Category Archives: My Father

Jimme To The Rescue

17 Saturday Nov 2012

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

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United States Coast Guard rescue diver jumps from a helicopter (demonstration), 2004 Seafair, Seattle, WA, June 18, 2008. (Brandon Weeks via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Thirty years ago this week was the beginning of my second relationship with my father Jimme, brought on by the desperate need for money and material support as the Hebrew-Israelite world of 616 was swirling down the proverbial toilet. Our “fiscal cliff” was more like Felix Baumgartner jumping off a balloon into Jupiter’s atmosphere without a parachute (see my posts “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12 and “Pregnant Pauses” from earlier this month). This was the determined teenager me, one with a smart mouth and a firm adult sense of pragmatism, trumping any shame or embarrassment I would’ve felt even four months earlier. As I’ve written in Boy @ The Window:

“It was time to do something desperate. We needed money just to eat bread and water, and the water was free. We hadn’t done a full clothes wash since the beginning of September. Me and Darren both needed a new pair of sneakers about every other month. The ones I had were forming holes on the sides and bottoms.

So I turned to Jimme. Mom was always complaining that he didn’t pay child support anyway. And I knew where he lived now. It was 153 South Tenth, not far from the East 241st Street station in the Bronx, the end of the line on the Subway’s 2 and 5 lines running from Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were a bunch of watering holes nearby.

Felix Baumgartner of Austria as he jumps out of the capsule during final manned flight, October 14, 2012. (AP Photo via Red Bull Stratos)

I’d actually started going over to Jimme’s in August, a consequence of my first long walks through Mount Vernon and Southern Westchester County. But this was different. I was going to Jimme’s for money and sneakers. I decided to wait for him at the 241st Street stop after school one Friday at the end of October, figuring I’d catch him just before he started his weekly drinking ritual.

Unbelievably, my first idea for tracking Jimme down worked! I caught Jimme coming down the rickety Subway steps, completely shocked by seeing me there.

“Bo’, whacha doin’ here?”

“We need money, and I need some sneakers.”

“Why don’ you aks Maurice for them?”

“’Cause you’re my father and you haven’t been paying any child support. If you had, I wouldn’t be here!”

With that, Jimme laughed and shook his head. Of course he was also mad. I was in the way of him gettin’ his “pep-up,” virtually anything with alcohol in it.

“Bo’, what I’m gonna do wit’ you? You got me,” he said. I negotiated fifty dollars from him. He promised to get me some sneaks.

The following Tuesday, I went over to his place. Not only did I get my sneakers, a pair of size eleven-and-a-half Nike walking sneaks. I got a brown Members Only jacket to boot. I could tell, though, that they once belonged to someone else. Still a bit hung over, Jimme said, “Man, lo’ at all dese suits! You gotta lo’ like a big shot when you work in the city.” The suits were too big and a bit mismatched. I was just relieved that Jimme cared enough about my feet to get me the right size.

241st Street-Wakefield Station entrance, Bronx, NY, January 18, 2010. (DanTD via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported,

Darren would usually come with me on what gradually became our weekly hike from the land of 616 to the near Bronx and the city. Jimme being Jimme, he would grab me by one hand while giving me the money and put his left arm around my shoulder, whispering in my right ear, “Don’ give Darren nothin’,” or “You keep fitty for yo’self an’ give Darren ten.” “You a Collins, don’ be sharin’ nothin’ wit’ them Gills,” he’d often say.

I almost always broke with Jimme around this. Yes, Darren often was a selfish goofball and my 616 family was just a step or two above total chaos. Yet I couldn’t go to eat at a good pizza shop with Jimme and Darren and let them subsist on bread, water and milk. I couldn’t watch them run around in graying underwear and just wash my own clothes. Not as hard as Mom worked, not as long as I lived there. I wanted to help as much as I could and still take care of my needs.

Jimme knew I was helping out at 616 too. So he would say things like “Don’ be givin’ your motha my money. Those ain’t my kids. Dis jus’ for you and Darren.” Or “Don’ give them muddafuccas nothin’,” which would start a brief argument between me and him about the needs of innocent children. Even with that and his drunken ups and downs, Jimme helped save the day for us and me as we plunged into the watery abyss of welfare poverty.”

The Third Armpit of Hell

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Illustration of Dante’s Inferno, Map of Lower Hell, 16th century. (Giovanni Stradano via Wikipedia). In public domain.

During most of my Pittsburgh years, whenever someone I knew asked me what it was like to live in the New York City area, I often said two things. One, that “New York was a great place to live if you have money.” But, “if you don’t have money, New York could be like the third armpit of hell.”

I didn’t even bother to discuss Mount Vernon until I was well into graduate school. Too unknown, too complicated to explain its proximity to the Bronx and to midtown Manhattan. And from the average Pittsburgher’s perspective, it was a distinction without a difference. As far as some were concerned, Mount Vernon could’ve just as easily been outside of Buffalo as it could’ve been in the heart of Harlem.

But I definitely knew better, that my relationship with Mount Vernon and “The City” was a love-hate one, born from my growing-up experiences during the Reagan years. The lens with which I viewed the New York City area, a trifocal one of race, poverty and “outsider” status, made me ambivalent about my times growing up in Mount Vernon and all of my times in New York.

2 NYC subway train with graffiti (cropped), 1980s, December 20, 2009. (Cope2 via http://www.doobybrain.com/). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture.

I have my father Jimme to thank, though. Without him, I would still be afraid of New York, not just ambivalent about it. Drunk or not, working or on his way to a hole-in-the-wall bar. Jimme would take me and my older brother Darren out and down to the city often enough, to ride the Subway, to hang out with him in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and especially Midtown. Whether it was to help him with his janitorial work on weekends, or just to hang out, we frequented Manhattan and other parts of the five boroughs off and on between ’80 and ’85, ’82 — the year of abuse — excepted.

Because of that year, the longest time I spent outside of the city growing up was between April ’81 and July ’83. After not making it down to Manhattan in all of ’82, we went to Midtown in July, where we learned about two of my father’s watering holes between 43rd and 47th. They were both near Mickey Mantle’s restaurant on 47th. He also had an Irish pub he’d like to go to around East 59th and Third, a drinking bar near his job on 64th and Columbus, and a couple of places near Macy’s on 34th Street. Because of our height and the times, when it was still legal for eighteen-year-olds to drink in public watering holes, me and Darren were allowed into these fine establishments. I learned a lot about vermouth, vodka, Cosmos and Long Island Iced Tea that summer.

Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse in New York City, March 4, 2006. (Janke and Diliff via Wikipedia). Permission granted via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

I also learned a lot about the not-so-nice side of New York in those years. I recognized this as I’d board the Uptown 2 Subway from West 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan at the tail end of rush hour. As I’d board the train, I’d notice the crunch of humanity in all of its oblivion, self-absorption, and diversity. As the doors close, I’d watch as the express train passed 50th, 59th, and 66th Street before it would grind to a halt at 72nd Street. I’d notice that a fair number of the White passengers alighted here. Between 96th and 125th Street, the load of the train would gradually lighten as about half of the passengers who’d crushed me between a tall, stale-breathed smoker and a woman who wasn’t my girlfriend were now at street level.

About three-quarters of the passengers for the rest of my trip would be Latino and Afro-Caribbean. After another hour of endless stops in the Bronx, the 2 would pull me out of my slumber as it would slowly roll into the rickety East 241st stop.

By the time I was a rising senior at Pitt, I certainly didn’t need my father to accompany on my trips into Manhattan. I also avoided the long trek from 616 across Mount Vernon to 241st to take the 2 whenever I could afford to. Metro-North was a luxurious godsend compared to the puddles of piss and infinite amounts of graffiti on the Subway I’d seen throughout the ’80s.

Toph’s “Hairy Pits” from Avatar: The Last Airbender (screenshot), July 26, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution picture.

But it introduced me to other odious issues. Like Grand Central Station, which by the summer of ’90 was in desperate need of renovation. Especially the restrooms, festooned with enough garbage, feces and bodily odors and fluids to make a coroner vomit.

Off a return trip from Pittsburgh that summer, I made the mistake of having no choice but to use the almost  unusable facilities there, which in the end I couldn’t use. Meanwhile, I observed homeless males hanging out in the restroom with carts, along with an individual who looked to have Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obvious sign of full-blown AIDS.

That’s when I coined New York to be “the third armpit of hell,” the place where poverty had meant your dreams were dead on arrival. For once, it made me content that I was from a place where many smug New Yorkers disdainly considered “upstate.” Though the New York City area has changed — and mostly for the better — since ’90, it’s still a place where economic inequality can easily grind the life out of people.

It’s Been 25 Years

18 Monday Jun 2012

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

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Me and My Uncle Sam, June 18, 1987. (Donald Earl Collins).

Today’s date marks a quarter-century since my Class of ’87 marched and graduated from Mount Vernon High School at Mount Vernon’s Memorial Field (see my post “It’s Been Twenty Years…” from June ’07). I guess that the seventeen-year-old version of me would look at me now and say, “Boy you’re old! What happened to you?” And the current me would say, “Life, you pathetic dufus!” in response.

I write this today a tired professor, educator and consultant. Tired from a week of scoring AP World History exams, grading students’ papers from my survey-level US History course, traveling to and from Salt Lake City. Tired from the vicissitudes of life, marriage and parenthood. At least, that’s how I feel sometimes. Most of the time, though, I feel like the person I’ve been for the past twenty-four years, someone who has a real bright present and even brighter future, regardless of how things may look from day-to-day or moment to moment.

That was and wasn’t the case twenty-five years ago. I really only had about three or four things on my mind on that hot and sticky 87-degree Thursday evening. One was about my family. Good, bad, and ugly all at once. My Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, my older brother Darren, and all of my younger siblings, and all going to my graduation. Getting myself and my younger brothers and sister ready was no easy task, especially without air conditioning.

Then, my Uncle Sam showed up, a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I hadn’t seen him since October ’84, at the one-time book store on Gramatan Avenue, where I used to buy all of my Barron’s test-prep books for the New York State Regents Exams, SAT, and AP exams. That was the only time I’d seen my mother’s brother since the picnic to end all picnic’s in August ’83 (see my post “Good Times, Good Times…Not” from August ’09). He still looked larger than life, all six-four and 240 of him, despite his bum knees.

Canadian Club bottle and goblet, February 12, 2011. (Craig L. Duncan via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My father Jimme was supposed to show up at 616 before we all left for the ceremony. And he did, just as I was about to pile into a cab with Mom, my sister Sarai, and Uncle Sam. Jimme was three sheets to the wind, liquored up real good, to celebrate my graduation. “Oh no!,” I thought, pretty much keeping my distance from him the entire evening. I already knew that Jimme would embarrass the hell out of me and Mom, not to mention any parent who talked with him.

Thought number two came in all of the folks to whom I said good-bye or good riddance as the ceremony came to a close. After throwing our burgundy and yellow caps in the air, we went over to our now former classmates — who were now friends, lovers, acquaintances, and in some cases, foes — to embrace and hug, to cry and scream and dance and twirl around in the air with. Along the way, A (of “The Legend of ‘Captain Zimbabwe’” post from May ’09) grabbed me and gave me a hug. “You made it, man,” he said. It startled me that he did that. The late Brandie Weston and I hugged, but not before saying, “You’ve changed a lot over the years. You used to be an asshole you know!”

I caught up with Crush #1, giving her a long hug and a mug as a gift. “I’m really going to miss you,” I said. I also gave a mug to H, V (the valedictorian in my post “Valedictorian Burdens” from July ’09), and Crush #2, telling them all that “when you’re drinking coffee late at night and trying to finish a paper, think of me.” When I gave a mug to Crush #1 and embraced her, T apparently was nearby watching the event unfold. I went over to her to say “Good-bye” afterwards. T snorted and raised her nose up in a huff, as if I’d given her the coup de grace (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’10)

But the thought that has stayed with me over the years wasn’t something that I was fully conscious of that day, given all of the excitement that was and is a high school graduation. It had been in my head for more than five years. See, despite having erased much of the stigma that was me being me at twelve in 7S and at 616, I knew that I could never fully be the person I knew I could be while living in Mount Vernon. People think I’m weird now, but at least I know what it is about me that makes some dumb asses act that way about me. The dumb asses who thought that “book learnin'” and listening to “White music” was wack back then were too numerous and too vocal for me to avoid. Especially since some of them were at 616 or my parents.

Grandstand at Memorial Field, Mount Vernon, NY, November 28, 2007. (Anthony22 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I knew that I had to leave. That’s what I thought about the entire walk home from Memorial Field. And I did walk, alright, for a full hour afterward. If I could’ve, I would’ve walked all the way to Pittsburgh that night, as I knew it wouldn’t get any better for me in Mount Vernon than a high school graduation. I’d already left my first hometown, at least in my head. It would take another fifteen months to confirm it.

When my wife came to Mount Vernon with me for the first time during Christmas ’99, we walked through downtown and The Avenue. After ten minutes, she asked, “Are you sure you weren’t adopted?” Sometimes, looking back, I ask myself the same question.

The Ivy League Dilemma

17 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, race, Upper West Side, Youth

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Columbia University's Butler Library at night, New York City, October 13, 2008. (Andrew Chen via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

A quarter-century ago this weekend, I made the decision to attend the University of Pittsburgh over Columbia University. Given that I lived in Mount Vernon, New York, this was a decidedly weird decision. So much so that I didn’t tell my mother of my plans for nearly two weeks, and waited until April to tell my classmates. But there’s a well marbled story here, of bad Ivy League practices, not to mention my need to get away from family and classmates alike.

I applied to eight schools in all, including Yale, Columbia and Pitt. If it weren’t for Pitt’s brochure of pizza and students having a good time, I wouldn’t have applied there to begin with. The only rejection I received was from Yale, in early February ’87. Oh well!

Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, December 20, 2010. (http://www.photohome.com). In public domain.

Over the next five weeks, I received one acceptance and packet of materials after another, including Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. All but Columbia gave me a full financial aid package of one kind or another. All offered either a partial or a full-tuition scholarship for four years except for Columbia. Pitt had offered me one of their inaugural half-tuition academic scholarships that they called the Challenge Scholarship, meant to attract low-income students and students of color from across the country.

I called Columbia’s financial aid office in mid-March to ask why they hadn’t offered me any kind of academic scholarship. They called me back to tell me that they wanted to “make sure” that I really couldn’t afford to go their West Harlem, er, Morningside Heights school.

“But you have my Mom’s financial paperwork,” I said.

“Well, we could send out a private investigator to track down your father and take a look at his finances. If everything checks out, either he can cover part of your tuition or we can offer you a scholarship,” the man on the other end of the phone said.

I was floored by the smug arrogance coming out of the phone. “My dad hasn’t paid child support in eight years,” I said, ready for an argument.

“We want to make sure that he doesn’t have money for your tuition,” was the creditor’s response.

“Thanks but no thanks. You either trust me or you don’t,” I said with conviction, and hung up the phone.

I was torn between having some idiot private investigator digging through my father Jimme’s pitiful life and finances and saying “Go to Hell!” to Columbia. I didn’t want to see the worst case scenario occur, which was that some fool would go back to Columbia and say that Jimme could afford to pay $3,000 of my tuition per year. In the three years up to March ’87, Jimme had given me $3,500 total.

Then I thought of other pros and cons, and as I thought of them, I wrote them out. Columbia was an Ivy League school, the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t. Yet, Columbia was more expensive than Pitt by more than two dollars to one ($18,000 per year versus $7,500) and the students at Columbia would likely be similar in education, socioeconomic background and attitudes to my Humanities classmates.

But the most important factor in saying “No” to Columbia besides their financial aid sleaziness was 616 and Mount Vernon. If I went to school there, where would I live and where would I study? Home? You got to be kidding! Mount Vernon Public Library? They only stayed open until nine pm, and were never open on Sundays. On campus? That would only work if I were able to get a decent paying part-time job on campus. After sorting through this, I knew that Columbia was out.

The look on my mother’s face when I told her said it all. She was as shocked as I’d ever seen her. She kept

Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, New York City, August 25, 2006. (Wikipedia). Permission granted via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic.

trying to convince me to go upstate to Hobart and William Smith, to see about going to Columbia for their private investigator. This after a year of her telling me that applying to West Point would “make me a man” because “women love men in uniform” and applying to HBCUs made sense because she’d given $25 to the United Negro College Fund.

My classmates spent the next couple of months asking me where Pittsburgh was and why I wanted to go there. All I knew was that I needed to get away from the New York area for a while and that the University of Pittsburgh’s tuition was cheaper than almost anything I would’ve faced in New York. I knew that they had a decent computer science program — this was to be my first major. But I also knew that I wasn’t stuck if I wanted to change majors or study something other that computer science.

In the end, I obviously made the right decision for me at the time. If I had to do it again, maybe I would’ve applied to the University of Pennsylvania or Georgetown. I certainly would’ve been better off in terms of immediate career options and income. But given the friendships that I formed, the degrees I earned and the wife that I have, I’m not sure if another good choice like the ones above would’ve been any better than going to Pitt. At least for my rather fragile psyche and near nonexistent social life.

Stomping In Coffee Table Glass

30 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, race, Youth

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Walking On Broken Glass Music Video screen shot, June 12, 2010. (Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and indirect reference.

Three days after my seventh birthday — which also happens to be thirty-five years ago on this date — I witnessed one of the most bizarre and frightening things a kid should ever see with two parents in the midst of a divorce. It involved infidelity, jealousy, vindictiveness and violence. But the incident itself was part of a domestic situation that had been spiraling out of control for at least two years.

My mother officially filed for a divorce from my father Jimme in July ’76, after six years of putting up with his alcoholism and his threats of violence. In the two years since we’d moved to 425 South Sixth Avenue in Mount Vernon in August ’74, Jimme’s alcohol-laced threats had led to a stabbing (his own) and my own call

425 South 6th Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

to the police (cut off by my folks mid-call). Things like finding him face-down in a pile of freshly cooked greens and chitlins and falling asleep on the Metro-North on Bicentennial Day with me and Darren in tow and ending up in New Haven, Connecticut didn’t help matters.

The fall after the divorce filing, me and my older brother Darren found ourselves in a strange limbo. Jimme hadn’t moved out, but was out drinking so much that seeing him at home was a random occurrence. My mother was home — sometimes — with Wednesday evenings reserved for bowling nights and occasional other nights out that weren’t easily explained except by my father’s accusations of cheating.

By October ’76, whenever Jimme was home, he found some way to get back at my mother. He put about $3,000 worth of my mother’s clothes and shoes into a bathtub full of hot water (about $10,000 in 2011 dollars). Me and my older brother Darren were there when he threw a brand-new thirteen-inch Sanyo color TV out of our second-floor window, this right around Halloween. Jimme also had repeatedly cut up the new furniture my mother had bought after filing for divorce.

My father’s drunken awareness of my mother’s new relationship with my eventual idiot stepfather Maurice led to a nasty incident that topped all of these, if only because I was wide awake for this one. My mother decided that it was time for us to finally meet the mystery man who had been in her life for the past several months, Maurice Washington. So for the first time in three days, we all gathered at 425, all to have a fried chicken dinner.

Two-layered tinted glass coffee table, similar to one my mother bought in 1976, December 30, 2011.

Jimme came home to bear witness to this gathering, and drunk as usual, flew into a rage. He started throwing food from the kitchen, then walked into the living room. There, with me and Darren sitting on the couch and Maurice and my mother watching, Jimme destroyed a glass-topped coffee table by stomping it in. Shards of glass were everywhere, including small bits in my father’s legs. He bled everywhere it seemed. I found myself hiding between the Christmas tree and the stairwell that led downstairs to the front door. Soon an ambulance and the police came — once again — to take Jimme to the hospital.

This was more than my mother could bear. She ended up in Mount Vernon Hospital for almost two months with a serious kidney ailment that turned out to be stress-induced. Darren and I stayed with our usual babysitter, one of my father’s drinking buddies in Ida. By the time my mother came out of the hospital, which was in April ’77, Maurice and my Uncle Sam had moved us into an apartment at 616 East Lincoln Avenue on Mount Vernon’s North Side.

But not before my Uncle Sam, a big man at six-foot-four and about 230 pounds, clotheslined Jimme over a fence in front of our old place as an act of vengeance. Me and Darren were there because my father had swept us up from our babysitter’s place on East Third Street and taken us to 425 to hang out for a few days, which meant us missing school as well. He’d managed not to drink for those two and a half days, and even made us lunch and dinner consisting of Kool-Aid, meatloaf, mac and cheese and string beans.

While Jimme went out to buy us some soda, my Uncle Sam and my soon-to-be-stepfather had come with the moving van. About a half-hour later, there was Jimme, about to walk through the gate into the front yard. The whole Deacon Jones-esque tackle seemed as if it were in slow motion, as I watched the 32-oz. glass bottle of Pepsi bounce twice on the sidewalk before landing in the grass, with only minor damage. The paper bag having landed right next to the front gate. And Jimme flipped backwards in the air, landing with a giant thud on the public sidewalk.

I was traumatized, to say the least. My grades throughout second grade reflected that, not that Ms. Hirsch and her low-expectations behind would’ve noticed. The fact that I no longer had any continuity in my life made it hard to want to be friends with anyone, a complete 180 degree turn from what I’d been like in first grade. Again, no one noticed. And Darren had also withdrawn, finding in The Clear View School something he didn’t have at home.

If Boy @ The Window Were A Movie…

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, Pop Culture, Youth

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Not So Young Man @ His Window, December 10, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

…who would I hire to play the characters in my memoir? Especially if I could reach across space and time to pick actors with the range necessary to play complicated characters, like yours’ truly, for instance. Hmm. I have a few ideas:

Rob Brown, ala Finding Forrester (2000) – He’d been a perfect character to play me during my high school years, between the blank stare and face, his height, and his ability to show awkwardness around Whites in authority.

Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace in Finding Forrester (2000) Screen Shot. (http://filmdope.com).

Khandi Alexander, ala The Corner (2000) – While she isn’t nearly as tall and is a bit chestier than my mother, her affect as the down-and-out West Baltimore mother on the groundbreaking HBO miniseries fits here.

James Avery – He would be in the role of my idiot ex-stepfather, with his bulging eyes and belly, and with his flashes of rage, yeah, he’d been perfect.

Clarke Peters, ala The Wire, Treme – I thought about someone like Sammy Davis, Jr. playing the role of my father, Jimme, but Davis’ acting range wouldn’t have been enough to capture both my father’s drunken rage and the comedy that often served as an overlay to my encounters with my father growing up.

Clarke Peters at Edinburgh Festival 2010, August 6, 2010. (Ausir). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

Jesse L. Martin – The man’s acting range is enormous, and would capture the complexities of playing someone like my older brother Darren, a super-shy kid who himself played the role of someone mentally retarded while also having taught himself to read at the age of three. Only, Darren didn’t know how to stop.

Jesse L. Martin at Annual Flea Market and Grand Auction hosted by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, September 26, 2006. (Insomniacpuppy). Released to public domain via Wikipedia.

Harold Perrineau, ala Oz – His face alone captures a lot of emotion, and show does the way he says his lines, something that I’d want from someone playing my best friend from elementary school. Perrineau’s face would also capture duplicity, a necessary ingredient for betraying a friendship. Just like many of the characters in the HBO series Oz.

Thandie Newton – This was a tough one, as I also thought about Rosario Dawson in the role of Crush #1. But Newton has quirkiness as an actor that Dawson lacks at times, and for all of the wonderful traits of the character known as Crush #1, quirkiness is key.

Thandie Newton at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1639139527/in/set-72157602744288487/). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Ray Liotta – Not nearly as tough, this despite the fact that the real “A” had blondish hair when we were kids. Liotta’s meanness, his laugh, his Italian coldness easily capture what “A” was like as my tormentor in seventh grade.

Nathan Fillion, ala Firefly (2002-03), Serenity(2005) – the near-perfect actor to play the contrarian one, “JD” (see my post “The Contrarian One” from February ’11), his aloofness, his sense of superiority, his maverick affect throughout our years in Humanities together.

Nathan Fillion as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (2002-02). (Wikipedia.org).

Alison Arngrim, ala Little House on the Prairie (1974-82) – She played Nellie Olson on the show, a bratty, well-off girl who only knew how to view the world through her own selfish lens. She could play any number of my former White classmates, especially many of the ones who left Humanities between the end of eighth and the beginning of tenth grade.

Little House on the Prairie's Nellie Olson as played by Alison Arngirm, circa 1977. (http://www.flickr.com/3595/3433153010_b5f3cae12a.jpg).

Gabrielle Union – as this actor has done the affect of pissed off and Black preppie well over the years, she’d be great for the role of Crush #2, the one the main character (me) becomes obsessed with in the six months after graduating high school. Like the character, Union can crush hearts.

Rita Moreno – A fixture in the acting business for more than sixty years, one of a handful to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award, she could easily slip on the role of a guidance counselor like the chain-smoking, stereotyping bigot Sylvia Fasulo. The only other person who’d fit this role is Callie Thorne from the USA show, Necessary Roughness.

Brian Dennehy – There aren’t many actors who could play my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer. You see, you’d need to be able to spit, to tell long and strange stories, to have moment of macabre laughter and moments of bitter rage. Dennehy, though, has experience doing all of those things, though not in one role. Plus, he’s tall and rotund enough for the part.

Brad Dourif, ala Dune (1984), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – He’s weird enough to play the role of Regis, one of my older friends from my undergraduate days at the University of Pittsburgh, someone who was there for me the semester I went through homeless and three months without money.

Brad Dourif at the Lord of the Rings-Convention Ring*Con in Bonn, Germany, November 23, 2002. (Diane Krauss). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation.

I could go on and on. But that’s unnecessary here. This ensemble cast, with the right script — and a time machine — would make Boy @ The Window come alive, and have me blushing and crying over and over again.

Finding My Father for the First Time

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Work, Youth

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Noah meeting his grandpa for the first time, December 21, 2003. (Angelia N. Levy).

It’s a funny thing to realize that it’s only been about thirteen years since my relationship with my father Jimme became a father-son relationship. That I was a month away from turning twenty-nine before I could say that I’d had a conversation with my father that lasted for more than ten minutes, that didn’t revolve mostly around his job and how many “muddafuckas” he could “buy an’ sell.” That, finally, finally, at the age of fifty-eight, he’d admitted his failings as my father and to being an alcoholic.

The last time I had talked with Jimme before the ’98 holiday season was in the summer of ’96. He’d been living with his boss’ family, the Levi’s, on Long Island because his last drinking binge had led to his landlord Mrs. Small finally evicting him from his South 10th Avenue boarding room. Even though he was with the Levi family (for more on this, read my “New York, New York” post from October ’09), his bosses were about to go out of business. Turned out that one of the Levi brothers made the mistake of talking to an undercover federal agent about doing a contract killing on a competitor. Sounded like fiction at the time, but life is stranger than fiction.

In any case, on that last call, my father seemed lost. Not because he’d been drinking. But because he had nothing left in New York to cling to anymore. A few months later, my father, unemployed and no longer enabled by his former bosses, finally left New York for the family home in Georgia at the invitation of one of his sisters. By the end of ’97, I heard that he had cleaned up his act and moved to Jacksonville. Throughout ’98 and into ’99, I began to get calls from Jimme about how he was finally sober, had found God, and was getting married, to another woman named Mary.

Right after Thanksgiving ’98, though, was the first time I returned one of his calls, just to see if the number worked, to see if he was sane and sober. I wasn’t ready to talk, as I’d heard my father’s song and dance about turning his life around since The Brady Bunch was still on the air with new episodes. But, the fact that he sounded sober for the first time in at least fifteen years was an encouraging sign.

Still, I thought long and hard about blowing him off, keeping my father at the distance of a light-year. All my life, and certainly all of my older brother Darren’s, Jimme had been an evil drunk, verbally abusive and incapable of staying sober for more than three weeks at a time. But he had also been there for me growing up during my Humanities and Hebrew-Israelite years. He helped keep Darren and me from starving or walking around barefoot in ’82 and ’83. He kept the example of hard work in front of us even as the other parent figures in our lives went on dreaded welfare and laid around as if our lives were over. His money was the reason I was able to stay in school after five days of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt.

So I called him again, deciding to give him a second chance. That was February ’99, a two-hour conversation about how he managed to become a recovering alcoholic, a church-goer, and a married man. He admitted that he had made many mistakes, that he was an alcoholic, that he loved me and my brother. It was a conversation, a real conversation, an unbelievable change of relationship. After twenty-nine years and two months, I finally had a father that I really could call father.

Thirteen years later, and I’m still amazed that I’m able to talk to my father as my father, and not as the person I used to have to drag out of bars on 241st Street or in Midtown Manhattan growing up. I tracked Jimme down many times for money or to save him from himself between ’82 and ’93. And yet, I only found my father once he became so lost he had to leave New York to find himself for the first time.