Sixteenth Anniversary

28 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anniversary, Crisis, Family, Mother-in-Law, Old Age

Guinness Chocolate Cake with Bailey’s Cream Cheese Glaze (may make this for us after wifey gets back) March 17, 2010. (https://culinspiration.files.wordpress.com/).

Today’s our sixteenth year together in marriage, my wife Angelia and I. Except that we’re not together on this special day. Twelve days ago, my eighty-five year-old mother-in-law collapsed outside her senior high-rise in the lower Hill District in Pittsburgh. She fractured her chin and broke her right wrist in the process. Between that and her various medications for her heart and blood vessels, my mother-in-law became deeply depressed and agitated, to the point where the doctors postponed one of her surgeries. And that was within thirty-six hours of her collapse.

So my wife left for Pittsburgh eleven days ago to help take care of her mommy, to make sure the doctors and nurses did right by her, to maybe help lift her spirits, to get her affairs in better order. Thankfully, my mother-in-law recovered emotionally and psychologically, to be the cranky curmudgeon she’s always been. The doctors did my mother-in-law’s wrist surgery last Thursday, and they moved her to a rehab nursing home on Tuesday. There, maybe my mother-in-law can learn to be ambidextrous for the first time in her life.

The result has been that this is the second longest time me or my wife and my son have been away from one another (the longest were the two-week stretches I spent teaching at Princeton in the summers of ’08 and ’09, where I’d come back for a day or two). For her, I’m happy that her mommy is doing better, that everything worked out. It has been exhausting for me, being a single parent for more than a week and a half. But for Angelia, running around dealing with insurance and financial issues, family dynamics, a deeply depressed mother, and being away from us. I’m sure she’s ready to find a cave with a nice soft pillow and bed for hibernation. I’m sure because that’s how I felt after just six days in Mount Vernon in July 2010, working with my own severely depressed Mom to ensure that my late sister Sarai got the proper send off.

My wife not being here on this day is uncharted territory. No dinner plans or special desserts. No cards or flowers or other gifts. I will be able to do some of this once she’s back. The only thing that makes sense after the past two weeks is a co-ed day spa, where the two of us can get full body massages. That, and enough ZQuil for us to both sleep at least twelve hours, is on the consideration menu.

Wow, that’s about one hundred words too many to say that I miss my partner in life today! Still, Happy Anniversary!

The Temptations of Pizza

12 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertisements, Challenge Scholarship, College Applications, College Brochures, Mineo's Pizza Shop (Pittsburgh), National Honor Society, Pitt, Pizza, Sales Pitch, SAT score, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sicilian Pizza Pie, The 'O'

Pitt logo, the one closest to what was on their brochures in April 1986, April 12, 2016. (http://pitt.edu).

It’s been a full thirty years since I received a big envelope in the mail from my future alma mater. No, not that one. It wasn’t the big packet about my life-changing. No, it was their introduction.

It was at the end of a school day, and like clockwork, I went downstairs to check our mail. There it was. It was always news whenever I got mail, at least to me. It was a packet from the University of Pittsburgh, or rather Pitt. It was more the latter because the Pitt logo was gigantic and on the back of the large white envelope.

I opened the packet immediately. I barely began to read the form letter introducing me to Pitt and all of its eclectic buildings, wonderful faculty and staff, and precocious students, when I saw the brochure. On it was writing that formed a circle, something like “Pitt, a world of possibilities” (I say “something like” because I don’t really remember what it said, but that’s what I translated it to mean).

A cheese pizza similar to the one used on that ’86 Pitt brochure (only a LOT less orange), April 12, 2016. (http://student.plattsburgh.edu).

The writing circle surrounded a large, traditional, New York-style plain cheese pizza. The background of the brochure was set in Pitt’s traditional medium light blue. With the writing all in white, that pizza pie stood out like it was in 4D. I could smell it, taste it, lick it, eat it at that moment. My sixteen-year-old bean pole ass probably would’ve eaten a slice or two, too, if I hadn’t already planned to go down the street to a pizza shop for a Sicilian slice.

Never mind the letter that mentioned that I had been identified because of my 1050 SAT score from October ’85 and because of my National Honor Society membership. Forget about the fact that I didn’t even know where Pittsburgh was or what kind of city it was. Did I even notice that Pitt was starting a new academic scholarship program to attract more students of color and women to the university?

No, I was focused squarely on this picture of culinary beauty, a pizza after my own stomach, er, heart. I wanted to be at a college where I had an opportunity to eat that pizza, to feel my teeth bite down on that rich combination of tomato sauce, olive oil, basil, oregano, bread, mozzarella, and parmesan. I needed to feel those tidbits fall from the back of my mouth and into my throat before gravitating their way into my waiting stomach, to have that enzymatic orgasm.

But then I remembered the last time I made an academic decision on an empty stomach. That was in May ’81. Right after the Humanities Program had accepted me into their fold for middle school, I had to pick a language. The only choices were between French, Italian, and Spanish. My muy estupido culo picked Italiano over the other two. Why? Because I loved, absolutely loved, spaghetti. I loved spaghetti the way some people love their dogs. That’s not a reason, that’s literally a gut decision! I imagine that I would’ve picked Mandarin Chinese if it had been on the language menu because I loved Papa Wong’s egg rolls and chicken fried rice!

I decided to do some serious background research on Pitt and Pittsburgh before I would even suggest the idea of applying their to anyone. They was only the first college to invite me to apply, after all. I hadn’t planned on going out-of-state. As desperate as I was to leave 616 and Mount Vernon, I pretty much only saw myself applying to schools within 100 miles of New York City, like Columbia or Yale or Concordia College. Obviously I hadn’t yet thought through the places I really wanted to spend four or more years of my life. I just knew I didn’t want to spend most of it under the same roof with my insane family.

*************************

Mineo’s Pizza House, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, November 22, 2008. (http://thepodanys.blogspot.com/).

Fast forward to my junior year at Pitt. At that point, I’d been in Pittsburgh for nearly three years, and had yet to find that elusive New York-style cheese pizza pie they used to lure me to this po-dunk town. Oh, they said the pizza they used in that brochure was from The ‘O’, The Original Hot Dog Shop on Forbes Avenue in Oakland near the Cathedral of Learning for those unfamiliar with Pitt and Pittsburgh. Except their pizza was wack. It was a greasy pile of limp cheapness, with mozzarella that probably came from an arthritic cow, olive oil that was strained from Wish-Bone Italian dressing, and dough made out of Wonder Bread. Since Pittsburgh’s water came from reservoirs or from the Allegheny or Monongahela River, it didn’t come close to tasting like that pizza on the brochure either.

But at the end of ’96, the same month my advisor finally said he’d sign off on my doctoral thesis, I finally found my elusive pizza in Pittsburgh. It was at Mineo’s Pizza on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill. I’d probably passed the joint three dozen times in nine years, but never at night. I stopped there with my girlfriend (now wife) Angelia, and we bought a couple of slices. Not only were they good, but they had an added bonus. They specialized in Sicilian pies! After nine years, I finally found a slice of food heaven in Pittsburgh!

Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authority Figures, Black Action Society, Child Abuse, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Cross of Gold (1896), Dick Oestriecher, Domestic Violence, Estelle Abel, Evangelical Christianity, Frances Cress Welsing, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hoteps, Jack Van Impe, Judah ben Israel, Karl Marx, Kenneth Copeland, Kufi, Marxism, Maurice Eugene Washington, Molefi Asante, Neo-Marxists, Ostracism, Prosperity Gospel, Racism, Rapture, Religion, Wendy Goldman, William Jennings Bryan

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.” I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

On My Own Narcissism

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American Narcissism, Donald Trump, Humanities, Jean W. Twenge, Narcissism, NPD, NPI, Self-Awareness, Ted Bundy, W. Keith Campbell

You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

— 1 John 4:4 (New American Standard Bible)

For those who regularly read my blog, you’ve probably noticed the increased focus over the past year on the issue of American obsession with individualism and its own greatness mythology. At least, the parts of which I’ve roughly translated into a collective American narcissism, or a collective American absorption with itself. It has become the latest idea, my latest potential project, but still too early to tell what, if anything, will come out of this so far. Most Americans remain blissfully unaware of anything that doesn’t involve winners, losers, vicarious living, and America always being seen as #1 at everything (even though in most cases it isn’t).

This post, though, isn’t about how the world’s #1 nation is deeply flawed by a narcissism that runs nearly as deep as the center of a black hole. No, this post is all about me. Really, it’s about the fact that even as I recognize America’s narcissism — both historical and current — that I myself am not inoculated from that narcissism.

Expanding red giant stars will engulf too-close planets before turning into white dwarfs, August 13, 2013. (James Gitlin/STScI AVL via http://www.space.com/).

My first bout with narcissism began at the end of elementary school at William H. Holmes in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the spring of ’81. I’d just finished up three years as a straight-A student, been made into a Hebrew-Israelite, came in second for a city-wide essay contest, and been granted the honor of introducing the keynote speaker at my graduation. Even with fighting my best friend Starling, my family’s slow but steady fall into grinding poverty, and the next six years of Humanities in front of me, who wouldn’t have a head as inflated as the Sun at its red-giant stage?

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window

I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, ‘Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.’

It took a year of relative mediocrity while in seventh-grade Humanities for my march toward narcissistic personality disorder to end at the cliff of disillusionment. I wasn’t the “smartest kid in the whole world.” But as I also discovered in my time in this magnet program, neither were any of my classmates.

Perhaps the biggest lesson here was that I was all of eleven and twelve years old when America’s narcissism with individual achievement had caught me in a tangled web of lies and myths. No success or failure or anything in between occurs in a vacuum. No individual’s success happens purely on her or his own, without support, context, and in many cases, an advantage of one sort or another. It took years to learn this lesson, between Humanities and graduate school, the nonprofit world and academia, to learn to give up on the bullshit that is the American meritocracy.

That’s not to say that one can eliminate selfishness (which isn’t the same as narcissism, by the way), or shouldn’t strive for success or a better life for themselves or their kids or their families. But we should always ask ourselves why, in what context, how should we measure our victories, and even if running over others to achieve those victories is the right way to live? Most Americans don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t verify, and don’t think about their lives in this way, because most of us have been taught by this culture that the empathetic lens is a loser’s way of viewing the world.

My NPI Score, done August 20, 2015. (http://personality-testing.info/tests/NPI.php).

I have taken a read — actually, several in the past year — of Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell’s book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009). Theirs is a good base to begin to view American society as one so obsessed with individualism that it renders us all anywhere between a little narcissistic to borderline Donald Trumps and Ted Bundys. The psychologists and psychiatrists in this niche have a test for narcissistic personality disorder or NPD, the Narcissistic Personality Index. It consists of 40 questions, seeking to determine whether one is low, medium, or high in narcissism within the index.

I took the NPI last August, and scored a 9 out of 40. It meant that I have some narcissistic tendencies, but only scored higher than 35 percent of those who’ve taken the NPI. I wasn’t even close to being an average American narcissist! Not really a surprise, as those seeking to take such an index are likely less narcissistic than their navel-gazing neighbors.

So, I am in this world and mostly of it, if only because it’s hard to divorce one’s existence from the world in which they live. But I am self-aware enough to know my own narcissism, and empathetic enough to see the narcissism in others.

Great. It still means that as a nation, our narcissism goes as far back as the mind can imagine. It still means that in a couple of centuries, historians will lament about the America that was. Those historians will see a country and a people so busy in building themselves up that they stomped on the oppressed and crushed the downtrodden in the process. A US with so many myths and ideals, but so few attempts at making any of them true.

Starting Boy @ The Window, 10 Years Later

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Academy for Educational Development, AED, Friendships, Harold I. Meltzer, Interviews, Lumina Foundation, Memoir, Narcissism, Partnerships for College Access and Success, Sacramento CA, Salutatorian, Sam, Vanity, Vanity Project

Full-length vanity mirror, accessed March 9, 2016. (http://etsy.com).

On this week a decade ago, I began work on Boy @ The Window as a memoir. That sentence sounds so definitive and simple. The fact was, I’d been writing the book in my head for nearly three years, and had been doing interviews and other iterations of what would become Boy @ The Window off and on since the fall of ’89. But the first full week in ’06 marked a clear delineation between all of the hemming and hawing over writing the book and the actual process of interviewing former teachers and classmates. For some, though, I was devoting serious time and resources to what they called a vanity project.

I had already interviewed my late former teacher Harold Meltzer twice in ’02, and had done some reaching out off and on between the spring of ’03 and March ’06. It took a work trip to Indianapolis and then Sacramento for me to actually begin the process for real. The trip was about convincing Lumina Foundation for Education to continue funding the college access and retention initiative I was deputy director of after the end of ’06, as well as for me to take oversight over a grantee’s work in Sacramento. It just so happened that about two weeks before the trip, I learned that one of my former classmates, the salutatorian Sam, lived in Northern California. Despite my qualms, I decided to reach out and see if he’d want to meet up and catch up.

Why qualms? Short of a high school reunion, most folks who were outcasts or (really, in my case) misfits aren’t exactly jumping for joy to see people who helped make them feel that way. Sam for me was someone who made me feel as if I had no business being smart, Black, and male. Whether he meant for me to feel that way or not was irrelevant at the time.

The Sacramento skyline, as seen from The Ziggurat in West Sacramento, California (never looked like this in my 3 visits there), October 16, 2008. (J. Smith via Wikipedia). Released via CC-SA-3.0.

The irony was that by the time I’d last seen Sam — the fourth Friday of June ’89 — I no longer saw him as an arbiter of anything, much less someone to aspire to imitate. I realized from a short three-minute conversation that Sam may have had more identity issues than even I had faced in the previous eight years. That it was also the last time that I’d see nearly all of my classmates (I bumped into Wendy ten minutes earlier on this particular walk) prior to working on Boy @ The Window was also interesting, if not ironic.

That and the large amount of work that a book about myself and the worlds I inhabited — in my own mind, in reality at home, with family, with classmates, and throughout Mount Vernon and New York — was on my mind all week long. This was going to be a daunting task, diving deep into my mindset and my past. Dredging up old feelings and conjuring up old conversations that otherwise would best be forgotten.

And of course, meeting up with folks who were never “friends” or “girlfriends” or even often just friendly to me. There was a reason why I only called them “my classmates” or “acquaintances” when talking with family and my actual friends in the years since high school and Humanities. They had been larger-than-life characters in a very stretched out nightmare of a Harry Potter book.

Even with that, I also knew that I needed to meet up with and interview these folks. If only to provide some catharsis or to put myself in a mindset I had abandoned with the last year of the Reagan era. So when Sam said he was okay with meeting up, I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t kvetch over it.

We ended up talking for nearly three hours, about much more than Humanities or Mount Vernon High School. It was a pleasant conversation. Mostly because I allowed Sam to do what most people do in those situations. I allowed him the opportunity to spin his story, to put his best foot forward about his experiences and his life in the present. I made a point to only press him with questions on the stuff that was most important to me and to Boy @ The Window. After all, between Meltzer, other interviews I had planned, and my own steel-trap memories, I could note glaring contradictions when it came time to write.

Kim Kardashian, another boring vanity project, March 7, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

Still, Sam didn’t answer a key question, at least not directly for me. After I answered his question, “What do you think I thought of you?,” I asked him if wanted to correct or add anything to my answer. Sam was the only one I interviewed who dodged the question. That deflection to the burdens of Humanities and high school told me everything I needed to know. It told me that in Sam’s mind, I had been irrelevant, that his occasional put-downs were in fact deliberate.

There are some who have read Boy @ The Window since I put it out in 2013 who’ve said that they found the Humanities and high school parts of the memoir “boring.” I concede that point. Even with interviews and with Facebook, some of my classmates remain either an enigma to me, or more often, there wasn’t much exciting about them as people beyond grinding for A’s to begin with. Ten years ago, I was only beginning to learn this truth.

My Inevitable Walkman Era

05 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Masculinity, Coping Strategies, Disillusionment, Escape, Escapism, Manhood, Masculinity, Self-Discovery, Sony Walkman, Walking, Walkman

This version was my first Sony Walkman (between May 1987 and June 1988), posted August 28, 2013. (http://ebay.ie).

This week marks three decades since I finally entered the ’80s technologically, buying my first portable radio/cassette player with headphones. It wasn’t the Sony Walkman — I’d get my first one of those a year later. No, it was a Taiwan-made knockoff that I got at Crazy Eddie’s on 46th and Fifth in Manhattan, on sale for $22, that was my jump into the era of the Walkman. After a year and a half of carrying around a plug-in radio, playing with records on cheap $15 turntables (that cost $130 and much more in 2016), contemplating boom boxes, and having no control over what music I listened to outside of laundromat runs and 616, I found a new way to escape.

As I wrote in my memoir, this new toy was

my passport to another world, a world where I could make anything happen and no one could hurt me. Taking the Subway to go to The Wiz or Crazy Eddie’s or Tower Records was as much a part of mine and Darren’s Saturday ritual as our tracking down of Jimme. I no longer had to wait for WPLJ or Z-100 or WBLS to play the music I wanted to hear. I could buy a cassette tape for as little as six dollars. In the month after I’d bought my Walkman I’d gone out and bought more than twenty tapes. Whitney Houston, Simple Minds, Phil Collins, Sting, The Police, Mr. Mister, Mike + The Mechanics, Tears for Fears, even Sade. All were welcome who could contribute to my all-consuming effort at conquering my courses.

I was tough on my first Walkman, though. I must’ve dropped it a dozen times in two months, as it barely made it to Memorial Day ’86. My second one was a $42 Panasonic, which I bought with my Technisort earnings, and it lasted from July 4th until the end of October. I bought a decent Aiwa knockoff of the Sony Walkman in December, and that one made it to April ’87. before I finally found the $60 I needed for my Sony Walkman the month before high school graduation.

In a span of a year, I would accumulate more than seventy tapes, covering everything from pop and hard rock to rap and R&B, new age and jazz. As anyone who knew me in the spring of ’87 could attest, I carried my tapes with me in my book bag to have at the ready, the same way in which I had toted my Bible everywhere when I became a Christian three years earlier.

I walked everywhere in the Upper Bronx and Southern Westchester County for nearly three and a half years before I bought a Walkman of any kind. But in that window between March ’86 and my college move to Pittsburgh seventeen months later, my walks became much more frequently and much more eventful. I was walking to escape, to find mental space away from the gang of under-five-year-olds that ruled the too-small, two-bedroom space of pain in which I had grown up. I walked to figure out who I was and who I wasn’t, to be angry at my family, at the world, and at myself. I walked to find meaning in a chaotic life and world. I walked because I could wear myself out with warp speed, spin moves and high-falsetto highs, with questions and emotions and sometimes even, some answers, before coming back to 616 and grabbing some sleep. I must’ve have gone on 100 or 150 walks of five miles or more in that year and a half before college.

Inception (2010), Paris dream construct screen shot, April 27, 2012. (http://dpmlicious.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of poor resolution of shot, not intended for distribution.

That doesn’t even count my more frequent forays into the city, not to do anything or be anything. I wasn’t working for my father anymore, and after he repeatedly called me a “Faggat” in August ’86 and tried to set me up with a prostitute in December ’86, I hardly went to see him at all until the last few weeks before leaving for Pitt. I didn’t even take Darren down to Midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, Harlem or Flatbush with me. That’s what I did with the spare hours I started stealing from my Mom on weekends during that year. I’d go down to the city, maybe buy a few tapes at Tower Records on 66th and Broadway (usually not, since most of my tapes came via Terra Haute, Indiana). Sometimes if I had a few dollars, I’d go to MOMA or Radio City or some other place and go into escape/observation mode there. Mostly, I walked and people watched for an hour or so, and then take the long way home between the 2 train, 241st Street and the heart of Mount Vernon.

All the while, my music was on, often at full blast. It was a coping strategy, a pain and stress reliever, my sword and my shield. It took my Phyllis obsession and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh to break the link between music, Walkman, and the need to escape. It took the pain of rejection, removal from an anti-Donald environment, and a bout of homelessness to make music about enjoyment and education. When that happened, sometime in ’88, I knew I couldn’t escape anymore.

EWF, A Reminder That I Did Have a Childhood

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

EWF, Funk, Hebrew-Israelite, Humanities, Imagination, Jazz, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Maurice White, Pop, R&B, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery

Earth, Wind & Fire’s All ‘N All (1977) album cover, February 6, 2016. (http://www.allmusic.com).

I’m still reeling over Maurice White. Yeah, I still have my Earth, Wind & Fire on my CDs, my iPod, my iPhone, on three laptops and a desktop. Phillip Bailey and White’s brothers-in-arts are still here. Their music will always be with me and with us. But it feels like a little piece of my relative (if not contrived) innocence from my pre-Humanities, pre-Hebrew-Israelite days died with White Wednesday night.

Here’s what I wrote about those days of deliberately-induced blissful naiveté, Earth, Wind & Fire included, in my memoir:

“For me, this boy, this tweener, an active imagination and an even more animated dream life was critical. Living in between the hustle and bustle of “The City,” — Manhattan and the other four boroughs of New York — and the relative quiet of the ritzy suburbs immediately north of it was everything and everyone I knew before the age of twelve. Just three blocks after the elevated 2 Subway line ended at East 241st Street in the Bronx was where “Mount Vernon, New York” began. From the hard concrete sidewalks and green street signs of New York to the crumbling light blue slate and dark blue signs were my only indications that I had truly left the city. This despite the claims of so many I knew that upstate New York began somewhere above 125th or 207th Street in Manhattan. I knew by the time I was twelve that, sleepy bedroom suburb or not, Mount Vernon had more features in common with the Bronx and upper Manhattan than most city folk were willing to recognize.

“My only links to the great metropolis to the south were WNBC-TV (Channel 4), Warner Wolf — with his famous “Let’s go to the video tape line — doing sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2), and WABC-AM 77 and WBLS-FM 107.5 on the radio. I found the AM station more fun to listen to, but I also liked listening to the sign-off song WBLS played at the end of the evening, Moody’s Mood for Love, with that, ‘There I go, There I go, The-ere I go…’ start. Music had been an important part of my imagination in ’79, with acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, Christopher Cross, Billy Joel and The Commodores. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, Queen, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album. The music also made me feel like I was as much a part of New York as I was a part of Mount Vernon. It left me thinking of the ozone and burnt rubber smell that I noticed as soon as I would walk down into the Subway system in Manhattan. But aside from my occasional slip of the tongue — ‘warda’ for ‘water’ and ‘bawwgt’ for ‘bought’ — I didn’t sound or act much like a New Yawker. Still, I discovered something about New York from afar. I could sneak up to the rooftop of my apartment building, 616 East Lincoln, a five-story complex of three connected brick buildings with Tudor-style facades and a concrete-stone foundation. I’d find the exit to the roof unlocked and see the tops of the Twin Towers floating over some low-lying clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The symbols of the greatest city on Earth seemed to float toward the heavens on those days, and me with them.

“Besides the occasional reminder of life outside of my world, of Mount Vernon, I was the center of my own universe. Mount Vernon was but a stage on which my life played out, a place I hoped would stay this way forever. I was an eleven-year-old who thought that my world was the world. I lived my life like Philip Bailey and Maurice White would’ve wanted me to. I came to see ‘victory in a life [sic] called fantasy’ as my own life, living as if my imagination and dreams could be made into reality. All I had to do was wish it so.”

Because of what I went through during the Boy @ The Window years, I had to learn to get over my idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse to continue listening to Earth, Wind & Fire between ’82 and ’89. The late Maurice Eugene Washington was a fan as well, and I didn’t want us to both like the same music. Who the heck knew what was going on in his head when he heard “Fantasy” or “After The Love Is Gone,” anyway?

All I know is, there won’t be another group like the one Maurice White founded in ’69, the year I was born. All I can do is hold on to my precious Earth, Wind & Fire music, and the imagination that it helped spark. All I can do now is hope that someone can even begin to approach the kind of ethereal and powerfully Black-and-proud mix of music that White, Bailey, et al. were able to construct for nearly a decade. One can fantasize, right?