Tag Archives: 616 East Lincoln Avenue

Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie”

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Mr. Mister, “Kyrie” Single Cover, August 8, 2010. Vanjagenije. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the image’s low resolution and because image illustrates subject of this blog post.

Twenty-five years ago this week, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” made it to the top of the Billboard pop charts, making me goofy and giddy beyond belief. March ’86 was the beginning of a great month of music for me. I bought my first Walkman — a Walkman-knockoff really — from Crazy Eddie’s on 47th and Fifth in Manhattan, as well as the first of what would be about 200 cassettes of my favorite music. Not to mention a ton of musical experimentation — most of it bad, goofy and un-listen-able for even the musically impaired.

For many of you, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” would likely fall into that last category. It was semi-religious rock at a time when the closest thing to that was Amy Grant. It was Creed a whole decade before Creed, but with better musicians. It was a group of studio musicians putting out a breakout album that actually stood apart from the super-serious or super-sugary music of the mid-80s. It was a perfect storm for a sixteen-year-old in search of inspiration beyond the chaos of 616 and the lonely march toward college via Humanities and Mount Vernon High School.

“Kyrie” was one of two songs that kept me in overdrive in and out of the classroom through most of my junior year at Mount Vernon High School. Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking” was the other song. It almost became my mantra in the months that straddled ’85 and ’86. Every time I heard that song, especially the album version, was like going on a game-winning touchdown drive at the end of the fourth quarter. Studying was time to throw screen passes or seven-yard slants, to run the ball on a power sweep or on a draw play. It was methodical, the drums and synthesizers, and put me in a determined, methodical mood as I prepared for a test.

But Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” was magical. Short for “Kyrie Eleison” Latin/Greek for “Lord have mercy,” it became my go-to song for every big academic play I needed to make for the rest of the year, even for the rest of high school. “Kyrie” combined all of the elements that my vivid imagination relied on. My faith in The One, my hope for a better future, lyrics that made me think, music that evoked a big play, like throwing it deep and completing it for a game-changing score. It was as methodical as “Alive and Kicking,” but the bigger bass guitar and heavier synthesizers as the background gave me the feeling that God’s grace was with me wherever I went and whatever I did. It was a true underdog’s song.

It was like I was singing a high-falsetto, four-and-a half-minute prayer whenever I played “Kyrie.” Some of my classmates, as usual, didn’t appreciate whatever deeper meaning I saw in the song or in its lyrics. See, my being Black and high-pitched singing to it was another obvious sign of my weirdness. Yet somehow, when it came to music, I didn’t really care what any of them thought.

As I went off to college and became more sophisticated in my understanding of music, I realized that there were some songs I couldn’t completely part with, no matter how goofy or out-of-date the music video was. “Kyrie” was one of those songs for me. I didn’t play it regularly by the time I’d reached my mid-twenties, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t sing to it in high-falsetto while shopping at Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh when the song would come on over the PA system.

Once iPod and iTunes technology became part of my household in ’06, I uploaded the old song and listened to it regularly again. I’ve wondered from time to time what would the sixteen-year-old version of me would think about me at forty-one. I’ve achieved more, and been hurt and lost more, than I could’ve possibly imagined a quarter-century ago.

It’s taken me more than twenty years to fully understand Richard Page’s lyrics about “would I have followed down my chosen road, or only wish what I could be?” The answer is both. Life is a funny and winding journey, even when on the path of the straight and narrow. Christian or atheist or of some other faith, it’s always good to hope that someone is there to watch over us, to protect us, even our younger selves from our older and allegedly wiser versions of ourselves. And that’s what I here now when I listen to — and sing high-falsetto still to — “Kyrie.”

Sarai, A Poet In My Heart

09 Wednesday Feb 2011

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Sarai, circa 2009. Unknown.

Today, if she were still alive, my sister Sarai would’ve turned twenty-eight years old. To think that I was only six weeks past my thirteenth birthday when she was born. Sarai was the one sibling I didn’t want because she was born in the middle of our plunge into welfare, my ex-stepfather’s abuse, and my mother’s inability to make any good decisions for herself and for the family.

But her life was a miracle in and of itself. Sarai was born a sickly sickle-cell anemia child, another sign of my mother’s indecisiveness and the collective stupidity of adults in my life. None of that really mattered after the first few months, though. From the time she was six months old until I went off to the University of Pittsburgh four years later, I made a point of looking after her, of getting her extra food, of making sure that everything she ate was fortified with iron.

Sarai was my little princess, the only girl I could relate to, the one I could dress and attempt to comb hair for (I say “attempt” because she didn’t have much hair before she became a teenage and my hair-doing skills were mediocre most days). I didn’t want to love her, but I did anyway.

As she grew older, her status as my little baby changed too. But only in a few ways. Whenever I came home

Sarai, Yonkers Apartment, December 23, 1995. Donald Earl Collins

to 616 for the holidays or visits, Sarai would say “hi,” give me a hug, and hold out her right hand for some money. Sometimes I gave her some walking around money, other times I didn’t — I was a poor student for most of the ’90s. It took awhile, but the little girl who was my sister grew up enough to live on her own a few short years before she died. That’s part of how I’d like to remember Sarai.

The first song I ever sang to her outside of lullabies was Starship’s “Sara.” It was the winter of ’86, a quarter-century ago, and Sarai didn’t care too much for my rendition of the song, with my high-falsetto flourishes and adjustments of “Sara” to “Sarai” throughout. (By the way, for those of you who aren’t practicing religious Jews or Judeo-Christian scholars, Sarai was the name of Abram’s wife before God ordained that their names would become Sarah and Abraham.) Of course, I usually sang it to her when she became petulant or when she was teasing her older brothers.

But what I should’ve been singing to her was Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara.” I should’ve been singing “wait a minute baby, stay a little while…” It would’ve been so much more appropriate. Sarai was a “poet in my heart.” She never really changed, and luckily, she never stopped living her life. And now she’s gone, and has been gone for more than seven months now. My life seems more empty, my family even less of a family, than it was before. Hopefully, I’ll see her again, whenever I’m finally called home.

Sweet and Sour 16

27 Monday Dec 2010

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Slice of cake nicer looking, but similar in style to cake I had 25 years ago, December 27, 2010. Source: http://www.cake-decorating-corner.com

Happy forty-first birthday to me! Competing with the savior of humanity on the last week of the year has never been easy. Most years, there’s been no contest between the observed celebration of Jesus’ birth and the date of my actual birth. But the second half of my growing up years were the worst in terms of how I saw my birthday. From ’78 to ’87, there were two Happy Birthdays for me: one in ’79, and one in ’85. The one that occurred twenty-five years ago, I’d rather forget.

My sixteenth birthday, the twenty-seventh of December, was the first time since I turned nine that anyone bothered to give me a cake. This was a spontaneous decision, as I sat around 616 all day with little to do but watch after my younger siblings. Mom and Maurice agreed to buy me a birthday cake. Since it was my abusive stepfather’s money, I didn’t want any cake. I especially didn’t want the Carvel ice cream cake he thought I should have. I mean, it was a cold last Friday in December day, and all he could come up with was ice cream cake?

Carvel Ice Cream Store, Edenwald, East 233rd Street & Paulding Avenue, Bronx, New York, December 27, 2010. jag9889 at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jag9889

The kicker was that I had to go get the cake. It was my birthday, but I had to leave 616, catch the 7 bus to Prospect, get off at Waldbaum’s and walk over to the empty Carvel store to buy a chocolate ice cream cake with a huge vanilla ice cream coating. I bought it and brought it home so we could celebrate me turning sixteen.

I wasn’t thankful for this assignment, and it showed. I had two bites before my older brother Darren and my younger siblings devoured the rock-hard dessert. I wished that Maurice would just go somewhere and die. Not a violent death or one that I had to be the cause of. Just a death that he deserved, like a massive coronary blockage due to a diet rich in saturated fats.

About a week ago, I told my seven-year-old son this story. Or at least, an exaggerated, funny and much less painful fictionalized version of it. I made my ex-stepfather into Jabba the Hutt, and my Carvel ice cream cake into a small square boulder that was painted white. At one point in the story, I told Noah that I hit my stepfather in the head with a piece of the cake, “knocking him out cold.” I made it so that my siblings ate the cake like Shaggy and Scooby ate Scooby Snacks after solving a case, with tongues circling their faces and licking off the excess to boot.

Noah just laughed and laughed throughout. I just hope that he finds something to laugh about when he finally hears the real story.

On Broken Wings

02 Thursday Dec 2010

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Two pictures of a seagull that eventually soared, Puget Sound off Bainbridge Island, WA, May 21, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two pictures of a seagull that eventually soared, Puget Sound off Bainbridge Island, WA, May 21, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

It was thirty years ago on this date that Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” Broken Wings was #1 on Billboard’s Top 40 pop charts. Twenty-five years, another time, another person, I was in and was. Somehow in a world dominated by hip-hop and rap, it seems like it’s been way more than a quarter-century since a bunch of studio musicians in their mid-thirties got together to create the album Welcome To The Real World.

What I remember most about my fifteen-year-old self in ’85 what how music served as an escape from the violence — or the potential of it — at 616 and from my loneliness at school. I could find myself in another world through song, where no one could touch or hurt me in any way, where life seemed more worthwhile. The sounds, images and smells that lyrics and notes could conjure gave me a place to find myself, a confidence that I otherwise didn’t have.

I liked a lot of crap in those days of my renewed interest in music. I liked Mr. Mister, Tears for Fears, some Heart, Sting, Simple Minds, some Madonna or a-ha, and U2 even before I knew who U2 was. I also liked Kool In The Gang, Billy Ocean, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force), Run DMC, early Whitney Houston, some Freddy Jackson, Sade, and Luther. The problem was, I had trouble combining these divergent interests in music. Sade would make me feel sad. “Another woman out of my reach,” I often thought. While I liked Run-DMC (especially “My Adidas”), the lyrics were sometimes silly, and I couldn’t be silly all the time. Kool In The Gang had gone from cool to wack in the last year or so. For me, most of the R&B from the mid-’80s was boring, romantic yet stiff. I wasn’t feelin’ it.

Sunset Over Clouds (feeling of soaring), December 2, 2010. Source: http://www.writeideaonleadership.com

Sunset Over Clouds (feeling of soaring), December 2, 2010. Source: http://www.writeideaonleadership.com

Certainly the pop of ’85 wasn’t exactly full of passion, pride, or pain. It often had the feel of folks working off a high in a recording studio, which has turned out to be true in many cases. But it was easier to listen to. Keep in mind that the music world had just started to recover from seven or eight years of music that was without social conscience and virtually pain-free — and that’s even accounting for Phyllis Hyman, Miki Howard and U2.

Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” met me at a place where I needed to be met in ’85. My own “wings” needed some mending. I wanted to be free of my family’s so-called love, and I wanted to know what love as an emotion really felt like. I needed inspiration on a weekly basis because of what I saw at home and at Mount Vernon High School. R&B rarely provided that kind of fuel for my mind and spirit.

I found it in the lyrics, the liner notes, the pace of the music, the ability of a voice or synthesizer (as the case often was) to make a song soar. Given my situation, it was a no-brainer for me to choose lyrics like “take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free . . .” over “rock . . . steady . . . steady rockin’ all night long . . .” in the mid-’80s.

I certainly don’t walk the streets of Mount Vernon with $20 Walkman knockoff singing in high falsetto to Mr. Mister like I did twenty-five (or thirty) years ago (I do that in DC and Maryland running 10Ks, with my iPod or iPhone instead). But I do still find songs like “Broken Wings” appealing. At almost forty-one (now almost forty-six), I understand much better the need to mend broken relationships, to heal bruised and broken hearts, to want to make yourself and those you love whole again. From my wife to my mother to my late sister Sarai and older brother Darren, I really do understand. I sometimes can’t believe I got this much out of one song from so long ago. Especially when I was so young and so injured myself.

The Eclectic, Authentic Donald

04 Saturday Sep 2010

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Maxwell's Embrya (1997) Album Art

I am, and will always remain, a goofy oddball. I’ve known that for at least twenty-five years, probably closer to thirty. For it was this week in ’85 that we finally got cable at 616. More than four years after MTV, and a few months into VH1, we finally no longer needed antennas to watch TV. My fat, greasy slob of a stepfather hogged the gigantic wood-framed hand-me-down of a nineteen-inch Zenith, along with the living room, most of the time. But I came home from the beginning of the school year — my junior year of Meltzer and AP US History at MVHS — at the end of the first week, with no one home.

I turned on the TV, found MTV, and boom, I was in the heart of the ’80s. As soon as I hit the channel, a new video began, heavily synthesized and very much over the top. It turned out to be Heart’s “What About Love,” the first release off of their new album. I liked the song immediately. But more importantly, I liked

Heart, 1985. (Look at that hair!?!)

the fact that I could now also put faces and styles to voices and lyrics. I was late, four years too late in understanding the jokes, the fashion motifs and consumerism concerns of my more socioeconomically- blessed classmates. As the saying goes, though, better late than never.

That afternoon, I ended up seeing videos from Sade, Tears for Fears, Dire

Mr. Mister (1985) Welcome To The Real World

Straits, Sting, and Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings.” The last one was a weird video, but very heartfelt, and one that has stayed with as long as any song I’ve heard or video I’ve seen since (more on that in December). I eventually checked out some boring Alexander O’Neal videos on BET before my mother and younger siblings came home from school and grocery shopping.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t listened to music before September ’85. I was already well aware of the fact that my music tastes weren’t stereotypically Black, weren’t all that White, and certainly weren’t all that old and mature. Having played the trombone in fifth grade, the fife for Hebrew-Israelite stuff all through ’82, and sang in school choirs sixth, seventh and eighth grade (until my voice started cracking), it wasn’t as if I didn’t know when someone was off key or timing their drum sequences.

Still, I found music that didn’t have the voice of Luther (Vandross) or Patti (Austin or LaBelle) or the beats of Doug E. Fresh, Grandmaster Flash or Run-D.M.C. appealing. It reached me because I had moments I needed to be reached, to be serious, to focus on the pain that was my life in the mid-80s, a pain that few artists sang or wrote about in any direct way. I could relate to the lyrics of rejection, redemption and

The Best of Sade (1992) Album Art

resolution more than I could relate to someone stepping on my brand new sneakers and getting attitude. Songs that could reach me because I had moments I needed to feel and be goofy, to laugh at myself for feeling as pathetic as I did back then. Nothing, and I mean nothing, in the R&B and early hip-hop repertoire of ’85 did that for me.

So I branched out, almost immediately after that MTV afternoon in early-fall early-September. I became even more interested in what some of my classmates called “that White music,” even deliberately listening to WPLJ and Z-100, adding that to WBLS. I also took the occasional turn to WCBS-101 (oldies station of Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Dean Martin), had a brief foray into Phillip Glass and ’80s new age, a rare stumble into jazz, and yes, for those who believe I embody the rejection of all things “Black,” found my need for R&B and some rap in my eyes and ears.That first week in September ’85 pretty much sealed my fate as an eclectic music listener. Many who know me and my Mount Vernon past would say that Humanities and being around all those White kids had something to do with this. Some, including my mother, would say that my education has led to some sense of racial self-loathing, that I deliberately gave up my heritage to chase some false sense of Whiteness — or,

Seal (1994) Album Art

that I’m “acting White.”

I’d say that I was a goofy and serious late-bloomer, who listened to music and lyrics for meaning, for a kernel of wisdom and hope. Some or all of those things can be found in any genre of music, anywhere, anytime, under any circumstance. Music, like people, can’t be separated into races unless people choose to be separate, a truth I understand now and guessed at intuitively then.

Finding Home

30 Monday Aug 2010

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Highland Building (tall) and 6007 Penn Circle South (short). Source: http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com

A flat at 48 Adams Street in Mount Vernon, New York. Followed by one at 24 Adams Street. Then 48 Adams Street again. Then the entire second floor of the house at 425 South Sixth Avenue. After that, a 1,200-square-foot apartment on the third floor of the front building of the 616 East Lincoln Avenue

48 Adams Street, circa 2006

complex. After going to Pittsburgh for college, a dorm room at Lothrop Hall my freshman year. Five days of Howard Johnson’s and sleeping on a concrete landing on the fifth floor in a stairwell at Forbes Quadrangle (now Wesley Posvar Hall) the beginning of my sophomore year. A poorly partitioned one-room flat with a shared kitchen and bathroom in a firetrap for a row house, 25 Welsford Avenue, the rest of my sophomore and all of my junior years at Pitt.

The above is every place I’ve lived during my first twenty years on the planet. I never felt at home in any of those places, and when I’d come close, something violent or life changing would occur to remove that feeling of at least a sense of minor uneasiness. Alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, second marriage, financial pressures, religious stupidity, more domestic violence and abuse, more siblings, financial collapse, college, homelessness, lack of funds and privacy defined the spaces in which I lived between ’69 and ’90. I was mostly lonely and yet hardly alone for all of those years. I had about as much space to think and write as I would’ve had in a bathroom stall at Grand Central before the renovations there during the ’90s (a story for another post). Which is why most of my Mount Vernon classmates and friends can testify to dozens of “Donald sightings” — me walking everywhere — between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

I made the decision after my junior year to find my own place, my own space, as close to or as far away from Pitt’s campus as I could. I took a week off from my summer job at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains at the beginning of August ’90 and took the express Greyhound to the ‘Burgh. I stayed with my friend Terri and her mother — a blog post unto itself — while looking all over the city and its po’ White and Black trash suburbs for anything between $150 and $300 a month in rent, one with my own kitchen and bath.

I found a nice place in Wilkinsburg, only discouraged by the distance it was from the East Busway East Busway near East Liberty stop. Source: http://www.pittsburghtransit.info(Pittsburgh elected in ’64 to spend twenty years building a busway instead of a subway to connect downtown with the suburbs — talk about being cheap!) and Pitt. Not to mention feeling uneasy about a slightly older next door neighbor who looked like she caroused a bit too much. I looked at places in Shady Side, Squirrel Hill, Highland Park, North Oakland, off Braddock Road and near Frick Park, even the Manchester and Friendship neighborhoods (somewhere between middle class, affluent, and student housing). The rent was either too rich for me or the places looked a bit run down.

Finally, on my next to last day to look, I found a place at 6007 Penn Circle South in East Liberty, right

East Liberty Presbyterian Church, down the street. Source: http://www.citizendia.org

across from the Shady Side neighborhood. It was a one-room efficiency (calling it a “studio” would make it sound better than it was). I had a kitchenette area with a sink, counter, cabinets, a stove and oven with a ventilation fan, and a fridge. I had my own bathroom and enough closet space for my meager clothes and toiletries. I was within walking distance of Giant Eagle, the big grocery store in the area, as well as the busway. The Highland Park Zoo bus, the 71B, as well as the 71C, ran their way to Oakland and Pitt. And Pitt was within my walking distance back then — it was more than two and a half miles from Penn Circle South to the Cathedral of Learning.

It was $220 if rent for each month was paid before the first day of the month, and $245 if not. I took the 450-square-foot flat, this despite some of the riff-raff living in the building, the hole-in-the-wall bar Constantine’s within a couple of blocks, or Kelly’s Bar for the down and out across the street. The heating and cooling, the toilet and shower, the food in my fridge was all mine. My friends Kenny, Elaine, Marc all thought it was a dump. Maybe so, especially compared to the places I’ve lived since. But it was my dump. Those eight and a half years there, I learned so much about myself and life and God and women and love. I learned how to live my life while I was in apartment 204. That began twenty years ago today. The building’s now gone (at least, it was slated to be), but the memories remain.

What A Fool Believes

23 Monday Aug 2010

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Wall Collapse Rattles Mount Vernon High School - wcbstv.com, April 13, 2010

Mount Vernon really has changed, and unfortunately, not for the better. I’m talking about in the past four years, and not just since I left for college and Pittsburgh twenty-three years ago this week. As some of you may know, I was threatened the week of my sister’s death and funeral by a young thug because I stopped him from choking his girlfriend in front of me and her three-year-old daughter.

That’s not a completely accurate description. I yelled “Hey! Stop!” as I ran toward the side gate of 616. I saw a short, nappy-headed, unkempt-corn-rowed-haired, light-skinned thug. At first, he was yelling, “Get out the godd**m car you B***H” at a young woman in a blue older-modeled Toyota Camry, punching his fists on the driver’s side window at the same time. Then, when she did get out, she grabbed her three or four-year-old daughter and attempted to get toward the side gate. The fool then pushed her up against the back right side of the car and proceeded to wrap his hands around the young woman’s neck, as if no one else was around.

I was on the telephone with my father, talking to him about the rough week it had been, standing outside to get away from folks for a moment or two, staring across the gates and driveway to the five-story red-brick sister complex 630 East Lincoln when I witnessed this episode of domestic violence. After I yelled and distracted the dumb ass, the young woman ran inside with her daughter. Then the short butt attempted to run up on me, telling me to “mind your own godd**m bisness, you stupid f**k!” He tried to get in my face, but at five-foot-four, he was much too short to intimidate me with rage. I told him if he took another step, that I’d call the cops. He did, and then I dialed 911.

“Oh, you think your life’s miserable now! It just got a whole lot worse for you and your family. And for what? You willing to risk your life for her? For a b***h?,” the stupid ass said as he gradually backed out of the yard and then outside the 616 gate. Apparently he wasn’t as stupid as he looked, as he kept moving farther away while yelling “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, you stupid f**k!” Finally, I said something. “Yeah, I’m a stupid f**k. You and your homies could beat me up, kill me, put me out of my misery. But I’m not the one walking away, you are!” Mr. Thuggish Ruggish Bone then disappeared.

There were numerous other reminders that what was once my hometown would never be again. The fact that neighborhoods that were once affluent White ones were now a mixture of White, African American and Latino, and weren’t so affluent anymore. The closings of Athena’s and Baskin-Robbins and other businesses in once ritzy Fleetwood, the rundown sense that I saw in faces Black and White and Brown all during that week.

Other parts of the city had long succumbed to poverty, crime and neglect, but with the middle class regardless of race in full flight, the uphill battle for a thriving bedroom suburb was now an unorganized retreat, with carnage all along the way. The newest thing I saw in Mount Vernon during my midsummer night and day-mare was the track behind Mount Vernon High School and the construction crew working on a new wall for the southwest corner of the building.

I know that a fair number of my Mount Vernon-based or nostalgic readers will think me biased, ungrateful even for having grown up in a town that they themselves found enriching and enjoyable. If that is the case, then that’s wonderful. Your Mount Vernon wasn’t the one I experienced, and “your blues ain’t like mine” (as the late Bebe Moore Campbell would say), sorry to say.

Aside from the atypical experience of dealing with the death of my sister, the Mount Vernon I grew up with and the one I witnessed last month were one and the same. My time growing up there included unpleasant moments with young punks and thugs, far too much rage and violence and poverty for me to stick around after high school. The difference now is, the city as a whole has become a reflection of my worst experiences, and not a “city on the move.” Silver linings like Ben Gordon or Denzel Washington or not, anyone who refuses to acknowledge that this is the reality for most living in Mount Vernon should tune into a 70s station and look up Michael McDonald for advice on foolishness and wisdom.