Freud and Beethoven and Billy Joel and hysteria

Grad school was interesting, y’all

“Slipped my mind that I could use my brain.”

Listening to an album from grad school at Boston University, It’s A Shame About Ray by The Lemonheads. First time I listened, I walked the entire length of campus in half the time, 30 minutes in 15, from my brownstone on Bay State to my internship past the administration buildings (also literally “past the mission” on campus, which is from the most touted album that year, Under the Pink by Tori Amos. Its cover was all over the place, looking into my soul as I rode the T, in the old-school record store windows like the ones hand-painted in the movie Xanadu. It looked luminous in the snow.)

I’ve made a Yale Summer School playlist; I need to make one for NCSU undergrad (R.E.M., The Smithereens, The Indigo Girls, Concrete Blonde, Toad the Wet Sprocket, U2 from high school) and BU grad (classical music, Tori, Lemonheads, the random stuff on the soundtrack of So I Married an Ax Murderer 😁, Billy Joel).

The Billy Joel leads me to a story that happened the weekend I holed myself up in my studio apartment at the top of my brownstone and finished reading all of Freud for class. All at once. By hour ten or so (I thought) of no phone, no internet (CompuServe, where you really are just a number!), and my only view being snow on the Charles River, shut up with all these theories on how we are born sexual beings and how other people mess us up and then these other theories on the überimportance of dreams—and all the snow, all the time, Snow TV—I think my brainpan slipped a little. I felt stoned. Wrapped in cotton. Like no other person existed.

Then I found myself singing along to Beethoven, and I knew I had lost my mind.

I made some more coffee (like that was a good idea), took several deep breaths watching Snow TV, and started the song over on the CD. And started singing the words again. I needed to see the counseling center. Pronto. If I could find the door.

Then I realized I knew those words. I dashed to my CD shelf, nearly spilling said coffee, and examined each one. Mind you, I am looking for Beethoven lyrics. Madwoman. Except the cotton batting was opening. I knew those words.

I found it! On probably the third go-round. Billy Joel. And then I laughed for several minutes, lying on the carpet, holding myself and unable to stop, because yes, I was crazy, and they can’t give counseling masters’ hoods to mentally ill people with these types of fixed delusions, can they? Is this the point where I start taping cardboard to the windows?

Nope! I was avenged, and so is my memory that says everything’s connected. “This Night” on An Innocent Man, his ode to the 50’s and 60’s (and therefore played a lot in my childhood jukebox house) uses the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. He is credited as a songwriter on the album. I found that after taking the unfolded CD cover to the window and squinting at its small print with and without my glasses. That’s how we learned things about music in the early 90’s, kids.

After I stopped laughing like a loon, I found my shoes, found the door, and walked down the street to buy a bagel from the Bagel Stand Lady in the lobby of my class building on the corner. A situation like this required carbs. She asked where I had been. I asked her how her Saturday was going. She told me it was Sunday and asked me if I had been sick. I told her yes and sang “This Night” all the way back to the brownstone to the snow and the one hearty rat outside with me. He told me to lay off the Freud and to read some assigned fiction from Human Development class. So I curled up in my bed corner with its Snow TV window and read Rabbit, Run by John Updike and ate my bagel tuna salad sandwich and couldn’t get “This Night” out of my head. The novel wasn’t funny but I kept giggling out loud.

These are the BU brownstones on Bay State Road. Mine was 131, with a lovely domed red door. Hen I dig up my photos, I’ll post them. These were initially individual mansions for the Very Important People of Boston. Think Edith Wharton characters. My building still had the home’s original blinding chandelier in the foyer and its original maroon carpet on all three floors. Your feet and sound sunk into it. It also had its servants’ entrance intact, an iron-wrought spiral staircase that climbed the entire height of the building, and led to the creepy basement and the laundry room. I miss that studio apartment. This pic is Bay State Road; my third floor apartment faced the Charles River on the other side of the building. If I rose early enough, I could watch BU and Harvard crew teams rowing.

So. This, folks, is what being autistic is like for me. Weekends like this and being able to remember them like this, and being triggered to do so by one lyric in a Lemonheads album, which isn’t even part of the story. Hyperfocus and hyperattention to detail and everything’s connected. And don’t give me an assignment involving research unless you want that bad boy researched to the hilt. And yes, I have to remind myself to eat and drink when I am so engaged, even…thirty years later?! I did not graduate twenty-nine years ago. Fuck that noise. Off to make that playlist.

Look, the doofus got her hood. (Why were my glasses so big? Did they hold secrets?)

Oh, and yeah: the Bagel Stand Lady really did know me by sight, and knew me by name by the time I graduated. Autistic creature of habit. Also disordered eating, but I was doing much better by then. Plus, I am one of those folks who greet people others just don’t. She was stationed by the front door, so I said hi and good evening and some such to her as I went back and forth to meetings and classes and some such. I just can’t tune helpers out like that.

Once the cashier at the corner bodega in Kenmore Square blurted out, “Where are you from?!” after I asked her how she was. I told her Charlotte. “I figured it was something like that,” she responded. “Baby, be careful. You’re too nice to be from around here.”

Add appropriate Freudian quote here. 🙃