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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Monthly Archives: October 2009

Imagine That

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

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Over the years, I’ve often wondered what it would’ve been like if I’d grown up in a different time and place. How I’d sound speaking Russian or Swahili (I do have some idea about Swahili — not that great!). Whether I’d been born as a peasant or into a nobleman’s household. Whether I would’ve displayed the same intelligent, the same tenacity that I’ve learned to tap into over the past four decades. As a person who spends a significant amount of time in self-reflection and as an historian, it’s truly an interesting exercise.

But it’s much more interesting to do it as a world historian than an American or African American one. In the other two cases, imagining myself in eighteenth or nineteenth-century America around folks like Thomas Jefferson, Horace Greeley or Teddy Roosevelt leads only to one conclusion. That I would’ve heard the N-word over and over and over again, as if it were my real first name. Even if I’d somehow pulled off in W.E.B. Du Bois’ time what I’ve done up until now, the best case scenario for my life would be working as a professor at Howard or Morehouse, or teaching history in the segregated DC or Baltimore Public Schools. This wasn’t insignificant for elite, educated Blacks in early twentieth-century America. But it’s still a limited set of options in a world where race and class mattered every moment of every day.

This would explain why so many Black intellectuals became American expatriates over the past one hundred or so years. From Josephine Baker to Du Bois and James Baldwin, often the best place to live for talented folks of color in an American context has been outside of the US. American citizenship does have its privileges, ironically, if one lives away from the great beacon of democracy.

So it’s easier for me to think about what it would be like to live my life in a world context, like say, in Roman times, during the time of the Arab Caliphates, or in modern-day China. To think that I’d dream continually in another language or languages. Or that the people I’d meet would likely be less selfish and narcissistic (or more so) than the ones I’ve met over the years. To see myself as an expert in Roman, Arab, or Chinese history than in American history. To write stories of love and loss, triumph and tragedy with a different cultural and philosophical lens than the one I have now. The possibilities would be more than I could comprehend.

But then reality sets in. As an historian, I realize the one simple truth of human history. For most of it, about nine out of ten modern humans have held one occupation: peasant. Even people with great intellectual potential tended to lead simple, if difficult, lives. Farming for basic sustenance. Even in the great civilizations of China, India, Mesopotamia, Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Rome, and West Africa, this has been the case. Still, a simple village life of family, love, farming and religion would seem like a blessing compared to the great complexities that I deal with every day.

Or, of course, I could’ve found myself in someone’s military, a harsh existence under the best and most victorious of circumstances. One billion modern humans have died as a result of war since 10,000 BCE, and serving as a soldier, even when well-trained, pretty much guaranteed injury or death. Still, it might’ve been cool if I’d been a ranking soldier among the Mongols or Arab Muslim armies. Not so much, though, to be part of a Roman or Greece city-state army.

Given my spiritual, philosophical and religious struggles, I may have well ended up in a priesthood or its equivalent in different times, both an intellectually and politically powerful position in many a civilization. A Brahman in India, the Mandarin class in Han China, a Jesuit in France, all intriguing possibilities when most people in the world weren’t able to read or write. In other settings, though, castration to become a eunuch in some imperial court would’ve been involved, not something I’m interested in at forty. It’s painful to just think about.

So it’s interesting to look at our times to consider what is and isn’t possible. With White women (despite this week’s Time Magazine cover on the “American Women”, not to mention Gail Collins’ latest book), some Black and Latino women, and individuals like President Obama breaking through the barriers of race, gender, class and religion, I guess we can imagine ourselves into a reality that most would think impossible. On the other hand, as a historian, I also recognize that people, even friends and loved ones, might fight us every single step of the way, and then continue the fight once reality and imagination become one in our lives.

Maybe that’s why so many of us see Obama as great or as the anti-Christ. It certainly explains why we treat our leaders — however flawed — like crap in their years, days and hours before their tragic deaths. Like Gandhi, JFK, MLK, Abraham Lincoln. Or, for that matter, like Joan of Arc, Confucius or Jesus of Nazareth himself. Maybe that’s because those living symbols of making the impossible possible strained the imaginations of so many. To the point where there was a collective break with the imagined or real as a result. Unfortunately, history shows how unimaginative most of us are.

Dear Mama (More Like, “Dear Mom”)

26 Monday Oct 2009

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Forgiveness, quiet as it’s kept, is for the forgiver, not for the forgiven. Forgiveness enables us to move on with and enjoy our lives in ways that we otherwise couldn’t. It keeps us sane, ready to receive love and forgiveness from others, even when we think that we don’t deserve it. Forgiveness allows us to appreciate the good in people, not to mention the good in ourselves. Still, it’s something that we have to do regularly, if not every day, than many a day. Especially when it comes to family.

My mother turns sixty-two on Wednesday. And I love her very much. But over the years, I’ve learned about my mother past, ticks and behaviors that have convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should’ve never given birth to any of us. Of all of the parents I’ve ever met or known, few have been more unhappy or miserable as my mother. That fact and two abysmal marriages have left her in some state of depression for the better part of the past three decades. She often said, “I like children when they’re [between] babies and two . . . it’s all downhill from there” while I was growing up, a sign that becoming the eventual mother of six children was perhaps not the best life choice.

For me, what made statements like that worse was when I learned that my mother grew up as the oldest of twelve — yes, twelve — siblings in the Red River valley area of southwest Arkansas, in a town called Bradley, just five miles from the Louisiana border. Growing up as the child of tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South in the ’50s was hardly easy. Especially with cotton on the decline as a commodity. The poverty that my mother grew up with was balanced by the reality that poverty was all around, especially if you were Black. After all of that, and then finding the opportunity to move to New York with one of her cousins in the summer of ’66, why would my mother fling herself into the heartache of marriage and kids that became her life in Mount Vernon starting at the end of ’67?

She must’ve asked herself the same question some sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded (even though he wasn’t), a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The “I love you, Donald” faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

It would be awful enough if I could say with certainty that our hellish lives occurred because my mother made awful decisions. But the reality was, my mother often made no decisions at all. That allowed people in her life who had no interest in her interests to make decisions for her. Like when my two-sheets-to-the-wind father took my older brother Darren to Clearview in ’74 and forced him into the battery of tests that would determine that his severe shyness was really mental retardation, even though Darren had taught himself and me to read. She allowed him to go to school there for six years before she made any attempt to remove him, and by then, it was way too late.

Or when she took her spiritual confusion and channeled it into becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in order to hang on to her dead-beat, no-account second husband, dragging Darren and me into it in the process. Or when my mother just kept going to work at Mount Vernon Hospital in the summer of ’82, even when her friends and co-workers begged her to take part. Her non-decisions, as it turned out, were really decisions of the worst sort, the path-of-least-resistance type of decisions. Ones that didn’t require much forethought, self-reflection, assistance from others, or wisdom.

These things take their toll, and they did for my mother and for the rest of us. By the time I moved from Pittsburgh to the DC area in ’99, I had tired of listening to my mother’s weekly gripes about “the kids,” my four younger siblings from her second marriage. She’d been calling them “Judah babies” for nearly a decade by then. It referred to my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name, Judah ben Israel, and the fact that she saw them as burdens that God had given her, because “no one else would want them.”

I had been a mama’s boy for years, first by nature and because I’d been the younger brother for nearly a decade. Then by virtue of witnessing the full rage that my stepfather vented upon my mother on Memorial Day ’82. For years, I saw it as my duty to help her and my younger siblings survive those terrible, terrible days. But after ten years of higher education, academia, and finding myself, I no longer had the energy to provide the optimism and sense of success that my mother drew out of me time and time again.

Once I did my version of a family intervention in ’02, confronting my mother and younger siblings with this and much more than I could mention here, I knew that my relationship with my mother would stayed strained, maybe for good. The fact was, I was never so mad or resentful that I had stopped loving her. I decided long before ’02 to forgive, because I couldn’t have met anyone, much less gotten married or become a father, walking around with the kind of hatred a person could generate from learning so many horrible things about his family or mother. Yet I also understood that if my siblings were to ever leave 616, or Mount Vernon, or learn to see a world beyond their narrow version of it, I needed to perform a version of seppuku. I had to end my mixed friendship, boyfriend-girlfriend, husband/father-wife relationship with my mother. Just so that I could be her adult son, period.

That’s been tough, so tough, over the past eight years. Even now, I know that I can’t have a conversation with my mother about work, writing, teaching, finances or family without inviting stories about how “them Spanish people” took some job away from her or about how “fags are ruinin‘” this country. I stick to basic family stuff, nothing more, nothing less. I do love her, very, very much. I just hope that she can find her out of her own misery and enjoy life before there’s no more life left for her to enjoy.

The Living Years

24 Saturday Oct 2009

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Of all the songs I listened to back in ’89, few made me think more about my future than Mike + The Mechanics’ “The Living Years.” It’s not a great song, not one that I’d recommend everyone I know to listen to. But it’s a contemplative piece, one that I’ve thought about off and on over the past two decades as my relationship with my father has improved, while the one with my mother has declined and remains somewhat strained. Luckily, both have spent time with my son Noah over the past six years.

I used to think that I didn’t have any regrets, that I maxed out my life as best I could so that there wouldn’t be anything to regret as I’ve grown older. Although that’s mostly true, it’s not, not in total. My deepest regret is that I didn’t have the courage to stand up for myself and my mother all those years ago. If I had not worn my kufi to my first day of seventh grade, at least made a move for my crush #1, and called the police on my idiot ex-stepfather, maybe so many other things it took me between the ages of twelve and twenty-four to figure out would’ve happened much, much sooner. Maybe I would’ve written Boy @ The Window in the ’90s instead of the ’00s. Maybe, just maybe, I would’ve earned a different set of degrees and be well on my way as the writer and author I still aspire to be.
But despite those regrets, at least by the time I first heard Mike + The Mechanics’ “Living Years,” I had found enough of myself to think about whom I wanted to be and how to get there. It was my junior year at Pitt, and my first full year without the personification of my abuse living at 616 anymore. It was a time of dates and new friendships, of thinking about the prospect of graduate school. It was, even with the stress of third-semester calculus, multiple integrals and differential equations, a fun time for me. 
It was also a time of learning how to see myself for whom I was at that moment and not the person I felt I needed to be for most of the ’80s. I wasn’t just some skinny kid who was scared to have sex because I didn’t want anyone to get pregnant or someone whose sole purpose in life was to be there for his mother and for his four younger siblings. I was also a six-foot, nearly two-inch tall Black male who was a student and wanted more out of life than just striving for an emotional break from my past or for a 4.0 average for one semester.
So I did something that I hadn’t done in nearly four years. I started writing down my experiences from those most traumatic of days. My mother being beaten up in front of me. My running away from 616 and spending the night sleeping at Mount Vernon High School. My experiences in Humanities and with my former classmates. I hadn’t seen myself as a writer in years by then. Yet here I was, writing down my experiences, conversation for conversation, and almost word for for.
I had kept journals before, when I was eleven and twelve, before the crushing burdens of life and a horrible marriage had pushed writing — and reading — out of my mind. I tried at fifteen — in the summer of ’85 — to write down my account of what happened to my mother on Memorial Day ’82. I got just far enough not to start crying. I shut it down, deciding that August ’85 wasn’t the right time to write about such things. 
But after my mother and my stepfather split in June ’89, all I could think of doing was to write. I wanted to write a book about my mother’s experiences on welfare and in welfare offices. I wanted to interview case workers and case managers, to learn about their experiences with their clients, to understand what made them as calloused as an iron worker’s hands. I wanted to write about my academic success, to understand what made me tick. I wanted to see a real history of race and poverty, education and educational politics written from the perspective of someone who lived with the sights, sounds and smells of inequality every day. 
Still, I had some more growing to do. With the earthquake in the Bay Area in mid-October, I found myself re-evaluating everything and everyone who had been in my life for the previous eight years. Should I continue to communicate with classmates whom still barely saw me as an acquaintance, much less a friend? Did I still like watching baseball, or was I watching it out of habit? How do I support my mother and younger siblings now that the biggest threat to their future has moved on without them? Was I free now to make up my own mind about my future, my life, my calling without fear or without concern for anyone other than myself? Some of these questions took a few months to answers. Others would take years. But for me, these were truly the beginning of my living years, where the specter of danger and death no longer seemed so real in my life.

The Wannabe Set

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

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I’m sure that many of you have noticed a recent slowdown in my posts over the past two weeks. I’ve been busy with other writing projects, attempting to keep my fledgling writing process going, for Boy @ The Window and writings related to it. I’ve also been catching up on my TV entertainment. Thank goodness for the power of Netflix. I’ve been catching up on Ugly Betty of late, finding it a stomach-churning show to watch in the process. I guess naivete does have its advantages.

Something else caught my eye while watching America Ferrara’s character go through life like Edith Bunker from All In The Family, only as a working woman in the fashion industry. It was an episode I’d seen a few times. One in which workers fought over $4,500 Gucci bags and $1,500 shoes. It made me think. Who, really, has the cash or credit on hand to buy such things? Even if I took my debt down to zero, I maybe, just maybe, could buy the shoes outright. The Gucci bag, I’d have to buy through a layaway plan.
It allowed me to realize why the impending recovery, if it goes as planned, will hardly lift most boats, forget about all of them. We as a society have allowed ourselves to become wannabes. We might not all want a $4,500 Gucci bag. For some of us, it’s a $750,000 home, or a $120,000 Mercedes, or a $3,000 refrigerator. We want these things, but the vast majority of us have hardly the money necessary to buy them outright. So this recovery, like everything else in our nation, is borrowing-based. We may be out of a recession by the spring of ’10, but we won’t be out of the woods.
You see, we’ve made the decision as a culture that the American Dream is really about being rich. Period. It’s not about just having a home or paying off the mortgage or having enough left over to send our kids to college. It’s about the here and now. It’s about buying the next iPhone or the next new, hip product before anyone else can get their greedy paws on it. It’s all about ourselves and our immediate material needs.
So even though it’s really only the folks in the top three percent of income (roughly over $500,000 a year) who could possibly afford all the stuff that can be bought in our world, many of the rest us attempt to live that way as well. The next 80 percent of us aspire to live like we’re neurosurgeons and professional athletes, corporate lawyers and investment bankers. Perhaps that’s why so many of us were so upset when the stock market collapsed and the banks started failing last fall. Maybe that’s why we became enraged when the federal government bailed out so many of them. We saw this not as a stop-gap measure to prevent a twenty-first-century global depression. Instead, we saw these changes as preventing us from pretending that we all can be rich.
We, of course, pretend through debt. We’ve been borrowing our way into the middle class since the ’70s, and increasingly so in the past fifteen years. It’s no accident that even those of us making more than $100,000 a year have as much as six times that amount hanging over us as debt. Our natural instinct has become one of selfishness and narcissism. We don’t see the point of taxes, of having a social safety net, of helping others outside of prayer and giving through a religious institution. We see government as the enemy because, quite frankly, it has positioned itself to be the enemy. We assume that everyone else is doing well or better than us because we all want the brass ring.
What’s worse is that we not only don’t want to help others and denigrate the poorest twenty percent in our country by blaming them for our own ills and mistakes. We don’t even want to help ourselves. So many are opposed to education reform, to longer school days and universal postsecondary education that it would make you think that no one in this country wants an education that prepares them for the future. We want to eradicate climate change while we find all remaining sources of oil. We prefer universal health insurance to universal healthcare. Our priorities are so screwed up that we still think college is only for nerds, and that an online four-year degree is the equivalent to a face-to-face experience for the working adult learner.
It’s a sad situation. Because if or when the bottom does fall out of our economy, it will make the past two years look like a speed bump by comparison. So many of us don’t have the skill sets, degrees, or intrinsic tools we need — like the ability to think independently of an ideology, our media, or other people in leadership position — to weather a storm of those proportions. Heck, even those of us with the necessary sets of skills, education and experiences might well go under. As someone who is also guilty of being in the wannabe set, I remain positive about my future and my families future. But I also know it can no longer be based on my borrowing power, but rather, my saving power.

New York, New York

17 Saturday Oct 2009

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Today is the fortieth anniversary of the New York Mets winning their first World Series. They took out the powerhouse Baltimore Orioles of Palmer and McNally in five games. Even as an ex-baseball fan who didn’t actually watch the series, I know the story all too well. My mother spent my baseball-crazed teenage years telling me the story of the Miracle Mets of ’69 over and over again. Cleon Jones wasn’t an unsung hero in our chaotic corner of the world!

Those were the years I began to get to know the city immediately south of Mount Vernon. Especially Manhattan. Between hunting down my father Jimme almost every weekend between the end of ’82 and the summer of ’87 at watering holes in the Bronx and in Midtown Manhattan in order to buy clothes, buy books, wash clothes and eat. And working for Jimme in spurts in the fall of ’84 and the summer of ’85. It was an interesting time working and milling about in what I’d eventually nickname the “Third Armpit of Hell.”

It was the Koch years, of graffiti and dangerous Subway rides, with puddles of piss on the floor and people dressed for a Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force) video. There were plenty of weekends I looked forward to that kind of disarray. It easily beat the hum-drum of watching after four younger siblings, avoiding my idiot stepfather and a town with all of the excitement a bedroom suburb in search of an identity could muster on a Friday evening or late Saturday morning.

I didn’t come to fully understand the gnawing sensation I’d feel when walking through the diverse socioeconomic and ethnic sections of Mount Vernon until I started working for my father in September ’84. Jimme thought it’d be better for us to work for his money rather than us just coming over every week to get a few dollars. So off and on during that fall, Darren and me spent part of our weekends working for Jimme on various cleaning jobs on the Upper East Side going into Spanish Harlem, or on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center and the West 72nd Street Subway station.

Whenever anyone asked me what Jimme did, I usually said, “Oh, my dad’s a carpet cleaner.” I didn’t see him as a simple janitor, although it was true that he cleaned stuff. But Jimme didn’t clean toilets or latrines or bathroom sinks and tubs. He cleaned the floors of office buildings — carpeted, wooden, or otherwise — thoroughly treating any surface he encountered with industrial cleaning machines. He cleaned high-rise co-ops and condos where the mortgage or rent payment per month was more than our rent at 616 for a year. It was an important job in his eyes, and I wasn’t going to diminish it because other folks couldn’t understand or wouldn’t have a clue as to the amount of labor involved in Jimme’s work.

I didn’t have much of an idea until I started working for him. Spending a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday morning working with Jimme was no easy task. We’d have to walk over to Jimme’s — or catch the 7 and get off in downtown Mount Vernon and then walk over — and get him, then get on the 2 at East 241st and get off at 72nd Street. If we were lucky Jimme might’ve had the cleaning machines at home with him and would take them on the Subway to the job. If we weren’t, we’d have to walk over to Jimme’s job at 20 East 64th to get them, all the while dealing with the mafioso-like Levi brothers Glen and Bruce (pronounced Lee-vy, not like the Levi’s Jeans). They often treated us like we had severe mental retardation.

The work was hot, hard, and boring, and with my imagination, I’d sometimes forgot that I was buffing a floor, drawing anger from Jimme. “Bo’, don’ be messin’ around with them machines,” Jimme would say. Sometimes he would mumble in anger, so much so that I thought that we were about to fight. So one thing we did to help us pass the time was to buy a standard AM/FM radio with an antenna. It kept us from getting lost in thought. This was the way I could keep up with music, with my Mets, Giants, Knicks, and Rangers, and pass the time while concentrating on the work.

Jimme decided after a couple of weeks to treat us by taking us to a Mets game. Not only was this our first time at Shea. It was the first time we’d been to any sporting event, unless you count the Ice Capades with ’76 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill at Madison Square Garden in March ’78 as one. It was a Tuesday night game near mid-September, the Mets desperately trying to catch up with the Cubs and first place in the division. It didn’t happen that cold night, as it dropped into the thirties. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals 9-5. Keith Hernandez and George Foster hit home runs, and Darryl Strawberry got one little hit. We left after the Cardinals rallied late in the game, playing the role of spoiler and keeping a permanent underdog team like the Mets from making the postseason. As disappointed as I was, it was a wonderful experience going to see a game in person for the first time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that today also marks the fortieth birthday of my crush #2. It’s significant only in the sense that it reminds me that my perceptions of where I’ve lived and of my times has been shaped as much by the personalities that have populated my life as it has been by geography and circumstance. Seasons do change, crushes go away, and sports that were once faves become distant memories. But the fact that I got to see more than one side of New York and Mount Vernon has helped me understand more about the inevitability of change than I otherwise would’ve if my world had been limited to 616 and my family.

Born In The U.S.A.

08 Thursday Oct 2009

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"Born In The U.S.A.", American Politics, Bruce Springsteen, Economic Inequality, Oligarchy, Poverty, Power of Music, Racism, Social Change, Social Justice


What does it say about a nation or society when a quarter century can go by and the same issues that were front and center then are ones that vex us now? What does it say about us when our standard operating procedure is to avert our eyes to problems that we know must be fixed yesterday? How should we see ourselves if the arguments of our grandparents and parents become our own, especially as we tidy them up for our children and our eventual grandchildren?

If I were Bruce Springsteen (and the E Street Band, for that matter), I might be a bit pessimistic right now. It’s been twenty five years since his groundbreaking single and album made him a household — and not just a New York tri-state area — name. All of his work prior to the summer and fall of ’84 contained threads of social commentary on America’s malaise. But Born In the U.S.A. and “Born In The U.S.A.” raised his level of folksy commentary to a new level, at least for those of us who weren’t listening to Nebraska or who hadn’t heard of the band or Springsteen before.

It was such a simple song. And yet it expressed all of the disappointment, disillusionment and disgust of a generation of folks who grew up seeing America one way. Only to find out that the promise of America the Beautiful and free that they were fed growing up was really somewhere between porridge and gruel. “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground” is such a bitter, yet appropriate way to start a song about a Vietnam veteran whose life never worked out the way it was supposed to. Work hard, do the patriotic thing, and expect to have a job and a comfortable life, if not a happy and prosperous one was the expectation of most Americans. Not poverty, debt, welfare, homelessness, drug addiction, undereducation, unemployment and incarceration.

I became a closet Bruce Springsteen fan because of “Born In The U.S.A.” With my mother out of work and on welfare, my father in the middle of his third decade of alcohol abuse, a stepfather with the familial skills of Charles Manson, I could relate to all of the rage and confusion in the song. It was a refreshing change from the coke-induced pop, R&B and rap of the period. The mid-80s were so weird. Between Springsteen and the E Street Band, John Mellencamp and U2, you had Thompson Twins, Doug E. Fresh, Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” and “I Would Die 4 U,” and battles over who was the real Roxanne. At least some artists were awake and aware enough to write something for those of us whose lives weren’t exactly a Benetton commercial.

Here we are, a quarter-century later, and nothing really has changed. The highly educated have at least something to fall back on, while those of us with a high school diploma or less face a permanently uncertain future. The rich, while not getting as rich as they were just two years ago, remain far richer than those of us working hard but not getting anywhere. We are still fighting wars with little long-term purpose and without sufficient benefits to those who are fighting on our government’s behalf. Our government continues to drag its feet on anything that would benefit anyone with an income under $200,000 a year.

It’s no wonder that somewhere between two and three million Americans are in jail or prison, that three out of ten of us never graduate from high school, and that the richest one percent of Americans have a net worth greater than the bottom 80 percent of us. It’s such a shame that it could render all of us helpless. I, for one, may need to consider refugee status in a nation with even a modicum of universal health care and moderately less hypocrisy in its government.

But Bruce Springsteen hasn’t given up, at least in his music. His work continues to speak truth to power, to say things that most in the music world don’t have the courage or the innate wisdom to say. It’s unfortunate that what sells today is the bling of booty and booty, and not the thought-provoking lyrics and feelings of folks like Springsteen, of artists like Chuck D and Tupac, of those who dare to use music as a weapon of social change (although Pink, John Mayer and James Blunt are occasional exceptions).

With the end of a disappointing first decade of the twenty-first century looming though, maybe we can still hold out hope for a more permanent nexus between our wild world of pop culture and our need for a stimulated social consciousness. That kind of hope is what keeps me going.

A Tale of Two Letters

05 Monday Oct 2009

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I know, I know. Why do I remember things that most of us dutifully forget? How come I discuss details that so many prefer to and do commit to the memory deletion bin? These are good questions, often ones I ask of myself regularly. The answer is, I just do, I just do.

Such is the case with my applications for college some twenty-three years ago, the wonderful fall of ’86. I’ve already commented on my wonderful relations with Sylvia Fasulo, my chain-smoking guidance counselor from my MVHS years. But I neglected to discuss what it was like to get letters of recommendation from my MVHS teachers. Because I trusted almost no one in authority, I ended up with only two letters of recommendation, one out of this world, one the equivalent of used toilet paper. For those of you who either are applying to college this year or are parents whose kids are applying to college this year, here’s a lesson in critical discernment.

Of all the former teachers I decided to ask for a letter of recommendation from, I went to Andy Butler. My Pre-Calc (or Higher Math) class the year before might as well have been a study hall with function formulas. Around the end of October ’85, I began to notice what I thought was a strange everyday occurrence. Andy Butler brought a can of the new Diet Coke to class every morning without fail. We met for class during third or fourth period, around eleven o’clock. Well, he never seemed like he was awake considering he was drinking Diet Coke in front of us at a particularly high energy point of the day. The other thing I noticed was that his can seemed to have the same dents in it day after day.

I spent about a week in Butler’s class just figuring out the dents in his can. If his can had been a map, the dents would’ve been in the southeast corner, down and to the right of the red-brown Diet Coke logo (in the white area) and just above the aluminum gray bottom. When I mentioned what I’d seen to the seniors in my class, Adam, Anthony and Richard all thought that I was crazy at first. By mid-November, though, we’d figured out the dents and the truth.

On one of my after-school runs to C-Town in Pelham I stopped at the deli down the street from 616. Butler was there buying three cases of beer for home. It was about 4:30, just ninety minutes after school had ended, and it wasn’t even Friday.

“I’m going through a rough divorce,” he said, before I could say anything. As if I really wanted to know. “I’m sorry,” I said.

As far as my nose was concerned, Butler was getting refills. I’d solved the mystery, which included Butler’s long disappearances from class for no apparent reason.

This is the teacher whom I asked to write one of the most important letters in my then young life. What the inebriated Butler wrote was eighty-four words of qualified support of my pursuit of postsecondary education. I was “a good student” when I “worked hard,” but I could also become “distracted sometimes.”

Not that I felt I had other places to turn, but there were other and better possibilities. I just didn’t allow myself to realize it at the time. I knew I probably should’ve asked someone else — almost anyone else — for a letter. Cuglietto, Flanagan and Warns may well have been better choices. Even some of my senior-year teachers would’ve done better by me. I just didn’t trust anyone who practiced “tough love” like Cuglietto, put on airs like Flanagan, or compared me to Sam or any other student like Warns did. So I went with Butler’s lousy letter, figuring that Meltzer’s would at least tip the balance.

I didn’t get much help from my teachers other than Meltzer. And Meltzer did help out in numerous ways. He helped me get over some of my embarrassment as I wrote my college essays about my life as the adult teenager at 616. I needed to write this type of essay, since I had some explaining to do about my lack of extracurricular activities. Meltzer helped me interpret the multi-page green-and-white financial sheet that I picked up from the local welfare office outlining my mother’s income between ’83 and ’86, figuring out that my mother’s average income was $16,600 per year as a welfare recipient.

He also set up an interview with a Columbia University alum living in the Wykagyl section of New Rochelle, a rich neighborhood full of small mansions and near a professional-level golf course and country club. The pompous fool seemed as interested in intimidating me with his soliloquy about Columbia’s great traditions as he was in helping me get in. He never asked why someone like me would want to attend. I guess he thought that of course this Black boy would want to go to an Ivy League school like Columbia. “Why do I have to go through this to get into college?,” I thought. I tried to not hold it against Meltzer that I had to witness opulence and arrogance in my college quest.

What Meltzer did that probably helped me most was to bolster my confidence in the college application process. His letter of recommendation was six pages of unrestrained praise. He used so many superlatives to describe my academic success and college potential that I thought that I was the great Dwight Gooden by the time I finished reading it. I was “a great kid,” a “diamond in the rough,” hard-working,” a “critical thinker,” the “best student [he] ever had,” an “intellectual,” smart “beyond belief,” and, well, you get the picture. It made me laugh and blush over and over again after I first read it. I said to Meltzer the next day in the Social Studies Department’s faculty lounge, that “you know more about me than I know about myself.” He just laughed and laughed about that.

It did all work out. Meltzer’s letter — more like a six-page paper on every positive quality I had at the time — more than made up for my lackluster letter from Butler. I should’ve been wise enough to get two letters like Meltzer’s instead of the one. But then again, given where I went to school, I’m not completely sure I had a better alternative.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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