Category Archives: Mount Vernon High School

The Politics of the Apolitical

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Mimi and Eunice comic strip, July 27, 2012. (Nina Paley via http://mimiandeunice.com/category/politics/).

In late-October 1994, I had a wonderful steak dinner with my friend and former high school classmate Laurell in DC. It was during my first ABD (all-but-dissertation) visit to the area to conduct some official initial research on my multiculturalism-in-Black-Washington, DC-doctoral thesis. It was also a couple of weeks before the midterm elections, the cycle that would sweep in Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House and the rest of his cronies as part of the Contract With (really, on) America, the gift that has kept on giving for the past twenty-three years.

As part of our three-and-a-half hour dinner and dessert, we talked about the Clintons, their failed attempt at universal healthcare, the Contract With America, and the ongoing politics of racial resentment. Laurell said, not for the first or last time, that she was “apolitical,” that she didn’t “adhere” to “either party’s platform.” This was because she was “fiscally conservative” and “socially liberal.”

Even in ’94, I could’ve picked apart Laurell’s hair-splitting with a hot hair comb. But here’s the part that got me then and really irks me now. Being apolitical is a political stance and perspective. Being apolitical is like being agnostic. You may not believe in someone or something exactly the way most people in the crowd do. You may have some serious doubts. But you are still a human being. And since you are human, and have beliefs, you also have a political point of view. Otherwise, your apolitical stance is the equivalent of selling bullshit to others and lying to yourself.

The politics of steak, August 8, 2017. (http://zeenews.india.com).

A few weeks ago, I watched BBC World News and saw a young White actress on the telly promoting her new summer film, declaring it “apolitical” as it delved into serious issues around feminism and potentially other -isms. Here’s a news flash, folks. Every movie, piece of art, song, poem, every article, book, or TV show, contains a hidden agenda, a specific set of beliefs, an ideology. By definition, every piece of entertainment or art has a political message, no matter how gentle or subtle. Even if a movie like, say, Rough Night is just about women “laughing at themselves” and “having a good time,” the idea that White women have the right to both feminism and femininity is embedded in these otherwise rather banal phrases. And that’s a political statement, whether people are willing to see it or not.

But the realm of politics goes well beyond the world of entertainment and leisure. Politics is everywhere, in everything, and with everyone, all the time. Calling yourself “apolitical” doesn’t change this truth. If you eat steak and potatoes, you obviously aren’t a vegan, and that reflects your personal politics around food. When you buy clothes, wear perfume or cologne, take a vacation overseas, call a young person in your neighborhood an “all-American boy” or “all-American girl,” you are unwittingly expressing your politics. Even in declaring yourself a Christian, atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, or Jew, this isn’t just an admission of your love for God, Yahweh, Allah, or a lack of belief in a higher power at all. It is a worldview with political implications, one that colors how you see the world, humanity, and governance. We are all political animals, no matter how little some of us pay attention to the machinations of the Democrats and Republicans.

Time Magazine cover (cropped) Colin Kaepernick, October 3, 2016. (http://facebook.com). Qualifies as fair use due to cropped nature and subject matter.

This is also why the common refrain among racist sports junkies about not combining sports and politics is also total bullshit. Of course the political implications of sport are intertwined with the actual sport in question! How else can you explain the blackballing of former 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his Black Lives Matter kneel-downs during the National Anthem at NFL games in 2016? It’s certainly not based on Kaep’s performance or merely about a kneel-down. The politics of American racism, of faux-hyper-patriotism, of money and fandom, were and remain in play here. That some continue to doubt this is yet another example of the penchant of millions to crave willful ignorance of anything that would make them think beyond their own perceived superiority and simplistic views of an always political world.

So no, you can’t away from politics in this world. One would have to take a time machine back to before the Agricultural Revolution to find humans in a world without politics. But even then, there would be domestic politics, gender politics, tribal politics, and food/water politics. Not to mention, religion and the politics thereof. But, keep believing that you’re apolitical, and see how that works out as your worldview comes crashing down.

When Enough Isn’t Close to Enough

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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

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Yiscoc Washington, July 5, 2017. (http://facebook.com).

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my Mom yelled at us the day before Sarai’s funeral seven Julys ago. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of Mom’s flat at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Today is my brother Yiscoc’s thirty-sixth birthday. That he’s here at all is a bit of a miracle. Especially with the number of times he ran away from 616 between 1989 (when he was eight years old) and 1994, with his one-time video game addiction, and with muggers and pedophiles out there and all too willing to take advantage of a vulnerable preteen.

I started with Mom, though, for a reason. Her yelling at us was probably meant for me, but it was in response to Yiscoc, who shared a personal secret with her for the first time. Mom’s response was to defend her record as a parent, to tell us that we had no right to judge, critique, or assess her record. That she added, “That’s what you get for…” in response to Yiscoc’s tearful sharing session was shameful and disgusting.

“You’re So Vain” (1972), by Carly Simon, 45 cover, cropped, July 23, 2017. (http://avclub.com).

“But you don’t understand, your Mom was mourning the loss of her only daughter,” would be the response of Mom-defenders everywhere. To which I say, really? Your Mom’s response is to push four of your five living children away with a tirade? One where she says, “this fucked up, piece of shit life I helped set up for all of you was the best I could do, and if you don’t like it, that’s on you, and you can kiss my Black ass!” Would that really be acceptable under any circumstances, much less during a week of mourning?

Yiscoc ran away from home, hung out with several wrong crowds, and dropped out of Mount Vernon High School a year and a half before he could have completed his coursework. Seventeen years later, and Yiscoc still doesn’t have his GED (the last two times, he failed the social studies portion of the exam — ain’t that a kicker!). I’m not laying all of this at my Mom’s feet. But Yiscoc’s adult life wasn’t exactly set up for success by his growing up years. The normative permanence of systemic racism on the one hand, and domestic violence, welfare poverty, and the 616 fire of 1995 that left Yiscoc and my other younger siblings temporarily homeless on the other, would make any kid itching to run away.

A second younger brother has now reached the second half of his thirties. Yiscoc’s the same age I was eleven and a half years ago, when I began working on Boy @ The Window in earnest. One of the things I figured out in writing such a torturous book was that I blamed myself for so many of my parents’/legal guardian’s failures and sins. I had blamed myself for not putting an end to the domestic violence at 616 since I was twelve, for not doing enough to support Mom and my younger siblings since I went away to college at Pitt in 1987. I also came to understand how much Mom deflected, defended, and denied when it came to her parenting, especially when we called on her to do more than find temporary shelter, meager food options, and threadbare clothing. Mom was and remains one of the vainest and unaffectionate people I have ever known — vain, insecure, and likely clinically depressed.

“Flash Memory #2” (an unmasking), in stainless steel, by Liu Zhan, Kuang Jun, and Tan Tianwei, 2009. (http://elhurgador.blogspot.com/2012/05/unmask-group-escultura.html; H.T. Gallery, Beijing, China).

I also know that Mom has passed these traits down to each of us. I’ve been dealing directly with them for three decades. I’m not sure Yiscoc has ever peered behind his mask long enough to see Mom lurking in the shadows, warts and all. If he has or ever will, it has been or will be an ugly sight. But if we are truly attempting to rebuild and remake ourselves, it is a sight we must endure. A painful process of honesty, soul-searching, revelation, and admitting that on some level, we’ve fucked up, and been fucked up, by life, oppression, and parenting.

Happy Birthday, Yiscoc. Know that despite everything, I do love you. I hope that this next year brings you closer to the person you want and need to be.

The Yoke of Student Loans

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Time, money, debt, yoke = same difference, from screen short from movie In Time (2011), October 27, 2011. (http://collider.com/in-time-review/).

This week in July thirty years ago, I took out the first of what would be a series of student loans. Loans that would help cover eight of my ten years of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In three-and-a-half-months, I will be ending my twentieth year paying off those loans. If I had to do it all over again, I may have stayed in New York State to take advantage of the TAP award (need-based financial aid). That way, I wouldn’t have needed to borrow for my undergrad. But given my near desperation for wanting to escape grinding poverty, 616 and my family, Mount Vernon, New York, and the stigma that was my life living there among hostile and indifferent classmates, teachers, and neighbors, borrowing $2,625 on July 16 of ’87 didn’t seem so bad.

Yep, my first subsidized/unsubsidized Stafford student loan was a modest one. It was a set maximum based on the old laws limiting student borrowing (especially for college freshmen) three decades ago. I remember thinking to myself, “How the heck am I gonna pay this back?,” as I went through an hour of phone calls between Pitt’s financial aid office and Marine Midland Bank (now part of HSBC). The latter was where I had my first bank account, where I had deposited $500 of scholarship money from Mount Vernon’s Afro-Caribbean Club. That’s how little I knew about the process – I went with a bank that didn’t exist outside of New York State to work with a school in Western Pennsylvania!

Pact with the Devil, July 18, 2017. (http://evil.wikia.com/wiki/Pact_with_the_Devil)

Because I wasn’t yet eighteen, I needed my Mom to co-sign my loan. Because my Mom didn’t have collateral, she needed to add two relatives who did have assets to my first loan. In the end, Mom chose my maternal grandmother Beulah and my great-great-aunt in Seattle Inez (who just happened to be Johnny Gill’s great or great-great grandmother — didn’t know it at the time) as relatives with collateral who could be on the hook if I or she ever defaulted on our future payments. Of course, Mom didn’t actually seek permission from my then sixty-year-old grandma in rural Arkansas or my better-off, octogenarian, great-great aunt for this sign-off. Apparently, Marine Midland didn’t care, either. And that’s how it was for the next four years, having relatives whom I had never met (and in the case of great-great aunt Inez, who died at 101 years old in the early ’00s, would never meet) as collateral for my loans.

I’d also take out the smaller Perkins Loan for my undergraduate time at Pitt, an additional $2,000 per year, for three of my four years there. In all, I’d borrow more than $16,000 in four years, with a high of $4,000 in Stafford Loans in my junior year, 1989-90.

It bothered me every time I had to re-up for student loans. Not just because of the false notion of American individualism, the idea that I shouldn’t need anyone’s help to go earn a degree. It bothered me because I feared, sometimes to the point of nightmares, that I’d never be able to pay this money back.

Graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and the loosening of the student loan rules and amounts under President Clinton in 1994 made things better and worse. I barely borrowed my first two and a half years of grad school at both Pitt and CMU, to the tune of $1,800 in all. CMU paid me so little as a grad student that I had little choice if I ever planned on eating more than one meal a day but to borrow. And that’s how most of my borrowing occurred between January 1994 and January 1997, to either have to supplement my meager stipend (before the year of my Spencer Dissertation fellowship). Or, to use the funds to help support my dissertation research, the travel to/from and living arrangements while in DC in 1994 and 1995. Unlike many of my graduate school colleagues (especially the ones working on professional master’s degrees or a law degree), I didn’t use my loans to go on extended weekends to Bermuda or to take summer vacations in the Grand Caymans.

Of course, I graduated in May ’97, and lo and behold, I couldn’t find full-time work. And with the exception of the months of July, August, and September 1998, I wouldn’t have full-time or full-time equivalent work until I left Pittsburgh for work in the DC area in the summer of 1999. But, my consolidated student loans through the dispensations of Sallie Mae never took that into account when my first payment became due Thanksgiving Week 1997. I was able to get a reduced payment of $20 per month for the first two years. I didn’t default, but it made paying off my student loans that much harder. It didn’t help that Sallie Mae had locked in my interest rate at eight percent, retroactive to July 1987, and unchangeable under any circumstances. Even with consumer interest rates the way they have been for the past decade.

Relationship between lenders and payees, July 27, 2015. (http://forbes.com).

Flush or not, full-time or underemployed or somewhere in between, the student loan payments, deferments, and forebearances have been non-stop for two decades. Even credit card companies will leave folks alone if they make regular minimum payments. Not so with student loans or with Sallie Mae (now Navient, which must mean assholes in financial aid-speak). Despite everything I’ve been through financially over the years, I finally paid off the original principal of my consolidated student loans about two years ago. Great. It still means that I have left another decade of payments on accumulated interest before I can be forever free of this nearly endless cycle.

Here’s the real thing that I think I’d do over again, that should be done about this corrupt and serfdom-like process. Sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years old is way too young to be making financial decisions that I or anyone else will have to live with for four decades or more. Even deciding to serve in the military isn’t a decades’ long commitment (unless one chooses to re-up or goes to officer’s school). At the very least, no one under twenty-one should have to commit themselves to debt peonage, including student loans. As for me, working thirty hours a week on or off campus between 1987 and 1997 to cover costs and necessities would’ve been preferable to this iron collar.

The real problem, of course, is that adult learners are taking out many of these loans these days. Even though they may be old enough to know better, they aren’t experienced enough. Lumina Foundation and other organizations have concentrated on “financial literacy” as the way out. This is wrong-headed, as it does nothing to change this financially enslaving system. Really, it would take free and significantly-reduced undergraduate tuition to do the trick. But where’s the fun, profit, and human misery in that?

High School, When 30 Makes You Old(ish)

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Réunion Island’s (French department, off Madagascar) Piton de la Fournaise, lava flow, February 26, 2005. (Samuel A. Hoarau via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Today I am thirty years removed from my Mount Vernon High School graduation. Yay me (and 500+ others, I suppose)! But at forty-seven and a half years old, this also means I’m in my late forties, older than the age of many of my teachers on the day I wore my cap and gown on Memorial Field.

What I am still young and old enough to remember is the distance between me and my classmates, acquaintances (since I really didn’t have any friends back then), and family. Putting up a good front, a mostly blank front with an occasional laugh or smile, was what I did in public back then, enough to make it appear I wasn’t an outcast. Except that I was. But it wasn’t just the silent-treatment folks who reminded me that I was nothing and meant nothing to them within days of the MVHS graduation. I felt it, knew it, and wanted to escape it, every single day back in ’87.

There have been at least two high school reunions since Thursday, June 18, 1987. One was in September 1997, way too early to do a get-together from where I sit. Not to mention, I was coming off of three months of post-PhD unemployment, and wouldn’t have wanted to spend money I didn’t have to impress people with whom I could’ve never shared good times a decade earlier. The other was five years ago, a more appropriate frame for a reunion, but it was part of a group of reunions between 1985 and 1989 (or more even). I barely knew half my classmates in the Class of ’87, a couple dozen from ’86, and a few from ’85 and ’88. All together, it would’ve felt like a room full of strangers to me.

But at thirty or more years, would I want to go to a reunion now or in the future? I really don’t know. Part of the problem with reunions is the same problem I had in Humanities and in MVHS. I would have to fit someone’s predetermined mold or role. If I went in as Donald Earl Collins, would anyone actually remember me or acknowledge me as my true self? Could I be Donald Earl Collins the writer or historian or educator? Could I be the disillusioned Christian, the anti-racist American, or the middle-aged athlete who does yoga and can still hit threes despite my IT-band issues? Or, will I just fall into my role as the super-smart but enigmatic loser, the wack-ass weird mofo that scores saw me as three decades ago?

I know one thing my ex-mates wouldn’t see me as — a father (after all, today is Father’s Day). I guarantee you, some of the folks in my class took bets as to whether I was straight, gay, asexual, or if I’d have sex with another human before the Rapture! Yet I’ve been married for more than seventeen years, and a father for almost fourteen. Much longer than I was ever in high school, Humanities, or Mount Vernon’s public schools. This is what makes me old and keeps me young. Family, love, parenting, and making pancakes, bacon, and eggs for Sunday brunch.

Memorial Field in complete disrepair, locked up (and like me in 1987, locked out), April 2, 2017. (Mark Lungariello/The Journal News).

The day of graduation in 1987 was a trip in itself, between an 87-year-old graduating with our class, the sudden hugs and immediate ostracisms that occurred, the triple-H evening in polyester in the middle of Memorial Field, and my father’s drunken attendance. It was a clash of White Italian Mount Vernon, Black elite Mount Vernon, and stereotypically ghetto Mount Vernon, with a splash of affluence, Afro-Caribbean, and other Mount Vernons. That’s what made it a strange ceremony, a last look at my hometown’s population as a teenager, good and bad.

There’s someone on Facebook who runs the page “I grew up in Mount Vernon.” My former classmate frequently blocks or admonishes participants for negative posts or negative portrayals of Mount Vernon. His defense: he wants the page to be “a place of positivity.” It’s his page, and he should be able to do what he wants with it (within reason). However, “positivity” is not the same thing as “positive posts only.” You should be able to generally like Mount Vernon and occasionally discuss issues affecting people in town that aren’t positive ones. Like poverty. Like the need for more social justice activism and more political participation. Like the need for a donut shop on par with the former Clover Donuts.

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

Really, I find this “I grew up in Mount Vernon” Facebook page yet another example of how a privileged group of folk get to frame a conversation for people who can’t or won’t speak for themselves. Middle-class, one-way-thinking, Black respectability politics folk whose Christian ethics blind them to history, racism, poverty, misogyny, homophobia/heterosexism, and other -isms and -obias that affect their neighbors. The page is smug, elitist, and exclusionary. I rarely look at the page, and I’ve posted to it maybe three times in seven or eight years. “I grew up in Mount Vernon” is a reminder that I share little in common with these Mount Vernonites, even as my socioeconomic and educational status has changed over the years.

As a father, though, I am reminded about the need to protect and to nurture, balanced with the need to give my son room to grow and learn. I may not be able to stop a cop from exercising his/her lethal racism with a badge, but I can prepare my son as best I can to be in public anyway. When it comes to Mount Vernon, MVHS, or any future reunion I may decide to attend, maybe, just maybe, my ex-classmates should be as ready to see all sides of me. At least as much as I have granted that their version of Mount Vernon is one that is real for them, if not for me and many others.

Prom Toking

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Me at Prom Dinner, White Plains, NY, May 21, 1987. (Suzanne Johnson neè DeFeo).

I can say with absolute honesty that I have never rolled, smelled, or smoked a joint. No weed, not ever, as I approach my late forties. I have, however, gotten a contact high on at least a dozen occasions, over the past thirty years. Heck, I’ve probably been high a few times off of burnt oregano and gasoline fumes, as infrequently as I’ve exposed myself to endorphin catalysts in my life.

My first contact high happened in the vestibule of 616 East Lincoln Avenue, on the night of my senior prom, the third Thursday in May ’87. As with all things in my life at seventeen, this was unexpected, uncomfortable, and underappreciated on my part. I had just called to find out when the limousine was coming to pick me up before swinging across town to pick up the other four people with whom I was to ride. I had done myself up as well as my sinewy bean-pole ass could. With my father’s funds, I rented a well-fitting tux with a white shirt and peach cummerbund. I’d bought my friendly date Dara a white carnation, matching the once pinned on my tux jacket. My idiot stepfather tied my peach bow-tie. Unusual for me, I lotioned myself from head to toe, greased my hair down, and otherwise made sure I smelled as clean as a Carolina pine forest. Not that I usually smelled bad, but I couldn’t look like a po’ boy tonight.

It was almost 6:30 pm before I walked downstairs to wait for the limo. Right on the steps leading into the vestibule were my C-building neighbors and two guys I didn’t recognize. They were all smoking joints, and the smoke had filled a good portion of the semi-enclosed lobby leading to the front doors. My elementary school classmate Valerie was in this group, across the lap of one of the unknown young men, all as he felt up Valerie’s ass like it was his own. Part of her thong underwear was visible, as Valerie’s boyfriend gave one of her butt cheeks a good slap while she giggled. Her brother Ernie was also there, fully blazed up, apparently without a care in the world. I don’t think he went by Ernie by ’87, though. He was a low-level drug dealer at this point, and had bulked up a bit over the previous couple of years, to protect himself in his line of work, I guessed.

Screen shot from video, Mako, “Smoke Filled Room” (2015). (http://beautifulbuzzz.com).

Ernie asked me if I wanted a puff. I said, “Naw, man, I’m fine.” Him and his sister and crew just laughed like I told the funniest joke. But I knew why they were laughing. In the half-minute or so of standing around waiting for the limo, I was already high. So much so that I didn’t sound like the proper English-speaking teen I often was in public. I sounded like one of them, in slow motion even to me. A full hydro hit would’ve left me ready to do anything else other than go to the prom.

The limo arrived, and not a moment too soon. Even though I’d been in the lobby and vestibule less than two minutes, even I could smell that the weed was a bit stronger than my deodorant, lotion, and cologne combined. The one guy already in the limo with me asked if I was “okay.” I knew what he meant. “I just have a contact high, that’s all,” I responded.

I would’ve hated to admit this thirty years ago, but I needed to be a little high and a little more relaxed, and not just that prom night. It actually helped to be under the influence, even though the contact high only lasted for thirty or forty minutes. By that time, I had noticed that the non-alcoholic drinks in the back of our limo were alcoholic. My date and a couple of the guys, after they became little buzzed, asked me how I knew. I said, maybe for the first time in public, that, “I know from experience. My father’s an alcoholic.”

White Castle, 550 East Fordham Road, Bronx, NY, circa 2015. (http://zomato.com).

In between, me, my date Dara, classmates Allison and Gina, and two MVHS upperclassmen now in college, went to White Plains for the prom dinner and dance, then to Midtown for Copacabana on West 34th, and somewhere around 2 am, for the White Castle on Fordham Road in the Bronx. I didn’t get home until 3 am.

I went to the prom mostly because I didn’t want to look back at my time in high school years later and feel regret about not attending. But the fact is, other than a feigned attempt at social protest during the prom dinner, there was little particularly memorable about the event. Not the rubber chicken or overcooked salmon. Not the music or the overextended small talk. Nor should I have gone on a friendly date to the prom. I should’ve either found someone I did like to go out with, and months earlier, gone in solo, or not gone at all.

But really, the main event for me prom night occurred in the two minutes before I walked out to get into the limo. I didn’t want to smoke weed, feel up a one-time classmate, or risk years of imprisonment in New York State. But even in the midst of a living hell, sometimes it’s best to relax a little. I have five 616 folks to thank for that reminder.

From One Starving Writer to Another

19 Sunday Mar 2017

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Raven eating a hand (in my case, the writer’s dead hand), March 19, 2017. (creativeuncut.stfi.re via http://pinterest.com).

Six years ago, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn’t want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, “smearing paint on a canvas” while waiting for a big break. I thought at the time that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I’ve made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at MVHS. I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn’t want to be a starving artist “like Edgar Allen Poe” all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar — although better developed — reference. I think I understood better the momentary look of shock on my former teacher’s face after that conversation.

My student made me think about what Martino saw in my writing so many years ago. I certainly wasn’t focused on it. The same week she commented on making myself into a writer was also the week I had my Ivy League dilemma, between Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh for undergrad. I was waist-deep into my obsession with Phyllis, or really, my obsession with my crush on Phyllis. So much so that I wrote my creative writing assignment for Martino about me and my Crush #2, switching the names to “Donna” and “Phil” to barely cover up the truth of this otherwise short fictional work. Martino returned it without comment. She did comment heavily, though, on my assessment of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a series of redundant paragraphs in search for a coherent sentence.

But my wack “The Way It Is” title was as much an indication that I was as far away from seeing myself as a writer as Earth is for Alpha Centauri without a faster-than-light-speed vehicle. And I was starving on so many levels back then. For food. For attention. For love. For a connection with anything or anyone who didn’t remind me of my poverty. Martino’s encouragement, though she obviously meant well, sent me scurrying in my mind for something a bit more comfortable than Poe’s indebted and untimely death.

My own student’s commentary made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would’ve been much easier at seventeen than it is as a married forty-seven year-old with a contrarian teenager and bills to pay.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny designs a time machine, I can’t rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March ’87 have stayed with me for three decades. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I’m juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of ’88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May ’91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in ’93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in ’94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December ’96 to June ’99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. In all, I’ve probably made about $2,500 in direct net income as an author and writer since 2003 (half through Fear of a “Black” America, the other half in the past two years), not counting consultancies or giving talks based on my writing. If I depended on my writing income, I maybe could pay the cable bill or treat us to a night of Cheesecake Factory and a movie. Two or three times a year. When one doesn’t follow their calling and doesn’t follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren’t fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn’t give up on our own aspirations, for it’s those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others — including the most important folks — in our lives pursue their own calling.

Lit on Moonlight

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

I finally, finally saw Moonlight with the wife and son at AFI Silver Spring yesterday, months after the in-crowd had already seen it and attempted to spoil it for the rest of us. It was excellent. The cinematography, the loud and incredible silences, the small moments, when actors just being in the moment with their facial expressions did more than any dialogue could to move me and anyone else watching. Mahershala Ali was only in five scenes. But his first scene set the tone for the whole movie. As Juan, Ali channeled both the need for hard hypermasculinity and the vulnerable fragility of such in just one scene. His time with the youngest version of Chiron made me laugh, cry, sad, and angry, and left me wondering if I’ve seen this much intimacy between Black man and Black boy on screen before. I know I have (Antwone Fisher, The Wire, even Roots comes to mind), but on-screen doesn’t reflect this anti-stereotypical slice of truth nearly as often as it should.

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Yet I was also not as impressed as I expected to be. Not because I didn’t like the performances — I loved them. I thought every actor in the film was legit, every scene was moving in some way. Naomie Harris I’ve been fond of for years, André Holland and Janelle Monáe’s work I already knew, and Trevante Rhodes and Barry Jenkins, well, the two need bigger platforms for doing more great work. Moonlight wasn’t a film. It was a collage, a kaleidoscope of precious moments, blood-churning episodes, and tender images. Jenkins’ treatment of coming-of-age, Black boyhood into manhood, and Black masculinity, hypermasculinity, and vulnerability was avant-garde.

Still, I felt like I’d seen Moonlight before. Or, really, lived parts of Moonlight in my own past. No, I did not befriend an older, Afro-Cuban crack dealer in 1990s Miami, have a drug-addicted, abusive mother, or have a group of kids chase me around and beat me up off and on for ten years. But I didn’t look at the world the same way as my peers. I didn’t sound like a Noo Yawker, walk and talk and code switch like Denzel Washington, or try to fit in like so many of my 616 neighbors and my Mount Vernon school mates during my growing up years. And I paid for it, dearly, with few friends before I turned eleven, and no friends in the six years before I went off to the University of Pittsburgh.

But on Chiron and that most pernicious issue of hypermasculinity, the need to be hard all the time, I’ve been there too. I’d been called “faggot” (or in my father’s case, “faggat”) enough times to occasionally question my own sexual orientation growing up. My senior year at MVHS one day, I hit a three-run homer during a softball game in gym class. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. But for one Jamaican dude, me drilling a ball 350 feet off his slow fastball was an affront. He called me a “faggot” after the game, and threatened to wait for me after school with a machete to chop me, adding “bumbaclot mon” at the end of his threat. I left school as normal and waited for him. He was lucky he didn’t show up that day.

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

You see, my rage didn’t need years to build up. All before I’d finally lose it one day, and take out a bully with a wooden chair and break it across his back, like the way Chiron did at the end of II of Moonlight. I didn’t have bullies at school per se. There were a couple I dealt with at 616, but they weren’t regular. Many folks would make a crack, but generally left me along. Any bullying I faced in high school was completely random and momentary, because I stood up for myself. Because if I could face down a six-foot-one, Isshin-ryn black belt of an abuser in my idiot stepfather Maurice, a stupid football player was gonna get hurt trying to hurt me.

No, the bullying I faced was in middle school, from a bunch of overwhelmed and racist Italian classmates in Humanities. I’ve named them in Boy @ The Window and here in this blog before. Alex, Anthony N., Andrew, Anthony Z., etc, the Italian Club. That things were much, much worse at home meant that I saw them as background noise. There was always a part of me, though, that had enough rage, even in seventh grade, to take a desk and smash Anthony N.’s head in with it until his fuckin’ Italian brains spread out all over the floor and walls!

I ended up beating up a wannabe bully in JD that year instead. I won kufi battles in eighth and ninth grade. I wore a blank face that most of my more dumb ass classmates interpreted as a smile. I made plans to get out, because I never wanted to fit in. I was already awake, coping with the day-to-day, but in it for the long-term. I had that President Barack Obama, audacity-of-hope-beyond-failure, beyond reality thing goin’. When I saw Chiron as played by Ashton Sanders, I wanted to hug him, beat up his bullies for him, and tell him that you can love who you want to love, even if they never love you back. And to always, always be your best self, and not some “I don’t want to feel pain again” version.