On Maturity and Writing In Text Message Form

11 Monday Nov 2013

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

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"I Would Die 4 U" (1984), Anger, Black Masculinity, Crush #1, Crush #2, Depression, Disillusionment, Emasculation, Maturity, Objectification, Obsession, Pedestal, Phyllis, Pitt, Prince, Rejection, Sexism, Text Messaging, Wendy, White Plains Galleria

Dulcesita, “i would die for you,” November 11, 2013. (http://www.myxer.com).

In Boy @ The Window, I have a chapter on my first year at Pitt and the baggage I carried from my last months in Mount Vernon, New York, Phyllis (a.k.a., Crush #2) included. I haven’t discussed Phyllis much in the six and a half years I’ve been running this blog on all things related to my memoir. Mostly because once I got over my crush-turned-internalized-obsession, I realized that she wasn’t really all that as a person. Still, given the number of posts I’ve done on my Mom, my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice and Wendy (a.k.a., Crush #1), Phyllis does deserve some mention, along with my stumbled-filled transition to manhood that went with the years between December ’85 and August ’88.

A key point for me in this transition was in October and early November ’87. I finally worked up the courage to write Phyllis a note about an incident earlier that summer, one in which she all but emasculated me at the White Plains Galleria. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

Crushing walnuts in plastic bag, November 11, 2013. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/).

I got the address, bought her a card for her eighteenth birthday, and sat down and wrote her. About how I liked her and wanted to know if she “ever liked me.” I needed to know if she and her sister really were talking about me at the bus stop that day, “one way or the other.” I wanted to know what she thought I needed in order to impress someone like her in the future. Then I added “Happy 18th Birthday!” I sent the card off on the second week in October, just a few days before her birthday.

On the second of November, I got her response. It was in purple ink, with heart shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Phyllis had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of sign language on paper, a real “revolution” on both their parts. I remember she started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She would’ve been better off with, “Yo nigga, ’s up wit’ ya sweatin’ me?” She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and Claudia’s topic of conversation that day, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt…

After Phyllis’ wonderful response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like normal. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Phyllis’ name – or any woman’s name for that matter — one of us said the B-word and we’d guzzle down some beer.

In today’s world of text messaging, I would’ve found Phyllis’ response so ridiculous that I probably would’ve shared it with close friends and laughed about it for weeks afterward. But as someone with the emotional and psychological maturity of a twelve-year-old in the fall of ’87, Phyllis’ response really, really, really hurt. Her letter shattered the pedestal on which I had placed her, and reaffirmed every negative thing I’d felt about myself for the previous half decade.

Depression image, Carroll College, Counseling Services, November 11, 2013. (http://www.carroll.edu).

It also left me so depressed that I finished that semester with a 2.63 GPA. That, and spending the holidays at 616, made me determined to use the anger I felt toward myself and Phyllis as fuel for the next semester. And even though that worked so well that I made Dean’s List, I still hadn’t really gotten over Phyllis’ rejection by the time the school year was over in April ’88.

It took one last look at that letter — that unbelievably trifling and simple letter — to realize that even under the best of circumstances, Phyllis and I would’ve been a match made only in a mad scientist’s laboratory. I’d never be interested in a human being who talked down to me, as if I was unworthy of anything other than some simple shorthand language. Or in any woman whose expectations of men were about as objectifying as Mike Tyson’s views of women. I realized that I had finally gotten to know the real Phyllis, and in the process, had begun to know the real me, and what I needed to change about myself in order to build a better, 2.0 version of me. With that, like so much from my freshman dorm at Lothrop Hall, Phyllis’ letter became part of my garbage pile.

Fear of Flying Solo (Not Literally)

19 Monday Nov 2012

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

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"Sign 'O' the Times (1987), Blackness, Busch Beer, Continental Airlines, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Depression, First Flight, Homesickness, Infatuation, Loneliness, Love, Lust, Manhood, Obsession, Prince, Self-Discovery, Theft, University of Pittsburgh

Continental Airlines B737-200 (similar to one I flew on in November ’87, logo included), Providence, RI, 1990, January 2, 2009. (Phillip Capper via Wikipedia). Releases to public domain via cc-Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

This week twenty-five years ago, the pressures of college, “homesickness” and Crush #2 had screwed up the inner movie and music soundtrack (think Enigma’s “I Love You, I’ll Kill You” [1993]) that had been my coping mechanism for the previous half decade. I was in the midst of a psychological breakthrough, but it felt more like a combination of depression and a nervous breakdown at the time. Such were my times as an emotionally tortured seventeen-year-old who should’ve left Mount Vernon a full year earlier (see my post “A One-Year Sooner ‘What If’” from June ’11).

The downward spiral of my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh started with a burglary the third week in October ’87. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. Of course, I didn’t really even trust myself at the time, and the loss of my textbook didn’t make it any easier. I was out of money to boot, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to replace this loss.

Excerpts of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) liner notes, November 19, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution illustration of text-like writing style for this post.

Crush #2’s response to my letter about her emasculating comments back in the summer made matters worse (see my posts “Origins of the Obsession” from June ’12 and “A Dream That Had to Die” from July ’07). Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. She started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

After Crush #2’s wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed eighteen of twenty-four classes at one stretch between November 3 and Thanksgiving, only showing up for exams or if my black-cloud mood had let up long enough to allow me to function. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans of Busch beer. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch” as if it was part of a drinking game. I spent the next day vomiting and trying to regain my balance.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I still managed a few firsts, though. That trip back home was my first ever on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn’t use music, sports or my imagination to escape (see my post “Coping In The Boy @ The Window World” from October ’12). I hadn’t realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent those last weeks of ’87 as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. I fully understood, though, that I couldn’t drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman whom felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren’t really my friends, and was homesick for 616, a place that was never really mine to call home in the first place.

Male duck swimming solo, Chicago River, Chicago, IL, June 16, 2002. (Donald Earl Collins)

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a “triflin’ ass” was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. And, for that moment in my life, I needed that anger to be a better student, to be a better me. Because as far as I was concerned, I was out in Pittsburgh, alone, facing down my past and present all at once.

Origins of the Obsession

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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

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Boy @ The Window, Chicken McNuggets, Crush #2, Fake Meat, Fake Smile, Friendship, Immaturity, Manhood, Obsession, Operation Opportunity, Relationships, Self-Discovery, Self-Revelation, Shyness, The Galleria

Obsession Night For Men, Calvin Klein, June 12, 2012. (http://www.dealsdirect.com.au).

To think that it’s been a quarter-century since I went into obsession mode over a girl. Not love, not so much a crush, but a bonafide obsession. Well, it’s a confirmation of how pathetic I’d allowed myself to become in the summer between the end of high school and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

The funny thing was, it was an obsession with Crush #2, and one that almost didn’t happen. After all, I’d given up on seeing Crush #2 again after our graduation ceremony. So the week after, I began working at the General Foods’ (now Kraft Foods) scientific testing facilities in Tarrytown, just down the road from the GM plant and the Tappan Zee Bridge over to Rockland County. I was hired as part of their Operation Opportunity program, a summer internship program for students of color.

It was my first office job, and it showed. I had to take two buses to get to and from work and walk the seven blocks from the bus stop at the corner of North Columbus and East Lincoln to 616. I took the 40 or 41 bus to downtown White Plains and transferred to either the 13 or the 1W to Tarrytown. I was consistently late to work in the first three weeks, not even knowing to call in to let folks know I was going to be late.

About a week into the job, I boarded the bus for White Plains on my way home from work and decided to vary my routine. I got off at the White Plains Galleria, a state-of-the-art mall back then. It was five stories of concrete and a glass ceiling, of shops, eateries and a movie theater.

Mechanically processed chicken, the key ingredient in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, pouring out into small tubs, October 5, 2010. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

The mall had a mom-and-pop cookie store that had the best chocolate chip-walnut cookies this side of Mrs. Fields. They also had a McDonald’s, a luxury for me for most of the decade. I stopped to buy my ultimate pre-dinner snack: a six-pack of McNuggets with that sweet-and-sour sauce, small fries, a vanilla “milk”shake and two gooey and warm chocolate chip-walnut cookies. It was heaven-on-earth food for me. When I went outside to wait for the 40 bus back home, there she was. Crush #2 was standing there, also waiting for the bus. We exchanged “Hi”s and started some small talk about college, music and movies. It turned out that Crush #2 had a summer job in White Plains just a couple blocks from the Galleria.

Even as pitiful as I was, I knew I had a window of opportunity to get beyond the idle chatter to the “Do you want to hang with me?” question. But I just didn’t and couldn’t ask. Not on that commute home, and not on any coincidental bus trips after that. In all, I probably had about a dozen opportunities to ask Crush #2 if she liked me or if she wanted to go out with me throughout July.

A standard non-conversation conversation went like

“Hey, [Crush #2].”

“Hi. How are you?,” she’d asked.

“All right,” I’d say.

“How was work?”

“Okay. How was your day?,” I’d ask in response.

“Fine,” Crush #2 would say.

Then, there would be the occasional “Did you see…?” some movie, or a “Did you buy…?” the latest album or tape. Otherwise, it was like two ex-spouses attempting small talk before switching the conversation to concerns about their kids.

These bump-ins weren’t deliberate and not even “by accident-on purpose.” When I did see her, I didn’t get the sense of euphoria that I had when I saw her in high school. My heart didn’t go pitter-patter, and my throat and mouth didn’t turn dry. At times, I felt a sense of dread when I’d come out of the Galleria with my comfort food in hand and Walkman on, only to have to talk to Crush #2 without the cover of school as a pretext.

I preferred to think of Crush #2 from afar. On meandering walks that often took me through Crush #2’s neck of the woods. Or when I listened to certain songs, particularly love duets and Whitney Houston. I never once dared to walk over to her house, and I refused to call even though her family’s number was in the phone book — I did look it up, though. I couldn’t even quench my libido’s growing thirst by thinking of her and how she looked.

In the back of my mind I began to realize that my attraction to Crush #2 didn’t have much to do with Crush #2. Yet when I did bump into her, I tried through our short conversations to see if there was any “there” there. Anybody with about two years’ more maturity than the twelve-year-old in a seventeen-year-old that was me knew that I was on the short road to rejection and embarrassment. And that rejection would lead to six months of obsession over Crush #2, and stalker-esque thoughts, if not stalker actions.

But I couldn’t get that smile of Crush #2’s out of my head. Even if it was more fake than any Chicken McNugget I’d ever eaten. In a year filled with rejection, scorn and externally imposed invisibility, the eventual rejection I suffered from Crush #2 was a bridge too far.

Mitt Romney (via http://news.yahoo.com), May 10, 2012. (Charles Krupa/AP).

A Dream That Had to Die

23 Monday Jul 2007

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

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Attraction, Blackness, Crush #2, Depression, Fear, Galleria, Manhood, Obsession, Relationships, White Plains New York

I’m approaching another Boy At The Window related milestone this week, a not-so-fun twenty years since experiencing an obsession-driven heartbreak. This involved another crush, another young woman out of my league, one which left me scarred for a little more than a year.

She was one of those mid- to late-80s cool Black girls, attractive and popular, yet one of the nicest people I’d known during my middle school and high school days. The things I remember about her most are kind of silly and sensuous. I remember her long legs, her long dark hair, her always wearing skirts in public. I remember her lips and bright white smile most of all. She was all of 5’7″, and seemed to be always there to pick up my spirits. I guess that was why I ended up wanting to date her by the middle of my junior year.

But images of the mind, no matter how powerful and complex, can only begin to capture the reality of the person who could be the object of your affection. So it was with shy and pitiful me our senior year and the summer before college. I tried but I could never figure out a way to ask her out, to tell her that I liked her, to tell her that I was terrified of my own emotions about her and about her learning about my family. After a few weeks of stifled attempts at conversation, I accidentally ended up overhearing a bitter conversation about me between my crush and her sister outside of a mall in White Plains. I wasn’t a man, I certainly wasn’t a Black man, so she kept saying to her sister.

I was devastated. I didn’t have the greatest opinion of myself to begin with. I went into my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh more protective of my heart than I’d ever been. Still, with the help of a female friend that I’d made during the summer, I decided to confront my obsession, leading to a letter that brought me more despair and heartache. She had all but destroyed my image of her as someone who could save me from the horrors of my world, someone who I could pour all of my confidence and aspirations into.

I finished that semester with a C+ average, homesick and not sure about people or my future. I completely distrusted anything any woman had to say about me that semester. Most of all, I distrusted myself. How could I allow this “triflin’ ass” — as one of my friends described her — affect my grades, my life like she had? I took all of that anger and focused it on my classes, and pulled my over GPA back up to a B in the process.

You could say that I learned my lesson. But that would be a lie. I had to go through a summer of unemployment and a week of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt before I learned one of life’s most important lessons. Trust is a decision that we all have to make, even if it does mean heartbreak, because trust — especially in yourself — allows you to see people as they are and as you would hope they could be. Trust means taking risks with your heart, means being honest with yourself about why you may be terrified to date or for someone to know about your dark past. Trust means that people, even people you may know fairly well, may betray you in some way, but trusting anyway, because it’s the only way to live a great life.

I also learned that much of what I thought I saw in my second crush reminded me a lot of my mother. Especially around definitions of manhood and being a Black male. We were supposed to be bold, even arrogant. We were expected to make the first move, in dating or otherwise. We were supposed to break away from our families but be there for them at the same time, to succeed in the world but never forget where we came from. I realized that my mother and my obsession were both wrong, that they didn’t know me, and had no right to lay their expectations on me. I figured out, for the first time in my life, that having a mind as powerful as mine brought with it the responsibility to tame it, especially when it came to figuring out men and women. I needed to trust my instincts, that a bright smile and wonderful lips didn’t equal a sense of seriousness or integrity or actual kindness. I could still dream of a kiss. I just needed to make sure that the rest of the person in that dream was worth kissing.

Still, I have to thank her, my second infatuation. I wouldn’t have known what not to look for in women or in friends without this experience. I learned as much about what attracted me to my first crush as I did about what kept me from going after my second one. The women I’ve dated and the woman I married all benefitted from my period of mindful obsession. My college education, formal and informal, became that much sweeter once I let go and allowed myself the opportunities that only trust in myself could bring.