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Top Cook

25 Monday May 2009

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

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I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the Bravo show Top Chef, hosted by Padma Lakshmi and with head Italiano judge Tom Colicchio. It’s been a reality-series-mainstay for five years, with chefs in constant competition over the quality of their dishes and the ambiance with which they present them. When I do watch — it’s one of my wife’s shows, not so much mine — I find myself thinking, “I can out-cook most of these people, no problem!”

But as the mafioso-like Colicchio has said numerous times, “the show’s called Top Chef, not Top Cook.” Given the fact that most of the contestants don’t even bother to taste what they cook, I don’t think that they should be in competition for either title. I should know. I have twenty-five years of experience to prove it.
One of the consequences of my youngest brother Eri’s birth in the spring of ’84 was that I learned how to cook, at least enough to make sure that seven people actually gained weight and enjoyed eating my food for the next two months. It was a time of irony and hypocrisy (as if any other time during my Boy At The Window years wasn’t), putting another nail in the Hebrew-Israelite coffin in which my stepfather was prepared to bury himself. It also gave me the opportunity to see myself as an adult beyond my academic abilities. It provided a level of confidence that would be helpful in my Pitt years.
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My conversion to Christianity and my developing interests in sports, music and girls in the spring of ’84 couldn’t have come at a better time. The week before Memorial Day ’84 was when my mother gave birth to my baby brother Eri. The little porker came in at just under seven pounds. Two weeks before that, my stupid stepfather invited his Hebrew-Israelite matriarch “Balkis Makeda” (she believed that she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Sheba, the one who would marry King Solomon of ancient Israel) to stay with us. She was moved in before my mother could seriously object. What a situation! Six kids, including me, plus Mom, Maurice, and an old woman living together in a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment. We now needed to behave like good little Hebrew-Israelites with this woman in our house, so as to not embarrass my stepfather.
One of the wonderful rules of our absurdly orthodox practice was that my mother couldn’t cook or do any familial tasks for the next three months. She was “unclean” because she’d just given birth to Eri. This might’ve made sense in the deserts of ancient Canaan, with no antibiotics and drugs to deal with unclean “issues of blood” and other bodily fluids. It didn’t now. Plus I didn’t remember my mother not cooking for three months after Yiscoc and Sarai were born. This was suck-up time, plain and simple.Maurice made what was an abyss-of-bad even worse by cooking dinner for three days. Three straight nights of overboiled and under-ripened cabbage drenched in its own juices and seasoned to high heaven with red and black pepper. My stepfather could’ve been the founder of the cabbage soup diet if he’d actually eaten his own cooking. Man, a week of cabbage like his would’ve left skinny me in an emergency room in need of an IV. As it was, my younger siblings couldn’t even eat a mouthful of the gruel. We needed someone else to cook, and soon. My mother knew just who to ask.

So from the end of May until mid-July, I cooked dinner night after night for my family of eight. Makeda refused to eat my food on principle — the man of the house or a female servant was supposed to cook, not me. Before this crisis, I’d only cooked a few things, like baked chicken leg quarters, fried and boiled eggs, sticky-bad grits, and toast with butter. I immediately learned to control temperatures on our gas stove to fry chicken Southern-style, started making spaghetti and meat sauce, and figured out how to season meats and the difference between that and seasoning veggies. All while still doing my other chores, helping out with my siblings and getting ready for Regents and final exams.

I learned how to make the five-dollar-spaghetti meal for eight. For that amount of money, I’d shop at C-Town, buy a pound of ground beef (two dollars), a box of Ronzoni spaghetti (eighty-nine cents, often on sale for fifty cents), a can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce (ninety-nine cents), and a box of frozen chopped broccoli (fifty-nine cents). With the fifty-four cents left over, I could buy two packs of grape and lemon Kool-Aid or a pack of Wise Crunchy Cheese Doodles as payment for my shopping expertise and culinary services. Sometimes I’d even squeeze a Twix candy bar out of the remaining change.

It was a sharp learning curve, but I wanted to learn. I’d been asking my mother to teach me how to cook since I was nine or ten. Now I was learning under a bit of pressure. Our health and my continued psychological wellness depended on me making food we not only could eat but enjoy as well. By the middle of my second week as 616’s master chef, even Maurice was complimenting me on my skills at the stove and oven. My mother was the only holdout, constantly saying that my food was only “okay,” or “It needs more seasoning,” or that my gravy was “oily and lumpy.”

I did the best I could under these difficult circumstances. My grades remained consistent all year and remained that way even through Regents and finals the third week in June. I managed an 86 on the Geometry Regents despite seeing too many proofs, a 91 on the Biology Regents, and scores in the high-80s and 90s on my Literature and History exams. I got a 73 on my Italian final, a sure sign of things to come with me and Romance languages. My fourth semester GPA was a 4.48, and for the year it was a 4.26. If I could keep this pace up, Humanities in high school would be “as smooth as a milkshake,” as a former classmate would’ve said.

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I’ve added quite a few dishes to my repertoire since ’84. I can make everything from broiled salmon to  veal stew, from wine-drenched pork tenderloin to wok-cooked vegetable fried rice. The most important thing I’ve learned as a cook is the ability to walk in a kitchen, look at a bunch of raw ingredients, and come up with something to cook, without a recipe or without it being something I normally make. I figured out how to make good gravy from scratch one time in ’93 when the only thing I had to work with was water, oil, flour and seasoning. I combined ketchup, soy sauce and chili sauce to make barbeque sauce one day in ’99 when we had only $10 to work with while living in Pittsburgh. Learning this, and that my palate is pretty good in discerning seasonings and tastes, is what makes me as good a cook as I am.
None of this would’ve likely happened, though, without going through those years of malnourishment and wanting for food. None of my ability to cook would’ve been converted to actual cooking without those weeks of cooking in volume for hungry mouths at the end of my freshman year of high school. I likely wouldn’t have finished college or grad school without the ability to cook my own food — it would’ve been too expensive to go to school otherwise. Like reading, critical thinking and creativity, cooking to the point of chef-like ability is a skill that always comes in handy, that makes the most boring of meals worth eating. It also revealed a lot about my character and my sense of initiative than I knew before, especially outside of the classroom.

The Meaning of Eri’s 25th

23 Saturday May 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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Eri Washington (with my left arm) at 616 for Thanksgiving, Mount Vernon, New York, November 23, 2006. (Angelia N. Levy).

Yesterday, my brother Eri Washington turned twenty-five years old. He’s my youngest brother (technically, half-brother, but I don’t bother with such labels), and he’s as old now as I was when I was in the middle of my dissertation process. Wow! To think that it’s been a quarter-century since his birth makes me think about how much has happened and how much my youngest brother didn’t have or get to experience in the twenty-five years since his birth.

For starters, Eri’s birth ended a cycle of bad experiences and bad decision-making on the part of his father and my mother. I love my brother and know that the world would be a different place for me and others without him here. Yet his birth was in the middle of our fall into welfare poverty. Eri was the fourth of my younger siblings born in less than five years, between July ’79 and May ’84. He was also the third kid born during our dreaded Hebrew-Israelite years. Although his would be and remains a Hebrew name, it was also one of my family’s final acts as Hebrew-Israelites. My mother didn’t believe in abortion, nor in any form of birth control. My idiot stepfather didn’t believe in condoms. But he loved hanging out with other idiot guys bragging about how many kids he sired — I caught him once sharing cigars with these imbeciles soon after Eri’s birth.

Once again, I digress. The worst of things were over. My mother wasn’t physically abused in the final years of her so-called marriage, and I only had to face down any form of physically abuse once after Eri’s birth. Our financial status was so far below the poverty line that the only place to fall was in homelessness. Between AFDC, WIC, and FS (as my wife calls Food Stamps), we had about $16,000 coming in to feed, clothe and pay rent and other bills for a family of eight. Of course, my obese stepfather shouldn’t have been there, but oh well! There weren’t any more kids on the way, and it seemed as if my mother and I were both waking up from the illusion cast by the cult that we lived under for the previous three years. Having too many mouths to feed can do that, I guess.

There were also things that Eri would never see as he grew up, especially as he reached his tweener years. Me, my older brother Darren, and my younger brother Maurice all have memories of my mother working as a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s Dietary Department. We all knew that she worked very hard at her job and fought to keep it even though it was a losing battle. (You can’t cross your own picket line and expect to keep your job in the long run.) So Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri never saw my mother as a worker growing up. My mother didn’t start working again until the fall of ’97, and would work off and on as a temp for six years before getting a job with Westchester County Medical Center. Eri was nineteen years old by the time that happened.

He also never saw me slogging my way through Humanities and Mount Vernon High School to get into the University of Pittsburgh. Heck, Eri was a just a bit more than three years old when I went off to college. He took it harder than any of my siblings when I left for Pittsburgh in August ’87. When I did my family intervention in January ’02, Eri was still angry with me about it, accusing me of “abandoning the family.” In a way, I guess he was right. This despite the fact that I visited every summer through ’94 and every Christmas through ’97. My need to go away to school meant that there was little reason for Eri — or any of my other siblings for that matter — to follow my example. Of course, by ’93, none of them could have even if they had wanted to. The Humanities Program graduated its last cohort of brainiacs that year.

For better and for worse, Eri was born into an era of limited possibilities and little imagination. His first nine years of life were spent in welfare poverty during the Reagan and Bush 41 years. Not exactly a time of optimism about American innovation, social mobility, and racial harmony. Not in Mount Vernon, not in the New York City area, not for the poor and for people of color of this more conservative era. With no Humanities and living in a bedroom suburb not exactly “on the move,” Eri spent his formative years without the constant academic and familial encouragement necessary for early successes — small and big — that could provide fuel for optimism later on as a tweener or teenager.

Then the fire of April ’95 at 616 happened. It left my mother and younger siblings in a semi-homeless, semi-halfway-house state for nearly three years. They lived most of that time in Yonkers, just five blocks from the Bronx and within a half-mile or so of Van Cortlandt Park. It changed all of us. But I think it changed Eri most of all. He was always angry. Even when I visited, I could see how angry he was with me and with the rest of the world. By the Yonkers years of ’95 to ’98, he was in middle school. But instead of sending him to middle school in Yonkers, my mother made the decision to keep all of my younger siblings in Mount Vernon public schools. Only Maurice did well. Of course he did — he was a junior at MVHS when they all lived in Yonkers. Not so for Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri. My youngest brother spent three years and one summer in middle school, including two years at Davis in seventh grade and a summer making sure he didn’t have to repeat eighth grade.

Eri continued to behave as if his actions had little meaning after moving back into the new, insane-asylum-looking 616 in ’98. From the fall of ’99 until he dropped out in ’02, Eri was a ninth-grader at MVHS. He was a drop-in, cutting classes, hanging out with his buddies, bringing girls home apparently to hump. It wasn’t until he managed to knock up one girlfriend in the middle of ’01 that Eri realized that his life couldn’t get better without him making an effort to make it better.

By the time of my family intervention in ’02, Eri was enrolling in JobCorp in upstate New York. Still, I wanted to make sure that I gave him as strong a push as I could so that he would take the program and its possibilities seriously. Within eighteen months, Eri had completed his GED, gotten his driver’s license and earned an auto mechanic’s license. Even after not being able to find steady work, Eri made the decision to join the Army Reserve, earning him a tour of duty in Iraq in ’07-’08, not to mention a broken toe.

Not everything in Eri’s life, especially of late, has been bad. Yet when living with so much anger because the world seems like it’s against you aspiring to anything, it’s easy to just throw up your hands and say, “No mas!” The meaning that I can take from the past twenty-five years is to never give up, especially on yourself, and never let the world take your dreams from you. I hope that Eri can continue to do the same.

On Catherine Lacey

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Work, Youth

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Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

This month marks fourteen years since my plans for earning my doctorate were all but assured by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. It was a one-year fellowship, only $15,000, but it meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, that I didn’t have to do grunt work for my advisor Joe Trotter, and that I wasn’t beholden to the history department at Carnegie Mellon for much of anything. It was a great triumph in my little world of graduate school. But of all the things that resulted from that award, one thing that I didn’t count on was another mentor and friend. Without a doubt, Catherine Lacey has had the longest lasting impact on my career and on my thinking, in and out of academia.

Catherine was the Senior Program Officer and Director of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program when I applied for it in the fall of ’94. She had taken over the program in ’93, with the apparent charge of making the program more inclusive and more dynamic for its participants. I’m not sure what the foundation’s dissertation fellowship program was like before. All I know is that Catherine’s seven-year-long tenure running it was one in which she practiced compassion, humility, optimism, and quiet leadership. She never sounded like an academician in directing the work, although she was a bit philosophical at times. She never sounded like a bureaucrat or a senior foundation officer who practiced the power of “No,” even though that was certainly a major part of her job. Almost from my first conversation with Catherine, I realized that she was different from anyone I’d met with an academic background or in the foundation world.

Her background was as a Catholic nun who at one point was a Catholic school teacher, at least through the late ’70s, if I remember correctly. At some point she decided to go back to school, to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Even though she was no longer a practicing nun (whatever I mean by that, I’m not entirely sure), I’m sure that this training and philosophical approach to life and work helped her a lot in her position at the Spencer Foundation. Maybe it was also the fact that she grew up in the Midwest, North or South Dakota I believe. Whatever the case, I think that this combination of experiences made her a more flexible and generous person than most of the foundation program officers and academic bureaucrats I’d met before and have come to know since.

The first time I ever heard from Catherine was right after a two-month research stay in Washington, DC and visit home in Mount Vernon, New York. I’d just come off of weeks in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research collection at Howard University, the Sumner School Archives for DC Public Schools, and several other places doing research on my dissertation topic, multiculturalism in philosophy and practiced among Black Washingtonians. It was the end of March ’95, and it had been five months since I’d submitted my application packet for the Spencer fellowship. When I went to my Carnegie Mellon mailbox in the history department, there it was. A standard #10 envelope with only a one-page letter inside, which I knew because of the envelope’s thinness. I knew it was a rejection letter. Except that it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It had a handwritten note at the bottom of it from Catherine, asking me to give her a call as soon as I received the note.

So I did. Catherine did most of the talking, asking me about my research stay in DC, about my definition of multiculturalism and how it had or hadn’t changed because of my research. Then she talked to me about the selection committee. Apparently out of eight committee members, six voted in favor of awarding me the fellowship, one against, and with one in absentia. The sticking point was how I defined multiculturalism in my research proposal, putting me on the fence between award and no award. Although I would learn later that there were some academic and cultural politics involved in the two non-Yes votes, at the time Catherine told me that she would do everything she could to see if she could still fund my work. “I’m not making any promises,” she said before we got off the phone.

I didn’t know what to make of the call, other than the fact that Catherine cared about funding my work. That it wasn’t everyday that someone with her responsibilities called a student who had technically been rejected was also something I took away from that call. Two weeks passed. On Friday, April 14 of ’95, I got a call at home, right after 9:30 am. I assumed it was my mother or one of my friends. I hadn’t even taken the time to spit and rinse my toothpaste when I answered the phone. After the pleasantries, Catherine excitedly blurted out the good news. And I swallowed my toothpaste in response before asking how and saying thanks.

It turned out that Catherine thought that in addition to the 29 awards that were granted fellowships by the committee, that there were four others (including me) who should also receive the fellowship. Catherine had spent the previous two weeks asking the foundation for additional monies for the other four of us, and found that at least two of the original 29 awardees had accepted other fellowships. As a result, she could then give out four additional fellowships as part of her discretion as the director of the program. I was happy, to say the least about the award. But I was even happier that someone would fight for me and others the way Catherine did.

As a Spencer fellow, I learned a lot from my “fellow Fellows,” as I constantly called our group. That I wasn’t the only one whose advisor was acting as a roadblock toward our degree and career aspirations. That our colleagues on our campuses stared us all down with daggers in their eyes after learning about our awards. That hours upon hours of lonely research and intense writing and editing didn’t make any of our significant others or spouses particularly happy. Still, I learned as much from Catherine as I did from my fellow Fellows. About balance between life and work. About the realization that academia wasn’t our only career option, even as much as we thought it was at the time. That it was all right to feel ambivalent about pursuing an academic career.

This last one was of great importance to me, because my worries about becoming a publish-or-perish professor had always been there. I wanted to do something useful with my degree and life, something to benefit others, something that would allow me to help people who grew up like me, poor, possibly abused, and with the world thinking that I’d sooner go to jail than graduate high school. The one thing that Catherine’s work revealed to me was that it was possible to have a job and career that you could fall in love with, that helps others, and that enabled you to prosper financial. Her job allowed her to do all three, and very well at that.

It was that realization that enabled me to stumble my way into the nonprofit world, doing work on everything from community computer labs and civic education to a social justice fellowship program and education reform work on college access and success. Even after my fellowship ended in June ’96, I kept in contact with Catherine, attended Spencer gatherings and asked for advice. I even took my wife with me on a business trip to Chicago once to, among other things, have her meet Catherine at the Spencer offices in the John Hancock Building. I haven’t had quite the same luck of finding work that is as fulfilling as Catherine’s work was with Spencer. But I haven’t given up trying, and hope that what I have done and am doing does actually help others.

I haven’t talked to Catherine since the end of ’04. Not for lack of trying, though. Catherine decided after two years as a high-level administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that it was time for her to retire, to move back to the Dakotas, to live in seclusion, I guess. She didn’t particularly like Philly, or the grinding work that is almost pure administration. She missed Spencer, Chicago, and all of the people that she had met over the years. I think that the Bush years and 9/11 depressed her greatly

I miss Catherine. I miss asking her advice on everything from my job to whether I should turn Boy At The Window into a fiction novel instead of keeping it a memoir with narrative nonfiction elements (I know, that’s redundant) or even continue to pursue finding an agent. I miss sending her pictures of Noah or talking to her about her days at Spencer. Most of all, I miss telling her how much her friendship and unofficial mentoring have meant to me over the years. To Catherine, and really, all of my friends, many, many thanks.

Jeremy Spoke In Class Today (updated)

19 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Sometimes as Americans we can be so stupid. It’s been fourteen twenty years since Timothy McVeigh left a Ryder van in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building building in Oklahoma City filled with two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel to blow a tragic hole into it, leaving 168 women, men and children dead. It’s been ten sixteen years since two White male teens decided to lock and load at their high school in Columbine, Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead, 25 others wounded, all before killing themselves in a blaze of White male angst glory. Yet we’re still up in arms over any significant legislation to keep assault guns out of the hands of folks who may do their neighbors harm, as if the Second Amendment doesn’t itself provide limitations on the use of firearms in our society.

Right now, without any abatement, some idiotic father or mother is so depressed about their financial situation and the future of their family that they’re willing to go into their garage, pull out the 9mm pistol or .45 caliber rifle and take out their children, their spouse and themselves in a public display of psychotic-ness. It’s happened in recent months in Chicago, in Maryland, in California, in Florida, and in so many other places that the public only barely pays attention to it anymore. Then there are the folks who are literally clinging to their guns — if not their religion — because the nuts on Fox News Channel and on the conservative talk radio shows have stirred them up about President Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration had any plans to take people’s guns away from them is about as ludicrous as blaming the grunge group Pearl Jam for the Columbine massacre in ’99.

Cover art of Pearl Jam's single "Jeremy" (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

Cover art of Pearl Jam’s single “Jeremy” (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

To think that it’s been more than a decade since Columbine and that we as a nation have learned next to nothing from it is just a sad commentary on how fearful we as a nation are. I remember as I packed my bags for my presentation at the Organization for American Historians conference in Toronto how the events of Columbine unfolded. One of the first things that came out of the media was that songs like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was to blame for stirring the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into killing and maiming their unaccepting, cliquish classmates. Except that “Jeremy” killed himself in front of his classmates. He imploded — he didn’t take his rage and angst out on the rest of the world.

Harris and Klebold’s disproportionate response had little to do with Pearl Jam or grunge, and more to do with our culture of fear, as explained by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2004) through Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear (1999). When combined with easy access to guns and other weapons, it’s no wonder why events like Columbine and Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech and more recent ones in Binghamton, New York, Tennessee, Alabama, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and so many other places across the country are happening regularly. Kind of like the bombings and shootouts that have taken many a life of American soldiers while keeping Iraq safe for democracy since ’03. In our case, all it took was a severe economic downturn and the election of President Obama to produce disproportionate fear and rage, implosion and explosion, family annihilators and gun-hoarding psychopaths.

I would’ve thought ten years ago that Columbine would take the Brady Bill passed by Clinton and Congress in ’94 a step further, but it didn’t. I would’ve thought that Americans might become more willing to be introspective in considering the reasons for all of our senseless democracy-based violence. But we haven’t been. We haven’t even conducted national townhalls on these issues. We’ve allowed the NRA, gun-makers and others who benefit from the proliferation of assault weapons to dictate how we exercise our Second Amendment rights.

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

There were the kinds of things I thought about during my five days in Toronto, which seemed as far away from the violence and fear of the US as Rome at the time. I also thought about my experiences in middle school and in high school. I wasn’t bullied, at least in not any physical way. But I felt ostracized at times, and I was certainly made fun of more times than I could count. I didn’t have access to guns, and it never would’ve occurred to me to shoot the folks who were clownin’ me. In later years, in seeing signs of the US melting down economically and culturally, it wouldn’t have been in my thought process to blow up a federal building, threaten the president or another public official, or otherwise arm myself for a coming race war or war against the federal government.

No, what I thought about while in Canada was how peaceful and settled it seemed compared to anywhere I’d been in the US. I didn’t feel my skin color or race the way I usually felt it as an American citizen in America. I loved the multicultural atmosphere and the fact that folks truly embraced it there, and not just by serving hummus and falafel at parties and by taking yoga classes. If I could, I’d move all of us up there to live a less fearful and more accepting lifestyle than the one that we can live here.

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Somehow, some way, we as a country need to find ways to deal with our fear of each other, of failure, of the loss of power and dominance as a nation among nations, as Whites over everyone else. Confronting these fears as part of a public display of transparency and openness will allow for angst without implosion or explosion, and dissent without a turn to ridiculously senseless violence. This is the reason why we have so many dead and wounded every year from gun use (though not usually bombs), in everything from homegrown terrorism to everyday acts of community annihilation. If not, we will continue to serve as a model of first-world dreams and third-world chaos, offering the world not much more than our hypocrisy in the process.

On People and Stress

28 Saturday Feb 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

As February draws to a close, I’m reminded of the fact that, like now, the last days of February in ’89 and ’90 for me represented small yet telling changes in my life. Like buying my first CD player in February ’90. It changed my relationship to music forever, as I never fell behind any trend I wanted to keep up with again. It gave me more opportunities to experiment with and experience jazz, smooth jazz (formerly known as jazz fusion), rap, Latin music, and even grunge. That Aiwa player lasted me through all of grad school, and made it easy to forget that there was ever a time when I didn’t have access to music.

But enough with more pleasant experiences in late February. Overall, the two and a half years between my five days of homelessness at Pitt and a semester of financial woes and the start of grad school were fun times, but were stressful times, with a steep learning curve to boot. Obviously, they weren’t as stressful in most ways as now — but they reflect how my world view began to grow up in the months after recovering from being on the edge of dropping out from Pitt.

By the end of February ’89, I found myself in a bit over my head as a student and worker. It was manageable only because I had already begun the process of leaving all things 616 and Mount Vernon at 616 and in Mount Vernon when I wasn’t home or on one of my weekly phone call listening to my griping mother. Even though I could see that the day was coming when my stepfather would no longer be my stepfather, I had decided to leave that situation be — unless he was attempting to hurt my mother again, of course. It was a pattern that would continue beyond my mother’s second marriage until the summer of ’91, when I had made the switch to Pittsburgh as home. It’s funny to think about now. Having pushed all of my past, my feelings and thoughts about Mount Vernon to the back of my brain stem during those school years. Putting aside what was going on at Pitt during the summers I worked at home.

I did slip up sometimes. I paid a heavy price when I slipped up in Mount Vernon, especially around my mother. I had to explain away my anger, changes in language (it was harder for me to code switch back then), and education whenever I displayed the Pitt version of me. It scared her that I was “puttin’ on airs,” as if I could hide years of accelerated education. It was hard enough hiding my rage against all that had happened at home after ’81.

At Pitt, I acted as if I didn’t have a past before the summer of ’87, so my slip ups were pretty rare. But when I did slip up, it usually involved a woman at some level. The spring of ’89 was no different. I had already set myself up for a rough semester. Sixteen credits of courses in existential philosophy, macroeconomics, Shakespeare, the second half of Biology, and the writing seminar for history majors. The last was a course I’d been advised to wait to take until my senior year. On top of that, I was working for Pitt’s computer labs on a near full-time schedule. From the end of January through the second week in April, I averaged thirty-six hours a week. And all for $4.15 an hour. We were short-staffed, and after a semester of near starvation, I needed the money. That I had a 4 pm to midnight shift at the Cathedral of Learning labs on Mondays and an 8 am Tuesday macroecon lecture on Tuesdays didn’t help — I rarely made it to that class. Other than the occasional outing or movie, I had no social life for most of that jam-packed semester.

It was during my work days that I began working with P. She was a twenty-six-year-old peroxide-blond party girl who’d come back to school and ended up an Information Systems major. Sometimes I ended up paired with her on my Monday evening shifts. I liked talking to her during those shifts to pass the time when I couldn’t concentrate on evolutionary theory in second-semester Bio or didn’t feel like reading more existential philosophy. But I wasn’t interested in her. Despite the fact that she was the first White woman I’d met in Pittsburgh that had anything other than a flat butt and that she’d occasionally said something interesting, P. was out-of-sight and mind when my shift was over.

Three weeks into the semester, the reason we became so short-staffed had thrown a party at his apartment on North Craig in North Oakland. This co-worker had taken a job to work for AT&T somewhere in Virginia, a job that would start at the beginning of March. He wanted to celebrate, so he invited all of us over. I liked the man, so I went. I got there and it was as insane a scene as I’d seen in the dorms my freshman year or with my father at the bars in the city. The place was barely lit. It had this moody dark red glow in his living room, with every other room lit for making out. Booze and boozers were everywhere, and almost everyone was in some phase of inebriation.

I got in, and P. started talking to me all crazy, as if we’d been in conversation about our sexual preferences in the past. I pulled away from her, had conversations with my former computer lab boss and a few co-workers, had a customary drink—my first beer since just before Thanksgiving ’87—and left.

At least I was trying to. As I began putting on my coat and scarf, P. came out and put her arms around my neck and her left leg in between mine, pushing me up against the foyer wall in the process.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, her eyes glazed and bloodshot.

I didn’t say anything, I just tried to get her arms from around me.

“I know you’re attracted to me . . . that you like this White girl,” P. said as she tried to kiss me.

“You’re drunk!,” I said in response as I finally managed to unhook her from my neck and body.

“I might be drunk, but you can still get laid,” she said as I shook my head and left.

I assumed that P. had too much to drink and that what happened at the party was the end of it. It wasn’t, not by a long shot. All through February and early March she worked hard to bait me into conversations that were all about sexual innuendo. During one Saturday project when we were installing new PCs and new software, P. called me a “useless prick.” I responded, “Just because you think you have a nice butt doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be attracted to you!” I pretty much tried to avoid her after that.

That was hard to do, because I worked so many hours that semester, and because our new boss was a high school friend of P. Once I finally cut my hours so I could concentrate on being a student again, at the beginning of April, my boss, who knew what was going on, told me that I had a “bad attitude” and that I needed to settle up with P.

My response was to resign my position before I found myself fired or accused of sexual harassment by the very person who was harassing me. I sent a detailed email at the end of that semester to my boss’ bosses about the incidents with P., about the lack of persons of color on staff, about the state of computing labs at Pitt in general. It made me a bit of a muckraker, but I noticed that there were more students of color on staff when I came back to Pitt that fall.

It didn’t really help my view of White women either. Not that I had formed any real opinion about them. It did make me realize how difficult it would be to be in a mixed relationship, especially in the conservative world of Western Pennsylvania. The race issue and all of the innuendo and stereotypes would likely get in the way, unless both folks in the relationship were far more enlightened than a twenty-six-year-old party girl and a nineteen-year-old discovering himself for the first time. I wasn’t even ready for a relationship with my nerdy yet attractive Black female friends. Anything more complicated, even a one-night stand with a White woman, was the equivalent of achieving peace in the Middle East, that’s how alien it seemed to me at the time.

Still, I was kind of thankful to be done with computing labs and being seen only as a “computer guy.” I had changed my major to history, been journaling on my own for the first time since I was fifteen, began hanging out with a diverse group of friends and acquaintances, and discovered myself as attractive for the first time in years. I left Pitt more content than pissed about what happened that semester. I left that semester knowing that I had the capacity to handle any situation, even the adult ones, as an adult.

On Public Enemy and Eclectic Music

31 Saturday Jan 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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PE, Fear Of A Black Planet (1990) Album Cover

Tomorrow’s an important milestone in my life. Nineteen years ago, I went to a Public Enemy concert with one of my Pitt friends. It was a Thursday evening engagement at the old Syria Mosque, a weird name for a place that was a entertainment hall, not a place of worship. I believe it was a Masonic temple, one located less than two blocks from Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning on Bigelow Blvd near or on Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t the beginning of my interest in hip-hop, my friendly date for that evening, or maintaining an eclectic sense of thought and style. But it confirmed in many ways how unbounded my mind was, regarding music and so much else.

I’m still amazed at times what I’ve come to like over the past three decades of almost continuous music consumption, as reflected when I allow my iPod to randomly select from some 1,300 songs. My home life at 616 wasn’t much of a guide. My mother liked Al Green, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Temptations and The Four Tops. My idiot stepfather loved The Ohio Players and The Commodores. My alcoholic father was into anything that he could snap his fingers to off- rhythm, including Motown, and especially James Brown. I guess that makes sense, since Jimme and the Godfather of Soul spoke in the same incomprehensible cadence. For me, it all started with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy.” I just happened to catch it on the radio one day, it must have been on WBLS 107.5 FM, sometime in second grade, ’76-’77 for me. I loved the song, I don’t know why, but it was literally the first time I consciously came into contact with music.

Two years later, I had a much easier way of gaining exposure to music without waiting for my mother or stepfather to turn on my mother’s beat-up stereo system from her days with my father. One of the first things Jimme bought me and my brother Darren after we started our occasional weekend times with him was a small transistor radio. It had both FM and AM, which in the days of the late ’70s was a relatively new technology. Both me and my older brother would play around with the radio, but I used it more often. I eventually settled on two stations — WABC 77 AM and WBLS.

Because I had no immediate guide as to what to listen for, my criteria for music was to like whatever sounded good as it bounced around my ears and brain. Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, E ,W & F, Christopher Cross, Michael Jackson (the Off the Wall album), Stephanie Mills, Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, The Commodores (post-funk — my stepfather made me sick of “Brickhouse“) and so on. I loved how WBLS signed off at the end of the night, with “Moody’s Mood for Love,” a song from the mid-’50, with the “there I go, there I go, there I go” refrain at the beginning of the song. Call me weird, but this is where my eclecticness started.

The summer of ’80, just before my mother and stepfather separated for the first time, we went to a concert in the park, somewhere in the Bronx, most likely Van Cortlandt Park between 242nd and 262nd. It was a rap concert, my first one, and it featured Sugar Hill Gang among others. I kind of liked it, especially since I couldn’t believe how quickly the rappers put words together in combination and in rhythm. It was as silly as it was profound, at least for me at ten. I liked it, but it wasn’t exactly playing on every radio station in New York. Even WBLS almost completely ignored rap in those days. My stepfather bought their album soon after that concert.

For the next year, my musical tastes continued to take shape, including Pink Floyd, Queen, Luther Vandross, REO Speedwagon, Kenny Rogers, Kenny Loggins, Genesis and Phil Collins, along with what I already liked. Then my stepfather came back into our lives with his Hebrew-Israelite religion, disrupting the songs in my head for a few years. My saving grace, in the weirdest of ways, was being in Humanities, the gifted track program in which I was enrolled for six years.

I’ve counted off numerous negatives about this program in this blog over the past nineteen months. One positive, though, at least for me, was the rich mix of pop culture in the classroom. I could vicariously keep up with music through the singing of classmates, the music that some of them would play on their radios, boom boxes, and their first Walkmans. I learned to despise The Who, like The Police, tune out the heavy metal, continue to feel ambivalent about rap, and wish I didn’t have to wait for my classmates or for a trip to a grocery store to keep up with music’s constant evolution. Much of the rest around my explorations of pop music and rock, of silliness and search for spiritual meaning, I’ve described in my previous postings.

Like many folks in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I became caught up in this sense of affirming or reaffirming my sense of Blackness, of understanding my world through the lens of race, of attempting to make sense of Afrocentricity and how I fit or didn’t fit into it. One of my grad school friends tried to define this as a period of renewed Black pride, between roughly ’88 and ’92, with the rise of what he called “Afrocentric rap,” including Arrested Development, Digable Planets, Wu-Tang, and of course, PE. I think that’s a bit too cerebral, and that’s saying a lot. For me, it was a period of experimentation and discovery, between ’87 and ’95, when hip-hop evolved and devolved between socially-conscious messages, materialism, and socially-conscious messages through materialism. That’s what PE represented for me, even before I left for Pitt in ’87.

By the beginning of the new decade, the ’90s, I’d already been reconfiguring my inner and outer musical soundtrack for more than two years. I had already weeded out such wonderful artists and groups such as Thompson Twins, Starship, Glass Tiger (don’t ask), Whitney Houston (can’t listen to anything from her first two albums) and other things that one should only listen to while snorting coke. As soon as I found out that PE was coming to Pittsburgh to play songs from Fear of a Black Planet and from their other albums, I went over to Syria Mosque and snapped up two tickets, presuming I could get one of my friends to come with me to see them perform.

I knew who to ask and why. As much as any person over the years, this friend made me feel all right about my eclectic music tastes, partly because hers were almost as eclectic as my own. Other than my wife, who loves Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry along with Talib Kweli and Blind Willie Johnson (’20s era Blues), I can’t think of another person who’s influenced my musical likings more. I mean, how many Blacks did I know who both liked The Beatles and PE, unless they were artists like Doug E. Fresh or Grandmaster Flash?

It was a great concert, probably the best concert I’ve ever been to (not that I’ve been to all that many over the years). It made me realize that music was truly universal, that there was some merit to any music genre, no matter how silly, serious or scintillating. I felt connected again, in that music was about more than my enduring march of miracles and fantasies, of using it as an escape or as a way to motivate myself academically or otherwise. It was something to enjoy, to read into it as much or as little meaning as I wanted. It was a way to build connections to other people, to form friendships and relationships. And it was a way to map the events that unfolded in my life. That PE concert wasn’t the beginning of my modern eclecticism of music, and it was hardly the end. But it really did help.

Early November

08 Saturday Nov 2008

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Work

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I don’t usually have much to say about my life during the month of November. It’s usually been a lackluster month, at least until Thanksgiving. But there are a couple of interesting things to note about early November that have occurred in my life in recent years.

Election Day 2000, Tuesday, November 7, was the day of my first interview with my last full-time employer, a nonprofit organization called AED (aka Academy for Educational Development). I wasn’t exactly euphoric about Gore’s prospects at beating W, but I was hopeful. I brought that sense of hope and optimism with me to my first interview. After a year and a half of working with a small civic education organization that didn’t care very much about education, I was ready for something more in line with my interests in helping others and a better fit for my talents as an educator and thinker. I was blown away by the ambiance of the organization. Its expensive artwork, spacious conference center and conference room, its professional, almost corporate style gave me confidence that I would be a better fit with them than with my employer at the time.

If I’d paid closer attention, I would’ve recognized two or three glaring signs that would’ve warned me against taking a job there. One was my eventual immediate supervisor, who seemed extremely nervous around me. At the time, I took it as him being a generally nervous man. Yet given how often he mentioned his two masters degrees during the interview process, I should have acknowledged that gnawing sense that was forming in the back of my mind. That my doctorate intimidated him. That he had serious qualms about hiring a thirty-year-old Black man with a doctorate and with career accomplishments that were nearly on par with his own. I should’ve recognized this, but didn’t.

I should’ve also known based on the number of indirect questions about it that I was overqualified for the position that I would eventually accept. I assumed that a program officer position was the same everywhere, whether working for AED or the Ford Foundation. That’s what happens when most of your job experience has been with government or in academia. My degree and my years of experience put me at a senior program officer position with the organization, but no one in HR bothered to put it in those direct terms. Given the low salaries of a full-time academic position, a job paying $50K seemed great by comparison.

Then there were the little things that I either didn’t ask or didn’t notice. Like the fact that each project within the organization had as part of their charge the heavy responsibility of sustaining itself. Projects came and went regularly at AED because there was little organizational support for sustainability. I never asked about it. Nor did I ask questions about travel expenses. AED didn’t and doesn’t provide corporate cards, and you have to risk your own credit to get one that’s business-related. I asked about benefits, but not about salary increases. I asked about organizational culture, but didn’t pick up on the fact that most staff of color worked in HR, accounting, facilities and contracts.

When I was offered the position on November 17, I probably should’ve said no. I wanted to do something wonderful, something that had symmetry with my educational background, my interests as an aspiring author and writer, something that would leave me inspired everyday. I wanted to have a job and career that was fulfilling. One of my graduate school mentors was a senior program officer and director of the Spencer Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship Program at the time. I had the image of that kind of work and that kind of career trajectory when I said yes to my first job at AED. Boy was I wrong! Still, given the circumstances of my work prior to AED, I don’t think I had many options other than to say yes. I just should’ve left much sooner.

Tomorrow marks a year since I tendered my resignation letter to my last supervisor at AED. The letter cites all of the issues I sensed during my first interview in 2000. The lack of job and financial security as being part of an initiative whose money was about to run out. The knowledge that I was hired in a position that was beneath my actual level of experience and expertise. The fact that I had frequently used my own credit and money to pay for business-related travel and expenses. Despite all we face financially right now, it was a good decision for the long-term.

There are other November issues to remember related to money and carving out the best possible future, but those will have to wait.