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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Mount Vernon New York

My First Vacation, Valedictorian Included

10 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race

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Arlington Virginia, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Diversity, Family, Friendship, Georgetown University, Humanities, Metrorail, Mount Vernon New York, MVHS, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Spring Break, Suitland High School, University of Pittsburgh, Vacation, Valedictorian


Ballston high-rise (on right), Arlington, VA, where I stayed with "V" and her roommate during first DC area visit, June 26, 2008. (http://therealestatedirt.com).

I’ve lived in the DC area now for nearly thirteen years, but it was this time two decades ago that I came to the DC area for the first time. This was my first vacation ever as an adult, and the first time I’d gone on a vacation of any kind since my mother took me and my older brother Darren on a day trip to Amish country in Pennsylvania at the end of third grade, in June ’78. The visit had as many layers to it as a Vidalia onion, as it involved my past, present and future, and all at once.

At the center of my visit was spending time with my Humanities classmate and friend “V,” the valedictorian of Mount Vernon High School’s Class of ’87. I crashed at her and her roommate’s place in the Ballston section of Arlington, Virginia for a week during my spring break in March ’92. As I said in a previous post (see my “A Friendship Changing Lanes” post from October ’11), I’m not sure how our acquaintanceship ever became a friendship. Somewhere between having circumstances in which our fathers weren’t around consistently, or at least being able to relate to Billy Joel, or both of us scoring “5”s on the AP US History exam.

Healey Hall (front gate perspective), Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 19, 2010. (Daderot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The fact that we went our respective ways, to Pitt and Johns Hopkins, helped. The fact that we wrote each other about some of our social triumphs and challenges helped more. Most importantly, it helped a lot that we both were more honest about our family troubles. Everything from my mother’s need to divorce my idiot ex-stepfather and the issues with my younger siblings to V’s mother’s health issues and her struggling with burnout trying to watch over her family while going to school. So, by the time I began my second semester of grad school, we’d become fairly close.

I hadn’t seen V since the day before New Years Eve ’88, the last Friday of that year. I hadn’t planned to visit V at the start of the year, but by the middle of February, I needed a break from Pitt and graduate school (see my “Paula Baker and The 4.0 Aftermath” post from January ’12). As I knew that I was two months away from finishing my master’s, I had begun to check out some alternatives to doing my history PhD at Pitt.

Key Bridge, connecting Georgetown area with Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA, at sunset (picture taken from west), September 18, 2008. (Jersey JJ via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Through Dr. Transatlantic Studies himself, Marcus Rediker — he was a Georgetown University history professor who somehow had been given an empty office in Pitt’s history department — I made arrangements to do some informational interviews at Georgetown during my early March spring break.

As soon as I told V of my opportunity to check out Georgetown, she offered me a place to stay for the week. I made arrangements through a couple of friends driving to Virginia to have them drop me at V’s that first Saturday in March.

The trip was a whole series of firsts and seconds for me. I rode Metrorail for the first time, went to Capitol Hill for the first time, and visited Howard University for the first time. I also spent one full day hanging out with V at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where she was a first-year math teacher. Other than a couple of rowdy students, V was a very good teacher, and not just for a rookie.

My meeting at Georgetown went pretty well also. I managed to get a sweatshirt out of the deal, one that I still wear to this day. Aside from that, finding out from a then second-year grad student (and now and associate professor in African American history at Georgetown) that his annual stipend was only $7,500 a year in expensive DC made my decision for me. I decided that despite the name recognition, Georgetown wouldn’t be where I’d earn a PhD.

I also visited with V’s sister and mother toward the end of that week. V’s sister was in the process of transferring to Goucher, a far cry from the rising high school freshman I’d last seen a week before my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. V’s mother seemed happier in Virginia than in New York, but medically speaking, she had gotten worse since ’87. Her speech was slower and more slurred, and her upper body motions were even more limited than I last remembered. It was a reminder that as much as things had gone well for V over the years, she also faced the intense pressure of trying to care for a slowing dying mother and her sister, and all at twenty-two years old.

What I came away with from that week as my friends picked me up the following Saturday afternoon were two things. One, that I really liked being in an area with great diversity, with Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians from all walks of life, but without the rude chaos and energy that was and remains New York. Two, that V and I had truly become friends, as adults in our twenties, mostly unattached from how we saw each other when we were in Humanities and high school.

Was I Really In Love In 7th Grade?

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Sports, Youth

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7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Coldplay, Crush #1, First Love, Humanities, Love, Mount Vernon New York, Muse, Music, New York Giants, Patrick Ewing, U2


Tomorrow will mark thirty years since I began an emotional journey the likes of which I’ve only approximated maybe three other times since. In the three decades since, I’ve learned that I was actually in love for the first time. Not just a crush, or puppy love, or some preteen infatuation. Love, actually and truly. But as a person of deep thought, a boy surrounded by sexism and misogyny, and a lonely and semi-ostracized twelve-year-old, I didn’t have the thoughts, much less the words, to describe what I felt between March 4 and May 30 of ’82 (see my “On Women and Wired Weirdness” post from March ’11).

To think that this all pretty much started because I picked a fight with Crush #1 at the end of class on the first Thursday in March in 7S. Almost all of my extracurricular incidents that year began or ended in our homeroom with our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay. The incident began because Crush #1 asked a question about a subject that Mrs. Sesay had spent the entire week going over, a concept that Sesay would test us on that Friday. I laughed out loud — thinking that I was only snickering — after Crush #1 asked that question.

Thinking nothing of it, I began to pack up after the 2:15 pm bell rang. Crush #1 came up to me and pushed me from behind.

“You’re an ugly, arrogant asshole!” she said with the distaste of a ballerina being asked for money by a junkie.

I called her “stupid” and then said something else stupid. “You’re an idiot!,” Crush #1 yelled as she threw two punches into my chest and a third at my jaw.

The fight lasted about fifteen or twenty seconds, but after landing a punch on her left boob and nipple, I stopped fighting, already descending into the land of the idiot romantic, as in The Doobie Brothers “What A Fool Believes” (1979). All while Crush #1 kept hitting me, then being pulled away from me by a couple of her friends. One of them, the recently deceased Brandie Weston, called me a “pervert” as they exited the classroom.

I know that I wasn’t the first boy in history to start a fight with a girl who I’d come to like or love, but I do think that boys who do that have a lot of weird in them. Mind you, I hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, so my testosterone levels weren’t high enough yet to be the cause of my brain malfunction. No, my very sexism and her fierce sense of tomboyish feminism was why I liked her in the first place, and I drank deep from that well for the next three months.

I’ve had thirty years to reflect on this incident and the three months of school-day dreaming that followed. There are only a handful of childhood memories I’ve thought about more. For years, though, I’d packed my emotions away. Through high school and Crush #1’s first dating experiences, through my own high school and 616 trials and tribulations, through college and graduate school and my years of dating and then marriage to my wife of twelve years.

Then, as I began work on Boy @ The Window six years ago, I opened up that dusty box of memories and emotions, to find them almost as strange at thirty-six as they had been at twelve. But unlike in ’82, I shared it with a bunch of friends, and especially my wife. After telling the story of me and Crush #1, my wife said, she was my “first love. It doesn’t matter if she didn’t reciprocate.” Or, for that matter, if she didn’t know. It was the first time it dawned on me that I really had fallen in love before I’d learned how to love. Wow.

It explained why after so many years, through all of my ups and downs, and despite the love I do feel, have and show to family and friends in my life, that Crush #1 would show up in my dreams. It helped me understand why I found few girls, young women and women attractive prior to going to college, and even then, they didn’t compare. It also let me know that a feeling like that can’t die, doesn’t die. If anything, it allows room for more love, and more understanding for how to love in the process.

The video above is about the best way I can express what I felt in ’82, without the complete sappiness of an incurable romantic, or worse yet, a tragic one. Like Professor Snape (as played by Alan Rickman) in the Happy Potter movies, or worse still, Ralph Fiennes’ character in The English Patient (1996). Combining music and two of my three favorite sports (the other one’s golf, but Tiger’s inappropriate for this theme), it’s a mere approximation for how I felt back then.

There’s plenty of other music I could’ve used (see my “The Ultimate Crush” post from March ’08 and “Desert Rose” post from April ’09), other themes like figure skating or ballet that would better show what I saw and felt in Crush #1, and what I see and sometimes feel in my dreams on occasion now. I guess that I really was in love. But there’s at least one thing I can do now. I can be there for Noah when it happens to him for the first time.

Quitting Before a Fight

13 Monday Feb 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, 7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Failure, Grades, Humanities, Humiliation, Humility, Isolation, Maturity, Mount Vernon Hospital, Mount Vernon New York, Mount Vernon public schools, Paul Court, Poverty, Quitting, The Crucible


Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks Fight, Convention Hall, Atlantic City, NJ, June 27, 1988. (http://antekprizering.com).

As a writer, I can often see my past as if it happened within the past week. As a forty-two year-old, though, it sometimes seems like my failures and pitfalls are a long-lost memory, one of a very bad dream. To think that it’s been a full thirty years since my preteen struggles with identity, purpose, and the realization that I was in an intense academic competition that I was predestined to lose. It seems like I was playing a role, acting my way through my tweener and teenage years.

But this time thirty years ago, I seriously thought about quitting the Humanities Program. It was the beginning of the third marking period in seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, early February ’82. My grades were unimpressive. I struggled in every subject except social studies, where three years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and forty books of all kinds on World War II made me a nerdy standout among my mostly nerdy peers. My social studies teacher Paul Court was so much fun and so inept that he played games with us to keep our class interesting. Anyone who could find factual errors in his teachings on American history would earn twenty-five cents. I’d already earned more than three dollars by the end of the second marking period.

I barely averaged a C+ in math. My Italian teacher Ms. Fleming told me that my “Italian sounded British.” And I was averaging a C+ in art. In Art! All because Doris Mann, who was about as good an art teacher as I was at making friends, said, “I don’t give A’s for effort. I give out grades based on your ability to create good art.” I couldn’t believe that she gave me C+’s while the art world fifteen miles away cheered folks who smeared blood, paint, and feces on canvasses!

I thought that I was the only one who felt like a failure. I was certain that I was more of a failure than my Holmes School classmates or other, non-Pennington-Grimes students in Humanities, at least. If other students appeared to have problems, especially my classmates who were alumni of the Pennington-Grimes program (Mount Vernon public schools’ K-6 Humanities Program), I believed that they were faking it.

The Crucible (play), date and location unknown. (http://reyvl.com).

I had good reason to. It was around this time that one of my White female classmates from Pennington-Grimes had become anxiety-ridden prior to a test in our English class. She began to sweat, her hands and face turned colors, like one of Arthur Miller’s female characters in The Crucible, his famous Salem-Witch-Trial play.

Within a few seconds, three of her friends joined this tortured soul in this expression of fear. The one girl kept saying, over and over, “I know I’m going to fail!” The other three huddled around her and joined in séance, as if they expected God to witness this physical expression of pressurized fear and take pity on them. That this involved the Pennington-Grimes group of Humanities girls was not lost on me. They loved their grades, almost as much as they loved Jordache Jeans, The Gap or Benetton.

We received our exam grades from Mrs. Sesay a few days later. My grade: a 78. The Fear Bunch’s lowest grade: a 92. Understanding how quickly fear can destroy your confidence: priceless. Their fears had left me thinking more about failure — theirs and mine — than it did about the task at hand.

Then it was my turn to act demon-possessed. I went to the back of the classroom at the end of that day and chanted, “I’m silly, I’m stupid. I’m silly, I’m stupid. I’m silly, I’m stupid.” over and over again while pounding the back of my head into the side wall. But I learned a valuable lesson that day. That doing well required me to ignore the worries and grades of other, to concentrate on me and my own emotions on test days.

So, I spent the first two weeks in February thinking about sliding into the general population of A.B. Davis Middle School. I couldn’t do much else other than think. With the growing problems of lack of food, late rent payments and three siblings at 616, my mother’s tiny Mount Vernon Hospital paycheck, and my idiot and long-term unemployed Hebrew-Israelite of a stepfather, I had no one to talk to about school (see “Humanities: First Contact, Full Circle” from September ’11).

What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t yet begun to fight. My efforts up to that point in Humanities — from making friends to studying — were all half-hearted at best. I was the emotional equivalent of an eight-year-old in a preteen’s body, one right at the early stages of puberty at that. With life at 616 starting to fall apart and the isolation I felt at school, I was growing up, whether I wanted to or not. All it would take was an immature spark of inspiration to prove it….

Super Bowl XXI and Vicarious Living

28 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, Sports, Youth

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Coping Strategies, Escapism, Living Vicariously, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York Giants, Super Bowl XXI, Underdog, Underdog Mentality


New York Giants as underdogs, January 26, 2012. (BlasBlasB via http://Flickr.com). In public domain.In little more than a week, my New York (football) Giants will play against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, and hopefully win their fourth NFL championship. It’s good for me to watch this process unfold — again. Only without the significant emotional and psychological attachment I had to my Giants back in the days of Bill Parcells, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Phil McConkey, Joe Morris, Lawrence Taylor, Leonard Marshall, Carl Banks, Elvis Patterson, and Harry Carson, among so many others.

It’s been twenty-five years and three days since my Giants won their first Super Bowl, against John Elway and the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Or, as Dick Enberg put it over and over again, “the man with the golden arm,” who looked like Tim Tebow most of the game against the Giants pass rush. At times after that win on January 25, ’87, it seemed as if that was the only thing that went right for me that year.

Of course, that wasn’t true. After all, this was also my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, about to graduate and move on to the University of Pittsburgh that fall. But at seventeen years old, in the middle of my obsession with Crush #2, and feeling the pressures of life at 616, the ridicule of some classmates at MVHS, and the need to grasp my future, I needed many forms of escape.

The Giants had served as one major form of escape for me since the ’83 season. Yeah, their 3-12-1 season. I was neither a Giants nor a Jets fan, but after watching what had happened with both teams that year, I felt sorriest for the Giants. With a first-year coach like Bill Parcells not knowing yet how to coach his team, I just felt they had nowhere else to go but up. They hadn’t won a championship since ’56, and didn’t look like they were going to win one anytime soon.

Just like me. As an underdog in life, I already was rooting for teams that no one else would care to talk

Mark Bavaro after touchdown catch in Super Bowl XXI, January 25, 1987 (note the kneel down that people now attribute to Tebow). (Walter Iooss, Jr. via http://nypost.com).

about. The Jets just looked like a team that squandered talent, they had Richard Todd, and they never played as hard as the Giants. So by the end of the year I didn’t care to watch them anymore.

I watched or listened to my Giants play football virtually every Sunday from that point on, but that didn’t interfere with my studies. It often helped me remember obscure information, especially as my ability to study at 616 complete deteriorated. Through a visual cue, like Phil Simms throwing a touchdown pass on a crossing route or post pattern to Mark Bavaro, I could remember how to solve a specific function or recall a series of “if-then” statements for a Pascal program.

Then, after disappointment in the playoffs in ’84 and ’85 at the hands of the 49ers and the Bears, the Giants won Super Bowl XXI, blowing out and brutalizing each team they faced along the way. My underdog team had become a juggernaut in three seasons, meaning that there was hope for me yet.

But it would take me a bit longer to see myself as a winner, a champion, someone deserving of a victorious life. When I did, a couple of years before the Giants’ second Super Bowl victory in January ’91, I realized that I didn’t need to live and die with any team I was a fan of in order to validate the meaning of my own life. Rooting for the Giants, win or lose, has given me a small degree of joy over the years, like a kid just enjoying the excellence of his team. How it translates for my own life is immaterial. It’s up to me to decide how much victory in my life I’m willing to fight for, and how much success I can stand.

Taking the Long Road: Driver’s Delight

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Youth

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Adulthood, Driver's License, Kauffman's Driving School, Late Bloomer, Learning How to Drive, Mount Vernon New York, Perseverance, Pittsburgh, Rite of Passage, University of Pittsburgh


Our 2004 Honda Element, Mount Vernon, NY, November 2006. (Donald Earl Collins)

How I was able to get my driver’s license twenty years ago tomorrow is a shining example of my late bloomer status. I started in the middle of May ’88, a couple of weeks after the end of my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. My main motivation was the fact that the only piece of picture identification I had was a choice between my Pitt ID and my old Mount Vernon High School ID. It also seemed to me that I couldn’t hope to travel or to get a good job without having a driver’s license.

1974 or 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, cropped and colored green, January 23, 2012. (http://http://www.allcollectorcars.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because photo is of low resolution, cropped and altered for purposes of post.

I knew plenty of people with cars, but in my family and immediate circle, only my idiot stepfather Maurice had a license. In the eleven years he’d been in our lives, he had access to his Reliable cab for two years (’77-’79), and had owned a ’70s-era Coupe de Ville for about a year and a half. At least until he burned out his engine on the New Jersey Turnpike earlier in ’88.

Despite all of these disadvantages, I began my journey. At the end of my second week back, I grabbed a manual at the White Plains DMV, leafed through it, and took the exam. I passed with a 70, making the cut by two questions. I scheduled and took my first driving lesson two days later. I was quickly on my way to becoming a licensed driver.

But if I hoped to follow-up on that quick success with a job that could cover the cost of more driving lessons, I was sorely mistaken. I spent the rest of the summer of ’88 unemployed, like nearly seventy percent of Black males my age that summer. This began the off and on again cycle of my quest for one simple symbol of adulthood.

Even in the midst of my fall of homelessness and with $205 to work with between Labor Day and Thanksgiving ’88, I continued plugging away. I’d gone at the end of October to the Pittsburgh DMV center off Washington Boulevard, near the bridge across the Allegheny River into the northern suburbs. I ended up walking from Welsford through Oakland to Forbes, then Fifth Avenue, stayed on Fifth through Shadyside and Point Breeze and Homewood-Brushton until it turned into Washington Blvd, then kept going until I reached the center. It took me an hour to get there and another to get back. In between I scored a 95 on the Learner’s Permit exam, making me eligible to get a driver’s license in two states.

I even got my former CIS (Computer and Information Systems) co-worker Bill to give me a driving lesson in Highland Park Zoo’s parking lots before he left for Virginia that March for a job with AT&T. It was February ’89. I was behind the wheel of Bill’s car, his “babemobile,” his white ’88 Ford Thunderbird. It was an easy lesson until I screwed up. I was going too fast on a left-turn, cut the car too close to an embankment. We ended up going down a short grassy hill that cut off one side of the large parking lot from the other. Bill was terrified and a scary shade of purple for his car. I’d no sooner parked it then he had jumped out to make sure there wasn’t any damage. I knew that this lesson was over.

I continued taking driving lessons off and on in ’89 and ’90, between Kauffman’s Driving School (at $53 an hour), my Pitt friends, and a couple of 616 folks in Mount Vernon. By September ’90, with about twenty-five hours of driving lessons under my belt, I thought I was ready. After three driving test failures, I was obviously mistaken. Then my money ran out again, and then I started grad school the following year. I wondered, sometimes out loud, whether I’d finish my master’s degree before I’d earn my driver’s license.

It all came together at the beginning of January ’92. I decided to spend whatever it would take for me to pass the driver’s test on the Washington Blvd course in Pittsburgh. I took seven hours’ worth of lessons from Kauffman’s in ten days, mostly to practice parallel parking and three-point turns in a ’88 Chevy Cavalier. I

1991 Chevy Cavalier - similar to one I drove on day I got my driver's license, Gaithersburg, Maryland, July 5, 2008. (IFCAR via Wikipedia). In public domain.

practiced turns with my dinner plate in my apartment in between the lessons.

Finally, we scheduled my driver’s test for 9 am on Friday, January 24. That morning, it began to snow. By the time I drove to the test site, six inches of snow had fallen. I was the first person on the course. Between that and the falling snow, I was comfortable. Seven minutes later, I’d done it all, and had barely parked the car after hearing the words “You’ve passed” before literally jumping out of it and into the snow.

It took me three years, eight months and eleven days in all to pass my driver’s test in Pittsburgh. At the time, I was prouder of that than I was of any of my academic achievements or other personal triumphs. A month after my twenty-second birthday, I’d now earned the right to add to humanity’s carbon footprint. As well as a real badge of adulthood.

Stomping In Coffee Table Glass

30 Friday Dec 2011

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

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425 South Sixth Avenue, Alcoholism, Coffee Table, Jimme, Maurice, Mount Vernon Hospital, Mount Vernon New York, Neglect, Sam Gill Jr., Vindictiveness, Violence


Walking On Broken Glass Music Video screen shot, June 12, 2010. (Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and indirect reference.

Three days after my seventh birthday — which also happens to be thirty-five years ago on this date — I witnessed one of the most bizarre and frightening things a kid should ever see with two parents in the midst of a divorce. It involved infidelity, jealousy, vindictiveness and violence. But the incident itself was part of a domestic situation that had been spiraling out of control for at least two years.

My mother officially filed for a divorce from my father Jimme in July ’76, after six years of putting up with his alcoholism and his threats of violence. In the two years since we’d moved to 425 South Sixth Avenue in Mount Vernon in August ’74, Jimme’s alcohol-laced threats had led to a stabbing (his own) and my own call

425 South 6th Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

to the police (cut off by my folks mid-call). Things like finding him face-down in a pile of freshly cooked greens and chitlins and falling asleep on the Metro-North on Bicentennial Day with me and Darren in tow and ending up in New Haven, Connecticut didn’t help matters.

The fall after the divorce filing, me and my older brother Darren found ourselves in a strange limbo. Jimme hadn’t moved out, but was out drinking so much that seeing him at home was a random occurrence. My mother was home — sometimes — with Wednesday evenings reserved for bowling nights and occasional other nights out that weren’t easily explained except by my father’s accusations of cheating.

By October ’76, whenever Jimme was home, he found some way to get back at my mother. He put about $3,000 worth of my mother’s clothes and shoes into a bathtub full of hot water (about $10,000 in 2011 dollars). Me and my older brother Darren were there when he threw a brand-new thirteen-inch Sanyo color TV out of our second-floor window, this right around Halloween. Jimme also had repeatedly cut up the new furniture my mother had bought after filing for divorce.

My father’s drunken awareness of my mother’s new relationship with my eventual idiot stepfather Maurice led to a nasty incident that topped all of these, if only because I was wide awake for this one. My mother decided that it was time for us to finally meet the mystery man who had been in her life for the past several months, Maurice Washington. So for the first time in three days, we all gathered at 425, all to have a fried chicken dinner.

Two-layered tinted glass coffee table, similar to one my mother bought in 1976, December 30, 2011.

Jimme came home to bear witness to this gathering, and drunk as usual, flew into a rage. He started throwing food from the kitchen, then walked into the living room. There, with me and Darren sitting on the couch and Maurice and my mother watching, Jimme destroyed a glass-topped coffee table by stomping it in. Shards of glass were everywhere, including small bits in my father’s legs. He bled everywhere it seemed. I found myself hiding between the Christmas tree and the stairwell that led downstairs to the front door. Soon an ambulance and the police came — once again — to take Jimme to the hospital.

This was more than my mother could bear. She ended up in Mount Vernon Hospital for almost two months with a serious kidney ailment that turned out to be stress-induced. Darren and I stayed with our usual babysitter, one of my father’s drinking buddies in Ida. By the time my mother came out of the hospital, which was in April ’77, Maurice and my Uncle Sam had moved us into an apartment at 616 East Lincoln Avenue on Mount Vernon’s North Side.

But not before my Uncle Sam, a big man at six-foot-four and about 230 pounds, clotheslined Jimme over a fence in front of our old place as an act of vengeance. Me and Darren were there because my father had swept us up from our babysitter’s place on East Third Street and taken us to 425 to hang out for a few days, which meant us missing school as well. He’d managed not to drink for those two and a half days, and even made us lunch and dinner consisting of Kool-Aid, meatloaf, mac and cheese and string beans.

While Jimme went out to buy us some soda, my Uncle Sam and my soon-to-be-stepfather had come with the moving van. About a half-hour later, there was Jimme, about to walk through the gate into the front yard. The whole Deacon Jones-esque tackle seemed as if it were in slow motion, as I watched the 32-oz. glass bottle of Pepsi bounce twice on the sidewalk before landing in the grass, with only minor damage. The paper bag having landed right next to the front gate. And Jimme flipped backwards in the air, landing with a giant thud on the public sidewalk.

I was traumatized, to say the least. My grades throughout second grade reflected that, not that Ms. Hirsch and her low-expectations behind would’ve noticed. The fact that I no longer had any continuity in my life made it hard to want to be friends with anyone, a complete 180 degree turn from what I’d been like in first grade. Again, no one noticed. And Darren had also withdrawn, finding in The Clear View School something he didn’t have at home.

Reaching Level 42

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincole Avenue, Darren, Hebrew-Israelites, Life Roles, Mount Vernon New York, Responsibility, Role as Eldest Brother, Youth


We all get used to playing certain roles in life, no matter how uncomfortably those roles fit. Privileged, rich, powerful and entitled Americans are accustomed to shitting on the little guy and using all of their resources to maintain their separation from the rest of us. Attractive women — especially White blondes and Black women with music video bodies — tend to act as if the world’s purpose is to serve them. Religious people who somehow believe that it’s their role to tell every person they meet how to deal with all of the issues they face in life, without a real understanding of those people or their lives.

I’ve gotten used to the role of the eldest sibling over the past thirty years. This despite all of the growing pains I went through in the ’80s to take on this role, in spite of the fact that I have an older brother, one two years and eighteen days older than me.

My older brother Darren, as I put it more than twenty-five years ago, “abdicated the throne” of eldest brother by the time I was in the middle of puberty. That happened twenty-nine Decembers ago. Once our family went off the cliffs of the Himalayas and plunged into the hell of Hebrew-Israelites, abuse, abject poverty, responsibility became my motto. Add to that four more mouths to feed between ’79 and ’84, but with only enough food in the house to feed us twenty out of every thirty days, and it became obvious that someone had to do something.

Darren withdrew into the fantasy world that he’d constructed through his psychological imprisonment at The Clear View School in Briarcliff Manor, a school for the mentally retarded (see “About My Brother” post from December ’07). Except that Darren wasn’t mentally retarded. But he played up that role as life at 616 became tougher after the ’81 no-Chanukah, no-Christmas, no-Kwanzaa season. Darren would rock back and forth in his too-small twin bed, as if in a catatonic state. Or he’d spontaneously jump up and down by himself in our bedroom or while in the bathroom, making a high-pitched “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee” sound while nearly hitting the top of his six-foot frame on the ceiling.

Mostly, my older brother would make himself sound as stupid as he possibly could to get out of anything to do with all of the craziness at 616. His favorite answer to any question from our mom or from our idiot ex-stepfather Maurice was, “I Dunno.” And he’s say it over and over again. For nearly a year, stupid ass Maurice attempted to conduct a version of Torah study with us on Saturdays. Every time Maurice asked Darren what he learned, my brother would say, “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…,” regardless of what book we were charged with reading. By August ’82, Darren was permanently excused from Torah study.

Darren did what he did to get out of going to the store, or washing dishes, or helping out with “those kids,” or anything that meant him acting like his IQ was higher than eighty-five. Some neighborhood guys who knew my brother then would ask me, “What’s wrong with yo’ brotha’, man?,” and I’d say, “Nothing.”

How did I know? Because for three years, every time he boarded his 7:40 am school bus to go to Clear View, off came his kufi or yarmulke. Because outside of 616, Darren ate whatever he wanted, whether it was a lard-based Hostess’ Apple Pie or a ham and cheese sandwich. Because Darren was smart enough to realize that perception for most people — most of us undiscerning and self-absorbed Americans, anyway — is reality, and that acting like he was severely mentally retarded would save him from the worst effects of living with a family that had fallen apart.

So everything fell on me. At first, it was going to the store and watching over my younger siblings Maurice and Yiscoc. By the time I began puberty, it was taking punches from Maurice and tracking down my father Jimme for money. By the time of Michael Jackson’s last single release from Thriller in early ’84, it was cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, protecting my four younger siblings, and maintaining some sense of sanity for myself and them. I did it because I had no choice, but I helped grow a jealousy and competition in Darren that he’s yet to give up on.

It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be who I am today without growing up the way I did. But who in their right mind would want to go through what I went through? At the time, it was so much better to be Darren. Only in the last ten years have I realized how much Darren gave up. His sanity, his piece of mine, his development as a human being, as a Black male. All shredded in his well-practiced Clear View persona.

At forty-two years old today, I’m forever learning and relearning, but my ironic, goofy, sarcastic, contrarian, honest and caring, disdainful and cocky persona is well-marbled. Darren’s, sadly, remains trapped in jealousy and misery, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

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Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

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