Tag Archives: New York City

American Denial & Fear, Courtesy of Family Feud

10 Saturday Sep 2011

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The Culture of Fear cover (audio edition), September 10, 2011. (Source/http://betterworldbooks.com).

It’s been a decade since the largest American tragedy since World War II in 9/11 in New York, Washington, DC and central Pennsylvania. And we’ve spent much of the past week in remembrance of this event, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as a society since that tragic Tuesday. Cutting through all of the chatter and bullcrap in the run-up to 9/11 the last few weeks has been a part-time job, especially since most of it is wrapped in one of our nation’s best-selling products — fear.

Second plane, Twin Towers, 9/11, 9:03 am, courtesy of Today Show. (Source/http://en.wikipedia.org).

But a few things are clear. One is that we as a nation have spent the past ten years in constant fear, as if the Cold War wasn’t enough for anyone born before ’74. We wasted trillions of dollars on wars that have done more harm than good for us at home and abroad, ruining the economy, shredding the social welfare state and leaving us with curtailed civil liberties. Most of all, we’ve left ourselves in constant denial of our own fear, xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, making America look even more imperialistic — if that seemed at all possible in ’01 — then we did a decade ago.

Of all the half-truths and total lies we’ve been told — and told ourselves — over the past ten years is how “the nation came together” in the first few months after the attacks. Really? In a parallel universe, maybe. I had the unfortunate experience of riding a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Washington, DC two days after the attacks. My one-day business trip became three days, with flights suspended, rental cars gone and trains booked ten days out. Two guys, one White, one Black, “came together” on the back of the bus to insult and threaten a Sikh, all because he had the nerve to wear a turban. I had to get between the two dumb asses and the poor Sikh man to tell them that he wasn’t Arab or Muslim. “What difference does it make,” one of the dumb asses said, implying that I didn’t love America because I wasn’t ready to kill the “m-fs,” as he put it.

We came together, alright. To persecute Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians and anyone else

They Hate Us For Our Freedom (2008), Claire Fontaine, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, December 11, 2008. (Source/http://language.cont3xt.net).

who looked like a potential terrorist. Even now, people like Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh can agree that because some Arab Muslims are terrorists, that we should suspect the millions here in the US and the half a billion in the Middle East. This makes the Red Scare look like a high school lunchroom fight by comparison.

This is why the reference to Family Feud reference is so appropriate, especially with good-old Brit Richard “Dickie” Dawson as the host from ’76 to ’85. It was a show full of not-so-learned people giving rather folksy answers to questions big and small. I loved the part where one family would get together after a first or second strike, and someone would come up with an answer everyone in the group sounded like it was correct. Then they’d start clapping and yelling, “Good answer! Good answer!” before the buzzer would sound and the audience would say, “Uhhhhhhhh!”

That, and the hillbilly theme music for the show, and Dawson prancing around the set while kissing all of the female contestants, allegedly to wish them luck, were all things I enjoyed about Family Feud. The ’70s were so grand!

So in the spirit of Family Feud, I’ve spliced myself as various characters into an episode from ’81. The topic is about naming the people to blame for our current American mess, at home and abroad. I hope that it’s funny and goofy.

But I also hope that it’s food for thought. For in the end, we are all to blame. For being so entitled and privileged, for worshiping the US dollar and the people who have billions of them. For refusing to believe that America, as great a country as it is, screws up on the international stage, that our politicians have put our nation in a precarious position militarily and economically. For being so willing to buy the idea that the Rapture is upon us, but not the idea that climate change is real and that we can do something about it. For acting as if ours is a Christian nation, despite the fact that Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and yes, Muslims were all part of America’s founding.

I hope that we can somehow find a way to outgrow our petty, stupid, idiotic differences around race, religion and politics and put down the class and corporate warfare against the average person. But our lust for wealth and constant feuding may be too much to overcome. Did those twenty Saudi terrorists win after all? Only if we let denial and fear — and those in power who rely on us voting out of both — lead us over a cliff.

No Bravery, But All Too Entitled

30 Tuesday Aug 2011

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Hurricane Irene, picture from International Space Station, August 24, 2011. (Source/NOAA). In public domain.

Dateline: Thursday, September 6, ’79. Hurricane — now Tropical Storm — David has hit the New York City area with wind speeds up to 70 mph and some heavy rains. A nine-year-old fifth-grader walks the half-mile from his apartment building on East Lincoln Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York to William H. Holmes Elementary School. In between, limbs and branches snap and fall and the wind breaks up a cheap umbrella as this boy hops over a downed power line and telephone wire on his way to and from school.

That boy, of course, was me. It was my second day of fifth grade with Mrs. O’Daniel. We’d all heard about Hurricane David for nearly a week as it tore through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, Florida and the Appalachians on its way to New Jersey and good old New York. I certainly wasn’t the only one who jumped, hopped and literally ran through near-hurricane force winds to get to school that morning, and to get home that afternoon.

By the time I reached school, I didn’t feel wet so much as I felt blasted by the wind. I felt excited, mostly in a

Hurricane/Tropical Storm David, US Eastern Seaboard, September 6, 1979. (Source: NOAA). In public domain.

good way, seeing a power line spark within twenty feet of me near a drainage grate. Not to mention trees pummeled into submission, uprooted, pushed into sidewalks and houses, across streets and into traffic. I felt adventurous, fearless and really, really clean.

I don’t remember a whole lot of folks complaining that Frank Field, Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons of WNBC-4 TV in New York had over-hyped what at one point was a Category 5 hurricane as it went through the Dominican Republic the week before. I don’t remember — even though this apparently happened in South Florida — the two and a half million people in the NYC area without power accusing the National Hurricane Center experts of having some form of Munchausen Syndrome because the storm didn’t destroy the Twin Towers. I certainly didn’t hear about parents complaining when their schools were open or if their schools were closed despite or because of Hurricane/Tropical Storm David. After all, more than 2,000 people lost their lives in the Caribbean and the US to this system.

But here we are, thirty-two years later, as the pampered and spoiled Americans we are, complaining about having to prepare for what turned out to be a relatively minor hurricane event in Irene. If a Category One hurricane that only on its final day of blowing across the eastern seaboard (Sunday, August 28) became a tropical storm can be called minor.

Town lies in rubble after Hurricane David hit Dominica, September 1979. (Source/National Geographic Society/Joseph J. Scherschel).

Meanwhile, at least twenty-one people died. Millions in New York, Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey and the Carolinas were left without power. Several major river systems are cresting or will crest in the coming days, causing more flooding and damage. All adding to the damaged power lines that are part of our degraded national power grid. As well as the washed-out bridges and roads and towns from Vermont and upstate New York all the way to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

For those asking the question of whether there was too much hype about Hurricane Irene, shame on you. For those parents who complained bitterly — like those in my Silver Spring, Maryland neighborhood — about the first day of school being delayed because our school didn’t have power, shame on you. For those who were too shortsighted to realize how much worse things could’ve been beyond waiting for Con Ed or Pepco, shame on you.

Life happens. And when life happens, our choices are to ride the waves of life, be drowned by them, or to sit on our entitled hands in judgment over whether life happens or not. Unfortunately, a few too many of my neighbors and fellow citizens too often choose the role of critical hand-sitting. It’s simply ridiculous.

Working At AED: Alternate Sources of Fear

28 Tuesday Jun 2011

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AED’s DC Office, circa 2008, before the sign came down. Source: http://www.glassdoor.com

It was ten years ago on this date that I began to think seriously about quitting New Voices and AED, the Academy for Educational Development, the subcontractor for USAID and the State Department in trouble these days (see my “USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation” post from December ’10). In the end, I probably should’ve on this date. I realized that most of the people I worked for and with cared more about money than Wall Street investment bankers, and had an addiction to fear greater than a junkie’s addiction to heroin. And, most sadly, I began to see signs of what my former immediate supervisor would admit two and a half years later, his bipolar disorder.

I’d seen signs of Ken’s mental illness as early as February ’01, but the first time I realized that I worked in an organization that thrived on fear was after me and my wife returned from our honeymoon in Seattle, at the end of May that year. All during the month of June, as I did site visits in Tulsa, Jackson, Mississippi, Fairbanks, Alaska and Durham, North Carolina, and visited my maternal grandparents in Arkansas, all fear was breaking loose in the New Voices offices at AED. Our funder, the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit at the Ford Foundation in New York, had called for a meeting to discuss the progress of the New Voices Fellowship Program to date.

I didn’t think all that much of it at the time, with me doing site visits almost every week and having done presentations for funders and academicians, including the Spencer Foundation, what was now the Gates Foundation, and a few corporate foundations over the previous five years. But as soon as I returned to the office that last Monday in June ’01, I realized that nearly everyone I worked with directly was on pins and needles about our Thursday afternoon meeting on East 43rd Street in Manhattan. Ken was on a higher level of worry than the rest of the staff, but it wasn’t a good worry. He had our program assistant and associate printing new copies of memos and other meeting materials every time he came up with a new sentence, found an error or realized he wanted orange paper for program statistics instead of lavender.

Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy in Driving Miss Daisy Screen Shot (though Sandra wasn’t as aged, her attitudes definitely were), 1989. Source: http://heraldsun.com.au

What made this even worse was that on Tuesday, Ken’s boss Sandra — whom I regularly called “Driving Miss Daisy” because of her bigoted semi-liberal ways — called an additional meeting to emphasize how crucial this meeting was to the future of New Voices. After ten minutes, Ken, the program assistant and associate all looked like Bush 43 and former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson did on September 15, ’08, when the US financial markets melted down. When I politely pointed out that “we need to be ready, but not scared” in presenting our results to date to the folks at Ford, another meeting was called.

Except this Wednesday afternoon meeting was just between me and Driving Miss Daisy. She called me out on the carpet for “disrespecting” her. She told me, “if you don’t like it here, you can leave,” and that she’ll be at AED “longer than [me].” It made me feel as if I had to worry about my job for doing my job. Meanwhile, Ken was going over word for word what each of us would have to say the following afternoon in New York, as if one bad choice of words would cost us $2.25 million, money we’d already received from Ford.

After a rough night of sleep before an early Amtrak from DC to New York, I arrived at Penn Station refreshed and glad that I didn’t ride the same train with the rest of the Nervous Nellies. They were already at Houlihan’s, eating an early lunch, with Ken obviously more relaxed from whatever he had to drink by the time I arrived.

The Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street, New York City, November 19, 2007. Source: Stakhanov (permission granted)

The Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street, New York City, November 19, 2007. Source: Stakhanov (permission granted)

The meeting itself was where something kicked in for Ken, what appeared to be a natural high at first. After Sandra and Yvonne (Ken’s actual immediate supervisor, even though Ken never listened to her) did the introductions, Ken took over the two-hour meeting. He talked over me, the program assistant and associate, even the program officers in the spartan meeting room. Ken’s euphoric fear was so strong that he didn’t trust us to speak on behalf of New Voices, meaning that it was a waste of time and money for anyone other than Ken to be there.

Or was is? The imam-suit-wearing program officers from Anthony Romero (who was within a few months had moved on to become the Executive Director of the ACLU) to Alan Jenkins (now co-founder of The Opportunity Agenda), who had sat silently through Ken’s soliloquy, finally spoke in the final fifteen minutes of the meeting. Romero said, “Maybe it’s time for AED to consider looking for alternate sources of funding” for New Voices “over the next couple of years.” That was my take-away from the whole ordeal.

But it wasn’t for Ken. He was on one of his blue-crystal-meth-like highs again, giddy like a kid getting a ten-speed bike for Christmas. Yvonne looked ready to go, while Sandra the wise-one was just happy it was over. I wondered, out loud to the group, if the not-so-veiled hint provided by Romero meant that the unit and foundation’s priorities were changing. I, of course, was accused of worrying too much. Too bad none of the senior staff understood the definition of irony.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

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My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

 

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.

My Father Jimme — Happy Birthday!

17 Saturday Jul 2010

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My Father, August 2007

On Monday, my father Jimme turns seventy years old. Seventy, 70, 7-oh! Amazing! Given the years of alcohol abuse, so much loss, so much pain, so much rage, and to recover and make it to the age of seventy? That’s a big-M miracle, the kind that you can only attribute to sheer strength of will and the grace of God.

I must admit, after the summer of ’92, I had my doubts about my father’s future. The few times I saw him that summer, he was drinking like he had never drank before. The first time I saw him, he accused me of lying about having my master’s degree. “No college gonna giv’ you a degree afta a year,” he said. Only when his Jewish bosses told him it was possible for someone to finish a master’s in a year did he believe me.

The second time I went to see him, his landlord Mrs. Smalls was about to evict him. But my father wasn’t there. Or, I guess he was, in a way. He had made plops of defecation, from the front gate and blue slate walk up to the front steps and porch, into the entrance way and foyer, up the gloomy carpeted steps, all the way to the attic bathroom next to his room. They’d been cleaning for hours, according to Mrs. Smalls, but it sure didn’t smell like it.

Fast-forward two years to Christmas Eve ’94. My mother and my younger siblings and I went on a bus trip to Cross County Mall and Toys ‘R Us in Yonkers. Jimme showed up at the last minute to join us and to regale us with his “po’ ass muddafuccas” and his other favorite Jimme-isms. We were on the 7 bus to Yonkers, packed with parents who were shopping late for toys and Christmas trees. Jimme was so drunk that he fell over on some people on the bus once, and fell into the rear stairwell one other time. I wasn’t embarrassed as much as I was disappointed and saddened.

So by the time I finished my doctorate at the end of ’96, I’d all but given up on my father turning things

Three Generations, May 2006

around. A few months later, my father, unemployed and no longer enabled by his former bosses, finally left New York for the family home in Georgia at the invitation of one of his sisters. By the end of ’97, I heard that he had cleaned up his act and moved to Jacksonville. Throughout ’98 and into ’99, I began to get calls from Jimme about how he was finally sober, had found God, and was getting married, to another woman named Mary.

I thought long and hard about blowing him off. All my life, and certainly all of my older brother Darren’s, Jimme had been an evil drunk, verbally abusive and incapable of staying sober for more than three weeks at a time. But he had also been there for me growing up during my Humanities and Hebrew-Israelite years. He helped keep Darren and me from starving or walking around barefoot in ’82 and ’83. He kept the example of hard work in front of us even as the other parent figures in our lives went on dreaded welfare and laid around as if our lives were over. His money was the reason I was able to stay in school after five days of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt.

So I called him, deciding to give him a second chance. That was February ’99, a two-hour conversation about how he managed to become a recovering alcoholic, a church-goer, and a married man. He admitted that he had made many mistakes, that he was an alcoholic, that he loved me and my brother. It was a conversation, a real conversation, an unbelievable change of relationship. After twenty-nine years and two months, I finally had a father that I really could call father.

That was eleven and a half years ago. I’m still amazed that I’m able to talk to my father as my father, and not as the person I used to have to drag out of bars on 241st Street or in Midtown Manhattan growing up. But most of all, I’m amazed how much I love him and care about him. Happy Birthday…Dad!

Working for My Father

08 Thursday Jul 2010

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Me and My Father, August 2007

The first job outside of 616 I ever had was working for my father Jimme. Off and on from September ’84 through the early part of July ’85, me and my older brother Darren schlepped our way between 616, Jimme’s place on South 10th Avenue, the 2 Subway and the Upper West and Upper East Side. We cleaned high-rise offices, high-rise condos, and high-rise co-ops in the process. The last of those jobs was twenty-five years ago this week. This was Jimme’s way of making us earn the money he’d been giving us (really me) since the end of ’82.

Whenever anyone asked me what Jimme did — which was really rare — I usually said, “Oh, my dad’s a carpet cleaner.” I didn’t see him as a simple janitor, although it was true that he cleaned stuff. But Jimme didn’t clean toilets or latrines or bathroom sinks and tubs. He cleaned the floors of office buildings — carpeted, wooden, or otherwise — thoroughly treating any surface he encountered with industrial cleaning machines. He cleaned high-rise co-ops and condos where the mortgage or rent payment per month was more than our rent at 616 for a year. It was an important job in his eyes, and I wasn’t going to diminish it because other folks couldn’t understand or wouldn’t have a clue as to the amount of labor involved in Jimme’s work.

155 West 68th - One of Many Cleaning Jobs in '84 and '85

I didn’t have much of an idea beyond seeing him mop a floor at Salesian High School until I started working for him on a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday morning. This wasn’t an easy task. We saw Jimme almost everyday for the first three weeks of the summer of ’85, cleaning the carpets and floors of one high-rise after another on the Upper West Side, especially between 67th and 72nd near Broadway. We did mostly night work, in office buildings and in condos. We also had a couple of stints on the Upper East Side around 86th. We carted the industrial carpet cleaning and floor equipment for stripping, buffing, and waxing on the 2, 5, and 6 trains at three in the morning.

Jimme didn’t drink much during these weeks of withering toil and sweat. He was constantly irritated with us, though. “Got no reason to be tired, bo’,” he’d say. “Hurry up an’ dump out that water!,” Jimme would yell. And with a killer’s cold, strangled look, he’d say to us, “I dun told you how to do dis shit right, now I got to do it my gotdamn self!”

It was fascinating seeing Jimme work and work us as hard as he did. Darren didn’t complain much, but then again, he didn’t do much work either. It was up to me and Jimme, and with my dad in a perpetual state of irritation, I was getting pissed too.

“I feel sorry for the people who work for you during the day! I hope I never have to work for you again!,” I yelled over the roaring machines on several occasions.

“Shut up ya faggat!,” Jimme would yell back. Or he’d just mutter in anger, and look at me as if he were ready to stab me in the neck.

In some of the condos we’d clean, Jimme would help himself to whatever he thought wouldn’t be missed — sport coats, shoes and socks mostly. Sometimes we’d take breaks to go to this Jewish deli that used to be on 65th and Broadway/Columbus, across from the Lincoln Center. They made turkey, hot pastrami and corned beef sandwiches stuffed with meat and loaded with every ingredient you could think of — all for five dollars. That, a bag of Doritos, their blondie desserts and a sixteen-ounce carton of Hershey’s chocolate milk made the torture of working for my dad during his brief period of sobriety more bearable. Otherwise we’d tune the radio we had with us to the Mets game while we were working, broadcast by WHN, an AM country oldies station (as in ’40s and ’50s oldies) that was obviously on its last legs.

We’d work these high-rises at night, sleep during only part of the day, with siblings Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri at home, after all, and catch the Subway for another night of work. Until the week after the fourth of July. Jimme decided that it was now all right to have some of his Miller Beer “pep up” while we were working. Besides the usual “I make fitty million dollas a week” and “I buy an’ sell muddafuccas,” Jimme decided that a Subway car was a good place to relieve himself at two in the morning one night.

The lack of sleep, my dad’s crankiness, and now his verbal abuse and drinking while working had all caught up with me. After that week, I quit. I told Jimme, “I’m not doing this anymore. You’ll have to find someone else to drink with.” Those were good times, good times. At least when compared to living at 616.

Not Finding Work

14 Monday Jun 2010

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Source: Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2003

This is at least the fifth time in my adult life that I’ve struggled with having enough full-time work consistently, this time in concert with the Great Recession and a drying up of consultant work. Luckily I do teach and do have some consulting work. There have been other times over the years, though, where having any work at all was beyond my grasp.

The first time I went through this as an adult was the long, hazy-hot-and-humid summer of ’88. Long because the University of Pittsburgh’s school year ended the last week of April. I was home from April 30 to August 29, 120 days in all, marking the longest time I ever had off from school. I came back to New York, Mount Vernon and 616, and spent the first two weeks on domestic work. I waited two weeks because there was too much cleaning to do, too many clothes to wash, too many old responsibilities to pick up again.

It was already too late by the time I began to look. Summer jobs were sparse and I was now in competition with college students in the area. I could’ve had a two or three-week head start on things if I’d started looking right away. My mother didn’t let me here the end of it. “I told you to look, but you didn’t listen,” she said to me over and over again. “You could’ve had a good job, but you sat on your ass and did nothing” was another thing my mother said to me, as if I didn’t need a break before looking for work.

By the beginning of June, I was also in competition with high school students for jobs. The summer of ’88 just happened to be one of the worst summers on record for finding a job, at least if you were between sixteen and twenty-four. In some areas like New York, the summer unemployment rate for young adults went over seventy percent, and it was worse for Black males. So I wasn’t alone, at least according to Tom Brokaw and NBC Nightly News.

I certainly didn’t feel any better, though. I went to the New York State Employment Office on Gramatan, and they offered me jobs mowing grass and fixing air conditioners. The first one required a car and barely paid four an hour. The other paid $4.50 an hour but I needed to have experience fixing air conditioners. Oh well! I looked through the papers, and called for a law office job doing research. The job required a history background and offered a $10 an hour salary, but it required me to have my B.A. in hand. “Just because I don’t have degree yet doesn’t mean I can’t do the work,” I practically begged. The woman on the other end of the phone responded, “Trust me, I’m doing you a favor. You’ll thank me later.”

I was desperate for work by the second half of June, so desperate that I literally walked Manhattan for a job one day. I looked at a job ad in the Daily News, one that required applicants to go to an address on Broadway in Manhattan. The job allegedly paid $400 a week. I had just enough money left from my CIS job at Pitt to catch the Subway there and back. I walked from 616 to 241st, and took the 2 like I used to. Stupid me got off the train at 42nd Street and Times Square, having forgotten that New York’s numbered addresses didn’t take jumps from block to block. If a building’s address on one block was 1000 Broadway, the building’s address on the next block would likely be 996 Broadway. My address was around the 200 mark of Broadway. I proceeded to walk in my only good suit from Times Square to Broadway and from there in Midtown all the way to Chinatown, a walk of nearly three miles. It was pouring rain on that hot and humid day, somewhere in the upper eighties.

After almost an hour of walking, I found the place. It was a sweatshop, with lots of Chinese immigrant women sewing cloth for dear life. Apparently the job involved “supervising” these poor women. I had to turn around and walk until I found the nearest Subway stop, wind my way back to 241st, and then walk home from there. Five hours, five lost pounds and two ruined shoes later, I was beyond worn and forlorn. I gave up hope that day of finding any summer work.

My last real attempt at finding work that summer was to take the U.S. Postal Service’s postal carrier exam out at their sorting facilities in North White Plains. It was an embarrassing experience, taking a civil service exam with folks who obviously weren’t in school. I didn’t even know that there were study guides for these exams, for knowing the difference between McClellan and Mclellan, zip codes 10552 and 15250, and AK and AL as states. I spent two hours sweating in a warehouse-like room, breezing through questions and hoping that I would get a call. That was the twenty-fifth of July, the last Monday of the month.

About ten days later, a letter came from the Postal Service telling me that I passed the exam with an 86. Preference would be given to veterans and other applicants with special circumstances, then the highest scores after that would get a call, depending on job vacancies. I knew that it would be a long time before I heard from them again. I did, just before Christmas ’92, when I was in my second year of grad school.

While going back to school ended my unemployment cycle that time around, I don’t have that as an option now as a partially gainfully employed professor and consultant. But, between my skills, faith, hope and the fact that I still have quite a bit of work already, I have as much to look forward to now as I did twenty-two summers ago.