A bit ago I was reaching down the storm drain like a freak, checking over my shoulder but not because I was worried a Mazda could run me over. About a week ago my new friends, rolling down the boulevard in the Ford, caught me in the middle of a light hate crime. They haven’t said anything to me about it. But I know they were appalled. I saw it in their faces, and I’ve since been out in the street and at the storm drain with a stick, trying to fix what I did. I’ve got a piece of gum speared at the end of the stick, fishing it down into the sewer to scutter Trevor’s little yellow cartridge out.
Trevor: It’s all his fault that everyone thinks of me badly, thinks I’m a monster. Maybe I’m a bit of monster. It’s not for the reason people think. I did the right thing to Trevor because he needed it done to him. And I’ve been trying not to be autistic. But then Trevor showed back up again, and I’ve been out here in the street and autistic like I used to be.
A decade back, Trevor and I met at an autistic support group. Inside a rec center gym, on the glossy gym floor we were these frail little kids, strange and drawn in a circle. Nowadays I surmise not a single kid was happy or functional. I know I wasn’t. My parents pulled me out of school. They assigned me to the gym autist group on doctor’s orders. And sure, I threw a few chairs down the front hall steps about it. I ended up committed with the other autists. We were all dwarfed and fitted under a massive slab of wall, encrusted with rock-climbing kidneys.
We sat in a circle with Mr. Astor stood beside us. Paunched and slouched, he was a recovering social freak. He watched us struggling to understand the most basic social moves. And across from me was Trevor. He was a sad little thing looking down at his crossed legs. He wore his emerald green Legend of Zelda shirt, with three little triangles, some spots of grease and I had been watching him. I’d been wearing my own Super Mario shoes that were too small and squeezing on my feet, the Velcro stuck with dog hair and lint. I wanted to talk to Trevor about his shirt, or about my shoes, and this is while today, years later, it seems so easy to speak up. Today talking comes like a sprung gasket but as a young autist it was near impossible. I’d at the time only ever talked with my mom in her bedroom. Back in the gym I was too afraid and I wasn’t going to be the first to share. And this is especially funny in that Trevor seemed the most afraid of everyone, as he had held his head so low it seemed it’d tip from his shoulders, roll around the floor. With a tic every time the kids laughed, he reeled from overloading at the stimulus. A strand of black hair whipped down his glasses. And then I remember that he took his left hand up his check, separated his teeth slightly. He pressed his fingers inward from the outside, shoving some cheek inward and biting down, he sucked his mouth flesh while side winding his right foot in a flip-flopping Croc. This was his stim. Or at least part of it and he never, over the course of it, looked up. Meanwhile I unconsciously plucked hairs from my right eyebrow. I nipped them into my opened mouth and rolling and springing them around my gums. If only Trevor would look up, I felt. Maybe see me, maybe notice my red Mario shoes, which I slowly inched a squeaky flit and mirroring Trevor’s crocs. But neither of us could do much more than gyrate. Neither of us could speak.
But Mr. Astor had been watching. Quietly and motionlessly plotting, and despite an overcooked inner life, he’d grown a wise autist variant. Astor suddenly took Trevor and I aside. Away from the big rock wall and the others, he led us towards the basketball hoop and past it and to the corner of the gym. He stuffed us in some bean bag chairs under a high window. He asked us if we had a favorite video game.
“Maybe Metroid? Halo? Crash Bandicoot or Final Fantasy? Well. What about Mario? What about Zelda? Maybe you could share that with me.”
Suddenly Trevor turned shades of white and red. Neck swinging, eyes flashing upwards toward Astor and hands flapping auxiliary motors. He told Astor about the GameCube. He told him it was released in North America: November 5th, 2001. And he told him about his favorite video game, the Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, and Trevor rattled off every detail of the game. He went on for what felt like forever, and with obsessive detail while I just sat and shook. I sat there wondering if Trevor even noticed me at all. Or if he noticed I was dying over a chance to speak – that I wanted to say that I loved Zelda too. I ate eyebrow hairs and I wanted for Trevor to know who I was and what I loved. If he could just get that I had beaten the game a month ago, that I had plumbed the sunken Wind Temple, far below the Northern Sea. Or maybe that he could know I dreamed as a swordsman every night in my homeschooled isolation and took outside and traipsed with sticks outside by their duct taped hilts in the muddy grass, where I’d had visions of islands with fat dragons atop mountains. That I’d sidled cliffsides gnawing a black ocean, and I wanted him to know so bad. I wanted him to know how our loves were the same. That we were the same. Though I couldn’t get that word in then, in the gym together and over the course of a dozen or more meetings, I cracked my mouth open. I leaked about every great love and lore, and for that Trevor saw and heard me, and became my very first best friend.
Running outside fighting pig demons together, we traded titles as hero and villain, or roped together in some great but hazy tussle on Ganon or Bowser. We most of all wanted to play the Gameboys; the little boxes we brought inside the gymnasium and cabled together. Under the rock wall and on the cool floor, we ran our screens through wires. Transmitting our bodies, jumping over pits by sticky button presses, we gave into hysterical ranting though we never really listened to each other. We never stopped to ask or think to whom the other was. Instead, we found ourselves rising from out of the tangle. From out of the game and the monologues, into a shared understanding of what it means to be alive and with another person, then to return home exhausted and full. This was all about twelve years ago. There was some beauty to it, what Trevor and I had. It was a time in my life that I’m somewhat fond of thinking about. I mean – I was obsessed and bad, then, shriveling and inward and alone in my homeschool room and sometimes with Trevor. But I was just a kid, and kids should be afforded a bit of time since they still have time to grow. As kids, Trevor and I had some potential to learn and grow. But after a year, the rec group fizzled out. Astor went off somewhere else for lack of money or health benefits or for his own mental anguish, while the gymnasium emptied out. In this way Trevor and I’s friendship had its first ending. All I ever did with him after that was talking over the phone, and once, over at his house for a play date, we played Pokemon and he let me borrow this old Pokemon Yellow (one of his favorites). I hardly played it, even though he let me delete his save. I had it sitting in the attic for a long time with the Pickachu sticker on the front, faded in the square of the cartridge beside the water bugs. After all that I forgot about Trevor. I went to more autist groups elsewhere without him and there were more wacked kids like him, and over the years, I tired of the groups. Mom and Dad did too since I wasn’t improving. Then one year when I was a teenager, I took a trip to North Carolina – a real evangelical Christian camp, or less than a camp; more of a stay away in an old plantation house. There something changed in me. When I came home, Mom and Dad could hardly recognize me. Into the ceiling I’d raised praises, and in doing so I had altered. I had lost my voice, had my hair cut by a sweet-smelling girl with soft hands, in a process like baptism. I grew better and better from there. At a new public school, I tried out for the varsity football team, though I ended up playing golf instead, worked on a few girls because of it. I fiddled with some of them on the nighttime golf course. With a stint of guitar playing, I’d picked them up (it helps when you croon awfully about whisky and tractors and sex. Sneak a few winks), and I started to get in with this group of boys.
On weekends, blasting Toby Keith out truck loudspeakers, we drank warm beers bought by older brothers and from this one backroad gas station which obliged an underaged knuckle’s wad of under-the-table cash, lugged them to the Taco Bell drive-through. We’d drain them after the high school football games and in the truck whip a few donuts, or often we’d go mudding through the baseball field after a rain, jockeying the side of the truck bed and hollering. Once I flung out the back, near broke my ass. And the boys laughed and laughed, and I was their own and I felt so solid. I felt so far and away from where I had come from before. Often, I felt better. Like a fixed individual free. Like shrugged off the autistic tendency, who was at the worst an autistic sleeper agent with a soul of Kevlar – no one could have ever guessed. The boys only laughed at my weirdness once in a while; laughed at my penchant to mouth breath, stare, and talk wacky. If anything, it was endearing, the traces of the shitbrained past. So, I was one of them and I was normal until Trevor came back.
Outside the Taco Bell and standing around the truck bed, the boys smoked cowboy killers and mulled over their dip, spitting, while I nursed some warm beer, and someone had to piss. Someone’s girl was working the Best Buy just nearby. So, we staggered over, and someone tried to pry a bike from the out-front bike rack and the automatic doors slid open and inside the Best Buy it was dead but for the surround sound system running an Avengers Blue-Ray ad on a wall of flatscreens, and when the girlfriend was nowhere to be found, my buddies stumbled to the bathroom, while I stuck behind and saw him.
Trevor was stooped over. His hand scraped a Best Buy employee key into a glass case, he made some awful tongue slogging noise, his shoulders hunched and razored. The first time having seen or thought of him in years, I saw him stand up. And when he turned toward me, I revolved away and stood and with my hand I scrabbled in my down jacket pocket, terrified he had seen me. I mock admired a prepaid TMobile card at the end of a DVR aisle. In my plaid wool cap and my post pubertal slackness, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, I meant to flat out ignore him. But it was no good. Trevor got to me quick. He flagged me down and when he asked my name aloud, I pretended at shock as I turned toward him, took my hat in my hands.
Trevor stood before me like my memory, slouching hideously. His hair, shining with grease, hung far down his back and stopped around his railish waist, and when he saw me, he began to sputter; a bad throttle. He could do nothing to turn the most basic social gears. Even after all those years, he was the same. Hounding me just like he’d done when we were in the gymnasium as kids, ranting about video game commercials, only now working for minimum wage. I tried my best, I really did, to contrive interest. But he swallowed my bullshit too readily. He was too eager to talk about things I knew nothing about, and no number of nods or well-meaning smiles could dissuade him. Plus, he never talked to me. He could only speak into the floor or into his hands or towards the row of video games next to us while he fiddled and scrunched his ear, dragging on about his favorite flight simulator, how its graphical fidelity brought the entire juice out a graphics card, segueing into how he near burned his parents’ house down when working an unwound clothes hanger into a circuit breaker. His parents got him a social worker after that. He said that he could only hold down the job because of this social worker, that she had put him up to it and this was as my friends were coming out the bathroom and I began to cringe. My eye sockets twitched at the coming roil my friend’s laughter. They came churning louder and louder and I felt batshit, thought if they were laughing at me. One of the boys knocked over a Madden 12 display. NFL running back Peyton Hillis went twirling and brought a line of Ethernet cables swinging from their metal hooks, and Trevor yelped, and kept rambling. It was as if he was rambling his anxiety down and off onto me and I realized, then, for the first time in a million years, I was picking at my eyebrows. I thought for second of my own shitheadedness, and when would he get a clue? Did I need to punch his shit in? I should’ve clobbered him. With him I was trying at carefree when my friends abandoned me in the store. It was my fault. I had let Trevor get away with it. And then he looked into his ribs. He asked me for my phone number, and he said we needed to catch up. I gave him my number and left, and back at the truck, the guys were drunker than before. They prodded at me when I arrived. They giggled. They said I’d found my perfect boyfriend. They talked about his long and luscious locks. They asked if I was into that sort of thing. And if I liked it in my ass or not. Reddening and heating I forced out a laugh. Oh yeah, I said. I love, love big cocks and they laughed. And I said, Especially some greasy retard cock, and right then the tenor of the hick laughter swung higher, more affected and awkward and fake.
After that night I did not receive a call from Trevor because I had not given him my real number. I could’ve done him worse. Like beat him up or call him retarded to his face. But I couldn’t do that. It was too hard to be that direct and I just didn’t want to be around him, didn’t want anyone to know I knew him. Or for me to go retrograde. For real it could be like another bout of brain worms, me going autistic again, whereas the life I was building was good. I’m sure someone would say I’m crazy for feeling this way, but it’s like that. Autism and the mental states are virus adjacent. They suck into you, and everyone sees you, when you’re around the autists, hanging with the autist, that you are an autist yourself. So, I did my best to get away from him, after a few days of trying to forget the whole thing, but Trevor started sending me messages over Facebook. I had to eventually say something. It started fairly harmless, him sending a few memes, though about nothing I knew anything about – like some new video game release or whatever or more often about some fanfiction. This crossover between that My Little Pony show and that Fallout game. And another time, only glanced at, memes of his favorite anime and his anime “waifu”, a big-titted anime girl with blue hair, who was a demon. Like, what kind of degeneration was this? He’d only grown worse with time. And sometimes, in my lowest moments, I felt like I was looking at some version of myself, saw myself in him still. Was I still like this? Where would I end up? He wanted to play video games together online. He sent his Nintendo friend code, his online Steam ID, but I never went through with any of it. I said I was busy or out, or I just ignored him until I stopped responding entirely. That was when Trevor started showing up at my house. Without a car or a driver’s license, he began pedaling up a steep hill in the cold, underdressed and freezing blue at the knuckles only to knock huffing at the front door whereupon I would go silent and still. Mom and Dad weren’t happy with the ignoring, but it had to happen. After a while he stopped coming by. I felt at ease again, hit a few golf balls off the pier, until, finally, Trevor began Facebook messaging my friends. They told me they were getting messages from some kid with an anime profile picture – asking about me as an old friend – and I jumped. I panicked. I had to do something. And now that I’ve done it, what I did a few days ago, I know everyone thinks of me as worse, one way or another. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter since I’ve worked so hard and done so much to keep myself out of this spiral. I’m good proof. You can make yourself normal, get out the autism. You can peel your way out by the fingers, even if it hurts. Before I did, I had panic attacks in the bathroom with the hot shower steaming. I messaged Trevor to come to my house.
When Trevor arrived, there was a light drizzle. He stood outside my house, his bike in the driveway, and he was breathing heavy. From the damp cold, I’m sure he was itching all over. He was underdressed in a faded, kiddish Pokeball teeshirt and when I came out to meet him, instead of asking him to come inside, I asked if we could stand outside for a bit. He said Ok, and I took him down to the street.
At the bottom of the driveway and next to the storm drain, Trevor’s hair looked frozen. He asked, through chattered teeth where I’d been. When I didn’t say anything, he told me he’d been struggling at work. His mom was too busy to drive him because of her job. Biking was hard but he’d gotten good at it, and he said he was happy to see me, that we could watch YouTube together or something. I kept saying nothing. I let the quiet stir and I saw him squirm. He looked down at his feet. He picked his cheek. He worked up a full shiver and pushing that bit of cheek in his mouth like old times and sucking. Then it really began to rain. We didn’t move and you’d think we would’ve run out of the rain, but we didn’t. Trevor didn’t even make a try at it or suggest we should do anything. He just took off his glasses and blinked. Just stood there blinking with me as we got wetter in the rain and after a period of long silence in the cold downpour he went to speak again, clicked and lifted his mouth open, to again kill the silence but really he was just unthinking and autistic and bad in the head when I finally interjected if he remembered Pokemon Yellow. Do you remember that old game, I said. And he nodded excitedly. He loved that game growing up; said he’d lost the cartridge a long time ago. He didn’t remember where he’d left it, when it seemed to dawn on him – that he had given me the cartridge all those years ago and I meanwhile picked frantically the stalks from my eyebrows, my head tilted to the side and with my upper lip curling while another hand adjusted the air and the rain between us, with him still feeble and holding his drizzling glasses, I went to speak, but I barked. Look at me, dude. Look at me. And he looked me in the eyes for the first time. He appeared pained and I breathed and picked my eyebrow more – a musical pluck-plucking – and I pulled Pokemon Yellow from my jacket pocket. I held it to his face, joggled it. I joggled it and I pointed at the storm drain, now building with water. What would it mean, I said. If I chucked this down. If I chucked it down in there. Trevor looked at the storm drain. He looked at the cartridge and Trevor looked to me like a wooly, sad manchild and I laughed. He stammered. He asked me why I would think to do something like that. And I stopped laughing. He just wouldn’t get it and he never would. So, I said, Because its old and needs to go. And when I rose the thing in the air to throw it down, I held it up and looked at Trevor. Stopping to finally see him understand something social like a gray dawn, and when he reached to grab the cart from my hand, not forcefully but with a sad kind of desperation, I unfroze wet in the rain to us flimsily grappling and grunting in the street, and I dropped the cart. We stopped and looked down. We watched it slip away in the running water. It went below the street.
Suddenly the din of a truck loudspeaker. A blinding light. It went fast all around us and came shaking from out the rain over us and from beyond the pounding loudspeaker, the thunder of my name rising from somewhere out in the drenching world, my buddies rolling up. They had seen the whole thing. They’d seen me throw the cartridge down the drain after struggling with Trevor in the street in the rain. And what was worst – I knew they had seen Trevor looking so pitiful. They’d seen him sad. In his Pokemon shirt. They knew what the shirt meant and what Trevor was and most of all they saw themselves in him since they’d been children once, too, though they had long forgotten what it meant to be a child, until right then. They felt their own inner child crying, when they rolled up in the rain, chasing poor Trevor away. And Trevor had gone away quick. Without a word, he’d gone pedaling on his bike, coasting downhill in the ice and soak.
But I stood defiant. I smiled in the wash of light and rain and as the truck lurched up to me on the side of the flooding road, the back door swung open to a blackness. A dark portal opened for the good and typical. And like I was when I stepped inside.