Lit on Moonlight

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Barry Jenkins, Black Males, Black Masculinity, Bullying, Chiron, Coming-of-Age, Faggot, Hypermasculinity, Italian Club, Mahershala Ali, Manhood, Moonlight (2016), Mount Vernon High School, MVHS, Rage, Sexual Orientation

Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

I finally, finally saw Moonlight with the wife and son at AFI Silver Spring yesterday, months after the in-crowd had already seen it and attempted to spoil it for the rest of us. It was excellent. The cinematography, the loud and incredible silences, the small moments, when actors just being in the moment with their facial expressions did more than any dialogue could to move me and anyone else watching. Mahershala Ali was only in five scenes. But his first scene set the tone for the whole movie. As Juan, Ali channeled both the need for hard hypermasculinity and the vulnerable fragility of such in just one scene. His time with the youngest version of Chiron made me laugh, cry, sad, and angry, and left me wondering if I’ve seen this much intimacy between Black man and Black boy on screen before. I know I have (Antwone Fisher, The Wire, even Roots comes to mind), but on-screen doesn’t reflect this anti-stereotypical slice of truth nearly as often as it should.

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Yet I was also not as impressed as I expected to be. Not because I didn’t like the performances — I loved them. I thought every actor in the film was legit, every scene was moving in some way. Naomie Harris I’ve been fond of for years, André Holland and Janelle Monáe’s work I already knew, and Trevante Rhodes and Barry Jenkins, well, the two need bigger platforms for doing more great work. Moonlight wasn’t a film. It was a collage, a kaleidoscope of precious moments, blood-churning episodes, and tender images. Jenkins’ treatment of coming-of-age, Black boyhood into manhood, and Black masculinity, hypermasculinity, and vulnerability was avant-garde.

Still, I felt like I’d seen Moonlight before. Or, really, lived parts of Moonlight in my own past. No, I did not befriend an older, Afro-Cuban crack dealer in 1990s Miami, have a drug-addicted, abusive mother, or have a group of kids chase me around and beat me up off and on for ten years. But I didn’t look at the world the same way as my peers. I didn’t sound like a Noo Yawker, walk and talk and code switch like Denzel Washington, or try to fit in like so many of my 616 neighbors and my Mount Vernon school mates during my growing up years. And I paid for it, dearly, with few friends before I turned eleven, and no friends in the six years before I went off to the University of Pittsburgh.

But on Chiron and that most pernicious issue of hypermasculinity, the need to be hard all the time, I’ve been there too. I’d been called “faggot” (or in my father’s case, “faggat”) enough times to occasionally question my own sexual orientation growing up. My senior year at MVHS one day, I hit a three-run homer during a softball game in gym class. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. But for one Jamaican dude, me drilling a ball 350 feet off his slow fastball was an affront. He called me a “faggot” after the game, and threatened to wait for me after school with a machete to chop me, adding “bumbaclot mon” at the end of his threat. I left school as normal and waited for him. He was lucky he didn’t show up that day.

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

You see, my rage didn’t need years to build up. All before I’d finally lose it one day, and take out a bully with a wooden chair and break it across his back, like the way Chiron did at the end of II of Moonlight. I didn’t have bullies at school per se. There were a couple I dealt with at 616, but they weren’t regular. Many folks would make a crack, but generally left me along. Any bullying I faced in high school was completely random and momentary, because I stood up for myself. Because if I could face down a six-foot-one, Isshin-ryn black belt of an abuser in my idiot stepfather Maurice, a stupid football player was gonna get hurt trying to hurt me.

No, the bullying I faced was in middle school, from a bunch of overwhelmed and racist Italian classmates in Humanities. I’ve named them in Boy @ The Window and here in this blog before. Alex, Anthony N., Andrew, Anthony Z., etc, the Italian Club. That things were much, much worse at home meant that I saw them as background noise. There was always a part of me, though, that had enough rage, even in seventh grade, to take a desk and smash Anthony N.’s head in with it until his fuckin’ Italian brains spread out all over the floor and walls!

I ended up beating up a wannabe bully in JD that year instead. I won kufi battles in eighth and ninth grade. I wore a blank face that most of my more dumb ass classmates interpreted as a smile. I made plans to get out, because I never wanted to fit in. I was already awake, coping with the day-to-day, but in it for the long-term. I had that President Barack Obama, audacity-of-hope-beyond-failure, beyond reality thing goin’. When I saw Chiron as played by Ashton Sanders, I wanted to hug him, beat up his bullies for him, and tell him that you can love who you want to love, even if they never love you back. And to always, always be your best self, and not some “I don’t want to feel pain again” version.

Fife and Shalom

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Black Male Identity, Black Masculinity, Chorus, Domestic Violence, Fife, Judah ben Israel, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mentoring, Music Lessons, Oppression, Poverty, Pulaski Day Parade, Summer of Abuse, Tamrin, Trombone, Type 2 Diabetes, William H. Holmes Elementary

Civil War-era wooden fife, May 19, 2004. (Kevin Saff/National Parks Service via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One thing I never discussed here or in Boy @ The Window were the handful of “leisure” activities I had during the Hebrew-Israelite years. The world in which we lived back in the ’81-to-’84 period had precious few resources and even less room for things like summer camps, overseas travel, baseball games, amusement parks, or even a free impromptu rap battle at Van Cortlandt or Hartley Park. Heck, the Kool cigarettes’ music series that sponsored “Teddy Pendergast” or “Rufus and Chaka Khan” in those days might as well have been a trip to see the World Cup in France compared to our pitiful roach-and-belt circumstances.

One of my idiot stepfather Maurice’s Hebrew-Israelite friends, though, did provide a free service for us males in ’81 and ’82. His name was Tamrin. He was a heavy-set dude, probably about five-foot-eight, maybe 120 or 125 kilos (between 245-260 pounds), and likely in his late-thirties. Unlike so many of the Hebrew-Israelite men I had the curse to meet in those naiveté-shattering years, Tamrin had a lighter touch. His idea was to put together a boy’s band of fifes, drums, bugles, and other marching instruments to lead us Hebrew-Israelites in marches through the street of Mount Vernon, as well as temple sites in the Bronx, in Harlem, and in Brooklyn (specifically, Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, if memory serves). Even at twelve, I knew how ridiculously uncool that idea sounded.

That was his plan, anyway. So off and on, between August ’81 through the second week in July ’82, Tamrin gave me and other kids music lessons to play overly bombastic marching band music. These were the kind of joyless songs which one was mostly likely to hear at Moscow’s May Day parade of soldiers and nuclear missiles than hear anywhere in ancient Israel. I was picked out because I had musical training in my immediate pass. I played the trombone in fifth grade. Or rather, I had six months of trombone-playing lessons at William H. Holmes ES before my music teacher had a heart attack and died in March ’80. I sang in chorus all through sixth, seven, and eventually, eighth grade. I could read music, though I struggled in transition between half-notes and quarter-notes.

Pulaski Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, October 6, 2013. (http://www.posteaglenewspaper.com).

So Tamrin would come over about twice a month, usually on Saturday afternoons, and spend a couple of hours with me playing the fife. (Can you imagine that? A twelve-year-old, kufi-wearing Donald playing such a small and delicate reed instrument? Really? Really!) Tamrin took us to the Pulaski Day Parade down in Manhattan the first Sunday in October ’81 to see how the pros do the fife-and-drum thing. The costumes I found fascinating, but I dreamed of food, not of marching around with fife.

Once Mom’s already pitiful funds got down to a disposal income of $5 per day — that was in December ’81 — Tamrin didn’t come around as much. Though he wasn’t getting paid much, I think he still expected $10 per lesson. Still, he came around even when he wasn’t getting paid, though it was only once a month during the ’81-’82 winter. That’s when I noticed, though just barely, that Tamrin had diabetes. His fingers had swelled during the winter, and he moved slower, too.

From mid-April to the beginning of July, Tamrin was around nearly every Saturday for an hour at a time, working with me on marching while playing fife, polishing up fife-ful flourishes, and getting me to learn more bombastic music. There were a couple of times I played with the other preteen and teenage Hebrew-Israelite kids. They seemed about as cool with this fife-and-drum band as I was with having an abusive stepfather.

And that’s who stopped my participation in Tamrin’s pet project. After my summer of abuse began in earnest on July 6, ’82, Tamrin came around that Saturday, July 10. I played my fife to some music, but the knot on my head, the bruises to my left cheek and jaw, and my busted lip would’ve been obvious to any observer in the week after Maurice tried to beat me into submission. I kept playing my music, but I knew that Tamrin and Maurice were jawing at each other about something or other, hopefully not me. All I know was, that was Tamrin’s last time working with me to play the fife. I’d continue to see Tamrin at temple. But that second Saturday in July ’82 would be the last he’d come over to 616 to teach me terrible music for the fife.

Oppression graffiti, January 15, 2013. (Students for Liberty via http://genderlitutopiadystopia.wikia.com).

Did I play a good fife? Tamrin thought so. Compared to my Hebrew-Israelite comrades, I’m pretty sure I did. But like with so many things Hebrew-Israelite during those years, it was a bitter march to nowhere. The fife was part of a Hebrew-Israelite physical and spiritual gulag that put me into more chains, rather than freeing me to be me. Despite Tamrin’s intentions, the idea of molding me and others into men in conditions that would make most “men” contemplate homelessness or running away was a ridiculous pipe-dream.

That Tamrin was likely the only adult male in the Hebrew-Israelite camp who saw Maurice for the lying, abusive, womanizing asshole he was made me realize not everyone in this world was against me. But in a religion that when practiced helped oppress me and others more than the outside world, what was any Tamrin to do?

Independence Day On The 6’s

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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1976, 1996, 2006, 7 Train, Adulthood, Coming-of-Age, Dwight Gooden, Escapism, Growing Up, Independence Day, July 4th, Lee Iacocca, Manhood, Metro-North, Mets, New York Mets, Nolan Ryan, Peace, Shea Stadium, Siblings, Statue of Liberty, Subway, Technisort

Shea Stadium (taken from 7 Subway), Flushing Meadows, Queens, NY, September 10, 2008. (Gary Dunaier via http://farm4.static.flickr.com/). In public domain.

For me, the 6’s are ’76, ’86, ’96, and ’06. For 2016, all I’ve done today is make BBQ chicken legs and thigh (after an hour of so of marinating), corn on the cob, mac and cheese, and New York Style blondies with chocolate chips and walnuts. It’s a rainy 240th anniversary of America’s independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. About as dreary the Mid-Atlantic and the nation, really, can be during an election cycle.

It wasn’t that way for most of my on-the-6 Independence Days. I’ve talked about my first one, the bicentennial of 1976, the summer of “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” That Saturday down in a ship and fireworks smoked filled New York Harbor, followed a train ride with my inebriated father to New Haven. I slept more peacefully on that train ride than I probably did at home. At least, until the conductor woke us up to let us know we were in Connecticut. We were lucky the trains in and out of New York were free that day.

Typical Pittsburgh fireworks show for Independence Day, Point State Park, Pittsburgh, PA, July 4, 2014. (http://davedicello.com/).

Independence Day/Week 1996 was pretty good, if not as meandering. Me and my future spouse Angelia went to Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh to watch the fireworks. For all of the issues that po-dunk Pittsburgh has, bad fireworks shows weren’t one of them. I needed the break, after a spring of turmoil with my advisor Joe Trotter and weeks revised my then 430-page dissertation (I would end up writing seventy-five pages [net] that month while doing a second set of revisions). It rained that afternoon and early evening, but it cleared up at 8 pm, just in time for some excellent fireworks. We perched ourselves where we could see sparkles and artwork over the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers.

Tuesday, July 4th of ’06 wasn’t memorable. It was my first summer working on Boy @ The Window, and I had already began planning my escape from AED and the daily grind of nonprofit work and raising money. I think we had my sister-in-law over. I made some ribs and chicken, bought dinner rolls and macaroni salad, and talked mostly about my then nearly three-year-old son and his potty training woes. Ah, the boring stability of a more typical middle-class American life!

Of all my Independence Days — on a “6” year or not — one stands out over all the rest. Friday, July 4, 1986. It was the grand re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of one-time Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which had raised hundreds of millions to restore both symbols of American inclusion (via European immigrants, at least) and American freedom to museum-quality glory. My Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, and my younger siblings Sarai and Eri went down to Battery Park by Subway and Bee-Line bus to see the grand ships and fireworks for that celebration of the Statue of Liberty at 100 years old.

Dwight Gooden, aka, “Dr. K,” Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

Not so for me and the rest of us. I took me, my older brother Darren, and my then near-seven year-old brother Maurice and nearly five year-old brother Yiscoc to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play. It was either a 1:05 pm or 1:35 pm start, I don’t remember. What I do remember, though, is that was a beautiful eighty-five degree afternoon, beautiful because it wasn’t particularly humid, and there were no storm clouds to be found that Friday. Dwight Gooden was on the mound for the Mets, starting against the all-time great Nolan Ryan. It was built up to be a duel, and it was.

Keith Hernandez drove in a run in the first, and that was it until the top of the seventh inning, when Dr. K gave up a home run to Kevin Bass. Other than that, fly balls, walks, double-plays, and strikeouts were the order of the day. Lenny Dykstra drove in the game-winning run with a double to right-center field at the bottom of the seventh inning off of a reliever, as Ryan was out after beginning the bottom of the sixth giving up a walk and a hit. Despite giving up five walks and only striking out four, Gooden got a complete-game win, and 30,000 saw the Mets go to 54-21, well on their way toward their World Series title for 1986.

That was already a good day. But it so much better with three of my brothers there, away from 616 and Mount Vernon, hanging out, without an adult to supervise, or rather, abuse us in some way. It was one of the first times I actually felt like a responsible adult. I took the four of us down to the city on Metro-North at the Pelham stop, rode into grimy Grand Central, took the Shuttle train to Times Square, and then the 7 Subway to Shea. Maurice and Yiscoc were so enamored with the trains and the city that it seemed all they did was stare at skyscrapers and out of train windows when we weren’t at the game. Darren, though mostly quiet, at least wasn’t staring off into space plotting some revenge on me for my “5” on the AP US History Exam while doing the Wave.

Shea Stadium, second level, behind visitors dugout, Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY, 2008. (http://www.bloggingmets.com/)

It was so cheap to do what we did that day. The four upper-deck, left-of-home plate tickets we bought cost $4 each, but each hot dog was $3, and the sodas were $2. apiece Given my $3.40-per-hour job with Technisort, though, the $50 excursion wasn’t so cheap that I wasn’t thinking about sneaking a Sabrett hot dog from a street vendor in before we got to the stadium. To be sure, the hot dogs at Shea were better than my usual fare on the street or at Gray’s Papaya.

It was probably the best day I had during my Boy @ The Window years. I was with innocent family members, watching my favorite team and one of my favorite players. I was lost in the humongous human mob of New York on a double-whammy of an Independence Day weekend. I slept well that evening, knowing that I’d drawn a 10 am-2 pm shift that Saturday. I planned on buying a new Walkman at the Cross County Mall that Saturday afternoon. A normal weekend for many sixteen-year-olds was a small eye-wall in the chaotic hurricane that was my life back then.

My Inevitable Walkman Era

05 Saturday Mar 2016

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Masculinity, Coping Strategies, Disillusionment, Escape, Escapism, Manhood, Masculinity, Self-Discovery, Sony Walkman, Walking, Walkman

This version was my first Sony Walkman (between May 1987 and June 1988), posted August 28, 2013. (http://ebay.ie).

This week marks three decades since I finally entered the ’80s technologically, buying my first portable radio/cassette player with headphones. It wasn’t the Sony Walkman — I’d get my first one of those a year later. No, it was a Taiwan-made knockoff that I got at Crazy Eddie’s on 46th and Fifth in Manhattan, on sale for $22, that was my jump into the era of the Walkman. After a year and a half of carrying around a plug-in radio, playing with records on cheap $15 turntables (that cost $130 and much more in 2016), contemplating boom boxes, and having no control over what music I listened to outside of laundromat runs and 616, I found a new way to escape.

As I wrote in my memoir, this new toy was

my passport to another world, a world where I could make anything happen and no one could hurt me. Taking the Subway to go to The Wiz or Crazy Eddie’s or Tower Records was as much a part of mine and Darren’s Saturday ritual as our tracking down of Jimme. I no longer had to wait for WPLJ or Z-100 or WBLS to play the music I wanted to hear. I could buy a cassette tape for as little as six dollars. In the month after I’d bought my Walkman I’d gone out and bought more than twenty tapes. Whitney Houston, Simple Minds, Phil Collins, Sting, The Police, Mr. Mister, Mike + The Mechanics, Tears for Fears, even Sade. All were welcome who could contribute to my all-consuming effort at conquering my courses.

I was tough on my first Walkman, though. I must’ve dropped it a dozen times in two months, as it barely made it to Memorial Day ’86. My second one was a $42 Panasonic, which I bought with my Technisort earnings, and it lasted from July 4th until the end of October. I bought a decent Aiwa knockoff of the Sony Walkman in December, and that one made it to April ’87. before I finally found the $60 I needed for my Sony Walkman the month before high school graduation.

In a span of a year, I would accumulate more than seventy tapes, covering everything from pop and hard rock to rap and R&B, new age and jazz. As anyone who knew me in the spring of ’87 could attest, I carried my tapes with me in my book bag to have at the ready, the same way in which I had toted my Bible everywhere when I became a Christian three years earlier.

I walked everywhere in the Upper Bronx and Southern Westchester County for nearly three and a half years before I bought a Walkman of any kind. But in that window between March ’86 and my college move to Pittsburgh seventeen months later, my walks became much more frequently and much more eventful. I was walking to escape, to find mental space away from the gang of under-five-year-olds that ruled the too-small, two-bedroom space of pain in which I had grown up. I walked to figure out who I was and who I wasn’t, to be angry at my family, at the world, and at myself. I walked to find meaning in a chaotic life and world. I walked because I could wear myself out with warp speed, spin moves and high-falsetto highs, with questions and emotions and sometimes even, some answers, before coming back to 616 and grabbing some sleep. I must’ve have gone on 100 or 150 walks of five miles or more in that year and a half before college.

Inception (2010), Paris dream construct screen shot, April 27, 2012. (http://dpmlicious.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of poor resolution of shot, not intended for distribution.

That doesn’t even count my more frequent forays into the city, not to do anything or be anything. I wasn’t working for my father anymore, and after he repeatedly called me a “Faggat” in August ’86 and tried to set me up with a prostitute in December ’86, I hardly went to see him at all until the last few weeks before leaving for Pitt. I didn’t even take Darren down to Midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, Harlem or Flatbush with me. That’s what I did with the spare hours I started stealing from my Mom on weekends during that year. I’d go down to the city, maybe buy a few tapes at Tower Records on 66th and Broadway (usually not, since most of my tapes came via Terra Haute, Indiana). Sometimes if I had a few dollars, I’d go to MOMA or Radio City or some other place and go into escape/observation mode there. Mostly, I walked and people watched for an hour or so, and then take the long way home between the 2 train, 241st Street and the heart of Mount Vernon.

All the while, my music was on, often at full blast. It was a coping strategy, a pain and stress reliever, my sword and my shield. It took my Phyllis obsession and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh to break the link between music, Walkman, and the need to escape. It took the pain of rejection, removal from an anti-Donald environment, and a bout of homelessness to make music about enjoyment and education. When that happened, sometime in ’88, I knew I couldn’t escape anymore.

Boy @ The Window Origins: Meltzer Conversations

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Benetton Group, Black Elites, Black Identity, Black Masculinity, Black Migration, Black Washington, CMU, Colorism, Dissertation, Doctoral Thesis, Harold Meltzer, Harper Stewart, Humanities, Hypermasculinity, Inequality, Internalized Racism, Logic, Manhood, Multiculturalism, Personal Insights, Race, Racial Identity, Rationalism, Self-Discovery, Social Injustice, Taye Diggs, The Best Man (1999), Washington DC, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) scene, where Wolverine frees mutants kept as experiments by Colonel William Stryker , March 13, 2015. (http://cdn.collider.com/).

Of all the tangents I took related to writing Boy @ The Window, the most direct path that got me to write a memoir about the most painful period in my life was through several conversations with my dear teacher, friend and mentor in the late Harold Meltzer. I’ve discussed bits and pieces of some of those conversations here and in longer form in Boy @ The Window. It’s still worth rehashing some of those conversations, at least in terms of what was and wasn’t good advice, as well as in explaining how some of the main themes of the memoir developed over time.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, though my “first interview with him was in August ’02,” the first time “we discussed the possibility of me doing Boy @ The Window went back to February ’95.” Meltzer had been retired from teaching about a year and a half, while I was beginning the heavy lifting phase of my doctoral thesis, “living in DC for a couple of months while hitting the archives and libraries up for dusty information. In need of a writing break, I gave him a call on one cold and boring Saturday afternoon.”

It was in response to a letter he sent congratulating me. I’d recently published an op-ed in my hometown and county newspaper, “Solving African American Identity Crisis.” I was writing about issues like using the n-word, hypermasculinity, and internalized racism in the short and, for me at least, dummied down piece. Somehow our discussion of that piece led to a discussion of my classmate Sam. Did I really want to spend an hour and a half talking with Meltzer about Sam and some of my other Humanities classmates and their possible identity issues, considering some of my own serious growing pains — the Hebrew-Israelite years, my suicide attempt, my Black masculinity and manhood issues? Absolutely not!

But I learned quite a bit about how I might want to approach writing Boy @ The Window through that phone call. Not because Meltzer had given me any sage advice, which he didn’t, or because he revealed things to me that I shouldn’t have come to learn during our conversation, which he definitely did.

Benetton ad, 1980s, January 2013. (http://fashionfollower.com/).

No, it was the idea that a lot of the things that I had pursued as a historian and researcher were things that came out of my experiences growing up. Multiculturalism as a historical phenomenon (at least if one linked it to cultural pluralism)? Can anyone say Humanities Program, or, what I used to call “Benetton Group” when we were at A.B. Davis Middle School? Writing about African American identity issues? Obviously related to living in Mount Vernon, the land where any hint of weakness translated into me being called a “faggot” or a “pussy.”

And what about any scholarly concerns with racial and socioeconomic inequality and Black migration? Anyone ever meet my Mom and my father Jimme, 1960s-era migrants from Arkansas and Georgia/Florida respectively? An examination of the Black Washingtonian elite and their looking down upon ordinary Blacks because of their own colorism or the latter’s lack of education? Come on down, Estelle Abel and any number of well-established Black Mount Vernon-ites who never gave me the time of day! As much as academia had been an escape for me, into a world of rationalism and logic, a place of dispassionate scholarship, it was all personal for me, without realizing it until that phone conversation with Meltzer.

Fast-forward to November ’02, the last interview I did with Meltzer before his death two months later. We spent the last couple of hours on that brisk fall Thursday discussing the book idea that would become Boy @ The Window. Meltzer thought that it should be a work of fiction, “based on the real flesh and blood folks in my life, but with different names of course to protect me from any potential lawsuits. He did make me rethink the project from a simple research study of my high school years into narrative nonfiction or a memoir.”

Screen shot of fictional character Harper Stewart's bestselling novel nfinished Business, from The Best Man (1999), March 14, 2015. (hitchdied via http://s785.photobucket.com/).

Screen shot of fictional character Harper Stewart’s bestselling novel Unfinished Business, from The Best Man (1999), March 14, 2015. (hitchdied via http://s785.photobucket.com/).

Was Meltzer correct? Should I have done a Harper Stewart — played by actor Taye Diggs in The Best Man (1999)? Should I have fictionalized all of my experiences and those of my family, teachers, administrators and classmates? I’m not sure if it would’ve made a difference. Stories of fiction tend to have a tight symmetry to them. Or, the theme of “what goes around comes around” is usually a big one in any novel. You can’t leave too many loose threads or unresolved issues, even if the novel is part of a series. For my purposes, since my life remains a work in progress, a story of relative — not obvious or absolute — success, telling it as fiction would hardly ring true to me, much less to any group of readers.

Whatever else anyone wants to say about the late Harold Meltzer, the dude got me to think about difficult things until I was no longer comfortable in leaving my uncomfortable experiences and assumptions unchallenged. The very definition of a mentor, the very purpose of Boy @ The Window.

My First Mugging

03 Thursday Apr 2014

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

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Boys, Brotherhood, Bullying, Darren, Manhood, Mother-Son Relationship, Muggers, Mugging, Pearsall Drive, Poverty, Projects, Robbery, Street Smarts, Thugs, Vernon Woods, Wannabe

New York mugging, Granger (1857), April 3, 2014. (http://chroniclevitae.com).

This is another story not in Boy @ The Window, though it could’ve been. It was thirty-five years ago this week that a group of my preteen neighbors from the Pearsall Drive projects (now the Vernon Woods co-op community) jumped me on my way home from the store, beat me up and stole a grand total of four dollars. It seems like such a small thing now, getting mugged for the first time, a block from 616 East Lincoln, our apartment building on the eastern edge of Mount Vernon, New York. Still, I learned a few things on that first Saturday in April ’79 about myself, my older brother, my mother and humans in general, things that haven’t changed in the three and a half decades since.

That particular day was definitely a crisp early spring one, windy, partly sunny and cloudy, just warm enough not to need a winter coat. I’d barely been out the house at all since attempting to run away from home some four months earlier. In the months in between, I’d been engrossed in reading everything I could, especially World Book Encyclopedia, not to mention what I hadn’t already read in Charles Schulz’ Peanuts series.

I hadn’t been out the apartment to do much of anything other than go to school or to the store. So little was my time outside that when I had to do a full food shop, I’d forgotten a few basic rules about protecting myself. Like making sure that a group of nine-to-fourteen-year-olds weren’t following us home from the local grocery store. And making sure to take the most direct route home when I could, or a circuitous route home when necessary. Going west on the north side of East Lincoln, making a left on Station Place, then a left on Lafayette Avenue, then a final left on Bradley, walking four short blocks that would’ve left us in front of 616.

134 Pearsall Drive (now part of the Vernon Woods co-op complex), April 3, 2014. (http://trulia.com)

On this day, the circuitous route would’ve been better. But that would’ve meant me being better, too. I was already not feeling well when I left with Darren for the grocery store. I had a stomach ache, and the diarrhea that came with it. So my best bet was to go to the store at 671 East Lincoln with Darren, cross over to the south side of East Lincoln, and walk as quickly as we could back to 616.

Only, the half-dozen boys trailing me and Darren back home had crossed with us, and immediately tried to surround us near East Lincoln and Pearsall. Darren, to his credit, ran off for home, leaving me alone and holding two paper bags of groceries. Somewhere between “nigga” and “muthafucka” and “giv’ me the money,” I struggled and ran away with the groceries, where after a minute or two, I ended up in the bottom floor of one of the project buildings.

I was jumped again, punched in the face and the mouth until one of the wannabe thugs had busted my lip and left me bleeding down the side of my face. I somehow crapped on myself during the run, but hadn’t noticed because I was too busy trying to not get mugged. After they took the four dollars’ worth of change I had in my right pant pocket, another wannabe said, “Oh shit, the punk dukeyed on hisself!” They laughed and left me there, in this abandoned, junky apartment, garbage and groceries and two ripped grocery bags all over the room, bloodied and soiled.

I picked up all I could from what remained of the groceries and began the long one-block walk home. By the time I walked through the front door, there was my Mom, angry with me about the groceries. “What I’m gonna do with this!” she said. It was afterward that she noticed my condition. “You let them kids scare the shit out of you!,” she gasped with what seemed like a bit of laughter in her voice. I said, very angrily, “I told you before I left that I had diarrhea!,” then went into the bathroom and cried.

Oscar de la Hoya’s face after his beat-down via Manny Pacquiao, December 6, 2008. (AP via http://boxingscene.com).

My Mom came in later to help me wash myself down. In the meantime, I had a bruised left cheek, a busted lip, feces all over my lower body, and soreness all over my ribs and stomach. It took about twenty minutes in all, but by the time I was done and washed, I went into mine and Darren’s bedroom and fell asleep.

It was April 7, ’79, and I already knew that I couldn’t count on my older brother to help whenever there would be a crisis. I knew that my Mom cared about me, but apparently not enough to keep me protected. I knew that the assholes that lived around me wouldn’t have minded it if I’d been run over by a Mack truck, as long as they could get a dollar out of me. I knew, most of all, that I needed to look out for myself as much as I could, since there weren’t any cousins or other family around to look out for me.

So when at the end of ’83, the city had sold the projects at Pearsall Drive to a real estate developer, though I was sad for a few individuals, I wasn’t sad in general. Those wannabes had helped make one relatively small aspect of my life — going to the store, going outside and going to Wilson’s Woods — miserable. And with so much misery in my life already, I was glad to see many of those kids move away.

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.