Over the years between Humanities, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, I likely met no one weirder than a man named Regis. He had a typical Pittsburgh accent — meaning that it took me a while to understand him. He seemed at times like he was a cross between Rasputin and Albert Einstein. But he was one of my best friends in my six years at Pitt, undergrad and grad.

In the Western Civilization II course I took during my second semester at Pitt, there were two people who would remain friends of mine long after the Winter Term. One was my teaching assistant, who was in his second year of graduate school in the History Department. He helped a lot with my decision to switch majors from Computer Science to History. The other was Regis. He was a working-class Western Pennsylvanian through and through, with that guttural Pittsburgh-ese accent. Regis said “jagoff” for “jackoff,” “ruff” for “roof,” “yinz” for “you all” or “y’all,” “dahntahn” for “downtown,” and so on. He’d been unemployed for nearly a year, laid-off by Westinghouse, where for the previous five years he guarded a boiler room in one of their plants. He was about five-six, constantly scruffy and disheveled, and sometimes looked like he was a step or two away from insanity.

But Regis was also a quick study, absolutely enjoyed going to college, a rarity for a twenty-eight-year-old. He was a deeply critical thinker. As a result, we hit it off right away in our discussion sections on Friday mornings. We often ganged up on the rest of our discussion section on all things Western European-related, from the French Revolution and whether it was or wasn’t a revolution to the connections between the European slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and European imperialism in the nineteenth century. It was wonderful not being the only oddball in class for a change.

Our friendship went beyond the classroom in the fall of ’88, my semester of homelessness and financial strife. From the middle of September until the week of Thanksgiving, I lived off of $205 left over from my financial aid package. My money was so short that I finally swallowed my pride in early November and asked for help. I first asked Regis, after he noticed that we weren’t even hanging out at the Roy Rogers in the Cathedral of Learning anymore. After I told him about my starvation diet consisting of tuna fish with limited mayo, pork neck bones and rice, pb & j sandwiches, and grape Kool-Aid, he said, “I don’t have much, but I can at least bring you some bread and a potata. We don’t want you out here starvin’.” Later that week, Regis actually gave me some bread and a small sack of potatoes.

Regis was in my circle throughout that critical semester, which was why he was able to provide me some much needed starch during my semester-long time in need. We talked, mostly about his Heidegger course, a scary existential philosophy course for anyone to take. I heard so much from Regis about Heidegger’s Being and Time that I felt like I was in the course. Whenever the subject came up, he was always like, “So you got a hot date tonight, right?” No excuse was good enough for him, whether it was lack of money or lack of confidence.

Regis was my Ferris Bueller, or at least, he was one of two or three friends who played that role in my life between ’87 and ’91. I didn’t see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until ’94. As intense and uptight as he was about his studies, he was the opposite when it was time to catch a movie or hang out at a bar. He certainly did his share to get me to date, far more than I wanted to at the time. Yet I know that someone needed to push me past my relationship comfort zone.

We took one other class together. In the fall of ’89, we discovered that we were both taking Greek History, an easy A if there ever was one. At least for me. Regis had to work a bit for his A. What impressed me, though, was how quickly he could cram information in his head the night before an exam. I never crammed — I just let my well-honed memory ticks take over. Still, if I were to ever need to cram, Regis was the best to study with. He often played word games to help him remember concepts or events or names.

Once Regis and I graduated in ’91, we didn’t hang out as much. That summer was spent getting over one final “relationship” hurdle and getting things set up for graduate school, so I lost touch. He did start a master’s program in philosophy, the following year I think. So I would see him on campus or made the occasional call to keep in touch in my last two years at Pitt.

The last time I met with Regis was after I had transferred to Carnegie Mellon to finish my doctorate. He called me up, said he wanted to treat me to lunch, to congratulate me for moving on from Pitt. We ended up going over to the Tastee Freeze across from Waterworks Mall, near the banks of the Allegheny River. I think that’s near Washington Blvd. No matter. It was a beautiful May afternoon to hang out with my dear friend. We talked, mostly about our lives and the future. After six years, Regis didn’t seem to know where to go after his master’s. I told him to get his doctorate, because his was the mind of a professor. Of course, he told me to do the same.

Even though that was another rough time for me financially, I felt like Regis was going through a hard time himself. I honestly thought that he would just pull it together, become a professor — a misfit one, maybe — and move on from the ‘Burgh. I really don’t know what’s happened with him since that day in ’93. I wish I did, so that I could thank him for being a true friend.

I like to think of another day, the final Friday of undergrad for me and for Regis. It was about a quarter to six on April 26 of ’91, and it had finally set in that the long path to my college degree was finally over. It was done. I bumped into Regis, who was also happy to be done. We bumped into two other friends of mine, one of whom I’d struggle with in terms of defining our friendship in the coming months. That wasn’t on my mind right then.

We stood on the steps of Hillman Library, the four of us, all of us either graduating or on the verge of doing so. The sun was still high in the sky, but you could tell even looking east that it was slowly starting to set. Shadows had become prominent on the Cathedral of Learning and the Carnegie Library building. I took a mental snapshot of that moment, because it was a moment of — dare I say it — happiness and vindication for me. I hugged Regis — or rather he hugged me — in celebration of the end of one journey and the beginning of another. I hope that our paths cross again.

Time now for a silly post. As I interviewed my former Mount Vernon classmates and friends for Boy At The Window, I was frequently reminded by them of the way I spoke and the way I walked during my six years in the gifted track. I’m sure that some of that carried over to my years at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. Except that the folks who knew me in my higher education years don’t seem to dwell too much on those ticks. Yes, I was a bit weird, but many of my classmates, acquaintances and friends were a bit weird too. As recently as four years ago, when I worked to upgrade my public speaking skills for promoting my book Fear of a “Black” America, my coach, a trained theater actor, said that no one would ever “mistake [me] for James Earl Jones.” But according to him, I can and have altered my cadence and volume to project my voice, to create different emotional states in my voice to pull an audience in.

Anyway, how did I get to the point where one group of folks thought I was somewhere between weird and a buffoon, another thought that I was weird yet deliberately erudite, and the folks who’ve known me since the middle of grad school though that I wasn’t so weird and my voice the smoothness of an orator? It doesn’t make much sense. Well, I figure it started at home. My vocal examples include a mother from Arkansas, a father with between eight and twelve teeth who drank a lot from Georgia, an ex-stepfather from Virginia/New Jersey, and growing up surrounded by New York accents — Black, White, Italian and Jewish — and Jamaican ones at the same time.

Even at eight, I cared about how my voice sounded, how words rolled off my tongue. It was third grade, and I still said thirty like “dirty,” specific like “pacific,” had trouble saying words like “spaghetti,” “broccoli,” “cannoli,” etc. My teacher — but I more so — wanted me to harness the ability to speak standard English as I moved on to fourth grade. So I worked on it, enunciating my t’s and th’s, picking up New York accents for “warda” (water) “bwaught” (bought), and “soda” (soda) in the process.

No one explained to me that I needed to pick up the pace of my words. Being in a classroom full of students of widely varying skill levels didn’t help. Girls spoke faster than boys anyway, I thought. There were several boys in my class who weren’t reading, speaking or writing anywhere near grade level, so I might as well have been Michael Eric Dyson by comparison. (I’m not clownin’ here. There was a thirteen-year-old in my fifth grade class who was reading somewhere between the first and second grade level. My teacher, the late Mrs. O’Daniels, had me tutor him for a couple of weeks.) So I had only a handful of decent examples of how to “twalk” (talk) around me. Add that to my mother’s slow pace and the disconnect between the speed at which I thought in comparison to the speed in which I spoke. It would create an interesting journey.

My first crush, my one-time seventh-grade beauty, pointed out during our interview “how annoying” it was for her to hear me introduce myself to others. Me saying, “My name is Donald Collins” might as well have been done at Slow Level 3 on our Sony DVD player. She thought that I thought that I was better than her merely because I spoke so slowly. She wasn’t the only one. You add that to the whole Hebrew-Israelite, naivete because of growing up in and around poverty, not in touch with pop culture thing, and I was first among equals when it came to weird. So after seventh grade, most of the time when I did speak, I spoke in class. And for whatever reason, my exchanges with teachers came at a much more rapid pace that my quiet, soft-spoken way with my classmates.

My walk developed much later, and it was an accident. It was the fall of ’84, and I was coming out of a summer in which I had tried out for the JV football team. I made the team, only to drop out because of my fears, responsibilities at home, and an assistant coach who insisted on bulking stick-figure me up. Over the summer months, I’d gotten into the habit of running to and from the stores on East Lincoln Avenue, even running to C-Town in Pelham on occasion, a mile and a quarter walk if I didn’t run. Who cared? People thought that I was weird anyway, and with my mother sending me to the store as many as three times on a school night, I wanted to get in and out as fast as I could. One day I ran in a hard sprint to the store, only to pull up because something contracted sharply in the back of my right leg. I pulled my hamstring, and boy did it hurt. Idiot me had been running and sprinting for months without stretching.

I didn’t like the slow version of me in the six weeks it took for my hammy to recover. I figured out, though, that if I walked faster, I could get to and from the local stores quickly. Not as quickly as running, but quick enough. I realized that I was a really fast walker, between the long legs and my elongated strides. So I used it everywhere, because I walked everywhere. So what if my idiot classmates laughed when I went into warp at school or to get across town. As far as I was concerned, they’d do that anyway. I made it a bit of a game, because thinking about how much I walked to get to my father’s watering holes every weekend or to get groceries almost every day was depressing beyond words. Once I got my first Walkman in ’86, my walk became a regular fixture through grad school.

I took my show to the ‘Burgh in ’87. Gradually, I learned to use my walk only when necessary, because I occasionally would plow through a crowd and run someone over in the process. The way I spoke, though, took longer to modulate. Some thought that my voice was “sexy,” and said as much. Some thought that it was cute how I would slow down my voice and deliberately choose my words. Which was in direct contradiction to the reality that I was frequently a “tactless wonder,” something my wife has called me about 1,000 times over the years. What I learned about myself by my senior year at Pitt was that I had so many thoughts and feelings running through my head that I couldn’t sort them out. That was why my voice would sound as slow and as deliberate as it did (and sometimes still can). I learned that once I concentrated on sorting out what I was going to say and to anticipate the next thing I would say, my pace, unsurprisingly, picked up.

My walk has had no choice but to slow, as I drive most of the time, have fewer walking options in the DC area, and I’m thirty-nine now. But I can crank it up when necessary, to the chagrin of my jeans and other pants. Over the years, I’ve probably ripped about twenty pairs of jeans and fifteen other slacks in the crotch area because of my warp-drive walk. Maybe if I bought better pants…

Both help define who I am today, and I don’t think that I would trade my voice or walk in for someone else’s, even if it meant sounding like Obama and walking like Denzel (you know, the determined, rounded shoulders walk he does when it’s crunch time in one of his films). I mean, Tiger Woods sounds a bit like me and Cornel West walks like he’s inebriated, and look at them!

An interesting thing about life, especially my life, is the number of times I need to make a critical decision at the very beginning of a new year. Typically, I’m carrying baggage of some sort from the previous year into the next, and find myself in a situation — often of my own making — where I need to make another decision in order to move forward. Or, if the decision’s a bad one, fall further behind.

This is a tale of one January from the ’90s. It was in ’94. I spent my holiday season with my mother and siblings in Mount Vernon after a year of financial hardship caused in large part by transferring from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon to finish my doctorate there. I made the move because I realized all of the intangibles that a young scholar would need for their career as a historian didn’t exist for me in Pitt’s History Department, and certainly not through my advisor there.

I was correct, of course, but Pitt paid their grad students more and provided health insurance. After I transferred, I was jobless for six weeks, fell behind on my rent, took a job with Allegheny County that paid $6.00 an hour, was within a week and a half of being evicted, and was generally miserable that summer. I decided to take a break from dating before my financial crisis — by midsummer, I couldn’t afford to take myself to McDonald’s.

The fall at Carnegie Mellon wasn’t much better. I was fine academically. So fine that some professors — particular my new advisor Joe Trotter — thought that I was making a mockery of the History Department’s policies and politics by pushing an agenda of finishing my coursework and all requirements for the doctorate except for my thesis in a year. Oh well! That meant, though, I had few friends on campus, and only one or two in the department that first semester. And my monthly stipend of $750 a month was less than what I earned working for Allegheny County full-time that summer.

It had reached the point where I could only make the minimum payment on my two credit cards, didn’t dare touch the Amex card, and didn’t buy anything new at all. I hadn’t bought a new pair of basketball sneakers in nearly three years, with one pair so worn that my soles had holes all over the place. It was one thing to grow up in poverty, or to struggle through my financial maelstroms while in undergrad. Now I had a master’s degree, and still the way I lived looked very much like what I struggled through in the ’80s. Except that I was reading E.P. Thompson and William Julius Wilson and Diane Ravitch, writing paper after paper, doing my initial thesis research when I’d been told specifically to wait, and watching the Steelers and Giants struggle their way into the NFL playoffs.

After being back at 616 for almost a month and reminding myself of what poverty really looks like, it was time to go back to Pittsburgh and execute the plan I’d put together ten months earlier. The one thing that did go right for me during the holidays was that I had caught up on sleep, with seven or eight hours at night and long naps in the afternoon. But I apparently hadn’t had enough rest. I made the wonderful decision to take the 7 Bee-Line Bus to downtown Mount Vernon, walk from there with my suitcases to East 241st in the Bronx, and then catch the 2 Subway to Midtown, transfer to the 7 train and then to the Train to the Plane, where I’d eventually catch a bus to JFK for my USAirways flight.

My flight was at 5:30 pm on January 10. So to make this work, I left 616 at 2 pm. Wouldn’t you know it, I forgot which “Train to the Plane” train to catch once I got into Midtown? The 7 train would connect, but I didn’t know which train to connect to. I found myself in the middle of Kew Gardens at a quarter to five, eventually caught a local bus, which meandered its way to JFK. I ended up walking into the airport entrance and to the terminals, another ten minutes. It was 5:35 pm by the time I reached the ticket counter. The agent told me that my flight had been cancelled hours ago because of the snowstorm in Pittsburgh. “Didn’t you get our call,” she asked? I then called my mother, who confirmed that about fifteen minutes after I left for the train, USAirways had called.

I eventually found an alternate flight out of LaGuardia that left at 7:30. But I had no cash on me, at least not for a cab or other expenses. That was the reason I went through the excruciating process of cheap public transportation to get to the airport, to save some money. So I walked over with my luggage to the next door terminal to take out money for a taxi. I had about $50 in the bank. Total. So I took out $40. The cab ride from JFK to LaGuardia cost $20 or so. I spent more money to get to my flight than I would’ve if I’d just taken Metro-North from Pelham to Midtown and then a taxi to LaGuardia. Could I have been any more of an imbecile than I was at that moment? I spent more money trying to save money and caused myself an undue amount of stress and drama in the process.

I did change tickets, I caught my flight, and reached Pittsburgh sometime around 8:40. Then I caught an airport bus. This wasn’t a public transportation bus. It was a private bus service that ran between downtown Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh International in the days before PAT Transit provided for such things. The cost was enough $12. I caught a Yellow Taxi lined up in front of the William Penn Hotel (I have no idea what it’s called now) to my flat in East Liberty. I needed one that ran credit cards, since I now didn’t have the cash to cover the cost. This may not sound like a big deal. But back then, paying out more than $200 a month to Amex would’ve killed my budget and left me in search of food or additional money for rent, so I watched every penny as closely as I could.

The cab ride with tip cost $30. I was so exhausted from the ordeal that I didn’t notice that I’d left my wallet in the taxi when I got out. I was unpacking when I noticed it missing. Luckily the cab driver noticed immediately and had turned my wallet into the Yellow Taxi. What made this even luckier was that I lived on Penn Circle South and Highland Avenue, about two blocks from where Yellow Taxi’s offices in Pittsburgh and cab fleet were located. Still, 26 inches of snow had fallen in Pittsburgh in the past two days, it was cold and I simply had been through too much. I picked up my wallet first thing the next morning.

Out of that ordeal came a major decision. I had spent most of grad school finding ways to save money, cutting corners, making use of a copier card that a librarian at Pitt had lost to make thousands of copies of articles and microfilm for my classes and dissertation. I couldn’t afford to buy books, so those books I hadn’t checked out of the library already I usually made sure to read at least three book reviews before incorporating my ideas and those quotes in my papers. I was even walking the two and a half miles to and from campus every day to save money on bus passes, no matter the weather. With the snow on the ground, I’d wrap Giant Eagle plastic bags around my feet and socks before putting on my well-worn basketball sneaks. At least it kept my feet dry.

I did all of this so that I wouldn’t have to borrow any money for grad school. I’d already borrowed $16,000 for undergrad at Pitt, and another $1,800 my first year of grad school. I was hoping to make it without any additional debt. I realized that what I was doing was beyond sacrifice. It was stupid and unnecessary, and it meant putting up with things that would’ve made me drop out of Pitt my sophomore year. I made the decision to take out my first student loans in nearly three years after that. It was for another $1,800, enough to buy a new pair of sneakers and at least be able to catch the bus a couple of times a week. My quality of life went up a bit and my stress level dropped. I began to think about creating a space for myself at both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon while also knocking out my coursework and exams that semester.

It’s important to remember sometimes that life is like yin and yang, an ebb and flow, a dance. That even after all that I’d gone through in my past, that we carry some of those lessons with us and apply them in situations in which they’re not appropriate to solving a problem. Though debt is an issue, it wasn’t the issue for me in ’94. Getting to the doctoral thesis stage was more important. Even in debt, sometimes a little more debt is necessary in order to get back on one’s feet and push forward toward immediate and long-term objectives.

It’s kind of like what we as a nation face right now. Everyone’s up in arms about a trillion-dollar stimulus plan for a $13 trillion GDP nation. My $1,800 loan was the equivalent of eighteen percent of my income for ’94. The stimulus package is about eight percent of America’s GDP — at most. Debt is bad, and for America, it’s about as bad as a billion gallons of coal ash sludge in the Tennessee Valley. But I can also say that if I hadn’t taken out that loan in ’94, even with a stipend and free tuition, my doctorate quest would’ve ended by the end of that year. A lot of dreams might well end even if this stimulus package passes Congress and does stimulate the economy. Doing nothing or fighting it, though, is worse, and would leave many of us in a kind of America that we don’t want to live in.

In the past few weeks, my son has asked me to tell him a made-up “silly story” on the days I put him to bed. I’ve been telling him all kinds of weird and silly stories. They always have elements of the truths in them, as I drawn these stories from real-life experiences. But then I exaggerate the parts that are funny, or laugh at inappropriate times to make Noah laugh, or demonstrate with sounds and smacks how funny something is — especially when it’s actually not funny. Noah’s none the wiser, though.

One of the people I’ve incorporated in these stories is my father Jimme. It’s hard to take actual events involving an inebriated man in his mid-forties and make them sound funny when he’s your father. Especially when he was calling me a “faggat” (his pronunciation) because I hadn’t gotten my “dict wet.” I’ve learned how to poke fun at the guy, but I didn’t want him to come off as a complete buffoon in my stories. So I made up a few things to exaggerate, like his drinking problem as one of volume rather than because of alcohol. I made Noah a part of these stories as a spectator who could occasionally turn into Ben 10 (see Cartoon Network series) and defend me and my older brother Darren when Jimme started sounding like he lost it. I cleaned up all of the foul language. And I of course remind my son and myself that my father isn’t as silly at I might make him seem in these stories. At least I hope he gets it.

One story I won’t be able to tell Noah anytime soon about his grandfather involves his most extreme attempt to make a man out of me and end my virginity. It was December ’86, my senior year and the month of my seventeenth birthday. Darren and me went through our usual Friday evening routine of tracking him down, only to find that he was already home. We went upstairs to his attic room, and there she was, a prostitute not much older than me. She looked like someone I remembered seeing at MVHS a year or two ago. I couldn’t remember if she graduated.

“Man, I got a girl fo’ you! Look at dis bit’! Dis yo’ chance to git yo’ dict wet,” Jimme said.

I looked just long enough to get angry. I walked out of his room, embarrassed, asked for $50, which he gave me, and started to leave.

“What I s’posed to do wit’ her? I paid her $50,” Jimme said.

“Then you sleep with her!,” I yelled.

“You’re A FAGGAT!,” he yelled over and over again as we left.

Jimme didn’t even bother to offer Darren his rented pleasures. I assumed that Jimme went ahead and got his money’s worth. “Maybe I should’ve gotten it over with,” I thought. “Who’d it hurt if I’d gotten laid for the first time at Jimme’s?” Whatever. The bottom line was that I was scared, scared of disease, especially AIDS, and scared that I’d get someone pregnant. With our family’s luck, I’d bust a condom and end up getting a girl pregnant on the first try.

It would be another three years before I gave up my not-so-precious or pristine virginity. What I experienced that evening and that fall in terms of my exposure to lust and romance was in so much conflict with my pressure cooker home life and how as saw myself as a Christian. So much so that I coped by separating love and lust in my mind. I wasn’t fully conscious of it. But what it meant was that those I may well have been interested in dating were larger than life at times in my mind. Others whom I felt lust for, well, let’s just say that they weren’t dating material for me. I know for sure that my second K-12 crush got caught up in my mental contradiction. And I’m sure that this affected my relationships or semi-relationships with women I hung out with between ’87 and ’91.

It took another crush, a weird infatuation and friendship that pushed my relationship learning curve into high gear. At that point I was far away enough from my past and from Mount Vernon to realize that I could experience both in one person and still be a Christian. That it was entirely up to me as to how to see and treat other women in ways that respected them as the complex human beings that they are and not as holy beauties to sit on a pedestal or as simple women to sleep with. Luckily I didn’t need a prostitute to make me realize how idiotic separating lust and romantic love was. There weren’t too many in Pittsburgh to pick from anyway.

As for Jimme, I’m certain that he doesn’t remember his drunken attempt to end my sexual repression. Even with Boy At The Window, there are literally dozens of Jimme stories I’ve left out because of their lack of relevance to the main story or because the stories that I’ve chronicled are likely embarrassing enough. He knows about the book and that I’m writing about what I went through with him, and he’s been okay with it so far. My father knows that I’m not writing about these events to spite him or for some perverse pleasure. If I wanted to do that, I’d just take my “A” material and go to a comedy club and do my Jimme act.

As of today, all of my immediate classmates (and many of my friends) from elementary school, middle school, high school and Pitt are at least thirty-nine years old. Meaning that ’09 is year forty for us. Within the next 365 days, all of us (hopefully) will turn the big 40. One of my former classmates has called this her “40 f-its.” Meaning that when she turns forty this year, she’s just going to say “f-it” to anything that she would normally kvetch or worry about. Another recently listing forty as her “new twenty-one.” Some in the press have been calling 50 the new forty and 40 the new thirty.