For What It’s Worth, My Life Matters, Our Lives Matter

27 Thursday Nov 2014

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

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"For What It's Worth" (1970), Bob McCullough, Buffalo Springfield, Darren Wilson, Double-Consciousness, Faith, Ferguson, Michael Brown, Police Brutality, Police Harassment, Racism, Rudy Giuliani, Self-Awareness, Self-Worth, Souls of Black Folk (1903), Systemic Racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, White Vigilantism, White Violence

(For What It’s Worth) Protestors hold a die-in at 14th and I St NW, Washington, DC, November 25, 2014. (Andrea McCarren/WUSA via http://www.wusa9.com)

Between Bob McCullough, Darren Wilson, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, the NYPD, Rudy Giuliani, the Cleveland PD, and 100 million other sources, I could easily draw the conclusion that the lives of Americans of color are only worth as much as three cigarillos or a toy gun. Or, with it being 2014, that we’re just characters in a video game in which scared Whites get to kill us for sport or out of spite. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ferguson PD allows Wilson to mount Michael Brown’s skull above his mantle after he returns from his long-delayed honeymoon, the poor racist!

But my life, your life, all of our lives are worth more than what any racist asshole or system places on us. I had to learn this lesson a long time ago. It’s the lesson that is the raison d’etre for my blog Notes from a Boy @ The Window, not to mention my book Boy @ The Window. There are literally millions of messages we as Americans of color take in over the course of our lives that for so many, our lives don’t matter. Counterintuitively, it means our lives really must matter. Why would anyone or any system expend so much time and effort excluding people on the basis of race and social status in the first place?

Café Crème cigarillos, Denmark, October 21, 2011. (PeddderH via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Still, learning that I mattered began at home, in Mount Vernon, New York, from folks who treated me every day as if I mattered not at all. Between my Humanities and Mount Vernon High School experiences and the abuse I suffered at home, I didn’t need the additional dimension of police harassment or White vigilantism to remind me that those of us without standing, who refused to conform to acceptable ways of thinking and speaking, were discardable. Maybe that’s why I turned to nondenominational Christianity in the first place. To realize that despite it all, that I mattered to God, to a universe much bigger and much more mysterious and powerful than the fists of my stepfather or the denigration and ostracism I received at school. It all gave me reasons to live.

So when my first encounters with police harassment and White vigilantism did occur (beginning right after my seventeen birthday), I had faith in God, and with that, faith in myself as a foundation from which to draw strength. Whether at Tower Records or in Pittsburgh or in Los Angeles, and regardless of how scared I might have felt during those moments, I remained outwardly calm. I remained myself.

Yes, I was lucky. Maybe my weirdness, my proper speech, my faith, maybe even God and the universe, kept me from getting beat up or shot on sight by police, security guards or by groups of drunken White guys in pickup trucks. But really, by the time Whites (and some Black cops, to be sure) started profiling me in earnest, I had made the decision that I had worth, that my existence, creativity, analytical ability, critical reasoning, all mattered.

It helped that I had victories in my life, big and small and somewhere in between, to draw on, too. Not just my advanced education or my first publications. By the time I’d hit thirty, I’d learned how to love again, to feel again, to write again, to have fun again, to even feel pain and recover again. All of that made my life much sweeter, filled my world with color and sound and texture, with words and deeds that mattered to me and everyone who’d become important to me.

W.E.B. Du Bois in duality (double-consciousness), original picture circa 1903, November 26, 2014. (http://www.storify.com/ozunamartin).

While there are moments that I can go there, because of the likes of Wilson, McCullough and Giuliani, the fact is, I refuse to allow dumb-assed racists to determine my life’s worth. That those folk who devalue the lives of other folk because of their -isms (racism, misogyny, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism) and ish are in fact making their own lives worth less and worthless.

While W.E.B. Du Bois was right about this “peculiar sensation…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” I don’t think I live my life in a constant state of double-consciousness. If I did, I would’ve jumped off that bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway long before adulthood. No, up or down, I know my life has meaning, my existence is worth more than a 9mm bullet, that every sentient life matters. And like Michelle Alexander’s talk with her son this week, I’ve made sure that my son knows that his life matters, and should matter, to him, his mother, and to me.

Big Feet and Football Tryouts

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Coming-of-Age, Decision-Making, Foot Sizes, Football, Football Tryouts, Humanities, Humanities Program, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, Puberty, Puma, Self-Awareness

Aerial view of refurbished fields (for track and field, football, softball and tennis) across from MVHS (and the Cross County Parkway), Mount Vernon, NY, circa 2012. (Google Maps)

Three decades ago this week, I tried out for Mount Vernon High School’s junior varsity football team and made the team. Only to immediately quit. Mostly because I realized that there was too much going on at 616 for me to be a Humanities student, a blocking wide receiver (the coaches had an unimaginative view of offense) and a jack-of-all-adult-responsibilities at home.

What made the decision easier was something my Mom did that made my tryouts harder. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I ended up making the team, but they wanted me to sit on the bench for a year while I bulked up to at least 175 pounds. The most I’ve ever weighed was 238 pounds at six-foot-three, and I weigh 228 now. It took me until ’10 before I wore my first pair of size-fifteen sneakers that actually fit (I wear size sixteens now). The idea of me as an offensive lineman simply because my sneakers were two sizes too big was and remains ridiculous. Thanks Mom, and thanks, coaches!

The one lesson I took with me from the process of trying out was that I couldn’t rely on my Mom to help me do the things I wanted to do with my life. Nor could I rely on her encouragement (or lack thereof) in that process. It wasn’t an assessment based on anger or disappointment. I’d only begun to figure out that my life was my life, and the decisions I needed to make needed to be my own.

How Nixon’s Resignation Made Me A Self-Aware 4-Year-Old

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

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

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48 Adams Street, Another World, Continual Memories, Days of Our Lives, Headstart, Home Accident, Hot Oven, Hot Stove, Impeachment, Memories, Memory Cap, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, My Mom, Nixon, President Nixon, President Richard M. Nixon, Resignation, Richard Nixon, Seared Skin, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery, Total Recall (1990), Watergate

President Richard Nixon delivering his resignation speech (cropped screen shot) ahead of impeachment over Watergate, abuse of power, August 8, 1974. (http://washingtonpost.com). In public domain.

I have a deeply personal perspective from which I saw President Richard Nixon’s resignation forty years ago. It’s a perspective that has ordered my steps nearly every day for the past four decades. If it weren’t for a kitchen accident and his televised resignation speech, I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today, or the person I’ve been over the past 14,610 days. Nixon and my kitchen accident combined to “pop my memory cap,” to quote a line from the original Total Recall (1990) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Total Recall (1990) scene where fake memories meet real ones (a.k.a., “memory cap scene”), August 5, 2014. (http://www.rellimzone.com/).

That Thursday evening, August 8, ’74, was the very first time I became continually self-aware, forming memories like a video camera records scenes, with thoughts of myself and the world around me. I didn’t understand everything I saw, of course. But I did know that I saw what I saw, and for more than just a few moments.

Seeing Nixon’s big head on my Mom’s 19-inch color Zenith wasn’t my first memory, though. I remember crawling by my Mom’s TV set in ’72 at our second-floor flat in which we shared a kitchen with another family in Mount Vernon, NY. I remember because it was the first time I’d seen numbers, the numbers being 1972 with a copyright symbol in front of it. (I told a graduate student friend of mine about this first memory once – she told me it would be impossible for me as a two-year-old to remember specific numbers. What did she know?) I also remember the closing theme song from the show that was on immediately before Another World, which I figured out in later years was NBC’s other soap opera Days of Our Lives.

“Tide Gives You A Fresh, Clean Wash” commercial (cropped screen shot), circa 1970 (guess our babysitter took this literally), October 14, 2013. (http://article.wn.com).

Two other memories prior to August 8, ’74 stand out. One was me escaping from the front yard at 48 Adams Street and walking down the block to the local asphalt playground, with basketball hoops and jungle gym included. I remember playing with much older boys, having fun, and my Mom whupping me from the playground all the way down the block back to the house. The other was when our babysitter Ida bathed me and my older brother Darren in a tub full of scolding hot water with Tide Detergent. I was so angry, I called her a “Bitch!” Angry likely because I was itching all over, the b-word likely because my Mom and my father Jimme used the word like it was a period to end a sentence. Miss Ida backhanded me like I was going cross-court as a tennis ball at the US Open. All of this happened when I was three.

The flood gates opened the following summer of ’74, though. It started because of a traumatic injury. My Mom was cooking in the shared kitchen at 48 Adams, making some kind of chicken dish. She had the oven door open, having just taken the chicken out of it and having placed it on the stove. I asked her if I could have a bite. Of course my Mom said, “No, Donald, it’s too hot!” I didn’t listen. I tried to climb up to the top of the stove by using the open oven door as a step stool, and lo and behold, I scorched my right leg when I put it on the inside of the door. I remember my Mom screaming, “Oh my God!” as I fell to the floor, screaming along with her.

My second-degree leg burn, 40 years later – darker area circled is faded mark that was once on the right side of my right calf, August 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

The skin around the burn area was gone (if it had happened today, it would’ve been a pretty good second-degree burn, and I probably would’ve ended up at the hospital), leaving a white — not pink, white — circular burn mark. My Mom applied ointment and a bandage, made me take two Bayer aspirin for the pain, and told me to calm down and be quiet. She plopped me down on the couch in the living room, which was slightly to the right of the TV.

I was still crying in pain from the shock of seeing, smelling and feeling my skin being seared in the kitchen. As my Mom sat me down, a man with a gigantic head appeared on the television screen, a man I vaguely knew as the President of the United States. I really didn’t understand much of what President Nixon said, but I do recall my Mom shaking her head, and Cronkite calling it a “sad time” for the country. Given how sad I already felt, I think I might have felt sorry for the man with the big head on the TV set.

From that moment on, I’ve had continual memories. I remember my Mom taking me to Darren’s Headstart program somewhere around South 2nd or South 3rd Avenue in Mount Vernon the next day to pick him up, seeing the man with the big head wave with his fingers sticking in the air before going on a helicopter ride, and then being dragged to Met Grocery Store on South Fulton Avenue for groceries, all with a painfully sore leg. Luckily, my Mom caught us a cab home.

And the week after that, we moved to 425 South Sixth, next to Nathan Hale Elementary, where I would go to kindergarten the following month. And the week after that, my father Jimme introduced Darren to The Clear View School, after an argument with my Mom about him “drinkin’ up all his money again.” Ah, the parallels between big historical events and key moments in my life haven’t stopped since!

Killing Joe Trotter

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

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

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Burnout, Child Abuse, CMU, Dissertation, Dissertation Committee, Dreams, Emotional Baggage, Father Figures, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, Graduate School, Guerilla Warfare, Hatred, Imagination, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Mental Health, Murder, Paternalism, PhD, Psychological Baggage, PTSD, Self-Awareness, Self-Defense, Un-father Figures

Yeah, I did it. I killed the man who kinged himself mentor over me. I took some piano wire, tightened it around my hands while listening to him yammer on an on about “running interference” to protect “my interests.

As the pointy-headed, smoothly bald and mahogany man gazed at my thesis, myopically gazing into nowhere, I pounced. I quickly jumped out of my seat and took Trotter from behind. He clutched at the wire with his elderly left hand as I pulled and tugged, hoping to prolong the bloody agony for as long as I could. Trotter choked for air, then choked for real, as spit, bile, blood and tongue all became his substitute for oxygen. Then, with one bicep curl and pull, I garroted his throat, and watched as his already dead eyes turned lifeless. All as his burgundy blood poured down his white shirt and gray suit. It collected into a small pond, where his pants crotch and his mahogany office chair met. Trotter’s was a chair that was now fully endowed all right. Thanks to my righteous stand.

=======================

Tired, mentally drained, battery, March 2014. (http://blog.batterysharks.com/).

First, a disclaimer. I am in no way advocating killing Joe Trotter, or any other professor, whether they’re a great advisor or a terrible one (except perhaps in the case of literal self-defense). This was how I imagined what I could do to Trotter in the spring and summer of ’96, as our battles over my dissertation and my future turned from typical to ugly. By mid-July ’96, after his handwritten all-caps comments telling me to disregard my evidence on Black migration to DC during the Great Migration period (1915-30) — or really, the lack of evidence — I was mentally drained. I went back to our first big arguments over my future, the “you’re not ready” meetings from November ’95 and April ’96, and thought about what I could’ve done if I’d stayed in his office five minutes longer. That’s when I imagined killing my advisor for the first time.

By the time Trotter and my dissertation committee had approved my magnum opus, the week before Thanksgiving in ’96, I’d played that scenario in my head at least a dozen times. That’s when I knew I was burned out from the whole process. I may have become Dr. Collins, but I might as well have been my younger and abused self, the one who had to wade through five years of suffering at 616 and in Mount Vernon just to get to college.

Four months ago, I actually dreamed about killing Joe Trotter, exactly as described above, in his office, on a warm spring day like I imagined eighteen years ago. Keep in mind, I don’t think about Trotter much these days, other than when I write a blog post or am in a discussion of worst dissertation advisors ever. So when I woke up from this old-imagination-turned-dream, I had a Boy @ The Window moment and revelation. Did my struggles with Trotter open up old wounds, unearth my deliberately buried past? Did I see my fight with Trotter over my dissertation in the same light as my guerrilla warfare with my abusive and manipulative ex-stepfather?

I obviously brought baggage into my doctoral process that I’d hidden from everyone, including myself, and hadn’t fully resolved. The fact that Trotter was at times tyrannical, deceitful and paternalistic didn’t help matters. In some ways, then, Trotter must’ve morphed into Maurice Washington during the dissertation process, with me only half-realizing it once I was freshly minted.

Emotional and psychological baggage, January 2014. (http://www.projecteve.com/).

I actually went to Trotter’s office a few weeks after I graduated, to apologize for how our relationship devolved, and to grant him my forgiveness as well. Arrogant as my act was, I needed to make the gesture, to at least begin my healing process. I knew Trotter was beyond surprised, but he shook my hand anyway. I also knew, as I walked away from his Baker Hall office, that other than a letter of recommendation, Trotter no longer had anything to offer me. At least, anything that would help me resolve some deep, underlying issues.

It’s safe to say that of all the reasons that led to me writing Boy @ The Window, my problems with Trotter in ’95 and ’96 were near the top of the list. Still, I needed to kill the idea that Trotter was an indispensable part of my present and future, if I were to ever resolve the issues from my growing-up past.

Observation and Action, Before and Now

01 Wednesday Jan 2014

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

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Acceptance, Action, Activism, Coping Strategies, Growing Up, Inaction, Observation Mode, Resolutions, Self-Awareness, Self-Reflection

Michael Cerveris as The Observer, code name “September,” via Fringe (2008-13), January 1, 2014. (http://fringepedia.net/wiki/The_Observer).

Believe it or not, I’m a naturally shy person. I realize that this sounds like a contradiction, especially since so much of my life is out there for the world to read and see. But shyness doesn’t necessarily mean introverted and scared of people and the world. That came later, my preteen and teenage years. The crush of cliques and ostracism that forced me into becoming a loner helped shape the way I saw people.

On the one hand, I’ve always found our tremendous capacity for love and hate, compassion and coldness, creation and destruction fascinating. On the other, I have a well-developed sense of disdain for the great human capacity for willful ignorance, bigotry and shallow thinking. It means that there are times that I love being around family, friends and people in general, and there are times I could put a good portion of humanity in a sack and drop them over Niagara Falls.

For both sides of my love-disdain relationship with my fellow humans, I developed a coping strategy more than thirty years ago that I’ve come to recognize as my “observation mode.” It was especially helpful to be an observer during my Boy @ The Window years at Davis Middle School and Mount Vernon High School. I saw so many things occur that aren’t in my memoir, but informed my thinking about people and life and myself. Things like young women yanking out hair and earrings and nails over some idiot guy. Or a Class of ’87 student giving birth near the Cosmetology Department. Or teachers driving out of the parking lot at warp factor nine within fifteen seconds of that end-of-the-school-day, 2:50 pm bell.

USS Enterprise at warp screen shot, Star Trek (2009 – alt reality), January 1, 2014. (http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/).

Most of all, I observed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how smart I showed myself to be, that I would never be one of them, at home or at school. At 616, I was a brother, the usurper eldest brother who was also a bit of a father, uncle, worker, husband, and resistance leader, but not part of a functioning family. In Humanities — at Davis and MVHS — I was an underachieving smart guy who never said anything and too uncool to be around, even though I said plenty — and attempted to do plenty — while I was there.

I understood back then that my observations and my actions in response to my observations didn’t and couldn’t match up. I had very little control over my life prior to the University of Pittsburgh. I had precious little access to money, time and the physical and mental space necessary to act upon my observations. So much so that I could easily stay in observation mode in my own life for months at a time, turning one of my key coping strategies into a ball and chain, allowing opportunities to change how I saw myself and others go by in the process.

There were a few areas in which I acted beyond observation. My efforts to get into college, my constant resistance to my then idiot stepfather Maurice, taking care of my younger siblings, trying out for football and baseball, and tracking down my father Jimme for money. And though this was hardly enough for a growing young man to live on, it was enough for me to survive Mount Vernon before moving to Pittsburgh.

Artist rendering of supernova SN 2006gy, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

Artist rendering of SN 2006gy, the brightest supernova observed to date, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

But it would take my five days as a homeless student before I decided to be the actor I needed to be in my own life, and not just an observer. I found my way because the only other alternative I had was to go back to Mount Vernon and 616 and wait around for something to happen, and I’d long grown tired of waiting, even on God. It was beyond time for me to help myself, to come out of the bleachers and get on the playing field as the quarterback in my own life. That bout with homelessness was the supernova I needed and used to shoot myself forward to three degrees, a career as a historian, educator, nonprofit manager and writer, to dating and marriage and fatherhood.

I still have an observation mode, though. At conferences, particularly academic conferences, and especially ones in which I am not a presenter. At literary festivals and other gatherings in which I feel the brown-nosing bullshit quotient is just too high. But with Boy @ The Window now out in paperback after more than seven years of interviewing, writing and rewriting, with my son more than halfway toward adulthood, and with me within two years of the middle ages, I need to be done with observation for now.

On Becoming A Father — 11 Years Later

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Fatherhood, Fear, Fears, Pregnancy, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery, Self-Revelation, Thanksgiving

Wife and son, August 16, 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

Wife and son, latter at two weeks and change old, August 16, 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

This week eleven years ago is when I first learned from my wife that she was pregnant with our one and only child, our son Noah. It was a high that took a few months of post-natal sleep deprivation to come down from, not to mention a fight to keep my job and move on from it courtesy of AED in ’03 and early ’04. But learning that I was soon to become a father didn’t just bring joy and euphoria. It came with baggage and the fear that my baggage would be a handicap to me as a father and to my gestating son.

Luckily I had a bit of time to prepare for becoming a father. I figured out that my wife was pregnant a few weeks before she did. It was on Thanksgiving Day ’02, and I was whisking a cream sauce to go with some chocolate torte dessert I was making. I asked my wife to watch over the cream and to make sure that it didn’t boil over when I went to the bathroom. Sure enough, the sauce was boiling over when I came back. I said sarcastically, “Thanks for messing up the cream!,” which led to my wife going to the bathroom, crying. You have to understand, my wife rarely cries, and never cries over my brand of New York-esque sarcasm. So when she said, “I’m sorry,” I said, “It’s okay, honey,” followed by, “Why are you literally crying over boiling cream? Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

From that moment until my wife had given herself an EPT test three weeks later, I’d already started the process of psychological preparation. We’d barely begun trying to have a kid. We talked about it in July ’02, changed our diets in August and September, and I started taking herbal supplements by the end of September. Two months of actual trying in total. Really? That’s all it took?

All I knew was that fatherhood would bring back so many memories, some good, most of them bad and ugly. About my father Jimme and his alcoholism and homophobia as directed at me, my ex-stepfather’s physical and psychological abuse, about having to serve in my father-like role with my younger siblings and with Darren. By the time I’d reached grad student, some eleven years earlier, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever fall in love or get married, much less become a father. I mean, who would want to be with me, have little Donalds and Donnas running around that had about half of my features and traits? I wasn’t sure if I’d ever want that.

Fast-forward through grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, through four and half years of dating and two years of marriage. I was in a different place, not much different, but different enough to be much more sure about what I wanted. As I said to my wife, “There are four days out of the week where I’m sure about having a kid, two where I don’t want a child, and one where I simply don’t know.”

That was still good enough for my wife. And she’s the reason I could be firmly committed to fatherhood. I don’t think that I would’ve become a father otherwise. Have I made mistakes over the past ten years and five months with Noah? Of course! I once left him in a carrier on our table when he was five months over, and it flipped over end-over-end, scaring the crap out of him (literally!). I’ve yelled at him when I shouldn’t have, and I’ve cursed out at least one hundred too many bad DC area drivers with him in the back seat of our Honda Element over the years.

But despite all of the ups and downs in my life, career(s) and even marriage, one of the handful of things I’m sure about is having become a father to my son a good eight and a half months before he was born. I still check on him nearly every night to watch him sleep (and breath).

Muggers’ Delight and The Aftermath

05 Thursday Dec 2013

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

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Abuse, Bullying, Channeling Emotions, Classmates, Depression, Disillusionment, Emotional Disconnect, Family, Friendships, Human Contact, Human Interaction, Muggers, Mugging, Poverty, Self-Awareness, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide

Champagne popping, December 5, 2013. ( ).

Champagne popping, May 2011. (Brian Freedman via http://www.uncorklife.com).

I was mugged for the last time on this date thirty years ago, the first Monday in December ’83. I’ve talked about this before, the experience of being jumped by four teenagers, who in the end, made away with $13 and change, the dumb asses. It was the beginning of a long and emotional month for me, mostly because of how my classmates responded to finding out about it.

From Boy @ The Window:

The first person who came up to me to ask what happened was Craig. He saw me as I was leaving Carapella’s office, on my way to gym. We talked for several minutes about what had happened. He gave me a high-five, which completely surprised me. It was maybe the second or third time in three years that anyone cared to ask me about what was going on with me outside of school.

It wasn’t just Craig. From Phyllis and Wendy to Joe and Danny, they all seemed to care that I was all right. It was the first time in three years that I knew anyone actually cared about me even in the most basic sense. That whole twenty-four-hour period was overwhelming. Fighting off four muggers and chasing them for over a mile, Mom responding by taking me to the police and their tracking down of Corey, to my classmates’ genuine concern left me emotionally exhausted. I spent most of that evening at 616 asleep.

It was the last of four muggings and robberies in four years, at ages nine and twelve, and two at thirteen. People said that Harlem was rough, and from my trips on the Subway through and times in Harlem with Jimme, it was. It didn’t mean that Mount Vernon was soft or a place for only wannabe-thugs. Within a couple of months, Corey and his gang had all gone to juvenile detention for what they had done to me.

It would also be the last straw for me as far as my identifying myself as a Hebrew-Israelite. The fifth and sixth of December had taught me a lot about the human condition. My classmates had shown me their maturity upon learning about my mugging. Mom took more initiative on my behalf in taking me to the police than I’d seen her take in years. The police actually cared about my case and didn’t play around in tracking down my assailants. It took about three weeks, but I tracked Jimme down, and, after collecting some money for the holiday season, gave Maurice his thirteen dollars.

I guess I also learned a small lesson in redemption. The fact that I had even a teaspoonful of support was very different from the way my classmates might’ve treated me if Corey and company had gone after me two years before. I must’ve done something right in middle school and in ninth grade, enough to where I redeemed myself as a decent human being in the eyes of my classmates. Despite this, I didn’t trust it, not completely. I realized that things would get back to normal in a week or two, and I’d go back to my loner role. And while I was happy that Mom came to my aid, I knew that this was a rare event. Expecting Mom to be there to support me was really too much to ask.

Behind the emotionless mask based on Itachi Uchiha, a ninja from the Village Hidden In The Leaves (Konohagure) of the anime, Naruto, January 25, 2013. (JeiGoWay via http://sites.psu.edu).

Emotionally, it was as if someone had uncorked a bottle half-filled with warm champagne. I had gotten used to my role as nerdy loner at school and blank, unemotional eldest child in resistance to my idiot stepfather’s abuse at home. My classmates’ positive expressions toward me caused a psychological systems error, one that meant I could no longer avoid a simple truth. That it had been more than two and a half years since the last time I’d felt any connections to any person in my life. I had no friends, no family with which I shared an emotional or psychological bond. I hadn’t had a hug in at least two years. At least, until the day after my mugging.

After years of being weird and odd, of being made fun of (luckily Facebook, Twitter and cyber-bullying didn’t exist in ’83) and beaten up (with the constant threat of abuse to boot), and our plunge into welfare poverty, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make it to be fourteen, much less become a full-grown adult. I was approaching a crossroads, where my previously bottled-up emotions of the period between April ’81 and the mugging were coming directly into contact with my emotionless persona. It was an explosive mix, leaving me to question my very need to exist at all.