I have written — quite extensively I might add — about the late Harold Isaac Meltzer over the past two and a half years. I still have plenty more to write about my favorite and probably best teacher between seventh grade and my doctorate. But I’ve neglected to mention that there have been others. Others whom did manage to reach me as a student and a person during my Boy @ The Window years. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a short list. In six years of Humanities, about six teachers in all would fit the mold of above-average or outstanding, while at least twice as many would be somewhere between mediocre and miserable.

Once again, I’ve digressed into the negative. I had one teacher, and only one teacher, that made my senior year at MVHS worthwhile. It was first-period AP English with a Rosemary Martino. She was someone whose aspirations beyond teaching were obvious, which both took my breath away and brought frightening chills to my bones. For she wanted to write, not just teach about writers, but actually write. Even in grad school, I only knew of one professor who loved to write beyond scholarly analysis, and his writing chops were atrocious. Oops, I went there again! Anyway, Martino could talk about the art and craft of writing for days if the course had been about more than reading the existential and the utilitarian for our eventual AP English exam.

But our AP English teacher wasn’t a favorite of mine at the beginning of the year. She was immediately disappointed with us because we weren’t particularly motivated to do the readings and the work. Almost none of us had touched a tomb during the summer of ’86, and we were exactly motivated to read at thirty-five or more pages per hour to start the school year off well. We started with Albert Camus’ The Fall, a bit of swirling existential thinking about the nature of inhumanity in human nature. Oui, oui — more like Oy vey! We moved on to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment, a seven-hundred-page marathon read of humanity at its worst that took us from mid-October through early December. Martino’s choices, though impressive in complexity, didn’t exactly inspire.

I knew I needed to read more, and read for arguments, plot, hidden plot, characters and character development, the tone and pitch of narration, the shifts in the narrative, and so on. That took time, and lots of it. Time I didn’t have between two other AP courses, college applications, SATs, not to mention my continuing saga at 616, as I’d become the go-to-child for every adult chore imaginable, short of working a full-time job. Of course, it didn’t help that I spent most of my spare moments in October ’86 watching or listening to every play the Mets made on their way to a World Series championship. I had a really wonderful teacher at the wrong time in my life. I should’ve found a way to have taken classes with her the year before.

So I spent about half of twelfth grade treading water in Martino’s class. My grades were barely adequate C+’s from mid-October to mid-February, sneaking in an occasional A or A- whenever I found two hours and a quiet place to write. I even managed an “Outstanding” A on my Dostoevsky essay in December, this despite only skimming the last third of his long and winding road. What helped was that I also had Martino for Philosophy from Socrates to Sartre. For whatever reason, I took to the half-year course better than I did AP English. Martino’s curriculum seemed more free-form and her lectures much more opinionated than in the full-year course. Her obsession with the existential and the dehumanizing made Dostoevsky easy to understand. Based on my 616, Humanities and MVHS years, I could certainly relate to existential philosophy on a personal level.

Martino shifted gears from the existential novel to poetry and plays for a while at the beginning of February, from Archibald Macleish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” and Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. She even threw in a creative writing assignment. The assignment was for us to write a short story. I wrote a short story titled “The Way It Is,” corny I realized even at the time. A better title would’ve been “On the Brink of Obsession” or “Role Reversal” or “A Pathetic Tale.” The story was about me and my crush # 2 and a take on some of our more coy conversations over the previous three years. Except that I had switched our names, feminizing my name and masculine-izing hers in this story. I handed the essay in, talked about it in class, and yet not a single person, including Martino and crush # 2, picked up on the not-so-subtle hint in the story.

We also read the late Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This time around, the post-modern, post-structural, neo-Marxist perspectives on dehumanization and the end of the world as some of us knew it didn’t bother me. My grades went up again, even though my concentration and my time-to-task had dropped. I wrote my essay on Catch-22 the night before it was due, in my mother’s bedroom, in front of my stepfather’s portable TV, with the Rangers winning a close game. I started doing so well that Martino said to me one day before class, “you know, if you’d work harder, you could become a really good writer.”

I looked at her for a second. Martino was a very attractive teacher in her late-twenties, with that burning-the-candle-at-both-ends look around the eyes. She had short brown hair and was about five-three or five-four. Besides that, she was an aspiring writer in her own right. Martino had published a few short stories, was a big Anne Rice fan, and wanted to follow in her footsteps. So when she paid you a compliment, you tended to pay attention. Despite the backhanded nature of her praise, I thought very quickly of the image of the starving artist, the famous-after-death ones like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson. “I don’t want to become a starving artist,” I said in response. The idea of being a writer was still an attractive one to me, but I wanted to do and be something that would at least make it possible to have three squares a day. Martino didn’t push the issue. I thought I hit a sore spot with the “starving artist” image. She still talked with me first thing in the morning about the news and about her writing, but left my aspirations alone.

I only have a few regrets regarding all of the teachers I had between September 8 of ’74 and November 22 of ’96. One of them was that I didn’t attempt to get to know Rosemary Martino better. Meltzer may have inspired to me to write more. But it was Martino whom inspired me to write better, more literary, with some degree of passion and opinion, and not just facts. While the psychological and social dysfunctions of Humanities prepared me well for graduate school, my classes with Martino did help me with no less than five undergraduate courses at Pitt.

In the process, she managed to do something that even Meltzer couldn’t do. Martino awakened the writer in me, the writer that had been on hibernation since Memorial Day ’82. After her class, I couldn’t entirely say that I had no idea what to do with my life besides taking another classmate’s sardonic advice and appearing on Jeopardy. I will forever be in her debt because of it. So, Rosemary Martino, whatever your reading, writing or doing these days, many, many thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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