The Meaning of Chicken McNuggets

23 Monday Jun 2014

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Chicken McNuggets, Class of '87, Contaminated Food, Coping Strategies, Distractions, Food, Food Critic, Food Justice, Food Policy, Food Politics, General Foods, McDonald's, MVHS, Operation Opportunity, Pink Slime, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sweet and Sour Sauce, Vanilla Milkshake

McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets with Sweet and Sour Sauce, November 17, 2006. (The Food Pornographer via Flickr). In public domain.

I’ve found it amazing over the years how much my diet and palate has changed, and how my cooking has changed with it. Once upon a time, I thought that Burger King, Arthur Treacher’s, and (to go more local) Mount Vernon’s Papa Wong’s and Clover Donuts had the best food in the world. I knew no other way of preparing fish other than frying it in oil and coating it with a combination of flour and corn meal. And any meal that cost more than $10 — whether eating out or in buying the ingredients to make a meal for my 616 party-of-eight — was a real luxury.

By the summer of ’87 — the summer between the end of high school and the beginning of my college journey at Pitt — I was working for General Foods (now Kraft Foods) in Tarrytown, New York as part of the minority access program Operation Opportunity (the details are all in Boy @ The Window). After work, I often stopped in White Plains at or near The Galleria to switch buses, since it took two buses and a three-quarters-of-a-mile walk to get from 616 and Mount Vernon to the company’s testing facilities down the road from the Tappan Zee Bridge. I also stopped at The Galleria to avoid the hum-drum grind of poverty and chaos at home, to get something substantial to eat, to check out and/or buy the latest tune. And, to feel like a normal seventeen-year-old, and not the boy-man who always felt as if he was part of some epic struggle.

As I described it in Boy @ The Window:

And it was a heaven, a haven, a distraction, if only temporarily, from all of my terrors and fears. Of being permanently alone, of not being able to establish real, lasting friendships, of not being able to love, of only being able to evaluate myself through the eyes of women who saw me as a boring automaton. Not to mention, of having yet another incident with my idiot stepfather Maurice over my refusal to submit to him as “Dad.”

It was also really my first time on my own for more than a few hours without the crutch of high school and Humanities, without the constant noise of my younger siblings tearing up the apartment like it was the Daytona 500. So with every bite of those six orange-yellow McNuggets and every slurp of that fake vanilla milkshake, I savored my quieter mind. I may have looked to others as if I was woofing down the food faster than Scooby Doo and Shaggy in the middle of a food orgy. But for me, those five or six minutes lasted more like twenty, as if I was in deep meditation or watching a bird flap its wings in slow-motion.

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

Twenty seven years later, and I can barely stand the sight or smell of anything McDonald’s — or any fast food in general. Thank you, by the way, Eric Schlosser and your Fast Food Nation (2002) book for making my stomach churn with every fast-food smell my nose can detect! I even make my own pizzas most of the time now! I buy my son Noah and my wife (on occasion) Mickey D’s, mostly McNuggets, and lately, with milkshakes that apparently now contain some dairy-like substances. As for me, I do sometimes eat a couple of fries, but my near-middle-aged tongue and stomach limits my ability to push down the food.

My palate after thirty years of cooking and progressing from $5 spaghetti meals for eight to broiling sockeye salmon in olive oil with a from-scratch fettuccine dish is far more sophisticated now. I no longer can lose myself in food in order to de-stress from carrying the weight of my world. Cooking, however, has been my one of my cathartic exercises for the past twenty years. It’s sometimes even more of a remedy than writing. Too bad there was never any hemp in those McNuggets, though!

My One and Only College Visit Before College

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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

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"Party All The Time" (1985), Black Males, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Classmates, College Visits, Concordia College, Eddie Murphy, HBCUs, Humanities, Rick James, Self-Discovery, Walks

Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, November 5, 2013. (http://concordia-ny.edu).

One of the many pitfalls of poverty in the midst of striving toward college was that I didn’t do a single formal college visit prior to taking the Amtrak to Pittsburgh in late-August ’87. (Ironic, then, that I’ve been on at least sixty college campuses to teach or lecture, for graduate school, for conferences, talks, interviews and other events in the past quarter-century). The only options for doing any college visits at all while at Mount Vernon High School (NY) were either the schools in the area or to go on the HBCU college visit trips to Howard and Hampton University. I had no interest in applying to an HBCU (which I’ll talk about later), and the prospect of visiting Columbia or NYU never really occurred to me until years later.

But I did have one inadvertent encounter with a college campus prior to arriving at Lothrop Hall on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus in ’87. It was in the fall of ’85. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I discovered something rather interesting about myself toward the end of the year. I understood, maybe for the first time, how much walking and nocturnal self-pleasure had replaced sitting on the radiator at the living room window as my after school and weekend distraction. Walking allowed me to continue to contemplate my future, to make sense of my senseless world. Very early on in my junior year, I went on a Saturday walk straight up Route 22, from East Lincoln and North Columbus. I ended up at Concordia College in Bronxville, a small liberal arts school in the middle of one of the richest towns in America. It was a cloudy and crisp early fall day, those first series of gray days you experience after a long, hot summer. I wore my gray hooded and zippered sweat jacket with my beat-up multi-colored and checkered long-sleeve shirt and some cheap, made-in-Taiwan blue jeans.

Even with that and my tall, Black male self on a mostly White campus, I seemed to blend in. Not a single person looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. Some of the students actually said “Hi” to me, and not that overly enthusiastic greeting, either. I walked across the campus, walked into some of the buildings and walked around some of the empty classrooms. After a bit more wandering around, I ended up at the library. It was surprisingly small, but the books it did have were the kinds I used to like reading. Old and dusty historical texts and subjects of interest only to old writers and historians. I saw students at tables studying or talking softly while studying. Then it dawned on me why the students didn’t automatically assume that I wasn’t a college student. I was dressed like they were, or,I guess, they dressed like me. Sloppy, but not too sloppy. It also dawned on me that you needed a college ID on the campus in case the guards suspected that you weren’t a college student. So I made my way from the campus and trekked back home.

This was my first and only college visit. And though I hadn’t stopped by the admissions office or spoken with a financial aid counselor, my wandering walk gave me much food for thought. The visit reinforced my thinking on what I needed to do in eleventh grade to guarantee both college acceptance and a scholarship. I assumed an academic scholarship, but an athletic one was still in the realm of possibility. I knew, again, that this was my make-or-break year to bring my grades up as far as possible. I had no idea what my class ranking was, but I assumed that I needed to be in the top fifteen or twenty to have my best shot. So I set the largest goal possible – making it to the top ten of my class.

Eddie Murphy (with Rick James), “Party All The Time” (1985) video (screen shot), November 5, 2013. (http://vimeo.com).

In the back of my mind, I knew even then that I didn’t want to attend a school with any of my classmates or with any reminders of Mount Vernon. So many of my Black classmates were already talking about attending HCBUs or New York area school. I knew that despite their relative maturity as eleventh graders, I didn’t want to be in classroom settings with the Rick James “Party All The Time” set or with White and Black classmates who thought of me as a caricature of a human being or Black male.

That walk to Concordia reminded me of a simple fact. That my path to college was my path, not to be determined by anyone else, and certainly not the people I didn’t even trust with a smile.

It’s Been 25 Years

18 Monday Jun 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Classmates, Family, High School Graduation, Leaving Home, Memorial Field, MVHS, Remembrance, Reminiscence, Self-Awareness

Me and My Uncle Sam, June 18, 1987. (Donald Earl Collins).

Today’s date marks a quarter-century since my Class of ’87 marched and graduated from Mount Vernon High School at Mount Vernon’s Memorial Field (see my post “It’s Been Twenty Years…” from June ’07). I guess that the seventeen-year-old version of me would look at me now and say, “Boy you’re old! What happened to you?” And the current me would say, “Life, you pathetic dufus!” in response.

I write this today a tired professor, educator and consultant. Tired from a week of scoring AP World History exams, grading students’ papers from my survey-level US History course, traveling to and from Salt Lake City. Tired from the vicissitudes of life, marriage and parenthood. At least, that’s how I feel sometimes. Most of the time, though, I feel like the person I’ve been for the past twenty-four years, someone who has a real bright present and even brighter future, regardless of how things may look from day-to-day or moment to moment.

That was and wasn’t the case twenty-five years ago. I really only had about three or four things on my mind on that hot and sticky 87-degree Thursday evening. One was about my family. Good, bad, and ugly all at once. My Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, my older brother Darren, and all of my younger siblings, and all going to my graduation. Getting myself and my younger brothers and sister ready was no easy task, especially without air conditioning.

Then, my Uncle Sam showed up, a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I hadn’t seen him since October ’84, at the one-time book store on Gramatan Avenue, where I used to buy all of my Barron’s test-prep books for the New York State Regents Exams, SAT, and AP exams. That was the only time I’d seen my mother’s brother since the picnic to end all picnic’s in August ’83 (see my post “Good Times, Good Times…Not” from August ’09). He still looked larger than life, all six-four and 240 of him, despite his bum knees.

Canadian Club bottle and goblet, February 12, 2011. (Craig L. Duncan via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My father Jimme was supposed to show up at 616 before we all left for the ceremony. And he did, just as I was about to pile into a cab with Mom, my sister Sarai, and Uncle Sam. Jimme was three sheets to the wind, liquored up real good, to celebrate my graduation. “Oh no!,” I thought, pretty much keeping my distance from him the entire evening. I already knew that Jimme would embarrass the hell out of me and Mom, not to mention any parent who talked with him.

Thought number two came in all of the folks to whom I said good-bye or good riddance as the ceremony came to a close. After throwing our burgundy and yellow caps in the air, we went over to our now former classmates — who were now friends, lovers, acquaintances, and in some cases, foes — to embrace and hug, to cry and scream and dance and twirl around in the air with. Along the way, A (of “The Legend of ‘Captain Zimbabwe’” post from May ’09) grabbed me and gave me a hug. “You made it, man,” he said. It startled me that he did that. The late Brandie Weston and I hugged, but not before saying, “You’ve changed a lot over the years. You used to be an asshole you know!”

I caught up with Crush #1, giving her a long hug and a mug as a gift. “I’m really going to miss you,” I said. I also gave a mug to H, V (the valedictorian in my post “Valedictorian Burdens” from July ’09), and Crush #2, telling them all that “when you’re drinking coffee late at night and trying to finish a paper, think of me.” When I gave a mug to Crush #1 and embraced her, T apparently was nearby watching the event unfold. I went over to her to say “Good-bye” afterwards. T snorted and raised her nose up in a huff, as if I’d given her the coup de grace (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’10)

But the thought that has stayed with me over the years wasn’t something that I was fully conscious of that day, given all of the excitement that was and is a high school graduation. It had been in my head for more than five years. See, despite having erased much of the stigma that was me being me at twelve in 7S and at 616, I knew that I could never fully be the person I knew I could be while living in Mount Vernon. People think I’m weird now, but at least I know what it is about me that makes some dumb asses act that way about me. The dumb asses who thought that “book learnin'” and listening to “White music” was wack back then were too numerous and too vocal for me to avoid. Especially since some of them were at 616 or my parents.

Grandstand at Memorial Field, Mount Vernon, NY, November 28, 2007. (Anthony22 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I knew that I had to leave. That’s what I thought about the entire walk home from Memorial Field. And I did walk, alright, for a full hour afterward. If I could’ve, I would’ve walked all the way to Pittsburgh that night, as I knew it wouldn’t get any better for me in Mount Vernon than a high school graduation. I’d already left my first hometown, at least in my head. It would take another fifteen months to confirm it.

When my wife came to Mount Vernon with me for the first time during Christmas ’99, we walked through downtown and The Avenue. After ten minutes, she asked, “Are you sure you weren’t adopted?” Sometimes, looking back, I ask myself the same question.

In-Abel-ed

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Being Black, Black Teachers, Blackness, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Diversity, Estelle Abel, Harold Meltzer, HBCUs, Intelligence, Lessons, Mentoring, MVHS, Oreo Cookies, Race, Teaching, Un-Black, Uncle Ruckus

“Murder of Cain by Abel,” Ghent Altarpiece painting (1432), Jan van Eyck, January 6, 2007. (Paunaro via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I’ve written about the infamous Estelle Abel in my blog on this date (or at least, this time of year) for each of the previous five years (see “My Last Day,” “The Last Class,” “AP Exam Blues,” “Honors Coronation,” and “Twenty Years in a Week” for the full scoop). She was the chair of Mount Vernon High School’s Science Department while I was a student there, and remain so for years afterward.

As anyone should be able to tell from my previous posts on Abel, I have a bit of an ax to grind. More like a samurai sword, actually. The woman and her ten or fifteen minutes of berating me as both a student and as an un-Black young adult Black male ruined my last day of high school. Forgive me, then, for not being completely objective when it comes to the subject of Estelle Abel and her methods of teaching, motivation, and guidance on issues of academic achievement and race.

Though I’ve also forgiven her, I’m not God, and with my memory, I can hardly forget. But if there had been any chance at forgetting, I lost that opportunity in a conversation I had with my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer back in the ’89-’90 school year. Estelle Abel came up as a topic because of something that had occurred with one of his AP students. Apparently, this particular student, a female basketball player, had made the decision to apply to some predominantly White institutions, and had left HBCUs off her application plate. And apparently, Abel had gone after this student for doing so, all but calling her a traitor to her race by taking the route that a majority of traditional African American students have been taking since the ’70s.

Two Oreo Cookies, February 7, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). In public domain.

In all, it took Meltzer about twenty minutes to tell what would’ve been a five or seven-minute-story for the long-winded. That’s how much he could meander in the forests of his stories sometimes. Then I told Meltzer my Estelle Abel story from my last day of school. It sparked a conversation that I wasn’t quite prepared to have. One not only about Estelle Abel, but about the African American faculty at Mount Vernon High School in general.

For most of the rest of the conversation, Meltzer was in full gossip mode, telling me things about individual teachers that I shouldn’t have known, and mostly have forgotten, thankfully. But I did say to him early on in this part of the conversation that I really didn’t know much about the Black teachers at MVHS. The reason was simple. I didn’t have a single Black teacher as my teacher in four years of high school. Humanities classes — particularly the Level 0 and Level 1 classes — had few, if any, Black teachers, much less any teachers of color.

I didn’t say that exactly, but it was the essence of what I said and thought about while Meltzer yammered on about the disunity among MVHS teachers. To think that from Ms. Simmons’ math class in seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School until my history and Black Studies classes my junior year at Pitt, I’d gone without a single African American teacher or professor. I knew that some of the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo, Humanities coordinators, MVHS’ leadership and the Italian Civic Association.

But how much of this was my fault, being so myopically focused on grades, college and getting away from 616 and Mount Vernon, I didn’t know. After all, I learned in the middle of my senior year that Dr. Spruill taught a Black history class, that there had been efforts to bring in more Black teachers and other teachers of color at Mount Vernon High School dating back at least four years.

Uncle Ruckus screenshot, from Aaron McGruder’s animated TV series The Boondocks, July 4, 2011. (Grapesoda22 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of picture’s low resolution.

Still, none of that really mattered to me that year. I had already and unsuccessfully attempted to thread the needle between a cushy senior year and a year that prepared me for the rigors of college. Anything else, whether it was Black history, a trip to West Africa or a visit to some HBCU campuses, was hardly on my radar.

Whatever my lack of focus could be construed as in ’86-’87, it wasn’t because I wasn’t Black enough, or ashamed of being Black, as folks like Estelle Abel implied or accused me of in their thoughts and words, and with their eyeballs that year. Sure, I was weird, and readily admit to being weird, aloof, and emotionless in my MVHS days. But given the hell that I lived with at home and in that community in my last years in Mount Vernon, weirdness and a focus on getting out through college should’ve been applauded, or at least tolerated, without teachers like Abel staring at me as if I was demon-possessed.

That it wasn’t tolerated was the real shame. It took me years to get over it, that uncomfortability of being judged by other Blacks as too smart, too weird, too un-Black in their eyes for my own good.

Pre-Prom Paradoxes

26 Saturday May 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Youth

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Celebration, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Crush #1, Dating, Friendships, Humanities, Humanities Program, Irony, Muse, MVHS, My Mother, Paradoxes, Prom, Relationships, Self-Discovery

“Stop Defacing Signs,” a stop sign ironically defaced, June 24, 2011. (Scheinwerfermann via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

This week a quarter-century ago was my Class of ’87 senior prom. Though I may tell some of the more boring and significant stories from this prom one year, this won’t be the case this year. Especially since the days before presented themselves with a theme that has remained a constant in my life for more than three decades — irony. If irony were a food, I could feed all of the Global South with it, and still have enough left to keep me in protein and P90X recovery drinks until I turn seventy.

And irony was a full-blown buffet the week before the prom. What told me that maybe my prom date “J” wanted more out of this arrangement than I did was an incident at our Humanities Program honors convocation that Tuesday evening (see my post “Prom-Ethos” from earlier this month). Mrs. Flanagan (then the Humanities Program coordinator for Mount Vernon High School) and the Mount Vernon Board of Education wanted to honor us collectively for making Humanities a grand success.

We had a keynote speaker, one who was a recent college grad and MVHS alum who had started her own business and wanted to talk to us about the value of the education we were about to pursue. It was an opportunity for our parents to share in our success.

My Mom decided to come to this event, only the second time she’d been to MVHS in four years. We got there, with Mom dressed in her best business dress, with high heels, hair done, light-brown makeup powder and black cherry-red lipstick on. I was somewhat dressed up, with a collared shirt, cheap black shoes and the polyester black pants my mother mail-ordered for me at the beginning of the year. The event was in the school cafeteria, where we were to have punch and snacks before the festivities began.

The first person I introduced my Mom to was J, whose mouth fell open like I’d slapped her in the face. She looked at Mom as if I’d been cheating on her with Lisa Lisa. “J, this is my mother,” I said a second time. J just stood there, angry. Then she walked away in a huff.

“What’s wrong with her?,” my mother said in complete disbelief herself, with the “her” part lingering in my ear.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Clio [Muse of History] reading a scroll, (Attic red-figure lekythos, Boeotia c. 435–425 BCE), The Louvre, March 17, 2008 (Jastrow via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Crush #1 must’ve seen the whole thing unfold, because she came over right on cue, gave me a hug, and then politely introduced herself to my mother.

“Thanks,” I whispered as I walked over to talk to J while Crush #1 had a conversation with my Mom, something I’d hoped my prom date would do.

“That’s not your Mom,” J said when I reached her table. As if I would lie about something as serious as that.

“Yeah, J, she is,” I said, pissed that she’d assume that quiet me would suddenly become bold enough to bring an older women to a Humanities.

I knew Mom looked young, but she still had twenty-two years on me. Since she didn’t want to talk about it, I just walked away and joined in the conversation between my former crush and the woman who was the reason Crush #1 was my former crush.

That Crush #1 came to my rescue was ironic and poetic, given the ways in which my muse has come to my rescue over the years. That one of my nicest classmates acted a bit like an ass that evening contradicted everything I’d seen her do and say over the previous six years. That anyone would think that low-confidence me could walk into a ceremony with a thirty-nine year-old woman was both idiotic and ironic. Yeah, even in the land of friendships and emotions, irony walked with me, hand-in-hand and stride-for-stride.

My First Vacation, Valedictorian Included

10 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race

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Arlington Virginia, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Diversity, Family, Friendship, Georgetown University, Humanities, Metrorail, Mount Vernon New York, MVHS, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Spring Break, Suitland High School, University of Pittsburgh, Vacation, Valedictorian

Ballston high-rise (on right), Arlington, VA, where I stayed with "V" and her roommate during first DC area visit, June 26, 2008. (http://therealestatedirt.com).

I’ve lived in the DC area now for nearly thirteen years, but it was this time two decades ago that I came to the DC area for the first time. This was my first vacation ever as an adult, and the first time I’d gone on a vacation of any kind since my mother took me and my older brother Darren on a day trip to Amish country in Pennsylvania at the end of third grade, in June ’78. The visit had as many layers to it as a Vidalia onion, as it involved my past, present and future, and all at once.

At the center of my visit was spending time with my Humanities classmate and friend “V,” the valedictorian of Mount Vernon High School’s Class of ’87. I crashed at her and her roommate’s place in the Ballston section of Arlington, Virginia for a week during my spring break in March ’92. As I said in a previous post (see my “A Friendship Changing Lanes” post from October ’11), I’m not sure how our acquaintanceship ever became a friendship. Somewhere between having circumstances in which our fathers weren’t around consistently, or at least being able to relate to Billy Joel, or both of us scoring “5”s on the AP US History exam.

Healey Hall (front gate perspective), Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 19, 2010. (Daderot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The fact that we went our respective ways, to Pitt and Johns Hopkins, helped. The fact that we wrote each other about some of our social triumphs and challenges helped more. Most importantly, it helped a lot that we both were more honest about our family troubles. Everything from my mother’s need to divorce my idiot ex-stepfather and the issues with my younger siblings to V’s mother’s health issues and her struggling with burnout trying to watch over her family while going to school. So, by the time I began my second semester of grad school, we’d become fairly close.

I hadn’t seen V since the day before New Years Eve ’88, the last Friday of that year. I hadn’t planned to visit V at the start of the year, but by the middle of February, I needed a break from Pitt and graduate school (see my “Paula Baker and The 4.0 Aftermath” post from January ’12). As I knew that I was two months away from finishing my master’s, I had begun to check out some alternatives to doing my history PhD at Pitt.

Key Bridge, connecting Georgetown area with Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA, at sunset (picture taken from west), September 18, 2008. (Jersey JJ via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Through Dr. Transatlantic Studies himself, Marcus Rediker — he was a Georgetown University history professor who somehow had been given an empty office in Pitt’s history department — I made arrangements to do some informational interviews at Georgetown during my early March spring break.

As soon as I told V of my opportunity to check out Georgetown, she offered me a place to stay for the week. I made arrangements through a couple of friends driving to Virginia to have them drop me at V’s that first Saturday in March.

The trip was a whole series of firsts and seconds for me. I rode Metrorail for the first time, went to Capitol Hill for the first time, and visited Howard University for the first time. I also spent one full day hanging out with V at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where she was a first-year math teacher. Other than a couple of rowdy students, V was a very good teacher, and not just for a rookie.

My meeting at Georgetown went pretty well also. I managed to get a sweatshirt out of the deal, one that I still wear to this day. Aside from that, finding out from a then second-year grad student (and now and associate professor in African American history at Georgetown) that his annual stipend was only $7,500 a year in expensive DC made my decision for me. I decided that despite the name recognition, Georgetown wouldn’t be where I’d earn a PhD.

I also visited with V’s sister and mother toward the end of that week. V’s sister was in the process of transferring to Goucher, a far cry from the rising high school freshman I’d last seen a week before my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. V’s mother seemed happier in Virginia than in New York, but medically speaking, she had gotten worse since ’87. Her speech was slower and more slurred, and her upper body motions were even more limited than I last remembered. It was a reminder that as much as things had gone well for V over the years, she also faced the intense pressure of trying to care for a slowing dying mother and her sister, and all at twenty-two years old.

What I came away with from that week as my friends picked me up the following Saturday afternoon were two things. One, that I really liked being in an area with great diversity, with Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians from all walks of life, but without the rude chaos and energy that was and remains New York. Two, that V and I had truly become friends, as adults in our twenties, mostly unattached from how we saw each other when we were in Humanities and high school.

Salutatorian Story

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Youth

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Black Male Identity, Boy @ The Window, Class of '87, Harold Meltzer, Humanities, Identity, Mitt Romney, Mount Vernon High School, Narcissism, Popularity, Sacramento, Salutatorian, Self-Reflection

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.