circle of wind, dancing to the spirits while the bass pounded through huge boom boxes, shuffling my bones. I watched jugglers tossing knives and chainsaws and black acrobats leaping into pyramids, into pinwheels spinning. I watched a magic woman with a table of tricks, and two black men strumming Stevie Wonder so sweetly I almost cried. And I watched swimsuit models posing in front of bikini shops; me and Jeremiah and Lizzy, laughing, as everything we saw was taken by the wind and ocean mist into some alternate reality.

  And I was mesmerized watching the barely clothed bodies. I longed to see the patterns they made with other bodies. The tattoos and dimples, scars and bone angles, arcs of movement and pimples. The flowing currents of cellulite. The cabinets of muscles and fat. A brightly colored, moving masterpiece on a canvas of light. Now and then, someone would say to me, out of the blue, “How do you like my body?” They would stop as they were passing and put their hands on their hips and smile. Or they would turn the other way and look back over their shoulders and let their backbones slip like they were going to break. They would smile at my embarrassment as I retreated into the shade under trees and turned into a spirit.

  The rules of Venice seemed to be: Show as much of your body as you can. Talk with your body. Sing with your body. Make your body a song. Make your body a story. Cry with your body. Plead with your body. Get your joy with your body. Sometimes I felt that the songs and cries of bodies were so desperate it must be near the end of time. Other times I thought, This is the way we should be talking; this is a more honest conversation; this is more real.

  Some days I took my camera to the beach and photographed the special places where the spirits lived, where the shadows were mysteriously hinged to light. Some of the stairways had textures that came alive in certain light and their shadows became their own entities, their own vessels, hovering like clouds, rippling like sheets on a clothesline in strong wind. Some of the rounded cement tables had shadows that played music while the spirits danced. There was a vendor’s table with pretty bottles where the spirits liked to blow over the lips of the bottles and make them sing. On the days that I took my camera, I tried to be invisible. I would not even look at people, except in mirrors. Many of the vendors along the boardwalk had mirrors at their tables, so that people could see themselves when they tried on a hat, necklace, or whatever. I would watch people only in those mirrors. Cameras drew people, though. Many people wanted their picture taken. They dreamed of being discovered, of getting their break in the movies, in modeling, or on television. They would think I might be somebody important, and even if I wasn’t, they would pose and plead, “Please take my picture.”

  I would sit on bleachers and watch the bodybuilders in a giant, fenced-in space along the boardwalk. Some of their bodies were oiled and glistened like glass in the sun, and they liked showing off their hardened shoulders and abs, tight thighs and buttocks. They grunted like they were having sex when they lifted the weights. They sighed like they were having orgasms when they sat the weights down. Some of the people in the bleachers seemed to be having orgasms too.

  Near the weightlifting cages were the basketball hoops. That’s where men went to proclaim they were men. They went there and took their shirts off and walked around like roosters. White girls went there to proclaim they liked men. They especially liked black men. They liked their bodies and their rhythm. They liked their talk. They liked the contradictions between white and black bodies, between the frightening power of muscular black men in the flesh and their feeble power in society or their vulnerability next to their white skin.

  Men and boys went there to proclaim they liked men, for different reasons. Some liked to imagine they were the guys playing basketball or lifting weights. Some liked looking simply because, through their eyes, men were the prettiest things. I liked to watch all the people. Those playing and those watching, as if the carnival was just mine. As if it belonged to me. I drank it, and no one could stop me. I took my skin off and basked in it. The tender tissue beneath my skin was dripping. I became the alien in their midst. I inhaled the light. I inhaled even more deeply at times when I felt the familiar anxiety that there was something so wrong with me. That I had no right to happiness. I inhaled as if I was draining smoke from a giant bong when I felt the familiar guilt that I was simply fooling other people, pretending to be one of them.

  At times, even in my seminars, I was still at the beach. I rubbed the beach on myself, like animals rub on layers of mud. Like ancient hunters rubbed themselves with the grease of their kill. I rubbed it on to protect me from the din of cars and buses. From the vastness and strangeness of the campus. From the glares and slights and dismissals of the educated people. From the thing and time and place they called the normal. From the brutality of the thing they called the civilized. Inside the city of Venice was a second city of my tribe. Even if I rarely talked to them. The homeless. The people in wheelchairs with their garbage bags and voodoo-painted carts filled with their things and their brightly painted bicycles. The artists and musicians. I could tell them by the bronze glow they gave off. I could tell them by the way their colors opened up and took me in. I could tell them by the songs their silences played on the pores of my body. Among them, I was at home.

  When I would leave Venice Beach I would walk to the bus stop, and I would get on the bus, and I would be tingling with current. I would be spastic in my bus seat. I would get home and my body would be a storm of trembling, of lightning and thunder. Sometimes it went on for days. I would carefully order all the sights I had seen at the beach, in my mind. The colors, the shapes, the scents I had gathered. The glances into my spirit. The words I heard passing from members of my tribe. “Yeah, beautiful.” “Yeah, brother.” “Yeah, umm humh.” I would order them as neatly as glasses and cups in a kitchen cabinet. Then I would open the cabinet and smile, and close it, and do the same thing again. On those days, I would not talk. After days of trembling, of my skin crackling like a loose electric wire, torrents of rain would pummel the ground inside me. And after the storm had passed, I would feel an incredible peace. It would grip me like the tightening hand of a dying person holding on to my wrist.

  There were days I had trouble getting home from the beach. There were times when my mind spun around like the rainbow-colored Mac apple spins when the system is overloaded. I would get caught in a loop and then couldn’t get out of it. I might be at the bus stop coming back from the beach. Or at a bus stop on a wide, busy street that suddenly seemed unfamiliar. I might be passing a group of trees or cluster of green shrubs when shadows moved independently out of them. The traffic would sometimes take my mind. Especially at noon, when the sun was too bright, or when I misjudged the time and it got dark before I left the beach. Some days I just couldn’t leave, even when I knew I should.

  I had to see the sunset. To hear the way the waves sounded, splashing against the sand when the colors of the sun were softly breaking the west sky apart. The way silhouettes came out of hiding. Silhouettes of palm trees and buildings. Silhouettes of people walking across strips of grass or sidewalks or sand. I had to taste the air when the tourists were starting to leave and my tribe started being more themselves. When the tastes of comfort and danger mixing on my tongue almost gave me goosebumps. I had to find the patterns in the sounds of the waves. I had to see how the blue left the ocean at sundown, to see if I could discover where it went. I had to spe
ak to the seagulls one last time before leaving. I had to keep an eye on the people in the wheelchairs, and the children who were by themselves, so that no one would harm them. How could I leave when so many things needed me?

  But everything changed in the dark, with all the neon-colored signs and jarring headlights. Distances changed and became hard to gauge. Directions lost any meanings they might have had. Time completely disappeared. The day city moved aside, like in the movie Dark City. Another city took its place. Blue disappeared and everything turned black. I could see buildings in the distance, like in a dream, rearranging themselves. Sometimes I would sit on a bench at a bus stop on an unfamiliar street, and I would forget absolutely everything. For a while, I would be all right. But eventually, I would get so lonely sitting there, but I wouldn’t know that I was lonely. I would be like a numbed tooth, screaming. The rule was never to get on a bus if I wasn’t sure where it was going. What was the right street? What was the right number for my bus? Where was the arched building that was supposed to be at the right bus stop? At times, things came back into clarity after a little while. Then I could think about where I needed to go to catch the bus home. Other times, no clarity came, and I would just keep sitting. I remembered that if I didn’t move, I couldn’t get more lost.

  Once, a deaf African man sat beside me on the bench. He showed me his notebooks filled with poems and dazzling otherworldly watercolors. They were so beautiful! He would paint the pages first and then write words here and there, over the paintings. He wrote words like Ashanti, heart, rise, red, dye, and magnificent. He gestured to me to come with him, and reluctantly I did. By then, the traffic had died down and the buses were hardly running. He took me to his home, which was a cardboard box. I was sad and anxious that I couldn’t be at my house, and sleep in my own bed, and touch my own things. The man had dirty fingernails, but he didn’t smell bad. He smelled like cookies and dirt and lard, and his scent reminded me of Uncle T. The way people smell when they live close to the ground and they don’t change their clothes for a long time.

  His box had a broken radio in it. A broken piece of mirror and a red beer can with a picture of an almost naked woman. A pair of tattered biking gloves. Next to his box was a big refrigerator box where two white boys about thirteen slept. But they didn’t seem white. They talked more like black people in the city than I did. I don’t know what the homeless people saw when they looked at me, but they gave me water and crackers. They warned me to be careful that no one stole my wallet.

  On the other side of the African man, in a smaller box, was a girl about nineteen. She had a penis, but that was the only boy thing about her. I liked her because she wasn’t dressed up and her short hair and soft cheeks were so pretty, and something about her was calm and steady, and she looked at me without her eyes. She made me smile and fell asleep with me, and she smelled like cherry chewing gum and motor grease. I held on to her like I held on to the handles of a Ferris wheel once, when it started climbing, desperate and terrified. The next morning, when the noise of the nearby traffic woke me up, the girl was gone. The African man was gone. The two white boys were gone. The fire had gone out in the big trashcan, and I was alone in the cardboard village beneath the underpass.

  Professor in the Silver Town

  When in Rome. . .

  Snow fell. In the city of autumn brown light, where sat the silver town. Silver light, like a spoon. Silver, like an aluminum cup. Silver, like a nickel. Silver, like a shiny buckle. Snow fell. I hadn’t seen snow in over ten years. On postcards. In movies. But not in the real world. It reminded me of days in childhood. It reminded me of my sisters and my brothers, throwing snowballs and coming in to the warmth of the potbellied stove and mama yelling to get out of those wet things and don’t track that mud and water across her floor. My sisters and my brothers are in my skin. Diffused through pores and corpuscles. They are like melanin, like rhythm. Like tones, like a tune. They are the flesh of my flesh.

  Snow fell, and I was sitting there, watching, as dazed as an alien who had come through a time portal. Like a swami who had fallen back to earth from the fifth heaven. I was like someone in a movie who had been beamed to a strange planet, but the transporter malfunctioned and only a part of me made it. Part of me was still somewhere in between, a trail of vapor stretching across Utah, Texas, California, and Arizona. I had landed in a bare room, in a house with no furniture and no heat, and through a fog, I could see the devil standing in the corner. I could feel his breath. He was holding pictures in an outstretched hand, a safe life with a car, a house, awards, honors, books, and health insurance. The picture I cared the most about was me sitting around a Christmas tree with my son, opening presents, but to get that I had to take the whole package. Me and the devil had met before, and made bargains. We had made them quick, before the spirits and the angels came and turned the room light. This time it took me all of five minutes to say yes, and I would have said yes even if I hadn’t been in a daze. I needed so badly to feel human. To stop feeling like a rabbit, running and hiding, panting, hyperventilating and out of breath.

  Snow clung to the branches and bent them over like a lover bending over a lover. It bent the thin limbs of saplings or scrubs, berry bushes and thorned tentacles of roses down to the rising river of snow, like a preacher leaning bodies back into the holy water; like John, dipping Jesus. Snow fell, and with it, quiet. At last, the quiet. Where do the birds go, when snow is falling, I wondered, where do they go? Are there secret tunnels of sanctuary, spun from the lightness of flight, somewhere among the trees? Snow fell, and I had no coat. I had no boots or gloves either, and this was biting cold that took no prisoners.

  I hadn’t had time to really think about what coming eastward meant, or what it meant to become a professor. I tried hard to grasp the reality of it, but it was like catching smoke with my fingers. I couldn’t move from the window, looking out, and flashing back, two years, five years, one year. I was back at the window in my Oakland apartment, with my son, Nick, who was then only four. I was wondering how we were going to make it. I was watching the repo man taking the van, and trying not to let Nick know that anything was happening. I was thinking about the sentences his mother was famous for: “You’ll never amount to anything,” and “I won’t let you see him.” I was thinking about all of the friends and the money I had lost, because I didn’t know anything about lawyers or court. I was hearing her lawyer calling me a deadbeat dad. I was hearing the judge saying, “You niggers are all the same.”

  I was missing and missing and missing Nick. I talked to him every weekend, but that wasn’t the same. I would fly to California twice a year and bring him back, and when he got older, I would buy his tickets and send them to his mother. But sometimes she wouldn’t take him to the airport or put him on the plane. And this was one of those times. I was going to have another lonely Christmas, with snow outside, blowing into drifts, and icicles dripping from the roof’s edge, as I sat inside, pretending nothing was the matter.

  I was so happy whenever he came. When I went to meet his plane, and he walked off last, escorted by the flight attendant, I almost broke into tears. Flying so many miles alone. I wanted to protect him. From everything. It was hard to know that I couldn’t. Taking him back to the airport was even harder. I tried to be strong. Hugging him and watching him disappear down the boarding ramp with the attendant. Waiting for the other passengers to board. For the door to close and the plane to slowly drift out onto the runway and lift off. The sight of the plane climbing into the sky turned all of my strength to weakness, and I felt like I was disappearing.

  Out the window, I watched a large tree branch sagging more and more under the weight of snow. And then it finally cracked, split and crashed half way across the street. The creaking, cracking and splitting and thumping down were filled with cries of pain, and I was back in downtown San Francisco, a few months earlier, in the middle of the big earthquake. There was a long, low moaning and then things started to sway, when they were supposed to
be steady. The buildings shifted their angles and the windows and doors could not stand it. They tried to stay square and rectangular, like soldiers who have been ordered to stay at attention, but they couldn’t hold. Glass popped from windows and people came running out of buildings and put their arms out to balance themselves, and held their arms up to keep from getting cut.

  Pipes screamed as they were ripped from their sockets, and water spurted out of them like lost dreams. Electric current fled from wires and conduits and danced in the air, going “na na na na na.” Traffic lights went out, but everyone saw green anyway, and raced through intersections like lemmings toward cliffs. Tires screeched and metal crashed against other metal. Sirens screamed into reddened air thick with the tastes of smoke, of something burning, of fear and tears and blood. Heels scurried and concrete and plaster buckled, and white powder and debris drifted down around us like snow. I walked in a daze, listening to the broadcast on radios that people who had run shrieking from buildings were listening to as they stood, shaken, along the streets.

  Standing at the window, I still had that feeling of not being able to trust the ground beneath my feet. Everything teetered. The illusion of stability was gone, and there was nothing to replace it.

  The idea that I could become a “professor” broke slowly, over years. It was a slow breaking, like a wave that starts off the coasts of China, and a year later makes to an American beach. I never wanted a career. I had always thought of my life as my career. Writing poetry. Tasting things. Deciphering colors. Witnessing. I always thought that’s why I was put here, that this was my way of making the world better. It had never occurred to me that I’d ever leave the West Coast. My communities and families and friends were there. The ocean was there. The eucalyptuses and redwoods. How could I leave them? I knew I needed a better job, to get more stable, but I thought I’d end up at an alternative college in the Southwest, where there would be lots of art, people of color, and no grades. I thought the universe would take care of it. But the universe is full of surprises and tricks.