Tag Archives: Coming-of-Age

The Third Armpit of Hell

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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


Illustration of Dante’s Inferno, Map of Lower Hell, 16th century. (Giovanni Stradano via Wikipedia). In public domain.

During most of my Pittsburgh years, whenever someone I knew asked me what it was like to live in the New York City area, I often said two things. One, that “New York was a great place to live if you have money.” But, “if you don’t have money, New York could be like the third armpit of hell.”

I didn’t even bother to discuss Mount Vernon until I was well into graduate school. Too unknown, too complicated to explain its proximity to the Bronx and to midtown Manhattan. And from the average Pittsburgher’s perspective, it was a distinction without a difference. As far as some were concerned, Mount Vernon could’ve just as easily been outside of Buffalo as it could’ve been in the heart of Harlem.

But I definitely knew better, that my relationship with Mount Vernon and “The City” was a love-hate one, born from my growing-up experiences during the Reagan years. The lens with which I viewed the New York City area, a trifocal one of race, poverty and “outsider” status, made me ambivalent about my times growing up in Mount Vernon and all of my times in New York.

2 NYC subway train with graffiti (cropped), 1980s, December 20, 2009. (Cope2 via http://www.doobybrain.com/). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture.

I have my father Jimme to thank, though. Without him, I would still be afraid of New York, not just ambivalent about it. Drunk or not, working or on his way to a hole-in-the-wall bar. Jimme would take me and my older brother Darren out and down to the city often enough, to ride the Subway, to hang out with him in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and especially Midtown. Whether it was to help him with his janitorial work on weekends, or just to hang out, we frequented Manhattan and other parts of the five boroughs off and on between ’80 and ’85, ’82 — the year of abuse — excepted.

Because of that year, the longest time I spent outside of the city growing up was between April ’81 and July ’83. After not making it down to Manhattan in all of ’82, we went to Midtown in July, where we learned about two of my father’s watering holes between 43rd and 47th. They were both near Mickey Mantle’s restaurant on 47th. He also had an Irish pub he’d like to go to around East 59th and Third, a drinking bar near his job on 64th and Columbus, and a couple of places near Macy’s on 34th Street. Because of our height and the times, when it was still legal for eighteen-year-olds to drink in public watering holes, me and Darren were allowed into these fine establishments. I learned a lot about vermouth, vodka, Cosmos and Long Island Iced Tea that summer.

Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse in New York City, March 4, 2006. (Janke and Diliff via Wikipedia). Permission granted via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

I also learned a lot about the not-so-nice side of New York in those years. I recognized this as I’d board the Uptown 2 Subway from West 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan at the tail end of rush hour. As I’d board the train, I’d notice the crunch of humanity in all of its oblivion, self-absorption, and diversity. As the doors close, I’d watch as the express train passed 50th, 59th, and 66th Street before it would grind to a halt at 72nd Street. I’d notice that a fair number of the White passengers alighted here. Between 96th and 125th Street, the load of the train would gradually lighten as about half of the passengers who’d crushed me between a tall, stale-breathed smoker and a woman who wasn’t my girlfriend were now at street level.

About three-quarters of the passengers for the rest of my trip would be Latino and Afro-Caribbean. After another hour of endless stops in the Bronx, the 2 would pull me out of my slumber as it would slowly roll into the rickety East 241st stop.

By the time I was a rising senior at Pitt, I certainly didn’t need my father to accompany on my trips into Manhattan. I also avoided the long trek from 616 across Mount Vernon to 241st to take the 2 whenever I could afford to. Metro-North was a luxurious godsend compared to the puddles of piss and infinite amounts of graffiti on the Subway I’d seen throughout the ’80s.

Toph’s “Hairy Pits” from Avatar: The Last Airbender (screenshot), July 26, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution picture.

But it introduced me to other odious issues. Like Grand Central Station, which by the summer of ’90 was in desperate need of renovation. Especially the restrooms, festooned with enough garbage, feces and bodily odors and fluids to make a coroner vomit.

Off a return trip from Pittsburgh that summer, I made the mistake of having no choice but to use the almost  unusable facilities there, which in the end I couldn’t use. Meanwhile, I observed homeless males hanging out in the restroom with carts, along with an individual who looked to have Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obvious sign of full-blown AIDS.

That’s when I coined New York to be “the third armpit of hell,” the place where poverty had meant your dreams were dead on arrival. For once, it made me content that I was from a place where many smug New Yorkers disdainly considered “upstate.” Though the New York City area has changed — and mostly for the better — since ’90, it’s still a place where economic inequality can easily grind the life out of people.

Milk-N-Things

21 Saturday Apr 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


Major fire Sunday evening at F&Y Store (formerly Milk-n-Things), Grand Cleaners, Pelham, New York, March 9, 2008. (PelhamWeekly.com). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of picture and subject of this blog post.

As most folks who aren’t Black males have learned in the past couple of months, part of our collective coming-of-age story involves this sordid and cruel rite of passage to manhood. One in which people we’ve known since childhood suddenly start to treat us as if we’ve committed a crime or an unpardonable sin. No matter how smart, how tall or short, how athletic or waif-like, this ritual has continued unabated in American culture for as long as there have been free Black males living their lives.

My whole year between my seventeenth and eighteenth birthday in ’87 was like that. Between a crossing guard I’d know since third grade, some of my classmates, my idiot Mount Vernon High School principal, the late Richard Capozzola (see post “Capo, Mi Capo” from September ’09) and Tower Records (see my post “Why Black Men Carry A Public Anger” from March ’12). I was constantly shown through their eyes how my man-sized Black body was a threat to them.

One of the bigger kickers that year was an incident at the former Pelham, New York mini-mart Milk-n-Things. It was in a strip mall across the street from a Mobil gas station, off a Hutchinson River Parkway exit, just across the bridge on East Lincoln connecting Mount Vernon to Pelham. The store was two doors down from the laundromat in which we washed our clothes every week (or just about) between ’78 and ’87, and next to Hutchinson Elementary School and Pelham Library.

I’d been shopping there on my own since ’77, before I’d started third grade. Over the years, I’d gotten used to the smell of cheap cologne, the noise of broken Italian and Brooklyn-ese as spoken by the Hair Club for Couples, the people who owned Milk-n-Things. Not to mention their love of all things from the ’50s, especially with a gigantic picture of Frank Sinatra on the wall that greeted customers upon entrance. By the time I was fourteen, it dawned on me that these folks may have been mobbed up, but what did that matter to me?

Then one day in April ’87, the Italian folks who owned Milk-n-Things reacted to me as if they’d never seen me before. As usual, I went there to buy a few groceries late in the evening, somewhere around 9 pm, when C-Town had already closed. Milk, eggs and butter were among the things I planned to buy. When I got to the counter, the old Italian lady said, “I got you on camera.”

“On camera doing what?,” I asked without thinking.

“You know whatcha been up to. I got you stealing, thief,” she said as if she had another word in mind.

“There’s no way you could have me on camera. You might have someone else on camera, but I know I haven’t stolen a thing,” I said, as I felt both hurt and rage coming out of me.

“Get out of my store now before I call the cops!,” the woman yelled.

I left the groceries and took back my money, feeling persecuted. This was a store I’d been shopping at for ten years. Now this Frank Sinatra-worshiping bitch has the nerve to accuse me of stealing right out of the blue? “Fine,” I thought. “You’re not getting another dime of my money.” That was the last time I shopped there.

I actually didn’t step foot into the space again until ’06, during a Thanksgiving visit with family. By that time, it was no longer Milk-n-Things, and the Italians who owned the place had long since moved away. I went in, realized they had nothing I wanted, and left. No one walked up to me to check my pockets as I walked out. I was mildly surprised.

Time, Love & Goofy-ness

21 Thursday Jul 2011

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


Time, Love & Tenderness Album Cover, July 18, 2009. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

Sometimes I have no choice but to confirm how weird I am. Especially when it comes to what moves me, including in my choices of music. It wasn’t hard for me to become a Michael Bolton fan when his first solo album dropped in ’87. “That’s What Love Is All About,” a minor hit, was something I enjoyed then, but appreciate much more now as a married man than I possibly could’ve as a freshman at Pitt. “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” well, that’s another story. It’s a fine cover version (something that Bolton grew all too fond of doing in the late-’90s), but nothing will ever replace the Otis Redding original.

The summer of  ’91 was the clincher for me regarding Bolton and other artists from that period. I was in the midst of getting over myself getting over E (see “The Power of Another E” posting from April 2009) when I first heard Bolton’s “Time, Love and Tenderness.” 02 Time, Love and Tenderness.wma I was on my way home from work at Western Psych that hot and sweaty July evening, walking at Warp 3 like I always did back then when the local pop station began playing the song. I also knew the moment I heard it how schmaltzy it was. But it was exactly what I needed to hear and at the time I needed to hear it. I fell in love with the song immediately, and would eventually by the album. “Time, Love and Tenderness” remained one of my pre-iTunes playlist songs for the next three years.
Thus began a year-long odyssey of inviting new music into my life, music that would represent the more adult, contemporary, cool, eclectic and schmaltzy graduate school me. Bolton’s Time, Love and Tenderness album was just the first step. The months of July and August ’91 included music from Seal

My iPod, July 21, 2011 (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Every song named here is on it, but rarely do I play them consecutively.

(“Crazy” — I’ll talk about more in another post), Lenny Kravitz (“It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”), Vanessa Williams (“Comfort Zone”), and Mariah Carey (“Make It Happen”). Not to mention PE (“Can’t Truss It”), Naughty By Nature (O.P.P.), and Boyz II Men. It was the beginning of a new period of music experimentation for me, all caused by me tiring of being the odd wheel in a sea of dating friends.

It was the early ’90s, and I could already see how much music was changing. Fewer synthesizers, a faster more rhythmic pace, a much greater fusion of genres and styles. Heavy metal was morphing into grunge and White booty-call songs were turning into passion tales of White male (and female) angst. Whitney Houston’s music was becoming hip, and Michael Jackson was steadily making himself less popular. With me weeks away from beginning grad school, I felt like I’d found theme music that would fit nicely with my times.
Within a year and a master’s degree of “Time, Love and Tenderness,” I would add Grover Washington, Jr. and Jon Secada to my growing and eclectic music collection. Jon Secada? For many fans of the Miami Sound Machine (Gloria Estefan, et al.) not to mention various subgenres of Latino music and Latino fusion, Secada might as well have been Neil Diamond or Michael Bolton. But for me, it gave me a window into other forms of music that I didn’t have or understand before. The dogged and soaring passion with which Secada sang his “Just Another Day” I’d only heard in gospel or with divas like Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston and — in the first two years of the ’90s — Mariah Carey. Men didn’t sing like that, certainly not in pop music!
I became enthralled with Secada and Bolton, Grover and Mariah, so much so that I continued to branch out. Coltrane, Celine Dion, The Cranberries, Sarah McLachlan, Pearl Jam, Tupac, grunge, world music, New Age — Deep Forest, Enya, Enigma — along with neo-soul — Maxwell and Erykah Badu — were all in my collection by the time I finished grad school.
Still, I needed my schmaltz, and I still do. Michael Bolton, for all of his vanity and overestimation of his voice (he’s done duets with Patti LaBelle and Celine Dion, for goodness sake’s), has been a part of my musical memory for twenty-two years. “Time, Love and Tenderness,” for all of its ’80s-esque quirks, is by far my favorite song by Bolton. It made the second half of the summer of ’91 not only bearable, but fun. It reminded me of how innocent I still was, of how it was a must that I keep my heart open to the possibility of love, even though I would undoubtedly get hurt from time to time.
Life is like that sometimes, and in my case, most of the time. I find myself learning more from loss, more determined because of betrayal and more committed when others tell me I can’t do something, like earning an advanced degree or doing a job successfully. For those times, schmaltzy music is often where I revert to for strength and encouragement, for the ability to move forward.

The Turd Dream

24 Monday Jan 2011

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


Russet Potatoes, January 23, 2011. Source: http://www.Fotosearch.com. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the limited use of picture and because its use is for illustrative purposes directly related to the topic of this post.

I found myself at a party one cold and starry evening, standing in an equally cold kitchen. It was really bright in the kitchen, almost to the point of overpowering my eyes. The walls and cabinets were all-white, the counters made of formica, and the floor light blue-and-white tiled. This was in stark relief from the adjacent living room. It was in a red-brown, ’70s dimmed-light den mode, with beads hanging over the doorway leading out of the kitchen to it. It was the kind of party I never had the chance to go to in high school.

But everyone was there. Even people I hadn’t seen since my Davis Middle School days. The class valedictorian and salutatorian, the affluent and middle class types who went to Pennington Elementary, Crushes #1 and #2, members of the Italian Club, and so many others were there. Two of them were peeling potatoes and throwing them into big pots of boiling water. They started slicing and dicing them, laughing as they were throwing the pieces into the bubbling clean and clear liquid.

Except these weren’t potatoes. These were turds, each shaped like a large Russet, being peeled and chopped, looking white but quickly turning crappy-brown upon contact with the air. The two turd-peelers shared the boiled and mashed turds with my former classmates, who were smiling in glee and eating them up with delight. I then looked at this six-foot, trapezoidal pyramid of a rack in the middle of the super-bright kitchen. It was full of turds, stacked on each one of its seven levels. It was enough to feed the guests several times over.

When I sat up from this dream in my small room in a shared row house on Welsford in Pittsburgh and found myself in the present, the first Saturday of February ’90, I gave Mom a call. I told her about the dream in all of its strange details. I asked her what she thought of it. “You’re friends are full of shit,” she said. After laughing so hard that I nearly rolled out of bed, I said, “That can’t be. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”

Yet I knew that Mom was absolutely right. Most of the people I knew during my years in Humanities — classmates, teachers, administrators, family members and neighbors — were full of crap when it came to me. I certainly included myself in that category. I might’ve made sure of or accidentally given myself a couple of enemas between 7S and the University of Pittsburgh. But it would’ve been hard to stay clean around all the filth on which we dined growing up. This was thanks in large measure to our community leaders and all of the racial and socioeconomic strife that was part of everyday politics and conversations at school and at city hall.

What Mom said was ironic, too. For better and mostly for worse, Mom, father and ex-stepfather had crapped up our lives with their baggage. The turds from their lives were the reason why my dreams had grown to be so vivid, so complicated by the time I reached adulthood. Mostly, my dreams and nightmares brought me to anger, as if someone were trying to steal my life from me, which, as it turned out, was how I felt most of the time when I was awake. And that also made me resolute whenever I left my dreams for the conscious world.

This was the final break between my immediate past of Mount Vernon, the whole Hebrew-Israelite and Humanities thing, and all of the ridicule, ostracism, poverty and abuse that came with those things. My past experiences were all now a part of my dream world. It was an occasional reminder that I wasn’t really myself in the relatively recent past.

That was nearly twenty-one years ago. Except for the occasional email from an ex-teacher or ex-Humanities classmate, the only reminders I have of the time before I became myself again are my Boy @ The Window project and manuscript. And though I don’t necessarily see the people whom I grew up with and around as being full of crap these days, I do see how our collective community baggage would make it difficult for many of us to find our way, our calling. Even in the midst of the best education our city had to offer.

Walls and Secrets

11 Wednesday Nov 2009

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,


 

Crane removing part of Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate, December 21, 1989. (SSGT F. Lee Corkran/US Dept of Defense). In public domain.

Crane removing part of Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate, December 21, 1989. (SSGT F. Lee Corkran/US Dept of Defense). In public domain.

This Monday should’ve been a momentous occasion for us in the US. It was the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Although it would be a bit more than two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the Warsaw Pact. Still, it meant that the fear that I and millions of others grew up with — the one about having a day of mushroom clouds and shock waves, gamma radiation and the end of civilization — was over, or at least, abated somehow. But knowing my fellow citizens as well as I do, I know that most of us gave as much thought to this as we do to where our tap water comes from.

More of us give more serious thought to Chris Brown and Rihanna, my Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants, and who our friends date and break up with than we do of our world beyond ourselves. Which is sad. Because if gave the larger world even a modicum of thought, maybe we would have the better world that so many of us want, but don’t want to work for. While the idiot American media spent as much time talking about where they were when the Berlin Wall began to come down, the rest of the world, at least, spent a bit of time thinking about what’s actually happened geopolitically speaking in the past generation.

When President Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” in Berlin in ’87, even our bungling fortieth president was talking about more than a wall. He was speaking of a geopolitical and cultural wall between peoples who otherwise had so much in common, so much so that it was disheartening, even criminal to maintain separation because another superpower needed nation-states as buffers. Really, what Reagan was speaking of was well beyond his own neo-conservative thinking. For the wall that really needed tearing down was the one in our own minds, the one that says that we can’t do or say or be a certain way because the cultural and political norms of our society say otherwise.

It’s what I took from the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and Reagan’s speech in ’87 anyway. Sometimes, though, we must put a wall around those things in our minds that would keep us from thinking, being and doing those things that others in our lives would ridicule. In my little case, it was majoring in history, finishing my degree and possibly going to grad school for more degrees that would lead to steadier employment, if not high-paying jobs. In our money-is-everything world, that’s an invitation for family and so-called friends to clown on us, to say that what were about is like spending another decade in school to “earn another high school diploma.” It’s limited thinking, the kind of thinking common behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War era. Or at least, that’s what our leaders and the international academic community have said.

It’s tough to walk to beat of our own drums, especially if we know in our bones, minds and spirits that we were born to do and say certain things in which others in our lives vehemently disagree. And when we become side-tracked by the pressures of people and events and things of this world, it becomes doubly-hard to find our way to our proper path. Without folks in our lives who can help, or at least listen, it can be a lonely, if rewarding road.

Not too many weeks after I was swept up in end-of-the-Cold-War-fever, I realized something about the previous eight-and-a-half years of my life. That I’d been living my life for the sake of others, be it God, my mother, my younger siblings, or for the euphoria of an A or A+. That just about all of the real friends I had came out of my Pittsburgh experience. That I was no longer living in fear of having my chest caved in (as he liked to say) by my now ex-stepfather.

At the beginning of ’90, I did a bit of an experiment. I still kept in contact with about a half-dozen or so of my former classmates from my Humanities days. Which in my case meant that I wrote them far more often than they wrote or called me, if they did any of that all at. I stopped writing. I only wrote them or called if they responded in kind. I found out fairly quickly that I really only had one friend from my gifted-track days.

So I built my own wall in the first few months of the 90s. I deliberately yet unconsciously managed to put everything bad that happened between April 13 of ’81 and September 2 of ’88 inside of that wall. I only opened it up to a handful of my closest friends, and often revealed the most gut-wrenching of events in the most academic and dispassionate of ways. It worked very successfully for nearly thirteen years. But in having a child, being a married man, working with thousands of students and doing work to benefit thousands more, I realized it was time to tear down this wall.

I couldn’t write and revise Boy @ The Window without tapping into this past, and all of the emotions involved with it. For most of us, it unfortunately takes an event like the fall of the Berlin Wall for us to be introspective and conscious of the world beyond our own nose. For me, that’s an everyday thing, something I think we all should aspire to at least a few times a year.