Go Greyhound (only when you can’t afford anything else)

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Chance Encounter, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Dating, Friendships, Greyhound, Growing Up, Mother-Son Relationship, Pitt, Poverty, Psychological Scars, Self-Awareness, Winter Weather

Screen shot of December 1988 calendar, December 17, 2016. (http://timeanddate.com).

It amazes me sometimes when I look at a date on a calendar and not only know I was doing at that time years and decades ago. It is uncanny sometimes how similar the weather is on a specific date versus the same date and time from another year of my nearly forty-seven.

So it is with today, a cold and freezing wet day, not only here in the DMV, but also in Pittsburgh. It’s not as cold as it was on Saturday, December 17, 1988, when lake-effect snow was pouring down on Eastern Ohio, Western New York, and Western Pennsylvania. But dreary is dreary anyway. Despite the weather, I was grateful after making it through a semester that began in homelessness, continued in foodless-ness, and ended with new friendships and with enough money to hang out for the first time in well over a year. I had aced my courses in spite of it all, faced down my Mom in changing my academic and career course to history, and felt like Pitt, if not Pittsburgh, had become my home for the first time. Thirteen months after the second of two rebuffs from my high school classmate Phyllis, I was finally, finally, self-aware of my emotional and psychological scars enough to want to begin the long, painful, and difficult work of healing.

So why couldn’t I sleep the night before my first Greyhound trip from Pittsburgh to New York?

Greyhound Bus and blizzard, Vancouver, BC, Canada, circa 2015. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

There was something different about this, though. I couldn’t go to sleep, even though I was absolutely exhausted. I wasn’t supposed to catch a bus until eight o’clock that morning, but I gave up getting sleep at five-thirty. I went out in a snowstorm to catch a PAT-Transit bus downtown, and walked over from Grant to the Greyhound Bus terminal. I didn’t think we were going anywhere the way the snow was coming down, but we left on time for New York City. Good thing for us that the bus was a non-stopper between Pittsburgh and Philly.

On the bus and across from me was a young Black woman with a Brooklyn accent. She was as pretty as anyone I’d seen in the previous seven years. But I was so tired that I kept to myself. Despite our driver’s attempts to kill us all by going at near ninety an hour on the part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike that crossed the Allegheny Mountains, I slept for a couple of hours, playing Phil Collins, Peter Cetera, Brenda Russell and Kenny G throughout.

I suppose I was antsy about going back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to 616, to the life of constantly looking over my shoulder and looking at myself through the eyes of my former classmates and neighbors. After finally rediscovering the real me, and finally beginning the process of putting away the coping strategy, Boy-@-The-Window-me, I was going back into the third armpit of hell for the next nineteen days. Or, maybe it was my terrible taste in music (except for Phil Collins, of course)!

I also had unfinished business. Now that I realized I could trust myself again, at least in part, what did everything mean? Could I sustain friendships? Would I know how to date? Can I reconcile what kind of Christian I could be in a secular, scholarly world? What would being a history major mean for me by the time I graduated in 1991? Why does this woman across from my seat keep staring at me?

Once I woke up, I looked over at her and struck up a conversation. We talked from central Pennsylvania to Philly and from there to New York. She was a second-year medical student at Wayne State University in Detroit, and was in between boyfriends. We talked about our families and our growing up in and around the big city. She was the first person to tell me, “Anything above 125th Street is upstate, don’t’cha know?,” referencing Mount Vernon. It was a long and wonderful conversation, and if I hadn’t been embarrassed by 616, I would’ve asked her out. She didn’t give me the chance to think about it. She gave me her number and said, ‘You don’t have to call, but I really would like it if you did.’

Rhiannon Griffith-Bowman smokes an e-cigarette, San Rafael, CA, April 16, 2015. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; http://washingtonpost.com).

I should’ve given her a call, but I didn’t. I was scared, not of her, but of being my better self while at 616. I had no idea how to do the dating thing when I had to be around my idiot stepfather and his size-54, 450-pound, greasy, abusive personage. Or my Mom, who spent every waking moment either singing God’s praises (literally) or hatching plots with my input to find another way to drive my stepfather out of 616 once and for all. Or my siblings, four of which were now between the ages of four and nine, and my older brother Darren, who might as well been a six-foot-five thirteen-year-old. My Mom and Maurice smoked up a storm. There were evenings where they would have farting contests, with legs lifted up in the air, as if they were part of a nasty, stupid comedy routine! There was no way I could handle the psychological code switching I’d have to do just to hang out, not at almost nineteen years old, and with a woman four years older than me.

Looking back, I realized I had deeply over-thought the situation, that I could’ve just had tunnel vision and done what I wanted to do, and not involve myself with any 616 drama that Xmas/New Year’s break. But I couldn’t do that, not yet. My sexist, damsel-in-distress syndrome was still more powerful than any of my other sexist, misogynistic, or even feminist tendencies. Even with all that, the first of my Greyhound bus trips was easily the most important one I went on.

The Quest For Work, Past and Present

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University College of Education, Economic Inequality, Hard Work, Individualism, Joblessness, Marginalization, Mount Vernon Hospital, Pittsburgh, Psychological Impact, Psychological Scars, Social Safety Net, Underemployment, unemployment, Unions, Welfare

Down and out on New York pier, 1935, June 2009. (Lewis W. Hine via FDR Presidential Library). In public domain.

Election ’12 should be about how to generate more jobs and how to grow the economy. Sadly, it hasn’t been about these issues, and given the toxic political and cultural climate, it will not be about jobs or the economy when this cycle ends on November 6.

I’ve seen this horror movie of economic downturns and mini-depressions in American society and in my own life now three times in the past thirty-five years. Each time, I’ve been better prepared, more informed, more able to ride out the storm. And each time, I’ve seen the ugly side of what we call the United States of America, a place that has and will continue to punish the unemployed and underemployed for problems beyond their control. Especially if they were and are women, young, over forty, of color, and among the poor.

In the period between ’79 and ’83, when the effective inflation rate for that four-year period was more than thirty-five percent, when we experienced a double-dip recession, when interest rates reached 22.5 percent. My mother’s meager income of $12,000 in ’79 didn’t keep up, even as it reached $15,000 in ’82. We were late with our rent at 616 by an average of three weeks each month and didn’t have food in the apartment the last ten days of any month, going back to October ’81. Things were so bad that my mother, a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s dietary department, brought food home from the hospital kitchen for us to eat for dinner several times each month.

“Negro Women,” Earle, Arkansas, July 1936, August 21, 2012. (Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress/http://libinfo.uark.edu). In public domain.

The good news was, Mount Vernon Hospital’s employees went on strike for higher wages and increased job security in mid-July ’82. The bad news was, although Mom was a sixteen-year veteran, nearly fifteen of those as a dietary department supervisor, Mom never joined the union. She didn’t want to pay “them bloodsuckers” dues, and said that she “couldn’t afford them” anyway.

I can only imagine how much spit and venom Mom faced on her way to work every day for three weeks. Considering our money situation, which I knew because I checked the mail and looked at our bills every day, picketing and getting union benefits might have been better than working. It wasn’t as if there was food in the house to eat anyway. As much as I enjoyed Mount Vernon Hospital’s Boston Cream Pie, I thought that picketing for a better wage was the way to go.

Soon after I started eighth grade, the other shoe dropped. Mom, so insistent on not joining Mount Vernon Hospital’s union, was the odd woman out. The hospital’s concession of five percent increases per year over three years left them looking to cut costs. The only personnel left vulnerable were non-union service workers and their supervisors. My Mom had been cut to half-time by her boss Mrs. Hunce. Mom was screwed, but it was a screwing partly of her own making. It was the beginning of a two-decade-long period of welfare, underemployment, unemployment welfare-to-work, with an associate’s degree along the way. So much for hard work leading to prosperity!

I’ve gone through my own periods of unemployment and underemployment over the years. The most severe one for me was between June and September ’97, right after I finished my PhD. It was the first time in four years I hadn’t had work or a fellowship to rely on, and it was brutal. I did interviews with Teachers College and Slippery Rock University for tenure-track positions in education foundations, only to finish second for one job, and to see the folks at Slippery Rock cancel the other search. In the latter case, I think that they felt uncomfortable hiring someone of my age — twenty-seven — and my, um, ilk (read race here).

What made it worse was the fact that I couldn’t simply apply for any old job. I did actually try, too. McDonald’s, UPS, FedEx, Barnes & Noble, among others. I couldn’t even get Food Stamps in July, because my income threshold for March, April and May ’97 — $1,200 per month — was too high. And because I technically was a student for tax purposes my last two semesters at Carnegie Mellon — even though I was adjunct professor teaching history courses — I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits either.

Shuttered Homestead steel mill, 1989, August 21, 2012. (Jet Lowe/Historical American Engineering Record). In public domain.

I had to omit the fact that I had a PhD to get a part-time job at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which began after Labor Day ’97. I ended up teaching as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University’s College of Education the following year. Still, my income level did not return to where it was my last year of graduate school until June ’99, when I’d accepted a position with Presidential Classroom in the DC area.

I am nowhere near those times of being considered or treated as a statistic, marginalized in media and in politics as being lazy, shiftless, not smart or hard-working enough. But as a person who teaches near full-time and has more than occasional consulting work, I know how precarious and temporary work can be.

Ironic, then, that the people making decisions that have put people like me and my Mom in terrible financial straits have never missed a meal or not paid a bill because they were choosing between heat and not making phone calls. That most Americans regardless of party affiliation shun the poor, unemployed and underemployed is a shame and a pitiful example of how we really don’t pull together during tough times.

These attitudes are why rugged individualism and hard work aren’t enough to get and hold a job. An education, a real social safety net, even regulation of the job market, would help level the playing field for millions. Or, maybe some of us should learn Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic or Portuguese and move to where the jobs really are.

To My Ex-Stepfather

29 Tuesday Jul 2008

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Child Abuse, Fatherhood, Forgiveness, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Open Letter, Psychological Scars, Self-Discovery

It’s been a good decade and a half since the last time we had contact. Not that I’ve ever really wanted to. I’ve spent the past twenty-six years of my life undoing most of the damage that you brought to my family, my brother Darren, my younger siblings and me. It’s been a long hard road, and though I know that I’m near the end of my journey in reclaiming myself, past, present and future, I also know I can’t finalize this without speaking my piece and finding it with you in the process.

You see, even though it’s been a good twenty-two and a half years since the last time you put your hands and fists on me in anger, I still bear some of the scars from those episodes of abuse. Some of my dental work, to be sure, is a result of one too many punches to my jaw and a few too many chipped pieces off of my two front upper teeth. A small but thick and dark scar remains on my right hip from the time you literally whipped me when I was twelve. And the constant stress of living in the same apartment with you is likely the single biggest reason for my irritable bowel syndrome.

My psychological scars are even deeper than my physical ones. Even with me forgiving you so long ago for all the horrors that you caused, your face still symbolizes evil in my nightmares. For the first ten years after my mother’s so-called marriage to you ended, I could count on you showing up in my dreams about once every six weeks. It was a brief reminder that no matter how well things might have been going, that I shouldn’t be but so happy, so content, so at peace with myself and my world. Even as a man who’s been married for eight and a half years and has a truly wonderful five-year-old son, I still occasionally have to fight the evil that you represent off in my scariest of dreams.

Yes, I forgave you ages ago, soon after you left 616 for the last time, the summer of ’89. I didn’t forgive you just because the Bible says to do so. I certainly didn’t forgive you because of the rare occasions you might have done something good in our lives. I forgave you because I knew that I couldn’t live my life, that I couldn’t begin trusting others again until I let go of my hatred toward you.

But because of the mind that I’ve been blessed with, I can’t truly forget all that you did. I can’t forget how you allowed me to be mugged by your good-for-nothin’ friends just so that you could “make a man outta me.” I can’t forget how you knocked my mother unconscious in front of me. I can’t forget how I discovered that you were a overeating, womanizing, abusive asshole who used being a Hebrew-Israelite–the most bizarre cult that anyone could possibly join–as an excuse for your misogyny and violence. Despite forgiving you, I still have a part of me that has yet to heal from you snatching my childhood away.

Yet you know what I’ve come to realize? That forgiveness is a choice that I have to make everyday if it’s to mean anything in my life, especially when it comes to you. It’s like being married or being committed to raising your children in the best possible way. It’s a choice that allows me to grow as a person, as a husband and as a father. It’s a choice I simply cannot afford to ignore.

And in the past two decades, as I’ve continued to make the hard choice to stand in forgiveness, I find myself feeling sorry for you. Not so much because of what made you who you were back then. More because you have numerous opportunities to make the right choices in life for yourself, your children, and for my mother, and chose instead to make the wrong ones. There are many things in life that aren’t black and white, but most of your choices were, and yet you still chose evil over good. The single worst choice you made in life was to delude yourself and attempt to delude us by believing that becoming part of a wacky Afrocentric Judaism would make you a better person, a benevolent father, a beneficial husband.

By not getting to the root of your issues, your emptiness, your contempt for yourself, your fear of the world outside of your definition of the so-called streets (as if Mount Vernon was South Central LA), you came to us in the spring of ’81 to start a wave of terror that could only end with me leaving for Pittsburgh and my mother finally standing up to you six and eight years later.

For me, the cruelest irony about those years was that my alcoholic father and my late eccentric AP History teacher Harold Meltzer served as better role models for manhood and human hood than you did as a sober kufi-wearing and Torah-quoting descendant of Abraham. Yet you spent as much time as you could telling us how to be men, even though you didn’t know how to be one yourself. From what my younger siblings have told me over the years, you’re still searching for an identity as if you can go to Madison Avenue and West 47th and buy it as the latest and coolest fashion. Luckily, I did learn quite a bit about what not to do with kids from your example. Maybe that’s a part of the reason why Noah’s thriving as much as he is.

So my plan from here on out is this. Just because I find myself liking something that you may like or might have liked in the past does not mean I should automatically hate it myself. I’ve picked up a new appreciation for martial arts in no small part because of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Just because you used your fourth-degree black belt in Isshin-ryu karate to knock out my mother and put a knot on my forehead doesn’t mean I should shun the idea of spiritual balance and finding peace within myself.

Just as I need to rededicate myself to forgiveness in order to save myself from time to time, I also need to continued to resolve to both be at peace and enjoy life. All without the gnawing sense that something or someone will betray me and take those things away from me. So, for this piece of hard-earned wisdom, if nothing else, I thank you.

About My Brother

06 Thursday Dec 2007

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Brotherhood, Brothers, Clear View School, Darren, Darren Gill, Education, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Mental Retardation, Psychological Abuse, Psychological Scars, Self-Hatred, Self-Loathing, The Clear View School

: A better picture of Darren and me, taken in April 1975, Sears, Mount Vernon, NY, July 6, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

: Darren Gill (cropped), Thanksgiving Dinner, Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

This Sunday, December 9, my older brother Darren Lynard Gill turns 40 years old. It should be a day of pride, of tears of joy and long-suffering, of wondering about entering the prime decade of his life and my soon joining him there. With our relationship and my older brother’s life as such, there is only the hope that both get better before it’s too late for us.

You see, Darren had both the blessing and the curse of being the first-born son of our mother and our father Jimme Collins (they weren’t married at the time Darren was born) when he was born in ’67. It was a period in which both of our parents were still people full of hopes and dreams. It when my father was nothing more than an occasional social binge drinker and my mother was on the verge of becoming a supervisor of Mount Vernon Hospital’s Dietary Department. Darren became the embodies of their hopes and dreams.

And it should’ve been obvious that at least one of their hopes in Darren came true during his toddler years. All during her first pregnancy, according to my mother, my Uncle Sam, and a number of my mother’s friends at the time, all my mother prayed about was for Darren to be healthy and brilliant. She got what she wished for when Darren turned three. Sometime in 1971, my brother had taught himself how to read. The story goes that Darren was sitting at the dinner table in our second-floor flat at 48 Adams Street while my mother and father and me were milling about. Suddenly, they noticed that Darren had picked up a box of Diamond Crystal Salt and began reading the words on the box. Not just the letter, the actual words “salt” and “diamond” and “crystal”! If he hadn’t been moving his finger from left to right as he was doing this, I don’t think my mother and father would’ve believed what they’d witnessed at all.

This story doesn’t exactly take Darren to the academic decathlon. There was something else Darren inherited from my mother and father besides a high capacity for analytical thinking. He was also extremely shy and didn’t like being around lots of people. For both of them, this shyness needed to be taken care of, as if being shy is some sort of curse. My mother’s solution was placing Darren in Headstart in ’73 and ’74 (delaying his start in public school a full year) so that the shyness issue wouldn’t be one when he started school.

Jimme took this idea one step further and farther. He decided one day that Darren was too much like himself. After seeing an ad for a special school in Upper Westchester County called Clearview, he took us up to Dobbs Ferry (where the school was located at the time) so that Darren could be examined by a group of professionals. After a battery of psychological exams and an IQ test, they determined that my brother was mentally retarded. Darren would begin school in September ’74 at the Clearview School as a day student. Neither of our lives would ever be the same.

But before Darren became an institutionalized version of his shy and wonderfully intelligent self, he gave me the same gift he gave himself. I started kindergarten at Nathan Hale the same fall he started going to Clearview. I already knew and recognized my ABC’s, but couldn’t always make out or sound out words, and didn’t recognize them in sentence form. One afternoon between Christmas and New Years at the end of ’74, we sat down and went through sentence after sentence until I could recognize and read a sentence. He literally changed my life, and I didn’t even know it.

For years after that we remained close. We’d fight like all brothers fight. The main issue besides Clearview was my mother, who treated Darren as if he really was retarded while treating me more favorably because I wasn’t shy like Darren. Between my mother and father’s divorce in ’76-’77, my mother’s second marriage to Maurice, and the kids, poverty, abuse and bizarre religion that would come into our lives on the North Side of Mount Vernon, distance began to grow between us.

The key changes included a temper-tantrum that Darren threw in the middle of a Pelham laundromat in the summer of ’80, when my mother suggested that it was time to move my twelve-year-old brother into a “normal school.” It also included all of the abuse I took from my stepfather two summers later while Darren was off at Clearview’s summer day camp having the time of his life. By the time puberty struck, Darren was jealous of me and I was finding it hard to relate to him and survive 616 East Lincoln at the same time.

Darren would remain a student at Clearview until the year after I finished high school. For fourteen years, the state of New York covered his $33,000-a-year (in 1982 dollars) tuition, as he just slid under the public school accommodations radar for the mildly mentally retarded. I always knew that Darren wasn’t retarded, even though he now mimicked the severely retarded students he’d spent day after day with over the years. Through a dispensation granted by the Mount Vernon Board of Education, Darren graduated with the rest of the Mount Vernon High School Class of ’88, even though he had not spent a day in a public school.

From that point on, Darren was jealous of everything I did. I score a 5 on the AP American History exam, and Darren would take the CollegeBoard score sheet and dump it in the garbage. I get into the University of Pittsburgh, and Darren would enroll in college at home for a semester just to prove that he was just as good as me. If I said I was dating someone, Darren would stop talking to me altogether. Even during our Thanksgiving visit to Mount Vernon last year, Darren became angry with me because I offered and gave him a ride home in my family car, even though he wanted to walk in the pouring, freezing rain. I’ve never been able to have a normal conversation with him for fear of pissing him off or making him feel bad or him letting me know how much better my life has been compared to his.

The truth is, I do feel guilty sometimes about where Darren is in his life. For nearly twenty years, Darren has lived in a one-room flat, where he shares a bathroom and a kitchen in South Side Mount Vernon. His jobs have never paid more than $10 an hour. He’s often too afraid to say “Hi” to a woman he’s attracted to. He’s never learned how to drive and hasn’t taken a college-level course since the end of ’88. I’ve tried many, many times to reach out to him, to give him comfort and out of my hard earned wisdom and knowledge. I went through with my family intervention in ’02 in part because I wanted Darren to see what went wrong for our mother and Jimme as far as his education was concerned. Darren rejects almost all that I have to say and give him out of hand, with a smile of meanness that is praying hard for my failure in this life.

My wife says sometimes that she’s surprised that Darren hasn’t tried to kill himself yet. I’m not, if only because someone with Darren’s level of misery wants to see other people suffer with him, in this life, not in the next. That’s why he regularly visits our mother on Sundays for dinner, to remind her of one of the biggest mistakes she’s ever made. It’s why he regularly calls our father for money, to remind him of the idiotic decisions he has made on Darren’s behalf. It’s why Darren wears a permanent smirk on his face, to conceal his contempt for us all.

But I do want to remind him and anyone who knows either of us one thing. I wouldn’t be the intellectual I am today if Darren hadn’t taken the time to teach me how to read. He stepped in the breach to save me from years of catch-up in public school at a time when no one else in my life was willing or able to. Darren is a better person than me, because without him I wouldn’t be able to do what I do today. Happy Birthday Darren! I love you very much.