Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

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Here's an interesting excerpt from Chapter 4 of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt -- the salesman character sounds like an Aspie, don't you think?
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... I visited a junk shop on the edge of town. It was a cluttered, barnlike warehouse that extended back into a series of rooms filled with Formica dinette sets, sofas, office furniture, and all manner of machinery from washer-dryers to apple corers. The owner sat like a Buddha behind a desk, barking hellos to customers and instructions to his salesman.

The salesman was an expressionless man in his mid-thirties. He had mousy brown hair parted at the center, and his arms hung loosely at his side. His clothes were clean but faded, like the suits and shirts on a rack in one corner of the store. I was immediately impressed by the man's instant recall of the store's vast inventory. "We have seven of that type item," he would say. "One's like new, four work pretty good, one's broke but could be fixed, and the other's on lay-away." In addition to having a mental catalog of the place, the salesman was a virtuoso on the strengths and weaknesses of practically any brand of appliance, particularly brands no longer in existence. "Kelvinator made a good one in the early fifties," he'd say. "It had five speeds. It was real easy to clean, and you could get replacement parts right quick."

Impressed as I was by all of that, I was struck even more by something else -- a carefully applied arc of purple eye shadow that blazed like a lurid sunset on his left eyelid.

... From time to time, while he was waiting on me, the boss would shout questions from his desk about whether such-and-such an item was in stock. The salesman would cock an ear and call out the answer over his shoulder without looking directly at his boss. After one such exchange, the salesman said in a low voice, "What the boss don't know won't hurt him."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"He didn't like this", the salesman said, pointing to his left eye. "I don't do drag or anything sick like that. I just do my eyes. I used to do my other eye the same way too. The boss told me to stop, and I was all set to walk out the door and never come back. But then I figured, 'Wait a minute. He never gets out of that chair, see, and my desk is over by his left side. If I only do the eye away from him, maybe he'll never notice.' That was two years ago and he ain't never said nothin' about it since."

On my next visit to the shop, the salesman was out to lunch but due back soon. The boss and I chatted. "Jack's a good man," he said, speaking of his salesman. "Best I've ever seen. He's a strange one, though. He's a loner. This shop and everything in it is his whole life. I call him 'Jack the One-eyed Jill' -- not to his face, of course. He used to put that eye make-up on both eyes, you know. God, it looked awful. I told him, 'I can't have this in my shop! No more or you're out!' So what did he do? Came in the next day not wearin' any eye makeup at all as far as I could tell. But he was walkin' sideways around the store like a damned crab, twistin' this way and that. Then he went past a mirrored wardrobe, and I saw it plain as day: He'd put the makeup on the other eye.

"I was ready to kick his butt clear out the door, then and there. But he's good at what he does, and it doesn't seem to bother the customers. So I kept my mouth shut. And from that day to this, he's kept that eye turned away from me. He must take me for blind or some kind of idiot, but that's okay with me. He pretends he's not wearing makeup, and I pretend I don't know he's ignored my wishes. Meanwhile, he keeps walkin' sideways, twistin' around, speakin' outta the corner of his mouth, and hopin' I won't notice. And I make out like I don't. I don't know who's crazier, Jack the One-eyed Jill or me. But we get along just fine."
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Several Aspie themes there: loner, encyclopedic knowledge, strong work ethic, detail oriented, etc.; even a touch of rebellion against authoritarian figures, I think. Nice that his boss valued his work performance over making a big stink about the eye makeup; would be good to have a boss like that ...

I LOVE that book (and movie - the Lady Chablis is my PERSONAL ROLE MODEL ) but I honestly think you could re-title it "Aspies, at midnight, in the garden of good and evil" because it seems to be riddled with us. The trick would be spotting an unambiguously NT character...

M

smack bang on the spectrum... gotta read the whole book now...

I think I shall have to read this book. I used to work in a gift shop here on Dartmoor, and it was my gift shop. I knew exactly how items were in the shop, how many I had in stock, when the next ones were coming in/or cancelled lines. Every time someone would buy a souvenir I would go to the place on the shelf and rearrange the rest of them so that they were symmetrical again. The waitresses twigged what I was like and used to move stuff about just to amuse themselves.
Then if I had to get something from the store, I had to rearrange that as well. This became a bit distracting when it was the store for the adjoining restaurant as well. Stock taking in the wintertime was as good fun, if not better. The only blow was it was a tourist spot, so it was always busy. People coming into my shop...Thats why I had to leave.

Ummm... lest I inadvertently lead people astray, the excerpt I posted covers basically the salesman's entire part, and I don't recall that he ever re-appeared in the rest of the book.

However, as Mechanima says, both the book and the movie (Kevin Spacey!) are quite excellent, besides being a good opportunity to play "Spot the Aspie" (Luther Driggers also comes to mind).

Darn, nevermind, at least I could relate to him, thats pretty cool for me. It is the sort of thing I will have to do, now, get the book because of that one passage.