The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  Until then, I hadn’t fully understood desperation. I knew what the word meant, but I didn’t know the feeling. I had seen it plenty of times. The first desperation I saw was in the scent of slave spirits running through the woods where I grew up, trying to escape. I was in bed sick for weeks after feeling their terror. When I was eighteen, I spent three weeks around desperate people. I took a job working for a company that sent young people around the country selling magazine subscriptions door to door. The ad said “Travel! See the country!” That sounded so cool, but it wasn’t. They took in mostly teens from inner cities and held them prisoners. They kept us in a hotel and taught us the sales pitches, and took us in vans to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, dropped us off in rich neighborhoods and told us we had to sell or they would leave us out there, or take us and pimp us out. Now and then, the drivers really would leave people, a hundred miles from the hotel.

  We were in their debt, until we sold enough to get out, for the hotel, for food, and for whatever else we needed. A few people did all right, because they were used to hustling. But most of us didn’t. One guy latched onto me and followed me around, always talking about the house he was going to buy for his mama. When I was sneaking away one night, trying to escape, he followed me for blocks. “But how are we going to buy those houses for our mamas?” he kept saying, over and over. At the time, it didn’t make sense. Why didn’t he just do what I was doing, and leave? But now, I understood desperation. I understood the feeling.

  Little by little, I got the hang of how things worked at the university and what the rules were in my department, in the silver town. They were so different than the rules in other places where I had lived, or even in other universities. They were different because I was in Missouri now, and because I was a professor, rather than a student. There were different rules for professors, but no one had ever told me what they were. I was a non-swimmer thrown into the water. I would learn to swim, or sink trying. If Brer Rabbit could get Brer Fox to throw him in the briar patch; if Shine could swim all the way back to Harlem; if Sweetback could make it to Mexico, I could do this.

  The first rule was to always wear a mask. Otherwise, I felt too naked. Too many gazes were crashing against me and I was used to blending in. To hiding in or outside of crowds. There had always been a lot more “different” looking people than me for other people to stare at. I could pass good, as far as how I looked, especially on a college campus. But I was used to being a student on campuses. I could stand among the shrubs and be green, and no one would notice. But professors are paid to stand out, and so they do. They wear different clothes. They look like they’re carrying heavy weights, and at any minute, they could topple over. They look like their bodies are there, but their minds are some other place.

  At first, I tried wearing a paper mask, but too much got through it. All the things getting through were hurting. Then I tried wearing a silk mask, because it felt so soft against my skin. But that only lasted for a week, and I came home in tears. Then, I tried wearing wood, but it wouldn’t bend around my head. Finally, I tried copper, and I knew that was it. The copper talked to me and reminded me of things. “Remember,” it would say, “don’t try talking about real things in an unreal place.” “Don’t be blinded by the silver light.” “Don’t fall asleep and get killed in the quiet jungle.”

  So, I put on a copper mask and sent myself off to work. The man in the copper mask could talk to people. He could teach and go to meetings. He knew when to smile and when to be witty, because I had taught him. I had picked it up from watching others. It wasn’t that hard. In fact, a part of the difficulty was that it wasn’t that hard. The man in the copper mask would be talking and I would be listening to colors, thinking about the clouds, the hues of blue skies. I would be lost in a phrase in a song or a hibiscus blossoming in my front garden. But it was not unusual for the man in the copper mask to come home after work, take his mask off, lay his head on my shoulder, and burst into tears.

  The second rule was, don’t speak everyday talk. Otherwise, people think you’re stupid. I had been used to street talk, Rasta talk, sannyasin talk. Therapy talk. I was used to talking as a way of revealing myself, of sharing feelings. But the rule was don’t share feelings in the silver town, and use only intellectual words that mimic thought. So I had to put away the words I loved the most, the ones that made me feel that I was beautiful, and whole, and good. I had to put away “cool,” or “man,” or “brother,” or “sister,” or “I-rie.” I had to put away “mama,” “y’all,” “baby,” and “ain’t,” “samadhi,” and “enlightenment.” I had to pick up “theory,” “unpack,” and “critique,” “epistemological,” “discourse,” and “trope,” and put them in my briefcase and folders.

  The third rule had to do with the body. I had been used to the languages of dance and touch, to holding someone’s hand, and hugging. I loved hugs, as long as no one breathed on my neck. But one day in the silver town, I hugged someone and I could hear people loudly sucking in their breaths, putting their hands over their mouths, and staring downward, as if I was obscene. So the next rule I learned in the silver town was, “never touch anybody.” Live in a touchless world. Live alone with skin that is always crying.

  Dancing was one of my very favorite things. I used to go to clubs and conjure spirits with my body. With my heart. Sometimes people stared at me and cleared a circle. Sometimes the spirits came out of my body and took over the club. Blue and maroon me and the moon, and all the other repossessed bodies. This was one of my deepest loves. The freedom of it. The beauty! I would never forget when I was young and my body could hardly move. So I never lost the sense that moving was a miracle, or that me getting the hang of it was the biggest miracle of all.

  And one day I moved my body, at a faculty party. I kept waiting for the music. For the dancing. Why did they call it a party? People held glasses of wine and sipped every so often, in between saying clever things. So I played music in my mind, and ever so slightly, moved my body. And then I heard someone say something about Japan, and I said that I loved sumo wrestlers because their fat was so sexy. A silence came over the room, as if someone had died. So I learned rules number four and five. Don’t dance with my body. Don’t hang out with rhythm in public. Rhythm is a criminal here, and will get me sentenced or exiled. The other rule was don’t say anything to anyone about sumo wrestlers.

  The sixth rule was to be a single gender. Pick a gender and stick with it, preferably, the one your body says you are. I was so terrible to Ruby. I sold her skirts and dresses and packed away her earrings and necklaces. I wouldn’t let her walk down any street. I barely let her lounge on the sofa, or visit with Jeremiah and Lizzy. I should be ashamed. Every now and then someone gentle would see her, and want to hold the two of us, and I would let them. But it was only for a little while. They would eventually realize that a penis really did make a difference to them, after all. Or they would be getting ready to move to a bigger city where they could live freer, where there were lots of others like us.

  And there were more rules. Consider yourself blessed, privileged to be here. You are being watched. Always being watched. Be polite. Appear logical. Be plain. Don’t let your disabilities show. Never cop to any mental illness.

  It was hard following the rules. I was lonelier than I have ever been in my life. I had lots of small breakdowns, meltdowns, and shutdowns. I lived part time in the gray concrete of doctor’s offices and hospitals, therapy clinics and inpatient facilities. Needles, tubes, splints, casts, bandages, catheters, examination tables and beds, pill bottles, thermometers, hospital gowns, and scales. I was sick so much. I had a hard time holding it together, and sometimes, I couldn’t. I was spinning around all of the time.

  I learned that tenure was the golden apple, and at the same time, it was the apple that Adam and Eve ate. The formula was simple for me: Say yes to the devil and forget my old lives. Forget life. Forget about meditation and spirituality, hot tubs, redwood trees, yoga, exercise, f
riendships, movies, concerts, dancing, hugging, reading for pleasure, camping, or laughing. Forget any leisurely thing. Work all of the time. There was so much to get done, and I worked so slowly, so working all the time was the only way I had even the slightest chance. When I wasn’t working, I was lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, hearing the voices of people talking when there were no people around, or walking back and forth in the house, like an animal in a cage. I did the same thing with my mind and spirit that black football players do with their bodies. I sacrificed them.

  I lived in a daze, thinking that any day, I would be going back to California. I would be going back to be near my son and the rest of my families. Thinking I would be going to Pune, to live in the commune and meditate and be near my guru. I lived numb. “When am I going home?” I would sit on my bed and ask myself at night. I would bounce checks every month and try to slowly work myself out of the sinkhole. By the time I paid bills, there was nothing left, but then I still needed to eat. I stood at the counter in the grocery store, sweating, wondering if my card would be rejected. Wondering if I would be shamed again in front of other people. I was wearing decent clothes now, but I still felt like a homeless person.

  The comforts that kept me going were usually random pieces of memory. I sometimes found myself back in the smoke house in the yard where I grew up, surrounded by the aromas of peppered and salted bacon, hams, loins, ribs, and beef shoulders and sides. By the scents of hickory smoke and rubbed oils and sage. Thin slats of light filtered through cracks of the boards, dissolving time, dissolving space, and dissolving my body. I could hear my breath, my heart. I would close my eyes and remember what safety felt like. I would hold on to Jeremiah and Lizzy for dear life. Sometimes, in the silver town, I would wake up from my memories on a strange lawn, with a dog barking or licking my face, or with the light starting to come to the morning and a car going by.

  But in winter, snow fell, and it was quiet. And one more thing about the snow—it was a good filter. There were lots of filters in California. The hills. The fog. The ocean was one the filters. The ocean was a cure for so many things. It was a cure for darkness, because the water always held light. It was a cure for my inability to imagine the future, because it gave me a picture of what goes on forever but can’t yet be seen. But along with the trees and the hills, it also gave me a mysterious filter. The ocean mist that was in the air filtered sounds so I could focus better and not be so overwhelmed. I could half dissolve in the mist and wrap around sounds rather than be buffeted by them. When the streetcar’s iron wheels screeched against the iron of the track, the mist shaved off the high peaks of pitch, like an EQ dial. It softened voices and horns so that crowds became like a heartbeat. It dimmed the red of sirens. This buffer emanated from the undulating of waves, lapping at the shore in a thousand places, all day, all of the night.

  But in Missouri, there was so little filtered. Everything that blew across the flat lands of Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, banged into my brain. There were no hills. No ocean. No fog, or mist. There were so many noises peeling away my skin. Horns and sirens. Diesel engines, grinding bulldozers and high screeching cranes. White men in loud trucks and cars threw bombs at people they didn’t like, as they were crossing the street or standing on the corner. There were bombs in the revving of their engines and in the screeching of tires and burning of rubber. They were angry because the end to stretching Confederate flags across their truck windows was coming, or at least, it seemed that way in 1990. They were angry because people who weren’t like them dared to be walking on the streets. Dared to be alive.

  And there were so many eyes on me, as if just walking on a sidewalk made me a sideshow. It was a little like being back in the South in 1950, except there were hardly any black people. There were so many gazes lighting people on fire. I hated standing on the street corner, watching people burn. During the Vietnam War, I saw pictures of monks in orange robes who lit themselves on fire. I also saw men, women, and children being lit on fire with napalm. When I stood on the corner, in Columbia, Missouri, waiting for the light to turn, and saw people ablaze, I wondered, is this a war?

  The snow was like the hills, sea, and sea mist in California. It softened noises, except, it brought so much cold.

  I understood that time was against me. I understood that I needed to publish a book, but I couldn’t write anymore. I had abandoned all the things that fed me. My poetry couldn’t get through all the costumes and masks. I had no space in my mind, or any peace, and so poems stayed as far from me as a butterfly from a hive of bees. My first experience with the tenure clock was that I was a failure. I didn’t have what it takes to make it as a poet in the academy. And so I started publishing articles and writing academic books. I cared deeply about my research projects, but I didn’t need to do them. It was like the dreadful sensory experience of sticking my hands in mud or wet clay and weeping as a sickness spread through my body.

  I found it difficult always having to explain everything, and never being able to make a statement without talking about what someone else had already said. In fact, everything about writing books was hard. I didn’t always understand a lot of what I was reading when I did research, or even a lot of what I was writing, not the way others understand it. But I understood the patterns of how language worked, and the patterns of thought that went along with the words. The patterns were often more interesting to me than the thoughts. I would rather have fallen down a long flight of stairs than to have sat for hours at a computer. If I was John Henry, the computer could be my hammer. But if I was B.B. King, it couldn’t be my Lucille. I had no love for it. Life wanted me to write academic books, and so they got written, because life always gets what it wants.

  I learned to write good books and articles, but I never knew the people who read them. I never knew whether or not they made any difference, so I never felt like I had said anything. And being a successful scholar was about more than publishing books. One had to become “known,” and for that I would have had to network, go more places and talk to more people, remember names, and stay in touch. And I couldn’t do any of those things.

  Getting tenure was even more complicated. I had to be what was called “a good citizen,” and to somehow fit in, or at least, not stand out in the wrong ways. But it wasn’t always clear what ways were wrong. I knew that I couldn’t let a lot of things show. I knew that I shouldn’t let people know that I was like I was, even though at that point, I wouldn’t have known to use the words, autism spectrum. Looking around, everyone else seemed to communicate with each other so well, to understand how things worked. To understand what we were here for. A big part of their pleasure seemed to be the delight of having similar points of reference, similar minds. They were sometimes giddy with it.

  The people in my department were perfectly nice to me, down to the last person. They were kind, supportive, and welcoming, and I could tell they wanted me to succeed. They liked me, and appreciated my thoughtfulness, and what they thought of as my wisdom. I think they also appreciated my quiet—that I was not “the angry black man” they had so much fear of.

  But in the end, they would be judging me. Deciding if I could stay. To become one of them. And they were strangers, neurological typicals, and mostly, white men. I saw tides in the department turn on someone, and drown them, if they didn’t fit in. It was usually a woman, burned at the stake. They put gags over the person’s mouth, with their looks and their silences. They would start to look at the person the way they looked at non-academic people, the way people passing by on the streets sometimes looked at me when I was homeless, or confused, or having a day when I couldn’t hold it together. I saw other people leave because they couldn’t take the pressure, or because they had breakdowns and resigned, or because the sacrifice just wasn’t worth it.

  How could I fit in? Everyone’s experiences and ways of looking at life were so different from mine. They talked about their summer homes in Colorado and vacations in Europe, and shared
stories about the boarding schools they attended. There was an unmeasured distance that couldn’t be crossed. If my family had lived near their families, Mama could have been “the help” watching some of them when they were children, or being paid by some of them to watch their children. She could have cooked for them, cleaned their houses, and taken them to museums and picked them up from school while their parents were working. I could have worn their hand-me-downs. I could have had a moist rag over my nose and mouth to keep from getting asthma attacks while I mowed their lawns, or while I mopped the floors of their school at night, after getting out of my school across town. Daddy could have been their janitor.

  I was being asked to be loyal to a department that might ultimately abandon me. How did that make sense? And what were we, to one another? How much of what I saw could I believe in? And, what would I do if I didn’t get tenure?

  When I came, the university was recruiting black professors and pushing for diversity. But most of the black professors who came during those years soon left. There was no support for us. When students wrote “niggers” or other things like that in their papers, or expressed those same thoughts in class, we couldn’t do anything. To support us, the university would have had to admit the problems. But it wasn’t going to do that. When I talked to the department chairs about these things, they would just pause, and reflect, and say, well, I’m sure they’re really good kids. Just the mention of the word “diversity” could set people off. It was like they had been slapped in the face, and they started defending their innocence. They started making the person who said the “D” word the bad one, like the body wanting to rid itself of a splinter.