My Day of Atonement/Bitter Hatred

14 Saturday Sep 2013

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

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Afrocentricity, Day of Atonement, Disillusionment, Family, Forgiveness, Hatred, Judah ben Israel, Judaism, Love, Maurice Eugene Washington, Self-Discovery, Ten Lost Tribes, Torah, Yom Kippur

Prayer at the Wailing Wail, Second Temple, Jerusalem, February 1, 2013. (Steve Ibrom). Released by public domain by author.

“Yom Kippur ’83 opened me up to understanding why I no longer put my trust in Maurice’s God. I spent part of another September fasting and going to temple to atone for my sins. The temple was on Fifth Avenue and Second Street, just down the street from Washington Elementary School. I’d gone to temple maybe a half-dozen times since the spring of ’81, three of those times to have some rabbi with a ragged beard tell me that Yahweh had forgiven me for my wicked ways.

“And it left me thinking, ‘Well, what about Maurice? His sins are many, and we get treated the same? Does he get forgiveness even if the sin is still in progress?’ It didn’t make sense to me that I needed to starve myself for three days and ask for forgiveness in a situation where a fat, greasy SOB for a stepfather could steal from, cheat on, beat up on, and lie to Mom, get forgiveness, and keep on trying to do what he’d done before Yom Kippur. I said to whoever was a higher power, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ I didn’t get an answer, and nothing anyone at temple said gave me any answers either. I felt empty, as if everything I thought being in this faith was about was a farce, a morbid, diabolical joke that was played on me and my family. And Maurice was the devil himself.”

That’s what I wrote in Boy @ The Window about my last Yom Kippur as a Hebrew-Israelite. That Saturday, September 17, ’83, was the last time I went to temple, the last time I looked at any aspect of our bizarre and goofy mix of Judaism and Afrocentricity with a modicum of seriousness. By the time I left, I wasn’t in a forgiving mood at all. I hated my then stepfather Maurice, and hated the people who claimed that people like Maurice were descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Ancient Israelites.

Please understand. When I said, “I hated Maurice,” it wasn’t a euphemism for me in the fall of ’83. If I had access to a gun, I would’ve blown him away and gladly served time in prison for doing so. I had stomach ulcers in the fall of ’83, because I couldn’t stand the smell, sound or sight of the obese asshole. I all but prayed to Yahweh that he get hit by a Mack truck going eighty miles an hour down East Lincoln Avenue. I wanted him dead, and I wanted to piss on his ashes to boot.

Even at thirteen, though, I also understood that this kind of anger and rage wouldn’t help me in the long run between ninth grade and college. Or with sports. Or dating. Or in finding my own path to God or to anything else worth believing. My bitterness and hatred were so deep, about as deep as any love that I’d experienced up to that point in my life. Whether my Mom, my father Jimme, my Uncle Sam or my version of Wendy, all that love was nearly drowned out by my hate for my stepfather.

Even on my irony scale, this hatred broke all records. Especially on a day of atonement, where we all but sacrificed an unblemished lamb at the temple over four hours that Saturday. But I had other reasons to be bitter on this, the holiest of holy days. No bar mitzvah, no celebrations of Hanukkah, no participation in Hebrew-Israelite life for me beyond their 613 rules and regs for nearly two and a half years. I understood and yet didn’t understand this sense of pride and Blackness that came through in a near Asian religion that allowed for reincarnation and an post-Babylonian Israelite diaspora to Sub-Saharan Africa to boot. That confusion didn’t help me deal with a man who wasn’t one, but was a teenage bully who did everything he could to keep me and Mom in submission to him, with Yahweh and Torah as his excuse.

I knew after I left temple that Yom Kipper afternoon that it would be my last. I didn’t know how, but my days of wearing a kufi or yarmulke were on their way to an end. Still, with hatred and confusion in my heart and mind, I was also lost, more lost than the other ten ancient Israelite tribes undoubtedly were in the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest.

Second Day of High School, Wake-Up Call #17

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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Bullying, Disillusionment, Faith, Fights, Hatred, Kufi, Louis Cuglietto, Maurice Eugene Washington, MVHS, Nes, Vindication, Wake-Up Call

Laurence Fishburne yelling “Wake up!” at end of movie School Daze (1988), December 9, 2009. (screenshot via Tumblr.com). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution and clarity of picture.

I talked about my first day at Mount Vernon High School in ’83 a few days ago. But as I said in my book Boy @ The Window, my second day was just as memorable. It was already the beginning of the end of my days as a Hebrew-Israelite by the time the summer of ’83 had turned into ninth grade. I didn’t need any more wake-up calls than the reality that my then stepfather was more of a hypocritical bastard than he’d been before finding this strange Afrocentric and “Jewish” religion. But my classmate Nes gave me yet another one anyway:

“After a day of assignments and learning the names of our new teachers, I went to Louis Cuglietto’s eighth-period Geometry class. It was on the first floor of the school, just to the right of the front entrance and the cafeteria. As I milled around the classroom looking to take my seat, my Latino classmate Nes came out of nowhere and snatched my kufi off my head.

“’Give it back now!,’ I yelled.

“’Make me!,’ Nes responded with a bit of sarcasm.

“Just as he was about to throw it to another classmate. I grabbed Nes and knocked him to the floor. There we were, on the floor by the dark green chalkboard, me on top of Nes, who was struggling to hold on to my kufi. I lay on top of him, punched him in the face a couple of times, and took my kufi back from him just before Cuglietto came into the room. By this time everyone in our class had formed a circle to watch the spectacle. I don’t remember all of what Cuglietto said, but he did ask, ‘Do you want to get suspended?’ After we dusted ourselves off, we went to our desks and got back to work.

“For me, the incident marked a transition point in my life at school. This would be the last fight I’d have in school. Some people continued to try to verbally intimidate me. But they left it at that, probably because my height and my face said ‘Don’t mess with me’ before I’d say anything.

“The more immediate result was that I began to question more consciously my motives for defending myself as a Hebrew-Israelite. ‘Why do I care if Nes snatches my kufi from me?,’ I said to myself on the way home from school that day. It wasn’t as if I truly believed in any of the teachings anymore. I definitely didn’t want anyone messing with me at home or in school. At the same time, I didn’t want to use up energy defending something in which I didn’t believe.”

To say that I was disillusioned would be like saying active volcanoes are dangerous. I had a smoldering anger from the previous twenty-eight months of physical and mental abuse at home (along with our plunge into welfare poverty), and ridicule and isolation at school. But I also realized that making a move to declare that I was no longer a Hebrew-Israelite meant that much of what I had gone through at school, though, was a complete waste of time and energy. And with nothing and no one to believe in or for, I still wasn’t ready to move on.

But the month of September ’83 had more in store for me, Yom Kippur especially (to be continued).

Me The Little Runaway

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Runnin'" (1995), 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Child Abuse, Father-Son Relationships, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Poverty, Running Away, Self-Defense, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, The Pharcyde

Literally on this day and date, and at this time twenty-eight years ago, I was at the beginning of a twenty-three hour adventure away from 616, my idiot stepfather (no longer, of course, and recently deceased) Maurice Washington and his abuse, a trek that took me all over Mount Vernon and into both my dreams and fears. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

“We got into it over the ‘Dad’ issue again. He told me to do something, and I only said, ‘Okay.’ I didn’t say ‘Okay, Dad,’ and my ‘Okay’ wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. This was the one thing about Maurice that I refused to accept – him as anything other than the leech and bully that he was. He certainly wasn’t my dad, and he gave up the right to be called “stepfather” three years before. Yet he insisted on me calling him “Dad!” I usually walked a fine line between open defiance and acquiescence with him, not referring to him by anything at all. He had no name, no title, no label. Maurice was nothing and meant nothing to me other than the reason I’d eventually have to leave 616. Our incidents had become less frequent only because he worked nights as a security guard and slept during the day. And I stayed home as little as I could when he was around.

“So on the last Sunday of August ’85, we had another round.

“I’m your father, and the Bible says to ‘honor thy father and mother’. . .”

“You’ll never be my father. My father lives at 149 South Tenth Avenue.”

“As long as you live under my roof, you’re gonna call me ‘Dad’.”

“No, I’m not,” I said shaking my head at the same time.

“I’m gonna show you how to respect me, nigga!,” he said as he balled his fists.

“Luckily I had fast feet. He tried to grab me and then hit me at the same time, not a good tactic when you’re significantly overweight and off balance. I slithered past him, got out of his grasp, and dashed down our long hallway to the front door. I ran down the stairs that led to the back dirt courtyard area of 616 and didn’t stop running into I ran into the woods nearby, Wilson Woods. It was a mostly cloudy late summer day, thank God, because I wasn’t in any shape to be bothered with anybody.

“I wound my way through Wilson Woods on its serpentine path toward the southeast side of Mount Vernon. I saw a few folks who recognized me as I walked from the woods toward East Third and South Columbus, but the walk was mostly a blur. I made my way to Jimme’s place on West Third and South Tenth, all the while thinking about the reality of my long-lost childhood and quickly evaporating time as a teenager. Jimme wasn’t home, and I didn’t feel like going on a hunt for him at one of his watering hole after a meandering three-mile walk. So I waited there for a while, maybe an hour or so.

“I made my way past downtown Mount Vernon, up Gramatan Avenue, taking on the hill on which Davis Middle School sits. From there I reached Fleetwood and walked past homes and cars that I thought me and my family deserved but would never own. I likely walked by the homes of some of my classmates without even knowing it. Tudors and townhomes, beamers and Volvos populated this neighborhood. I turned right on Birch Street and headed east, eventually meandering past Pennington-Grimes Elementary. I noted that this was the place where the remaining affluent and most assertive Humanities classmates went to as kids. It made me think for a moment about the reality that when put together, Mom, Maurice and Jimme had no clue about what it was like for me to be in a program like this, with students whose parents owned their own homes or were able to take a vacation overseas. These compadres were more sophisticated than I was, even after four years in the program. Just thinking about it made me clinch my teeth.”

I eventually made my way to Mount Vernon High School, where I spent the night sleeping on the floor in the classroom next to the Humanities coordinator’s office (Joyce Flanagan’s office at the time). I had a morning of meandering, ended up at St. Ursula Catholic Church for three hours of prayer and contemplation about my future. All before going home to my worried (for once) Mom, my dispassionate dipshit of a stepfather, and my uncivilized siblings.

There, around 3 pm that Monday, I just collapsed, in my sometimes bed and bedroom, not knowing I was literally two years away from being on my way to Pitt and Pittsburgh. But I knew for sure that I couldn’t keep running away, either.

The Lazarus Woman

22 Thursday Aug 2013

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

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Barbara B. Lazarus, Barbara Lazarus, Brandie Weston, Carl Zimring, Death, Friendship, Graduate School, Harold Meltzer, Joe Trotter, John Hinshaw, Life and Death, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mentoring, Politics of Academia, Politics of Graduate School, Sarai Washington, Susan McElroy

Barbara B. Lazarus, obituary picture, July 17, 2003. (http://cmu.edu).

Now that my book’s been out for a couple of months (between two and four months, depending on the e-book platform, actually), I’ve found that my thoughts sometimes drift toward those that are no longer around to read it.

Not so much my family or nemeses, though. Sarai, my only sister, who died in July ’10, would likely have never read a word of Boy @ The Window — it would be too honest an assessment of life at 616 for her. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was already unhappy with my numerous posts about his borderline personality issues and constant psychological and physical abuse of me and family when I picked up the phone one day that same week my sister passed.

As for my former classmate Brandie Weston — to whom I’ve dedicated my memoir (actually, a co-dedication that includes my son) — maybe, if she had been well enough. My favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer, though, would’ve begun reading Boy @ The Window five minutes after it had gone live on Amazon.com!

But of all of those folks who are no longer a part of this corporeal world (or who have gone into some state of seclusion from it), one other person stands out today. My dear friend and mentor from my Carnegie Mellon years (and the six years after I finished), Barbara Lazarus. I’ve discussed her here before, but not lately. Probably because I do tear up sometimes when thinking about her support of me specifically and her work at CMU in general. Barbara helped make my otherwise rough and dehumanizing experience at CMU manageable and even career-affirming.

As I wrote about Barbara for the memorial service at CMU in September ’03:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17. For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields. She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself. I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

That only approximated how much she meant to me during and after my four years of doctoral success and failures at CMU. The months immediately before my advisor Joe Trotter and my committee approved my dissertation were the worst, as is well documented on this blog. Barbara convinced me to not become hot-headed and drop-out of the program with a completed first-draft of my dissertation under my belt. She also managed to keep me from requesting a change of advisors so close to the finish line. She did offer to “step in” as her duties as Associate Provost would’ve allowed, but warned me that this political solution would delay my graduation. My connection with Barbara kept me from meeting Trotter in one of CMU’s parking lots late at night wearing a ski mask and dark leather gloves!

She became my best reference professionally and otherwise after those dark days ended with the end of ’96. She read my articles and my first book before they went to print. We swapped stories about family and life and religion. We stayed in touch even after I moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in ’99. Barbara died on July 14, ’03, just sixteen days before my son Noah was born. It’s been a decade, a month and eight days since she passed, nearly as long as I actually knew Barbara (roughly between October ’92 and July ’03). Boy, I wish I could’ve shared my first photos of my son with her!

There were a few people like Barbara at CMU during those years. Susan McElroy (now at UT-Dallas), John Hinshaw (at least prior to my Spencer Fellowship), Carl Zimring (before the O.J. verdict), the Gants and the other Black doctoral students I’d met there (all fourteen of us) were my CMU lifeline beyond multiculturalism and Trotter tired sense of migration studies.

But Barbara Lazarus and I had a friendship that went well beyond academia and career, and went undamaged by petty jealousies or sudden bursts of outrage from jury verdicts. I’d been to her home, met her husband and her kids, learned something about her as a person, and in the process, managed to be my better self even in the worst of circumstances. That is being a good mentor, friend and person. I just hope that I was the same to her, and that Boy @ The Window proves to be the same to others.

Post-Mortem Post

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Child Abuse, Death, Declining Health, Domestic Violence, Eulogy, Ex-stepfather, Fatherhood, Forgiveness, Judah ben Israel, Kidney Failure, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mourning, The Wizard of Oz (1939), Type 2 Diabetes

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abortion, Angelia N. Levy, Boy @ The Window, Choice, decisions, Eri, Family, Fatherhood, Intervention, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mom, Motherhood, Parenthood, Pregnancy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Reproductive Rights, Sarai, Silver Spring, Women's Rights

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.

Moving (On) To Pittsburgh

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, race, Religion, Youth

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241st Street Subway, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Alternative History, Alternative Universe, Amtrak, Darren Gill, Eri Washington, Fighting Demons, Hebrew-Israelites, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Poverty, Self-Discovery, Subway, University of Pittsburgh

241st Street-Wakefield Subway Station, Bronx, NY, August 25, 2012. (jag9889 via http://flickr.com). In public domain.

I’m now a quarter-century removed from leaving my original hometown, Mount Vernon, New York, for Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh. Wednesday, August 26, ’87 wasn’t my first day of adulthood, but it turned into my first day of freedom from the disappointment that my years in Mount Vernon and at 616 East Lincoln Avenue had turned into. It’s been a long road of triumphs and setbacks, of mistakes and sins, of excellence and miracles (see my post “Trip to the ‘Burgh” from August ’09).

But I’ve frequently wondered what would’ve happened if I’d stayed in Mount Vernon, or, at least, somewhere in or near New York City. Would I have turned out like my older brother Darren, a forty-four year-old who’s never been able to shake off the years of psychological torture he endured at 616? He was caught between my mother believing him to be retarded and being in a school for the mentally retarded as a kid with an above-average IQ for fourteen years. Darren never had a chance to build on him teaching himself to read at three and teaching me how to read at five (see post “About My Brother” from December ’07).

Outside of the upper-crust lily-Whiteness that was his Clear View School experience, Darren’s never known a middle-class adult life, a middle-class education or people he could talk to about his experience in order to move on from it. My brother lives around 233rd Street in the Bronx, as isolated now as he was at 616, trapped in our 616 past and in the warped thinking that has retarded his growth as a human being for nearly forty years.

Or would I have turned into my youngest brother Eri, a twenty-eight year-old frequently angry with the world? He’s been taking solace in a father (my ex-stepfather) who was never there for him and in his father’s twisted sense of Afrocentric Judaism? Unlike me and my older brother Darren, who at least knew what it was like to live in a time when even we experienced some sense of the old American Dream, Eri never had that chance.

Poverty, the grinding-with-millstones kind, and joblessness are really all that Eri’s seen the past three decades. Job Corp and the Army National Guard have really been his only times away from the daily anguish of 616 and Mount Vernon. And with the death of our sister Sarai two years ago, I know that he’s felt even more angst and isolation. Leading Eri to begin the process of re-upping with Uncle Sam for this fall.

Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian passing the 1895 Bryn Mawr Interlocking Control Towerat Bryn Mawr, PA, en route from New York to Pittsburgh, June 6, 2011. (Centpacrr via Wikipedia). Permission granted via cc-by-sa-3.0.

If I had stayed, my story would likely have ended up somewhere between Darren’s and Eri’s. I would’ve somehow gone to college, maybe Westchester Community College, Hunter or possibly Fordham. But the drama of living at 616 and the constant reminders of the worst years of my life all around me would’ve made demon-slaying a near-impossible task.

It was bad enough occasionally bumping into Crush #1, Crush #2 or one of my silent treatment classmates during the holidays and summers I was away from Pittsburgh between ’87 and ’92. Seeing them regularly and knowing that they only saw me as a twelve-year-old asshole or socially-inept seventeen-year-old? That would’ve stunted me (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’10). I simply wouldn’t have felt that I had the space — geographically or psychologically — to move on from those morbid times.

Even if I somehow found the focus of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan combined to complete a bachelor’s degree, I would’ve needed to make the decision to leave the area anyway. Especially if I had any other aspirations besides helping my mother take care of my younger siblings, including going to graduate school.

All the decisions I made after August 26, ’87, in fact, wouldn’t have occurred if I had stayed at 616, in Mount Vernon, even anywhere in the New York City area. I would’ve been too close to allow my mother to be beaten by my ex-stepfather again. I would’ve been too embarrassed by my father’s increasing alcoholism. And I would’ve been too angry with myself for all of the fun I’d denied myself while my former high school classmates were living what I assumed was the equivalent of Sheila E’s “Fabulous Life.”

There would’ve been no decision to even risk being homeless my sophomore year for a degree — much less actually being homeless for nearly a week. There then wouldn’t have been a decision to change my major to history, much less rediscovering myself as a writer years later. I wouldn’t have ever seen myself as worthy of happiness, or seen myself as handsome, or seen myself through the eyes of others as funny or charming or goofy. Instead, I could’ve counted on anger, rage, disappointment and misery to be my four emotional companions, ever ready to introduce themselves to the New York City area.

We often need change to move on from the demons of our past and present. Thank God I made the decision to literally leave 616 and Mount Vernon for Pittsburgh. That decision has enabled me to remember the past without wallowing in it.