What A Fool (Make) Believes

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Born In The U.S.A.", "What A Fool Believes" (1979), Black Masculinity, Blocked Shot, Bruce Springsteen, Crush #1, Crush #2, Disillusion, Doobie Brothers, Emasculation, Fantasy, Inception (2010), Kenny Loggins, Make Believe, Manchild, Michael McDonald, MVHS, Naivete, Nightmare, Patrick Ewing, Pitt, Reality, Romantic Crushes, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sentimental Fool, Stupidity

Inception (2010) movie wallpaper (scene of falling too deep in a dream to come out of it), January 31, 2015. (http://www.alphatucana.co.uk/).

I am a firm believer in the idea that just about everything in our lives happens for a reason, even if the reason involves multiple layers of chance adding up to a certainty. Meaning even the unexplainable, given enough time, study and webs of connections, can add up to a certain amount of truth, even if we as humans cannot except that limited truth.

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

The beginning of ’87 put me in the middle of that scenario regarding my masculinity and my relationships with everyone in my life. I knew that at seventeen that I’d already been an adult of sorts, with everything that was going on with my family at 616. But while I might have been an overburdened high school senior with adult responsibilities and adult-level decisions to make, psychologically and emotionally, I was still a twelve-year-old. One damaged by bearing witness to my stepfather beating up my Mom on Memorial Day ’82, the abuse I’d suffered at his hands afterward, and my ostracism my first years in Humanities in seventh and eighth grade. I was “a dog that been beat too much” by my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, and I’d started wondering if I had stayed one year too long before heading off to college, because my last year of K-12 wasn’t going so well either.

I was also in the middle of my second classmate crush in five years. I was more than three years removed from my most intense feelings for Crush #1 (outed at Wendy in Boy @ The Window), only to feel stomach flutters for the young woman who’d been my Crush #2 (Phyllis) for about thirteen months. Except I was too scared to tell anyone, including myself, of how I felt about her.

Nor did I really understand why I felt the way I did when I was around her. With Wendy, I could point to personality, intellect, quirkiness, among other attributes, and the fact that prior to seventh grade, I’d never met anyone like her. Phyllis, though, I’d known for more than five years, and while she was attractive and smart, it wasn’t as if she was so unique.

Doobie Brothers, Minute By Minute (1979) album (with “What A Fool Believes” on Track 2), January 31, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Still, even in the back of my more mature and emotionally cold part of my mind, I knew what it really was. Phyllis had made this beaten and abused dog feel better about himself in the worst of times, between seventh and tenth grade, back in his Hebrew-Israelite days. Even if that emotional altruism was more about saving me from hell in this life and the next, and less about liking me, her actions tugged my deeply bruised heart strings. Not Phyllis’ fault by any stretch. Just a reality. I was a “sentimental fool…tryin’ hard to recreate what had yet to be created,” like the fictional man in Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes” (1979).

By my senior year, I thought about Phyllis from afar, just like I’d done with Wendy nearly five years earlier. With my imagination, I could almost imagine anything. Including all of the indicators of romance, from dating and joking to kissing, to getting together during holiday and summer breaks during college. Everything, except anything sexual. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how. It was because in the conscious side of my mind in which my emotional age remained at twelve, I couldn’t see any young woman my age as having a carnal side, of being anything other than a near-perfect being. Phyllis may as well have been a nymph or angel, and not a real person.

Somehow I knew I was setting myself up for a year of hurt. I knew that I had to grow up, to “be a man,” to find a way to actually say that I liked Phyllis, if only for myself to hear. And I did tell it, to myself, to her, to people I came for a time to trust. I even sent a letter to Phyllis after the fact, only to be hurt even more, just like the dumb ass Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins described in “What A Fool Believes.” “As he rises to her apology, anybody else would surely know…,” as the song goes. Only in my case, to crash and burn like the Hindenburg in New Jersey did in 1938.

Patrick Ewing blocking a Scottie Pippen shot, United Center, Chicago, March 14, 1996. (http://chicago.cbslocal.com).

By the end of ’88, though, I realized the truth. That my crush on Crush #2 wasn’t a real crush at all. It was my crutch, my coping strategy to deal with the fact that I really hadn’t felt anything about anyone in my life since those heady Wendy days. Those were my final days of childhood, those days before I’d learn for the second time in my first twelve and a half years how little control I had over my life, how little love and affection there was to find. As the song of that phase of my life went, I “never came near what [I] wanted to say, only to realize it never really was.” I never made Crush #1 “think twice,” and made Crush #2 reject me like Patrick Ewing in his prime smacking a basketball into the fifth row of Madison Square Garden.

I suppose that this happens to all boys and girls, men and women and transgender at some point or another in their lives. At twelve, it felt glorious, while at seventeen, it was painful and embarrassing. I’m just glad that I made it through that year, 1987 — though hardly happy to go and grow through the process — and came out on the other side of it ready to grow, risk and protect my heart again.

Born In The U.S.A.

08 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Born In The U.S.A.", American Politics, Bruce Springsteen, Economic Inequality, Oligarchy, Poverty, Power of Music, Racism, Social Change, Social Justice

What does it say about a nation or society when a quarter century can go by and the same issues that were front and center then are ones that vex us now? What does it say about us when our standard operating procedure is to avert our eyes to problems that we know must be fixed yesterday? How should we see ourselves if the arguments of our grandparents and parents become our own, especially as we tidy them up for our children and our eventual grandchildren?

If I were Bruce Springsteen (and the E Street Band, for that matter), I might be a bit pessimistic right now. It’s been twenty five years since his groundbreaking single and album made him a household — and not just a New York tri-state area — name. All of his work prior to the summer and fall of ’84 contained threads of social commentary on America’s malaise. But Born In the U.S.A. and “Born In The U.S.A.” raised his level of folksy commentary to a new level, at least for those of us who weren’t listening to Nebraska or who hadn’t heard of the band or Springsteen before.

It was such a simple song. And yet it expressed all of the disappointment, disillusionment and disgust of a generation of folks who grew up seeing America one way. Only to find out that the promise of America the Beautiful and free that they were fed growing up was really somewhere between porridge and gruel. “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground” is such a bitter, yet appropriate way to start a song about a Vietnam veteran whose life never worked out the way it was supposed to. Work hard, do the patriotic thing, and expect to have a job and a comfortable life, if not a happy and prosperous one was the expectation of most Americans. Not poverty, debt, welfare, homelessness, drug addiction, undereducation, unemployment and incarceration.

I became a closet Bruce Springsteen fan because of “Born In The U.S.A.” With my mother out of work and on welfare, my father in the middle of his third decade of alcohol abuse, a stepfather with the familial skills of Charles Manson, I could relate to all of the rage and confusion in the song. It was a refreshing change from the coke-induced pop, R&B and rap of the period. The mid-80s were so weird. Between Springsteen and the E Street Band, John Mellencamp and U2, you had Thompson Twins, Doug E. Fresh, Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” and “I Would Die 4 U,” and battles over who was the real Roxanne. At least some artists were awake and aware enough to write something for those of us whose lives weren’t exactly a Benetton commercial.

Here we are, a quarter-century later, and nothing really has changed. The highly educated have at least something to fall back on, while those of us with a high school diploma or less face a permanently uncertain future. The rich, while not getting as rich as they were just two years ago, remain far richer than those of us working hard but not getting anywhere. We are still fighting wars with little long-term purpose and without sufficient benefits to those who are fighting on our government’s behalf. Our government continues to drag its feet on anything that would benefit anyone with an income under $200,000 a year.

It’s no wonder that somewhere between two and three million Americans are in jail or prison, that three out of ten of us never graduate from high school, and that the richest one percent of Americans have a net worth greater than the bottom 80 percent of us. It’s such a shame that it could render all of us helpless. I, for one, may need to consider refugee status in a nation with even a modicum of universal health care and moderately less hypocrisy in its government.

But Bruce Springsteen hasn’t given up, at least in his music. His work continues to speak truth to power, to say things that most in the music world don’t have the courage or the innate wisdom to say. It’s unfortunate that what sells today is the bling of booty and booty, and not the thought-provoking lyrics and feelings of folks like Springsteen, of artists like Chuck D and Tupac, of those who dare to use music as a weapon of social change (although Pink, John Mayer and James Blunt are occasional exceptions).

With the end of a disappointing first decade of the twenty-first century looming though, maybe we can still hold out hope for a more permanent nexus between our wild world of pop culture and our need for a stimulated social consciousness. That kind of hope is what keeps me going.