The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  I can understand better now how hard it is for neurotypicals to understand Aspies. I know now that the difference is more profound than most neurotypicals can imagine, but I don’t really know how to explain it. I’m no Temple Grandin. I’ve become more aware of how many private rituals and how many must-be-this-ways I need just to function from one minute to the next. Everything, every day, all day long, is a part of a perfect system that no one else can see. Like long rows of dominoes standing on end, the first one falling into the next, and so on and so on. If one of the dominoes doesn’t fall, if there’s too large a space in between and one of them doesn’t tip the next one, my hold on things disintegrates. I tiptoe or skip from lily pad to lily pad in a deep lake. Trying to explain my systems is hard. I’ve never had to. I don’t know how to. I’ve never thought about them as anything separate from life. In fact, I’ve never really thought about them. It’s like thinking about breathing.

  There’s a two-days-old half of chicken sandwich on the bottom shelf. There are leftover potpies from the dinner I made last night. There are greens and falafel and lasagna from earlier in the week, and fried apples and biscuits from breakfast. But which food will fit best with the red of the sofa, the saffron of the throw pillow, the jazzy blue of the painting, the deep green of the soft velvet easy chair? Which food will pick up the sea of afternoon light, shimmering with déjà vus and intermittent waves of feeling? What flavors and colors on my plate will turn the waves into a picture of a place—the thing you call memory? What combinations of scent will help me stay grounded longer than a second?

  I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t I just eat whatever I feel like eating? The reason is because I never just feel like eating anything. I’m not sure what that would be like. Every food choice is tied to something else. The pasta sauce is Karen’s love. And so I don’t really want it to get eaten. I want to put it in the small refrigerator in the study and enjoy it endlessly, to preserve it. It’s how I eat a pastry. I take a bite and then wrap it and put it in a special place on a cabinet shelf. And I think about it and smile the rest of the day. The next day, I make myself wait, and then, maybe in the afternoon, I take another bite. Almost giddy, I close my eyes and savor it. I do that until it is gone.

  The food is the thing and the memory of it at the same time. Because I can’t remember, once I eat it, the experience is gone. So I keep holding on and, all too often, the food spoils. The greatest pleasure is not from the food but from what it captures and how perfectly it does it. My favorite meals are leftovers from three or four good days put together. Four really good days of recipes that carry the flavors of four days of special closeness with my family. I eat feelings, moods, memories, and pictures in my imagination.

  But today, twenty minutes have passed, and I’m still standing at the counter and looking at the options. I even try making rules. Rule number 22 is, Eat what is oldest first. So I rearrange the containers on the counter in the order of their age. But that doesn’t work.

  Rule number 28: Set aside dinner for tonight and then eat whatever is left. But then I start thinking about which kids will be home and which ones won’t, and what time, and who will have already eaten. Once I start thinking about the kids, I start forgetting about lunch.

  When I am with my children, I feel so satisfied and content. I feel as if I have managed to do something good on earth. In the spaces of the children, there is such goodness. Even when they are noisy sometimes, their presences are like quiet music. They struggle with the meanings of many things and I struggle to keep up with their growth. It happens so fast. Before I can process wherever they are, they are somewhere else. The Velveteen Rabbit and Goodnight Moon blurs with The Hunger Games. I have been a good dad in part because so much of me is a child. I loved reading to them. Playing games and going to the park. I already miss things from every stage of their lives. How could they be so grown up? When did they suddenly turn into such people of their own? Why don’t I feel that any time has passed?

  My first son, Nick, is all grown up now, working as an attorney in New York City. He’s a man. He decided when he was ten years old that he wanted to be a lawyer, and he never wavered. He was born in a yellow house, in the Mission District, in San Francisco. We had five friends there who were midwives, and a doctor who was a friend and sannyasin. We named him Nicholas Nesta Seth Folly. Nicholas means “victory of the people.” Nesta is after Bob Marley. Seth was one of the angels channeled by Claire Prophet. Nick is so kind, so passionate about truth and justice. When I think of him, or talk to him, I see all the years of his life. I feel all the moments. I feel such pride and joy. One day he was standing beside a redwood, in a redwood forest, and the tree lit up. He comes to visit several times a year and goes with us to visit my mama and family in Virginia in the summer. But sometimes I wish I could just walk over or drive over or take the train over and knock on his door, talk for a bit over tea, and hug him.

  My second son, Kahlil, was born in a hospital in Columbia, and I was also at his birth. I am thankful every day that I get to spend all of his growing up with him. He is at my house half the week and at his mom’s the other half, but we talk and text every day. His mother, LuAnne, lives five minutes away, and we work in the same department at the university. I met her at a folklore conference in Louisiana, shortly after being released from a mental inpatient facility. After being in the facility, I realized that I couldn’t wait for the spaceship to come and get me. That I couldn’t wait until I could go to India and live in the commune. That I couldn’t wait for the hypothetical day when I could get back to California and walk by the Pacific, and hug a eucalyptus or a redwood, or throw myself on the ground in a green meadow. That I had to find a community here and now in order to survive.

  So I took down the note card I had on the closet mirror. It read, Don’t ever get married again. Remember, you can’t live with people. It doesn’t work! And I started making a list of qualities I thought the perfect wife would have, and a list of prospective people to marry. I started looking for that wife. But as soon as I met LuAnne, my son started appearing to me in dreams. After that, I knew we were supposed to be together, and so I threw my list away. What I didn’t know was that we weren’t supposed to stay together.

  After she completed her MA at UCLA, she decided to move to Missouri, and for a year we lived in my yellow house. After a year, we moved to a nicer split-level house in a neighborhood that felt like the suburbs. It was quiet, with a huge backyard edged by woods and a huge front yard where we planted flower gardens. We had Kahlil, and like with my other relationships, things fell apart. The difference this time was that, after the divorce, we worked on things so that we could be good coparents, and even at times, friends.

  We named our son Kahlil Ravi Roth-Folly. We named him after Kahlil Gibran, the mystic and poet who wrote The Prophet, and then Ravi, which means the sun, brightness, warmth, giver of life. It turns out that he is the mystic, the philosopher. He likes to ponder the nature of the universe. What is time? What is the nature of the spirit, of consciousness? He opens his magic box and music comes out. He sees the patterns in colored dots and graphs on the computer screen and makes them into songs. “Beats,” they call them. He paints beautiful pictures with beats, the way I used to write poems or study insects. Sounds that are not music hurt him. A whisper sounds like a shout to him. The hum of other people’s sorrow weighs him down and breaks his heart. There is a joy, there is an innocent goodness that emanates from him like from a field of purple hyacinth. There is a bubbling lightness from his face, as if, like me, he came from the stars.

  Also, like me, my son Eze comes from another planet, but a different one than I did. He stands at the window, or outside, gazing up into trees and clouds, levitating. He feeds his geckos religiously and knows the birdcalls of every North American bird. He is the gentle scientist. I saw him in a premonition before he was born, and I called Karen in San Francisco to tell her about him. “King” is what his name means, and he gives a new meanin
g to it. He is the king of kindness. Sometimes his teenage anxiety is like water in a dam that is overflowing but cannot break. Then I want to hug him, but he hates touch, textures, almost as much as someone with autism spectrum disorder.

  My daughter, Asa, is a strong wind. In Igbo, her birth father’s language, her name means “beautiful.” If beauty is a whole thing, it’s the perfect name for her. She sees people, and sometimes I think she sees spirits, but she won’t look at them. She’s afraid.

  She might become a therapist someday, and if she does, she’ll diagnose patients with a glance. She’ll go straight to the marrow. Her insight sometimes gets ahead of her, the way a teenage boy’s body gets ahead of him, when his legs are suddenly longer. Every year, she bursts out of a new cocoon. She’s now you see her, and now you don’t. Even the chrysalis is always in motion. In the motions of words, of smiles and laughter, and at the center, a heart fragile as a poppy. Sometimes she goes by on her magic carpet, and I smile at the coco butter, tangerine, papaya, henna wind left drifting on the breeze.

  But now for lunch.

  Rule number 42: When all else fails, eat soup, and then go to the window. Take a few minutes. Let my eyes stop focusing so that I can see. Melt into the greens and the blues. The clouds. Look for the glimmers of spaceships.

  Prahlad received his MA and PhD in folklore studies and sociolinguistics at UC Berkeley and UCLA. He currently teaches folklore, film, creative writing, and disability studies in the English Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he has been a professor since 1990 and where he has been the recipient of numerous major teaching awards.

  Prahlad has published two books of poems, Hear My Story and Other Poems, and As Good As Mango. His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in literary journals such as Fifth Wednesday, Water~Stone Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, The Chariton Review, and Natural Bridge.

  Prahlad has also published critical articles and books on black folklore including Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, and African American Proverbs in Context. He has edited the three volume set, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, and the one volume The Greenwood Student Encyclopedia of African American Folklore.

  In addition to his creative writing and scholarship, Prahlad is also a songwriter and musician, who plays multiple instruments, including the African mbira. He released his first CD, Hover Near, in 2008, and is now working on a second CD.