On Maturity and Writing In Text Message Form

11 Monday Nov 2013

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

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"I Would Die 4 U" (1984), Anger, Black Masculinity, Crush #1, Crush #2, Depression, Disillusionment, Emasculation, Maturity, Objectification, Obsession, Pedestal, Phyllis, Pitt, Prince, Rejection, Sexism, Text Messaging, Wendy, White Plains Galleria

Dulcesita, “i would die for you,” November 11, 2013. (http://www.myxer.com).

In Boy @ The Window, I have a chapter on my first year at Pitt and the baggage I carried from my last months in Mount Vernon, New York, Phyllis (a.k.a., Crush #2) included. I haven’t discussed Phyllis much in the six and a half years I’ve been running this blog on all things related to my memoir. Mostly because once I got over my crush-turned-internalized-obsession, I realized that she wasn’t really all that as a person. Still, given the number of posts I’ve done on my Mom, my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice and Wendy (a.k.a., Crush #1), Phyllis does deserve some mention, along with my stumbled-filled transition to manhood that went with the years between December ’85 and August ’88.

A key point for me in this transition was in October and early November ’87. I finally worked up the courage to write Phyllis a note about an incident earlier that summer, one in which she all but emasculated me at the White Plains Galleria. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

Crushing walnuts in plastic bag, November 11, 2013. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/).

I got the address, bought her a card for her eighteenth birthday, and sat down and wrote her. About how I liked her and wanted to know if she “ever liked me.” I needed to know if she and her sister really were talking about me at the bus stop that day, “one way or the other.” I wanted to know what she thought I needed in order to impress someone like her in the future. Then I added “Happy 18th Birthday!” I sent the card off on the second week in October, just a few days before her birthday.

On the second of November, I got her response. It 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. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Phyllis had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of sign language on paper, a real “revolution” on both their parts. I remember she started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She would’ve been better off with, “Yo nigga, ’s up wit’ ya sweatin’ me?” 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 Claudia’s topic of conversation that day, 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…

After Phyllis’ wonderful response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like normal. 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. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Phyllis’ name – or any woman’s name for that matter — one of us said the B-word and we’d guzzle down some beer.

In today’s world of text messaging, I would’ve found Phyllis’ response so ridiculous that I probably would’ve shared it with close friends and laughed about it for weeks afterward. But as someone with the emotional and psychological maturity of a twelve-year-old in the fall of ’87, Phyllis’ response really, really, really hurt. Her letter shattered the pedestal on which I had placed her, and reaffirmed every negative thing I’d felt about myself for the previous half decade.

Depression image, Carroll College, Counseling Services, November 11, 2013. (http://www.carroll.edu).

It also left me so depressed that I finished that semester with a 2.63 GPA. That, and spending the holidays at 616, made me determined to use the anger I felt toward myself and Phyllis as fuel for the next semester. And even though that worked so well that I made Dean’s List, I still hadn’t really gotten over Phyllis’ rejection by the time the school year was over in April ’88.

It took one last look at that letter — that unbelievably trifling and simple letter — to realize that even under the best of circumstances, Phyllis and I would’ve been a match made only in a mad scientist’s laboratory. I’d never be interested in a human being who talked down to me, as if I was unworthy of anything other than some simple shorthand language. Or in any woman whose expectations of men were about as objectifying as Mike Tyson’s views of women. I realized that I had finally gotten to know the real Phyllis, and in the process, had begun to know the real me, and what I needed to change about myself in order to build a better, 2.0 version of me. With that, like so much from my freshman dorm at Lothrop Hall, Phyllis’ letter became part of my garbage pile.

Conversations With M² About “Big Foot”

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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" "Should've Known Better, "Don't Shed A Tear, Abe Vigoda, Anger, Channeling Emotions, Crush #2, Geology, Manhood, Masculinity, M², Paul Carrack, Pitt, Rage, Richard Marx, Self-Discovery, Sexuality, University of Pittsburgh

My left foot (excuse movie pun), size 14 4W, March 15, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Sometimes in my life, my anger and rage are a driver toward the better. Usually it’s because I channel that negative energy into something positive, like writing, running, praying and forgiving. In the case of the year after Crush #2 crushing me emotionally and psychologically, it was school and needing to pull my grades up that gave me a place to channel my anger and rage. But with a twist. I deliberately decided that it was the older students at Pitt that I’d befriend my second semester, shunning all but a few classmates under the age of twenty-two.

In Geology that Winter ’88 semester, I had a professor who sounded like Abe Vigoda from Barney Miller and looked like he’d been digging up shale every time he lectured in class. The class was pretty easy, all multiple choice. The main issue of significance wasn’t the class, though. It was M². I had met her at the Cathedral lab the previous semester. She always came to the lab with her boyfriend, and always somehow found something she needed help with. She made almost every girl I went to high school with, well, look like they were girls by comparison.

A “young” Abe Vigoda, Barney Miller, circa 1978, March 15, 2013. (http://notalwaysaboutmonkeys.com).

We were in this Geology class together, which apparently gave her a ready-made excuse for toying with me off and on that semester. As sexy and attractive as she was, I was ill-equipped for any drama between her and her boyfriend. M² was twenty-four, her boyfriend twenty-two and six-two at that. He looked like he worked out, or had at least filled out, in ways that I knew I hadn’t yet.

So at first I kept my distance, not wanting any part of what was going on in M²’s head. I bumped into her one day while getting lunch at the Cathedral of Learning, in the Roy Rogers restaurant on the ground floor. She asked me to sit down and eat with her, and for once, I didn’t refuse. We started talking, or rather, M² started talking about her boyfriend and how she felt about their relationship, particularly their sex life. I really didn’t want to know anything about it, but my ears perked up when she said, “You’d think that as tall as he is he would be bigger down there.” That was definitely too much information.

“You know what they say about men with big feet?,” M² asked next.

I really didn’t know. I guessed that I was about to talk my way into a punchline.

“What?”

“Big feet equals a big you-know-what,” she answered while pointing to my size thirteens and then looking at my face.

“You’re blushing,” M² said with a coy smile.

Of course I was blushing. It wasn’t every day that someone six years older than me hinted that they might want to have sex with me, boyfriend or no boyfriend.

Frame 352 from Patterson-Gimlin film, claiming to show Bigfoot, October 20, 1967. (Beao via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution picture.

For what it was worth, a gorgeous Black woman in her mid-twenties flirting with and insinuating that she wanted to have sex with me did give me a confidence boost that slowly wore away the anger I started the year with. What also helped was a battery of new music that helped focus my anger and reinvigorate my imagination. Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” and Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear” were two songs that were close enough in lyrics, meaning and emotion to my situation with Crush #2 that I smiled a silly smile every time I heard or played them both.For the first time in two years, I started paying attention to rap again. Rob Base, Salt ’n Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, and Public Enemy all began to seep into my consciousness that winter and spring. Geto Boys’ “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me” would’ve been nice to hear six or eight months before, when I was waist deep in obsession over Crush #2.

Still, M² helped me realize, maybe for the very first time, that as much of a mess I was back then, that I was attractive — or at least handsome –in my own right. And that a goodly portion of my former Humanities classmates were assholes.

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.

On Hugs and Walks

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Bronxville, Chester Heights, Child Abuse, College Plans, Crush #2, Dreams, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Pelham, Poverty, Puberty, Self-Discovery, Shuckin' an' Jivin', Tuckahoe, Walks

Commodus hugging Maximus as he plunges dagger into back (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution of picture.

The beginning of August for me thirty years ago was the beginning of adulthood for me. I had little choice. After five weeks of emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual abuse, my choices were to either allow myself to be broken or to find something to hope for. Otherwise, my life would’ve been over before my thirteenth birthday.

I thought hard about how to end the summer of ’82’s abuse. I figured that I could pretended to be something I wasn’t — a loving, wayward stepson. I begged for my stepfather’s forgiveness and even called him “Dad” while he beat me for the sixth time in a month, on August 1, ’82. He stopped, finally, and gave me a hug. I cried tears of rage and hate, because I couldn’t even stand to touch or smell the man, much less being pressed against his overabundance of fat. I prayed for his death to be long and painful, as if I had a dagger in my right hand, ready to plunge into his back left ribs.

Dagger through back rib and heart (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution of picture.

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 a boring early 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. Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616. We 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. 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.

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, August 1, 2012. (http://slc.edu). In public domain.

We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester, and then Bronxville. 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 several ritzy communities without any warning.

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. 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. 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.” Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

As we meandered our way back toward Mount Vernon, we ended up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22. 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 “P,” my eventual Crush #2, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. 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 do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere down South to visit family.

“Do you live around here?,” P asked.

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

“Okay,” she said in response.

The Denzel Washington Walk, American Gangster (2007), August 1, 2012. (http://variety.com)

“In the neighborhood.” Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, were all one gigantic neighborhood! After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing my eventual Crush #2 and her sister than I was.

I wasn’t unexcited. P was far and away the nicest person to me in 7S all year. She stepped up when others made fun of me. I just took her being nice to me the same way Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie probably took it when Mrs. Olsen was nice to her.

Still, I finally had a plan. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, though. But in looking at where P and her sister lived, I at least knew that someone in their family must’ve taken similar steps in the not-too-distant past.

Origins of the Obsession

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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

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Boy @ The Window, Chicken McNuggets, Crush #2, Fake Meat, Fake Smile, Friendship, Immaturity, Manhood, Obsession, Operation Opportunity, Relationships, Self-Discovery, Self-Revelation, Shyness, The Galleria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A standard non-conversation conversation went like

“Hey, [Crush #2].”

“Hi. How are you?,” she’d asked.

“All right,” I’d say.

“How was work?”

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

“Fine,” Crush #2 would say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prom-Ethos

02 Wednesday May 2012

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

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Cliques, College Planning, Crush #2, Dating, Ethics, Ethos, Humanities, Humanities Program, Manhood, MVHS, New York Giants, New York Mets, Prom, Prometheus, Relationships, Senior Prom, Senioritis

Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald as Duckie and Andie in Pretty In Pink (1986), May 2, 2012. (http://bing.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution.

I can’t believe that it’s been a quarter-century since I made the decision to go to my senior prom and to ask someone to go with me in the process. The fact that both happened should say that the things my classmates thought about me at the time were simply untrue, which also showed how little they thought of me to begin with. The fact that I stumbled my way to the prom, though, would say even more about the six years’ worth of isolation that I’d experienced between 616 and Humanities than anything else.

My senior year at Mount Vernon High School was hardly easy, between college preparations, senioritis, three AP courses (English, Calculus and Physics, no less), my classmates in constant conflict (see my post “The Audacity of Low Expectations/Jealousy” from September ’11), and my ever-growing list of adult responsibilities at 616. Not to mention checking out the months of October ’86 and January ’87 to watch my Mets and Giants win a World Series and a Super Bowl.

With all of that going on, I made a couple of decisions. One was to escape from MVHS as frequently as possible, which meant spending more time in the library or on the Subway or at 241st’s magazine shop, where I could find every conceivable porn magazine at the time. The second was that I wasn’t going to my senior prom. I couldn’t be so bothered as to get caught up in senior-year drama birthed from of six or more years of stress and trauma.

Several things changed my attitude, at least around the prom. With the end of my half-year of Philosophy and Humanities Music meant some more free time to turn around my grades (I had a 1.95 GPA during my second marking period) and to think about the immediate future of college. Most importantly, I realized that there were a few people around me who cared, if only in a feeling-sorry-for-me way. By the beginning of February, I decided to go to my prom, even if it meant going by myself, and to do what I could to salvage the school year, if only by a little bit.

But in making that first decision, I put off looking for a date in a serious way for the prom until I knew for

Prometheus Bound (1996), by Scott Eaton, March 3, 2010. (Scott Eaton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

sure if Crush #2 had one. Through idle chatter with her and some of her friends one day in the hallway
outside of the Music Department, I knew she had a date, with whom I was never able to find out. I learned all of this by the middle of April. I wasn’t shocked by any stretch. I just felt like a dumb and bumpy toad wishing and hoping for something to happen instead of making something happen.

Another classmate (one whom I’ll call “H” for the purposes of this post) was my next and best potential prom date. In H’s case, I assumed that she was dating someone, likely a former upperclassman now in college, so my hopes weren’t high to begin with. Plus it would’ve been a friendly date, no out-of-whack emotions to hide or control, no expectations beyond a friendly hug. Other young women who were in their various cliques and relationships had their prom dates lined up months ago, whether they seriously liked the person or not.

I didn’t want this to be a big deal. I just wanted to go so that when I got older I wouldn’t regret not going. So I decided to ask “J,” if only because she was a friendly acquaintance whom I thought would help make the evening fun. J agreed to go to the prom with me, which was nice, if only because it might my decision to go a less stressful one.

Even in the midst of suddenly finding the emotional strength of a typical seventeen-year-old to take this step, I made several incorrect assumptions and errors in tripping my way into something as cliquish and social as a prom. Among others:

Ethos (2011) movie poster, cropped and altered, May 2, 2012. (http://www.amazon.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and alterations.

1. My main reason for going to my prom was because I didn’t want to look back at my time in school later on and regret not going. I don’t regret going. But, in the end, it probably would’ve better for me to have hung out with folks at a Mets game or gone to a Broadway play, if only because the food may have been better.

2. Once I made the decision to go, I simply should’ve asked Crush #2 if she had a date or not for the prom. Period. Even if she had said “No,” it would’ve given me more time to ask other folks, or even to decide to go by myself.

3. I knew on some level as soon as I asked J that despite our agreement that this was a friendly date, that at least for her, it was more than that. A more mature person — me after ’90, for example — would’ve been vocal enough to let J know that I saw her as a friend, nothing more, and that I had other interests at the time (of course, it’s hard for forty-two year-olds to be that brutally honest, but a more honest approach would’ve been better).

My lack of same-age social activities over the previous six years left me only semi-prepared for all of the emotional and psychological torture that I’d be in for not only for the prom, but also for the summer to come. My social ethos was only beginning to evolve.

A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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

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"Something About You", 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, A Question of Freedom, Blackness, Boyz N The Hood, Coolness, Crush #2, Eclectic Music, Heterosexuality, Level 42, Manhood, Masculinity, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, R. Dwayne Betts, Youth

Boyz N The Hood (1991) Screen Shot, September 1, 2011. (Source/http://freeinfosociety.com). 20 years since this movie, and we still inquisition Black males about their masculinity. By the way, I was NEVER this cool growing up.

About this time a quarter-century ago, I received regular reminders from the people in my life as family and classmates that I didn’t fit their definition of how a heterosexual Black male should behave. At least in Mount Vernon, New York. You see, I didn’t have to be a young Barack Obama or Lenny Kravitz to learn at an early age that I wasn’t Black enough, man enough or heterosexual enough for many folks in my life. The fact that I didn’t run around with the other boys skipping school and sniffing skirts was evidence enough of how different I was.

One of the more subtle forms of interrogation I experienced occurred at the end of eleventh grade, going into the summer of ’86. That day I walked into English class, and Crush #2 asked me about that song of the day, which happened to be Level 42’s “Something About You” Something About You. When I told her who it was, she started snapping her fingers to it. LJ, an on-and-off again classmate since third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, walked by as we were talked. “Are they Black?,” she asked. When I said “No,” LJ shook her head and walked away. The group was White and from the Isle of Wight, no less, a bunch of off-shore British White guys. Somehow I’d violated some kind of code in LJ’s eyes. It was the last conversation we had before we graduated a year later.

South 10th Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York, November 19, 2006. (Source/http://weichert.com). The egg-shell white house in the center of the photo is where my father Jimme lived in ’86, an attic room. Looks better now than it did then.

I received a far less subtle hint that made LJ’s disgust look like romance by comparison. It was an incident just a week before the start of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, something I’ve posted about before. By the time I’d gotten a crush on Crush #2, my sexuality was no longer in question, although I’d never seriously questioned it before. My father, though, still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer of ’86, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I found Jimme that last Saturday morning in August, hanging out on the street around the corner from his place, having already drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking and stumbling down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house in which he rented a room. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again. (see my “In the Closet, On the Down Low” from June 1, 2009 for the full conversation and incident)

As I saw it then, I was a year away from college, and I was still in the streets dealing with my drunk ass father, my jealous and institutionalized older brother, a sham of a marriage at 616 and four younger siblings who were high on sugar all of the time. I’d done so much to change my life and yet almost everything in my life was the same. Up to this point the only things that had kept my head from exploding were God and school. As my senior year approached, I wondered how much longer I could maintain emotional control before I finally just lost myself in years of growing pain, like a volcano about to super-erupt.

As I see it now, it remains a shame that we as Black males have to run a gauntlet in our communities in order

A Question of Freedom (2009) Hardcover Cover, September 1, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

to become Black men, at least in the eyes of others. We can talk about the K-12-to-prison system that is public education in many a community of color. Or the drug trade. Or the sheer lack of quality public services and interventions in our communities or lives, other than police forces. Or even the daily images that tell so many of us that aspiring to be a rapper, football or basketball player, or just to be cool is so much better than knowing anything. The latest good memoir on this is R. Dwayne Betts‘ A Question of Freedom (2009).

But we must also admit that the people who attempted to raise us — our families, relatives, neighbors and classmates — are just as often at fault for turning out Black males who aren’t ready to be Black men, human adult males with ideas and aspirations outside of the box. Until we get serious about the fact that those closest to us have put such idiotic notions of masculinity, heterosexuality and Black coolness in many a Black male’s head, we get nowhere in helping to transform the lives of people like me when I was a teenager.

For we can’t depend on people like me becoming homeless, embracing solitude, and leaving my community as the best way to learn how to be a man, an adult, a really serious yet compassionate (and goofy) human being.