Category Archives: Christianity

The White-Boy Logic of Supernatural

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”) screenshot. Originally aired February 4, 2014.

One of the benefits of working from home for years is the ability to take in copious amounts of popular culture in passive and subliminal ways. For more than a decade before the pandemic, my daily schedule included a multitasking routine of writing, teaching, grading, working-out, napping, running errands, and getting my son off to school and my partner off to her job. All the while, I am consuming news and pop culture. BBC World News from 6 or 7 am until I go to the car to drive my spouse to the Metro stop or run errands, sometimes longer. In the Honda Element, listening to my tunes or ESPN 980 (before Dan Synder sold the station two years ago) or WAMU/NPR. And, bouncing from show to show while writing, grading, working out, making lunch, prepping dinner, sometimes taking a brief nap between 1:30 and 2:45 (when my son returned home from school) or between 3:45 and 6 pm (when it was time to pick my significant other up from the Metro). 

Of all the TNT reruns I’d put on in the midday slot over the years, between Bones, Castle, Arrow, and Law & Order, the one that has stuck with me the longest is Supernatural. Its final episode aired at the end of this past year. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a white boy’s show, or because it’s about as American as a show filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia can get. Whatever it was, I went from calling the show “Brooders” and “White Males Brooding” to actually enjoying the series, a not-so-guilty pleasure in between grading, writing, and revising, and yoga poses, planks, pushups, crunches, free weights, and plyometrics.

That doesn’t mean I’ve watched it with an uncritical mind. Just like with what I’ve called “white male angst music” in the 1990s — alt rock and grunge (think Pearl Jam and Live here) — Supernatural is a tour-de-force of whitemansplaining the world. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester might play classic ‘70s rock in their legendary 1967 black Chevy Impala, but they are all “White, Discussion” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge” in their attitudes. Seriously, how do two white dudes get away with mass murder while they constantly “save the world” with the “family business” of “hunting and killing monsters”?

The premise of the show, for the generation of folks who haven’t watched the 15 seasons of episodes between 2005 and 2020 (I watched my first episode in 2012, so there’s that), is that the Winchesters have to fight monsters born of supernatural forces while hunting for a yellow-eyed demon who killed their mother, and eventually, their father. In between bouts with demons, angels, archangels, Lucifer, Leviathans, Knights of Hell, Princes of Hell, the King of Hell, and God, er, “Chuck” himself, the Winchesters battled the usual. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, jinns, Greco-Roman, Norse, Incan, and Mayan gods, witches, and whatever other supernatural monster one could imagine. Supernatural was at its absolute best when the focus was on the ancient lore around cultural considerations of the metaphysical.  

But the overarching theme of Dean and Sam Winchester “saving the world” is the great white man’s white lie. How does anyone get credit for “saving the world” when they broke the world, the natural order, multiple times. Here’s a short list of the Winchester’s thirst for revenge leading to Armageddon:

– the father John Winchester selling his soul to the “yellow-eyed demon” to save Dean’s life (Season 1)

– Dean selling his soul to the same demon to save Sam’s life (Season 2)

– Sam drinking demon blood to kill a Princess of Hell and Dean torturing damned souls in Hell, breaking the last and the first of 66 seals to unleash Lucifer and the Four Horsemen on the planet (Season 4)

– Dean not allowing Sam to die after finishing the three trials to forever seal up the gates of Hell, and then tricking Sam into allowing a rogue angel possess him for months afterward (Seasons 8 and 9)

– Dean taking on the Mark of Cain, becoming a demon in the process, and Sam freeing Dean from the Mark, unleashing the Darkness (think if so-called dark matter was God’s sister here) and another universe-destroying force (Seasons 9, 10, and 11)

– The Winchesters allowing a nephilim to live and its power to open up a rift between alternative Earths, a rift that threatened both versions of the planet in the process (Seasons 12 and 13)

– Engaging in a all-out war with God, ending only when they resurrect the nephilim Jack from the Empty, as he become the new God, and the old God becomes just Chuck, “just a slob like one of us,” ala 1990s rocker Joan Osborne (Seasons 14 and 15).

Dean and Sam die and go to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory multiple times in this series. How narcissistic do even white guys — get to be when they assume that they can come back to life over and over again in order to “save” their brother while also saving the world? Especially when they sacrifice other family and friends to keep each other living and hunting monsters? So many die in this show because of their ignorance, so many who didn’t have to. When you take apart the context of their “jobs” as hunters involves hustling pool tables, identity theft and hacking credit cards, stealing cars, and regularly killing people who’ve turned into monsters or in the midst of demon possession. Any two of these gets Black and Brown and Indigenous folks a one-way ticket to prison or a grave, with no chance for resurrection.

It’s hilariously macabre and the height of arrogance of two white guys believing they are doing more good than harm. But isn’t Supernatural really just a parable about how white guys see themselves in the world? Everything is there for the taking, it’s all about us and our lives. Between the drugs, the boozing, the meaningless misogynistic sex, the endless buffet of death by food, Supernatural is the ultimately expression of white male-dominance, or at least, the quest for it, from two average Joes.

Near the end of Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”), Dean and Sam talk, not for the last time, about putting their need to save each other from certain death above the needs and lives of everyone else. Sam has a moment of complete clarity, one that fades away by the end of Season 10 (see the list above). 

You think you’re my savior, my brother, the hero. You swoop in, and even when you mess up, you think what you’re doing is worth it, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing more good than bad…but you’re not…What is the upside of me being alive?

Dean’s response:

You kidding me? You and me — fighting the good fight — together.

It never occurred to these characters, and perhaps, even the actors, producers, directors, and writers for Supernatural, that Dean and Sam Winchester are the real monsters here. Two everyday white guys who think that killing monsters and a host of supernatural entities is the solution to everything. Did they even consider that killing monsters might be the reason they need to keep hunting, because they create more each time they kill one? Or that maybe because the US is a place full of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, genocide, and murder, this nation is a natural incubator of supernatural hauntings and possessions, a place where all monsters can thrive? Did they ever see themselves as the humans they never seem to understand in the show? Probably not until the final episode in Season 15, when Dean and Sam finally die — this time for good, and for good. 

I never wanted them to “Carry On Wayward Son,” as Kansas sang it in 1976, as a choir of white girls sang it Season 10, Episode 5. As sad as it was to see the final finale of Dean and Sam Winchester, we need a world without the hundreds of millions of Dean and Sam Winchesters around us, an anti-racist world. A world without these narcissistic and yes, racist and misogynistic and homophobic monsters who see themselves as do-gooders.

BA Collins, 30 Years Ago

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,


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

As I have said in a couple of places this week, this time three decades ago I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. My major was History, with minors in Mathematics (courtesy of my 1.5 years working toward a Comp Sci degree) and Black Studies (before the powers that were changed the name of the degree to Africana Studies). Yay me!

My degree is nine years older than my marriage, between five and 10 years older than most of my students. Goofy semi-asexual me was more than 12 years away from becoming a father. It seems surreal to look back at myself from 30 years ago. Especially when there had been so many years before Saturday, April 27, 1991 when I didn’t think I’d make it to 30.

If I could somehow get a message to my 21-year-old self, and only one message, what would it be? Trust God? Write as if your life depends on it, because it will, and sooner than you think? Take time off after finishing the master’s next year? Move back to NY, so that you can please your Mom? Don’t try to date E, it will go badly?

No, no, no. None of those will do. Find your true self. Find your core beliefs. Admit your loves, your disdains, your anxieties, and your fears. You do that, you will be the writer and the person you always wanted to be. That’s what my dreams and my multiple muses have been saying for years. I’ve heard them, but only in bits and pieces, since I was in my teens.

Well, better lately than never, and better late than Laettner, as I say.

The Start of the “Shalom Aleichem” Years

13 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,


Primary Names of God in Hebrew, October 2018. (https://www.chabad.org).

This week 40 years ago brought an avalanche of changes to my already unstable world. I wouldn’t have noticed the instability, though. I believed my bubble of Mount Vernon and the NYC was pretty stable back in mid-April 1981. I had friends who I could talk to and debate with all day. I saw my father about once every three weeks. I was starting to get into mainstream popular music, and had some interest in sports. I liked a few girls here and there. I was doing well in school. I was doing well in general, with my stepfather separated from my mother for the previous six months. So well that I’d forgotten my sexual assault trauma from 1976. So well that even the bullies around my block hadn’t tried to stone me to death or beat my face in for nearly seven months.

But Maurice came back as “Judah ben Israel,” and the brief years of worldly enlightenment came to a crashing halt. I tell this story in Boy @ The Window this way:

This was the religion my stepfather converted to after he and Mom had separated. In the period before his return, my stepfather had been working on Mom, attempting to convince her that he was now a good man and could be trusted as the man of our house. He loved Jehovah, had stopped smoking, and had learned how to love himself. And he had changed his name to Judah ben Israel, not legally, mind you. The name literally means ‘Lion of God and of Israel,’ and referred to my stepfather as a royal descendant of Jacob/Israel, the immediate father of the Israelite people. It was in this context that my stepfather gained a sense of himself and control over his world, which was what convinced Mom to end her separation from him.

I was so confused that my brain felt like it was on a carnival ride. Really? This is what we are doing now? We’re still a family? What about my dad?, I thought. But people desperate for an identity that defies the beliefs of White folk often take desperate, cultist measures.

This week 40 years ago, Maurice worked on me and my brother Darren to take this Hebrew-Israelite bullshit seriously, which meant threatening us with ass-whuppins if he found out we weren’t wearing our kufis or yarmulkes at school.

The next step, of course, was our acceptance of the Hebrew-Israelite religion. This wasn’t exactly a process in which free will was involved. Our mother told us that this would be our religion ‘for the rest of our lives.’ Then our stepfather came to explain this ‘way of life’ to us, and we put on our white, multi-holed, circular kufis for the first time. I had no idea what Mom and Maurice had pushed us into. A part of me was on the outside looking in, thinking, This is crazy! But as nutty as this sudden conversion seemed, I convinced myself into acceptance. We were already the children of one divorce, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see another one so soon. Darren, to his credit, played along as if being a Hebrew-Israelite was just a role in a school play.

I went to the school the following Monday with my bright white kufi on top of my head for the first time. Talk about committing social suicide! The expressions on my friends’ faces, from completed stunned and disgusted to eyes that revealed what their set faces attempted to conceal. I was immediately an outcast, especially as far as my best friend Starling was concerned. Once I explained to some of them what had occurred the week before, they seemed to get it, even if they kept me at ulna’s length. They still said “Hey Donald. Wassup?” the way they did before.

Not Starling and some of our mutuals. He saw it as my betrayal, not just of him, but of God himself. Such are the inflated egos of children of preacher-men. His weeks of silence led to a fight (which he won) and the end of our two-year friendship.

But the friendships and my within-normal-levels weirdness came to a crashing halt the moment I decided to allow myself to be a canvas my mother and stepfather used to express their eccentric yearnings for identity. It was the worst three and a half years of my life, with child abuse, another sexual assault, the fall into welfare poverty, suicidal ideations and one suicide attempt included.

My brother Darren handled the situation so much better than me. “Darren, to his credit, played along as if being a Hebrew-Israelite was just a role in a school play,” is what I wrote. He only wore his kufi at 616 and whenever he was out and visible to my stepfather’s peeps. Otherwise, the hat was off his head. But then again, Darren attended The Clear View School, where no one would have cared what he wore.

Yes, it is important to remember the past. If only because it is a reminder that, pandemic or not, there have been worse times in my life. I’m so glad that I haven’t worn a kufi in nearly 37 years.

The Things I’d Like to Give for the Holidays, But Can’t

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


My copies of Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House (2019) and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), December 26, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

The holiday season is a time for giving unto others (apparently unlike the other 11 to eleven-and-a-half months out of the year, when it is your right under capitalism to give to yourself every single day). Except when your own life has shown time and time again that gift-giving without resources is hard. It has meant going years without receiving a gift, without your parents or guarding even buying any of us a card. It is doubly difficult when your birthday is in the middle of the holiday season, two days after Christmas, the second day of Kwanzaa, and at least one year where lunar calendar for Chanukah and my born date aligned.

But, as an adult, I made the most of trying to give to family and sometimes friends. I started buying my mother birthday and Christmas cards when I was 14. I began to buy my siblings cards and presents in 1989, just as I was turning 20. Over the years, I have bought video game systems and clothes, replaced TVs, given money, special-ordered flowers, taken my younger siblings to movies, Toys “R” Us, and other comical holiday ventures for a young man without a car.

Starting in the late 1990s, I began to switch to books as gifts. I figured that to really help my family and to get through to my sibs, books were key. They had been for me, and I assumed that it would be the same for them. I was so wrong! If the books got read by them at all, they generally didn’t say, or they said that they didn’t like them. When I finally got around to buying books for my Mom, she’d say, “What I need this for? I know all about racism already. I done lived it.” I guess my thirty-something years, and not expertise on the topic, should have been sufficient for me, too.

As with all issues related to my Mount Vernon family, this giving issue became tortuous. It is hard buying gifts for people who only talk to you when they have to or when they want something from me. As adults, I have gotten to know very few of their likes, dislikes, and habits and wants and needs. Also, I found myself in the boom-and-bust cycles of teaching and consulting during the Great Recession years (especially between 2010 and 2015). So, I either sent holiday cards with gift cards or just cards.

But then it dawned on me right about my 45th birthday that none of my younger sibs had ever sent me anything. Yes, I know that gifting need not be transactional or reciprocal. Still, I had struggled every year to remember birthdays, special occasions, and Christmases to send them something from the heart. They never saw me as someone to give unto, as if my degrees and relative career stability made me not need and not want, materially, emotionally, or otherwise.

So in 2015, I stopped with the giving. Except for my older brother Darren and my Mom. And even then I mostly send cards and the occasional gift card. The latter gets reactions like, “What I’m gonna do with this?” It was my Mom’s gut punch to the cliché, “it’s the thought that counts.”

One thing I’d like to do again with family in New York is to send books that I’d think they’d enjoy, books that I found entertaining and educational, books that set my mind and spirit in order. Especially in this year of pandemic-driven isolation and putting my and my family’s safety over travel, my recent excursion to Pittsburgh to help make funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law excepted.

The last two books I have completed in recent weeks stand out because of the things I observed and experienced growing up and growing into grown-ass adulthood, between Mount Vernon, New York, Pittsburgh, and my first three years in DC and Silver Spring, Maryland. The two books happen to be Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Both books are by Black women who grew up in the Deep South but sojourned their way to cold Northern cities like New York and Pittsburgh, just like my Mom. And with those physical and spiritual journeys, family and the connections with family were big themes for them both. Or, really, the fault lines and the disconnection that can and does happen over time. Being unmoored, an outsider to one’s own family, Broom and Philyaw cover so well in their books.

Yes, I know that Broom’s National Book Award winner is both genealogy and memoir at the same time, carefully not revealing certain things about herself until her Acknowledgments. Yes, I know Philyaw’s NBA finalist is a collection of short stories connected by the theme of The Church and hypocrisy, fictionalized but with elements of the author’s life that she unveils anyway. The two books are quite different in their approaches to history and family, but they both address history and family anyway.

And it is how they handle family and family secrets that propelled me through both books. Broom is extremely circumspect about what and whom she does put in The Yellow House, explaining why and her conflict about doing so throughout (she makes me look like a gossip by comparison in Boy @ The Window). “Why do I sometimes feel that I do not have the right to the story of the city I come from? Why, when I want to get down to it, just say the damned thing, do the thoughts pool and ring out in a loop in my head a childish chorus of ‘Oh, oh, oh, don’t tell on your place.’ Telling on. Like giving it all away. Giving what away?,” Broom writes on page 329.

I completely understand, between the Mount Vernonites who have declared my growing-up experiences invalid because I was “weird” and family members who have all but stopped talking to me because I unearthed something they didn’t like about themselves. That, and Broom’s use of “The Water” to demarcate the East New Orleans of her, her family’s, and her ancestors’ lives and the East New Orleans after Katrina in 2005. It was the fire of 1995 that was the break between the chaos of 616 and the life of uncomfortable distance between me and family for me. Broom being unmoored caused her to eventually seek deeper bonds. I tried too many times to count, and failed. But then again, family ain’t just blood, and it’s way deeper than the roots of any marriage.

Philyaw’s collection conjured memories of my Black evangelical Christianity years (and so did Broom’s chapters about her feeling the spirit, speaking in other tongues, and passing out in self-induced trances that lasted for hours, but I digress) and my unfortunate Hebrew-Israelite years. Years where Black patriarchy and toxic hypermasculinity ruled the roost. Some of these men practically dripped pre-cum while preaching the promise of Jesus and Yahweh in those days of temple and Covenant Church of Pittsburgh. Philyaw gets at this in so many ways. For so many of her readers, the stories “Peach Cobbler” and “When Eddie Levert Comes” were their favorites. The amount of behind-the-scenes cheating and familial conflict is enough for anyone on the fence to declare themselves an atheist.

For my money, though, “Jael” is the story that will stay with me. I knew at least one, maybe two Jaels while growing up in the New York City area. One of them tried to molest me when I was 12. I somehow know — despite forgetting about the particulars of my previous sexual assault until this time six years ago — that telling my Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, or my father about this was out of the question. But she was a Jael, alright, another traumatized kid, like me, yet willing to prey on others as a coping strategy.

Even though I wasn’t a Jael, my Mom prayed over me like I could be one, in order “to make a man out of you,” as she used to say. That she could actually say the words, “Or you could be a rapist” to me the same month I’d end up homeless at Pitt for five days was so telling. It told me that my Mom didn’t know me very well after all. Philyaw has me considering the possibility that with family, anyone could be a Jael, even the folks responsible for raising us.

Here’s what I know, though. No matter how I’d couch it, most of my family wouldn’t read a single word from The Yellow House or The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Queerness, hypocrisy, intersectionality, symbolism, stories that parallel their own? I might as well be sending my Mom a stereotypical Hollywood version of a voodoo doll with pins for her to push in it. For my younger siblings, a steaming hot plate of fried beef liver and kidneys smothered in onions and gravy over rice would be more appealing. So this post will have to do. A gift, I suppose.

“Let Me Tell You About Ms. Martha…”

Featured

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,


Ms. Martha with her grandson, Silver Spring, MD, December 25, 2009. (Donald Earl Collins)

I’ve been reluctant to write this post. Not because I have nothing good to say about my late mom-in-law, someone I’d known for nearly half my 51 years. I have nothing but good things to write about her. Not because I’m grieving. I often write when I’m in an altered state emotionally or psychologically. No, I’m a bit nervous because this will be my first blog post about any specific member of my wife’s family, Thanksgiving 2001 excepted. I’m mostly concerned that some will see what I have to write about my mom-in-law as an indirect slap toward my own mother and parents/guardian in general.

Trust me, it’s not. That I first met Martha Mae Guinn Levy (1931-2020) a month after my twenty-sixth birthday meant the nature of this relationship was never going to be strictly parent-to-child or mother-to-son.

The truth is, Ms. Martha really did treat me that way. But not just that. Sometimes our conversations could be contentious, like professor-student, or like two bickering friends, or brother-sister. The woman had nearly 39 years on me, but the battle-axe of a geezer could just as quickly be affectionate and a never-ending fountain of love and optimistic clichés. There are so many conversations, so many arguments, so many moments I could discuss that made me see all the facets and contradictions of my mom-in-law.

Ms. Martha made herself available for nearly every important event in my life since my then girlfriend introduced us on the last Saturday in January 1996. She attended my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon the following year. She drove me and her daughter to the Greyhound bus station in “dahntahn Picksburgh” in August 1999, so that we could begin our 20-plus years of living in the DMV, the Washington DC area. She shared a hotel room with my mom in 2000, just a few months after me and her daughter eloped. She came here to Silver Spring and watched at Sibley Hospital in DC as my wife gave birth to her one and only grandchild in 2003. She stayed with us for six weeks to watch her grandson in November and December of the same year, so that my wife could go back to work, and just before our son would start daycare.

But there’s one conversation that really and truly encompassed the evolution of our relationship over the years. It was in December 2013, just a few months after I had self-published Boy @ The Window. A week earlier, I had called my father about his yearly Christmas ritual of sending barely cashable Western Union money orders to give to his grandson for the holiday season. Instead, he mumbled and gave gruff one-word answers to my questions. “What’s wrong?,” I asked. “I told you not to put me in your book,” he said, sounding hurt and embarrassed. “I didn’t want nothing to do with your book. You shoulda left the past in the past.” My dad actually hadn’t said any of these things in the seven years between first sentence and the rough final draft I ended up publishing that April. I had been completely open about what I was going to write and why. I guess having a paperback copy of Boy @ The Window in his hands to leaf through was too much for him.

The weekend before Christmas 2013, Ms. Martha called. She dialed up my partner on her cell phone to talk to me (mind you, she had my direct number, but called her daughter first). When I picked up Angelia’s phone, I heard “Hey Donald” in Ms. Martha’s gravelly voice. After a brief exchange, she said, “I wanna talk to you about your book.” I mailed Ms. Martha a copy of Boy @ The Window, along with my dad and a few others, but I hadn’t expected her to read it, at least not so quickly.

“I started reading and I didn’t wanna put it down,” Ms. Martha said. I was surprised. Really, I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t expected this response at all. Not because Ms. Martha didn’t read. I figured, Oh, she’s just being polite, especially after hearing from my dad a little more than a week earlier.

We talked about my book for nearly an hour and a half on my wife’s iPhone. I might as well have been doing a book talk as conversation with my mom-in-law. Ms. Martha asked questions about my Boy @ The Window years, wanting more details beyond the stories I did include. There were a lot of “I didn’t know…” and “I couldn’t believe…” comments about what I and my family lived through. She asked at least a dozen questions about my mom and her decision-making, about my brothers and sister, about my asshole classmates.

Mostly, she doted on me. “Oh boy! I liked this sentence here…,” Ms. Martha said while reading me back to me a number of times. When I explained away my accomplishments or challenges, she’d say, “…as far as that matter goes…” to remind me that what was normal for me was not normal for most tweeners or teenagers, not even Black ones living with poverty. “This was a joy to read,” she said so many times. She said she laughed and cried while reading the book, and laughed and cried while talking to me about it.

I ended that conversation with Ms. Martha thinking, Wow! This tough old woman really loves me! It made me feel better about writing Boy @ The Window. It made me feel better at a time when I felt low, about my writing, about switching careers, about life in general.

And yes, I truly loved and love Ms. Martha. I will miss our conversations, our rational disagreements, our out-of-nowhere arguments, our hugs, our embraces, and her love for me, her daughters, her grandson, for family and community more broadly. I will miss your presence and your voice in my life. May God bless you and keep you…and give you peace, in your life after life.

The Fight of the (Buick) Century

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pop Culture, Religion, Sports, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Mike Tyson slamming his right fist into Michael Spinks’ left cheek and jaw, knocking him down and out (screen shot), Atlantic City, NJ, June 27, 1988. (https://www.gentside.co.uk/).

I hate bullies. There, I wrote it. There aren’t too many things I hate more than bullies. Because bullies are the ultimate liars. Their presumed strength is a mask for the same insecurities the rest of us humans have. Only, they’ve decided that beating up on others physically, verbally, and emotionally as the solution to their fears. The only way really to deal with bullies is to stand your ground and beat them into submission. Or, if you can’t win the fight, to make the fight so vicious and bloody that the bully would rather die than fight you again.

I was robbed four times growing up between age nine and a few weeks before my 14th birthday, all in Mount Vernon, New York (so much for my parents’ worries about me being out late at night in the Bronx or Manhattan!). Two of the four robberies were full-fledged muggings, where I had to fight. Two of the four robberies, my older brother Darren abandoned me with bags of groceries (April 1979) or three bags of laundered clothes in a laundry cart — seven people’s worth — (October 1983).

That next-to-last robbery was a calculated one. I was literally walking uphill near the Hutchinson River, about to cross the bridge over the parkway of the same name, with an overloaded cart and no help from Darren. As I strained with between 60 and 70 pounds of clothes in the cold and dank fall weather on this rickety cart that I had to pull from behind (no front facing wheels), Darren walked back toward me. Two wanna-be-hard-asses were a few steps behind. “They want you to give ’em five dollars,” Darren said, as if I was in the charity business.

Now the taller one was behind Darren, the shrimp to my left. After years of basic Isshin-ryu karate training and two years of taking my everyday bully, er, stepfather Maurice’s punches, kicks, and chokes, I could have easily taken the shrimp. But Darren, as he had done in my first mugging four years earlier, had fled the scene. My  choices were to fight and risk scattering and ruining six weeks’ worth of clean clothes for me, Darren, Mom, Maurice, and my three younger siblings, or give them the five dollars. I did the latter. “That’s the last five dollars you’re ever gonna get from me,” I said to the shrimp while gritting my teeth. He sneered, but when I stepped toward him as if I was going to hit him, he stepped back.

I never expected Darren to help me with anything after that. This was when I began to say, to anyone who asked about my positioning in the family, that I was the oldest brother by default. “Well, I’m actually the second oldest, but my older brother abdicated the throne when I was 12 or 13,” I said with sarcasm for the next 20 years after that day. Including on my college essays!

That shrimp’s name was Reggie. He was among a group of roving bullies from 616 and 630 East Lincoln and the Pearsall Drive projects in those not-so-long-ago days. Reggie had been robbing folks for years, stealing money and candy from ten and eleven-olds, trying to crack on boys for being “ugly,” talking shit to girls like they would give his Vasoline-needin’ ass the time of day.

I’m not going to lie. People like Reggie scared me when we first moved to the roughest part of North Side Mount Vernon in 1977. After being sexually assaulted the year before, pretty much everything scared seven-year-old-me. But that was before the Reagan Years, the Hebrew-Israelite years, before getting my head caved in and my ribs cracked and bruised by a 32-year-old bully, a fourth-degree black belt in leeching off a welfare-poor family, my mother’s second husband. It was before puberty had shot me up from five-two to six-feet even, and with a recognition that I had some physical skills. So no, my biggest fear that day wasn’t being robbed, mugged, or even standing up for myself. It was dealing with Maurice afterward.

Five or six months after I handed him an Abe, Reggie finally got his. It was after school, sometime in late March or April 1984. The Reggie incident was now long forgotten under a pile of high school assignments, my post-suicide attempt conversion to Christianity, and plotting another round of resistance against my idiot stepfather. As I stared out the second bedroom window on the third floor, toward the northwest corner of the A block of 616, a mob of preteens and teenagers, between 20 and 30 in all, surrounded Reggie the shrimp and another, lighter-skinned kid who had also shot up in height in the past year. It dawned on me later that the older Reggie was either still stuck in middle school or a high school dropout, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if his mama dropped him on his head when he was three.

Words turned into fists as the crowd swelled into a rough circle. I could hear the taller kid’s (lets call him KJ) fists land hard on Reggie’s cheeks and the left side of Reggie’s jaw, as KJ threw what we would now call an MMA combination that landed Reggie’s short ass in the dirt and sparse grass of 616’s front yard. KJ then pounced on Reggie and beat him in the face and torso until the shrimp curled up. I don’t remember what the freshly-minted teen yelled at Reggie as he stood over him like Ali over Sonny Liston, but whatever he said, the crowd of kids cheered and celebrated.

UFC 207 between Amanda Nunes and Ronda Rousey (screenshot; a full KO beatdown administered by Nunes in 48 seconds), T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, December 30, 2016. (https://youtube.com).

Reggie, bloodied lip, bruised from forehead to belly, with dirt and grass and straw in his hair and all over his clothes, all but cried as he stood up a moment later. By then, the crowd had followed KJ to 630, or gone home somewhere between 616, 630, or to their single-family dwellings on the other side of the street, or to the Pearsall Drive projects at the end of the long block. He somehow looked even darker, shorter, and more diminished than he did when I jerked at him as if to hit him five or six months earlier. As much empathy as I can have for the vanquished, I had zero empathy for Reggie at all. The only wish I had at that moment was that I had joined in with KJ and swung-kicked some teeth down Reggie’s mf-ing throat.

This is how we should all deal with bullies, like 45 and his minions. Not with empathy or with regard to what in their backgrounds helped make them this way. That comes later, when we have a chance to implement for the long-term. No, the immediate threat is a bully who taunts and grifts and threatens. You beat the shit out of that person, or make it so that their victory costs them so much that it feels like a defeat. After all, this is about self-preservation, survival, and harm reduction. Or to quote Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday from Tombstone (1993), “it’s not revenge that [we’re] after, it’s a reckonin’.” We need a reckoning this time around. Thanks, KJ, for showing the way.

About That Time at Van Cortlandt Park, and Other Bricks in the Wall…

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Van Cortlandt Park screen shot (parade grounds, cropped), June 4, 2020. (https://www.thisisthebronx.info/a-van-cortlandt-park-living-room-picnic/).

I don’t consider myself to be a seer. Not exactly. I might have gotten a thing or 1,000 predictions correct in my life. But since I usually prefer to expect good outcomes, I do not indulge the dreams I have of destruction, or the muses who conjure the possibilities of apocalypse, whether for me, my family, or at larger scales.

But the last half of 1980 was different for me. I’d come into my own as a kid. I finally had a posse of classmates and friends, between the two Joes, Starling, Chris, Ronald, Vanessa, Eric, Ray Ray, Sean, Lajuan, and Dahlia, among others. I was kicking ass academically, and was on the verge of discovering other talents, including writing. After my last summer camp with Darren at Clear View, and rereading the late Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, I understood my Blackness, really and truly, for the first time.

But I chose to see the glass as half full, both for myself and for Black folk in the US. Why wouldn’t I have? Somehow, in the middle of what I call “deep summer,” when the previous school year and the start of the first day of the next school year are about equally far away, it happened. My stepfather Maurice got a call from his music-obsessed friend Dennis (who was also a professional musician, by the way) in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in mid-August about going to some concert in the park in the Bronx. There was no mention of who the headliners were. I just remember playing Peanuts Land with my Matchbox cars and driving down along the shoppes in the nightlife district of the city underneath my bed when Maurice came in and rushed us to get dressed.

Mom, Maurice, Darren, little Maurice, and me. We piled into a cab over to Van Cortlandt Park, where we met Maurice’s friend Dennis. He knew a couple of the headlining people who were playing. I don’t recall tickets, but I do remember flyers everywhere. It seemed like this was a spontaneous gathering, where people somehow knew where to go and where to gather. I remember it being sometime around 7 or 8 pm when the jamming began, with all the music of the late-1970s and 1980. It was mostly an MC mixing a string a songs together, between Chic and “Good Times”, The Whispers’ “And The Beat Goes On,” and Michael’s “Off The Wall.”

But maybe 45 minutes in, three guys got on the stage to do their performance, Sugar Hill Gang, and the crowd of hundreds erupted into a roar as they rapped to “Rapper’s Delight.” They did a bunch of songs beyond the “a hip, hop/the hippie, the hippie/To the hip hip hop/a you don’t stop…” I was into it like everyone else, doing my terrible version of a Michael Jackson dance routine while clapping my hands to the beat. Sometime between 10 and 11, we left, I think, between a cab and Dennis giving Maurice and Mom and little Maurice a ride home. Even Mom looked like she had a good time. It would be just about the last good time we would have as a sort-of-family.

But the music didn’t stop with Van Cortlandt Park or the Sugar Hill Gang. The spring and summer of 1980 was the transition to a new decade of music, as homophobes from New York to Detroit and L.A. had spent the past year killing disco by smashing vinyl and smashing in Toyota Corollas and Datsun Zs. (By the way, for those who are still kicking and screaming over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” go on YouTube and listen to the late Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby“. It’ll probably make you question the meaning of your false sense of morality.)

Kool and The Gang had crossed over with “Ladies Night,” and were about to walk the fine line between success and selling out with “Celebration.” All summer on the bus back and forth from Clear View with Darren, SOS Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” was on at least once a day. There was also Teddy Pendergrass, the one, the only, and emerging, Luther Vandross’ “Searching” (yes, not his official solo debut, but), and of course Stephanie Mills with “Never Knew Love Like This Before”. And all that because my father had introduced us to Toni, a new drinking budding of his, herself a professional singer. Not to mention, a couple of bartenders in Mount Vernon and in the Bronx who didn’t mind a 12 and a 10-year-old sitting around on off nights in July and August.

On the AM side of things with 770 AM WABC radio, there was still Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins, Barbra Streisand and her collabs with The Bee Gees, “Guilty” and “Woman In Love.” Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was the second half of the summer of 1980, old and yet new, at least to me.

But as that summer moved into fall and 6th grade, I sensed something was changing, and not for the better. I sensed it in music, more than I did with Jimme’s alcohol abuse and fewer visits, more that even in Mom’s inability to keep food in our stomachs or in her failing marriage with Maurice. The music seemed more sinister, less hopeful, darker somehow. Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” somehow conjured “No mas! No mas!” and Roberto Duran giving up against Sugar Ray Leonard that November, the same month Reagan beat a beat down, haggard Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The beginning of four decades’ worth of hollow promises to White Americans, millions willing to sell the rest of us to Hell for their macabre pleasure and some tax breaks.

But no song signified the transition of the US for me in 1980 more than Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. It was likely the first true music video I ever saw, courtesy of my 616 friend Tré, who lived on the second floor. I spent a lot of time hanging with Tré, his older sister Renee, and her friend Stephanie (who I had the tiniest of crushes on, but I digress). It was during the months after Maurice and Mom had separated, with him taking the TV and a month’s supply of mail-ordered meats out of our two freezers. Tré, Renee, and their mother made me feel welcome between that first Saturday in October and when the Hebrew-Israelite bullshit began six months later.

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control…” It was about much more than strict teachers and social control over students. It was a prediction of a future, my future, our collective futures. That’s what I thought about this time 40 years ago. I had conversations with my classmates about this, about Reagan, about double-digit inflation and unemployment, about the Iran hostage crisis, about the rumors that the US had given Israel nukes, and Israel had, in turn given nukes to apartheid South Africa. “You’re so weird!” they’d say. Or, more often, “You worry too much, Donald!” Only Starling understood. But he expected me to “become one with Jesus,” as if Jesus alone could stop me from worrying about the future.

In short order, the Reagan Years came and gutted the relative economic security of the US, disrupting the shaky gains Blacks had made in the years between 1946 and 1980. Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon to ring in the holidays, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry badly rapped her way through their January 1981 hit “Rapture” while Mom began to talk about being raptured up for the first time. My family was at the edge of an abyss, a mini-apocalypse that would ultimately transform all of us. It would certainly sidetrack me from my calling as a writer for years to come.

But the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did life stop handing me days of happiness, of contentment, of miracles and even some joy. It just meant that I would be more cautious, anxious, depressed, worried, on edge. Because America believes itself above reproach, even as it deals in shit and blood, and drags the rest of us into the burgundy-soaked muck with it. The distance between 1980 and 2020 might be 40 years, but with Trump and his army of minions, I might as well be in the same moment. Only, I’m 50 now, and I know much better about listening to my inner voice and my muses.