Tag Archives: Brandie Weston

The Lazarus Woman

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Barbara B. Lazarus, obituary picture, July 17, 2003. (http://cmu.edu).

Barbara B. Lazarus, obituary picture, July 17, 2003. (http://cmu.edu).

Now that my book’s been out for a couple of months (between two and four months, depending on the e-book platform, actually), I’ve found that my thoughts sometimes drift toward those that are no longer around to read it.

Not so much my family or nemeses, though. Sarai, my only sister, who died in July ’10, would likely have never read a word of Boy @ The Window — it would be too honest an assessment of life at 616 for her. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was already unhappy with my numerous posts about his borderline personality issues and constant psychological and physical abuse of me and family when I picked up the phone one day that same week my sister passed.

As for my former classmate Brandie Weston — to whom I’ve dedicated my memoir (actually, a co-dedication that includes my son) — maybe, if she had been well enough. My favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer, though, would’ve begun reading  Boy @ The Window five minutes after it had gone live on Amazon.com!

But of all of those folks who are no longer a part of this corporeal world (or who have gone into some state of seclusion from it), one other person stands out today. My dear friend and mentor from my Carnegie Mellon years (and the six years after I finished), Barbara Lazarus. I’ve discussed her here before, but not lately. Probably because I do tear up sometimes when thinking about her support of me specifically and her work at CMU in general. Barbara helped make my otherwise rough and dehumanizing experience at CMU manageable and even career-affirming.

As I wrote about Barbara for the memorial service at CMU in September ’03:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17.  For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields.  She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself.  I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

That only approximated how much she meant to me during and after my four years of doctoral success and failures at CMU. The months immediately before my advisor Joe Trotter and my committee approved my dissertation were the worst, as is well documented on this blog. Barbara convinced me to not become hot-headed and drop-out of the program with a completed first-draft of my dissertation under my belt. She also managed to keep me from requesting a change of advisors so close to the finish line. She did offer to “step in” as her duties as Associate Provost would’ve allowed, but warned me that this political solution would delay my graduation. My connection with Barbara kept me from meeting Trotter in one of CMU’s parking lots late at night wearing a ski mask and dark leather gloves!

She became my best reference professionally and otherwise after those dark days ended with the end of ’96. She read my articles and my first book before they went to print. We swapped stories about family and life and religion. We stayed in touch even after I moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in ’99. Barbara died on July 14, ’03, just sixteen days before my son Noah was born. It’s been a decade, a month and eight days since she passed, nearly as long as I actually knew Barbara (roughly between October ’92 and July ’03). Boy, I wish I could’ve shared my first photos of my son with her!

There were a few people like Barbara at CMU during those years. Susan McElroy (now at UT-Dallas), John Hinshaw (at least prior to my Spencer Fellowship), Carl Zimring (before the O.J. verdict), the Gants and the other Black doctoral students I’d met there (all fourteen of us) were my CMU lifeline beyond multiculturalism and Trotter tired sense of migration studies.

But Barbara Lazarus and I had a friendship that went well beyond academia and career, and went undamaged by petty jealousies or sudden bursts of outrage from jury verdicts. I’d been to her home, met her husband and her kids, learned something about her as a person, and in the process, managed to be my better self even in the worst of circumstances. That is being a good mentor, friend and person. I just hope that I was the same to her, and that Boy @ The Window proves to be the same to others.

Adverbs and A-Holes

22 Saturday Oct 2011

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

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Good or well cartoon, January 24, 2009. (Gaurav: http://mbatutes.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of lower quality resolution with purpose for describing a part of speech.

Puberty is such a strange time in life, whether you’re male or female. It’s even worse when you don’t have the maturity to deal with the changes, physical, social and emotional. Add to that no real guidance from parents, teachers or other adult figures about how to deal, and you have a recipe for disaster, even social suicide. That became the case for me thirty years ago, in a fight with a history, with my late ex-classmate, Brandie Weston.

But I planted the seeds for it almost a year and a half before, the second Saturday in May ’80, the very first time I met Brandie. My father Jimme had taken me and Darren to his “girlfriend’s” two-bedroom apartment on Mount Vernon’s South Side. His alleged girlfriend — drinking buddy, really — turned out to be Brandie’s mother. When Brandie walked through the apartment door an hour into the visit, I greeted her with the words, “Wow, she’s fat!,” as if I’d complimented her on her great beauty (for full story, see “First Impressions and Brandie” post from May ’10).

Irony, of course, has been one of the ways I’ve come to be sure that there is a God. Why else would I have ended up in Humanities and in the same classroom with Brandie in September ’81? I had no doubt that Brandie told her Pennington-Grimes friends about the incident as soon as she saw me in class on the first day of seventh grade.  Every time I saw them, my shy “Hi’s” were greeted with grunts, names like “dumb ass” and “idiot,” or just plain ignored.

My cold war with Brandie became a fight only weeks into seventh grade. It wasn’t much of a fight, though. It was in Mrs. Sesay’s classroom, our 7S homeroom where we started the day, ended the day, and had our first-period English class. At the end of this day in October, Brandie was clearing out of room from the back, passing by my seat on the left side of the classroom toward the door.

“Dumb ass,” Brandie said out of nowhere, as usual.

“You’re stupid,” I said, not even bothering to look up as I put my plastic Mead, three-ring and five-subject notebook in my book bag.

Mike Tyson laying out Larry Holmes, January 22, 1988.

Within a couple of seconds, I got pushed from behind. I turned, and Brandie threw a punch into my chest. I threw one back into her right arm as she recoiled from landing her first punch. We were fighting in the back of the classroom.

It was two semi-nerds in a fight of words, lots of shoves, and a flurry of half-hearted punches. It was an ugly display, like watching a Larry Holmes fight or Muhammad Ali in his last days before his retirement. In one corner, at five-foot-two and 120 pounds was me, in the other, at five-foot-seven and about 150 pounds was Brandie. I certainly didn’t want to fight a girl. Brandie seemed to think that she could pound me into the ground, hitting me on top of the head a few times.

At one point I punched Brandie in the chest, only to find that her chest felt spongy. It dawned on me that Brandie had breasts. I stopped pushing and punching her right then and there, somewhat in shock from the revelation.

“You’re a pervert!,” Brandie yelled while two of her friends pulled her away from me.

I didn’t know what “pervert” meant — not that I would’ve admitted such a thing, since I was the “smartest kid in the whole world.”

“Well, you’re an adverb!” I yelled in response. Someone I pulled that out of my brain to call Brandie in response.

Of all the words — adverb? That ended our fight in horrific laughter from Brandie and the classmates who witnessed it. It was another About A Boy moment. It was a weird moment, even for me. I was embarrassed, all but sure that my classmates thought that I was incredibly dumb.

My fight with Brandie had awakened some sleeping wolves, what I called the Italian Club long before we actually formed one for our Italian class. And these preteens had social adjustment issues that made me, Hebrew-Israelite and all, look like a model preteen by comparison — a story for another post. But, still, on the next to last Friday in October three decades ago, I made myself into the adverb greater, as in an asshole to a greater degree. Seriously.

On Women and Wired Weirdness

05 Saturday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, music, Youth

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[Why Sade? Closest I could find to my dream-life muse, and most appropriate video I could find]

Getting a bit long in the tooth to be rattling off about Crush #1 again, right? After all, yesterday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fight that led to a crush that led to some sort of falling in love for the first time. The three-month period between March 4 and May 30 of ’82 shaped the ways I saw girls and women from the age of twelve until my early thirties. The crush on Crush #1 and its inevitable side-tracking as my then stepfather knocked my mother unconscious in front of me helped shaped my feminism, my womanism and my sexism.

In all of that, I’ve learned that I was wired for this weirdness. Because as a person of deep thought, a boy surrounded by sexism and misogyny, and a lonely and semi-ostracized preteen, the sum was much greater than these contradictory parts.

To think that this all pretty much started because I picked a fight with Crush #1 at the end of class in seventh grade. Almost all of my extracurricular incidents that year began or ended in our homeroom with our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay. I know that she’s a principal somewhere these days, but back then, her lack of behavioral leadership skills in the classroom led to more verbal abuse and fighting than a group of gifted-track kids should’ve stood for. Anyway, the incident began because Crush #1 asked a question about a subject that Mrs. Sesay had spent the entire week going over, a concept that Sesay would test us on that Friday. I laughed out loud — thinking that I was only snickering — after Crush #1 asked that question.

Thinking nothing of it, I began to pack up after the 2:15 pm bell rang. Crush #1 came up to me and pushed me from behind.

“You’re an ugly, arrogant asshole!” she said with the distaste of a ballerina being asked for money by a junkie.

I called her “stupid” and then said something else stupid. “You’re an idiot!,” Crush #1 yelled as she threw two punches into my chest and a third at my jaw.

The fight lasted about fifteen or twenty seconds, but after landing a punch on her left boob and nipple, I stopped fighting, already descending into the land of the idiot romantic. All while Crush #1 kept hitting me, then being pulled away from me by a couple of her friends. One of them, the recently deceased Brandie Weston, called me a “pervert” as they exited the classroom.

I know that I wasn’t the first boy in history to start a fight with a girl who I’d come to like or love, but I do think that boys who do that have a lot of weird in them. Mind you, I hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, so my testosterone levels weren’t high enough yet to be the cause of my brain malfunction. No, my very sexism and her fierce sense of tomboyish feminism was why I liked her in the first place, and drank deep from that well for the next three months.

The Memorial Day ’82 incident with my mother changed what was an otherwise innocent crush and love into something weirder and more meaningful. I think that’s why it has so clearly affected how I’ve seen girls and women over the years. Crush #1 defended herself, my mother tried and couldn’t. Crush #1 was cranky and usually personable, my mother polite and as close-minded as a clam in deep water. Crush #1 would be fine whether she knew I liked her or not, my mother a damsel-in-distress that needed someone with sense and care to help her.

The weeks following that Memorial Day I made a decision to put my mother first. The side effect of that decision was that I’d spend the next fifteen years or so using Crush #1 as my template — and my mother as the anti-template — for understanding women, for befriending, dating or not dating women, for women I’d put on a pedestal from afar and for women I’d merely sleep with. In the end, I’d resent myself and my mother for that decision. And another six years trying to understand why.

Thinking about it now, it still amazes me how much of what occurred between ’82 and ’96 was part of an unconscious decision process. But since the end of ’89, I’ve gotten a reminder about once every six weeks. Crush #1 has been a part my dreams and nightmares, a muse that would surface some of my wiser thoughts. She’s a reminder that the twelve-year-old in me isn’t dead, just dormant.

The muse reminds me of how little I do know about women and romance, even after eleven years of marriage and more than two decades of various relationships overall. And that the struggle between the various strands of feminist, womanist and sexist thought in me remains just that.

First Impressions and Brandie

27 Thursday May 2010

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Half-Sleep Mug Shot

A year and a half before me and Brandie were together in Humanities and 7S, my father Jimme took me and my older brother Darren to his “girlfriend’s” two-bedroom apartment on Mount Vernon’s South Side. The place felt bigger to me than it actually was. Maybe it was because of the day we made this visit. It was a Saturday in May ’80, when May used to mean early spring, and not May showers, October winds, and August heat and humidity, like it does now. It was sunny, and that sunshine found its way into that apartment that day, highlighting heavily polished wood and making the yellow walls brighter. Even though Brandie’s mother and Jimme were having drinks and paid me and Darren little mind, it was nice getting out of our sparse space at 616. It was good that Jimme actually showed up this time.

About an hour into the visit, Brandie walked into the apartment door. She held several bags in her hands from shopping. All I noticed was that Brandie was taller than me, and wider too. I saw her as a woman of massive girth, somewhere nearing six feet in height, the stereotypical Black woman whom people like my mother had spent the previous decade of my life making fun of. I couldn’t resist. Like a mindless idiot, I said “Wow, she’s fat!” with glee in my eyes and a welcoming smile all over my face. For me, it was as if I had said, “Wow, you’re gorgeous, and your skin has a wonderful glow!”

Brandie’s reaction was one of stone-faced, speechless shock. Jimme gave me a semi-chuckled “Donald!” to let me know that I had said something inappropriate, but other than that, nothing. Brandie didn’t scream or holler, Brandie’s mother said nothing about it, and everyone — including Brandie — carried on with conversations until we left for home. I learned that Brandie attended Grimes and about Humanities for the first time. I didn’t know that I’d be a classmate of hers sixteen months later.

We ended up fighting inside of six weeks of being together in 7S. I thought I was the “smartest kid in the whole world,” while Brandie thought I was a “dumb ass.” After punching her in the breast, I was also a “pervert” — and pathetic me didn’t even know what “pervert” meant — for the rest of the year. Boy, I really was a dumb ass back then!

It took me until the end of high school for Brandie to see me any other way other than the idiot ten-year-old that I’d been. By then, she had changed as well, and mostly no longer cared for Mount Vernon or most of us as her classmates. But, she didn’t hate me anymore, at least. Brandie and I hugged at our high school graduation in ’87, but not before saying, “You’ve changed a lot over the years. You used to be an asshole you know!”

She was right, of course. Unfortunately, she’s not here for me to say that. Or to say that I’m sorry. Not just for calling her fat. Not just for my prejudice toward people with obesity. But for not revealing my truer self, my better self to her, not in ’80 or ’81 or ’87. Despite all evidence to the contrary, sometimes we really only get one chance to make a good impression on others.

More on Brandie

30 Saturday May 2009

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Brandie Weston, Santa Monica, California, circa 2006, March 19, 2009. (Robert Cotnoir).

It’s all too unfortunate how much we can learn about someone once they’ve passed away. All secrets can come to light after we’ve died. If our death is through an unfortunate accident, a coroner can perform an autopsy and find out what we’ve been eating, snorting, ingesting, imbibing, what Rxs we’ve been taking, what diseases we may or may not have. They could do a genetic profile, and if we’ve giving consent, use our organs as a gift of life or to teach medicine to others. Beyond that, our words, our deeds, our dreams and our shortcomings are all there for others to look at. All anyone has to do is be curious.

That’s been the case so far as I’ve looked into the life of the late Brandie Weston off and on over the past twenty-one months. In that time, I haven’t learned much more than what I already knew about her last years before her death in August ’07. Through public records, I discovered that Brandie had left New York sometime in ’02, lived for a while in Montana, spent a bit of time in the Bay Area, and made her way to L.A. and Santa Monica by ’05 or ’06. She had been homeless pretty much that whole time. There’s also evidence of vagrancy arrests and her own paranoia regarding the police and being medicated through the bits and pieces I and one of her best friends from our high school days pulled off of the Internet.

I’d like to know more about Brandie’s last years and days, but that’s going to take a lot more work, like an investigative story piece. I need to reach out to her mother again, who didn’t want to talk about what happened when I called her a year ago. I might have to contact her sister, but that may mean opening up some bad memories for both of us. It may even mean me going to Santa Monica or L.A. to talk to folks at local homeless shelters. That, of course, takes money, and I’m pretty tapped out right now from doing Boy At The Window in terms of tracking down people and memories.

But I’ve learned a bit more about how Brandie lived in her years after high school. I’ve received at least a dozen emails from her SUNY Purchase classmates and friends, and some anonymous communications as well. All of them seemed shocked about Brandie’s end. All of them seemed like they knew Brandie — or at least a side of her — better than anyone she grew up around. All of them seemed like they would’ve wanted as much information about her mental illness and homeless state as they could’ve gotten in real time during all of those years before her death. It was nice to know that Brandie’s calling as a music artist took her to places that she did want to go, and that her SUNY Purchase and other friends wanted to go there with her.

This is as important a lesson as anyone can learn from life. However we leave this world, it’s important to have touched as many lives as possible with your calling, your dreams, your successes, even your shortcomings. It’s always important to have friends in your life who know the real you, not the one you have to show at work to get a promotion or at home to please family or at school to satisfy your teachers and your alleged friends. From the looks of things, Brandie had more than a few of those.

But not in total. Obviously Brandie didn’t exactly go around sharing the news of her mental illness and her homelessness with most folks. From what I’ve uncovered so far, she also didn’t share too much about her family or her Mount Vernon, New York past either. That’s unfortunate, and for several reasons. These college and music artist friends were the people most likely to have understood what she was going through and how much hell she had to go through in her final years. They would’ve been there for her in ways that even her family couldn’t (and likely wouldn’t) have been. Keeping her past, her struggles, her emotional aches and pains, the things that vexed her all bottled up couldn’t have helped her state of mind or decision-making in the years after ’02. It would’ve tormented Brandie, as it would anyone with aspirations and the talent to reach them under less trying circumstances.

As a writer and an educator, I understand the grand irony of a calling. That without the pain and trauma of the past, I wouldn’t be the writer or the teacher that I am today. For Brandie, those things should’ve driven her, maybe even made her a better singer and artist. There’s a danger to embracing one’s past and one’s pain, though, because both can become an addiction, driving people out of one’s life in the process. In the case of a couple of our former high school classmates, I think that’s exactly what happened. I just wish that Brandie had at least given her SUNY Purchase friends a chance to know that part of her before she died, and certainly before she left on a multi-year, homeless, cross-country journey to nowhere.

It makes me think of the still relatively new Nickelback song, “If Today Was Your Last Day.” What would really matter? Who would I choose to spend my last twenty-four hours with? As much as I want to publish Boy At The Window, I’d likely spend the day with everyone I’ve ever loved, make amends to whomever I felt I needed to, and go to a park to spend time enjoying nature. I’d leave my book manuscript with someone whom I could trust to publish it. I’d make them promise, but then I wouldn’t think about it again. I hope that Brandie didn’t spend so much of her precious few moments of clarity thinking about what could’ve been. I hope that those of us still here do make the most of Brandie’s warning to us to get our acts together while we still can.

Brandie Update

24 Monday Sep 2007

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After several weeks of looking for additional information, I confirmed through my father, who’d talked with my mother, who talked with Brandie’s mother, that Brandie Weston indeed died in August in California. I don’t know all the details yet, but it appears that my former classmate was not only homeless and mentally ill, but also seriously ill (physically speaking) as well.

It’s been a hard couple of days. As much as I held out hope that maybe this was all a rumor gone awry, I knew deep down that Brandie had died. The Google searches, the calls to the coroner’s office in L.A. and the area homeless shelters had given me a fragmented picture of her life in the last couple of years, just enough for me to know that her last days were far from pretty. Although we weren’t close by any stretch, I still have felt some sorrow for her hellish life and far too soon death.

Brandie’s death is a reminder, at least to me, that we must strive to live our lives to the fullest, that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee and that the important things we need to do with our lives ought not wait. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have fun or be happy, for in reality, all the important things in life, if we were to pursue them, should bring us fulfillment and joy and give us the opportunity to have fun.

So many of us want to be seen as special, as important, as successful in our careers and in our lives outside of work that we forget that life is about connecting to others and to ourselves in ways that enable us to be true to ourselves. For all of the horror of Brandie’s last years and months, the one thing that might have been the most heart-wrenching of all was her giving up on herself, her dreams, her ever connecting to another human being in a fulfilling and wonderful way.

Brandie is a character in Boy At The Window, a character that won’t be revised as a result of her sad end. She confirmed much about the value of taking an optimistic approach to life. But she also confirmed how life can run each of us over when the mind and heart betray us, when by will or force end up living life in our heads, in our imaginations, in our hopes or dream or nightmares. I managed to fight my way out of my own imagination ages ago, to temper my heart and head with an acknowledgement of reality beyond my own mind, as well as the realization that I could use the hope of imagination to change my reality.

Brandie in her last years wouldn’t get that chance. I’m just glad that her suffering is over and hope that in all of my searching threw her life that I’ve learned something about myself as well.