What Trump in 2017 and My Dad in 1984 Have In Common

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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45, American Narcissism, Delusions of Grandeur, Father-Son Relationship, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Materialism, Resentment, Self-Loathing, White Supremacy

Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

The first time I ever heard of Donald J. Trump was while working for my father in the fall of 1984. It was in the context of having to work for our money with my dad from August until December that year. Not to mention, Walter Mondale’s sad and forlorn presidential run, Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” sound bite, and my Mets making themselves relevant again with Strawberry and Gooden. So many Friday evenings, Saturday and Sunday mornings in that part of the year, me and my brother Darren spent on the 2 Subway going to the Upper West Side to clean co-ops and condos, offices and hallways with so many industrial cleaning and buffing machines. And usually, my father was either drinking, hung over, or jonesin’ for a drink during these nearly weekly weekend job duties for nearly four months.

My father would often name drop as part of his constant yammering about “The City,” and how he was “a big shot doctor an’ lawyer” working carpet cleaning machines on the eighteen floor of a co-op off 68th and Broadway or 77th and Columbus. For two weekends, we worked the Upper East Side off the 86th Street Subway stop. It was during those weekends on the blocks between White Manhattan and Spanish Harlem that I learned who really ran the city.

King of New York (1990) with Christopher Walken screen shot. (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/).

“You know who really run dis city? Milstein,” my father said, as if I had asked him about New York’s movers and shakers. I remained silent as I worked the buffing machine in an office building lobby.

“But dere ‘nother one comin’ up. That Donal’ Trump a good bid-ness man dere! Yep, yep!,” my father continued while waging his right index finger in admiration.

I didn’t think much of the comment at that moment, because it was part of my dad’s typical “Lo’ at dis po’ ass muddafucka! I make fitty million dollas a week!” delusional diatribes. But soon after, I remembered seeing something about Trump and his first wife Ivana in the Daily News. It was probably related to one of his business deals, either for the eventual Trump Tower, the hotel deal near Grand Central, or his fight with Koch over being snubbed out of the work for the new Jacob Javitz Convention Center. I thought nothing of the man beyond the truth for people like me, people who tended to be repulsed by narcissistic self-aggrandizers seeking attention and praise.

But in those Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous times, it was obvious Trump believed in host Robin Leach’s closing words. “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” The man always talked about making deals, making money, and living as if he were a single man with an insatiable libido and without kids. More than once, in listening to this unseemly rich man, I thought, “Sounds just like Jimme.”

To think that an eventual US president would have the same ways of viewing the world as an inebriated man in his mid-forties is beyond troubling. At the very least, it makes me wonder what kind of drugs 45 has snorted over the years. But it also is proof of the pervasiveness of American narcissism. That a Black man with a seventh-grade education — not to mention, an alcoholic with a $30,000-a-year job — could see himself as a “big shot” in the same way as 45 sees himself as a “successful businessman” with at least four bankruptcies, a $200 million trust fund and a $1-million loan courtesy of his dad to his credit. It points to a society that seethes with an egocentric penchant for money, riches, and power to lord over others. It points to a people who self-loathe so much that jealousy can be normalized, that using precious psychological, emotional, spiritual, and even material resources to one-up themselves over unnamed others whom they see as their lessers is an everyday thing.

Luckily, my father sobered up about whom he had been, his narcissism, the many slights he absorbed as a late-era Black migrant in New York, the many jealousies he harbored, and his own self-hatred. And that was all before he stopped drinking at the end of 1997. That doesn’t mean that my father now qualifies for sainthood. But he is at least in touch with who he is, and the need to be a better person every day.

Losing brain cells, September 27, 2013. (http://www.dailyhealthpost.com).

45, though, hasn’t grown a single self-reflective neuron in the past thirty-three years. Matter of fact, as evidenced with so many verbal explosions over Charlottesville and “Rus-shur,” 45 may have destroyed at least five billion neurons since Ivanka was a toddler. America, to its collective detriment, has a 71-year-old less psychologically able to be president than my father would’ve been during the worst of his alcoholic times. What makes this unsurprising, sad, and anger-inducing, is that the US has had at least a half-dozen other presidents who also shouldn’t have been trusted to sit next to my dad and remain civil at the same “Shamrock Bar” on East 241st Street, where he frequently gave away his paychecks.

So America, 45 is “a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. A shame to the US and the world stage, and a pitiful mess for anyone to watch in action.

Yes, I’m A Sexist Feminist

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Black Masculinity, Chivalry, Contradictions, Dahlia, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Father-Son Relationship, Feminism, Masculinity, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Nice Guy, Owning Imperfection, Patriarchy, Phyllis, Sexism, Womanism

Hostile vs. Benevolent Sexism, March 10, 2015. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

I finished up a chapter in Boy @ The Window with the closest approximation to my contemporaneous thoughts about Phyllis (a.k.a., “Crush #2” at times on this blog) in August 1988:

I must’ve rewritten these two paragraphs at least a half-dozen times before putting the book out for limited consumption. The thought process that I went through at eighteen years old bothered me then, and looking at the words even today leaves me wanting. Probably because there is more than a bit of sexism contained within these words.

But I wasn’t wrong, of course, not in ’88, not when I wrote and rewrote these paragraphs between 2007 and 2011, and not now, at least in terms of how I perceived things then. While I believed in reproductive rights, in equal pay for equal work, and in passing the Equal Rights Amendment growing up, I also believed in saving damsels from distress and in distinguishing between “ladies” and “bitches.” Or, as my father put it when he argued with my Mom in front of me when I was four years old, “You’s a black bit’!” Or, my contradiction could’ve fully formed when my father tried to set me up with a prostitute a couple of weeks before my seventeenth birthday, in December 1986.

There was no way in 1988 I could’ve understood the contradictions between the idea of feminism (in any form) and the notion of “being a nice guy.” I hadn’t been exposed, or, rather, exposed myself to Paula Giddings, Elsa Barkley Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, and Zora Neale Hurston. I hadn’t yet been engaged in the hundreds of conversations I’d eventually have with women folk I’d become friends with, people with whom I bonded because of their suffering, people from whom I’d hidden my own suffering during those years. Date rape, physical abuse, the more typical abuse of serial cheating, among other issues. With many of these women, I recognized the sexism and misogyny I saw in myself in 1988, and saw them again when I wrote down my contemporaneous thoughts in Boy @ The Window. It didn’t occur to me until the mid-1990s that women could be just as sexist and misogynistic as men, and often could pass down their notions of masculinity and patriarchy to their children. And that thought scared me.

Imprisoned brain (or, maybe, Culture Club and “Church of the Poison Mind” [1983]), December 27, 2016. (http://mdjunction.com).

It scared me because I realized I may have learned more of my contradictions from my Mom than from my father or idiot ex-stepfather. After all, she was the one constant in my parenting, the one person who engaged me in ideas like chivalry and manliness, who through her acquiescence to Maurice might have made it okay for me to see women, especially Black women (and to a lesser extent, Latina women) as ones in need of help, even when they decide not to take it.

And it may have made it okay for me to see myself as the victim in my incident with Dahlia in June 1987, when I accidentally (the first time), and later deliberately smacked her on her left butt cheek. Maybe I was the victim in a way, at least of my own deluded thought process. And there hasn’t been a time in the past twenty-nine and a half years in which I haven’t regretted that second, deliberate slap, in response to Dahlia accusing of thoughts I didn’t have, because my only obsession in 1987 was Phyllis. I’ve said and written this before, including in Boy @ The Window. To Dahlia, I am so sorry.

Beijing smog alert, Beijing, China, December 6, 2016. (http://ibtimes.com).

I may never be the perfect intersectional womanist feminist I’ve tried to be since I told my Mom to abort my future (and since deceased) sister in 1982. I still believe that professional women’s tennis players should play best-of-five-set matches at the Gram Slam tournaments. I think more women — particularly White women — should stop calling themselves feminists if their feminism stops when dealing with women of color or poor women in general. I think that most men who aren’t feminists are assholes. But I also know that, just like with racism (as now well noted by Ibram Kendi) and with narcissism (my next project, maybe), sexist ideas are as pervasive as smog in L.A. and Beijing. I don’t have to like it or accept it, but I do have to accept that I am a man, and I will make mistakes, including sexist ones. I will have to own up, and keep trying to do better.

A Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part Two

06 Saturday Aug 2016

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

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425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anti-Gay Slur, Big Wheel, c, Chevy Malibu, Dukey, Father-Son Relationship, Heterosexism, Hypermasculinity, Molestation, Mother-Son Relationship, Nathan Hale Elementary, Parenting, Pedophilia, Recovered Memories, Sexual Assault, Signs of Trauma

It took me until three weeks after the sex assault on the Nathan Hale ES playground before I told my parents. Those three weeks are a blur, but not the blur that the incident with the light-skinned teenager and his three friends would become until three weeks before my forty-fifth birthday

At the beginning of August ’76, my Mom and my dad Jimme were having another one of their vicious arguments. It was that Saturday afternoon when I finally learned that my Mom had filed for a divorce the month before. Anyway, I somehow managed to get myself in the middle of that argument. I complained that Darren’s bigger butt had been the final straw for my Big Wheel. It had broken in half after he tried to ride it earlier that week.

“I told him, it says ‘90-lb limit’,” I said to my Mom (which I pronounced as “ninety lebs”) while pointing at the inscribed warning label on my now broken Big Wheel, crying.

“You broke that shit weeks ago!,” my Mom yelled.

“I didn’t break it. A bunch of kids did,” I said.

“And you didn’t try to stop ‘em?,” Mom asked.

“I did try to stop ‘em. But they took it and one of them stuck a pee-pee in my mouth,” I explained.

“I done told you not to leave the house when I’m not here! That’s what you get for not listenin’!,” my Mom screamed.

I was so shocked by how angry she was. I was mad, too. I didn’t think. I just ran out the house and out into the middle of the street. I saw a tan Chevy Malibu coming down the street and I just stood there.

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

The older, salt-and-pepper bearded and balding Black man didn’t slow down until he realized I wasn’t planning to move. He slammed on the brakes and came to a stop about three feet in front of me. The man put his car in park and got out. He then slammed his driver’s side door really hard, and yelled, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you tryin’ to get yourself killed? Where’s your mama?”

He grabbed me by the back of my chocolate-brown t-shirt and made me show him where I lived. We marched upstairs to the second-floor, where he proceeded to explain my suicidal actions. My Mom then took the older man’s belt and beat me with it in front of him, with Darren and Jimme watching. Afterwards, she said “Thank you” to the older man, and then sent me to bed without dinner. “Don’t you EVER do that again!,” she screamed.

Nine months after that bicentennial summer, we moved across town to 616 East Lincoln, a three-in-one, five-story Tudor-style apartment complex. After a summer camp at Darren’s Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 East Lincoln chased us around the vast two-building complex while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark-brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us and took us upstairs to my Mom and my eventual stepfather Maurice. The two young men said that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my Mom and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Both “dukey” and “faggot” were part of my vocabulary — again.

The mind of a child is a strange place. Mine was no different. For years afterward, I’d managed to forget these most painful memories. I managed to bury them without burying all of my other memories, so many memories that I have for the last forty-one out of my forty-five years. I somehow didn’t remember the connections between my Big Wheel, the light-skinned teenager and standing in the middle of South Sixth, waiting to be run over. I didn’t remember my Mom’s response to finding out that her six-year-old son had been sexually assaulted.

It’s ironic. Ironic because I’ve already written my coming-of-age memoir in Boy @ The Window. I spent the better part of a decade researching, writing and revising it before self-publishing it in 2013. I included excruciating details about my family, my Mom, my father Jimme. I included as many relevant and embarrassing events as I could about how I became the person I always wanted to be. And with all that work, I never remembered the moment a teenager forced his penis tip into my mouth.

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

I only remembered during the holidays in 2014. One night in early December, I had a really bad trying-to-escape dream — again. This time, though, I remembered the taste of a penis in my mouth, and then I saw the light-skinned teenager. Even in my dream, I said, “That’s him. That’s it.”

After I woke up, a flood of images erupted in my brain. The Chevy Malibu and me standing in the street. Seeing the light-skinned kid who assaulted me on the playground at 616 on the same day the other kids chased Darren and me around the building while pelting us with pebbles and rocks. The wall of fear that my Mom had on her face when the neighbors told her that they thought Darren and me were “faggots” because we were standing so close to each other that we looked like we were “doing the dukey.”

The now-remembered incident explained so much. My Mom’s constant fear that I’d turn out gay. My father Jimme constantly calling me a “faggat” (as he pronounced it when he was drunk) whenever I stepped out of line or looked at people the wrong way. My Mom giving my one-time idiot stepfather Maurice carte blanche to “turn” me and Darren “into men” through Isshin-ryu karate and draconian physical abuse. Me being terrified at times when around Black guys on the basketball courts or in other social setting. My looking at young women from afar, attainable and yet all but unattainable for me. The sheer desire to save the people in my life from violence and destruction, especially my Mom and Darren, but the inability to do either.

My family’s fear of the mere possibility that I or my brother Darren could be gay drove many of their measures of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. So much so that they ignored all the signs of my actual abuse. Like standing in middle of the street to get run over by a car, were just considered “defiant” or “weird.” Or with me constantly chewing my fingernails right down to nail bed. Or me constantly stuffing sandwiches and other food down into the recesses of my winter coats, having already ripped out the pockets, and leaving the food there. Or the day I stood on Nathan Hale’s playground during recess in May ’77, when I took some string from my red and blue-striped t-shirt, gradually unraveled it, and swallowed nearly a third of it. My Mom figured she could beat the “something’s wrong with you, fool” out of me. My father calling me a “faggat” from the time I turned fourteen was just tough love, not a form of abuse piled on top of abuse.

Now that I remember everything about the physical and the sexual abuse, what do I do next? It’s been forty years since I found out how horrible life could be. It’s not as if I’ll be able to track down and then beat up the light-skinned teenager, who’s now in his early fifties, assuming he’s still alive.

I could start by revising Boy @ The Window. I wasn’t just weird because I wore a kufi, spoke too slowly, or grew up with weird people. I wasn’t just a child of poverty, abuse, and divorce. I was also a sexual abuse victim, all but completely unacknowledged, and yet such a major part of the story.

Forgiving my abuser could be at the top of the list. It would be difficult to be angry at someone whom I’d forgotten about for nearly four decades. But you know what? If I could just punch him in the throat and then knee him in the balls until one fell out and rolled down the street, that would give me some satisfaction.

Mostly, I’m just satisfied that I know my past in full. I already paid the bill. Now that I know what I paid for, I can move forward. I can look at my past, present, and future with more sanity than I thought possible.

How I Met My Son

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, 9/11, Abuse, Amadou Diallo, Baggage, Black Masculinity, Burden of Success, Child Abuse, Darren Gill, Domestic Violence, Eri, Family Intervention, Father-Son Relationship, Humanities, Maurice, Maurice Eugene Washington, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Noah, Parenting, Penguins, Poverty, Self-Reflection, Siblings, Teenager, Yiscoc

Noah’s birthday cake, Cheesecake Factory Original Cheesecake, adorned with candles, July 30, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

My son turned thirteen yesterday. That sentence by itself speaks volumes. That I have a son, that he’s reached an age where he’s in the midst of puberty, with a discernible personality, with a set of abilities and potential for developing more talents. Wow! Noah loves art, anime, and apples. He’s a classic contrarian who’s just beginning to realize that he has academic and athletic talents. He’s mostly observant, thoughtful, and independent thinking enough to deal with this crazy world outside our home. That he’s managed to get to this point without me messing him up with my own baggage as his father. To me, that’s not just amazing. That’s a miracle.

As late as the early spring of ’02, a half-year before me and my wife conceived our one and only egg, I had some doubts about ever being a dad. But those small doubts mattered little compared to where I’d been the summer and fall of ’01. I wasn’t dead set against becoming a parent. I just felt that in this dangerous, chaotic, racist, oppressive world, how could I be so selfish as to bring a child into this life?

Daddy Emperor Penguin with baby penguin, accessed July 31, 2016. (National Geographic via http://pinterest.com).

I wasn’t just thinking of Amadou Diallo or the aftermath of 9/11. This wasn’t just about the expense of raising a kid. Mostly, it had to do with growing up as the second of six, but with ALL of the responsibilities of a first-born Gen-Xer watching over four siblings ten to fourteen years younger than me, not to mention my wayward older brother. It was the trauma of living through eight years of abject, unrelenting poverty with an abusive asshole of a bully who frequently threatened my and my Mom’s existence. It was having to swallow shit from all of my legal guardians about my lack of observable Black testosterone coursing through my brain cells. Add going through a magnet program from middle school to high school and going to the University of Pittsburgh to this baggage. What I was by twenty was a hopeful but yet emotionally exhausted human being.

So, I was never someone who had this American evangelical desire to get married or have kids (which is also a passion connected to Whiteness, by the way, to propagate their numbers, but not just). Even when it was obvious that me and my wife were heading toward marriage by 1998, I was more against having kids than in favor of the idea. I was still occasionally sending money to my Mom and my siblings to help them out, and taking trips to 616 to put out figurative fires. I had changed enough diapers, made enough bottles, dressed, lunched, dinnered, and laundered enough for my siblings to say “I’m good” when it came to having my own child.

But when my youngest brother Eri beat me to the punch by siring his own kid with his high school girlfriend at seventeen in the spring of ’01, I lost it. I couldn’t sleep soundly for months. I listened to my Mom complain week after week about him and his post-high school dropout future. My brothers Maurice and Yiscoc weren’t doing much better. My family was a cyclone of a disaster, and nothing I had done to blaze a trail for them since 1982 had done much good.

This was when I decided to do my intervention, to go after both my Mom and my siblings. Not so much out of anger, and yes, I had enough anger to keep my current iPhone powered for three days. No, this was a combination of righteous indignation and, well, love. I did my due diligence to dig into my Mom’s life with a few questions that I already knew the answers to, about when and how it all went so wrong for us all. And then I did the intervention, in January ’02, right after the birth of my only nephew.

Only later did I realize the intervention I did was really for me. Only later did I figure out that the 616 intervention had freed me from my self-imposed burden to help lift my family out of poverty. The constant anguish and exhaustion I felt when dealing with my family went away in the weeks after the intervention, and I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, maybe years.

Noah in portrait, May 16, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins)

That’s when I was ready to do my part in the miracle of conception, childbirth, and parenting. Giving myself that permission and then having the recognition of the baggage I carried going in has made fatherhood and parenting much easier (not easy, just much easier) than it would’ve been if I had done like Eri or followed Phil Knight’s “Just Do It” advice.

It’s hard to really be passionate about having a child when nearly all your free time with family between the ages of twelve and thirty-one has been to participate in raising kids. Since my little egg arrived thirteen years ago, though, I’ve reserved my parenting for him. I’m the father penguin in -100°F temps, braving blizzards in eighty-mile-an-hour winds to see my son through. I think it’s paid off so far.

End of the Dorm Room State

30 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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25 Welsford Street, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Computing and Information Systems, Father-Son Relationship, Financial Aid, Freshman Year, Homelessness, La Guardia Airport, Lothrop Hall, Naivete, Pitt, Pork Neck Bones and Rice, South Oakland, Tuna Fish, unemployment, US Air, Western Union

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

On this day and date twenty-eight years ago was the Saturday end to my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. Like today here in the DMV, it was a cool and cloudy day, a day in which I was tired from the year, but hopeful now that I had survived many of my inner doubts and outward troubles to make it to another fall of courses.

But there was a lot of unfinished business at Pitt. And, no, after my first Dean’s List, it wasn’t my grades. Six weeks earlier that year was March 15. That was the deadline for me to put down a $350 deposit to guarantee a dorm room for next year. Otherwise, I’d have to participate in a lottery for one. And the deadline for that was April 30th.

As of that morning, I had more than enough money to cover my deposit, as I’d gotten paid for my eighty or so hours of computer lab work with Pitt from the month of March. That money was way too late now. I knew that I’d have to go back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to find work for the summer, to have the money I needed to find a place to live for the fall when I’d come back to Pitt.

25 Welsford Street, Pittsburgh (where I lived my sophomore and junior years at Pitt), August 2015. (Google Maps).

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask my parents. Mom didn’t have the money, between my idiot stepfather, my four younger siblings and my older brother Darren. Eight-hundred and fifty dollars of AFDC, food stamps, and WIC per month can only be stretched so far in a place as expensive as the New York metropolitan area. And my father Jimme, well, I let him know a month before the dorm reservation deadline that I needed the money. He said at least twice that he had wired me the funds via Western Union. I checked both times with the check cashing place in North Oakland, only to walk out empty-handed.

The timing just didn’t work out. That’s what I told myself, at least. I’d find a better place to live than Lothrop Hall. Between carousing Pitt basketball players, underaged boozers, the more than occasional tokers, and the terrible cafeteria food, I was probably better off living off-campus anyway.

You can convince yourself of a lot of things in the hours before a US Air flight to La Guardia when you’re staring at 120 days of living at 616 and being in Mount Vernon. Both places where I’d barely fit in before thirty-three weeks of college and relative independence. I was about to reclaim my emotionless role as the eldest son, all but running a house that was never mine to run in the first place. The fact of my questionable residential status as a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh could wait.

Like with so many things going on in my life that leap year, I was terribly wrong. I found myself unemployed for the summer, homeless in Pittsburgh for five days, and broke and malnourished for most of the Fall ’88 semester. From April 30th to the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’d live with financial crisis, without a place to lay my head, and with tuna fish sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice as food for many of those days.

I did make friends my freshman year, and I did have friends my sophomore year, some of whom probably would’ve taken me in had they known about my troubles. But that’s the thing about abuse and poverty and race in a country that purports to be great and yet contradicts itself. You seldom tell anyone about anything bad in your life, out of embarrassment or out of pride, because you don’t want to be the living embodiment of a stereotype. Still, when I hinted about my lack of eats in October and November, my friends and even my classmates did help.

Fast-forward to ’92, the spring my father refused to believe that I knocked off my MA in Pitt’s history program in two semesters. He had told my brother Darren and his drinking buddies for years that he had paid my way through college. I also found out about that bit of Jimme braggadocio that spring.

Bumble Bee Tuna in oil (not water for me – still has been almost 28 years since eating), April 30, 2016. (http://www.upcitemdb.com).

When I went over to his place in late June to show him my MA degree, he even tried to tell me how he paid for my BA for four years. “What are you talking about?,” I said.

“My bachelor’s cost $32,000, and my other expenses over four years were another $20,000. In four years, you sent me $480 total,” I yelled, even though my drunk father was only a couple of feet away.

“Naw, naw, naw, I paid, I paid,” my father kept saying, with very little of the confidence than he had displayed before.

The total of my father’s payments for me and college was actually $880, including $480 he Western Union-ed to me my first three semesters. I’d forgotten the $400 I managed to get from him in August ’88 so that I could find a place to live my sophomore year in Pittsburgh. It is true, without that money, and without me surviving my first days in Pittsburgh minus a dorm room, I wouldn’t have finished college. But as a father myself, I’m not sure I’d ever claim credit for that, drunk or sober.

Degrees of Fakery

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Upper West Side, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Advanced Degrees, Ben Carson, Bill Cosby, Brian Williams, Chevy Citation, CMU, Cynicism, Doctor, Doctorate, Dr. Steve Perry, Expertise, Experts, Fake Degrees, Fakery, Father-Son Relationship, Hard Work, Henry Kissinger, Honorary Degrees, Lawyer, Maurice Eugene Washington, Michelle Malkin, Newt Gingrich, Obsequious, Opinions, PhD, William Kristol

Anne-Marie Johnson in Im Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), March 17, 2015. (http://cdn5.movieclips.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws (low resolution and relevance to subject matter).

All too often, there are Americans high and low who believe they can say, “That’s just your opinion!” to anyone about anything. It doesn’t matter if the person they say this to is an expert in, say, climate change or American history or twentieth-century education policy. Or, for that matter, if the person they question is a total bullshit artist. All opinions are equal, and equally discountable.

But it does matter if the opinion comes from someone rich and famous. or at least, someone Americans see on TV and/or hear on the radio nearly every day, someone they like, someone they could see themselves sharing a laugh or cry with. That’s why opinions like those of Rudy Giuliani, Bill Cosby, Michelle Malkin, even Brian Williams seem to have mattered more over the years than the expert interpretations of many a scholar, scientist or public intellectual.

On the scale of those experts, those in the media likely view me as a middle-of-the-pack expert. I went to graduate school for five and a half years, earning two advanced degrees with a focus on twentieth-century US and African American history, with an even sharper focus on history of American education, African American identity and multiculturalism.

Front and left-side view of Chevrolet Citation II (1980-1985), Clinton, MD, August 28, 2008. (IFCAR via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Despite what my Mom, my dad and some of my more cynical former high school classmates may think, earning a PhD in history wasn’t nearly as simple as answering 1,000 Final Jeopardy questions correctly before getting a stamp of approval. Twenty-three masters and doctoral courses, more than forty paper assignments of twenty pages or more, two years as a teaching assistant, one year as an undergraduate student advisor, two summers as a research assistant, and twenty-seven months of single-minded focus researching and writing a 505-page dissertation with more citations than the number of Citations Chevrolet made between 1980 and 1985. Oh, and did I mention, nineteen months of burnout afterward?

Yet, when I take the years I’ve spent researching, writing, learning, teaching, publishing and working in the fields of history and education, and express views based on that, I get told what anyone else on the street could say. “That’s just your opinion!” Unbelievable!

I think, too, about those from a time not too long ago who could’ve and should’ve earned a doctorate, a medical degree, or a JD, yet the structures of socioeconomic privilege, racism and sexism prevent them from earning these most expert of degrees. Yet, at many an HBCU, in many a segregated classroom, in so many barbershops, we still called them “Doc,” a sign of respect, for their abilities, for their experience, for their — dare I say — expertise.

We still do this now, even for people who don’t deserve the nickname “Doc.” My father and my idiot, late ex-stepfather both at one point in their lives or another laid claim to being doctors and/or lawyers. For the first two years I knew my then stepfather Maurice, between ’77 and ’79, he carried a monogramed briefcase, always full of his “important papers,” telling me and anyone else he bumped into on the streets of Mount Vernon, New York that he was a “doctor” or a “lawyer.” When drunk, my father sometimes took it a step further, telling strangers on the Subway that he was a “big-shot doctor an’ a lawyer” on his Friday-evening paydays. Maurice drove a Reliable taxicab during his delusions-of-grandeur years, and my father was janitorial supervisor.

Given the history of education and our society’s denial of quality education to people of color and the poor in the US, though, I didn’t entirely hold it against them then, and I don’t now. What I do have much bigger problems with, though, are the people who should know better, and yet don’t do any better. Just in my lifetime alone, people with Dr. in front of their names without having earned a doctorate or a four-year medical degree. Like “Dr.” Henry Kissinger, “Dr.” Bill Cosby, and of late, “Dr.” Steve Perry (not to be confused with the former lead singer for Journey, I guess). And no, honorary doctorates for giving money to Harvard, Temple, or the University of Massachusetts don’t count! Nor does starting an outline for a dissertation without actually finishing one. Still, they insist on the “Dr.,” even when it’s obvious I could’ve sat on the stoop at 616 East Lincoln Avenue thirty years ago to get the same half-baked opinions from one of my hydro-smoking neighbors.

Stock photo of former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, August 2013. (AP/New York Post).

Then again, numbskulls like William Kristol and Newt Gingrich have earned doctorates from Harvard and Tulane University respectively, and Ben Carson was once one of the most respected pediatric neurosurgeons in the world! Yet, for some dumb reason, our media and most Americans think that their opinions are somehow more valuable, more consumable, than those of people who’ve spent decades understanding education, American culture, racial, gender and socioeconomic inequality, and government corruption. Or maybe, we just like listening to fake opinions from people with fake degrees and/or fake expertise on a subject in which they know nothing. Because nothing is exactly what Americans want to hear.

On Kicking My Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome

07 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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"Ballerina Wendy", Atlas, Burdens, Child Abuse, Chivalry, Crush #1, Damsel-in-Distress, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Domestic Violence, Father-Son Relationship, Feminism, Love, Misogyny, Misty Copeland, Mother-Son Relationship, Pitt, Resentment, Sexism, Wendy, Womanism

Chivalry with a suit blazer, March 7, 2015. (http://genius.com)/

This week marked thirty-three years since the fight that led to a crush that led to me falling in love for the first time, via a ballerina in training. The three-month period between March and June ’82 shaped how I dealt with teenage girls and women between the time I turned twelve and my mid-thirties. The crush on “Ballerina Wendy” and its mutation because of my stepfather’s knocking out of my Mom in front of me helped shaped my feminism, my womanism and my sexist damsel-in-distress syndrome.

Wonder Woman, October 30, 2012. (http://tvequals.com).

It was the beginning of my damsel-in-distress syndrome. Though it was triggered by the Memorial Day incident, my damsel-in-distress syndrome had been latent for years. I was in fact a mama’s boy, tempered by living at 616 and in Mount Vernon. I’d always been enamored by strong, athletic women (or at least, actresses with that role), going back to Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Yet I’d also been surrounded by sexism and misogyny, from my father calling my Mom a “Black bit'” since I was four to my stepfather’s constant quoting of the Torah to justify his laying of violent hands and feet on my Mom.

What I did in response was to help my Mom in every way I could, and in ways I never should’ve. Calling up Con Ed and Ma Bell to pay the electric and telephone bills. Listening to years of conversations about her failed marriages, about my father’s alcoholic failings, about her bills, about the burdens we as her children had put on her. Washing clothes for the house every weekend from October ’82 through August ’87 and anytime I was home for the summer and for the holidays once I went off to college. Going to the store as many as five times in a single afternoon and evening because my Mom forgot that she needed diapers or cigarettes. Hunting my father down for money even on weekends I didn’t want to be bothered because we were out of food for my younger siblings. Taking a fist-filled beating here or there from my stepfather to take the pressure off of my Mom. Promising my Mom that after I finished my degree, I’d come back to New York to work and help her out financially.

Atlas supports the terrestrial globe on a building in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia, October 9, 2006. (Biatch via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain.

On that last promise especially, I reneged. I changed my major from computer science to history, and decided to stay at Pitt, to go to graduate school, to earn a PhD, to start writing, both in the academic world and a bit as a freelancer, to teach for a living. It was the basis, I think, for her falling out with me in ’97, and why our relationship remains limited.

My Mom was hardly the only woman in my life in which I wanted to assist. Some of my Pitt friends can certainly attest to this fact, that sometimes I was there to help too often. To the point where once I realized I was overburdened or when that other person had become too reliant on me, it pretty much killed that friendship. Either way, I was angry, and sometimes felt used, while some of my Pitt friends were either confused or angry themselves.

I’ve had to learn over the years to say no, even to my wife, when I realized that one too many logs on the fire will actually put that fire out. It started with everything high-tech. Every computer glitch, every printer error, every Internet issue, and I was there like Clark Kent, ready to help. But by the time I hit thirty-five, I was just too tired and felt too burdened to be that on all the time. I finally stopped helping my wife with her tech issues. I stopped offering to help, and have only interjected when the issue actually affects all of our equipment.

The irony is, my wife is a stronger person than my Mom, stronger in many ways than how I perceived Wendy as a person so many years ago. It’s not as if my wife doesn’t need or appreciate the help. But, as I’ve learned over the years, too, sometimes, help is just emotional support, a hug or a joke. Or, when I’m ready to, simply listening without feeling the need to use a quadratic equation to solve the problem.

American Ballet Theater soloist Misty Copeland in a promotional photo via her Under Armour ad deal, January 30, 2014. (Under Arnour via Huffington Post).

American Ballet Theater soloist Misty Copeland in a promotional photo (cropped) via her Under Armour ad deal, January 30, 2014. (Under Arnour via Huffington Post).

Damsel-in-distress syndrome, as chivalrous as it is, can also be extremely sexist, for both women and men and girls and boys. It means constantly attempting to help people who may or may not want your help, especially in cases where it is clear that they may need help. It means taking on emotional and psychological burdens that otherwise should only belong to the person you’re trying to support. It means, sadly, providing advice and knowing answers and solutions that may not be answers or solutions at all.

The Memorial Day ’82 incident with my mother changed what was an otherwise innocent crush and love into something contradictory even as it became more meaningful. It made me appreciate women who could and can kick some ass, whose strength would be obvious to all. And it made me think women who weren’t like that — women like my Mom — needed constant help from people like me. Wendy defended herself thirty-three years ago. My Mom tried and couldn’t. Life and strength for us, male and female and transgender, though, has never been that simple. And though I have saved quite a few damsels in distress over the years, it isn’t my eternal burden to carry.