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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then you sleep with her!,” I yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As an author in search of an agent and a book contract for a memoir about my experiences growing up in poverty and with domestic violence, not to mention around more affluent folks in a gifted track program, it does irk me when I read about these stories of people embellishing their memoirs these days. The latest story involves Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, a memoir and love story involving him and his eventual wife while he was in a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Europe in World War II. Rosenblat was in a concentration camp. But the idea of him meeting his wife as a kid while she gave him apples through a barbed wire fence was shown recently to be about as plausible as me marrying my second Humanities years crush. At least they caught the lie before they published Rosenblat’s book.

This comes on the heels of the Love and Consequences debacle in March. Margaret B. Jones, the pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, claimed to be half-White, half-American Indian, raised by Black parents in South Central LA and a drug runner for the Bloods. It took 19,000 copies of the book for folks who knew Seltzer as an affluent attendee of a private school in North Hollywood before the truth about her completely fabricated story came out. What a crock! Lest I forget, there’s also James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), on the Oprah Book Club list until some major aspects of his otherwise truthful account were proven as lies.

This is typical of an industry that prides itself on being relatively high-brow but uses low-brow, make money for us in nanoseconds techniques in book publishing. Like expecting ready-to-publish-tomorrow manuscripts from lit agents in order to save money on copy editing and proofreading. Or not having fact-checkers in house to verify the more provocative, outlandish, or sexy aspects of a book manuscript. Forget about the more typical issues around marketing or promotion. Unless you’re an established author or some “fresh” first-time author, your advance is your marketing and promotion budget.

But I’m jumping too far ahead. An advance assumes an agent, a publishing house with an enthusiastic, interested editor, and a book contract. All need to happen (for the most part) before you or I can successfully publish a book. With the publishing industry using ex-editors and lawyers as agents/gatekeepers, authors face at least two layers of scrutiny to get a definitive “Yes” for their manuscript. This scrutiny, though, isn’t based on the quality of writing or the story. It’s based on what can be packaged and sold quickly and without a whole lot of line-by-line reading. A love story in the midst of the Holocaust — of course! A memoir about a White female growing up with and around Blacks and becoming a gangbanger — great! A coming-of-age story about a Black male finding himself, but no easy answers, in the middle of poverty, abuse, and high-brow education — sounds interesting, but…

Part of the problem, I think, is that the publishing world lacks the intellectual and multicultural diversity necessary to be successful in this century. It seems that most big-named editors and agents all attended the same exclusive private schools and elite liberal arts colleges. Smith, Vassar, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, not to mention the Ivy Leagues. That’s the world they know, and that’s typically the world they publish. Anything that sounds close to the world they know, and yet takes an unexpected turn is considered “cutting-edge” or “sexy.” Like the Holocaust memoir or the gangbanger story. With few exceptions, most of the folks who are given the opportunity to wax poetic about the experiences of the poor and/or folks of color aren’t authors of color. They’re White journalists like Ron Suskind or Adrian LeBlanc, because they dared to venture into a different world.

I know, I know. Many of you may think that I’ll stop complaining and start acting like these folk once I find an agent and publisher or if I decide to give up on this strange world altogether. or if Oprah gives me a call and has me on her show. Some of you may even think that I’ve made up some stuff about my past. Here’s a simple test to use about my story or any other autobiography to prove its truthfulness:

1. Does the author present themselves in simplistic terms — as a mere victim or as someone who actively shapes their own destiny? Or does the author show themselves as a work in progress, with advances and setbacks, triumphs and struggles, and issues that still need to be worked out even after achieving a major goal?

2. Even as unbelievable events unfold in the story, does it ring true with the kind of descriptions and depictions used in the rest of the story? Or does it seem like a twist more consistent with a fiction novel than with the way a real person’s life would evolve?

3. Is there much “tell-all” involved in telling the story, and did the author do much research beyond themselves in telling the story, such as comparing national, local and personal events, interviewing people, including additional facts about other people and places? Or does the story seem like a very involved stream of consciousness?

It’s far more plausible that I would’ve had two crushes on two classmates that went unfulfilled, given how I describe myself at the age of twelve or seventeen, than it would be for a young biracial “White” woman to be a drug runner in a major LA gang. A prostitute maybe, but not a drug runner. It makes more sense to describe myself as both a victim, a slacker, a passive activist in my family, among other things, than it would to discuss a bond over an apple that survived the Holocaust and led two people who re-met a decade later to marriage. It makes more sense to use evidence from local events that influenced my educational experience and that of my classmates to show the validity of my story than it does to keep writing without evidence as if no one can disprove your story.

I know I’ll publish Boy At The Window eventually. I just hope that the nonfiction memoir fiction writers out there don’t make it harder for me to sell my work.

What a way to end a year, huh? We’re within three days of ’09, and chaos and fakery remain two mainstays in our news cycle. For once, the holiday season and the solar and lunar calendars aligned over the past week, as Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and first day of Muharram have overlapped over the past eight days. 

Friday, December 30, 1988. One of the more pleasant, interesting and thought-provoking moments occurred on this day. After three semesters at Pitt and my bouts with homesickness and a broken heart, summer joblessness, sophomore homelessness and general pennilessness, I came back to Mount Vernon and 616 with a sense of hope that I hadn’t had in years. New friends, real friends, a somewhat steady income and my tuition fully paid, back-to-back Dean’s List semesters, and understanding trust for the first time in my life after going through all that will change one’s outlook on life.

It’s Christmas Day ’08, so I probably should be discussing my son’s reactions to his gifts, like his new basketball hoop, Ben 10 Omnitrix watch or Thomas Trackmaster Canyon Train set. But that would only reveal my understanding of Christmas as a commercial affair, a 150-year-old attempt at spreading cheer through material giving and receiving, not to mention egg nog and hot chocolate. Still, I’m sure my family will enjoy my sweet potato pie, fried chicken, corn bread, and mac & cheese (we’ll see how they’ll feel about the salad).