Brotherly Love

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

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

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Bronxville, Brother-Brother Relationship, Chester Heights, Competition, Darren, Eastchester, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Jump Shot, Lessons, Mental Disability, Mental Retardation, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Shyness, Sibling Relationship, Sibling Rivalry, The Clear View School

Not quite the courts at Chester Heights (aka, Bronxville/Mount Vernon border), but more or less what would've looked like 30 years ago, Eastchester Playground, Capitol Projects, Bronx, NY, August 11, 2015. (http://www.nycgovparks.org/).

Not quite the courts at Chester Heights (aka, Bronxville/Mount Vernon border), but more or less what they would’ve looked like 30 years ago, Eastchester Playground, Capitol Projects, Bronx, NY, August 11, 2015. (http://www.nycgovparks.org/).

This is a Boy @ The Window story, one that occurred a little more than thirty years ago, and so typical of my experiences growing up with my older brother Darren. Nothing I ever did to help my older brother seemed to help him overcome the trap of going to The Clear View School, a school for the mild to severely mentally retarded (of course, we say mentally disabled in 2015), although Darren was never such. He, in fact, had taught himself to read at the age of three, and taught me to read on my fifth birthday. Darren’s issue was severe shyness, and between my Mom, my father Jimme, and the good White liberals and moderates at The Clear View School, the trap for Darren’s potential genius had been set by the summer of ’74. By the time I was aware enough to say anything about Darren’s predicament, it was already too late.

But say and try I did anyway. Everything from sharing music to talking to Darren about our futures and my escape-Mount-Vernon-for-college plans. I shared books, and tutored him through algebra and geometry and US history.

I even tried playing sports with Darren, including basketball, which in the summer of ’85 was only my third favorite sport. As I wrote in the memoir

“Darren played at the center spot on Clear View’s basketball team, which made sense since he was already between six-three and six-four at seventeen. Of course they crushed every team they played. It was truly unfair. Darren towered over his classmates and his opponents, and being the only non-mentally retarded person on the floor, he could run rings around folks.

Still, Darren could knock down any jump shot within thirty feet of the hoop. His shot was smooth, like Isiah Thomas’ or Bernard King’s. It was the kind of shot no one on MVHS’ basketball team had at the time. Knowing this, I wanted to — no, I had to play my brother to see this shot up close. There were two well-maintained courts near 616, one in Pelham near its main street of Fifth Avenue, the other a longer walk in Chester Heights. We chose Chester Heights for most of these battles. Their court felt like a good outside court should, surrounded by trees, with level, quality-painted asphalt, and bright-white mesh nets.

The first few times we played that summer, Darren just killed me. Every time I left him open for a jumper, he buried it. It was obvious I hadn’t touched a basketball other than in gym class since I was ten. I didn’t have a jump shot, had never worked on my footwork, and could dribble only moderately well with my right hand. Forget about using my left hand! I was so afraid of hurting my two crooked fingers that the left hand’s role for me was to block shots, not to catch passes or take shots.

“Nothing but net” (in context of UPS/NCAA March Madness cross-promotional ad), March 2012. (http://compass.ups.com/).

My semi-buried competitive nature got the better of me. I knew I couldn’t beat Darren in a shootout. But I knew I was quicker than my taller brother. So I decided after another embarrassing performance (I lost 23-2!) that it would be easier to play defense and try to steal a few balls to keep the next game close. Amazingly, the plan worked! It worked so well that I took Darren completely out of his game. After three blocked shots and a couple of steals, I discovered that Darren couldn’t play me one-on-one if I drove hard for the hoop, that I could beat him with my first step. So every time I got the ball I attacked the rim. The last two games we played I won by a combined score of 50-18. I started feeling bad when Darren started forcing long jumpers. After a while, he just gave up. I wanted to win, but I wanted it to be competitive, too.

Darren was so upset that we didn’t talk on our way back to 616. He then walked to the back of our apartment building and threw his basketball down the garbage chute. I wanted to continue to play because I thought it would make both of us better and give us something positive to build on in our relationship. Instead it just made Darren mad and made it even harder for me to talk to him about what was going on at 616.

Standard New York-area garbage chute door, June 2009. (http://theferrisfiles.com/).

I really did feel awful about how Darren felt after the game. I had shattered confidence in one of the few areas in his life in which he had any. I had humbled a star basketball player at his own game, a game I’d yet to learn. I’d given my older brother yet another reason to be jealous of me. It was shocking to watch him throw the basketball away. I really didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Darren, for beating you two straight games, for making you look bad at your favorite sport?” I guess I could’ve said that. What fifteen-year-old with as much on my plate as me would, though, especially in an environment as competitive as ours when it came to basketball? It made me pity Darren for his situation at Clear View, but also left me angry with him. I was trying to help him, after all, not break his spirit. The incident left me shaking my head.”

I didn’t play basketball with Darren again until the spring of ’97, during my Teachers College interview/PhD graduation week. By that time, Darren’s jealousy and stubbornness had pretty much forced me to give up on my reclamation efforts. But, when left open, Darren could still nail a twenty-four-footer with ease.

Aside

What’s Up With These Leftist Labels, Anyway?

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"I Am 32 Flavors" (1998), Alana Davis, Anti-Stereotype, Class Struggle, Critical Race Theory, Derrick A. Bell, Dick Oestreicher, Evangelical Christianity, Franz Fanon, Graduate School, Humanities, JD, Karl Marx, Labeling, Labels, Leftist, Liberal, Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Pitt, Rosemary Martino, Stereotypes, W. E. B. Du Bois

Asian woman in nude breaking through a bar code, September 2010. (unknown author/woman, http://www.willeyelisten.com).

Over the years, I’ve grown tired of the idea that my social, cultural, economic and political beliefs could be summed up with one or two words. Like “progressive,” “Communist,” “neo-Marxist,” “leftist,” “liberal,” and/or “Marxist.” Why? Because like so many things American (or in this case, Western), ideologues and intellectuals take the easiest path and slap overgeneralized labels on groups of people without thought, without nuance, and certainly without an understanding of both people and history.

I’ve felt this way about these labels at least since my first year of grad school in the University of Pittsburgh’s MA and PhD programs (1991-92), and likely longer than that. But in that program, I was surrounded by professors and colleagues who were various shades of Marxism. At least that’s what they claimed. More to the point, they claimed that “the class struggle” was the defining feature of both human history and US history. “The class struggle” trumped slavery and America’s racial caste system, the near eradication of indigenous cultures in the US and around the world, it trumped the exploitation and exclusion of women in Western civilizations.

I admit it. It really, really, really pissed me off to be earning my MA and beginning my doctoral work around such ignorant thinkers. They would ask me about my Marxism, and I’d say, “I’m not a Marxist. I’m not a neo-Marxist. I’m not even a Groucho Marxist.” My Pitt grad school colleagues would laugh, sometimes a little too forcefully. My professors, for the most part, ignored me, since I was an African American history student who believed that race intertwined with class to be US history’s defining feature. How scandalous!

It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I read it via Rosemary Martino in twelfth grade, though I can’t remember if I read it for AP English or for her Humanities Philosophy class. I’d also read Marx’s much longer Das Kapital (1867), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and so many other supposedly Marxist-leaning tombs by the time I’d taken my first full semester of grad-level courses (I took my first grad course my junior year at Pitt).

A basic world political spectrum chart (really, too simple), August 5, 2015. (http://www.endofprejudice.com/).

I just wasn’t that impressed on the Marxism part of things. I mean, I was well acquainted with oppression, exploitation and abuse long before I’d read anything by Marx and Engels, or George Orwell in ninth grade English, for that matter. I had a contrarian Humanities classmate in JD who espoused what I considered even at the time his version of Communist gibberish all through middle school and into our sophomore year at Mount Vernon High School. So how do you label someone a Marxist or Communist who both views it with disdain and didn’t grow up quoting from it? I’d like to know.

This last question, though, is bigger than just my own experience with poverty, race, racism, child abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, homelessness, cultish religions, and sheer willful ignorance and neglect. Historically, labeling anyone who had radical ideas about the falsities of human civilizations as civilizing the human tendency to spread inequality and oppression to the most vulnerable as Communist is a bit ahistorical, no? So-called leftists or socialists do that with Jesus and Muhammad almost every day. Maybe we should call Karl Marx an original, Asiatic Christian or original Muslim, minus the spiritual component of kneeling before God in prayer.

Portrait of Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), author/date unknown, August 5, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

For me, growing up in a striving household that ended up in grinding welfare poverty didn’t make me a Communist. I went through several stages of belief, from my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice hoisting the Hebrew-Israelite thing on me, to evangelical Christianity, to just plain Christianity, to critical race theorist adherent. I never completely gave up on capitalist democracy, because what would’ve been the point of that? By the time my son was born in 2003, I saw myself more in European terms, as either a Social Democrat or a Christian Democrats, believers in compromises and reforms from within that ameliorate the worst forms of racial, gender and other forms of oppression and poverty.

Yet even that is too big a label to hang on me or others, now and across history. What did people call those who wanted to rid the world of poverty and economic oppression prior to 1848? Or prior to the French Revolution, for that matter? Troublemakers? Radicals? Jacobites? Weird? Lunatics? To be honest, any of these terms fit me better than progressive, liberal, leftist or Marxist. Because ultimately, I don’t believe in any single economic or political belief system crafted by Homo sapiens. They’re all subject to corruption, all subject to be bent by those with the most power and resources.

So, who am I, ideologically speaking? To quote Alana Davis, “I am 32 flavors” and dim sum. Go ahead. Try to figure that out and come up with a label that fits!

Aside

Sure I’ve Raised Money, But…

27 Monday Jul 2015

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

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Bob Beane, Capitalism, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Exploitation, Fundraising, Grant-seeking, Maximizing Profits, Medicaid, Medicare, Mount Vernon Clinic, Partnerships for College Access and Success, PCAS, Presidential Classroom, Valerie Johnstone, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Man on a hamster wheel gif, like constantly looking for money, July 26, 2015. (http://twitter.com).

Keep in mind that these are just observations, not me axe-grinding or feeling sorry for myself. My biggest observation is that raising money for others without reaping enough benefit for myself shows that even governmental and nonprofit organizations are just as prone to capitalistic exploitation as Walmart and Apple. And that I am not immune, nor have I ever been immune, to the pride and naiveté of production and exploitation.

Many times during my years in the nonprofit world as a manager or consultant, employers have asked me about my ability to raise money. I’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years. Fifteen minutes of work as an educational “closer” at Presidential Classroom led to a $25,000 grant from State Farm’s civic engagement work (a.k.a. service-learning) in 2000. I worked on a $1 million renewal grant from Lumina Foundation for Education for the college access and success initiative for which I served as deputy director during my last four years at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I also raised $200,000 from Lumina for data collection for the initiative in 2005.

“I come here looking for money (Got to have it),” lyrics from Pet Shop Boys “What Have I Done To Deserve This” (1988), July 27, 2015. (http://nonprofitquarterly.org/).

I’ve indirectly raised funds from which I didn’t derive a benefit, either because the amount were too small for AED’s vast overhead and other direct costs (read as paying higher-ups salaries for the privilege of raising money on behalf of the now-defunct organization). Or because others used my curriculum vitae and my work for AED to garner grants that I never worked on. My last year at AED we turned down what would’ve been a $100,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation because it would’ve been too small, especially since we needed to collaborate with a sister organization on K-16 access and success work. We turned down potential smaller grants from other private foundations for similar reasons.

And after nine months of work off-and-on, the wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning-columnist for a Washington newspaper received a $250,000 grant from a corporate foundation in New York, based on my work. Because the AED higher-up in charge of the process worked with her as a personal favor — and didn’t put our proposal and implementation work into a contract — her socialite friend and head of a college fund organization received a grant with no strings attached, for AED or for me. I did get paid for my work, as I did it under the AED banner. But the fruits born from that work went outside the organization, to a person almost as duplicitous as the organization for which I once worked.

But in terms of fundraising, or at least, making money for an organization, absolutely nothing in my work history compares to what I did at nineteen. Yes, nineteen! The summer of ’89, I worked for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, out of the Mount Vernon, New York clinic, across the bridge from the Mount Vernon East Metro-North stop. After the previous long summer of unemployment followed by five days of homelessness and two more months of living on financial fumes, I was happy, really happy, to have gained steady employment all through ’89.

So happy that I didn’t notice how productive I was being in the office. I had the rather official title of Summer Intern, and had been told by the Director of Community Mental Health Programs in Bob Beane that he was “counting on me.” I came to the Mount Vernon clinic with Beane’s charge to “get their back-billing in order.” Since 1984, the clinic had regularly had its Medicaid and Medicare billing for psychiatric and psychological services rejected by the state-level health folks in Albany, mostly due to coding errors.

Graphic on DSM editions since 1952 (DSM-V is in its “beta-testing” phase), American Psychiatric Association, 2012. (http://life-surfing.com/).

Specifically, the clinic staff were putting incorrect codes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders — in this case, DSM-III and DSM-III-R (with the III-R standing for version number three, revised edition) — on the state billing forms. There were other errors to be sure. Doctor’s names and patients names were often misspelled. Control numbers were incorrect. The proper signature wasn’t obtained. But well over ninety percent of the errors were DSM-III or DSM-III-R codes that staff had entered into a billing form incorrectly.

This was the summer of ’89, so the form itself was printed on a line printer, and the checking of such forms had to be done manually. It would take two or three weeks to hear from Albany about an incorrect code, a month to receive payment. After five years of coding errors, red tape, and the clinic’s administrative staff badly managed by one Valerie Johnstone, my job was to rectify as many of the old billing errors as I could before the summer came to a close.

In eight weeks’ time, despite all the other menial tasks Johnstone would sometimes have me do, as well as having to share the same billing computer with Beverly (who dealt with current billing, and was probably responsible for the majority of my back-billing work), I got through three cabinets’ worth of billing issues. I left at the end of August, I left for the friendly environs of Pittsburgh and Pitt, vaguely aware of how much money I’d made for the Mount Vernon clinic and for the county.

Screen shot of 100 East 1st Street and South 1st Avenue, where I toiled for Westchester County the summer of 1989 (and 1992), April 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

I found out in September that my work had made them $371,000! I was impressed, but then I quickly became depressed. My salary for Westchester County that summer was $5.90 per hour. Over eight weeks, my net income was $1,610. As an intern, I had no fringe benefits, not even a commuter allowance. In terms of ratios, for every dollar I made between June 26th and August 18th, Westchester County and the Mount Vernon clinic made $230.43!

No wonder the staff at the Mount Vernon clinic looked at me with a combination of bemusement and derision! I had shown them up, unknowingly, and allowed myself to be an exploitable resource. And though I had a guaranteed job for the next three years after that summer with Beane and Westchester County, there was no way I could ever make enough income to make up for that kind of profit-generation. So much for the idea of not-for-profit and government enterprises!

Aside

“Between the World and Me,” What I Don’t Get…

23 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White", "The Dream", American Dream, Between the World and Me (2015), Black Bodies, Black Women, Book Reviews, Britni Danielle, Cornel West, Critiques, David Brooks, Exclusion, Facebook, Homage, Intersectionality, Mabel Jones, Memoir, Narcissism, National Review, New York Times, Politico.com, Prince Jones, Race Matters, Rich Lowry, Samori Touré, Sidelined, Systemic Racism, The Root

My reading (and writing) for Summer 2015, July 23, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

I don’t get most of the critiques of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling new book, Between the World and Me. It’s as if Coates had written Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), the way White reviewers allegedly liberal and conservative have reacted to its publication. I have read Between the World and Me, and there are more than a few things that any reader could criticize or even praise. But more than a fair share of the criticisms of Coates’ book are flat-out misreads, impositions of the critics’ own biases on Coates, or based purely on the book’s back cover.

“Go West, Young Man!”

Cornel West began this parade of badly handled critiques last week with his Facebook post. The title — “In Defense of James Baldwin – Why Tony (how West spelled it originally) Morrison (a literary genius) is Wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates.” — says it all. One impressive blurb from a leading author of the last half-century, and West seems to have lost his mind. Aside from disagreeing with Morrison about the James Baldwin, West wrote, “Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power,” adding that

Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, Imperial occupation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals, paralyzed by their Obama worship…

Funny. I didn’t know that Coates’ 152-page letter to his fifteen-year-old son was supposed to be a damning critique of President Barack Obama. Ax-grind much, Dr. West? Especially since, in a structural sense, anyway, Coates’ book indirectly pays homage to West’s groundbreaking 101-page treatise, Race Matters (1994). For West, though, the world is not enough, because in his mind, “it’s all about me.”

Intersectionality vs. Exclusion

There have been a few reviews criticizing Coates’ for not dealing with the intersectionality between race and gender for Black women in the context of facing the same struggles as Black men. Britni Danielle wrote in her review of Between the World and Me in The Root last week, “[b]ut what of the women? In Between the World and Me, black women are footnotes to the men’s stories—baby mamas, lovers, mothers, classmates, around-the-way girls, grieving mothers.”

I don’t entirely disagree with Danielle’s assessment, especially in specific cases, like when Coates discussed his mother, talked about the first two women he fell in love with, and in his understanding of his slain friend Prince Jones’ mother, Dr. Mabel Jones. Then again, how could a late-bloomer like Coates really dig deep enough to discuss intersectionality with any depth for his fifteen-year-old son? My suspicion is that a more serious attempt on Coates’ part would’ve fallen flat.

Narcissistic White Men on “Race Matters”

The most explosive critiques of Between the World and Me — at least for most Americans (read “White Americans” here) — have come from two rather unimpressive high-brow intellectual narcissists. New York Times columnist David Brooks last Friday and National Review editor Rich Lowry on Wednesday (via Politico.com) both took it upon themselves to express personal outrage on the part of millions of other upstanding White Americans.

Brooks titled his column “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White,” though it really should’ve been titled, “Hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates While White.” Because based on what Brooks wrote, with sentences like “It [Coates’ book] is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it,” it becomes fairly obvious to the astute that Brooks wasn’t listening. As I’ve explained to my soon-to-be-twelve-year-old son and my students over the years, “there’s a difference between hearing and listening. One requires you to be look like you’re listening, the other requires you to think and act on what you read and hear.” I guess Brooks didn’t listen to Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) either. Like so many, he doesn’t want to understand that the American Dream is “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”

Brooks read Between the World and Me, and heard, “White people like me are bad, the American Dream is bad — how dare you say that about me, Mr. Coates!” This is even more evident later in the review, as Brooks wrote, “Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?” Yes, Mr. Brooks, your White privilege matters, but doesn’t give you standing here.

Lowry based his nullification of Between the World and Me on the very themes that Coates’ spun on their heads in his book — individualism and skin-color-based violations of the Black body. Lowry wrote, “He [Coates] argues — although that might be too generous a word; it’s more like assertion shrouded in a haze of lyricism — that all that other black people did to hurt or threaten him was ultimately the product of white racism.” As if racism is somehow self-contained, an individual choice or decision, and not something that is embedded in America’s institutions, with systematic effects throughout society, to the point of self-hatred and internalized racism. Wake up, Mr. Lowry, and smell what you’re shoveling!

Between Coates and Me

As for my read, I found the book powerful, self-important, compelling, pompous, and at times nihilistic and heart-rendering. Yet I also found some of Coates’ work weak and underdeveloped. Yet for almost none of the reasons that other reviewers have used to excoriate him and Between the World and Me. If Coates’ book is really just a letter from a near middle-aged Black man to his teenager son, I can tell you that at fifteen, my head would’ve been spinning for weeks after reading the letter. And not in a good way. My first reaction would be, “Thanks a lot, Dad! This burden you’ve given me could finish me before I have a serious chance to start!”

This book is far more than a mere letter. It’s part memoir and part treatise on the nature of the poisonous American Dream (one critique I read thought that Coates’ bought into the Dream — someone needs to learn how to comprehend what they read) and American racism. It is also partly journalistic commentary on the lives destroyed by “The Dream” and the structural racism that has supported it for centuries. Coates’ book is not just a nod to Baldwin, Langston Hughes or Malcolm X (whom he identifies in his book). There’s some influence, direct or not, between Martin Luther King, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, even the late Derrick Bell.

And that strength is perhaps Between the World and Me‘s great weakness. As strong as the writing is, and as personal and emotional the journey Coates tries to take us on, it is a journey with far too many destinations. Some of the people on Coates’ journey remain underdeveloped as characters, so to speak, and really serve as foils rather than as other bodies with the same hopes and fears that Coates’ had growing up. The appeal of The Mecca of the Howard University yard and Moorland-Spingarn would be difficult for some to appreciate without more of a sense of Coates’ lack of belonging, as there is so little about his relationship with his parents (especially his mother) and siblings beyond ass-whuppins. The repetitive declarations around the light-skinned kid with the gun, the notion of “twice as good” (which is mentioned several times over thirty pages before Coates provided a definition), and Coates’ cringing at all things Christianity, while understandable, probably do as much to exclude readers as they do to invite.

All in all, the book probably could have been thirty or even fifty pages shorter. But whether too repetitive, too long, too much rhetoric and not enough intersectionality, I still think Coates’ succeeded in his goal. If I’m understanding it correctly, that is. To remind his son (actual and the millions of proverbial sons and sidelined daughters, I guess) that the “Struggle is in your name, Samori–you were named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body” (p. 68). Imparting this wisdom may be perhaps the most important duty any Black parent has toward any of their children.

Aside

Ode to Tiger Woods

17 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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"Hangin' On A String" (1985), "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of" (2000), Billy Idol, Faded Glory, Golf, Grace Jones, Loose Ends, Odes, PGA, The Open Championship, Tiger Woods, U2

Gray Tiger Woods "TW" cap 2014, July 17, 2015. (http://ebay.com).

Gray Nike Tiger Woods “TW” cap 2014, July 17, 2015. (http://ebay.com).

Okay. So my wife calls me “the last true Tiger Woods fan” in her tweets about me watching Tiger struggle mightily to find his authentic swing and rhythm again, a process that supposedly was over in 2013 (when Tiger won five tournaments). But since the calendar flipped to 2014, Tiger may well be angrily muttering to himself, “Where have you f**ing gone, Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods?” All as he spends yet another week looking for balls in bunkers and hazards, hooking and slicing driver and 3-wood like he’s working on differential mathematics for NASA’s next deep space probe.

The loop water near the 1st green at St. Andrews' Old Course, (where Tiger put his second shot of his 1st round), Scotland, UK, July 16, 2015. (http://golfdigest.com).

The loop water near the 1st green at St. Andrews’ Old Course, (where Tiger put his second shot of his 1st round), Scotland, UK, July 17, 2015. (http://golfdigest.com).

For years I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Tiger’s dominance in a sport dominated by Whites and Whiteness. I have used and sang stock phrases and songs whenever Tiger’s competitors (e.g., Phil Mickelson, Luke Donald, Bubba Watson, Sergio Garcia, ad infinitum) have found the drink, deep grass, impassable fescue, and have gotten the yips with two-and-a-half-foot putts to tie or take the lead at a major. Watching Tiger play like he’s fifteen years older and ready for the Champions Tour right now is like, well, watching any other professional golfer play.

I’m sure Tiger will find his swing and rhythm — eventually. I’m sure, though, that I’ll only see flashes of dominance even when he does. In the meantime, like every other golfer, Tiger gets the silly golfer treatments I’ve been giving to everyone else since 1989. Today’s cut day at The Open Championship, and Tiger’s got me “hangin’ on the cut line” (thanks, Loose Ends, for lending me your song in my thoughts) — “like waitin’ on the bus, I’m waitin’ on you.”

But that’s not all for musical silliness and golf. Here’s some other smash hits Tiger has become well acquainted with in the past five years:

Sade — “You gave me the hook and slice/Hook and slice” (really, “Kiss of Life”)

Pat Benatar — “Par is for Children” (in your case, exactly like “Hell is for Children”)

Billy Idol — “Bogey, bogey, double bogey, triple bogey…” (derivative of “Mony Mony,” but not the 1968 Tommy James and the Shondells’ version)

Grace Jones — “Pull up to the bunker, baby/with driver in between, ooh, ooh” (yeah, I went there)

U2 — “I still haven’t found (a good golf swing)” (self-explanatory)

The Supremes — “Ooh baby, baby, where is my ‘A-game’?” (self-explanatory)

Thompson Twins — “Driver! Driver!/Can’t you see I’m hurting, hurting…”

That’s the extent to which I’m willing to call Tiger “just another guy” (in reference to Isiah Thomas’ ill-conceived comments on Larry Bird in 1987). Because I’m still a fan after all. Seriously. I think that U2’s “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” is most appropriate for breaking out of a slump, and not wallowing in one (I should know — I’ve faced a few slumps of my own). The last six lines are most appropriate:

And if the night runs over
And if the day won’t last
And if your way should falter
Along this stony pass

It’s just a moment
This time will pass

Aside

Finding A Memory, Knowing the Whole Truth

16 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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1976, 425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Bicentennial, Big Wheel, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Diana, Eidetic Memory, First Grade, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, Nathan Hale Elementary, Photographic Memory, Playground, Repressed Memories, Sarai Washington, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault

From Cam Jansen Mysteries, a series of children’s books about a girl with a photographic memory who would solve mysteries and take pictures in her mind of the clues, August 9, 2012. (http://appraisingpages.com).

No one’s memories — even those whom are eidetic or whose memories can be near photographic — are perfect, especially over the long haul. As far as the scientific community knows, there are no exceptions. I include myself in that category. This despite having a memory cycle that has seldom let me down. Since August 8, 1974, there have been only a few gaps of any major significance. I might not be able to tell you exactly what I had for dinner on July 16, ’85, but my guess would include either chicken and dumplings or $5 spaghetti with meat sauce and frozen chopped broccoli, both courtesy of my shopping at C-Town in Pelham, New York almost every day (it was a welcome relief from the heat of sitting home at 616, anyway).

One area where my memory had let me down was parts of the summer of ’76, the bicentennial summer. I could vague remember being down in the city for some of the festivities that July 4th, followed by a long sleep on the free Metro-North ride that day, only to end up in New Haven, CT because my father had been drinking and sleeping on the train, too. I remembered my Mom buying a Polaroid and taking pictures of herself and us and her new furniture at 425 South Sixth at the beginning of the month.

And I remembered that this had occurred a couple of weeks later:

My first memories playing with a group of Black males in Mount Vernon, New York are all negative. When I was six in ’76, a group of preteens on the neighborhood playground near Nathan Hale Elementary on South 6th Avenue tried to force me into sucking one of their dicks, practically sticking it in my face to do so. I got away before being truly scarred for life.

But I knew that I couldn’t remember what occurred beyond that, not only for the rest of that day, but for the next three weeks afterward. It had bothered me for years that I couldn’t remember beyond the flash of images I did write down.

Even in writing Boy @ The Window (which thankfully wasn’t about my earliest years growing up), as much as I drilled down into my past, I couldn’t fully conjure the memory of this incident. And when I did try, I ended up inducing headaches.

It was the year after publishing my memoir that I realized my headaches weren’t just because I needed new pillows for my neck. I had a repressed memory, maybe even more than one. I didn’t try to find a way to un-repress the memory, though. I figured that if I concentrated on other memories from the spring and summer of ’76, it would manifest itself, one way or the other. The key was my Big Wheel, the only toy I truly loved growing up, and my first “girlfriend” in Diana, who moved away at the end of first grade. Those memories helped me conjure up the buried memories I needed to fill in the blanks.

Cecil Parker Elementary School (formerly Nathan Hale ES), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Over the course of a couple of weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, I either had dreams or wide-awake flashbacks that filled in my blanks. I was in fact sexually assaulted, by a light-skinned thirteen or fourteen-year-old. With the help of two of his friends, he had gotten his penis in my mouth while I was being held down to the ground on the rain-soaked, asphalt, Nathan Hale playground. I only got away because his friends were laughing after I spit his penis out of my mouth, laughing so hard that they were no longer holding me down.

I did a bit of digging into July ’76. I already knew from my memories it had rained on a Tuesday or Wednesday the week after July 4th. Turns out on that Wednesday, July 14, a quarter-inch of rain fell on the New York City area, as there was thundershower activity and high winds that afternoon, with a high of 78°F. That, unfortunately, confirmed everything.

1976 Chevrolet Nova, Seattle, WA area (not the right color, but the right model), July 16, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

What I remembered next after was probably just as horrific. I didn’t tell my Mom about my incident for weeks, because I was supposed to stay home while she went to work at Mount Vernon Hospital that day. I did tell her, though, about three weeks later, on the first Saturday in August, as she and my father were arguing as usual. And, my Mom being my Mom, she didn’t believe me, leading to my first attempt at taking my own life. I ran out of 425 South Sixth, straight into the street, and waited to be run down by an older Black guy in a Chevy Nova (more on that at a later date).

But maybe what triggered these repressed memories in the first place was the trauma of losing my sister Sarai in July ’10. After all, that’s also the week I learned that one of my younger brothers had been raped by a short Black guy in his early twenties while pursuing his video game addiction via arcades at the age of nine. As traumatic as that revelation was, it was my Mom’s response that was the most chilling. “It serves you right. I told you to stay away from that man,” my Mom said in response.

Maybe it was too much for my Mom to hear on the same week as her only daughter’s death. Then again, from what I’ve come to remember now, finding out about any one of her children being abused was always too much for my Mom to bear. As for me, knowing the whole truth has made sleeping much easier, my dreams more peaceful, and my headaches all about stress and neck tension.

Aside

RIP Sister, Sarai Adar Washington (February 9, 1983-July 11, 2010)

11 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Brother-Sister Relationship, Death, Dread, Eri Washington, Father Figures, Growing Up, Independence, Life, Mazza Gallerie, Sarai Washington, Sickle Cell Anemia, The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Sarai Washington, circa 2009.

It’s been five years since I received my brother Eri’s call telling me what I had known and dreaded would come for nearly thirty years. That my only sister Sarai had died from complications stemming from sickle-cell anemia.

As soon as I picked up the phone five years ago, I knew. Sarai had been in and out the hospital for months since she had returned to New York at the tail end of ’09. Before then, she had lived either on her own or with two of her high school friends in Huntsville, Alabama since ’05. The skin and bone bruises, the constant blood transfusions, the always-there pain of sickled red blood cells circulating through her body. The average life expectancy for anyone with the disease is thirty-three years. That I had Sarai in my life for 82 percent of that life expectancy was still a minor miracle in the midst of what to me seemed completely unnecessary pain.

We weren’t as close in her later years, though. I mean, Sarai saw me as a bit of a father-figure when she was growing up. I had thirteen years and six weeks on her, so that’s how it goes. Between the 616 fire and homelessness for her and my other younger siblings in ’95, though — not to mention puberty — Sarai no longer treated me as her hero. That was fine by me. I already had too many people in my life who thought of me as some sort of hero or saint.

I think, though, that my sister enjoyed not really having to think about her future, about not feeling the need to grow up, since, what would be the point, really? I thought that because she knew more about her disease than anyone, it was her responsibility to grow up and find the best care possible to manage her disease, to bring some meaning to her life. That’s where our closeness became less so. I have a way of expecting more out of people than most people are willing to expect of themselves.

Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

When Sarai came to live with me and my wife Angelia in ’03, to help us out with our then newborn son Noah, it was obvious that my sister was doing little to take care of herself. When I finally confronted her about her poor diet and unwillingness to watch over her disease, Sarai yelled, “You’re not my father!,” right in front of Mazza Gallerie, on the DC-Chevy Chase border (we had gone to see The Matrix Revolutions, much more for her than for me). Of course she was right. But of course, I was right also.

Sarai decided the next day to pack up her stuff and move back home to 616 and Mount Vernon, “where no one told her what to do,” she wrote as part of her going away letter. She also said that I “don’t know anything about the streets” as yet another familial “Just because you have a Ph.D…” coup de grace. I thought, “If I didn’t know anything about the streets, you and the rest of the younger siblings would’ve gotten your asses kicked through the early ’90s.”

But I knew Sarai’s letter wasn’t about the streets. It was about her living her life the way she wanted, without me or anyone else telling her how to take care of herself. That’s why she went away to Alabama for nearly four years.

Luckily I did get to talk to her a couple of times after that. Though we weren’t close, I loved her, and I know she loved me. The sad truth was, though, Sarai never had enough time to take charge over her life, and I couldn’t make her take that precious little time.