The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  I was used to my new name right away, but it would take people who already knew me time. My mama was so insulted. “What’s wrong with the name I gave you?” She almost cried. A woman from our church said, to comfort Mama, “This too shall pass.” But I was thinking, Oh no it won’t. I was thinking how it’s funny that people assume the things they don’t like will pass. But what about the things they do like? What about my first name, Dennis? What about Christianity?

  I Think I Do

  I’m sitting here wondering/if a matchbox will hold my clothes.

  – Blind Lemon Jefferson

  There were times when I had no structures to keep me together. Those times it was often difficult to function. It was harder to remember things. I had more blank-outs. I couldn’t get a hold of time. After I took sannyas and returned to the Bay Area was one of those times. I had no job. No steady relationship. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t writing. Meditation had taken the knots out of my belly that had fed my poetry. I sometimes didn’t have an apartment or house to live in, and I was often lost somewhere for days. I sometimes couldn’t find my mind to think what to do, and so I slept in my car. There was nowhere to take a shower and so I got really dirty.

  I had an Ethiopian Rasta friend named Girma who let me stay at his house for a few days. I loved Girma. He was gentle and happy. He doted on me. I awoke at Girma’s to the sounds of Ethiopian piano and smells of spicy foods.

  Some days I went from Berkeley to San Francisco, just because I didn’t know where else to go. There were days when I was walking on the street and suddenly my mind would disappear and I couldn’t remember why I was there, where I was, or how to get home. I would be like two sheets in the wind that had come loose from the clothesline, blowing wherever.

  I was lucky to sometimes attract nice people who would help me. A few times a woman would come along when I was lost, and she would smile at me, and she would smell good, and she would be radiant. She would start talking to me, and the sound of her voice would be so soothing, I would have followed her anywhere. And then she would hold out her hand and I would take it. We would take a bus, or a cable car, or we would walk a long way up some hills, and the traffic would be singing and other people would be walking too or standing at bus stops or coming out of shops. She would sometimes talk, and the wind would blow pieces of shade back and forth. And I would talk, and I would get lost in the warm space of our voices going back and forth like the shade. I would forget everything else. Sometimes we wouldn’t get where we were going until it was evening and the night jasmine was making everyone along the sidewalks as drunk as bees. It would feel like another time in another world, and I would feel safer and warmer having someone with me.

  One time she was a hippie with an Indian skirt. I had a weakness for hippies in Indian skirts. One time she was a teller from the financial district. One time she was a trans girl from the red-light district. One time she didn’t speak much English, only Portuguese. At those apartments, I saw the rooftop view of San Francisco, an endless membrane of lights pulsing like an embryo. I saw a garden of calla lilies beside green chairs. Sometimes apartments were at the tops of wooden stairs in old Victorians, like in a movie or in a dream when the stairway ends before I reach the top. One time an apartment had a red sofa and a painting of Frida Kahlo. I loved Frida Kahlo. One apartment had metal chairs and a glass coffee table. One had a radio, and one had a black television. Some of the women made food for me. Sometimes strangers can be the best friends—often, in my life. They were all so nice and so tender. I liked sleeping with them and touching warm legs to legs, and smelling the shampoo of their hair and lotions on their skin.

  In the middle of the night, one woman got up and said, “I’ll be right back, baby.” There was a lot of noise, and when she opened the door to go into the living room, I saw two other women passing a crack pipe and two men with guns. I heard Lowell Fulson singing “Reconsider Baby,” which made me think of my daddy, because it was one of his favorite songs. I heard a lot of bitches and motha’fuckas, and then the woman came back. Her name was Princess. She sat on the bed and took my head in her hands and said, “I want you to listen to me. OK? Listen to me. I’ve got to go take care of something. Don’t you scream. Just don’t go there. I know you having a hard time with the noise. I had a brother like you, so I know, all right, baby? I’m goin’ to be back. So just find something to count. You like counting things, don’t you? My brother used to count the clicks of the fan. If anybody comes in here, you’re my brother from Detroit, OK.” And then she smiled and said, “You ol’ donkey dong.” And then, “You know I don’t mean nothin’ by it, don’t you?” I held on to her pillows when she left. Don’t worry. I wasn’t worried. I was tired. Jeremiah and Lizzy hugged me, and I fell back to sleep.

  I liked sleeping with people sometimes. It could make me feel safe, like when I slept with my sisters and brothers as a child. Of all the people in my life, the ones I remember best are those I’ve slept with. Most of them had nothing to do with sex. I think I remember them because the sentry comes down off the wall of the fort. The world slows down and gets quiet, so I can focus on the other person. I can see more clearly who they are. I think I remember them because I counted their breaths. I put the colors of their heartbeats in a red velvet satchel. And I remember them because sometimes I have seizures in my sleep, and the people who have held me as I was coming back are like family.

  But some days when I went to San Francisco, things didn’t go very well. Like, this one orange day in the city, I was parked on a hill downtown and my car overheated. I remember the sound of the traffic, like a river of water overflowing, coming over the hill and roaring down. I opened the hood to take a look and started to open the radiator. I was untwisting the cap slowly, the way I had seen mechanics do, but something grabbed my attention. The sound of an engine. The beautiful view of the marina in the distance. Hot water gushed from the radiator, pouring onto my chest and face.

  My body was burning, and I was tearing off my shirt. But before I could get it off, the water had burned the cotton into the skin of my chest and stomach. I had never felt that kind of pain. I walked back and forth, crying. I sat down on the sidewalk. I sat in my car and screamed. When I could think, I drove back to Berkeley, to my friend Aimee’s house. Aimee was a good friend. We had so many good conversations about the passages and colors of our lives. One time we spent the day sitting in a field, reading, and I was playing music, and we were not talking. We were just clouds.

  After I got burned, I stayed in bed at Aimee’s house, on fire, while for days she brought me water and changed the dressings. My skin was pink, but not the pink of a flower. Nothing is really pink like human flesh when it opens up from burns. I probably should have gone to the hospital, but I didn’t think about it. Sometimes now when I look in the mirror and see the scars, the patches where the color of my skin never came back, I remember the view of the marina. I remember Aimee taking care of me, and I start jumping around nervously, as if I’m on fire.

  Eventually, I found my way to sannyasin households. One of them was a yellow house in Berkeley. People in red were coming and going to and from the yellow house, and my green Valiant was parked on the street outside. The house belonged to Ma Prem Svarna, an American sannyasin. It had a flower garden and a quiet backyard. I could tell that some of the sannyasin boisterousness bothered Svarna. Before sannyas, she was probably living alone, had a few good friends, went to a good job every day, and came back home. It hurt her to see her quiet yellow house turned into a social hub, sometimes into a circus. But she was learning the lesson of letting go.

  I met a lot of sannyasins living in Svarna’s house. A European sannyasin named Ma Prem Mano lived there with her two children, Kuba and Karina. She was one of those who had been with Bhagwan since the early days in Puna, India. She told me a lot of stories about the early days. Mano was a “house ma,” a center of the networks of sannyasins in the Bay Area. So our house was like a heart, and I liked livin
g close to the heartbeat. I could know about everything that was going on without leaving home. I loved the feeling of belonging to a family and being surrounded day and night by sensitive people, by shades of red. I met sannyasins from Ethiopia, Germany, England, the Netherlands, India, Italy, Sweden, France, Japan, Korea, and other places. I had soft friends, some who could barely speak English.

  But, inside, I was drowning. I couldn’t focus, because I had no routine or structure. Sannyasin relationships were like streams of water, flowing all of the time. How well we could flow was supposed to be a measure of our commitment to Bhagwan. But I was already water. I needed land. And that was the moment when I met my first wife.

  Her name was Ma Prem Pravahi, and we were together for a few weeks before she became pregnant. And so we got married, early in the morning, in a meadow in a wilderness, with a few friends, with a garland like hippies wore. Birds were singing and a boom box was playing Pachelbel’s Canon. I was thinking about the dew in the meadow where I was born and about the little green trailer. “I do,” we said. I do. I think I do.

  I moved into my wife’s house on Twenty-Fourth Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. I loved the Mission District. It was a sunny valley, with mostly people of Hispanic descent. It felt like I was in South America. It was warmer and quieter than most parts of the city, because the hills around it buffered us against the cool breezes and a lot of the noises of the city.

  I moved out of living in streams and into living on land. I walked out of the water like the first animal. I was soaking wet. The light was too bright. Everything was too noisy. The food tasted strange. Every object was too hard to touch. Every movement was hard. There was something called time that ran people, like hunters run deer. But it was invisible. I liked some things about the land, but I kept dreaming of going back into the water.

  We should have talked about things, but we didn’t. We were caught up in the excitement and energy of the sannyasin movement. We knew each other’s spirits, or vibes, but that was not nearly enough. We couldn’t have been more different. She liked to go out all of the time, and the house was just a place to sleep and eat. She measured life by the number of social interactions in a day. I liked to stay at home. I measured life by the number of silences.

  I had no idea what she wanted, or who she really was, and she had no idea what I wanted or what I was thinking. I thought that since we were both sannyasins, we would think the same things. I was thinking that we would keep being sannyasins and that we would keep having lots of sannyasins at our house. I was thinking that our relationship would be open. I hadn’t thought at all about things like going to work or paying the bills. I was thinking that I was still black as ever, because I was. I was thinking that I was still very much a Rasta. I was thinking of financially getting by, because that’s all I had ever known. She was thinking that the open-house sannyasin life was over and that we would start being the all-American family. She was thinking that me being a new-age person meant I wasn’t really black. She was thinking that I must have as much wealth as she did. She was thinking we would be living the good life because that’s what she was used to.

  We got along well for the few weeks before she became pregnant. Before we were living together or being serious about the future. But after that, there were no more good times. We went to a therapist, but the therapist was also a white sannyasin. She didn’t know anything about black people either, or about autism or Asperger’s (a word I didn’t know yet). I never felt we were talking about the real issues, but I wasn’t able to articulate what those issues were. My feelings had already scattered to the four winds. My feelings had run out of my belly and were hiding in abandoned warehouses, under bridges and in overgrown fields. They would only appear sometimes when I was alone with our son.

  But even if my feelings had been there, in the therapy sessions, they couldn’t have expressed themselves. My wife and the therapist built a house with the way they spoke. The way they took deep breaths between sentences. The way they frowned or smiled. But it was not a house my feelings could breathe in. It was a house without the right colors that my feelings could make into words. It was a house the color of a gray day. Each session, I meant to say, I don’t think this is going to work. I don’t think this is going to make any difference. But the conversation would roll along, like a go-cart going down a hill. The clock ticked. I felt bad for my wife. I felt bad for the therapist. I felt bad for them because they wanted so badly to make everything about white lights and radiance that they couldn’t see all the other shades of the world. They couldn’t see simple things, like sometimes two people just aren’t meant to be together.

  After our son was born, I had to learn about practical things, like money, and work, and cars, and being a parent. I went back to school for a primary/secondary teaching certificate. I started teaching at Golden Gate Elementary School in Oakland Unified School District. Once I started teaching in Oakland, I got up at five o’clock every morning and drove to work. At three o’clock, when school was out, I drove to Haywood State University to take evening classes. Coming home late at night, I had to cross the San Mateo-Hayward bridge, a seven-mile stretch of darkness that linked San Francisco to the East Bay. I would be fighting sleep, nodding off behind the wheel and dreaming of plummeting over the rail, sinking down into the waters. That would evoke a feeling of being cold, of freezing, and shivering would help to keep me awake. I would imagine our house as a light in a dark forest, which, when I reached it and went in, would be filled with warmth and love and security. When I got home, though, it was never that way. The next day, I would forget the night before and imagine the same thing all over. I needed the image in order to keep going, even if I knew it wasn’t true.

  Things were bad for me in our house. There was no quiet, no space. And me and my wife didn’t seem to be friends. Friends are nice to each other. They want each other to be happy. They say “How are you doing?” or “What’s the matter?” They don’t take each other’s dignity. They don’t fight all the time.

  My wife knew the language of fighting, but I didn’t. Her father had taught it to her. For them, fighting was part of love. But I had been taught that it was wrong to fight, and especially, you should never say or do anything bad to your child’s other parent. A mother was special. Sacred. So was a committed father. And so I often said nothing. But saying nothing seemed to make it worse.

  And besides, no one could win a fight with me. It was never fair because I never played by the rules. Ever since I was a child, I had a knack for driving people crazy. Everybody said it, even if they loved me. Just my difference was sometimes irritating to people. They thought I was trying to be difficult, or that I was just cruel. They were arguing with something I couldn’t feel. With meanings that were foreign. With contracts I hadn’t signed. I was responding to their meanings with colors. With my logic. With the right places for things. With symmetry. With tastes.

  I knew I was the being of blue, of light blue, like the sky. I knew I was the chapter of blue. I was to spread light blue, like a flower or a butterfly. So usually I blew soft blue words to people because it made them happy, even though they didn’t see the blue words any more than they see spirits.

  Sometimes in arguments, though, I would blow red words at people. Sometimes I would blow red whispers at different parts of their bodies, and watch them come undone. I could be the Dennis the Menace my parents named me after without meaning to be. When I blew red words at people, they would get so mad they couldn’t see straight. They would be ready to explode. They would want to hit me, and sometimes I would be terrified, like I was when Daddy took off his belt and got ready to whip us. I would be feeling like I was something small being attacked by giants. Like Brer Rabbit, running from Brer Bear.

  I have had girlfriends who tried to stab me. Or to set me on fire. Or to run me over with their car. Or to turn the gas stove on when I was sleeping. Or to kick me out of their car, hours away from civilization, and leave me. They wer
en’t Robert Johnson’s black blues women, poisoning him. Or Al Green’s soul women throwing hot greens on him. Or the insane. Or psychopaths. They were middle-class, educated, mostly white women. But it wasn’t just my girlfriends I drove crazy. It was also friends and people I didn’t know. I’ve had waiters, storeowners, and people working in stores go into fits and embarrass themselves, throw things, or break their own glass counters in response to conversations with me.

  People would be wanting to touch something solid when they talked or argued. But there would be nothing but atmosphere, with the occasional yellow blur of a canary.

  Truth came up a lot in yellow houses. Like my wife would say, “Just tell the truth,” and I would usually say nothing, or say whatever I thought would make her happy. I would be thinking, I’ve heard that one before. I would want to just get back to having a good feeling. I would be looking at the faces in the wood of stair railings, cabinets, a coffee table, the floors. I would be looking at the angles of the room and thinking how amazing they were. I would be looking at the light coming in a window. The truth was that I didn’t know what the truth about my feelings was. My feelings would be lost, and I wouldn’t be able to find them. They were used to running, to foraging. To alleys and fields. They didn’t really know how to live in a yellow house. It took so little to scare them into bolting away, and they disappeared so fast that I had to struggle to get them to come back. To get them to come back could take a long, long time.

  The truth was that being in a relationship was like being in a rich person’s house. I was seldom at ease. I was always afraid I was going to break something, ruin something, or do or say the wrong thing.