Sometimes, Aspergers can make something that is completely
daft appear, well, completely sane. Like the time my friend Graham (yes, that’s
his name) and I visited our local nightclub when we were teenagers. Graham was,
as a lot of my friends were, a tiny bit autistic. I knew him from the school computer
group. Enough said.
Knowing that our only attempt to breed successfully was to
attend social gatherings, we occasionally visited the flesh centres that were
the local nightclubs. By visiting a specific club - for which we were
technically 8 years too young - we could commandeer one of its many darkened
booths and, fending off the inevitable comments about our sexuality, slink back
to the shadows when it all got too much.
Around the time we visited the nightclub, the television
schedule was reeling to the phenomenon of Miami Vice. At least, mine was. Since
I was fair-haired, had a face full of stubble, and tended towards pastel
shades, I was Crocket. Graham, blessed with dark skin and a line of natty
suits, was Tubbs. Yes, it was daft but read the first line again.
The evening we visited the nightclub, we were already in
persona. Graham wore a soft grey chalk-stripe suit and I had more pastel on me
than a piece of Degas art. Naturally, I wasn’t wearing any socks either. I
drove the short hop from our sheltered countryside houses into the heaving
metropolis that was our local town. I think we may have even stopped at a
traffic light, it was that frenetic. All through the journey, we played my
Miami Vice music cassette, recorded from a friend’s vinyl record. Oh yes. Not
only were we vice cops, we were pirate vice cops. Could we be any cooler?
Actually, Graham decided that we could. There was the usual
queue into the nightclub with a long line of people snaking along the pavement.
We had to drive past them to park the car. Graham suggested that we lower the
windows (I had fitted my car with electric boxes to replace the winding
mechanism, which, to us, made it feel like we were on the space shuttle) and
cruise slowly past the queue while playing the theme music to Miami Vice,
extremely loud.
I pointed out that the theme music was at the beginning of
the cassette and we were nearing its end but that was solved by pulling over
some metres from the crowd and rewinding. I am sure a few people might have
glanced over at the small red Vauxhall Nova blocking all the traffic while two
flustered geeks furiously pressed the rewind button on the cassette unit again
and again in the vain hope it might make it go faster. But they surely had no
idea what was coming next.
With the first cords blaring out of the open windows
(half-open on my side as the winding mechanism didn’t always work), we
approached the crowd. Graham hung his arm out of the window as we had seen
Tubbs do in an episode the previous weekend. He then came up with his second
great idea of the evening.
“Mike,” he shouted above the blare of the music, “stick your
sunglasses on”. I protested that I could barely see anyway with all the dazzling
lights from the nightclub interfering with my night vision but Graham was
insistent. It would make us look über-cool.
I stuck my shades on and, as predicted, all went immediately
black. There was a tiny amount of light from the nightclub door and, in my
increasing, and very literal, blind panic, I careered toward it. Graham,
oblivious to our direction of travel, concentrated on simultaneously looking
cool, while stopping his eardrums from bursting with the racket that was emanating
from the stereo. I am not sure whether it was when we mounted the curb that I
realised there was a problem or when people began screaming. Deciding that
coolness will only take me so far in life, I removed my sunglasses. I had a
line of people immediately to the left of my car, each of whom had been forced
to flatten themselves against the wall of the nightclub when my car mounted the
pavement. Graham continued to ham it up by shouting “Yo” to as many angry faces
as he could.
I turned the wheel and my car left the pavement and re-joined
the road. I decided to forgo the sunglasses whilst I entered the car park and
found a space. I looked at Graham, who was beaming. “That was so cool”, he
assured me. It took many years before doubts began to surface.
