Tag Archives: Alcoholism

Jacksonville Visit

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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

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Me and My Father Jimme, Mall, Jacksonville Waterfront, August 27, 2007. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me and My Father Jimme, Jacksonville Waterfront, August 27, 2007. (Angelia N. Levy).

Under almost no circumstances could I have ever seen myself visiting Jacksonville. A nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the federal government, a super-flu pandemic, perhaps. And that would be a hypothetical maybe at best. But I did visit, for the first time, eleven years ago this week, to see my father Jimme for the first time in since Christmas Eve ’94. It was a life-changing event, and for once, for the better.

It was a memorable visit because after three years of talking over the phone, I finally would get to see Jimme and his new family (see my post “Finding My Father for the First Time” from November ’11). It was a calm-before-the-storm two-day visit, nestled in between the sturm und drang of the ’02 New Voices Winter Retreat in Atlanta and my family intervention at 616 in Mount Vernon (see my post “The Intervention” from January ’08).

I honestly had few expectations. I knew Jacksonville covered a lot of acreage as a city, but was basically Georgia south more than it was a major city in Florida. I knew that the town had a high poverty rate, and I knew that they had the Jacksonville Jaguars. Not much more than that was in my memory banks as I touched down on my flight from Hartsdale International Airport to podunk Jacksonville’s airport on a rainy Sunday in January.

Glass extension of Jacksonville International Airport, January 24, 2013. (http://www.airport-technology.com).

Glass extension of Jacksonville International Airport, January 24, 2013. (http://www.airport-technology.com).

Collins family members besides my father were there to greet me, including a couple of second-cousins. They were much more excited to see me than I was to see them, mostly because I hadn’t been prepared to meet extended family on this trip. They gave me a brief tour of the city — although I wasn’t going to see much in the rain (and there wasn’t much to see to begin with). Still, I was happy that they were happy and chatty and welcoming.

Meeting my father’s second wife Mary was interesting, if only because she shared my mother’s first name. Though loud in so many ways, she was also very kind, very Christian and very warm to me. Like most folks, she made assumptions about me that I couldn’t possibly live up to, like viewing everything in life through the lens of the Bible. It made for a lively dinner discussion on the subject my second night there. Ms. Mary has kept her conversations with me much shorter since that first visit.

But the most important part of my visit, though, was the two days I spent with my father. This was my first time seeing him completely sober since ’88, and this was nearly five years since he had given up drinking. The change in his physical appearance was dramatic, as he now only looked his age, and not twenty years older than his age. He looked better and strong than he had in years, maybe decades.

That wasn’t all that had changed. Me and my father talked about everything, from family to work, politics to writing, education and religion over those forty-eight hours. He shared his secret to his new diabetes diet – a case and a half of diet soda per day and no water intake.

My father, Silver Spring, MD, September 8, 2012. (Noah M. Collins).

My father, Silver Spring, MD, September 8, 2012. (Noah M. Collins).

I spend our last conversation telling my father about what I was about to do in Mount Vernon, that I was going to spend an evening airing out three decades of dirty laundry, for the sake of my younger siblings. That’s when he apologized to me about his alcoholism and all the things he had put me and my older brother Darren through growing up. I told him that I’d forgiven him a long time ago.

It was a touching moment out of several touching moments that visit. I left that Tuesday morning, in awe of the fact that sometimes people can and do change for the better, even miraculously so. Even in a place like Jacksonville.

Stomping In Coffee Table Glass

30 Friday Dec 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding My Father for the First Time

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cracking Skulls

10 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Bighorn sheep in Silver Canyon near the town of Bishop, California, October 24, 2007. Rhalden (copyright holder of this work, has released it into the public domain).

Originally posted January 10, 2011:

I’ve written about this before, but not completely from the context of violence. Twenty-eight years ago today, I had a violent incident in my college dorm. It was never reported, thank goodness, since it really didn’t do damage to anyone per se. But it did involve striking two human beings out of anger, in response to a prank and violence on the part of two of my Lothrop Hall dorm mates at the University of Pittsburgh, “Mike” and “Aaron.”

I came back to Pitt after the holiday season in January ’88, determined not to make the same mistakes I’d made the semester before, since another 2.63 GPA performance would mean losing my academic scholarship. Whatever homesickness I felt for Mount Vernon and New York was crushed by the realities of home life at 616 and the sheer lack of friends in Mount Vernon in general. I knew I needed to channel the anger, bitterness, hurt and embarrassment I felt regarding my Crush #2 into my second semester at Pitt.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the third floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

The answer as to how to begin involved my dorm mates on the third floor, half of whom were on Pitt’s basketball team, the other half the folks I usually hung around (geeks who would make most of my high school Humanities classmates look like socialites by comparison). The latter group had spent most of November and December binge drinking and occasionally taking me along for the ride. Aaron had begun to build a pyramid of Busch beer cans in their room, one nearly five feet tall by the time I returned from the holiday break. I needed to figure out how to co-exist with these dorm mates, as they had enabled my holiday blues and sheer lack of caring about my grades with their morbid, drinking ways.

The opportunity I needed happened a few days after I straightened out my Pitt bill. As usual, I left my door open and walked down the hall to the bathroom, took a leak, and went back to the room to call my mother. When I called, my mother kept saying “Hello . . . Hello . . . Who’s there?” She apparently couldn’t here me. After my third attempt, I checked my phone to see what was wrong. One of my idiot dorm mates had unscrewed the phone and taken the transmitter piece out, which was why my mother couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t even make a call to report what they did! I set out looking for Aaron and Mike in their room. When Mike saw me, he ran and immediately closed his door, almost breaking my hand and bruising my foot as I kept slamming my body into his door and put my foot between the door and the door jam.

The Breakfas Club Screen Shot, "Cracking Skulls" line, january 9, 2011. Donald Earl Collins.

The Breakfas Club Screen Shot, “Cracking Skulls” line, january 9, 2011. Donald Earl Collins.

I thought about telling our RA, who was too busy screwing his girlfriend to notice that he had no control over our floor. So I took matters in my own hands. The next day, the stupid asses were next door in a mutual dorm mate’s room, bouncing balls off my wall and laughing like there was something funny about it. My anger turned into a rage I hadn’t felt since my fight with one of my classmates six years before. I grabbed my dust mop and unscrewed the handle, walked next door, and proceeded to smash Aaron and Mike — both drunk — on top of their heads. “I don’t hear anyone laughing now!,” I yelled. “If I don’t get my phone piece back by this time tomorrow, there’s going to be a fight, and I don’t intend to lose! We can ALL get kicked out of school!”

I’d never seen three White guys so scared and quiet. I knew I had crossed a line, but so had they. To make sure they knew that I meant business, I smashed my dust mop handle against the wall as hard as I could and said, “That’s what’s gonna happen to your heads if I don’t get my phone piece back.” They sent Samir, another dorm mate — the only other person of color in our group — as an emissary with the transmitter by the end of the day.

I didn’t allow myself to feel bad about going psycho or, from their perspective, “Black” on my dorm mates. With only a couple of exceptions, I saw everyone on my floor as the enemy for a while. And for the next couple of weeks, whenever I left the room at night for the bathroom or for something else on my floor, I kept my door locked and took the dust mop handle with me. I wasn’t crazy. I was as sane as I’d been in a long, long time.

===================================================

Could I have been expelled from the University of Pittsburgh for that incident? Possibly, but not likely. Was I crazy? Hardly. Still, it wasn’t my best moment, if you define good moment by always taking the high road. I suppose I could’ve reported Mike and Aaron to security and gotten the transmitter back that way. But at eighteen, I had already begun to get used to the idea that I had to take life on directly. That included taking risks and not following rules and procedures. I had to learn how to stand up for myself and for what I knew, even if it meant being seen as the angry Black guy or as a troublemaker.

On this day/date twenty-eight years ago, it worked. If only because the dorm mates I confronted probably had no business being in college in the first place.

My Father Jimme — Happy Birthday!

17 Saturday Jul 2010

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My Father, August 2007

On Monday, my father Jimme turns seventy years old. Seventy, 70, 7-oh! Amazing! Given the years of alcohol abuse, so much loss, so much pain, so much rage, and to recover and make it to the age of seventy? That’s a big-M miracle, the kind that you can only attribute to sheer strength of will and the grace of God.

I must admit, after the summer of ’92, I had my doubts about my father’s future. The few times I saw him that summer, he was drinking like he had never drank before. The first time I saw him, he accused me of lying about having my master’s degree. “No college gonna giv’ you a degree afta a year,” he said. Only when his Jewish bosses told him it was possible for someone to finish a master’s in a year did he believe me.

The second time I went to see him, his landlord Mrs. Smalls was about to evict him. But my father wasn’t there. Or, I guess he was, in a way. He had made plops of defecation, from the front gate and blue slate walk up to the front steps and porch, into the entrance way and foyer, up the gloomy carpeted steps, all the way to the attic bathroom next to his room. They’d been cleaning for hours, according to Mrs. Smalls, but it sure didn’t smell like it.

Fast-forward two years to Christmas Eve ’94. My mother and my younger siblings and I went on a bus trip to Cross County Mall and Toys ‘R Us in Yonkers. Jimme showed up at the last minute to join us and to regale us with his “po’ ass muddafuccas” and his other favorite Jimme-isms. We were on the 7 bus to Yonkers, packed with parents who were shopping late for toys and Christmas trees. Jimme was so drunk that he fell over on some people on the bus once, and fell into the rear stairwell one other time. I wasn’t embarrassed as much as I was disappointed and saddened.

So by the time I finished my doctorate at the end of ’96, I’d all but given up on my father turning things

Three Generations, May 2006

around. A few months later, my father, unemployed and no longer enabled by his former bosses, finally left New York for the family home in Georgia at the invitation of one of his sisters. By the end of ’97, I heard that he had cleaned up his act and moved to Jacksonville. Throughout ’98 and into ’99, I began to get calls from Jimme about how he was finally sober, had found God, and was getting married, to another woman named Mary.

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

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

That was eleven and a half years ago. I’m still amazed that I’m able to talk to my father as my father, and not as the person I used to have to drag out of bars on 241st Street or in Midtown Manhattan growing up. But most of all, I’m amazed how much I love him and care about him. Happy Birthday…Dad!