Tag Archives: 616 East Lincoln Avenue

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

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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

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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.

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad P(Vagina)y? Men, in a Word

13 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Layered anatomy of the anatomical male and anatomical female body, June 5, 2016. (https://naturopathicdoctorwizangwira.wordpress.com/).

The first time I became self-aware of myself as a male with male parts was when I was five. At our second-floor flat on South Sixth in South Side Mount Vernon, New York, sometime in the summer of 1975, I walked in on my mother in the bathroom. She had just finished peeing and was wiping herself. All I could do was stare at her vagina area, seeing mostly what wasn’t there. “Maywa,” I said (a mash of my mother’s name Mary with Mom) “what happened to your pee-pee?” My mother explained that she didn’t “have a pee-pee” — without explaining why she didn’t have one. “When I get some money, I’m gonna go to the pee-pee store and buy you one,” I responded.

There are maybe 20 stories growing up where it seems me and my mother both share and end up smiling, with a sense of real warmth and affection, and not just base-level love, and without irony or a hidden sense of jealousy or disdain. The pee-pee story is one of them.

But this is more than just about the time before sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, neglect, and a massive slide into poverty changed my sense of the world. It’s about how men learn to fear all things vagina and vagina-related, and how that fear so easily turns us into misogynists and misogynoirists. It’s about how we as men fail to educate ourselves about women, about patriarchy, and ultimately, about who we are and who we need to be to end patriarchy.

A few years after discovering the differences between the anatomically male and the anatomically female, I knew a bit more, in both an intellectual and social sense. I no longer accidentally danced under my mother’s and other older women’s dresses at the parties my mother took us to when I was five and six years old. I guess if you get slapped upside the head enough times, you recognize why acting like you’re playing hide-and-seek with your mother’s dress as a prop might be socially inappropriate.

But that’s not all. By 1978 and 1979, we had World Book Encyclopedia at 616. Once I began plowing through it to learn all I could — and not just as a way to punish my mother for punishing me — I learned even more about the body than any eight or nine-year-old ought to learn on their own. The “Human Body” section contained celluloid slices of the male and female body, which would layer together to form a full body. From bones to muscles, from muscles to blood vessels, from blood vessels to nerves and organs and systems, and then to derma and coverings for orifices.

I remember the reproductive system either being the last or among the last of the sectional celluloids to form a male or female body. I learned about ovaries, testes, scrota, urethras, and vaginas long before I could say these words correctly. This also meant that I understood where babies come from, without fully understanding the drive that led to human reproduction.

A year later, near the end of fifth grade at William H. Holmes ES (I think it was the third week of May 1980), me and my classmate Joe were on our way home (we both lived in the A section of 616). We were talking shit about girls, about boys, about life in general, maybe with a few “yo’ mama” jokes thrown in. Suddenly, Joe hits me with the question, “Have you ever seen a pussy before?” “No!,” I lied, and loudly too. Joe teased me about it, saying, “You can’t even say ‘pussy,’ can you?” I just laughed it off, not knowing what to say, really. Even at ten, I knew enough to know I couldn’t reveal I’d seen my mother’s vagina at five or that I had seen the encyclopedia’s White female rendering of one.

I didn’t use the word at all until June 1988. It was after I escaped yet another attempt by my idiot stepfather Maurice to make me see him as my father through the use of his fists. He ended up falling into a tub of bathwater meant for my youngest siblings Sarai and Eri. What made this even more ridiculous? This was after my first year at Pitt, a year where I knew more than enough about the world, about the predicament at 616, and about myself to recognize I didn’t have to put up with this bullshit. But I slid back into my old role as teenaged man-child anyway.

This was what happened afterward, via Boy @ The Window

All I kept muttering to myself was, ‘I’m a pussy,’ because I still could’ve gone to the cops for his attempted assault. After a couple of minutes, he said, ‘Get this through your head, boy. Me and your mother are happy together, and we’re gonna be together long after you leave here and go out in the world. The world’s a dangerous place, and we’re just gettin’ you ready for it.’
Huh? What? I knew not to laugh right then, but I was laughing at him on the inside. I knew right then that him and Mom would be over sooner rather than later.

Even in that moment, it felt weird to call myself “a pussy.” I never saw myself as weak, or women in general as weak. It didn’t occur to me that I was afraid, not of getting beat up or of being weak. I was afraid that I would never become the person I wanted to become. I was afraid that mfs like Maurice would continue to come at me because they saw the version of me that I presented at 616, the shell that seemed weak, just like how they saw women, just like how they saw anyone with a vagina.

This is the fear of all boys and men unknowingly or fully conscious of the patriarchy, masculinity, and the world, of folks on the verge of misogyny, misogynoir, and hypermasculinity. The fear of being seen by other men and women-as-patriarchy’s-footsoldiers as pussies, weak in body, mind, and spirit, and therefore as exploitable to the point of being used as a punching bag.

This was why there was such a ludicrous outcry over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” last month. The responses weren’t about Christianity and morality. Not really. They were about the need to keep women from freeing themselves and their vaginas from the clutches of patriarchy. The angry gasbags on Instagram and Twitter venting their spleens were expressing their need to keep women and their pussies in a locked box, fully under the control of men and women-as-patriarchy’s-footsoldiers, for use only in case of wanting to make a sanctified baby (especially White ones). Anything short of this total control weakens men, weakens patriarchy, and makes us vulnerable to questioning ourselves.

The truth is, heterosexual men especially are scared because we as a group cannot be as strong as women, queer/transgender women included. None of us can be strong when we refuse ourselves the right of vulnerability, the need to feel feelings aside from anger, rage, and bravado, the courage of solidarity and love, and the humanity of affection with and for others — including for the men in our lives. This isn’t just about men needing to cry when in each other’s presence (although I am more than sure that would be helpful for millions). It’s about the need to connect with the parts of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge. For most men, it’s as if we are all M1 Abrams tanks, ready to kill and destroy at a moment’s notice.

But as so many Black feminists in my life have reminded me over the years, the vagina is a really strong muscle. After all, the vast majority of humanity has passed through one on the way to being born. It is a muscle that can be strengthened, stretched, and even repaired, something we as a species and world so desperately need. Try as men might, there are no dick exercises in which any anatomical male can do reps with his penis and build strength. At least not yet.

Ugly

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Me in April 1975, Sears Picture Studio, Mount Vernon, NY. (Cropped/Donald Earl Collins).

Another title for this could be “Ugly Donald,” an homage toward Ugly Betty. But one word should cover it!

All this talk over the past few weeks about who is and who isn’t “ugly,” or “fat,” or just “too dark” take me back to how I felt about myself for most of the 1980s, and sometimes even as I gotten older over the 30 years since the Reagan decade. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve been in a camp of vipers like this since my preteen and early puberty years, where I definitely had my own excited utterances toward Black boys and girls in particular (also, the occasionally flat-butt White girl and bed-headed White boy, but I digress). So I never understood the need for deliberate meanness toward people over something that they would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fix for a group of misogynoirist assholes who aren’t worth a nanosecond of thought.

Whether Lizzo, Blue Ivy Carter, Bria Myles, Ari Lennox, or Teyana Taylor, these mofos who made fun of their looks, or called them a “rottweiler/German shepherd mix” (sic), or told them to workout to lose weight are such boring-ass losers. These women are beautiful. Black women are beautiful. Full stop. You got time to waste running down an active entertainer over your bullshit? Your ugliness is the kind that takes years of therapy, prayer, active listening, and educational reprogramming (i.e., reading lots of books on Blackness, Black feminisms, and intersectionality) to overcome, if you overcome it at all.

I have a bit of experience with ugly over the years. Usually from family and classmates throwing it in my direction. “Whatcha makin’ that ugly face for?,” my mom would say to me many, many times growing up. “You ugly, faggot!,” I remember hearing from folx in around the 616 and 630 apartment buildings on East Lincoln in Mount Vernon from the time I was nine. “Ain’t no one gonna eva wanna be with your ugly ass!,” an older girl who once attempted to molest me said to me when I was 12. I was ugly, alright. I felt ugly, living with poverty and abuse and anti-Black ugliness in the many places I went in Mount Vernon. It was probably why I felt more comfortable around my father, especially when in the Bronx or down in Manhattan doing work. The anonymity of the city meant that for hours or even days at a time, the centrality of my ugliness could disappear.

I felt so ugly inside and out that I wanted to take my own life at 14. I was so ugly that it scared me to look at myself in the mirror for more than a few seconds, mostly to make sure toothpaste or dried drool or eye crust was off my face. I kept my face as blank as I could, like Jamal Wallace (played by Rob Brown) in Finding Forrester, just so I wouldn’t have to endure more put-downs about my tall, lanky ass and my ugly features on top of that.

Me at Prom Dinner, White Plains, NY, May 21, 1987. (Suzanne Johnson neè De Feo).

But the worst of all this was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. My final days took an ugly turn the moment my classmates learned I was ranked 14th out of 545 students (509 of us eventually graduated in June 1987). I’ve written ad nauseam about how my White Humanities classmates responded to my ranking, as if I threatened their worldview of them being more intelligent than the Black folx they went to school with every day. Months before my soon-to-be former Black classmates began to stare through me like I was a ghost, they began to clown me. I’d blow by them in the hallways, and they’d bust out laughing. They’d comment on my ugly, brittle hair, talking about how my “hair could break picks.” They’d talk about my “cheap clothes from Taiwan” — which they were from, by the way (how did they know that?). Or, they’d simply shake their heads, as if my existence was a “shaking my head” moment on par with Raven-Symoné declaring herself “not Black.”

Clyde was among that group of Black guys and gals who made a point of telling me I was ugly throughout my senior year. He did it so many times that somewhere around February of that school year, I lost track of the number. “You ugly. There ain’t nothin’ in the world that’s gonna fix that,” Clyde said to me once. Most days, I ignored it, because what would have been the point? We were graduating, and my plans for college were bigger than any insult any asshole could muster. But, one day before winter break, Clyde just said, “You ugly, Donald. You ugly.” It took every bit of the low energy I had to not cry, and not pick up a desk and tear his fucking head off with it, like the chair revenge scene in Moonlight.

It took getting away and going to college for me to stop seeing myself and my own unique blend of Blackness as not ugly, even handsome. A bout of homelessness here and months of struggling to pay rent and eat there will begin to harden you against the bullshit of muthafuckas who would prefer to tear you down rather than build something for themselves or others. As Flavor Flav from PE would say, “Motherfuck them any damn way!”

After those days of sleeping on concrete slabs or eating tuna fish out of a can until I could eat it anymore, it didn’t matter how the Clydes, Gordons, and Tomikas saw me. I saw myself clearly, for the very first time. And I clearly saw my naysayers, too, as the short-in-body and in mind, coloristic, Blackness-but-only-so-much, racist, sexist, and homophobic pieces of shit for whom they were. Why should it have ever mattered what they thought of me?

One Saturday in early February 1989 in the shared bathroom in the Fu rowhouse on Welsford Avenue in South Oakland, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had just finished washing up. I was six-two, maybe 175 pounds, and six weeks past my 19th birthday, with barely enough facial hair to clog up my right nostril. I must’ve stood there staring at every angle of my face for two or three minutes. Then I chuckled. “You’re an okay-looking guy. You’re not Billy Dee or Denzel, but you’re not bad-looking at all.” Nor am I Idris Elba. But being me since has almost always been okay enough. The truth is, it always should been, for any of us.

My Life as a Scrambler

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

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

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I wish I could say that it was different. I wish I could say that the key to success in my life was crafting plans, developing rubrics, and building out scale models of every step, move, and smile toward achieving Points A, B, and Z on my life-sized to-do list. I wish that life was like being Tom Brady (not really). Or really, like being every White male statue that’s ever stood behind a bruising, blocking, dynamic offensive line in American professional football. One where even a mediocre quarterback like Trent Dilfer or Jim McMahon could stand behind and take as many as ten seconds to find an open receiver for a first down or a long touchdown on their way to a Super Bowl championship.

But, with some notable exceptions, my life, and the successes I’ve garnered in my life, have come from scrambling out of the pocket, usually because my proverbial offensive line couldn’t block the pass rushers in my life. It’s hustlin’ really, but not the kind of hustlin’ that would bring me notoriety. My life has been mostly Joe Montana and Russell Wilson, with occasional periods of Warren Moon half-standing in the pocket and half-scrambling in between.

Graduate school was the one exception that almost ruined me. I took the lesson I learned about keeping my schedule of work, social life (however ill-defined in 1991), and classes and transferred it to my five and a half years of working toward a doctorate. After a straight-A first semester and finishing my master’s in two semesters, I took it as a sign that this drawing up plans and executing them with brutal efficiency was the best way for me.

Keep in mind, I scrambled all through middle school and high school, for all six years I was in my Humanities Program. I scrambled because I had to. I couldn’t make concrete plans to study at 616, to read books by a specific date, to just have a day to myself just to work on me. Not with my abusive ass, idiot stepfather Maurice/Judah/Maurice there. Not with my younger siblings running around. Not with my Mom going through welfare and depression. Not with having to track down my alcoholic father on weekends for work and money.

San Francisco 49er QB Joe Montana scrambling to make a throw, Super Bowl XIX, Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, CA, January 20, 1985. (http://youtube.com).

And yet with all that, I finished 14th in my graduating class of White, Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Latinx hyperachievers. I received scholarship offers from every school I got into (with Columbia withholding only because they couldn’t believe I came from a family of eight with a $16,600 per year income in New York). Scrambling worked, even though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Which was why I went the other way. And so, for my graduate school years, and the baker’s dozen of years that followed, I stayed in the pocket. I drew up plans like an architect for my career and life, and followed those plans as if I’d gotten them from God him/herself. And the truth was, most of my plans worked to perfection. I earned a two-year master’s degree in one, earned a big-time dissertation fellowship without overwhelming support from my advisor and committee, published articles, presented at conferences, and, once fully immersed in nonprofit work, job after job, promotion after promotion, more publications and teaching opportunities.

Or so I thought. I hadn’t realized that while my 150-PowerPoint-slide gameplan seemed to be working, that I was still scrambling every chance I got, and hustlin’ myself in the process. I only completed my doctorate in November 1996 because I scrambled, and left my advisor little choice but to approve my dissertation. This after lobbying my other committee members, documenting every comment from my advisor on my dissertation going back a full year, and otherwise turning the academic politics of Carnegie Mellon to my favor that summer and fall. That, and having a complete, 505-page manuscript, sealed the deal.

I scrambled for work all the while, went the summer of 1997 without work before hustlin’ my way into nonprofit work by lying about only having a master’s degree that year. I scrambled into my jobs at Presidential Classroom, both of my positions at Academy for Educational Development, and every single teaching position I’ve held since 1998, AU included.

It just took me until 2008 to realize that I wasn’t the figurative pocket passer. I ran myself and those who’ve been there to catch my publishing, teaching, and working passes open. I’ve never had a good offensive line, because America stacks their lines for privileged White men and White women first, second, and third. Sometimes I’ve had to take the proverbial ball to the end zone or for a first down myself, because there hasn’t been anyone else who can help. Sometimes, too, I have to take the hit, also because I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’ve fought against the mantra “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” for most of my 49-plus years on this Earth.

I’ve come to accept that this is my life. I don’t have to like that despite all the article publications, conference and public presentations, grant money raised, students taught, students now in prominent positions themselves, book manuscripts produced, friends made, and so many other measurables, I am a bad six months away from career collapse. And with that, maybe my marriage, my status as a dad, and  my health and life would be at risk as well.

But I do not intend to be a contingent faculty member and an older man pretending to be a youngish freelance writer with fresh ideas (with the rare consulting opportunity) for the rest of my most productive working days. Either all this works out, somehow, or I’m driving as the Uber professor/Trader Joe’s stock boy/MCPS bus driver (ala Steven Salaita) down the line. Anyway, Red from Shawshank Redemption put it best. “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” My mantra for the past four and a half years.

The End of Peanuts Land

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

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

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Six Flags New Orleans, abandoned post-Katrina, 2017. (http://www.destinationamerica.com/).

I’ve told the story of how my imaginative version of Peanuts Land began, in the wake of my six weeks of punishment for running away from home the month of my ninth birthday in December 1978. The inclusion of so many World Book Encyclopedia and Scholastic Weekly Reader facts to create this alternate reality, one in which Charlie Brown was very much of flesh and bone. The creation of a utopia with few of the world’s deeply entrenched problems, one in which nuclear war wasn’t a worry. From roughly January 1979 until August 1981, I continued building on my knowledge of history, technology, geography, topography, economics, sociology, psychology, sexuality, and militarism to construct this land that never was and never will be.

This was also a time, though, in which my older brother Darren and I read comics. The Marvel and DC universes were a part of my reading in 1980 and 1981 as well. Whether it was Justice League or Spider-Man or The Incredible Hulk or The Avengers, all of them gave me ideas for potential bad guys to have on the streets of Peanuts Land City (the chief of police in this scenario was Snoopy, by the way), or enemies for Peanuts Land’s military to fight.

That world of child-like imagination with real world and comic book elements got warped like a vinyl album on a hot radiator the summer of ’82. Maurice beating me up or whuppin’ my ass once every three days between July 6 and August 1 might have had something to do with the rage and loss of any sense of control I had during my summer of abuse. My mom’s role as strikebreaker at Mount Vernon Hospital in the middle of all that abuse didn’t help. Nor did the weeks throughout July where my toddler siblings had more food to eat than me or my mom.

But that wasn’t all. One day, in between my idiot stepfather’s beatdowns, I had come from the store with a small bag of groceries. This time around, instead of walking up the fourth flights of stairs to our 616 apartment, I took the elevator. 616’s A-section elevator was and remains one of the slowest and noisiest elevators I’ve ever ridden. Guys pissed on its floor regularly. I’d seen everything from cigarette butts to dog shit on this elevator over the years. As a result, I only took this elevator whenever the groceries had gotten to be too heavy or because I was simply too tired to walk up the stairs yet again.

A broken pencil (cropped), January 2014. (http://associationsnow.com)

On this day near the end of my ordeals with Maurice, a teenage neighbor from across the hall from our third-floor flat joined me on the elevator on the first floor. As soon as the elevator door closed, she pushed me up against the elevator’s back wall and then attempted to reach into my pants for my penis. I dropped the groceries, and with my right hand, grabbed her arm while shoving her to the other side of the elevator with my left arm in a criss-cross sort of motion. It didn’t dawn on me until that moment that I was now a few inches taller than her. She couldn’t have been more than five-foot-four at the time.

“What are you doing?,” I remember yelling, just as the elevator reached the third floor.

“I was just playin’. Why you gotta be a faggot?,” I remember her responding with her fake grin.

I was already emotionally out of sorts. But this was a neighbor, someone I actually did find attractive. She was either sixteen or seventeen at the time, and I was twelve. As a result of the spring that was all about Wendy, I really didn’t find anyone even emotionally arousing. Sexual arousal was so new to me I couldn’t have described it in 1982 if the dictionary definition had been stamped on my penis.

So I did what I always did when I got really, really stressed, at least since I was three. I went into my and Darren’s bedroom, with my idiot stepfather snoring away, my mom at work, Darren in summer camp, and my younger siblings taking afternoon naps, and I humped a pillow. In this case, Darren’s brown stop-light pillow, one that he had made in art class at The Clear View School a year or two before. Except, for the second time in eight months, instead of stopping because I simply tired out, semen shot out unexpectedly from my penis, and onto the side of Darren’s artwork. Boy did I do my best to clean up the pillow, at least this time around!

Out of that experience came my last Peanuts Land run. Off and on over the next three weeks, I had created a story in which a serial rapist was on the loose. The rapist was a Black woman, an older version of my 616 neighbor. She raped men at gun point or knife point. Her signature was her super-powered vagina (think She-Hulk here). When she sensed physical arousal from the men after she forced them to penetrate her, she used her vaginal muscles to rip off their penises. A number of the men she raped had bled to death as a result.

Detective Snoopy, Woodstock and pal birds attempting to solve a crime (cropped), August 14, 2018. (http://pinterest.com.au).

Despite weeks of searching Peanuts Land’s capital, Snoopy and an army of police couldn’t find the rapist. She managed to get away with killing at least a dozen men in this way.

By the time I reached the end of this story, I was in trouble again, this time with my mom. The stuffing from Darren’s stop-light pillow had started spilling out, with big rifts in at least two places. Between that and the damage from me drowning it in water to wipe up my semen stains, I’d ruined Darren’s artwork. Of course I got an ass-whuppin’! Compared to Maurice, my mom’s use of the belt might as well have been a compassionate smack on the butt for a two-year old, though.

After that, I decided to give up Peanuts Land once and for all. Even then, I knew I wanted to slice my stepfather’s balls off, and that I despised the fact that felt any attraction to anyone besides Wendy at all. Especially to someone willing to molest a preteen.

Looking even further back, I know now that some of my reaction was a residue of the sexual assault I experienced when I was six. But since that memory was a buried jumble in the summer of ’82, all I could think of to do was to do a better job of hiding my masturbatory episodes in the future.

“Sweet Christmas”

26 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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Luke Cage, as played by Mike Colter (cropped), August 29, 2017. (https://refinery29.com; Myles Aronowitz/Netflix.

For the past eleven years, I’ve worked on this blog (albeit, not so much the past couple of years) to talk about my past and how it made me, well me, warts, lesions, and all. That has meant putting as many aspects of my upbringing under an electron microscope as I could bear. Everything from physical and sexual assault to ostracism and bullying. It has meant looking at my friends, acquaintances, enemies, classmates, my mother, father, idiot ex-stepfather, my older brother, and my younger siblings and trying to understand them. Most important, it has meant me constantly interrogating myself, my motivations, my challenges, my -isms, and my other bullshit. I’ve taken nothing for granted since my first post in June 2007, and for as long as I continue to blog and write, I hope that this attitude remains.

But since my blog’s second month, one group of people have consistently poo-pooed my blog and the experiences I’ve talked about here. Mount Vernonites, especially the ones who saw me, but from a distance, during my Boy @ The Window years. Not necessarily my immediate classmates or family (although I know a couple of siblings have had issues with a post here or there). Mostly, it’s been folks who grew up around me, ones who obviously saw me as strange, and used that as an excuse for never attempting to get to know me.

I accepted long ago that this group of Mount Vernonites would be a group I could never placate. But it’s been surprising over the past eleven years how so many have come out of the woodwork to complain about me publicly airing my experiences. About two-dozen in all have found fault with my blog. Their complaints have come in several forms:

1. “Mount Vernon’s a great city with a rich history — how dare YOU (of all people) ever type a word that shows us in a negative light!”

2. “You should never say anything bad about [so-and-so]. He/she was a great person to me — how dare you!”

3. “Donald, it wasn’t that bad. You wouldn’t be the person you are today without Mount Vernon and Denzel Washington.”

4. “You have no right to talk about [x-person]! You should never say anything in public about your experiences with them!”

As I noted in talking about my blog’s tenth anniversary last June, the first missive I ever received was from someone about how I “deserved” my stepfather beating me up. Given the specificity with which the person spoke about my “defiance,” it was likely my late ex-stepfather Maurice responding to my first post about his abuse of me. Too bad I never saved that comment!

This week I received a new comment on an eight-year-old blog post about the man from one of his other kids (from one of his other unions). I won’t post the comment, because her complaint doesn’t really deserve a full airing. “What ever you have with my father should be kept private…No one should be exploited like this. It’s unethical and childish. Seek therapy and consult God for your pain and issues,” she wrote. I guess she doesn’t get that I mostly write non-fiction. At 48, I’m also too old to be told what to do by someone who’s a stranger to me.

But that’s not my main point here. Silence kills people from the inside out, often long before the blood stops pumping through our veins. Bringing abuse to the light of day isn’t exploitation, it’s necessary. Especially if it helps us move on. If a writer like me cannot be honest about the people who were in my life growing up, why bother writing at all?

For the Mount Vernonites who’ve expressed their issues with my blog, let me say this one last time. This blog has never been for you. In so many ways, this blog hasn’t been for me, either. It hasn’t been cathartic, nor has it helped me exact revenge or a pound of righteous vindication. It’s been about the hundreds of comments and emails I’ve received over the years from people I don’t know and will likely never meet. The ones who’ve had similar experiences with abuse, poverty, systemic racism, not fitting in, graduate school, their parents, and in their marriages and parenting. The kids who decided to give college another try. The adults who’ve found their way to a career, or who’ve worked out some problem in their life. The ones who’ve occasionally found their way to God, or conversely, decided that God wasn’t for them.

After nearly 300,000 views and 970 posts, I’m secure in the fact that whatever I’ve said here over the years, my words have done far more good than harm. Or, at least, they have made folks think about a variety of issues differently than they would have otherwise.

It would be all too easy for me to wish that life at 616, in Mount Vernon, and in New York had treated me much more gently between 1969 and 1989. But it didn’t. It would’ve been easier to write everything I’ve typed here over the years as mystery novels or horror graphic novels. But that’s not me (at least, not yet). I don’t regret a single word. On the other hand, I do regret my dropped words (and dropped “s”s) and other grammatical errors.