Tag Archives: Boy @ The Window

Pregnant Pauses

02 Friday Nov 2012

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Ultrasound of fetus, 2nd or 3rd Trimester, November 1, 2012. (http://brmh.org).

I agree with President Barack Obama and with so many leading women. Men — especially men in leadership positions — should just shut up when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. Still, my life has given me a unique perspective on a woman’s right to choose, if only because I’ve had little choice as a child and a husband to be involved. I can only say that choice isn’t easy, even for pro-choice males. But I can also say that I knew more about choice at twelve than most men would ever care to know, and more about bringing new life into the world as a result.

The two examples of “the decision” that stand out most for me are twenty Novembers apart, in ’82 and ’02.

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving ’82, I noticed something about my mother. At a time when we all looked starved, my mother looked round. Her stomach and cheeks were telltale signs. So I asked her, my tweener voice cracking all the while.

Sickled and normal red blood cells, November 1, 2012. (original source unknown).

“Mom, are you pregnant?!?”

“Yeah, Donald, I’m pregnant,” she sighed.

“What! You got to be kidding! You mean you’re still having sex with him?”

“Watch ya mouth, boy!”

“Mom, what are we going to do? You can’t have a baby, not now, not with all these mouths to feed!”

“Donald, what I’m supposed to do?”

“You need to get an abortion, that’s what!”

“I don’t believe in abortion. It’s against God’s will.”

“Well, we can’t feed the kids that are here now, so how can you feed it? Get an abortion Mom, before it’s too late!”

Before my mother could say anything else, I stormed out for yet another store errand for milk, diapers, and all the things I couldn’t eat. I wanted to cut Maurice’s balls off and shove them down his throat. I wanted to shake Mom until her eyes rolled back in her head. Most of all, I wanted to get her to an abortion clinic yesterday (see my post “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12).

That “it” turned out to be my sister Sarai, my late sister, born nearly four months after I came out as a pro-choice feminist and a stress-out Hebrew-Israelite teenager. She lived for twenty-seven years, five months and two days with sickle-cell anemia, without ever knowing I once preferred her not to be born (see my post “My Sister Sarai (Partial Repost)” from July ’10).

Over the next two decades, I’d become so fed up with kids and family, 616 and Mount Vernon and so many things in my life that I once thought that I’d never get married or become a father. The people in my life growing up in Mount Vernon — like my ex-stepfather and the young folks in the neighborhood — refused the responsibility of fatherhood (and in a few cases, motherhood). The idea that there would ever be a child of mine running around without me being in their life made me determined to limit my casual relationships and ensured that I would always have protected sex.

Even after getting married in ’00, I still wasn’t sure if I really wanted a child. Out of any seven-day period, I would’ve been happy to be a dad for four days, and miserable for the other three. I wanted to make sure my wife and me could afford parenthood, that we had the emotional and psychological capacity to take care of any child we brought into this world.

By the middle of ’02, though, it was obvious that my wife wanted to have a child, a son. Coming off of a family intervention, in which my then seventeen-year-old brother Eri had made my mother a grandmother, I was even less excited than I otherwise would’ve been (see my post “Dear Mama (More Like, ‘Dear Mom’)” from October ’09). Still, I loved my wife, and I loved myself enough to think that if I liked the idea of a kid four out of every seven days, it was worth a try.

We didn’t try very long. By Thanksgiving Day ’02, I picked up on my wife’s change of emotions before she did. I had asked her to watch over heavy cream that I was warming up to make a chocolate sauce. The cream wasn’t supposed to boil. It did anyway, as my wife wasn’t paying full attention. Instead of being argumentative with me per usual about my pointing out her lack of attention to detail, she started crying, as if it was the end of the Law & Order franchise. I was startled, and said, “Honey, I think you’re pregnant.” She laughed at first, but as we would eventually find out, I was correct.

It was one of the happiest moments of my life! I had made my wife immeasurably happy, and I found myself wanting something, perhaps for the first time. To be a great father, to live long enough, to be healthy enough, to be productive enough to be the father that I never had growing up.

Noah in Baby Bjorn/my parka, Silver Spring, MD, December 3, 2003 (Angelia N. Levy).

If it had turned out that my wife had not wanted to be a mother, and she had become pregnant, and it turned out that she wanted an abortion, I would’ve fully supported her. Not just because I wanted her to be happy, and not just because I’m more firmly pro-choice now than ever. I’ve seen my mother and too many other mothers who’ve made the wrong choices for themselves and their lives.

Life can be long and miserable when making bad decisions, especially when it comes to bringing another life into this world. That anyone would think it a good idea to limit what is already one of the most difficult decisions women and families have to make is anti-Christian and immoral, not to mention just plain stupid.

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.

Origins of the Obsession

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Obsession Night For Men, Calvin Klein, June 12, 2012. (http://www.dealsdirect.com.au).

To think that it’s been a quarter-century since I went into obsession mode over a girl. Not love, not so much a crush, but a bonafide obsession. Well, it’s a confirmation of how pathetic I’d allowed myself to become in the summer between the end of high school and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

The funny thing was, it was an obsession with Crush #2, and one that almost didn’t happen. After all, I’d given up on seeing Crush #2 again after our graduation ceremony. So the week after, I began working at the General Foods’ (now Kraft Foods) scientific testing facilities in Tarrytown, just down the road from the GM plant and the Tappan Zee Bridge over to Rockland County. I was hired as part of their Operation Opportunity program, a summer internship program for students of color.

It was my first office job, and it showed. I had to take two buses to get to and from work and walk the seven blocks from the bus stop at the corner of North Columbus and East Lincoln to 616. I took the 40 or 41 bus to downtown White Plains and transferred to either the 13 or the 1W to Tarrytown. I was consistently late to work in the first three weeks, not even knowing to call in to let folks know I was going to be late.

About a week into the job, I boarded the bus for White Plains on my way home from work and decided to vary my routine. I got off at the White Plains Galleria, a state-of-the-art mall back then. It was five stories of concrete and a glass ceiling, of shops, eateries and a movie theater.

Mechanically processed chicken, the key ingredient in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, pouring out into small tubs, October 5, 2010. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

The mall had a mom-and-pop cookie store that had the best chocolate chip-walnut cookies this side of Mrs. Fields. They also had a McDonald’s, a luxury for me for most of the decade. I stopped to buy my ultimate pre-dinner snack: a six-pack of McNuggets with that sweet-and-sour sauce, small fries, a vanilla “milk”shake and two gooey and warm chocolate chip-walnut cookies. It was heaven-on-earth food for me. When I went outside to wait for the 40 bus back home, there she was. Crush #2 was standing there, also waiting for the bus. We exchanged “Hi”s and started some small talk about college, music and movies. It turned out that Crush #2 had a summer job in White Plains just a couple blocks from the Galleria.

Even as pitiful as I was, I knew I had a window of opportunity to get beyond the idle chatter to the “Do you want to hang with me?” question. But I just didn’t and couldn’t ask. Not on that commute home, and not on any coincidental bus trips after that. In all, I probably had about a dozen opportunities to ask Crush #2 if she liked me or if she wanted to go out with me throughout July.

A standard non-conversation conversation went like

“Hey, [Crush #2].”

“Hi. How are you?,” she’d asked.

“All right,” I’d say.

“How was work?”

“Okay. How was your day?,” I’d ask in response.

“Fine,” Crush #2 would say.

Then, there would be the occasional “Did you see…?” some movie, or a “Did you buy…?” the latest album or tape. Otherwise, it was like two ex-spouses attempting small talk before switching the conversation to concerns about their kids.

These bump-ins weren’t deliberate and not even “by accident-on purpose.” When I did see her, I didn’t get the sense of euphoria that I had when I saw her in high school. My heart didn’t go pitter-patter, and my throat and mouth didn’t turn dry. At times, I felt a sense of dread when I’d come out of the Galleria with my comfort food in hand and Walkman on, only to have to talk to Crush #2 without the cover of school as a pretext.

I preferred to think of Crush #2 from afar. On meandering walks that often took me through Crush #2’s neck of the woods. Or when I listened to certain songs, particularly love duets and Whitney Houston. I never once dared to walk over to her house, and I refused to call even though her family’s number was in the phone book — I did look it up, though. I couldn’t even quench my libido’s growing thirst by thinking of her and how she looked.

In the back of my mind I began to realize that my attraction to Crush #2 didn’t have much to do with Crush #2. Yet when I did bump into her, I tried through our short conversations to see if there was any “there” there. Anybody with about two years’ more maturity than the twelve-year-old in a seventeen-year-old that was me knew that I was on the short road to rejection and embarrassment. And that rejection would lead to six months of obsession over Crush #2, and stalker-esque thoughts, if not stalker actions.

But I couldn’t get that smile of Crush #2’s out of my head. Even if it was more fake than any Chicken McNugget I’d ever eaten. In a year filled with rejection, scorn and externally imposed invisibility, the eventual rejection I suffered from Crush #2 was a bridge too far.

Mitt Romney (via http://news.yahoo.com), May 10, 2012. (Charles Krupa/AP).

Salutatorian Story

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1594-96) – talk about someone with interpersonal issues – May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

As I began to work on Boy @ The Window six years ago, I realized that my story would be far from complete without the words and thoughts of my former classmates, teachers, and family members in my head. Thoughts about themselves. Thoughts about Humanities. Thoughts about me. Thoughts about our world and our times. After all, I hadn’t thought about most of these folks in nearly two decades.

I had already started with my late, wonderful teacher and mentor, Harold Meltzer several years earlier. My first interview with him was in August ’02, but the first time we discussed the possibility of me doing Boy @ The Window goes back to February ’95. I was working on my doctoral thesis, living in DC for a couple of months while hitting the archives and libraries up for dusty information. In need of a writing break, I gave him a call on one cold and boring Saturday afternoon.

Meltzer answered with his usual “H. MMMMMMM. here?,” the M’s strung together like a long string of pearls bouncing slightly as you’d lay them gently on a table. When I said who it was, he said, “DONNIE!! Why, it’s so good of you to call!” in his halting suburban New York accent. Little did I know that this was the start of a three-hour-long conversation.

We spent a lot of time talking about the salutatorian of my class, the Class of ’87. To me, he — let’s call him ‘S’ — was always an enigma. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

I felt the side effects of S’s success. Teachers telling me that I should be more like S, as if I was S’s younger, underachieving brother. I saw how S occasionally cashed in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be S or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me.

I said as much during a three-hour meeting we had during my first work-related trip to Sacramento during the second week of March ’06. When S asked what I thought of him, I said, “I thought that you were…obsequious, ingratiating…no, that’s too strong…I sensed that you needed to be liked by our classmates and teachers.” I don’t know exactly what S thought about my description of him, but then again, he did ask.

Mitt Romney’s proof positive that short of himself, calling someone obsequious is a strong statement. Romney at CPAC 2011, Washington, DC, February 11, 2011. (Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia). In public domain.

S asked during our first meeting and interview in March ’06, “What do you think I thought of you?”

“For the most part, as far as you were concerned, I didn’t exist . . . I mean, I was there, of course, but I wasn’t in any of your circles, so I didn’t really exist for you as a real person,” I said in response.

I based that answer on S’s rare attempts to make conversations with me, ones that were mostly of the shaking-his-head-in-confusion ones. He didn’t get my attraction to the pop/rock band Mr. Mister, an ’80s prelude to Creed, I guess. “They can’t sing,” S said to me in Warns’ English class once as a reference to Mr. Mister’s #1 hit “Broken Wings.” The incident on the school bus on our Albany/FDR trip was another example (see my “An a-ha Moment” post from October ’10).

Meltzer never made me feel like a was a freak. Nor did he ever engage in comparing me to S. But he obviously was concerned about him, and had been so even when we were in eleventh grade. As for me, he said, for probably the one-hundredth time, “I never worried about you, Donnie.”

At the time of my ’95 conversation with Meltzer, I’d recently published an op-ed in my hometown and county newspaper, “Solving African American Identity Crisis,” Somehow our discussion of that piece led to a discussion of S. Meltzer told me that S “had a really hard time at Harvard” and that he’d “graduated with Gentleman’s Ceeeeeeeee’s,” the C’s rolling off his tongue in the process.

Meltzer asked if I knew what S’s problem was when I brought up the whole June ’89 conversation I had with S, the one that showed me his obvious confusion about himself (see my “Strange Days” post from June ’09). After an unusually long pause on the phone — it was long even by Meltzer’s own standards — he said, “You’re exactly right.” We spent the rest of our S discussion talking about him in high school and his need to be liked as a significant part of his identity issue.

I thought of all this as me and S ended our meeting that cloudy Northern California day six years ago. As I explained my plans to track down Crush #1 as part of what would become Boy @ The Window, S warned that she “has some interpersonal issues.” As if she were somehow off her medication when she visited S in ’04. I said, “Don’t we all?” in response. Neither of us had any room to talk about anyone else’s issues.

Promoting Fear of a “Black” America

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Fear of a "Black" America front cover, July 2, 2004 (Donald Earl Collins).

It’s been seven years since my first radio interview and book signing for my first book, Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004). In all, I spent sixteen months actively promoting the book, through PR releases, contacts at universities and through my work at the Academy for Educational Development, and a huge volume of email exchanges and phone conversations. Between this nearly full-time work, my full-time job, and being a full-time parent and husband, I was exhausted by the end of ’05.

It’s unbelievably hard work to promote a book. Especially a self-published one. Not to mention, one that I’d proclaimed as an in-depth response to the conservative movement’s “Culture Wars” on all things “multicultural.” One that was a combination of personal vignettes with interviews and historical research to tell the story of African Americans and other groups of color coming to grips with their notions of multiculturalism in education and in their everyday lives. Granted, it was immediately available via Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble/B&N.com and the now out-of-business Borders.com. But if I’d done nothing, I would’ve sold maybe one hundred copies in ten years.

My work to promote Fear of a “Black” America began about a year and half before it hit virtual and actual shelves in September ’04. I created a website for the manuscript (http://www.fearofablackamerica.com) in February ’03,  learning HTML in detail in three weeks’ time. Within a year, the number of unique visitors to the fledgling site varied between 500 and 1,000 a month. After three years of coming close — but still failing — to publish Fear through traditional publishers like Beacon Press, Random House and Verso, I politely moved on from my agent and decided to self-publish.

A couple of months into the process, I hadn’t much success beyond a couple of professors using copies of Fear in their African American studies courses (a completely random occurrence — they were in different parts of the country). My friend Marc took it upon himself to have me meet him and a friend of his for a long talk about how to organize a marketing campaign for the book at the end of November ’04. While they were certainly well-meaning, their advice provided no real insight into the process other than what I already knew. I just needed to be persistent.

That persistence paid off in early February ’05. In a span of three days, I did an evening drive interview with Howard University Radio (WHUR-FM) and a book signing at Karibu Books. Both, at least, gave me some momentum beyond Black History Month, as I continued doing book signings in the DC area and through my job up in New York that spring.

My promotions reached their height in April ’05, when I did an hour-long interview with Pacifica Radio DC (WPFW-FM) about Fear. There, I realized how much more interested caller were in my personal background and how that shaped my views of multiculturalism. I also learned that some of the callers — whom I didn’t know — had actually read my book. It made all of the groundwork I’d done to get to this point worth the effort. By then, I’d cracked the top 100,000 in the Barnes & Noble list (84,000), or roughly ten to fifteen sales per week, and the top 200,000 (161,000) on Amazon.com (another 10-15 sales per week).

WPFW 90.9 Interview (Part 1), Fear of a “Black” America, April 25, 2005

WPFW 90.9 Interview (Part 2), Fear of a “Black” America, April 25, 2005

During that summer and fall, I continued to promote Fear, with another interview on Pacifica Radio DC in August, and a book signing at Howard University Bookstore in October ’05. But I was running on empty. As fast as email was, it didn’t have the immediacy of what we now call social media. And in ’05, Facebook was in its infancy, Twitter didn’t exist, and Blogger was a relative novelty. Even with a website that received 4,000 hits and over 1,200 visitors a month, I couldn’t generate the cascade effect that I could right now.

My final act of promotion for Fear of a “Black” America came in August ’06, though John Kelly’s Washington Post Metro Column, “Getting Work Done – On the Way to Work,”  in which I talked about editing my book on Metro Rail for two years. By then, I’d pivoted to work on Boy @ The Window, knee-deep in reopening memories that hadn’t been well-considered when I was a teenager.

Between September ’04 and December ’05, I promoted Fear of a “Black” America using $3,500 of my resources, and made over $1,000 on the book, selling about 600 copies in sixteen months. Overall, I’ve sold over a 1,000 copies between ’04 and ’08. Those numbers are on par with most works published in academia.

But I was hardly satisfied. I knew by ’09 that with a social media apparatus, I could’ve sold ten times as many books. I knew that my memoir manuscript deserved more than the fate of self-publishing, that I’d want to find a path to a traditional publisher. Still, despite my moments of despair, I believe that my persistence in finding an agent and a publisher is the right way to go. It’ll make it easier to work hard in promoting Boy @ The Window. In that case, I’ll be doing it in the virtual light of day.

If Boy @ The Window Were A Movie…

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Not So Young Man @ His Window, December 10, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

…who would I hire to play the characters in my memoir? Especially if I could reach across space and time to pick actors with the range necessary to play complicated characters, like yours’ truly, for instance. Hmm. I have a few ideas:

Rob Brown, ala Finding Forrester (2000) – He’d been a perfect character to play me during my high school years, between the blank stare and face, his height, and his ability to show awkwardness around Whites in authority.

Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace in Finding Forrester (2000) Screen Shot. (http://filmdope.com).

Khandi Alexander, ala The Corner (2000) – While she isn’t nearly as tall and is a bit chestier than my mother, her affect as the down-and-out West Baltimore mother on the groundbreaking HBO miniseries fits here.

James Avery – He would be in the role of my idiot ex-stepfather, with his bulging eyes and belly, and with his flashes of rage, yeah, he’d been perfect.

Clarke Peters, ala The Wire, Treme – I thought about someone like Sammy Davis, Jr. playing the role of my father, Jimme, but Davis’ acting range wouldn’t have been enough to capture both my father’s drunken rage and the comedy that often served as an overlay to my encounters with my father growing up.

Clarke Peters at Edinburgh Festival 2010, August 6, 2010. (Ausir). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

Jesse L. Martin – The man’s acting range is enormous, and would capture the complexities of playing someone like my older brother Darren, a super-shy kid who himself played the role of someone mentally retarded while also having taught himself to read at the age of three. Only, Darren didn’t know how to stop.

Jesse L. Martin at Annual Flea Market and Grand Auction hosted by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, September 26, 2006. (Insomniacpuppy). Released to public domain via Wikipedia.

Harold Perrineau, ala Oz – His face alone captures a lot of emotion, and show does the way he says his lines, something that I’d want from someone playing my best friend from elementary school. Perrineau’s face would also capture duplicity, a necessary ingredient for betraying a friendship. Just like many of the characters in the HBO series Oz.

Thandie Newton – This was a tough one, as I also thought about Rosario Dawson in the role of Crush #1. But Newton has quirkiness as an actor that Dawson lacks at times, and for all of the wonderful traits of the character known as Crush #1, quirkiness is key.

Thandie Newton at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1639139527/in/set-72157602744288487/). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Ray Liotta – Not nearly as tough, this despite the fact that the real “A” had blondish hair when we were kids. Liotta’s meanness, his laugh, his Italian coldness easily capture what “A” was like as my tormentor in seventh grade.

Nathan Fillion, ala Firefly (2002-03), Serenity(2005) – the near-perfect actor to play the contrarian one, “JD” (see my post “The Contrarian One” from February ’11), his aloofness, his sense of superiority, his maverick affect throughout our years in Humanities together.

Nathan Fillion as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (2002-02). (Wikipedia.org).

Alison Arngrim, ala Little House on the Prairie (1974-82) – She played Nellie Olson on the show, a bratty, well-off girl who only knew how to view the world through her own selfish lens. She could play any number of my former White classmates, especially many of the ones who left Humanities between the end of eighth and the beginning of tenth grade.

Little House on the Prairie's Nellie Olson as played by Alison Arngirm, circa 1977. (http://www.flickr.com/3595/3433153010_b5f3cae12a.jpg).

Gabrielle Union – as this actor has done the affect of pissed off and Black preppie well over the years, she’d be great for the role of Crush #2, the one the main character (me) becomes obsessed with in the six months after graduating high school. Like the character, Union can crush hearts.

Rita Moreno – A fixture in the acting business for more than sixty years, one of a handful to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award, she could easily slip on the role of a guidance counselor like the chain-smoking, stereotyping bigot Sylvia Fasulo. The only other person who’d fit this role is Callie Thorne from the USA show, Necessary Roughness.

Brian Dennehy – There aren’t many actors who could play my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer. You see, you’d need to be able to spit, to tell long and strange stories, to have moment of macabre laughter and moments of bitter rage. Dennehy, though, has experience doing all of those things, though not in one role. Plus, he’s tall and rotund enough for the part.

Brad Dourif, ala Dune (1984), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – He’s weird enough to play the role of Regis, one of my older friends from my undergraduate days at the University of Pittsburgh, someone who was there for me the semester I went through homeless and three months without money.

Brad Dourif at the Lord of the Rings-Convention Ring*Con in Bonn, Germany, November 23, 2002. (Diane Krauss). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation.

I could go on and on. But that’s unnecessary here. This ensemble cast, with the right script — and a time machine — would make Boy @ The Window come alive, and have me blushing and crying over and over again.

The Visit

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) Screen Shot, October 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

Over the course of a decade, between January ’02 and December ’09, I exchanged emails, interviewed by phone and visited nearly thirty former classmates, teachers and administrators from Mount Vernon, New York public schools for my book manuscript Boy @ The Window. Not to mention family members willing to be honest about life in Mount Vernon and 616 East Lincoln Avenue. Not to mention my family intervention nearly ten years ago. The saying “you can’t go home again” is such an understatement.

At times, my walks down memory lane have left me verklempt, or feeling that I’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Meeting with a former tormentor from my Davis Middle School days was strangely pleasant, while talking with my class’ salutatorian was both illuminating and a little weird. I met with some former Humanities classmates who seemed more ornery than former Georgetown coach John Thompson after a sleepless night dealing with idiot refs. I talked on the phone with former classmates and teachers who either couldn’t remember details about our school, or flat-out lied about some of the things they had said to me and about me twenty-five or thirty years ago.

But of all of those meetings and time machine-like encounters, none made me more nervous than my interview with Crush #1 five years ago. I was nervous for any number of reasons. I hadn’t seen her in nearly seventeen years when I went to see her in the Old South in October ’06. My plan was to be up front about my crush, my borderline love for her back in ’82, which would make anyone anxious or feel really silly, I guess.

And I was stuck at this point of my memoir, the part about how my crush on Crush #1 came about, and how abuse and domestic violence at 616 brought it to a crashing end, between March and August ’82. I knew what to write. I just didn’t want to relive all of those emotions, as they led me to seriously consider suicide within a year and half of all of that.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931), October 18, 2011. (http://www.moma.org). In public domain.

What I walked into on that rainy October ’06 day mirrored my own Silver Spring, Maryland residence. It was a modern-day carpeted flat in an apartment-home townhouse, appearing as lived-in by the scattered toys in the living room and foyer. Crush #1 was making stew peas. If I’d been in another frame of mind, a look of shock would’ve come over me. Crush #1 cooking? Put that above the fold of the New York Times! Yet since I was willing to expect anything from the new Crush #1, I wasn’t all that surprised.

Her husband greeted me warmly, which was a bit of a surprise. I’ve been around enough couples to get a sense of how these kinds of interactions are supposed to work, regardless of sexual orientation. It’s where the husband or the “man of the house” sizes me up, regardless of my intentions. Crush #1 walked out of the kitchen and gave me a hug, the kind friends give each other after seventeen years apart.

Then I met her daughter, this chip off the not-so-old block, a great combination of Crush #1’s and her husband’s facial features. She was an adorable four-year-old wanting to learn about the world around her. We shook hands and made animal noises for about two minutes. I felt at home. It was as if I walked into my apartment and had to chance to see myself, my wife, and my kid in action, with sarcastic banter and silly noises included.

There was so much to discuss and so little time. So I started where the twelve-year-old in me would’ve if he had a voice. I asked about her mother, her family, her growing-up years in New York, her time in school and in Humanities. What came out was so different from what I expected because it was so similar to my experience and because our similar experiences occurred during the same time frame.

It was all so normal, so typical for people from our respective backgrounds, so, well,  human. I liked this real-life version of Crush #1, and not in that twelve-year-old, I-think-I’m-in-love kind of way. That was something else I really didn’t expect. Not only did I enjoy the visit. I enjoyed getting to know one of my ex-classmates for the first time.