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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Big Wheel

A Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part Two

06 Saturday Aug 2016

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

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425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anti-Gay Slur, Big Wheel, c, Chevy Malibu, Dukey, Father-Son Relationship, Heterosexism, Hypermasculinity, Molestation, Mother-Son Relationship, Nathan Hale Elementary, Parenting, Pedophilia, Recovered Memories, Sexual Assault, Signs of Trauma


It took me until three weeks after the sex assault on the Nathan Hale ES playground before I told my parents. Those three weeks are a blur, but not the blur that the incident with the light-skinned teenager and his three friends would become until three weeks before my forty-fifth birthday

At the beginning of August ’76, my Mom and my dad Jimme were having another one of their vicious arguments. It was that Saturday afternoon when I finally learned that my Mom had filed for a divorce the month before. Anyway, I somehow managed to get myself in the middle of that argument. I complained that Darren’s bigger butt had been the final straw for my Big Wheel. It had broken in half after he tried to ride it earlier that week.

“I told him, it says ‘90-lb limit’,”  I said to my Mom (which I pronounced as “ninety lebs”) while pointing at the inscribed warning label on my now broken Big Wheel, crying.

“You broke that shit weeks ago!,” my Mom yelled.

“I didn’t break it. A bunch of kids did,” I said.

“And you didn’t try to stop ‘em?,” Mom asked.

“I did try to stop ‘em. But they took it and one of them stuck a pee-pee in my mouth,” I explained.

“I done told you not to leave the house when I’m not here! That’s what you get for not listenin’!,” my Mom screamed.

I was so shocked by how angry she was. I was mad, too. I didn’t think. I just ran out the house and out into the middle of the street. I saw a tan Chevy Malibu coming down the street and I just stood there.

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

The older, salt-and-pepper bearded and balding Black man didn’t slow down until he realized I wasn’t planning to move. He slammed on the brakes and came to a stop about three feet in front of me. The man put his car in park and got out. He then slammed his driver’s side door really hard, and yelled, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you tryin’ to get yourself killed? Where’s your mama?”

He grabbed me by the back of my chocolate-brown t-shirt and made me show him where I lived. We marched upstairs to the second-floor, where he proceeded to explain my suicidal actions. My Mom then took the older man’s belt and beat me with it in front of him, with Darren and Jimme watching. Afterwards, she said “Thank you” to the older man, and then sent me to bed without dinner. “Don’t you EVER do that again!,” she screamed.

Nine months after that bicentennial summer, we moved across town to 616 East Lincoln, a three-in-one, five-story Tudor-style apartment complex. After a summer camp at Darren’s Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 East Lincoln chased us around the vast two-building complex while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark-brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us and took us upstairs to my Mom and my eventual stepfather Maurice. The two young men said that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my Mom and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Both “dukey” and “faggot” were part of my vocabulary — again.

The mind of a child is a strange place. Mine was no different. For years afterward, I’d managed to forget these most painful memories. I managed to bury them without burying all of my other memories, so many memories that I have for the last forty-one out of my forty-five years. I somehow didn’t remember the connections between my Big Wheel, the light-skinned teenager and standing in the middle of South Sixth, waiting to be run over. I didn’t remember my Mom’s response to finding out that her six-year-old son had been sexually assaulted.

It’s ironic. Ironic because I’ve already written my coming-of-age memoir in Boy @ The Window. I spent the better part of a decade researching, writing and revising it before self-publishing it in 2013. I included excruciating details about my family, my Mom, my father Jimme. I included as many relevant and embarrassing events as I could about how I became the person I always wanted to be. And with all that work, I never remembered the moment a teenager forced his penis tip into my mouth.

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

I only remembered during the holidays in 2014. One night in early December, I had a really bad trying-to-escape dream — again. This time, though, I remembered the taste of a penis in my mouth, and then I saw the light-skinned teenager. Even in my dream, I said, “That’s him. That’s it.”

After I woke up, a flood of images erupted in my brain. The Chevy Malibu and me standing in the street. Seeing the light-skinned kid who  assaulted me on the playground at 616 on the same day the other kids chased Darren and me around the building while pelting us with pebbles and rocks. The wall of fear that my Mom had on her face when the neighbors told her that they thought Darren and me were “faggots” because we were standing so close to each other that we looked like we were “doing the dukey.”

The now-remembered incident explained so much. My Mom’s constant fear that I’d turn out gay. My father Jimme constantly calling me a “faggat” (as he pronounced it when he was drunk) whenever I stepped out of line or looked at people the wrong way. My Mom giving my one-time idiot stepfather Maurice carte blanche to “turn” me and Darren “into men” through Isshin-ryu karate and draconian physical abuse. Me being terrified at times when around Black guys on the basketball courts or in other social setting. My looking at young women from afar, attainable and yet all but unattainable for me. The sheer desire to save the people in my life from violence and destruction, especially my Mom and Darren, but the inability to do either.

My family’s fear of the mere possibility that I or my brother Darren could be gay drove many of their measures of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. So much so that they ignored all the signs of my actual abuse. Like standing in middle of the street to get run over by a car, were just considered “defiant” or “weird.” Or with me constantly chewing my fingernails right down to nail bed. Or me constantly stuffing sandwiches and other food down into the recesses of my winter coats, having already ripped out the pockets, and leaving the food there. Or the day I stood on Nathan Hale’s playground during recess in May ’77, when I took some string from my red and blue-striped t-shirt, gradually unraveled it, and swallowed nearly a third of it. My Mom figured she could beat the “something’s wrong with you, fool” out of me. My father calling me a “faggat” from the time I turned fourteen was just tough love, not a form of abuse piled on top of abuse.

Now that I remember everything about the physical and the sexual abuse, what do I do next? It’s been forty years since I found out how horrible life could be. It’s not as if I’ll be able to track down and then beat up the light-skinned teenager, who’s now in his early fifties, assuming he’s still alive.

I could start by revising Boy @ The Window. I wasn’t just weird because I wore a kufi, spoke too slowly, or grew up with weird people. I wasn’t just a child of poverty, abuse, and divorce. I was also a sexual abuse victim, all but completely unacknowledged, and yet such a major part of the story.

Forgiving my abuser could be at the top of the list. It would be difficult to be angry at someone whom I’d forgotten about for nearly four decades. But you know what? If I could just punch him in the throat and then knee him in the balls until one fell out and rolled down the street, that would give me some satisfaction.

Mostly, I’m just satisfied that I know my past in full. I already paid the bill. Now that I know what I paid for, I can move forward. I can look at my past, present, and future with more sanity than I thought possible.

Aside

Finding A Memory, Knowing the Whole Truth

16 Thursday Jul 2015

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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