Monthly Archives: November 2011

Finding My Father for the First Time

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

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Noah meeting his grandpa for the first time, December 21, 2003. (Angelia N. Levy).

It’s a funny thing to realize that it’s only been about thirteen years since my relationship with my father Jimme became a father-son relationship. That I was a month away from turning twenty-nine before I could say that I’d had a conversation with my father that lasted for more than ten minutes, that didn’t revolve mostly around his job and how many “muddafuckas” he could “buy an’ sell.” That, finally, finally, at the age of fifty-eight, he’d admitted his failings as my father and to being an alcoholic.

The last time I had talked with Jimme before the ’98 holiday season was in the summer of ’96. He’d been living with his boss’ family, the Levi’s, on Long Island because his last drinking binge had led to his landlord Mrs. Small finally evicting him from his South 10th Avenue boarding room. Even though he was with the Levi family (for more on this, read my “New York, New York” post from October ’09), his bosses were about to go out of business. Turned out that one of the Levi brothers made the mistake of talking to an undercover federal agent about doing a contract killing on a competitor. Sounded like fiction at the time, but life is stranger than fiction.

In any case, on that last call, my father seemed lost. Not because he’d been drinking. But because he had nothing left in New York to cling to anymore. A few months later, my father, unemployed and no longer enabled by his former bosses, finally left New York for the family home in Georgia at the invitation of one of his sisters. By the end of ’97, I heard that he had cleaned up his act and moved to Jacksonville. Throughout ’98 and into ’99, I began to get calls from Jimme about how he was finally sober, had found God, and was getting married, to another woman named Mary.

Right after Thanksgiving ’98, though, was the first time I returned one of his calls, just to see if the number worked, to see if he was sane and sober. I wasn’t ready to talk, as I’d heard my father’s song and dance about turning his life around since The Brady Bunch was still on the air with new episodes. But, the fact that he sounded sober for the first time in at least fifteen years was an encouraging sign.

Still, I thought long and hard about blowing him off, keeping my father at the distance of a light-year. All my life, and certainly all of my older brother Darren’s, Jimme had been an evil drunk, verbally abusive and incapable of staying sober for more than three weeks at a time. But he had also been there for me growing up during my Humanities and Hebrew-Israelite years. He helped keep Darren and me from starving or walking around barefoot in ’82 and ’83. He kept the example of hard work in front of us even as the other parent figures in our lives went on dreaded welfare and laid around as if our lives were over. His money was the reason I was able to stay in school after five days of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt.

So I called him again, deciding to give him a second chance. That was February ’99, a two-hour conversation about how he managed to become a recovering alcoholic, a church-goer, and a married man. He admitted that he had made many mistakes, that he was an alcoholic, that he loved me and my brother. It was a conversation, a real conversation, an unbelievable change of relationship. After twenty-nine years and two months, I finally had a father that I really could call father.

Thirteen years later, and I’m still amazed that I’m able to talk to my father as my father, and not as the person I used to have to drag out of bars on 241st Street or in Midtown Manhattan growing up. I tracked Jimme down many times for money or to save him from himself between ’82 and ’93. And yet, I only found my father once he became so lost he had to leave New York to find himself for the first time.

“It Is Done” – 15 Years Later

21 Monday Nov 2011

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Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The next twenty-four hours will mark a decade and a half since my former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter wrote today’s title quote in a God-like-pronouncement of an email to me regarding my final content-based revisions to my doctoral thesis. With those revisions following my committee meetings in October, I was now officially Dr. Collins. I knew that. I just didn’t feel it.

Working on a book-length research project with an abusive advisor and disinterested committee members at a school as conservative and isolating as Carnegie Mellon University left me exhausted. For I never felt I could ever be all of myself there. I made myself into the scholar I hoped that I wouldn’t become. At least, the twenty-one version of me that began graduate school back in ’91 held that hope. Five years later, I felt alienated from my own purpose and calling, and was more than unsure about becoming a full-time professor and historian. Especially given the wonderful examples of scholarly inhumanity and hypocrisy that Trotter, Dan Resnick and so many others had proven themselves to be (see “You’re Not Ready” post from November ’08 and “And Now, A Plagiarism Moment” post from September ’10).

I was burned out. I felt numb, with a boiling mantle of rage underneath the surface. If Trotter had said the

Arching fountain of a Pahoehoe (like my post-PhD rage) approximately 10 m high issuing from the western end of the 0740 vents, a series of spatter cones 170 m long, south of Pu‘u Kahaualea, September 10, 2007. (USGS via Wikipedia). In public domain.

wrong thing to me at the wrong time in ’96, I probably would’ve laid him out with a right hook to the jaw. And Resnick’s lucky that I didn’t own a car, because I might’ve run him down with it.

As it was, when Trotter attempted to meet with me a few weeks later to discuss “my future,” I refused. Especially given his suggestions for job applications. One, a one-year position at a University of Nebraska branch campus. The other, a CUNY school in Queens with a proposed position that wouldn’t begin until July ’98. I told him, “You don’t get to determine my future, certainly not without me.”

What should’ve been a period of rest and repair between Thanksgiving Week ’96 and graduation day in May ’97 was hardly that at all. It took me, really and truly, six months to recover from the dissertation process, and probably close to two years to not pass by or go on Carnegie Mellon’s campus without wanting to strangle my dissertation committee with piano wire. By then, I’d moved on to the rather mundane task of figuring out how to cobble together a career that wasn’t dependent on a full-time faculty position in academia.

And over the past fifteen years, I have pieced together several careers. As a part-time college professor, as a nonprofit program officer and as a consultant. It helped to have people like the late Barbara Lazarus and my dear friend Cath Lugg in my corner in those first years after I’d finished my doctorate. It helped that I expanded my career options from merely pursuing a history professorship wherever Joe Trotter’s winds could’ve taken me.

But it helped, most of all, for me to start trusting my instincts, my own heart, again. The irony of my complete disillusionment at the end of my degree-earning journey was that it left me with the time to contemplate whom I thought I really was, what I really wanted to do in life, and how I wanted to do it.

It was far from an immediate process of epiphanies and revelation. It took me nearly six years after finishing my dissertation to see myself as a writer, cutting through twenty years of denial and abuse in the process. It took me a little longer to see myself as a writer first and foremost, with all of my other professional hats second, third, and so forth. To understand that mine was a concern far greater than multiculturalism in education. My role as a writer and educator was also about aspirations, academic pathways to success, racial and ethnic equity in education, access to and success in college.

Barbara Sizemore, 1927-2004, circa mid-1990s. (http://sesp.northwestern.edu).

Now, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t looked back to wonder what could’ve been. If I were a White male with my credentials, I’d long ago been doing what I’ve been fighting to do as a writer and educator for years. If my advisors had been someone like a Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates. Or if I had attended an Ivy League school in undergrad. Or if I’d earned a master’s degree in journalism or communications, or a doctorate in a school of education or in psychology.

The late Barbara Sizemore once warned me about earning my doctorate in history some two decades ago. “You always have to do things the hard way, don’t you?,” she said to me with disapproval when she learned of my acceptance into Pitt’s history PhD program. I should’ve said, “Yes, I do.” Because the last fifteen years have been a hard road, as all roads to enlightenment are.

Out of Touch, In A Bubble

18 Friday Nov 2011

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Bubbles in water, November 17, 2011. (http://crusaders.biz).

I have said in many a blog post over the past four years how narcissistic our people are in this age. But with the recent uncovering of the extinction-level-event involving a serial child rapist and the decades-long covering for Jerry Sandusky at Penn State University has come something somewhat more subtle. A number of journalists and commentators have discussed the “bubble” that has existed at Penn State for years, the one that allowed for a group of high level of administrators to cover up at least one crime.

But the bubble is much more than covering up or denying the existence of a pedophile on a university campus. It’s how Penn State’s leadership has dealt with the world inside and outside of central Pennsylvania. Their commitments of support for two administrators who perjured themselves about what they knew regarding Sandusky’s child rape activities on Penn State’s campus in ’02. Their surly answers and vague statements to the media about the status of coaches or the football team. The three days it took Penn State’s Board of Trustees to respond to the national media crush that came with Sandusky’s arrest and release of the attorney general’s grand jury report with a statement and the firing of the university president and Joe Paterno.

A Real Time with Bill Maher writer playing role of conservative voter in a bubble, September 17, 2011. (Fanny Brown Rice/Flickr.com). In public domain.

And — even above Joe Paterno dictating his retirement terms to the Board of Trustees — Sandusky and his creepy lawyer Joe Amendola’s crash-and-burn defense of the pedophile’s “horse-play” actions via Bob Costas and Rock Center on NBC on Monday. It’s as if Sandusky, Paterno, Amendola and the interim head coach Tom Bradley expect their one-off communiques and non-committal pressers to keep the national and international media away. Kind of like they way they’ve been operating their little fiefdom for the past half-century, by stonewalling and intimidating local media and local authorities.

This bubble, though, isn’t limited to an institution as insular as Penn State. Because our nation has been a superpower for so long, our narcissism has allowed the rich, famous and powerful to create lots of bubbles. Even when folks have wanted to be in touch with the rest of the world, with the common folk of our society, their bubbles have made their interactions awkward and elitist, and have created their own set of problems.

We can start with President Barack Obama. Despite all of his oratory powers, his keen powers of intellect and insight, and his well-connected handlers, POTUS 44 is in the ultimate bubble, as out of touch with the American public as any of his post-World War II predecessors. A president that rode in on a populist wave in ’08, Obama has been all but disconnected from the Occupy Wall Street movement that was sparked — at least in part — by his brief moments of energy on behalf of the jobless in August and September. The bubble allows even someone as bright as Obama to become deluded in his mission, to fall into the grasp of political and corporate interests, even as he works for the American people.

POTUS 43, the man in the ultimate bubble, at window on Air Force One during fly-over of Katrina devastation, August 31, 2005. (http://Politico.com). In public domain.

The mainstream media, colored as it is these days by the green of corporate and affluent interests, is also in its own bubble. They are so far removed from the pulse of the American public that even the “man on the street” interviews done by local news reporters seem staged. They talk mostly to themselves, and are so enamored with their own intellect that even most scholars in academia think journalists are arrogant.

There’s a reason why the media slants everything to look like two equal and opposite sides, no matter the moral imperative to tell the truth. Which, by the way, is the raison d’etre of the Fourth Estate, no? They go through Hell itself to find an opposing side to counter the overwhelming evidence of climate change, or bring in Sandusky’s lawyer — a man with a sordid sexual history, knocking up and marrying a sixteen-year-old client of his — to counter charges against a serial child rapist (alleged). All in the name of objectivity, as subjective as an art critic at an Andy Warhol show.

The mayors of New York, Portland, Oakland and other places are in their bubble of shunning protests that last longer than a Grateful Dead concert, more interested in protecting the interests of their corporate and rich individual buddies than the public at large. And the police? Their bubble is one that allows them to see everyone as the enemy. Their slogan might as well be “To protect and serve — as long as you’re rich or a corporation.”

Protests, sit-ins, revolutions. They all burst bubbles, and put even the most insulated in touch with the pain that ordinary folks feel. That’s what the powerful and rich fear most. And that’s why more of us need to walk around with our proverbial toothpicks, ready to pop as many bubbles as we encounter.

The Top 1% – And Their Top Hits

15 Tuesday Nov 2011

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Protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement rally in Foley Square before marching through Lower Manhattan, October 5, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images via Amnesty International blog).

I had planned at the end of last week to write about what the top one-percent richest people, Wall Street banks and corporations in general want to hear from us – in the form of a greatest hits list in music and in movies. In light of the events of the past twenty-four hours in Oakland and in New York City, I’ve decided to go ahead with this list, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (hereafter known by me as “Mayor 1%”) included.

These folks want everything from us, like an abusive father and husband who wants his wife and children to smile, bruises and all. They not only want us to buy into their sick and ugly version of the American Dream, the one that favors them and their children over us and the planet. They not only want us to be quiet, to shut the heck up and take it prone without lubrication, all of this economic and political inequality. They want us  to do the very opposite of protesting, to smile about all of this, as if we all happy little pickaninnies and Raggedy Anns’ and Andys’, all happy workin’ fo’ our all-wise and all-kind massa, the so-called free market.

And the three-term mayor of New York, Mr. 1%, has been involved in vilifying and actively cracking down on

Occupy Wall Street arrests at Zuccotti Park, November 15, 2011. (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse) via New York Times.

the Occupy Wall Street movement almost from day one of these protests. He was for police brutality and suspension of First Amendment rights back when only a dozen or so brave souls began to gather in Zuccotti Park in mid-September. And why wouldn’t Mayor 1% be so active? He wholly represents everything that the Occupy Wall Street movement’s protesting. An overbearing, out-of-touch and out-of-time opportunist who’s rigged the political and economic system to his favor.

Well, here’s to you, Mayor 1%, you and the rest of the people you represent, the folks that will have all of us debt slaves from here to eternity. Here are the song you’re playing and movies you’re watching these days:

1. “Rock The Boat” (1974), Hues Corporation – note both the lyrics – like “don’t tip the boat over” – as well as the fact that the group named Hues Corporation wrote this first (or second) disco hit.

2. Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) – the movie fits perfectly what Mayor 1% and Wall Street have wanted from politicians and protesters over the past thirty years. “Do what we say, take our dirty money to do our dirty deeds, or shut the heck up!” I guess Mayor 1% would be the emperor, or Darth Vader?

Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), June 25, 2011. (Nehrams2020 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws due to its low resolution and the subject of this blog post.

3. “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” (1987), Pet Shop Boys – the song embodies everything the one percent types like Mayor 1% stands for – and what he wants the rest of us to stand for as well. Except they haven’t “had enough of scheming, and messing around with jerks” – they are the schemers and jerks, of course.

4. Boiler Room (2000) – not the greatest film about Madoff-esque Wall Street scheming. But the Wall Street brokers and bankers can sit, watch and critique the bonafides of the film, to point out what the characters played by Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck all did wrong in getting caught.

5. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) – a dark, semi-horror (and for some, horrid) drama involving Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves as money and power-hungry go-getters. But get this. Mayor 1% hosts a dinner party with his other one-percent buddies, who dress like the movie’s characters. Mayor 1% dresses up as Al Pacino’s character, the Devil Incarnate. Then, they sit down and watch some of the film. Except they all think that Devil’s Advocate is a comedy.

6. “Out Of Touch” (1984), Hall & Oates – the top one-percent’s closing hit, telling the Occupy Wall Street protesters with derision, “You’re out of touch, I’m out of time.” The “out of time” part would either be about their ability to make money hand-over-fist in five minutes, or about them making that money before we notice another rise in economic and political inequality. Mayor 1%, though, would bring Darryl Hall and John Oates in to sing the one-percenter’s version of “Out Of Touch” to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It’s too hard to do a top-ten hits list for the top one-percent. Ten is too many for them to begin with, especially without an additional nine zeroes after that ten. And Mayor 1%, you’re officially worse than Mayor “a verb, a noun and 9/11” himself, Rudy Giuliani.

The Messiah Complex At Work, Part 1

12 Saturday Nov 2011

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Heinrich Himmler, ala Messiah Complex, 1938. (German Federal Archive via Wikipedia).

Today marks eight years since my former immediate supervisor Ken (see my “Working At AED: Alternate Sources of Fear” post from June ’11) forced me into a meeting with the head of HR and his “all-wise” boss Sandra “Driving Miss Daisy” in an effort to strip me of my Assistant Director of New Voices title at the now defunct Academy for Educational Development. All because I did my job while he was out of the office tacking on a couple of extra days after we’d attended the Independent Sector Conference in San Francisco the week before.

But this wasn’t about me or me doing my job as I’d been doing it for three years. No, this was about Ken in the middle of a period of emotional and psychological instability, and about me no longer trying to work around his moments of mania and depression. After all, I had a newborn son to worry about, a job search to keep secret, and a book I was determined to publish. Couple that with a fifteen percent cut in funding from the Ford Foundation for the New Voices program, and there was no way I’d make it through my last months with New Voices without Ken reacting irrationally.

Anglo Corned Beef, November 11, 2011. (cgi.ebay.com).

It didn’t help that Ken suddenly wanted to do a New Voices conference in Mumbai, India as part of the World Social Forum with no significant planning that August, while I was out on maternity leave. It also didn’t help that Yvonne, our center director, chose early retirement in June over being kept into “Driving Miss Daisy’s” box of highly talented and experienced but underutilized managers of color.

Most of all, it didn’t help that I was completely honest, for once, in my assessment of my performance in my annual review that October. I dutifully reported my recent publications in The Washington Post and a semi-scholarly journal, presentations, teaching of graduate courses at George Washington University, and so on. During that meeting, Ken all but told me he was jealous of the kind of year I was having professionally. He even asked me where I wanted to be in five years. “I want to be director of my own project, of something like New Voices,” I said, again being all too honest.

So, during a week in which we had zero babysitter coverage, where I’d taken the week off to take care of my three-month-old son, Ken insisted that I come into the office. All so I could listen to an hour of accusations, insinuations and wild speculations. He accused me of undermining his authority because I relayed State Department travel warnings for Mumbai to New Voices Fellows. He told me how “amusing it was” that I had titled my position Assistant Director, even though that was the title of my position when I applied for it, interviewed for it, and accepted the position three years earlier. And even though he’d been introducing me as his assistant director for three years.

He accused me of sexually harassing a New Voices Fellow and two staff members back in ’01 over two conversations that he had heard about third hand, and not from a staff member. One was about a strange site visit conversation that had nothing to do with anything approaching sexual harassment. The other conversation, it turned out, was about me and a former staff member’s gastrointestinal illnesses, something we had in common. Ken also accused me of wanting to take his job, of believing that I could do his job better than he could. Only on that last part I agreed, with a definitive nod of my head.

So when he asked me to accept having my title as Assistant Director stripped, along with the commensurate duties that went with that title (including supervisory authority), I said, “No, I think it’s time for me to move on from New Voices.” It left Ken in shock. Heck, it left me in shock, thinking about how we’d make it without my income if I couldn’t find another job over the next three months. The HR director and “Driving Miss Daisy,” though, weren’t surprised at all.

The meeting Ken had forced made my secret decision to move on an open one. Either way, it was inevitable. As I’d written in my journal after my annual review with Ken a couple of weeks before the meeting:

Mr. Magoo screen shot (and a serious lack of vision), June 23, 2011. (http://tumeke.blogspot.com).

“The most telling comment that my Director made during our fundraising effort came when I asked about his vision for our project. ‘I don’t know what the project’s vision should be,’ he said. I realized at that moment that everything we had worked for would fail, no matter how sound our ideas. My Director’s vision for the project did not extend beyond his need to feel needed, to feel as if he alone could keep our project – and by extension, himself – alive. I concluded that this was a dangerous position to find myself in professionally, and that it was beyond time to go.”

Rate My Students Dot Dot Dot

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

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Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, April 14, 2010. (http://http://teachingjobsportal.com).

Because there’s a website called RateMyProfessors.com, there also ought to be one called Rate My Students.com. Unfortunately, the only thing we have as faculty that indicates student performance is their grade in a course. But student demeanor, attitudes toward learning and their professors, about their level of commitment to being good students? For that, the only thing we have to go on are our communication exchanges with students and their responses, particularly on an evaluation. Below is one such exchange:

—–Original Message—–
From: Anonymous Student
Sent: Sat 9/10/2011 12:45 AM
Subject: Paper feedback question

I mentioned in my paper that the US feared soviet control of the Middle East and you said that it was never a concern. However, on page 61 of “Present Tense” It mentions the soviets backing a separatist movement in Iran and pressed Turkey to give the Soviet’s joint control over the Dardanelles which make some in the US government nervous that “the soviets would make a sweep across Turkey and Iran, which would give it control over much of the Middle East and its oil reserves.” The book then mentions that Truman sent a Naval task force into the Mediterranean as a warning to the Soviets.

My question is, how was the Soviet presence in the Middle East hardly a concern if it made Truman nervous enough to take military action. Granted it wasn’t a concern for long, and I could have gone more in depth, but I’m still getting conflicting information. Thanks

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 6:28 AM, Donald Collins wrote

Thanks for your email. You didn’t get credit for this point because it was a blanket and general statement, without any detail or nuance. You made it sound as if the Middle East was on the same level of concern as Europe, East Asia and the US itself. Plus, Turkey was and is not considered an oil state, and US concern over Greece and Turkey was much more a European concern than a Middle Eastern one — it helped lead to the first installment of what became the Marshall Plan. Only with Iran do you have a small point, but Iran wasn’t mentioned in your paper. And, more to that point, if the Middle East was such a concern, why didn’t Truman send a naval task force into the Persian Gulf in the late 1940s?

Yes there was fear and concern, but the actual decisions and actions that came out of it were so limited that one cannot simply say that the US feared control of the Middle East because of their tremendous oil reserves — in 1947…

But the real issue here is that you lost sight of the forest on this topic question, concentrating instead on this tree regarding the Middle East. You did not do enough to outline and analyze the factors involved in promoting and escalating the Cold War. You talked about events as examples of the Cold War, with some (like the Middle East) lacking in factual detail or explanation as to what, if any, factor or factors they fit in. Like the Soviet’s desire for a buffer zone in Eastern Europe and with eastern Germany. Or the US policy of aggressive containment of communism, as your example of the Middle East could’ve indicated, if it had been more specific — the Korean War or the Berlin Airlift are much better examples of this factor. Or the nuclear weapons and related systems races, including for long-range bombers, missiles, submarines from 1949 onward — bringing both countries ever closer to a possible hot and nuclear war.

The textbooks are just that, textbooks. They are not the Bible, and they are not even ones that I would choose to use if I could order my own textbooks. They are a guide, but, then again, so are my lecture notes, which would have helped clear up much of your confusion on this issue. I hope that this helps.

Professor Collins

From: Anonymous Student
Sent: Sat 9/10/2011 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: Paper feedback question

I figured the main problem was not going in depth enough, but I was worried about lingering for too long on certain subjects.

Anonymous Student’s response via evaluation (received October 27, 2011):

Donald Collins is very well versed in the events of the civil rights movement and not much else. Several times during the course he marked down assignments that I had completed based on what he incorrectly perceived to be factual errors. The one time I brought this up to him via email he wrote it off as “not important enough in the grand scheme of things” ignoring the fact that he stated that an event had never occurred despite being talked about in more than one of the assigned texts for the class….I still received a low grade on that assignment as well as others because of Collins’ seeming insistence that everything be tied into the civil rights movement regardless of how unrelated what I was writing about may have been to it…

—

This isn’t the first time I’ve received a racist response from a student for doing my job, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. But if I could, I’d recommend that this person learn how to be a good student first before pushing his deficiencies and bigotry onto me and other faculty.

The Beatdown

05 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Ironing out balled up paper, a bullying symbol, November 4, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins)

An anti-bullying video’s been trending in the social media sphere this week, in which a teacher demonstrates to her class the effects of bullying on a student’s psyche. All courtesy of balled up, stomped on and unfolded yet crumpled pieces of paper. It’s a good, though incomplete description, because it doesn’t address the great feeling of superiority that those dispensing the verbal, physical and psychological abuse get from bullying their classmates.

Though I seldom have thought of myself as someone who was bullied, by today’s definition, that’s exactly what happened to me for the better part of five months of seventh grade, from November ’81 through February ’82 and late-May to early June ’82 (see my post “The Legend of Captain Zimbabwe” from May ’09 for much more). I guess I’d been called so many names by so many people in 7S so first few months — and, to be truthful, did the same in response to a fair number of classmates myself — that I didn’t think too much of it as November ’81 began.

About two weeks after my fight with Brandie (see “Adverbs and A-Holes” post from last month), I experienced a serious physical bullying altercation (there were one or two attempts by neighborhood kids while I went to Nathan Hale and Holmes Elementary, and a couple of attempts in high school). The best way to describe it is that I got jumped and then beat-down after the end of the school day on the first Friday in November ’81.

It wasn’t a random jumping or beat-down, and not one that involved Davis’ Black or Latino students, who were always described to us super-nerds as “dangerous.” No, the perps in this case were from what I euphemistically called the “Italian Club,” a full two years before we had an official Italian Club in high school. They’d been on me in 7S homeroom and in Italian class with nearly constant verbal abuse for the two weeks or so since my scuffle with Brandie. Apparently, my decision to ignore them didn’t work well enough.

The leader of this pack of uncouth Italian or White working-class preteen Humanities boys was “A,” who presented himself as between John Travolta’s character on Welcome Back, Kotter and Arthur Fonzerelli from Happy Days. A’s favorite move those Humanities middle school years was to walk into our homeroom and belt out The Police’s “Roxanne” refrain, as if he were Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. The way his band of Italian or Italian-esque brothers hung around him, you would’ve thought he was a rock star, someone like his fave, Mr. “White Wedding” himself, Billy Idol.

A Christmas Story (1982) screen shot of bunny suit kid, December 11, 2009. (http://myhealthypassion.wordpress.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, between low resolution, cropping, and intent of use.

Led by A, about ten 7S classmates attacked me after school as I was on my way out the school’s side door closest to the Humanities wing to walk home. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God. A, of course, wasn’t actually involved in any of the dirty work of beating on me. Like a about half a dozen other 7S classmates, A watched as he directed his gang.

That was my third A Christmas Story moment. Except I’d been better off wearing the pink bunny suit over my kufi! Bullying is a funny thing, even when you’re one being bullied.

But unlike the piece of trampled, stomped, balled up paper, I wasn’t scarred in the sense that my self-esteem was shattered. Far from it, my self-absorption and delusions of academic grandeur shielded me, made it possible for me to iron out most of the wrinkles in my psyche from being jumped that day. It took my grades, a crush, and events that played out at home, at 616, to shatter my childhood.

Of course, being called a “dumb ass” as if it were my nickname, or “Captain Zimbabwe,” as a proxy for “Negro” or the N-word, wasn’t exactly besides the point. Nor was the idea that a bunch of White kids could decide that they could gang up on me essentially because I was an enigma to them. Like me being weird, uncool and smart was too much for their pubervescent heads to handle.

The best revenge, though, was going through puberty myself, to find myself growing ten inches in twenty months, between March ’82 and December ’83. That, and taking care of my body, mind and spirit over the past thirty years. Not that I have a dart board of my tormentors or anything, but I think it would be hilarious if any of them attempted to bully the 225-pound me today. Of course, I’d probably laugh so hard that they’d get a couple of licks in, at least before my sense of righteous rage would kick in.

The moral here, I guess, is to have a sense of how to deal with bullying if and when it does occur, to not shrug it off as “boys just being boys” or, for that matter, “cliquish girls being cliquish girls.” By middle school, though, it’s not just about reporting it to teachers or parents. It’s about other students stepping in, and students the subject of bullies’ discontent defending themselves. And that is what I’m instilling in my son. Of course, I’ll step in when necessary, too.

Flexing muscles, as in too bad I didn't have these 30 years ago, November 4, 2011 (Donald Earl Collins).