Tag Archives: Fatherhood

High School, When 30 Makes You Old(ish)

18 Sunday Jun 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Réunion Island’s (French department, off Madagascar) Piton de la Fournaise, lava flow, February 26, 2005. (Samuel A. Hoarau via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Today I am thirty years removed from my Mount Vernon High School graduation. Yay me (and 500+ others, I suppose)! But at forty-seven and a half years old, this also means I’m in my late forties, older than the age of many of my teachers on the day I wore my cap and gown on Memorial Field.

What I am still young and old enough to remember is the distance between me and my classmates, acquaintances (since I really didn’t have any friends back then), and family. Putting up a good front, a mostly blank front with an occasional laugh or smile, was what I did in public back then, enough to make it appear I wasn’t an outcast. Except that I was. But it wasn’t just the silent-treatment folks who reminded me that I was nothing and meant nothing to them within days of the MVHS graduation. I felt it, knew it, and wanted to escape it, every single day back in ’87.

There have been at least two high school reunions since Thursday, June 18, 1987. One was in September 1997, way too early to do a get-together from where I sit. Not to mention, I was coming off of three months of post-PhD unemployment, and wouldn’t have wanted to spend money I didn’t have to impress people with whom I could’ve never shared good times a decade earlier. The other was five years ago, a more appropriate frame for a reunion, but it was part of a group of reunions between 1985 and 1989 (or more even). I barely knew half my classmates in the Class of ’87, a couple dozen from ’86, and a few from ’85 and ’88. All together, it would’ve felt like a room full of strangers to me.

But at thirty or more years, would I want to go to a reunion now or in the future? I really don’t know. Part of the problem with reunions is the same problem I had in Humanities and in MVHS. I would have to fit someone’s predetermined mold or role. If I went in as Donald Earl Collins, would anyone actually remember me or acknowledge me as my true self? Could I be Donald Earl Collins the writer or historian or educator? Could I be the disillusioned Christian, the anti-racist American, or the middle-aged athlete who does yoga and can still hit threes despite my IT-band issues? Or, will I just fall into my role as the super-smart but enigmatic loser, the wack-ass weird mofo that scores saw me as three decades ago?

I know one thing my ex-mates wouldn’t see me as — a father (after all, today is Father’s Day). I guarantee you, some of the folks in my class took bets as to whether I was straight, gay, asexual, or if I’d have sex with another human before the Rapture! Yet I’ve been married for more than seventeen years, and a father for almost fourteen. Much longer than I was ever in high school, Humanities, or Mount Vernon’s public schools. This is what makes me old and keeps me young. Family, love, parenting, and making pancakes, bacon, and eggs for Sunday brunch.

Memorial Field in complete disrepair, locked up (and like me in 1987, locked out), April 2, 2017. (Mark Lungariello/The Journal News).

The day of graduation in 1987 was a trip in itself, between an 87-year-old graduating with our class, the sudden hugs and immediate ostracisms that occurred, the triple-H evening in polyester in the middle of Memorial Field, and my father’s drunken attendance. It was a clash of White Italian Mount Vernon, Black elite Mount Vernon, and stereotypically ghetto Mount Vernon, with a splash of affluence, Afro-Caribbean, and other Mount Vernons. That’s what made it a strange ceremony, a last look at my hometown’s population as a teenager, good and bad.

There’s someone on Facebook who runs the page “I grew up in Mount Vernon.” My former classmate frequently blocks or admonishes participants for negative posts or negative portrayals of Mount Vernon. His defense: he wants the page to be “a place of positivity.” It’s his page, and he should be able to do what he wants with it (within reason). However, “positivity” is not the same thing as “positive posts only.” You should be able to generally like Mount Vernon and occasionally discuss issues affecting people in town that aren’t positive ones. Like poverty. Like the need for more social justice activism and more political participation. Like the need for a donut shop on par with the former Clover Donuts.

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

Really, I find this “I grew up in Mount Vernon” Facebook page yet another example of how a privileged group of folk get to frame a conversation for people who can’t or won’t speak for themselves. Middle-class, one-way-thinking, Black respectability politics folk whose Christian ethics blind them to history, racism, poverty, misogyny, homophobia/heterosexism, and other -isms and -obias that affect their neighbors. The page is smug, elitist, and exclusionary. I rarely look at the page, and I’ve posted to it maybe three times in seven or eight years. “I grew up in Mount Vernon” is a reminder that I share little in common with these Mount Vernonites, even as my socioeconomic and educational status has changed over the years.

As a father, though, I am reminded about the need to protect and to nurture, balanced with the need to give my son room to grow and learn. I may not be able to stop a cop from exercising his/her lethal racism with a badge, but I can prepare my son as best I can to be in public anyway. When it comes to Mount Vernon, MVHS, or any future reunion I may decide to attend, maybe, just maybe, my ex-classmates should be as ready to see all sides of me. At least as much as I have granted that their version of Mount Vernon is one that is real for them, if not for me and many others.

On Becoming A Father — 11 Years Later

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,


Wife and son, August 16, 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

Wife and son, latter at two weeks and change old, August 16, 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

This week eleven years ago is when I first learned from my wife that she was pregnant with our one and only child, our son Noah. It was a high that took a few months of post-natal sleep deprivation to come down from, not to mention a fight to keep my job and move on from it courtesy of AED in ’03 and early ’04. But learning that I was soon to become a father didn’t just bring joy and euphoria. It came with baggage and the fear that my baggage would be a handicap to me as a father and to my gestating son.

Luckily I had a bit of time to prepare for becoming a father. I figured out that my wife was pregnant a few weeks before she did. It was on Thanksgiving Day ’02, and I was whisking a cream sauce to go with some chocolate torte dessert I was making. I asked my wife to watch over the cream and to make sure that it didn’t boil over when I went to the bathroom. Sure enough, the sauce was boiling over when I came back. I said sarcastically, “Thanks for messing up the cream!,” which led to my wife going to the bathroom, crying. You have to understand, my wife rarely cries, and never cries over my brand of New York-esque sarcasm. So when she said, “I’m sorry,” I said, “It’s okay, honey,” followed by, “Why are you literally crying over boiling cream? Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

From that moment until my wife had given herself an EPT test three weeks later, I’d already started the process of psychological preparation. We’d barely begun trying to have a kid. We talked about it in July ’02, changed our diets in August and September, and I started taking herbal supplements by the end of September. Two months of actual trying in total. Really? That’s all it took?

All I knew was that fatherhood would bring back so many memories, some good, most of them bad and ugly. About my father Jimme and his alcoholism and homophobia as directed at me, my ex-stepfather’s physical and psychological abuse, about having to serve in my father-like role with my younger siblings and with Darren. By the time I’d reached grad student, some eleven years earlier, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever fall in love or get married, much less become a father. I mean, who would want to be with me, have little Donalds and Donnas running around that had about half of my features and traits? I wasn’t sure if I’d ever want that.

Fast-forward through grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, through four and half years of dating and two years of marriage. I was in a different place, not much different, but different enough to be much more sure about what I wanted. As I said to my wife, “There are four days out of the week where I’m sure about having a kid, two where I don’t want a child, and one where I simply don’t know.”

That was still good enough for my wife. And she’s the reason I could be firmly committed to fatherhood. I don’t think that I would’ve become a father otherwise. Have I made mistakes over the past ten years and five months with Noah? Of course! I once left him in a carrier on our table when he was five months over, and it flipped over end-over-end, scaring the crap out of him (literally!). I’ve yelled at him when I shouldn’t have, and I’ve cursed out at least one hundred too many bad DC area drivers with him in the back seat of our Honda Element over the years.

But despite all of the ups and downs in my life, career(s) and even marriage, one of the handful of things I’m sure about is having become a father to my son a good eight and a half months before he was born. I still check on him nearly every night to watch him sleep (and breath).

10 Years Come and (Not) Gone

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Movies, music, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


Two different Noahs, nearly 10 years apart, August 21, 2003 and July 26, 2013. (Angelia N. Levy and Donald Earl Collins).

Two different Noahs, nearly 10 years apart, August 21, 2003 and July 26, 2013. (Angelia N. Levy and Donald Earl Collins).

Today my son Noah turns ten! That’s wonderful! But it’s also a reminder of both the passing of my youthful energy and relative innocence and the path toward his adulthood and future.

I note my son’s birthday in both small and big ways. I’ve been playing Coldplay’s “Clocks” incessantly for the past week and a half, because it was the summer of Coldplay when Noah was born. Every HBO promotion of shows and movies that summer had the “Clocks” melody in it, so I couldn’t get away from it even when I wanted to.

Every time I watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy I think for a moment of the summer of ’03 and Noah’s birth, My wife was literally days away from going into labor when we watched it in a marathon session — at home and in the movie theater.

I think of seeing the crown of my son’s matted hair about five minutes before the final push on this day. I think of the fact that I basically floated on happiness and hopes, dreams fulfilled and exceeded in the year before Noah’s birth. I don’t think that I ever felt so much romantic love as the love I felt for my wife and son this time a decade ago.

But I also think of the regrets of my past and the need to ensure that my son doesn’t make the same mistakes I did. To go after what he wants for his life, for his happiness. To not refuse genuine help, friendship or love when offered. To trust with wisdom and discernment, in himself and in others, knowing that some who may call him friend may yet betray that trust. To be content with being a contrarian, but not too content. To allow himself the opportunity of failure so that no early love in his life goes unrequited, and so that even his parents know his mind and heart.

I think, too, of my son’s future, of how we keep him on the path to college, a career and calling that he doesn’t lose sight of or regret later on, of the connections he’ll need to make along the way. And of the money we’ve already spent to get him this far. A quarter million on housing, $80,000 on child care, a paid-off ’04 Honda Element and numerous other expenditures just to get him to fifth grade. With middle school and high school and high-stakes testing, sports and summer camps, more travels for vacation and family visits to come.

I’m exhausted already, and my son’s my only child. But if nothing else, with what’s left of my dwindling youth, I want to make sure that Noah never has to search for faith, for God or wisdom or hope to hold on to. That, at least, I can secure, if nothing else. Through book and other means, all is with him already.

Jimme To The Rescue

17 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


United States Coast Guard rescue diver jumps from a helicopter (demonstration), 2004 Seafair, Seattle, WA, June 18, 2008. (Brandon Weeks via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Thirty years ago this week was the beginning of my second relationship with my father Jimme, brought on by the desperate need for money and material support as the Hebrew-Israelite world of 616 was swirling down the proverbial toilet. Our “fiscal cliff” was more like Felix Baumgartner jumping off a balloon into Jupiter’s atmosphere without a parachute (see my posts “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12 and “Pregnant Pauses” from earlier this month). This was the determined teenager me, one with a smart mouth and a firm adult sense of pragmatism, trumping any shame or embarrassment I would’ve felt even four months earlier. As I’ve written in Boy @ The Window:

“It was time to do something desperate. We needed money just to eat bread and water, and the water was free. We hadn’t done a full clothes wash since the beginning of September. Me and Darren both needed a new pair of sneakers about every other month. The ones I had were forming holes on the sides and bottoms.

So I turned to Jimme. Mom was always complaining that he didn’t pay child support anyway. And I knew where he lived now. It was 153 South Tenth, not far from the East 241st Street station in the Bronx, the end of the line on the Subway’s 2 and 5 lines running from Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were a bunch of watering holes nearby.

Felix Baumgartner of Austria as he jumps out of the capsule during final manned flight, October 14, 2012. (AP Photo via Red Bull Stratos)

I’d actually started going over to Jimme’s in August, a consequence of my first long walks through Mount Vernon and Southern Westchester County. But this was different. I was going to Jimme’s for money and sneakers. I decided to wait for him at the 241st Street stop after school one Friday at the end of October, figuring I’d catch him just before he started his weekly drinking ritual.

Unbelievably, my first idea for tracking Jimme down worked! I caught Jimme coming down the rickety Subway steps, completely shocked by seeing me there.

“Bo’, whacha doin’ here?”

“We need money, and I need some sneakers.”

“Why don’ you aks Maurice for them?”

“’Cause you’re my father and you haven’t been paying any child support. If you had, I wouldn’t be here!”

With that, Jimme laughed and shook his head. Of course he was also mad. I was in the way of him gettin’ his “pep-up,” virtually anything with alcohol in it.

“Bo’, what I’m gonna do wit’ you? You got me,” he said. I negotiated fifty dollars from him. He promised to get me some sneaks.

The following Tuesday, I went over to his place. Not only did I get my sneakers, a pair of size eleven-and-a-half Nike walking sneaks. I got a brown Members Only jacket to boot. I could tell, though, that they once belonged to someone else. Still a bit hung over, Jimme said, “Man, lo’ at all dese suits! You gotta lo’ like a big shot when you work in the city.” The suits were too big and a bit mismatched. I was just relieved that Jimme cared enough about my feet to get me the right size.

241st Street-Wakefield Station entrance, Bronx, NY, January 18, 2010. (DanTD via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported,

Darren would usually come with me on what gradually became our weekly hike from the land of 616 to the near Bronx and the city. Jimme being Jimme, he would grab me by one hand while giving me the money and put his left arm around my shoulder, whispering in my right ear, “Don’ give Darren nothin’,” or “You keep fitty for yo’self an’ give Darren ten.” “You a Collins, don’ be sharin’ nothin’ wit’ them Gills,” he’d often say.

I almost always broke with Jimme around this. Yes, Darren often was a selfish goofball and my 616 family was just a step or two above total chaos. Yet I couldn’t go to eat at a good pizza shop with Jimme and Darren and let them subsist on bread, water and milk. I couldn’t watch them run around in graying underwear and just wash my own clothes. Not as hard as Mom worked, not as long as I lived there. I wanted to help as much as I could and still take care of my needs.

Jimme knew I was helping out at 616 too. So he would say things like “Don’ be givin’ your motha my money. Those ain’t my kids. Dis jus’ for you and Darren.” Or “Don’ give them muddafuccas nothin’,” which would start a brief argument between me and him about the needs of innocent children. Even with that and his drunken ups and downs, Jimme helped save the day for us and me as we plunged into the watery abyss of welfare poverty.”

Post-Mortem Post

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt, November 12, 2012. In public domain.

My idiot ex-stepfather died over the weekend, sometime Saturday evening, November 10. He was three months past his sixty-second birthday. I learned of his death early Sunday morning, as two of my younger siblings (technically half-brothers, I suppose) had posted on Facebook their grief over their father’s death overnight. As I read their posts, I realized that I myself felt no particular emotion over the final physical demise of Maurice Eugene Washington.

For the longest time while I was in my teens and early twenties, the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz (1939) would come to mind when I thought about how I’d feel if the man collapsed from his own obesity and died. As far as I was concerned, my ex-stepfather could die a horrible death every day for eternity, and it still wouldn’t have been enough. A steamroller crushing him one day, a stabbing the next, getting smashed into by a semi-tractor trailer doing eighty miles an hour the day after that. Thoughts like that in the ’80s and early ’90s were a regular part of my mindset on Maurice Washington, not to mention a part of my dreams once every six weeks.

But, as I learned to forgive him — for my sake, certainly not for his — I found myself still frequently angry, but also feeling sorry for such a lost person. Whether in exacting abuse on me or my mother, eating himself into kidney failure and Type 2 diabetes, having affairs and producing kids out of those affairs, or in his bouncing back and forth between a Christian and a Hebrew-Israelite life, he was in search of love and stability. None of which, though, he could find from within. A life with only kids from at least three women and damaged lives to show for it. Not to mention a two-decades-long physical decline, in which the man lost both of his legs.

The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz (1939), November 12, 2012. (http://time.com).

They say living your life to the fullest is the best revenge for survivors of abuse like myself. I suppose that’s true. But what they don’t say is that eight years’ of living in fear for yourself and your family leaves scars, physical, emotional, psychological, even spiritual. I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century recovering from those years, making sure to make myself a better person, and hoping that I don’t pass my scars on to my nine-year-old son in the process.

Two of my more popular posts over the past year have been “Ex-Stepfather’s Balance Sheet” (August ’10) and “Whipped and Beaten” (July ’12). I don’t think that this is random. There are millions of us who’ve grown up with physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and most of us have no one to talk to about these hellish experiences. And nearly as often as not, there are folks who will say, “It wasn’t really that bad, right?” Or, in the case of the very first comment I received on my blog back in July ’07, “you should be grateful, he was just trying to make you a man. Obviously he didn’t do enough.”

So, though I’m not gleeful that Maurice Washington is dead, I’m not exactly in mourning either. I had to kill him as an abuser in my heart and mind a long time ago in order to move on. I feel for my younger siblings, but they didn’t really know their father either. I did, mostly for the worse. May he — and a part of me — now rest in peace.

Pregnant Pauses

02 Friday Nov 2012

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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


Ultrasound of fetus, 2nd or 3rd Trimester, November 1, 2012. (http://brmh.org).

I agree with President Barack Obama and with so many leading women. Men — especially men in leadership positions — should just shut up when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. Still, my life has given me a unique perspective on a woman’s right to choose, if only because I’ve had little choice as a child and a husband to be involved. I can only say that choice isn’t easy, even for pro-choice males. But I can also say that I knew more about choice at twelve than most men would ever care to know, and more about bringing new life into the world as a result.

The two examples of “the decision” that stand out most for me are twenty Novembers apart, in ’82 and ’02.

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving ’82, I noticed something about my mother. At a time when we all looked starved, my mother looked round. Her stomach and cheeks were telltale signs. So I asked her, my tweener voice cracking all the while.

Sickled and normal red blood cells, November 1, 2012. (original source unknown).

“Mom, are you pregnant?!?”

“Yeah, Donald, I’m pregnant,” she sighed.

“What! You got to be kidding! You mean you’re still having sex with him?”

“Watch ya mouth, boy!”

“Mom, what are we going to do? You can’t have a baby, not now, not with all these mouths to feed!”

“Donald, what I’m supposed to do?”

“You need to get an abortion, that’s what!”

“I don’t believe in abortion. It’s against God’s will.”

“Well, we can’t feed the kids that are here now, so how can you feed it? Get an abortion Mom, before it’s too late!”

Before my mother could say anything else, I stormed out for yet another store errand for milk, diapers, and all the things I couldn’t eat. I wanted to cut Maurice’s balls off and shove them down his throat. I wanted to shake Mom until her eyes rolled back in her head. Most of all, I wanted to get her to an abortion clinic yesterday (see my post “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12).

That “it” turned out to be my sister Sarai, my late sister, born nearly four months after I came out as a pro-choice feminist and a stress-out Hebrew-Israelite teenager. She lived for twenty-seven years, five months and two days with sickle-cell anemia, without ever knowing I once preferred her not to be born (see my post “My Sister Sarai (Partial Repost)” from July ’10).

Over the next two decades, I’d become so fed up with kids and family, 616 and Mount Vernon and so many things in my life that I once thought that I’d never get married or become a father. The people in my life growing up in Mount Vernon — like my ex-stepfather and the young folks in the neighborhood — refused the responsibility of fatherhood (and in a few cases, motherhood). The idea that there would ever be a child of mine running around without me being in their life made me determined to limit my casual relationships and ensured that I would always have protected sex.

Even after getting married in ’00, I still wasn’t sure if I really wanted a child. Out of any seven-day period, I would’ve been happy to be a dad for four days, and miserable for the other three. I wanted to make sure my wife and me could afford parenthood, that we had the emotional and psychological capacity to take care of any child we brought into this world.

By the middle of ’02, though, it was obvious that my wife wanted to have a child, a son. Coming off of a family intervention, in which my then seventeen-year-old brother Eri had made my mother a grandmother, I was even less excited than I otherwise would’ve been (see my post “Dear Mama (More Like, ‘Dear Mom’)” from October ’09). Still, I loved my wife, and I loved myself enough to think that if I liked the idea of a kid four out of every seven days, it was worth a try.

We didn’t try very long. By Thanksgiving Day ’02, I picked up on my wife’s change of emotions before she did. I had asked her to watch over heavy cream that I was warming up to make a chocolate sauce. The cream wasn’t supposed to boil. It did anyway, as my wife wasn’t paying full attention. Instead of being argumentative with me per usual about my pointing out her lack of attention to detail, she started crying, as if it was the end of the Law & Order franchise. I was startled, and said, “Honey, I think you’re pregnant.” She laughed at first, but as we would eventually find out, I was correct.

It was one of the happiest moments of my life! I had made my wife immeasurably happy, and I found myself wanting something, perhaps for the first time. To be a great father, to live long enough, to be healthy enough, to be productive enough to be the father that I never had growing up.

Noah in Baby Bjorn/my parka, Silver Spring, MD, December 3, 2003 (Angelia N. Levy).

If it had turned out that my wife had not wanted to be a mother, and she had become pregnant, and it turned out that she wanted an abortion, I would’ve fully supported her. Not just because I wanted her to be happy, and not just because I’m more firmly pro-choice now than ever. I’ve seen my mother and too many other mothers who’ve made the wrong choices for themselves and their lives.

Life can be long and miserable when making bad decisions, especially when it comes to bringing another life into this world. That anyone would think it a good idea to limit what is already one of the most difficult decisions women and families have to make is anti-Christian and immoral, not to mention just plain stupid.

A Baseball Bat and a Father’s Absence

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Cleaning, Eclectic, Jimme, My Father, New York City, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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


One Louisville Slugger, July 19, 2011. (Source/http://businessweek.com)

Today my father Jimme (his birth certificate name, as he actually goes by Jimmie) turns seventy-one. He’s in better health now than he was ten, twenty, and especially thirty years ago. That’s because this time in ’81, my father had apparently died for a few seconds on the operating table as doctors drilled into his brain to relieve pressure after a man did his best to dispatch him from this world. The incident, operation and time in the hospital meant that Jimme would be out of my life for almost fifteen months. It meant that I’d have a question to answer: what does a preteen boy do when his father is absent, and his best friend has shunned him? For that matter, what does a Black kid do under those circumstances?

But I’m jumping ahead of my story here. For over a week in July ’81, my father lingered in an ICU bed in Mount Vernon Hospital after he’d been reported dead in the Obituary section of the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. Jimme ended up in the hospital because he’d made fun of another, bigger drunk, calling him a “po’

Grandpa, Me, and Noah, September 12, 2010. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

ass muddafucca” at what we called “Wino Park” on South Fulton and East Third. So much was the humiliation that the man marched home, grabbed a Louisville Slugger, and returned to repeatedly smash my dad in the head until he was unconscious. Luckily, Jimme has a classic Collins head, hard enough to be used as a wrecking ball or 120 mm shell.

His near-death experience was not all that shocking for us, at least not obviously so. My father’s life in the New York City area had turned into a slow motion tragedy of errors long before I was old enough to witness one of his drinking binges and hangovers. And Jimme regularly went on alcohol-laced benders, ones that began on payday Friday and ended on Monday or Tuesday. As he liked to say, he “got to’ up” almost every weekend — “tore up” for those unfamiliar with Jimme-ese. This was going on for years before Mom had filed for divorce in July ’76.

Jimme also had a habit of saying, “O’ bo’, I can’t do dis no mo’. Gotta stop doin’ dis. Nex’ week, nex’ week. I’ll stop drinkin’ nex’ week.” All while shaking his head, his eyes down, ashamed of how he felt and looked once the binge had ended. Jimme never said “now” or “this week.” It was always next week with him. If there was any week where “nex’ week” should’ve been the week, it was that Friday in early July.

With that incident, the next time I’d see my father would be July ’82, being threatened by my stupid stepfather, who chased Jimme out of 616 for trying to see me. Dumb ass Maurice was in the middle of his five-week, abuse-and-break-Donald program, and didn’t want my real father interrupting his efforts to turn me into his prag. Witnessing that incident wasn’t a pleasant experience.

From July ’81 through August ’82, with Jimme absent and Starling no longer my friend, I really had no other Black males in my life with whom I could draw inspiration. My older brother Darren? He was already jealous of me and had withdrawn into the world of The Clear View School, acting out his role as a mentally retarded kid who wasn’t mentally retarded. My uncle Sam (my mother’s brother)? Really? I’ve seen him more in the past ten years, with me living in suburban DC, than I saw him through the ’80s and ’90s.

That left my idiot stepfather, who, at least in the summer of ’81, was there, and had gotten back together with

Wolf in sheep's clothing, a false prophet (a symbol of my ex-stepfather), November 2008. (Source/flickr.com)

my mother, and had converted us into Hebrew-Israelites. This must’ve been why I clung so hard and so long to my kufi identity, even when I knew that something was wrong. With this sudden change in religion, from lethargic and unacknowledged Baptists to Afrocentric Black Jews. With me treating my stepfather as if he really was a parent of mine. With me wanting to prove myself to others in ways I never felt I needed to before.

This wasn’t something I was conscious of, at least in ’81 or in the first half of ’82. I wish I had been. At least, then, I would’ve realized. That, more than anything else, I missed my dad and my best friend. And I was using my stepfather and his religion as a piss-poor substitute for both.