I wrote last summer about a young woman named “E,” one who helped me make it through my heartbreak and obsession with crush #2 as I transitioned from high school to college between the summer of ’87 and the spring of ’88. She was someone I could’ve — and probably should’ve — dated, at least during my freshman year at Pitt. It would’ve been a long-distance relationship, though, and given her own issues with her former boyfriend, not to mention it being her senior year at Mount Vernon High School and that her parents were in the midst of a nasty divorce, our friendship was what it was. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Now I write about another woman named E, one who eventually became my third major crush in the ’82-’92 period. Unlike the other two, she knew — in real time and from my own lips — how I felt about her at one point in our deepening friendship. It didn’t work out, for a whole host of reasons, but that didn’t mean that my friendship and what I called our “oscillating relationship” didn’t have an impact on how I saw myself and the women who were and would be in my life in the future. Without a doubt, E was the most important woman in my life between November ’88 and August ’91. In that time, I made the transition from asexual emotionless Donald to heterosexually active and more open Donald, as well as from undergrad to grad school at Pitt.

It all started around the Thanksgiving holiday in November ’88. It was the day after Thanksgiving, as a matter of fact. I’d seen E on campus or bumped into her at Hillman Library any number of times that fall. I usually gave a weak “Hi” or just walked by with head-bobbing acknowledgment for most of the semester. I was too busy trying to make it through my semester of homelessness and near starvation to have much of a social life. So it wasn’t until my financial situation at Pitt was fully straightened out that I began to feel comfortable enough to meet more folks on campus beyond the circle I already had.

It all started with E. I was spending the day after Thanksgiving studying at Hillman Library, working on a paper for my art history class. Otherwise, I spent time daydreaming, contemplating about how I had made it through the past seven months at 616 and on campus with hardly enough money to pay rent or feed someone who was permanently homeless. I often got up from wherever I sat at Hillman to walk around, stare at interesting books in the stacks, or look outside, since I couldn’t sit still for more than an hour at a time without become restless.

It was on one of those ten-minute walks of contemplation on the first floor of Hillman in the African American stacks that I saw E sitting at a two-person table by the windows facing Forbes Quad (now Posvar Hall). Normally in my Boy At The Window years, I would’ve just kept going or talked myself out of saying anything of real substance to E. But after months of financial struggles, which followed a year of getting over crush #2, I had already decided to turn the page. I walked up, introduced myself, said something about seeing her all the time on campus and used the day after Thanksgiving as an excuse for getting to know her. That introduction turned into a two-hour conversation. About ourselves, our majors, Pitt, her family, a bit about my family. I didn’t realize it then, but E’s obvious quirkiness and sense of humor had attracted me to her before she had ever said a word.

She wasn’t as sarcastic as anyone I knew from the New York area, and certainly not as sarcastic as I could be, but we shared a sarcastic and ironic way of looking at life and people in our lives. I’d learn that she was a huge “Stiller” fan, loved basketball, and had an eclectic music library, though not as eclectic as my own — she liked The Beatles, for goodness sakes! That one long conversation did lead to a friendship, one that became closer with each passing semester.

By April ’89, this time twenty years ago, I’d gotten to know E well enough to also know a bit about her family. She had five siblings, just like me, except that her mother and father were still together. Her parents had named their kids in alphabetical order, making E the fifth of six children. Her immediately older sister had helped her get a job at Hillman Library, which was one of the reasons why I bumped into her all of the time. As a result, I also bumped into this older sister and one of her cousins within a few months of meeting E. Before the semester was out, we exchanged phone numbers and mailing addresses to keep in touch that summer while I was in New York.

Other than the occasional letter or phone call that summer and into that fall when I returned to Pitt for my junior year, not much new had happened with us. I spent the first half of that semester dating someone I couldn’t handle, while E dated some guy that would graduate that December and move back to New England. It was at the end of that semester, during a major snowstorm, that I started hanging out with E regularly. Out of all of the women I’ve ever been friends with or dated, E was easily the funniest one. She laughed and made me laugh so easily. At her, at myself, her at herself, and her at me. It wasn’t that everything was a joke. It was that we knew not to take ourselves so seriously.

The following year led to me having ideas beyond friendship with E. We hung out so much and did so many things together. We went to a PE concert together, Pitt basketball games, a Pittsburgh Pirates game, a bunch of movies, a bunch of lunches and dinners. She helped teach me how to drive, in a broken down blue ’78 Chevy Nova no less. I got to meet her mother and father and other siblings at her parents’ home in Steel Valley country, on several occasions. It was the first time I noticed how light E was, as her mother and father were light and dark-skinned respectively. I think that she was the only woman who ever visited me when I lived in my beat-up room in South Oakland. There were moments there where I thought one or both of us could’ve but didn’t cross the line into deliberate physical contact all during ’90. That made it all the more confusing, probably for her, definitely for me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice the other women on campus besides E. There were more attractive women, and some did express interest, especially since it appeared to them that I was dating E. But E had something about her that touched my mind, and since I spent so much time with my head in the clouds as I pulled myself back together in those years, it was easy to see her as the person I wanted to spend all of my free time with.

It all started getting weird toward the end of ’90. I made my move at the end of October, asked her about moving beyond friendship to really dating. I told her that I knew that she was attracted to me, which she didn’t try to deny. She told me that she was still “hung up” on the New England guy that she hadn’t seen since the previous December. It was her only excuse, a lousy excuse as far as I was concerned. We didn’t talk for a few weeks after that — surprise, right?

Then she called me at the end of the semester for help, as she felt that she was in trouble in her ethnolinguistics class. E had switched majors again, and being someone who had trouble making up her mind, was in over her head. I had just finished my last final for the semester, and was looking forward to a week or ten days of rest before going back to Mount Vernon and 616 for the holidays. At first, I wanted to say, “Why don’t you ask your ex to help you?,” or “What do you need my help for, since we haven’t talked in six weeks?” But I didn’t want E to end up with an F in her new major. So I went over to Hillman Library that evening to help her with her research paper. I had no idea that I would be there and at David Lawrence Hall for the next twenty-four hours, editing and re-editing various drafts of a paper that I would’ve graded a D long before I started teaching a college course.

To use E’s language, I thought that this whole episode was an example of her “triflin’ ass” ways. Even though I don’t think that she meant to, I felt that E had used me, my sheer analytical, writing and editing powers, to get out of a major jam. She ended up with an A- on a paper that looked at the use of language in rap/hip-hop and the various themes that could be communicated through the nuanced use of language in the genre.

E did say that she’d make it up to me, and she did. We were back at our old ways in the first months of ’91, hanging out and going out as if we were dating but not. I tried to make a point of drawing some lines, like no holding hands, no back rubs, no hugs, but that only went but so far. By the end of the spring semester and undergrad — E was still a year away from graduating, even though she had piled up nearly 200 credits — I was caught up in the rapture of infatuation, again. She picked up on it, and deliberately or not, tried to take advantage.

E wanted to work on a joint piece for publication that looked at the issue of multicultural education and Afrocentric education that summer. It had gotten her attention because of the New York State report on multicultural education that had come out in May ’91. It was controversial, causing educators to choose sides between a more Eurocentric and a more Afrocentric educational paradigm. No need to go into more detail that than for those not interested in the so-called Cultural Wars of the ’90s. Despite my qualms about E and her reliability, I decided to go ahead with the work — it gave me something to focus on besides my mind-numbing work as a gopher at the Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic that summer.

Wouldn’t you know it, two weeks later E stood me up for a date? It was the third time that month that “something had come up,” either with family or a friend, preventing her from meeting me. We were to see Godfather III and then go out to eat. I was as pissed as I’d been since my second semester at Pitt, when I was pissed with myself and with crush #2. I made myself see the movie anyway, and then went home without eating.

As I struggled with what to do next, I talked about this weird situation with one of my married Western Psych colleagues. He laughed and told me to move on, that I should ignore her and her calls for help or a dinner date for a while. And that’s what I did. At first, it was torture. E was still about the only person I could talk to about almost anything — except my Humanities years, abuse and welfare poverty, of course. But I realized that our friendship had become dysfunctional, that if we weren’t going to date as a couple, and because I still wanted that, then the friendship wouldn’t work either. For the next seven weeks, I ignored her phone calls, didn’t attempt to see her on campus, and started doing my own thing, which included a series of one-night stands. By the time I started hanging out with E again, at the end of July ’91, I no longer wanted to date her. I no longer saw her as a friend.

It was in the interim that I also realized why she was noncommittal to dating me. I was younger than her by about fifteen months, hadn’t had much dating experience before her, and my body had yet to fill out. I mean, she had a near life-sized poster of Utah Jazz great Karl Malone hanging in her room at home! I was just about six-three (and about to go through my last growth spurt — at almost twenty-two), and weighed 175 or 180 in the summer of ’91. And I might’ve come off a bit needy at times.

For her part, despite how much she talked about others as “triflin’,” she was a bit triflin’ herself. She had majored in political science, Spanish, English Lit (I think) and linguistics since she started college in ’86. Her father, the chief of police on the Greensburg campus, gave her financial cover, so she took classes year-round. She lacked focus and didn’t think or have to think about the long-term for her life. That made me too serious by comparison.

I still talked to E off and on after I started grad school that August. We even went out to see Oliver Stone’s bomb JFK that December. But it wasn’t the same. I felt sorry for E. I hoped that she would get her life and career on track. I couldn’t be the one to listen to her complain and dream anymore, though.

By ’95-’96, I had finally filled out, between weights and age, enough to where I knew E was attracted to me — again. The last time I talked to E was at Pitt’s bookstore, with then girlfriend (and now wife) Angelia in tow. She literally had gotten in between me and Angelia so that I couldn’t introduce them to each other, all the while talking away as if she wasn’t there. That was it for me. After she invited me out with her for some cultural event, it was my turn to let the other down. Until the advent of Facebook, I hadn’t talked to E in nearly thirteen years. I did keep some tabs, though, at least through the Pitt Alumni network and Google. I knew that E had pulled it together and graduated in ’92. She eventually applied and got into Pitt’s School of Library Science in ’94 or ’95, picked up her master’s, and found a career as a librarian. I couldn’t be happier for her.

I learned so much from my friendship+ with E. From what to do and not to do in relationship to how to be friends with someone and disagree fundamentally with their actions and ideas. About how to see myself as Black without changing anything about myself in order to fit in. About the power of a wonderful family, which hers was. About getting out of my head and seeing my friends and the people around me for who they are, and accepting them for who they are. About the superficiality that we all possess and the imperfections that we all have. Most of all, I learned the difference between different kinds of love and attraction. Other than my wife, I don’t think I’ve learned so much from one woman as I have from E. For that, if nothing else, I say, Mwah and many, many, many thanks.

April is a pretty significant month in my life and times, almost as significant as August and December. I finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in April, married my wife Angelia in April, became a Christian in April, watched my family become homeless in April. My first crush’s birthday’s in April, and I became friends with my first best friend in April. This particular April marks three decades for some of these events. This was the spring of Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It” and the emergence of Christopher Cross. A Snickers bar was 25 or 35 cents, a 12 ounce can of soda 25 or 30 cents, and chips 15 or 20 cents. Mind you, this was the year the inflation rate reached 14 percent.

But I digress. The first significant thing that occurred in April ’79 was that my father Jimme came back into our lives, mine and my older brother Darren’s. It was Saturday, April 7 to be exact. (Don’t think that my memory’s that good, I had to look it up — I thought it was April 5). We hadn’t seen my father since the end of March ’77, after my Uncle Sam had clotheslined him coming through the front gate of 425 South Sixth Avenue, our previous home, flipping Jimme in the air and onto his ass, and knocking a bag with a 32 ounce Pepsi in a glass bottle to the ground. It happened in slow motion for me, watch Jimme and that bag hit the ground at roughly the same time.

This was in response to a nasty divorce between my mother — Uncle Sam’s older sister — and my father. The divorce and my father’s drunken awareness of my mother’s infidelity led to a number of nasty incidents after she filed for divorce in July ’76. Jimme once destroyed a glass-topped coffee table by stomping into it—in front of my mother, Maurice, Darren, and me. This happened on my seventh birthday, and left me hiding in the corner of our second-floor flat. Jimme had also put about $3,000 worth of my mother’s clothes and shoes into a bathtub full of hot water, thrown a thirteen-inch color TV out of a window, and had repeatedly cut up the new furniture my mother had bought in the months after filing for divorce. The stress of these random acts of rage had left my mother in the hospital for nearly two months with a serious kidney ailment. So when Jimme kidnapped us from our babysitter and took us back to 425 South Sixth, my Uncle Sam, already in the process of moving us out, lost it.

That happened two years before. Since then, my mother had remarried, hooking up with the guy that she had been in an affair with in the last months of her marriage to my father. Who could blame her, given what Jimme was like? At the same time, marrying a known womanizer whose first wife had divorced him for his abusiveness and infidelities wasn’t exactly the greatest decision in the world either. I didn’t like Maurice, and ran away from home two months after he had married my mother to show it, in December ’78. After thirty lashes with the whip and six weeks of no TV and no time to play outside, I had transformed into a bit of a nerd, since I was only allowed to read as punishment. So my braininess took off. But even with Darren and school, I was also lonely.

When Jimme finally called us to see if we wanted to hang out with him, it did lift my spirits some. Of course, my mother constantly reminded me how unreliable my father was. “You know, he ain’t never paid no rent when we was together,” or “You like him more than you do Maurice.” I ignored her snipes, for the most part. I knew my father, with all of his drinking, was about as reliable as Mount Vernon’s Reliable Taxi in those days. But drunk or not, even at nine I saw him as a better person than the constantly lying Maurice. Back then, though, I didn’t know that Jimme was light-years better than Maurice.

Still, he wasn’t a good father by any normal definitions of father. By the time I was old enough to witness one of his drinking binges and hangovers, when I was five, he regularly acted as if Darren and I were his drinking buddies, talking to us in language most of us only hear when watching Goodfellas. Jimme went on an alcohol-laced benders that usually began on payday Friday and ended on Monday or Tuesday. As he liked to say, he “got to’ up” almost every weekend—”tore up” for those unfamiliar with Jimme-nese. This was even before my mother had filed for divorce. Jimme also had a habit of saying, “O’ bo’, can’t do dis no mo’. Gotta stop doin’ dis. Nex’ week, nex’ week. I’ll stop nex’ week.” All while shaking his head, his eyes down, ashamed of how he felt and looked once the binge had ended. He never said “now” or “this week.” It was always next week with Jimme.

Darren and I had the privilege of witnessing this on a semi-weekly basis once Jimme came back into our lives from April ’79 until someone attempted to put Jimme’s head in orbit two years later, we spent time with our dad about once every three weekends. He’d call every Saturday to say that he was on his way, usually from a phone booth or from a bar, but usually didn’t make it over to 616. It got to the point where I could predict the next time he’d be over, either by date or by how he sounded on the phone the night before.

I looked forward to the times that we did go out with Jimme, though. Despite his deepening addiction, Jimme was fun to be around most of the time. He went out of his way to take us to Mickey D’s, to take us down into the city, to show us where he worked and the “big shots” that he knew. He’d take us over to his drinking buddies’ homes, including our one-time babysitter Ida. When Darren and I first started hanging out with our dad, he’d take us to visit his brother Michael, who also lived in Mount Vernon (he later moved back to Atlanta). Jimme would sometimes attempt to cook us dinner, would tell us stories about growing up on the Collins family farm in rural Georgia, about his work and all of the things he saw in Manhattan.

The last time we spent time with Jimme before the baseball bat incident was somewhat memorable. We’d gone down to the city to see the movie Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall. I didn’t have the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to watch beforehand, but then again, I didn’t need them to tell me that this movie really sucked. It was so horrible that we left in the middle of it. My dad had brought some beer in the theater with him, so he was to’ up by the time we decided to leave. After taking the Metro-North back to Mount Vernon, we stopped off at a one-time restaurant on the corner of “The Avenue”—downtown Mount Vernon—to pick up some roasted chicken parts and fries for a late-night dinner. We went to Jimme’s place, a sleeping room in someone’s house, ate and watched Eddie Murphy on SNL. It might have been his “Buckwheat” episode. Who knew that a few weeks later I’d read about my dad in the obituaries, only to find out that he’d only technically died for a few seconds before coming back to life?

Jimme ended up in the hospital because he’d made fun of another, bigger drunk, calling him a “po’ ass muddafucca” at what Darren and I called “Wino Park” on South Fulton and East Third. So much was the humiliation that the man marched home, grabbed a baseball bat, and returned to repeatedly smash my dad in the head until he was unconscious.

Jimme recovered eventually, but he was out of commission and out of our lives from April ’81 until August ’82, the longest I’d go without seeing my father until I went off to the University of Pittsburgh. It’s funny to write about all of this now that my father’s been sober for a decade. He’s literally spent more time around Noah sober than he spent with me between ’79 and ’96. Better later than never. Even drunk, those two years of time with Jimme did help me see, long before Humanities and the Hebrew-Israelites, that there was a whole big world out there. And though not mine, it was bigger than anything my mother or Maurice had experienced. Jimme was as important for me understanding that I had possibilities as my teachers and World Book Encyclopedia in the spring of ’79.

In the past forty-eight hours, we’ve seen one thing for certain. The hour-glass clock is ticking. It’s ticking for the original American automakers. And I’m afraid no one’s going to be there to turn the hour-glass over this time around. Ford will likely be the only one of the remaining Big Two-and-a-Half to survive through the spring.

From the time I was three years old, I could look at an American car and tell someone its make and model. It was the only game that I played with both my mother and my father Jimme. I knew the difference between a ’68 Camaro and a ’70 Charger. I could watch cars drive down Adams Street in Mount Vernon and go, a Chevy Monte Carlo, a Chevy Impala, an Plymouth Dart, a Ford Pinto, a Buick Electra 500 or 520, and so on. Drunk or not, it made my father smile when I could pull the details of an American car out of a hat.

Of course, these were the days when American cars represented the standard car around the world. A two-door car, about as long as today’s minivans, with enough trunk space to fit two or three dead adult males, getting between six and ten miles a gallon. Those were the days when a gallon of gas cost about 35 cents. That was the fall of ’73. Then the OPEC oil crisis hit, and the long downhill roll of American automakers began. I remember the car lines in Mount Vernon, but only vaguely. We didn’t own a car. But many of my mother and father’s friends did. When the cost of gas went over $1 a gallon, I remember my parents’ friends complaining bitterly about the expense.

The only person I don’t remember complaining all that much was my mother’s friend Billie. They worked together at Mount Vernon Hospital. Billie just happened to buy herself a ’73 Kelly green Toyota Corolla. I rode in that car enough times to complain about how small it was. But I also remember how much Billie seemed to love her car. Millions of other Americans ended up doing what Billie did, most of them after the price of gas began its inevitable climb.

Even though the price of gas eventually fell and stabilized between 85 cents and a $1.05 a gallon, it was just too much for the dinosaur-like American automakers. They weren’t ready for the demand for fuel-efficient and safer cars, not really. They took a bunch of half-hearted measures, with the Chevy Citation and Chevette, the smaller Ford Thunderbird and Ford Escort, with new alloys and new paints that would chip and fade after three or four years. My favorite car by ’80 was the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, but they were shrinking the body for that car as well, but not bringing fuel standards anywhere near the Renault LeCar, much less a Corolla or Honda Civic.

By ’79, the writing was on the wall for AMC, American Motor Corporation. I used to joke that the company was conducting a geometry experiment. They wanted to see which of their cars could be the least inefficient, so they built an oval (Matador), a triangle (Gremlin) a semi-circle (Pacer). AMC would’ve likely tried a rectangle, but the Lincoln Town Car already cornered the market. They were a joke, and so was Chrysler. They were making soup cans with wheels by ’80. It explained the skepticism so many had when Lee Iaccoca went to Congress with hat in hand for a $1.5 billion loan to keep the company afloat in ’80 and ’81. That’s when they launched the whole K-car campaign, which helped, but didn’t exactly guarantee the company’s long-term future.

Something interesting happened in the mid-1980s. Chrysler came out with its Caravan minivan, giving them the bounce-back they need to buy the remnants of AMC. In particular, they got their hands on their American Eagle line, including Jeep. By the end of the ’80s, Iaccoca was a genius and Chrysler was comeback corporation of the decade. They inadvertently kicked off the last great boom in American automaking — the minivan and the sports utility vehicle. Not that other companies weren’t working in this area, particularly Subaru, Honda and Toyota. Or certainly, the Land Rover, Ford Bronco or Chevy Blazer. But Chrysler had taken two forty-year-old ideas and built on them to repackage the American car to American consumers who were dreading a future of smaller cars and Toyotas in every garage.

From ’87 until ’05, we entered a new age of the American automobile. Where one out of every four cars were SUVs, and at least half as many were minivans. Both built after the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency had been last updated in ’81, it meant that these cars could slip under the radar of government regulations. It meant that though a ’88 Chevy Monte Carlo (they were back in production by then) had to get at least ten miles a gallon, a Chrysler Grand Caravan or a Chevy Trail Blazer could be built without meeting any reasonable fuel efficiency or emissions standards.

By this time, I didn’t have any favorite cars. I briefly liked the Audi 5000 and the Nissan Sentra in the mid-’80s. But I’d fallen out of love with most American cars by the time gas was $1.30 a gallon. For most of the ’90s that was the price of a gallon of gas. Sometimes it dropped below $1.20, sometimes it rose to about $1.70. Meantime, American carmakers raked in the profits, forgetting that it would all have to end. I mean, people have been talking about oil running out my entire life, and it the business of automakers to pay attention to these things, right?

Wrong, especially about the makers located in Detroit, and the autoworkers located all over the US, Canada and Mexico. I remember having classmates in Humanities in seventh and eighth grade who worried about their dads losing their jobs at the GM plant in Tarrytown, New York. Their fathers made an average salary of $50,000 a year at those jobs. In ’82! That’s about $87,000 in today’s inflated dollars. It was so much money back then that in many cases — not every case, but many — their mother’s didn’t work outside of the home. One salary at GM and a high school diploma was all one needed back in the ’60s to get a job like this. But from the ’81-’83 recession on, there were constant rumors that GM was about to close the plant. They finally did, in ’98, as part of GM’s ongoing effort to restructure and make more money.

By that time, I only looked at Japanese and European carmakers. It was between a Honda Accord and a Nissan Pathfinder for me by then. As the luxury SUV era reached its height, it struck me how wasteful and unsustainable the whole thing was. Between the Hummer and the H2 alone, our M-1A Abrams tanks might get better gas mileage than GM’s gaudiest SUVs. That’s the greatest mistake of GM, Chrysler and Ford. That this was going to last forever. They allowed themselves for the second time in my lifetime to not read the writing on the wall.

So here it is. Never has finally arrived in ’09. The impeding bankruptcy of GM and selloff of Chrysler is days or weeks away. It makes me think of two things. One, a Subaru commercial from ’05 that was introducing its crossover SUV, the Tribeca. The commercial shows its competition, other, gas-guzzling, luxury American SUVs fading from the road as the Tribeca drives by. The narrator essentially predicted the end of the SUV “as we know it” by ’09. How right he was. The other is of a Atlantic Monthly article from ’07 that predicts the decade-long decline of the American economy. James Fallows wrote that by 2012, GM would be bought out by Toyota, and Ford by Honda. Chrysler would be a distant memory.

We finally bought our and my first car in September ’04. A Honda Element. The car, with an internal combustion engine designed for the American market, gets as much as 29 miles to the gallon on the highway. The Ford Escape, with a hybrid electric-gas engine, gets between 28 and 34 miles to the gallon. Even now, an American Honda plant in Tennessee makes cars that are generally more fuel efficient, safer and more environmental friendly than the best the American carmakers can come up with. That’s it in a nut shell. I have no idea what my next car will be. I’m hoping to buy Honda’s hydrogen full cell vehicle, the FCV. Otherwise, it would likely be another Honda Element, a Lexus hybrid or a Subaru. It probably won’t matter, because there won’t be any American cars to buy by then.

If I could go back in time, say to my Boy At The Window years, what tunes would I take back with me? It’s not as simple as taking my iPod back to the ’80s. It would disrupt the time stream between that decade and now. But I could burn a CD, convert it to an audio tape, and take that back in time to the ’80s. At most, I could only record ten or twelve songs. Also, the music I take with me to the heart of the Reagan years can’t be from the ’90s, it’s too close in the time stream. So, what would I come up with, especially since I think much of the music from the ’00s kind of sucks.

1. U2 – “Beautiful Day”: For my days of puppy love and infatuation, or when I needed a pick-me-up. It would’ve been my favorite song in the spring of ’82, the three-month period of my first and greatest crush. It was all “sky falls, you feel it’s beautiful day” period at school and at home.

2. Coldplay – “Clocks”: This song’s right up there with “Beautiful Day.” It’s about infatuation, love, being in love, wanting someone to love you who probably doesn’t. That was ’82 and ’87 and ’88 for me. That sense of British male angst was closest to where I was in the mid to late-80s.

3. Mario – “Let Me Love You”: A rare R&B song in an era where three genres have integrated to the point where hip-hop, R&B and rap are often one, the same and stale. The song’s simple, romantic, and youthful — though I think “a dyme, plus ninety-nine” adds up to $1.09, and I’m not sure what that means. 😉

4. Eminem – “Lose Yourself”: Whatever any of you think about Marshall Mathers, he has much in common with the late Tupac — he’s a poet using rap to communicate, not the other way around. My music collection in the ’80s lacked anger — John Mellencamp and Boogie Down Productions were about the angriest folks I heard before PE at the end of the decade. But even their anger was muted compared to Eminem. This would’ve been good for me on many a day at 616 to nod my head to.

5. Maxwell – “This Woman’s Work”: It’s a cover version of Kate Bush’s ’88 signature hit, but Maxwell kind of makes it his own. It’s … pretty, and the only artist in the ’80s who could’ve made a song so pretty was Prince.

6. Green Day – “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”: Troubled White guys capture angst better than anybody, in this country at least. It would’ve been a perfect and dissonant response to Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” hit of ’87. For me, it encompasses my moodiness from the eighteen months between high school graduation and the middle of my sophomore year at Pitt.

7. U2 – “Walk On”: You can’t stay in angst forever, and if I needed a song to pull me out of a Green Day mood, this would be it. Plus, it sounds a bit like ’80s U2.

8. R. Kelly – “I Wish”: I generally don’t like R. Kelly, and his private life isn’t to be condoned. But we all have major issues in our lives that we struggle with. We all have weaknesses that we can’t quite overcome. We all have suffered loss, whether in the form of a loved one’s death or some other emotional trauma. It’s a good, cry-for-help song.

9. Celine Dion – “That’s The Way It Is”: This is borderline, and not just because the song came out in the last months of ’99. It sounds like pop music from the ’80s with a ’90s diva feel to it, not to mention it’s Celine Dion, right? Oh well. If my tape falls into the wrong hands, this song might fool some folks into thinks that this is an underground tape.

10. Anthony Hamilton – “Comin’ From Where I’m From”: This song is the story of my life. If this had come out in ’86 or ’87, I might’ve been the only person to buy it, as it borders between ’70s soul and neo-soul. If Groove Theory hadn’t done “Boy At The Window,” I might’ve used this song for the title of my book.

11. RENT Soundtrack – “Seasons of Love”: I picked this over John Legend’s “Ordinary People” for two reasons. One, between Mario, John Legend, Maxwell, and Anthony Hamilton, I’ve kind of privileged Black males here — oh well! Two, because Tracie Thoms knocks it out of the box with this song. It’s so ’00s and ’80s at the same time, and it puts a smile on my face every time I hear it.

12. Sting – “Desert Rose”: This last one was a tough one. I thought about picking Moby’s “One Of These Mornings,” symbolizing my leaving Mount Vernon for greener pastures in ’87. Or Moby’s “Extreme Ways,” but it felt too good for the decade of bad music from continental Europe. I thought about Ashanti’s “Rain On Me,” but her voice is so weak, too weak to take back to the ’80s. I wanted to pick another U2 song, like “Original Of The Species” from their ’04 album. But since twelve is the limit, picking the ever-eclectic Sting’s foray into world music seemed the proper choice.

I don’t know if my life would’ve been better if I had owned a tape like this. But I’m sure that my state of mind would’ve been better in my worst of the worst times with something like this in my Walkman. Now if I could only send some money back in time, too…

We live in an age where we overuse labels for folks whose works really don’t warrant it under any circumstances. “Beautiful” is one. “Off da hook” is another. But one that really gets under my skin more than any other is “genius.” Given the mediocre rot that is prevalent in our world, we are way, way too quick to anoint someone as a genius when at best, they’re brilliant. Maybe. Or have shown a flash of brilliance, exhibited shrewdness, or played the game in their profession like a violin or fiddle.

We need a reality check, though. Genius may well be relative, but it’s not that relative. For instance, would someone stand out as a genius if they were using their genius as one of the last two people on the planet? Or is it more obvious among six and a half billion people than it is among a few?

I’ve been hearing so-called authority figures in their fields or in general describing others as geniuses nearly all of my life. Some labeled as “genius” — like Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Yo-Yo Ma, even Michael Jackson and Prince — are obviously so. Part of their genius is that their work is unquestionably beyond the grasp of most people, universally brilliant and, at times, hopelessly complicated. Genius is harder to translate than define, and while all of these artists have enjoyed overwhelming popularity, their work has at times suffered because genius tends to go into uncharted territory, places where even their most avid supporters can’t follow. I can’t stand Miles Davis, but I recognize his genius. Was Jesus a spiritual genius? Was Gandhi? One could make that argument, I suppose. Madam Curie and Anna Julia Cooper were so brilliant and profound that their genius literally bordered on insanity. That fine line between genius and insanity might be the best way to know the difference between someone who’s brilliant and someone who’s a genius.

On the other hand, there are cases, far too many for my tastes, where using the term “genius” bumps into other terms, like “hyperbole” and a “bold-faced lie.” One vivid example of this was in high school. At various times, I heard my teachers describe our eventual Class of ’87 valedictorian and salutatorian as geniuses. Geniuses? Really? Now, I’m not taking away anything from the two people in question. They were virtually straight-A students with weighted GPAs of 5.45 and 5.17 respectively. They were both much more involved in school and community-related activities than I was or could’ve been in those years. But geniuses? I don’t think any of us approached “brilliant” in our Humanities years, much less genius. You could argue, though, that some of us were on the verge of non-genius insanity.

Another more vivid example was during my second year of grad school at Pitt, the spring of ’93. Four of us were lucky enough to serve as grad student liaisons on a academic search committee. The History Department was hiring for an assistant professor in Modern European history. It came down to two choices. One was a recent PhD from the University of Michigan whose research examined socialist movements in five European countries in the 1930s (France, Germany, Italy, UK, and Sweden). The other was another “freshly minted PhD” from a lesser known history program whose work concentrated on some aspect of twentieth-century Italian history. We attended the job talks for all four original candidates. We went out to lunch or dinner with them. We read all of their doctoral theses. While I can’t speak for my former colleagues, I didn’t see any of them as especially brilliant, and certainly not geniuses.

At the faculty hiring meeting — where we were allowed to attend, but not speak — a huge debate erupted over the top two candidates. The University of Michigan candidate, a White male with a background in German who also managed to pick up Swedish, French and Italian for his archival work, was labeled a”genius” by a few of my former professors. Yeah, right! I take nothing away from a man who was somewhere around proficient or fluent in five languages. But his research on socialist movements seemed rather pedestrian. His final chapter — the last thirty pages of a 600-page dissertation — took a combination of several theories to explain what happened to each nation-state’s socialist movements during the 1930s. His conclusion, based on on all of this research and theoretical application, was that the different trajectories of the socialist movements in these nation’s occurred by chance.

Despite one professor singing the praises of this candidate for the “depth and breadth of his knowledge” and language skills, if this dissertation was an example of “genius,” then I was a writing genius at the age of eleven. In the end, after a couple of impassioned speeches by senior professors in the department — including one where a professor said he wouldn’t “vote for any of the candidates” — the female candidate with the thesis on Italian history was hired.

It’s not that I don’t think that there aren’t geniuses among us, whether in the world of academia or in music or other places. I just think that the word shouldn’t be reserved for White guys who look like Clark Kent or for people who have doctoral degrees. Some of the least intellectually curious people I’ve ever met have PhDs, including two of my former advisors. I’ve met folks whose analytic abilities approached genius who never finished high school or college, much less a PhD program. There are barbers in barbershops from Mount Vernon to Pittsburgh to Chicago and Atlanta whose intellectual capacities would rival the best in academia, if they had the same platform for using theirs.

Genius is about much more than pure analytic ability or learning more than one or two languages. It’s about producing works, ideas, materials of such brilliance that others have to wear sunglasses in order to begin to see and understand the details. I think Toni Morrison, Nick Lemann and Eric Schlosser are writing geniuses. That Barry Sanders and Jerry Rice and Joe Montana were football geniuses, as was Jordan and Magic for basketball, Gretzky and Lemieux for hockey, and Navratilova in tennis. That Coltrane was as much as genius as Miles, and both as much as Mozart and Beethoven, if not more so. Like God, genius is no respecter of persons, or academic degrees, for that matter.

All I know is that I’ve met few actual geniuses in my life, and all of them were “outside the box” kinds of people, as eccentric and weird as they were normal and abundantly gifted. Genius, real, true genius, is rare. As much as we rush to confer the status of genius on to other, we should all take a deep breathe and put the term back in our pocket for the right person and the right moment.

The generation that either grew up in “the ’60s,” or “marched with Dr. King” or against Vietnam in the ’60s is a privileged generation. And they haven’t let us forget it for the past forty years. I should know. I’ve spent most of my adult life — and some of my growing-up years — swimming upstream against this pro-60s tide. The only thing about the ’60s that I can claim was that I was born in the ’60s, which is technically true. Then again, being born on the last Saturday in ’69 barely counts at all.

But that’s hardly the point. The optimistic sense that I felt during the mid to late-70s was a consequence of the ’60s, which, depending on which generation one is technically from, lasted from ’60 to ’68 or from ’64 to ’72. If you were a hardcore drug addict, then it lasted until you either died of an overdose or until you got clean. For most folks I’ve met who were part of that scene, the ’60s lasted until ’98. Again, I digress. The disappointment I sensed from progressives and Blacks and women and gays creeped up somewhere between the second half of ’78 and ’82. Then there was a mood shift, where those who lived the ’60s as kids or as revolutionaries had by the mid-80s exchanged their idealism for realism, and attempted to past that on to my generation.

Here’s the twist, though. It was passed on as a warning to keep our lives and minds on the straight and narrow path to financial and career success, as part of the “do as I say, not as I did” parenting and educational methodology of our era. No wonder my generation was labeled as slackers long before anyone from it could make their mark on the world. Mixed messages kind of have a confusing effect on kids as kids or students. Even when those from Generation X did follow that advice, they found that the jobs their parents had were either filled by folks from the privileged generation or weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

A former boss of mine once asked me was my high school class a political one. The question nearly made me choke on my spit. The general answer, of course, is no. There were moments of mobilization, I suppose. Like to get new textbooks so that folks could take them home after school. Or complaints about teachers who weren’t doing their job. Or about class sizes being too large for a Humanities class. But not much more than that. After all, the closest thing to Vietnam in the ’80s was divestment from South Africa, and that was more of a corporate/college issue for mobilizing people. Singing “We Shall Overcome” seemed silly when MLK Day had been put into law in ’83.

More than anything else, the contradictory behaviors and statements of the privileged generation in large measure explains the lethargy and apathy that my generation grew up in and had only recently distanced itself from. The privileged generation consistently claims the mantle of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, yet consistently made excuses for institutional discrimination, racist rhetoric and biased practices in our schools and in their jobs. The privileged generation argues that they were highly energized for politics and community like none that had preceded it, yet the voting record for these former radicals has been both contradictory — Reagan and Bush I — and low when compared with their numbers. Not to mention the utter lack of etiquette and community that exists in most of the country these days. Those from the privileged generation say that they sacrificed so much for my own, yet it is obvious based on everything from public services to education to jobs and housing that the only sacrifice they made was of their ideals.

Now I realize that I’m making gross generalizations. That not all folks who lived or experienced “the ’60s” was a progressive or into shaking up the system or into “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” Regardless of what one says about ’60s folk who weren’t radicalized by civil rights or Vietnam, their plans for political and economic domination have been consistent for more than forty years. Those who’ve spent years gloating about the good ol‘ days about Grace Slick and Marvin Gaye, hashish and oregano brownies are nothing more than blowhards who may have done something of significance in the past, but certainly not now.

I just want the idea that if you were born after the ’60s, that you have nothing worth contributing to our nation to die a quick but painful death. It would mean forcing more of these radicals — real one and ones who are legends in their own minds — out of power. It would mean shifting the media’s and popular culture’s ’60s paradigm, which we have in some ways. Bottom line: we need to move away from privileging the ’60s itself, as well as the generation that we’ve given too much credit for what happened in it.