Betrayal can be like an atomic blast. Even when expected. Even when you’ve steeled yourself for the impact, the light, the heat, the electromagnetic pulse of betrayal. It leaves you disoriented, disillusioned and in need of someone else’s help for perspective. There are a couple of examples of betrayal that left me wondering about the goodness of humans, that explain my not-so-insignificant amount of timidity around some people sometimes.

Like when I found out about my ex-stepfather’s idiotic and deceitful plan to make me a man by having a neighborhood thug rob me of $10. It was June 25 of ’82, the last day of seventh grade and the first day of my summer of abuse. My mother, my brothers Maurice and Yiscoc, and Darren’s Clearview School counselor Mrs. Karen Holtslag were at Wilson Woods Pool. My mother and Mrs. Holtslag were there to discuss Darren’s “progress” and his psychological needs. Me and my two younger brothers were there to have fun. My mother gave me a $10 bill to buy some snacks at the concession stand for everyone. As I walked over dreaming of hot dogs and mini-pizzas, careless me had the bill only half in my right hand. An older kid magically materialized, ran by and snatched the money from my hand.

When my stepfather found out about my tragic error, he demanded that I tell him exactly who stole the money. “I’m not sure. I think it’s some guy named ‘Pookie’,” I said. Maurice walked over to me, poked me in the chest, and told me to get the money back from Pookie in two weeks. I said that “I can get the money from Jimme,” but he didn’t want to hear that. I pointed out that Pookie was much bigger than me, and that I didn’t know where he lived. Maurice told me to “find out where he lives!” Otherwise I would get a “whuppin’.” After eleven days, I received my whuppin’, plus kicks to my ribs, welts on my right leg and butt, at least a half-dozen punched to my face, a busted lip, and a knot on my head. I think I might’ve also had a concussion. There were at least five other incidents of varying intensity between July 6 and August 1 that summer.

About a year later, I saw Maurice and Pookie in the middle of a conversation near the Vernon Woods projects. I was on my way home from grocery shopping in nearby Pelham. I saw them from a distance, and figured that they didn’t see me. So I hid behind a tree across the street from the Getty gas station and a closed grocery store, where Maurice and Pookie talked. They were laughing and joking around, having what appeared to be a friendly conversation. I thought that I was mistaken, but how could I forget who my mugger was? My stepfather, who knew where we were that day in June ’82, had paid Pookie with my mother’s money to mug me at the pool. My carelessness had only made it easier for Pookie to do his job. It was my stepfather’s warped way of making me a man. What he did was steal my childhood.

Another example involved the way some of my former classmates acted toward me from the moment we threw our caps into the air when we graduated in ’87. Right after the ceremony at Memorial Field, it started. I’d walk down the street to the store, see, say Gordon or Kiam, say “Hi,” and get no response at all. The few times I bumped into Tomika, Ms. Red Bone would stare straight at me, then straight through me, all as I said “Hi.” She just kept on walking, as if I were less than a ghost.

By the beginning of August I honestly thought that these people, my classmates for so long, were showing their true colors. They just didn’t like me, not me because I’d been a Hebrew-Israelite or me because I was poor or me because I listened to Mr. Mister more than I did to Luther. It was all about me, something within me that they detested. Every time it happened, it made me feel low and left me in doubt about myself.

“You can’t pay any attention to that. They’re all just jealous,” E said when I told her about the ghost treatment over lunch one day. She and I worked for General Foods (now part of Kraft Foods) in Tarrytown that summer.

“Of what? Of me?,” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s because you’re not trying to be anybody except yourself,” she said.

“That’s a good theory,” I thought, but I didn’t really believe it. E was fully in my corner, and much more obvious about it than anyone else.

This went on for two summers and a holiday season, between June ’87 and December ’88. By the middle of my sophomore year, though, it didn’t matter, because I started to realize that the many of the people I went through Humanities and to MVHS with didn’t matter either. It got to the point where the silent treatment I was getting was downright laughable. I mean, it wasn’t as if these folks had been dear friends and then turned on me. The way I saw it, they were assholes, not much different from my stepfather.

My life in no way compares to literally surviving Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl, for that matter. But there are emotional atomic blasts whose long-term effects on us body, mind and spirit can last for a lifetime or even for more than a generation. We can truck in all the non-irradiated earth, grass and tree we want. We have to dig up the radioactive in our lives before we can plant fresh dirt and seeds. Thankfully, I managed to do that years before Noah was born.

Most early Augusts in my life have been uneventful. Hot, hazy, humid and sticky, but otherwise boring with nothing dramatic happening. Except for my years of suffering at 616 and in Mount Vernon, New York. The month of August in the years between ’82 and ’89 were full of drama, bizarre and oh so typical at the same time.

No month of August demonstrated that better than in ’83. It was the summer that followed our first months on welfare. Man, it was a period of great disillusionment. I didn’t want to be seen with what my wife calls FS. Of course, now, the government gives folks an EBT card to reduce the stigma. But back then, I’d pick and choose when to use them, just so that classmates like Crush #1 wouldn’t see me with Food Stamps in hand.

It was also a month in which I began to help with taking care of my sister Sarai. She was a sickly newborn thanks mostly to my mother and stepfather not doing their jobs as parents. Apparently they both had the sickle cell trait and had given Sarai sickle cell anemia. By the middle of the summer, Sarai was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,”as my mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. My mother would say to me, “See, that why you shouldn’t wish for an abortion,” as if I was supposed to feel guilty because Sarai was sick. As if I had anything to do with her being here. If anything, she should’ve felt guilty about bringing a child with Sarai’s condition into our idiotic family. I just gave my mother a weak smile whenever she’d say something stupid like that.

My mother decided at the beginning of August that it would be a good idea to celebrate Maurice’s thirty-third birthday (August 3) and Sarai making it to six months old. It was a great feast of grilled chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs, macaroni and potato salad, fruit salad and lemon and chocolate cake, potato chips and Kool-Aid and lemonade. I would’ve been in a good mood to eat too, except for the fact that we were celebrating the fat slob’s thirty-third birthday. It pissed me off to no end that me and Darren had to shop and help with the task of grilling food for the asshole to eat a rare feast.

What should have been a fun gathering was one of more surreal experiences I would ever have. My mother had invited my Uncle Sam to the picnic at Wilson’s Woods, along with Dennis, one of Maurice’s friends, the best man at the wedding five years before. Neither of them wanted to be there, but my uncle was beside himself with anger. He hardly ate, which should’ve been a red flag to my mother. She didn’t seem to understand why her brother would be upset that she was spending a week’s worth of food stamps to throw a party for her abusive husband and a daughter with sickle cell anemia. To his credit, he stayed to help us clean up. He didn’t come around for another family event until I graduated from high school four years later.

It was strange to know that after all that had happened, my mother still threw a birthday party for a person that she despised. I hated the man as well, so much so that I’d developed a minor stomach ulcer soon after the picnic celebration. But I thought more about what motivated my mother to do something so bizarre as to throw a picnic party for a man who had abused her, had cheated on her, and had committed forgery and fraud by signing her blank checks to cover his adultery expenses. Was it fear or some sort of Stockholm Syndrome? Was it love, unconditional, accepting-and-enduring-everything-love? Or was it a form of subterfuge? Did my mother throw a party because she wanted to be outside and have a picnic, for herself and for Sarai, and used Maurice’s birthday as an excuse?

Today, my stupid ex-stepfather turns fifty-nine. His fate continues to reflect badly on him as he approaches his sixties. One of his legs was amputated earlier this year, a side-effect of Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, a horrible diet, lack of exercise, and kidney failure. I don’t think I ever had enough hate to wish the kind of decline that Maurice has experienced over the past sixteen years. But then again, none of this is really about him. I’ve worked hard to forgive the man. Still, that doesn’t mean Maurice isn’t an idiot. And watching how he’s lived his life over the years is a lesson in how foolishness, when mixed with poverty and domestic violence, can tear people apart, including the perpetrators of such. That’s why it’s important to forgive.

A few months after my mother and idiot ex-stepfather had broken up for the last time, we were sitting together eating breakfast one weekend morning. She was asking me if I was angry with her about all that had happened between ’81 and ’89. Not directly, mind you. But in her meandering, “don’t bring me no bad news” way, she wanted to see if I held her in contempt for taking so long to kick Maurice to the curb. “No,” I lied, somewhat unknowingly, “I’m not angry with you.” After a pause, my mother then said, “You know, he fooled us all.”

I was flabbergasted (what an understatement!) by that statement. It was as if I was talking to a woman who somehow thought that I was still eight years old. Either that, or my mother thought that I was an emotional and psychological idiot when compared to her. When I pointed out my running away from home in the weeks after their marriage in ’78, my mother said, “There’s no way you could’ve known.” Could’ve have known what? That my former stepfather pretended his way through life? That he had the parenting skills of DMX and Britney Spears all within his own persona? “Apparently, the only person he ‘fooled’ was my mother,” I thought.

It was the beginning of my mother’s attempts to revise history, in her favor of course. For years, she’d explain to “the kids” (my younger siblings Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri) that their lot in life as welfare kids was caused solely by their “no-good father.” Not to mention the “Spanish people” and “West Indians” and “Orientals” owning most of the shops on The Avenue in Mount Vernon and taking most of the good jobs in the New York City area. As someone whose knowledge of the world — being in it, if not necessarily of it — grew with each passing year, listening to these half-truths and bigoted lies became increasingly painful.

Then the big lie came, right around the time of the 616 fire in ’95. All of a sudden, my role in the family was rewritten. No longer was I the big brother/uncle/father figure that I’d been since I was twelve or thirteen years old. Now, my mother had become the only person to have taken care of the “Judah babies” (as she started to call my younger siblings). “I take care of my kids!” she’d yell at other people in public when they gave her weird looks as she’d yell at my siblings like she was a bit unhinged. Or my mother would say in exasperation, “I’m stuck with these kids! But they’re mine, and God gave them to me for a reason, so…” As if God forced her to get pregnant, forced her to give birth, and threatened her with lightning if she didn’t feed, clothe or shelter them.

At first, I took all of this as her way of coping with the trauma of homelessness and property loss — not that there was that much property to lose. But I realized — rather late I might add — that this was her way of giving herself affirmation through her bitterness about the lost years, those eleven horrible years of abuse and poverty. So what if it meant not acknowledging her oldest two children or the sacrifices they had to make on her behalf? Or not considering her own role in making matters worse than they already were, for herself and for the rest of us?

All of these issues led to my family intervention at the beginning of ’02. I was willing to sacrifice my mother-sort-of-son/sort-of-boyfriend/ex-husband relationship so that, at the very least, I could make sure that my younger siblings understood one thing. That it wasn’t just their father that played a role in screwing up their lives. That our mother had screwed up on numerous occasions as well. I wish I hadn’t had to do it. Yet I knew I couldn’t let Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri go into their adult years merely thinking that their father “had fooled us all.”

I certainly love my mother and acknowledge that without her hard work and persistence—at least through my thirteenth birthday—that I wouldn’t be here to write. But there are many things about her I didn’t like even when I was in the midst of constant abuse from my stepfather. The nurturing, affectionate mother that so many children take for granted as their first source of emotional strength was almost never there for me. My mother 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.

It’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve realized how much NOT receiving this kind of affection has affected my relationships with women and friendships with men. Emotional intimacy and the level necessary that each of us needs to function successfully in life can be the difference between experiencing happiness in almost any situation or dying a miserably slow death in an otherwise healthy life. I can honestly say that while I’ve made it most of the way back, I still had a bit of work to do on this front. Hopefully I’m not fooling myself in the process.

The hardest thing I’ve had to adjust to over the years has been the good moment. Given my background, you’d think I’d savor every positive moment, every small victory, every tiny miracle, every gram of beauty in my life. Sadly, I don’t. I mean, for most of my twenties, I’d often tell myself not to get excited when those moments came, partly because there were so many of them, and partly because I had gotten caught up in my larger goals, my life-long aspirations.

Tomorrow my younger brother Yiscoc turns twenty-eight, which is something to celebrate, of course. But it’s also something in which I can see a bit of disappointment. Not only from where I sit, but from Yiscoc’s perspective as well. Of all of my siblings, none of them has done so little with so much as Yiscoc. Apparently, much of this has to do with Yiscoc’s own struggles with his adulthood, with being a part of the in-crowd, the need to be accepted and the need to be cool.

It’s funny. I’ve spent significant time on this blog talking about my high school experiences in relationship to my graduation class’ salutatorian, and no time talking about our Class of ’87 valedictorian. Funny because she and I maintained an acquaintanceship that turned into a friendship that lasted for a good sixteen years after high school. Funny because I got to know her and her family better than anyone I ever knew growing up in Mount Vernon, New York. Funny because I learned some important life lessons while watching her ascent to number one in our class, and the struggles she faced once she had taken on the mantle of valedictorian.

I first met “V” in eighth grade, although I had heard about her academic prowess from my other classmates while in 7S. She was above all else a classic grinder, a nerd par excellence. At five-foot-seven, she was one of the tallest folks in class. She was also blond-haired, blue-eyed and blandly pale. V was always prepared, always ready for the next task at hand even then. Our eventual salutatorian seemed like he was always running for class president, constantly seeking others’ confidence in him. His A’s seemed more natural, as if he almost didn’t have to study. Beyond that, I really didn’t think that much about them that year.

At least until I started bumping into V on my way to or from school. It was through this that I met her mother and her sister and learned that her mother had a serious illness. What kind of illness I didn’t know at the time. I assumed it was serious to V, because I remember her being upset a lot in eighth grade. I would’ve thought that V might’ve cared about something like winning the history prize. I’m sure she had an A in Demontravel’s class. V being V, her favorite classes that year were science and algebra. And given Demontravel’s ability to make the end of American slavery seem like we were watching a dog lick its ass in the middle of the desert, it’s a wonder if V even said two words the entire year.

V was and still is the biggest Billy Joel fan I’ve ever known. Schmaltzy or not, everything Billy Joel from “Piano Man” to “New York State of Mind” to “Pressure” — the entire Billy Joel catalog — was in her head as if she were double our age. By the time I’d met her, she’d already been to at least one Billy Joel concert. I liked some Billy Joel — the operative word being some — but I would’ve needed a glass of Manischewitz to listen to some of his more obscure work. This was one of our first conversations, about music and her love affair with the singer-songwriter from Long Island.

I guess the fact that I learned about her mother’s illness early on gave me sympathy for her. Whatever else might’ve bothered me about my situation, I knew that my mother wasn’t sick or had a serious medical condition like, say, Lou Gehrig’s Disease or muscular dystrophy. So I learned fairly quickly that V didn’t come from a healthy family of means. This despite that fact that her father was a prominent figure in our city. It was something we had in common, poverty based in large measure on two fathers not involved in our daily lives. I don’t think that V would ever admit it, but that commonality was the reason we were able to form a bond that year.

Our eventual valedictorian took Humanities so seriously that she had thrown herself into her work by ninth grade the way in which I worked when I was in graduate school. Along with about a dozen or so others, V took every opportunity to take the hardest courses and to participate in as many activities outside of class as she could handle. I figured out early on in the year that if a student could take every one of their classes at Level 0 (including gym) and could earn an A+ in all of them, the maximum GPA for them could be a 6.3 on a 4.0 scale, a huge weighting system for such courses. Somehow something about this seemed unfair. Of course, V was a straight A student, soaking up Geometry, Trig, PreCalc, Bio, Chemistry, and so many other subjects as if she had the answers before the teachers asked any questions. And she did.

By eleventh grade, I found myself in more of V’s classes by virtue of me taking AP US History with Meltzer, along with first period English and eighth period Physics (or was it seventh? Hmm). God, she was so focused once class started! It was as if V was Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon, ready to pound an opponent in submission in under forty minutes.

Sometimes, though, that laser-beam-like focus of her’s was to her detriment. Our English teacher Mrs. Warns had given us an essay exam looking at James Baldwin’s writings, a pretty bold assignment for a White teacher to give us in ’86 (it wouln’t be bold now, except in the Bible Belt). Warns had warned us after the last exam to underline book titles and put quotation marks around essays or we’d get twenty-five points taken off our grades. V, unfortunately, was the only one who failed to follow these instructions, of which Warns had reminded us just before the exam. Sure enough, V’s 92 became a 67, the lowest grade I remember V receiving during our Humanities years. It was also the only time I can remember V receiving the lowest class grade for any assignment in any subject.

She protested, became angry with Warns, and walked out of class in tears. We walked with her to Meltzer’s class, we being me and three female classmates. It was our attempt to console her. Except I didn’t really feel like giving V emotional support at that moment. It wasn’t as if she was going to fail the class or, God forbid, end up with a B, not for even one marking period. So her 5.6 GPA would drop maybe to a 5.5. V herself wasn’t a supportive person academically-speaking anyway. I had mixed feelings about V’s response, but I understood perfectly why Warns did it.

By the summer going into our senior year, I began hanging out a little bit with V, whose life was fully dedicated to finishing college before she started. Besides her job as an assistant with a dentist who just so happened to be the husband of our former eighth-grade science teacher — it was on my weekly route toward my father Jimme’s watering holes in the Bronx — she was working hard at home taking care of her mother and her younger sister. I know I had it hard at 616, but V’s life was comparable in a few ways. Her ailing mother had reached the point where she was using a cane to walk, but she was mostly wheelchair bound. Her mother was maybe four or five years older than mine, but they looked twenty years apart. I knew why V worked as hard as she did, given her situation. It was something we had in common, becoming an adult long before our teenage years were over.

V was also blowing through our textbook for AP Physics. She apparently had borrowed a copy from Wolf at the end of the school year and was going through it during her spare moments. She was also working her way through Calculus, just so she could take the tougher version of the two AP Calculus exams. I thought she was crazy working as hard as she was to prepare for next year. I also realized that this was V’s secret to success, taking her time during the summers to study as if she was preparing for the state bar exam. Based on what I saw, I figured that V was going to spend about two hundred hours studying for the two AP classes that summer. Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable! I worried for her mental health, hoping that she wouldn’t burn herself out trying to be the perfect student.

Yet somehow she didn’t, at least not in ’86-’87. Like me, V scored a 5 on the AP US History exam. But that was only the beginning. She also scored a 1360 on her SAT, was ranked number one in our class with a 5.45 GPA, and would score a 5 on the AP Calc BC, AP Physics C, and AP Biology exams, and a 4 on the AP English exam. She guaranteed herself twenty-seven college credits, making her a college sophomore before she’d been given her high school diploma. Between the scores and grades, scholarship offers were aplenty, but V opted for Johns Hopkins and their pre-med program. I had no doubt that she would do just as well there as she did in high school.

Still, in the back of my mind, as I developed a regular correspondence with V all through our college years, I worried about her and her family. They all moved to the DC area right before V’s freshman year at Johns Hopkins. I knew that she was about to attempt to work, study, date, have a social life and take care of her mother and sister at the same time. I had no doubt that she’d find the strength to finish college, but I also had no doubt that all of these burdens were bound to catch up to her. My own family, school and social situation had left me with my own sense of burnout and reckoning by the beginning of my sophomore year. By her true sophomore year, they did.

Meltzer said to me on any number of occasions that “I never worried about you. I worried about V. I worried about V a lot.” I also knew that over the years he had worried about a couple of other classmates. The first time he ever said that to me was during my sophomore year of college. I was offended by the comment. “I had the least of everything when I was in his class,” I thought, “and he knew that but didn’t worry?” In the years since that first comment, I realized that the way I approached class and my life meant that I already had the tools to overcome everything I faced. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time.

What Meltzer didn’t realize was that V had the tools to cope as well. She just had to find the strength to use them, which she eventually did. I learned long before the end of high school that as analytically gifted as I was, that it wasn’t my job to be perfect, at school or at home. V learned that lesson in college, and from where I sit, learned that lesson well. It would behoove so many other parents and students to learn not to pursue perfection and excellence as if it were pure gold, to learn that life is about balance, and that learning is about more than A’s.