Anand PrahladVenice Beach*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 disappeared 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. 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. 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 wheel chairs 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 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 speak 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 my 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 19. 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.
*"Venice Beach" is an excerpt from Anand Prahlad's , The Secret Life of Black Aspie: A Memoir , forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press, February, 2017.
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