Monthly Archives: July 2010

Crush #1 and Other Bedtime Stories

10 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Sports, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Noah Sleeping, September 2009

For about the past year and a half, me and my wife have spent some of our time at the end of the day with our son Noah telling him bedtime stories. Actually, it’s been mostly me, since my wife doesn’t like making up stuff. At first, it was just about every night, with me telling Noah true stories about family, friends, former classmates and my school experiences.

I’d often put Noah in those stories, especially the ones I knew he’d laugh at. Like the science teacher who came in one day smelling like a skunk had sprayed him because a skunk actually did. Or the story about my second day of high school, where I had to fight a class hipster because he thought that I was a wimpy push-over.

With me injecting Noah into these stories — usually as the character Ben 10 turning into Big Chill or Humongousaur — I realized I had to embellish a bit, making some of my real-life encounters less like real-life. I told stories about my father where I changed almost all of the wording because the real stories involved more profanity and bigotry than a five or six-year-old should ever have to hear. I’d leave out parts of stories about how mean some of my classmates or teachers were just to make sure Noah was ready to go to sleep happy and without asking me a lot of questions about my past.

About six months ago, I started making up stories, about eighty-five percent fictional in nature. The names

Noah in Snowaggedon (on balcony), February 2010

and places remained the same, but the incidences and their improbable outcomes didn’t. I figured out that Noah mostly enjoyed a few choice characters: a fictionalized ’80s version of my father, a singing, wise-cracking fictional classmate, a super-smart classmate who’d get a case of the “ums” and “uhs” under duress, a friend from my elementary school days who’d fart when under pressure, and an even more tomboyish version of my Crush #1. Noah has since asked for those characters in my stories over and over again.

He’s also asked a lot of questions about my real-life classmates, teachers and family. Like, “Did you really have a classmate who sings ‘Roxanne’ all the time?” Or “Did [your friend] really fart all the time?” “Are you still friends with [super-smart boy]?” So I pulled out the MVHS Class of ’87 yearbook that I had borrowed from a former classmate when revising drafts of Boy @ The Window to show Noah pictures of them so that he could see that these weren’t the larger-than-life, made-up characters I used in my bedtime stories. Not to mention using the power of Facebook to bring home that fact as well.

This past week, Noah’s asked a few more questions. “Do you still like [Crush #1] a lot?,” Noah asked me a couple of days ago. “I still like her, but not the way I liked her when I was twelve,” I said in response, kind of shocked that he asked me that question out of the blue. I then thought for a moment, “Maybe I should keep the twelve-year-old in me to myself until he’s older.”

Noah Salutes

Then I realized. I have to tell Noah these stories. At the very least, it’ll help him not make the same mistakes I made growing up. That way, he won’t have to spend most of his time growing up without good friends, without an eleven-year gap between kisses, with mostly stories that would make most six-year-olds cry. Or, at the least, sad. He can read all about it when he’s older and Boy @ The Window’s published.

Working for My Father

08 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Work

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Me and My Father, August 2007

The first job outside of 616 I ever had was working for my father Jimme. Off and on from September ’84 through the early part of July ’85, me and my older brother Darren schlepped our way between 616, Jimme’s place on South 10th Avenue, the 2 Subway and the Upper West and Upper East Side. We cleaned high-rise offices, high-rise condos, and high-rise co-ops in the process. The last of those jobs was twenty-five years ago this week. This was Jimme’s way of making us earn the money he’d been giving us (really me) since the end of ’82.

Whenever anyone asked me what Jimme did — which was really rare — 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.

155 West 68th - One of Many Cleaning Jobs in '84 and '85

I didn’t have much of an idea beyond seeing him mop a floor at Salesian High School until I started working for him on a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday morning. This wasn’t an easy task. We saw Jimme almost everyday for the first three weeks of the summer of ’85, cleaning the carpets and floors of one high-rise after another on the Upper West Side, especially between 67th and 72nd near Broadway. We did mostly night work, in office buildings and in condos. We also had a couple of stints on the Upper East Side around 86th. We carted the industrial carpet cleaning and floor equipment for stripping, buffing, and waxing on the 2, 5, and 6 trains at three in the morning.

Jimme didn’t drink much during these weeks of withering toil and sweat. He was constantly irritated with us, though. “Got no reason to be tired, bo’,” he’d say. “Hurry up an’ dump out that water!,” Jimme would yell. And with a killer’s cold, strangled look, he’d say to us, “I dun told you how to do dis shit right, now I got to do it my gotdamn self!”

It was fascinating seeing Jimme work and work us as hard as he did. Darren didn’t complain much, but then again, he didn’t do much work either. It was up to me and Jimme, and with my dad in a perpetual state of irritation, I was getting pissed too.

“I feel sorry for the people who work for you during the day! I hope I never have to work for you again!,” I yelled over the roaring machines on several occasions.

“Shut up ya faggat!,” Jimme would yell back. Or he’d just mutter in anger, and look at me as if he were ready to stab me in the neck.

In some of the condos we’d clean, Jimme would help himself to whatever he thought wouldn’t be missed — sport coats, shoes and socks mostly. Sometimes we’d take breaks to go to this Jewish deli that used to be on 65th and Broadway/Columbus, across from the Lincoln Center. They made turkey, hot pastrami and corned beef sandwiches stuffed with meat and loaded with every ingredient you could think of — all for five dollars. That, a bag of Doritos, their blondie desserts and a sixteen-ounce carton of Hershey’s chocolate milk made the torture of working for my dad during his brief period of sobriety more bearable. Otherwise we’d tune the radio we had with us to the Mets game while we were working, broadcast by WHN, an AM country oldies station (as in ’40s and ’50s oldies) that was obviously on its last legs.

We’d work these high-rises at night, sleep during only part of the day, with siblings Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri at home, after all, and catch the Subway for another night of work. Until the week after the fourth of July. Jimme decided that it was now all right to have some of his Miller Beer “pep up” while we were working. Besides the usual “I make fitty million dollas a week” and “I buy an’ sell muddafuccas,” Jimme decided that a Subway car was a good place to relieve himself at two in the morning one night.

The lack of sleep, my dad’s crankiness, and now his verbal abuse and drinking while working had all caught up with me. After that week, I quit. I told Jimme, “I’m not doing this anymore. You’ll have to find someone else to drink with.” Those were good times, good times. At least when compared to living at 616.

Un-Father Figure

06 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,


Random Suge Knight Mugshot (closest I could find to what my stepfather looked like in '82)

Recently, a fellow writer — and poet — Abdul Ali, put together a series of posts with other writers regarding their experiences with their fathers or father figures. I thought about contributing to his efforts, but I couldn’t. I could’ve easily told any number of stories about being the father of Noah Michael Collins, my extraordinarily strong and sweet soon-to-be-seven year old. But I knew that I couldn’t tell that story in under 500 words. When it comes to growing up and helping others grow up, my life has been unduly complicated, bordering on suicidal misery. Especially in discussing fathers.

Today marks twenty-eight years since Maurice Washington whipped me like I was Kunta Kente for allowing myself to be mugged for $10 by Pookie at Wilson Woods Pool. That is, before I told him I hated him and was then nearly knocked unconscious and ended up with bruised ribs and a bloody lip. I’ve written about this before, in posts from July ’07, ’08, and ’09. That today’s date falls exactly on a Tuesday twenty-eight years later makes this a bit more unique.

No, today’s post has more to do with the motivations behind what happened twenty-eight years ago. You see, I learned later on that my stepfather was attempting to teach me a lesson in manhood by making a deal with the young wannabe thug Pookie to rob me. Part of the lesson was that I needed to defend myself against the world. The other part was that I should see Mr. Maurice as my one and only father, disregarding the fact that Jimme was alive, if not well, and still my father.

Even under the best light, the despicable act of putting a twelve-year-old at the early stages of puberty through some idiotic test of manhood was a form of psychological abuse so grave that this alone should’ve earned Maurice Washington a Joel Steinberg Award for the furthest thing away from a father. Otherwise, it was a cruel and calculated thing that my stepfather pulled, perhaps the worst thing he ever did to any of us. I wasn’t asking for a rite of passage, and even if I needed to pull my head out of books, was this the best way to do that?

I could think of a million more mean words to say about the bastard if I so chose. Only a sadistic sociopath could come up with a worse scenario for blaming the victim of a crime that he set up to happen and then punish the victim by perpetrating another crime. Yet, for a host of reasons, I can’t. I can’t allow myself the painful luxury of making this blog my version of revenge. And I can’t afford spend all of my time in righteous indignation mode.

Noah With One Of My Ties

I’ve often wondered whether it’s enough for me to take the 180-degree approach to discipline regarding Noah. That is, to mete out discipline — almost exclusively non-corporal in nature — tinged with grace and mercy, or to just take the path of my screaming with belt-in-hand mother and stepfather. I look at myself when I take Noah’s toys away, or deny him dessert or TV time, or send him to bed early. Those things actually hurt me when I do them, probably more than they do him. I feel for him, right in the pit of my stomach. That’s how I know that I’m nothing like the so-called father I had to live with at 616 for so many years.

Patriot Days

03 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Sports

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


Source: Donald Earl Collins, Fear of a "Black" America Cover

Few things are more annoying or more confusing than my understanding of patriotism and how others — mostly White — perceive my patriotism and the patriotism of people of color more broadly. It’s something that I’ve struggled to grasp for more than thirty years. For those of you whose patriotism is akin to breathing, that’s your prerogative. I’ve found that something like one’s love for their country, like one’s belief in God (or not), shouldn’t be one that comes without thought or without any doubts at all. For without giving it any serious or critical thought or without any questioning or lingering doubts, most American patriotism is like being a Yankees or a Lakers fan. Patriotism in that sense is simply rooting for a team that can do no wrong, one that is expected to win in any contest simply because that’s all they’ve ever done.

My sense of patriotism began in ’79, when I started to devour history books and volumes of World Book Encyclopedia. I wasn’t completely naive, because I had also read Lerone Bennett’s/Ebony’s three-volume Black America set while learning about World War II. But I did believe that America ultimately stood for goodness and prosperity, for freedom and democracy all over the world. I fervently saluted the flag at pledge of allegiance time in school in fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grade.

Snoopy & Charlie Brown. Source: Charles Schulz, Peanuts

At one point between fourth and sixth grade, I even created a pretend nation-state in our bedroom at 616, where I played out domestic and foreign policy issues through make-believe characters, from, of all things, the Peanuts comic strip. I saw the Cold War with the Soviet Union as one we absolutely had to win in order to keep the totalitarian communists at bay. Several of my Humanities classmates can attest to my defense of American foreign policy as late as ninth grade.

But even as I generally saw the US as the country the Scholastic Weekly Reader described it to be, I had my doubts as to America the always right and beautiful. It started at the end of fifth grade, when I hit the chapter in our social studies book about how we ended World War II with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I hadn’t seen the mushroom cloud or the fire-bleached skulls before then. It scared me, but more importantly, it made me think about how cruel it was to wipe out a city the size of Mount Vernon but with three times as many people in the same space.

Then, with the Reagan Years and the almost complete refusal to acknowledge racism and poverty in the ’80s got me to the point where I refused to recite the pledge by my junior year of high school. One of the reasons I never saw the military as an option for escaping the abuse and poverty I’d grown up with was because I saw American foreign policy as one that was at least as imperialistic as that of the Soviets. Iran-Contra, Vietnam, El Salvador and Grenada were examples of us over-stepping our role as the leader of the free world.

It got worse for me before it got better. The Gulf War (’90-’91) and my growing knowledge of American history and atrocities at home and abroad made me feel as if this country was never meant for me, never meant to be mine.

Luckily I had other people from which to draw inspiration about how to approach a nation that generally takes people like me for granted, as if my life and death doesn’t matter at all. People as varied as Derrick Bell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison — not to mention my Army ROTC friends who served — served to inspire another sense of patriotism.

Their writings and speeches, their acts on behalf of civil rights, human rights and social justice did teach me two things. One, that even folks who serve in the military deserve credit for understanding that their projection of American power means little without clear objectives and a clear sense that this use of power is necessary, justifiable and can actually matter to and gain the support of the rest of the world. Two, that holding my country’s feet to the fire around racism, poverty, imperialism and other forms of injustice is a form of patriotism. Without the socially conscious, this country’s ideals, its flag and other symbols of power, are meaningless beyond the imperial. So, for better and for worse, happy birthday America.

The Last Airbender, or Shyamalan’s Cynical Egg?

01 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


I’ve been reading the reviews. On HuffingtonPost, by Roger Ebert, on Twitter and so on. I’ve been watching the previews since December. I’ve read all of the articles about casting and race (see my post “Racebending Avatar: The Last Airbender” from April 2009). As of midnight in New York and L.A., the movie has finally arrived. And for most fans of the greatest animation series ever, The Last Airbender‘s DOA, SOL, and FUBAR, all wrapped into one. M. Night Shyamalan, who hasn’t done a great film since Shyamalan and Mark Wahlberg, 2008. Licensed with Cc-by-sa-2.0Sixth Sense in ’99, should’ve used all six of his senses before agreeing to wield a cleaver to a show based on multicultural authenticity and a sense of humanity only matched by its revealing humor.

The truth is, this isn’t all Shyamalan’s fault. Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, sold their movie rights and creative direction for this movie so easily and cheaply. They may as well have been the McDonald brothers selling what’s now McDonald’s to Roy Kroc back in 1955. The producers of the film and Paramount Studios should be shot with a turkey for letting a live-action film based on an animated series — which almost never works out — make it to a CGI board, much less a screen.

But even with all of that, the picking of mostly White actors to play multiethnic roles was horrendous. The making up for this by making all of the actors playing Fire Nation characters — the bad guys — Maori and South Asian was another sign. Not at all dissimilar from the constant complaints about Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), the last of that long-running franchise. The special effects of fire and water-bending — not so special, in the words of Beavis and Butthead. And 3D effects? Huh? Really?

Avatar Aang, Back Turned. Screen Shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender

This shows how cynical the world that controls what we see and hear is. They think that the consuming public is so stupid, our kids so demanding, that they can serve us slop out of a garbage can with a fungus-covered plastic spoon, and then expect us to like it. It’s still a world in which our heroes and villains must look and act a certain way, our appreciation for anything not overtly American gets thrown out of a window, our need for the bombastic more important than our need for the authentic.

The real jaded-ness here, though, is that The Last Airbender wasn’t made with fans of the animated series in mind, the majority of whom are teenagers and adults. No, this movie was made for the five to ten-year-old set, the ones who may or may not have seen the Nicktoons replays of Avatar: The Last Airbender. But even the kids who have seen the series cannot appreciate the layers of complexity in the show, the richness of the characters, or the overall dialogue of the series. That’s what folks like Shyamalan are counting on.

My son was asking about The Last Airbender this morning, because he thinks that it’ll be like the animated series. Soon to be seven, Noah has a more thorough understanding of the series than most his age. But he doesn’t know how bad this movie is. If I’m pushed to or if he begs, I might take him, if only to show him how a good series can be turned into a horrible film. Then I’ll ask Shyamalan to give back his salary for making such schlock.