A Diarrhea Football Sunday

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, Sports, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Come-From-Behind Victory, Coping Strategies, Diarrhea, East Rutherford New Jersey, Football, G/I Tract, Gastrointestinal Illness, Giants, Giants Stadium, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, NFL, Phil Simms, Pizza Shop, Pressures, Sicilian Pizza Pie, Stress, Stressors, Zeke Mowatt

Porthcawl, Wales takes a battering from a fierce Atlantic storm, February 5, 2014. (Getty Images, via http://www.express.co.uk).

I’m probably going to disgust a few of you who read this post. I promise I won’t go into a slurry of detail about this particular experience. It’s just that after years of gastrointestinal issues, I’ve learned a thing or two about triggers and coping strategies that may be helpful to folks.

Haagen-Dazs specialty milkshakes (my son had the $7 cookies and cream yesterday), November 23, 2014 (posted June 10, 2011). (http://www.qsrmagazine.com/).

This weekend thirty years ago, I learned for the first time that my body handled stress in a unique and painful way. I should’ve been aware of this much sooner than a month before my fifteenth birthday, and should’ve figured out how to counteract this long before my mid-thirties. I’d seen signs of it. The mugging I suffered from when I was nine in ’79. The recent broken toilet incident at 616. My inability to drink a chocolate milkshake from Carvel’s without the need to find a bathroom within forty-five minutes of my first sip.

But it wasn’t until the Sunday after Thanksgiving ’84, November 25th, that I recognized the link between the constant stress I felt and my G/I tract issues. It was a brisk late November day, like so many that time of year. The Giants were playing a big game in East Rutherford, against the Kansas City Chiefs. With a 7-5 record at the time, the Giants were fighting with both the Cowboys and Redskins for playoff position. They’d been on a roll of late, having won three of their previous four, including one on the road against Danny White’s Cowboys.

That’s what I thought about as the 1 pm game time approached. It wasn’t the only thing on my mind, though. It had been a long and stressful couple of months prior to this semi-break of a Thanksgiving weekend. This stretch included arguments with my Mom, including one in which I almost moved out. It included incidents with my teachers, especially Ms. Zini. It also included too many weekends of tracking down my father for money — including money that he owed us for working down in the city with him since the end of September. And washing clothes, and grocery shopping, and watching after Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri, and cleaning the apartment.

Somewhere in all of this, I must’ve picked up a stomach bug, from either my younger siblings or from something I ate. At least that’s what I thought at the time. The toilet became my constant companion throughout that afternoon, as a stepfather-free Sunday gave me and my older brother Darren the opportunity to watch the Giants game without interruption. That was, except from my stomach.

Flour water in a jar, November 23, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

I really didn’t know why I’d been on the toilet five times in two hours, but between that and Phil Simms’ lousy play in the first three quarters of the game (three interceptions, no touchdown passes), I felt really ill. My Mom suggested that I should drink flour water to settle my stomach. “Yuck” was the only thing I thought of her idea. The flour water thought had crossed my own mind, too though.

After Kansas City scored to take a 27-14 lead with a bit more than ten minutes left, I finally had an idea much more pleasant than flour water. I hadn’t eaten all day, and barely anything the night before. So I took five dollars of my Jimme money and went down the street to the local pizza shop. I order a slice of Sicilian with extra cheese. As thick as this shop made their Sicilians, I figured that would plug up my intestines.

While I waited for them to warm up my slice, I listened to the Giants game, which they had on their TV in the back of the shop. Simms had rallied the team and driven them down the field for a touchdown by the time I paid for my Sicilian slice. That actually lifted my spirits a bit.

I was hurting, so I didn’t wait. After I walked out of the shop, I took two big bites of my slice to see if it would help. By the time I made it to the front of 616, I let out a gigantic belch, and then my stomach, which had felt like a nor’easter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for hours, had finally calmed.

A good-looking Sicilian slice (my shop would’ve wrapped it in aluminum, though), November 23, 2014. (http://slice.seriouseats.com).

After I made it back upstairs to our place, the Giants had the ball again with less than three minutes in the game. They were driving on the Chiefs’ side of the field, in a two-minute drill. As I sat, ate and belched, Simms actually drove all the way down field for game-winning touchdown, a short pass to Zeke Mowatt. They won the game 28-27! I was stunned!

I learned a lot on that diarrhea football Sunday. For me, even watching a football game was stress-inducing. That sleeplessness and running myself down, the pressures of 616 and school, the pressure I put on myself, all manifested physiologically in my G/I tract. Sometimes escaping into comfort food, being pleasantly surprised by success, even someone’s else success, could calm my stomach. Sometimes not. Becoming fully aware of how my body responded to stress, though, would turn out to be a blessing, saving me from many moments of embarrassment over the years.

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

26 Sunday Oct 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Giants Anniversary

30 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Sports

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"Stuck In A Moment", "Wide Right", Andre Reed, Buffalo Bills, Giants, Graduate School, Jeff Hosteler, Jim Kelly, New York Giants, O.J. Anderson, Operation Desert Storm, Persistence, Phil Simms, Scott Norwood, Star-Spangled Banner, Super Bowl XXV, U2, University of Pittsburgh, Whitney Houston, Wisdom

Super Bowl XXV, "Wide Right" Screen Shot, January 29, 2011. This screenshot qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of its low quality and because it is only being used to illustrate the topic of this article.

It’s been twenty years and two days since my Giants pulled off the unexpected against the juggernaut that was the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV. It was the “Stuck In A Moment” (via U2) or “Wide Right” game, when Scott Norwood missed a 47-yarder to end the game, Giants winning, 20-19. It was a great and somewhat improbable moment, given that the Giants were minus Phil Simms and had as much offensive firepower as a firecracker under water. Yet, they somehow pulled it together, with great defensive, good special teams, and methodical, disciplined long drives in the second and third quarters to keep Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas off the field.

There were so many things to remember about that game and day. Whitney Houston’s spectacular performance of the national anthem. O.J. Anderson running three and four yards at a time. Andre Reed having a great game. The fact that the first Gulf War was just a few days old (I didn’t support that war either, but at least it had a real sense of international support). How ridiculous it was that few prognosticators picked the Giants to beat the Bills.

Most importantly, my takeaway was that ’91 was going to be a good year. Now just because my original hometown team won. Not just because they weren’t expected to win. But because of the way they won. They played like grinders, with long drives that led to touchdowns, that kept the opposing team’s offense watching on the sidelines. I had used sports as a metaphor for understanding my own life since I was a teenager. With the Giants winning their second Super Bowl in five seasons (or four calendar years), I saw it as a sign of what I needed to do to move forward that year.

I already knew that many of my history professors at the University of Pittsburgh thought I was a very good student, but at least three (including one of my letter writers, who told me his expectations of me after the fact) who didn’t think I was grad student material, whatever that means. I understood that I also didn’t want to go into the workforce in ’91 with just a B.A. in history and minors in math and Black Studies. I knew that having the masters or another graduate degree would help, and was still contemplating taking my 50th percentile LSAT score and using it to get into law school.

All of this would require persistent, consistent work and agitation on my part, because I had few in my corner going to bat for me, no matter what I finally decided. It was no longer a matter of talent or pure analytical ability. No, what I was going through now required wisdom, diligence, the need to seek allies wherever and whenever they could be found. And a bit of luck. All of which that Giants team exhibited throughout the ’90 season and in Super Bowl XXV. (To be continued…)