Last Gasps, Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love,” and My ’86 Mets

26 Sunday Oct 2014

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

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"Sweet Love" (1986), 1986 World Series, Alcoholism, Anita Baker, Bill Buckner, Billboard Pop Chart, Cameo, Child Abuse, Club Nouveau, Coping Strategies, Domestic Violence, Drug Abuse, Giants, Grammys, Hip-Hop, Joe Morris, Living Vicariously, Mets, Mookie Wilson, R&B, Rap, Rapture album, Singing, Super Bowl XXI, WFAN

The Mookie Wilson-Bill Buckner connection, Game 6, 1986 World Series, Bottom 10th, Shea Stadium, Queens, NY, October 25, 1986. (http://halloffamememorabilia.net).

Sunday, October 26, 1986 was part of a great three days for me, perhaps the three best days during my Boy @ The Window years. My Mets had pulled off a miracle. They survived being within a strike of losing the ’86 World Series because Mookie Wilson put a ball between Boston Red Sox 1st baseman Bill Buckner’s rickety legs the night before. Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love” was #1 or #2 on the R&B charts and was near the top of Billboard’s Top 40 on this day twenty-eight years ago. Within the next thirty-eight hours, my Mets would complete the comeback, and win their second (and last, to this point anyway) World Series after falling behind 3-0 through the first six innings. Meanwhile, my Giants would run through the Deadskins at home in East Rutherford, NJ, as Joe Morris rushed for 185 yards in a 27-21 victory, on their own march to a championship title.

GoGurt, Yoplait’s squeeze -in-mouth, portable yogurt, October 26, 2014. (http://freehotsamples.com).

My coping mechanisms were at their peaks, though, and had nothing else to do but crash down into the Earth. It was also my senior year in high school, a time of too many AP courses, too many college-going pressures, too many haters and doubters among my classmates, and too much of the grinding poverty and chaos that was living at 616. Within two weeks of my Mets, my Giants and Anita Baker’s first big hits, I’d discover my idiot stepfather’s pornography collection, nearly got set up with a prostitute because of my father, and face humiliation at the hands of my AP Physics teacher David Wolf and his boss Estelle Abel for the first time.

It took me almost two years to recover from the happenings of the mid-fall of ’86. In the process, I faced betrayal, ostracism, humiliation, broken-heartedness, and homelessness, but somehow managed to not make every song and every Mets and Giants (and Knicks and Rangers) victory a vicarious signpost for my own life. It helped that I started to think of Pitt — if not Pittsburgh — as my home, with concerns beyond living and dying with my New York teams and with relatively unknown but talented music artists.

Giants’ RB Joe Morris running through Deadskins again, RFK Stadium, Washington, DC, December 7, 1986. (http://sikids.com).

I learned other things along the way, too. That my Mets and Giants weren’t the perfect teams I thought they were. Between the alcohol and drug issues of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Len Dykstra, Lawrence Taylor, Kevin Mitchell, not to mention their and other teammates’ domestic violence issues, it was obvious to me that talent and winning were more important than living by a consistent code. Listening to the new 24/7 sports radio station WFAN when it began its run in the summer of ’87 showed me the hearts and minds of most fans. They obviously weren’t using sports as a coping strategy for dealing with the emotional grind of poverty and threats of abuse and domestic violence at home. Mostly White and male, their constant barrage of vitriol and disparaging racial commentary about my favorite athletes at that time — Mike Tyson in particular — actually made me wary of White sports fans for years afterward.

I also learned that with artists like Anita Baker and Luther was really the last gasp of R&B as I’d known it to be in the US. R&B was already too much like ’80s pop and a bit too mixed up with rock at times, but with Cameo’s “Word Up” and Club Nouveau’s cover of Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me,” R&B was already beginning its merge with hip-hop, and not in a good way, either. Yeah, there were some exceptions, like Levert, or Regina Belle, but the process of R&B devolving into some Yoplait GoGurt version of itself — with Autotunes, bad rap lyrics and worse rhyme spitters, and assembly-line hip-hop beats — had already begun.

Anita Baker, Rapture phase, circa 1986. (http://projects.latimes.com).

Some of you may say, R&B’s still alive in the US, specifically in our churches, but that’s not true, thanks in large measure to Kirk Franklin. His work in the ’90s made it so that it’s taken longer for jazz to catch on in bands and choirs than rap and hip-hop. No, if you want to find R&B with actual singers these days, try the United Kingdom of Great Britain, try France, try Senegal, try Nigeria. But don’t try the US. Nicki Minaj is no Aretha, no matter how imaginative her videos and her clothes. For that matter, Iggy Azalea’s no Teena Marie, as the former doesn’t understand the difference between cultural appropriation and authenticity. Hip-hop sprang in part from the roots and branches of R&B, but like a parasitic vine, it has cannibalized those roots.

Still, it’s good to remember days like the ones I lived through twenty-eight years ago, with Anita Baker in my ear, my Mets in victory formation, my Giants lined up right beside them. Those days are gone, like the coping strategies I used to get through every one of those days. Not to mention the R&B that was more a part of my life than the hip-hop that my contemporaries were supposedly raised on.

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!

AP US History Exam Day & Harold Meltzer

13 Tuesday May 2014

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

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AP, AP American History, AP US History, AP US History Exam, Appreciation, College Board, Coping Strategies, ETS, Exam Day, Harold Meltzer, Kaplan, Mentoring, Photographic Memory, Princeton Review, Privilege, Self-Discovery, Teaching and Learning

AP Day (cropped), May 9, 2014. (Tim Needles/http://artroom161.blogspot.com/).

Twenty-eight years ago on this day/date, I was on my way to Mount Vernon High School, listening to Mr. Mister, Simple Minds, Sting and Whitney along the way. I was a few minutes away from a three-hour exam that could change my future. It wasn’t exactly the sunniest or warmest of days, though. That second Tuesday in May ’86 was brisk and heavy with clouds, a high of only 52°F. Still, with the way I felt that morning, May 13th might as well have been sunny with a high of seventy-two.

I’ve written about my AP US History exam experience and Harold Meltzer ad nauseum here in this blog, as well as in Boy @ The Window. How I felt in the months and weeks before the exam. My expectations for a “5” and what that meant in comparison to taking something much less representative of the college experience, like the SAT. My perspective on my AP classmates and the general sense of obnoxious whining that permeated our classroom in throughout March and April ’86, and in whispers the following year. The keys to my academic success, and me being conscious of those keys, for the very first time. And, of course, the mentoring and tutelage of the late Harold Meltzer, the only teacher after elementary school who took a genuine interest in my development as a human being, not just in my grades or in my intellectual abilities.

I was a high school junior whom, at sixteen years old, had more wisdom about what would leave me well prepared for college than most parents, teachers and so-called education reformers possessed in ’86 or in 2014. Taking Algebra in eighth grade, AP courses in eleventh and twelfth grade, accelerated math and science classes all through high school. I knew even then that the APUSH exam was far more representative of my academic preparation than any SAT score would indicate, no matter how high.

AP US History For Dummies cover (2008), May 13, 2014. (http://bookoutlet.com/).

Yet I’ve found myself in debates with folks in recent months over an issue that’s been well settled in the education world for more than a decade. Over a single four-digit score that many thought should be the difference between going to an elite school and attending a no-name local technical institute. These folks refused to recognize what even the College Board and ETS recognize. That social class and racial privilege have been infused in the SAT process for years, with so many students taking SAT-prep courses at Princeton Review and Kaplan being all the prima facie evidence I need.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Advanced Placement (or International Baccalaureate, for that matter) is much better. But in terms of the actual amount of time spent in direct preparation, with the right teacher, even an impoverished Black kid like I was could attend a public school with a magnet program and earn a “5” — without spending $1,500 on Kaplan or Princeton Review.

Enough on that. Today, I can truly say that AP US History Exam ’86 Day was a fundamentally important milestone for me. It sealed the deal I made for myself in the midst of the summer of abuse, to get out of 616, out of Mount Vernon, and into college. Thanks Humanities. Thanks, Mr. Meltzer. Thanks, classmates. And, thank God!

Observation and Action, Before and Now

01 Wednesday Jan 2014

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

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Acceptance, Action, Activism, Coping Strategies, Growing Up, Inaction, Observation Mode, Resolutions, Self-Awareness, Self-Reflection

Michael Cerveris as The Observer, code name “September,” via Fringe (2008-13), January 1, 2014. (http://fringepedia.net/wiki/The_Observer).

Believe it or not, I’m a naturally shy person. I realize that this sounds like a contradiction, especially since so much of my life is out there for the world to read and see. But shyness doesn’t necessarily mean introverted and scared of people and the world. That came later, my preteen and teenage years. The crush of cliques and ostracism that forced me into becoming a loner helped shape the way I saw people.

On the one hand, I’ve always found our tremendous capacity for love and hate, compassion and coldness, creation and destruction fascinating. On the other, I have a well-developed sense of disdain for the great human capacity for willful ignorance, bigotry and shallow thinking. It means that there are times that I love being around family, friends and people in general, and there are times I could put a good portion of humanity in a sack and drop them over Niagara Falls.

For both sides of my love-disdain relationship with my fellow humans, I developed a coping strategy more than thirty years ago that I’ve come to recognize as my “observation mode.” It was especially helpful to be an observer during my Boy @ The Window years at Davis Middle School and Mount Vernon High School. I saw so many things occur that aren’t in my memoir, but informed my thinking about people and life and myself. Things like young women yanking out hair and earrings and nails over some idiot guy. Or a Class of ’87 student giving birth near the Cosmetology Department. Or teachers driving out of the parking lot at warp factor nine within fifteen seconds of that end-of-the-school-day, 2:50 pm bell.

USS Enterprise at warp screen shot, Star Trek (2009 – alt reality), January 1, 2014. (http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/).

Most of all, I observed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how smart I showed myself to be, that I would never be one of them, at home or at school. At 616, I was a brother, the usurper eldest brother who was also a bit of a father, uncle, worker, husband, and resistance leader, but not part of a functioning family. In Humanities — at Davis and MVHS — I was an underachieving smart guy who never said anything and too uncool to be around, even though I said plenty — and attempted to do plenty — while I was there.

I understood back then that my observations and my actions in response to my observations didn’t and couldn’t match up. I had very little control over my life prior to the University of Pittsburgh. I had precious little access to money, time and the physical and mental space necessary to act upon my observations. So much so that I could easily stay in observation mode in my own life for months at a time, turning one of my key coping strategies into a ball and chain, allowing opportunities to change how I saw myself and others go by in the process.

There were a few areas in which I acted beyond observation. My efforts to get into college, my constant resistance to my then idiot stepfather Maurice, taking care of my younger siblings, trying out for football and baseball, and tracking down my father Jimme for money. And though this was hardly enough for a growing young man to live on, it was enough for me to survive Mount Vernon before moving to Pittsburgh.

Artist rendering of supernova SN 2006gy, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

Artist rendering of SN 2006gy, the brightest supernova observed to date, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

But it would take my five days as a homeless student before I decided to be the actor I needed to be in my own life, and not just an observer. I found my way because the only other alternative I had was to go back to Mount Vernon and 616 and wait around for something to happen, and I’d long grown tired of waiting, even on God. It was beyond time for me to help myself, to come out of the bleachers and get on the playing field as the quarterback in my own life. That bout with homelessness was the supernova I needed and used to shoot myself forward to three degrees, a career as a historian, educator, nonprofit manager and writer, to dating and marriage and fatherhood.

I still have an observation mode, though. At conferences, particularly academic conferences, and especially ones in which I am not a presenter. At literary festivals and other gatherings in which I feel the brown-nosing bullshit quotient is just too high. But with Boy @ The Window now out in paperback after more than seven years of interviewing, writing and rewriting, with my son more than halfway toward adulthood, and with me within two years of the middle ages, I need to be done with observation for now.

My First Walk (and Making Plans)

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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Affluence, Bronxville, Child Abuse, College, Coping Strategies, Domestic Violence, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Making Plans, New Rochelle, Pelham, Phyllis, Poverty, Racism, Tuckahoe, Walking

Thirty-one years ago this week was the beginning of an inadvertent coping strategy that would lead me away from 616, out of Mount Vernon, New York, into Pittsburgh, and college, and grad school. (And eventually, to a worn-out right knee, leg exercises and a running regiment that I’ve adhered to for nearly a decade.) It was a walk that was literally my only time away from home and my summer of abuse at the hands of my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington (or Judah ben Israel). It was a walk in which I began to plan my escape from the madness.

From Boy @ The Window:

“It was August ’82, and I didn’t know if I’d make it to the end of the year.

“If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on another boring August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. First Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616 and walked to Pelham…The four of us walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. I hadn’t been down in the city all year, and my life for most of the summer was spent between Wilson Woods, Pearsall Drive, and 616. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ Darren said.

‘Yeah, and?,’ I said in response.

‘Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,’ Darren said.

“We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into a ritzy community without any warning. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. ‘Look at these houses!,’ I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs.

We walked across another bridge, this one with an overhanging meshed metal fence, across the Cross-County Parkway, and ended up in Mount Vernon for a brief moment. We veered right as we walked up a hill and out of Mount Vernon again. After walking through what appeared to be an enchanted forest, we discovered we were in Bronxville. Even at twelve, I knew that Bronxville was just about the richest community in America. And it looked like it, too. I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

“That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.’ I knew almost intuitively that my choices were to continue to experience abuse without reaching for something that I thought I could do based on my smarts. Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

“So as we walked through the villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe, ending up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22, I began to think about what I wanted to get out of eighth grade. It seemed to me that the most important class for my future was Algebra, since that led to higher forms of math. I knew English and Social Studies would be really easy, but with success in Algebra, I could go into high school with a little more confidence.

“That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was Phyllis, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. Phyllis asked what we’d been up to over the summer. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

“Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister Claudia do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere, somewhere down South to visit family. It looked like they were having a good time, the time of their lives compared to us.

‘Do you live around here?,’ Phyllis asked.

‘Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said in response.

“In the neighborhood. Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, was all part of one gigantic neighborhood. After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing Phyllis and her sister than I was.

“Yet it wasn’t that I was unexcited… I finally had a plan, a long-term plan, for dealing with the situation at 616. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, much less getting a degree…Otherwise I really didn’t have anything else to look forward to, except what I thought would be a very painful life and an extremely early death.”

That walk — and the hundreds of walks (and runs) I went on all through eighth grade and high school –was the difference between becoming a professor and a writer and having died well before the turn of this century. If not literally, then certainly psychologically.

Fear of Flying Solo (Not Literally)

19 Monday Nov 2012

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

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"Sign 'O' the Times (1987), Blackness, Busch Beer, Continental Airlines, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Depression, First Flight, Homesickness, Infatuation, Loneliness, Love, Lust, Manhood, Obsession, Prince, Self-Discovery, Theft, University of Pittsburgh

Continental Airlines B737-200 (similar to one I flew on in November ’87, logo included), Providence, RI, 1990, January 2, 2009. (Phillip Capper via Wikipedia). Releases to public domain via cc-Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

This week twenty-five years ago, the pressures of college, “homesickness” and Crush #2 had screwed up the inner movie and music soundtrack (think Enigma’s “I Love You, I’ll Kill You” [1993]) that had been my coping mechanism for the previous half decade. I was in the midst of a psychological breakthrough, but it felt more like a combination of depression and a nervous breakdown at the time. Such were my times as an emotionally tortured seventeen-year-old who should’ve left Mount Vernon a full year earlier (see my post “A One-Year Sooner ‘What If’” from June ’11).

The downward spiral of my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh started with a burglary the third week in October ’87. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. Of course, I didn’t really even trust myself at the time, and the loss of my textbook didn’t make it any easier. I was out of money to boot, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to replace this loss.

Excerpts of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) liner notes, November 19, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution illustration of text-like writing style for this post.

Crush #2’s response to my letter about her emasculating comments back in the summer made matters worse (see my posts “Origins of the Obsession” from June ’12 and “A Dream That Had to Die” from July ’07). Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. She started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

After Crush #2’s wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed eighteen of twenty-four classes at one stretch between November 3 and Thanksgiving, only showing up for exams or if my black-cloud mood had let up long enough to allow me to function. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans of Busch beer. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch” as if it was part of a drinking game. I spent the next day vomiting and trying to regain my balance.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I still managed a few firsts, though. That trip back home was my first ever on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn’t use music, sports or my imagination to escape (see my post “Coping In The Boy @ The Window World” from October ’12). I hadn’t realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent those last weeks of ’87 as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. I fully understood, though, that I couldn’t drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman whom felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren’t really my friends, and was homesick for 616, a place that was never really mine to call home in the first place.

Male duck swimming solo, Chicago River, Chicago, IL, June 16, 2002. (Donald Earl Collins)

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a “triflin’ ass” was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. And, for that moment in my life, I needed that anger to be a better student, to be a better me. Because as far as I was concerned, I was out in Pittsburgh, alone, facing down my past and present all at once.

Coping in the Boy @ The Window World

06 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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"Owner Of A Lonely Heart", Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica (2004 series), Coping Strategies, Fantasy, Football, Humanities, Imagination, Inner Vision, Inner World, New York Giants, New York Knicks, New York Mets, Psychology, Self-Discovery, Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011), Yes

Gaius Baltar tortured/in imagination (merged pics), Battlestar Galactica, October 6, 2012. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res (1st picture) and merged rendering.

“A wide receiver tiptoeing the sideline of a football field after making an acrobatic catch, barely keeping his left foot in-bounds by tapping his big toe in the two inches of space between the grass and the thick white line in front of him. A note in a song that is so inspiring, so well-balanced between rhythm and harmony, so well sung that the hairs on my neck stand up and my spirit feels like soaring.” This is what I wrote in the first paragraph of the preface (which I need to revise yet again, by the way) to my Boy @ The Window manuscript.

In context, I was writing about the infinitesimal decisions and actions that could’ve added up to success or failure for me growing up in those dismal days and years. But I could’ve just as easily been writing about what imaginations and fantasies went through my head growing up to make my inner world more powerful than anything I saw and experienced in the real world. Much of Boy @ The Window is about how I coped, good, bad and ugly (see my posts “Peanuts Land” from April ’12 and “Mr. Mister’s ‘Kyrie’” from March ’11 for more).

How I coped through imagination, inner projection and fantasy changed during the worst of my preteen and post-puberty years. I went from imagining and acting out an entire city, nation-state and culture in my room to the need for an internal world that couldn’t be taken apart by abuse, poverty and isolation. Ultimately it came for me in the form of the everyday things I either already liked or was on the cusp of liking. I already enjoyed a wide variety of music by the fall of ’82. Once I became a sports fan and occasional sports participant, those images and achievements became part of my inner movie and soundtrack.

It became a partnership that I eventually learned to conjure up at will, that became part of my residual sleeping state, that made the madness of 616, MVHS and Mount Vernon, New York dissolve into background noise.

Santonio Holmes’ Super Bowl XLIII game-winning catch, Tampa, FL, February 1, 2009. (http://bleacherreport.com).

It meant, though, that watching a Mets, Giants or Knicks game or listening to Earth, Wind & Fire wasn’t a simple casual experience. It involved rooting for the underdog, which in turn meant rooting for myself. It included the synching of home runs, touchdown passes and three-pointers to guitar riffs, crescendos and other highlights in a particular song or series of songs. It meant that my imagination became itself a fully dedicated line for coping with stress, checking anger, solving problems, and seeing my world the way I chose to see it, rather than the way my world actually was.

Take one of my favorite songs as a teenager, Yes’ “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” (1983). It wasn’t just the fact that I actually felt lonely and could relate to the song. When I heard the song, I could see myself running a screen play in football, following a group of well set-up blockers all the way to the end zone for a touchdown. I could relate emotionally, because the song was about me as an underdog, because of my unrequited love for Crush #1, because I now knew what a screen pass was. It made existential philosophy easier for me to understand my senior year of high school in my AP English and Philosophy classes.

“Owner Of A Lonely Heart” also reminded me to never “concede my free will,” even when my now ex-stepfather Maurice’s fists met my face and teeth and ribs at fifteen and sixteen. Like a scene from the ’00s Battlestar Galactica involving Gaius Baltar or Caprica Six, I often projected a view of the world I wanted over whatever was going on in reality. Going the mile or so between 616 and the C-Town in Pelham could either be a chance for me to catch a long touchdown pass or for me to figure out to which colleges I should apply.

Ryan Fitzpatrick of Buffalo Bills v. NY Jets, in rare protection against blitz while in pocket, October 6, 2012. (http://bleacherreport.com).

Sometimes, if I allowed myself to slip deeply enough, like, in the moments before an exam, I could use a buildup point in the song to bring in an extra blocking tight end to run a max-protect play. I’d snap the ball, send three receivers on one side of the defense, and wait just long enough for one to cross before delivering a perfect pass that allowed my receiver to split the secondary for a long score. All while taking a hit in my right ribs and being knocked down to the turf, just a quarter-second after my index finger’s come off the ball, giving it a smoother spiral rotation while in flight. And so many times, that re-visioning of my world made it so that my natural ability to remember everything and discern many things resulted in very good grades, solid performances, and a balancing act that made life at 616 and MVHS just bearable enough.

I was reminded of how often my mind went down this road by Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (which I blogged about earlier this week), particularly his chapter on imagination and art, “Keep It Real Is a Prison.” Except that my mind does still go there sometimes. Usually as I’m about to give a speech, or while running a five-miler, drilling a three or driving. Or in writing something for publication, like Boy @ The Window.