Tag Archives: Self-Discovery

The Painful Destruction of the Pedestal

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Demolition of the Kingdome as a GIF, Seattle, Washington, March 26, 2000. (USA Today).

This week thirty years ago was the beginning of the end of my sexist dream of having women recognize me for being “a nice guy.” As I wrote in one of my very first blog posts a decade ago, it was a dream “that had to die.” Precisely because it was a fantasy, a phantasmic display of teenage delusion borne from five years of abuse and oppressive social immaturity. In ’80s parlance, my wack ass had to learn the hard way that I had no game. And, more importantly, that pedestals are meant for smashing with sledgehammers, as people can never live up to their marble or bronze busts.

It wasn’t really women I was trying to impress with my quiet and stoic demeanor. I was all about my second infatuation, Crush #2, my version of Phyllis in the summer of 1987. I’ve outlined in painstaking detail here and in Boy @ The Window my obsession with Phyllis and her smile, and my ridiculously stupid attempts to make conversations with her in the three weeks of my various impromptu encounters at the old Galleria in White Plains and on the 40/41 Bee-Line Bus back to Mount Vernon.

But “the end of the lesson,” or at least, the “end of the beginning” of it (to quote both Kevin Costner in The Untouchables (1987) — which I saw at The Galleria twice that summer — and Winston Churchill), began on my brother Yiscoc’s birthday on the fourth Thursday that July.

I walked around for over an hour after I got off the bus at North Columbus and East Lincoln. I must’ve called myself “pathetic” at least a dozen times on that hot and steamy walk. And I was. I didn’t get home to wish Yiscoc a Happy Birthday until after 8 pm, by which time I missed any semblance of a birthday celebration at 616.

Packing up and moving to Pittsburgh — and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh — seemed as far away that weekend as it did during my summer of abuse five years earlier. I was no longer sure that this transformational period of my life would actually bear fruit. I thought I was destined to spend the rest of my days alone, ridiculed, emasculated, and otherwise as a piece of trash.

Toppling and destruction of Vladimir Lenin’s statue via sledge-hammer, Berdichev, Ukraine, February 22, 2014. (unknown).

I was seventeen years and barely seven months old when I had those thoughts. I’ve been married for nearly that long, and have a son on the cusp of turning fourteen. There’s no way that Donald 1.0 could have envisioned either of these experiences, much less worked to make them happen. It wasn’t exactly a miracle that I became a boyfriend, fiancé, husband, and father. No, it was an evolution, with a couple of personal rebellions and revolutions mixed in.

The one good thing I did after Phyllis took a wrecking ball to my delusions of feminine perfection was to talk about it with someone who was willing to listen. This time around, a young woman put up with me griping about something I never had, someone whom was never for me to begin with. As many times as I would go on to listen to women of all stripes about their relationship issues, I needed to be on the rueing end of things this one time.

It would take a lot more talking, a bit more learning, and four more years befriending and dating, before I’d completely give up putting women on pedestals entirely. Women may be beautiful, and Black girls may be magic, but none are meant to be worshipped at altars. Like all other anthropomorphized idols, humans on pedestals will always fail us when we delude ourselves into thinking that we need them to be free. Especially when we need them the most, or at least, believe so.

 

From One Starving Writer to Another

19 Sunday Mar 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Raven eating a hand (in my case, the writer’s dead hand), March 19, 2017. (creativeuncut.stfi.re via http://pinterest.com).

Six years ago, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn’t want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, “smearing paint on a canvas” while waiting for a big break. I thought at the time that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I’ve made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at MVHS. I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn’t want to be a starving artist “like Edgar Allen Poe” all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar — although better developed — reference. I think I understood better the momentary look of shock on my former teacher’s face after that conversation.

My student made me think about what Martino saw in my writing so many years ago. I certainly wasn’t focused on it. The same week she commented on making myself into a writer was also the week I had my Ivy League dilemma, between Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh for undergrad. I was waist-deep into my obsession with Phyllis, or really, my obsession with my crush on Phyllis. So much so that I wrote my creative writing assignment for Martino about me and my Crush #2, switching the names to “Donna” and “Phil” to barely cover up the truth of this otherwise short fictional work. Martino returned it without comment. She did comment heavily, though, on my assessment of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a series of redundant paragraphs in search for a coherent sentence.

But my wack “The Way It Is” title was as much an indication that I was as far away from seeing myself as a writer as Earth is for Alpha Centauri without a faster-than-light-speed vehicle. And I was starving on so many levels back then. For food. For attention. For love. For a connection with anything or anyone who didn’t remind me of my poverty. Martino’s encouragement, though she obviously meant well, sent me scurrying in my mind for something a bit more comfortable than Poe’s indebted and untimely death.

My own student’s commentary made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would’ve been much easier at seventeen than it is as a married forty-seven year-old with a contrarian teenager and bills to pay.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny designs a time machine, I can’t rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March ’87 have stayed with me for three decades. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I’m juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of ’88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May ’91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in ’93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in ’94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December ’96 to June ’99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. In all, I’ve probably made about $2,500 in direct net income as an author and writer since 2003 (half through Fear of a “Black” America, the other half in the past two years), not counting consultancies or giving talks based on my writing. If I depended on my writing income, I maybe could pay the cable bill or treat us to a night of Cheesecake Factory and a movie. Two or three times a year. When one doesn’t follow their calling and doesn’t follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren’t fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn’t give up on our own aspirations, for it’s those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others — including the most important folks — in our lives pursue their own calling.

How Libraries Got Me Through

07 Tuesday Mar 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Mount Vernon Public Library’s east entrance, Mount Vernon, NY, July 2, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

I’ve been enthralled with books since my brother Darren helped me decipher the code of the English language during Christmas ’74. Going to the library for most of my life — especially my growing up years — was always a break from the Grade II bone bruise that my life often seemed to be. I remember the first time my Mom took us to Mount Vernon Public Library, in August ’74. It was only a few blocks from our old place, 48 Adams Street, and about seven blocks from 425 South Sixth. I was too young to get a library card, though, and I started complaining. “May-wa! May-wa!” — that’s what I used to call my Mom (a combination of her name Mary and Mama) — “Why can’t I get a card?,” I cried on my way out the door.

A New Rochelle Public Library card (a close approximation to my first card from 1975), March 1987. (http://flickr.com).

I got my first library card in first grade. It was a class trip, as me and the rest of Ms. Griffin’s class walked to and from Nathan Hale ES to Mount Vernon Public Library. The librarians gave us a tour, during which a thunderstorm erupted. It was sometime in September ’75, a Friday I think. But feeling that small, round-edged MVPL card in my hand with that stamped metal plate on it made my otherwise rainy day. That it had my name typed on it helped as well.

I spend many hours at Mount Vernon Public Library over the years. I needed to. I had so much to learn, more than the 28-volume World Book Encyclopedia set from 1978 could teach me. And certainly more than what my parents and idiot ex-stepfather Maurice knew, much less what they decided not to share. MVPL got me through my spiritual crisis of 1983-84, because I had access to the Qur’an, Torah, and other spiritual texts from which I could make a decision and move on from the cultish Hebrew-Israelites in my family and life. I wouldn’t have considered majoring in history if I hadn’t been able to check out dozens of dusty World War II books between 1980 and 1982. My love for all things Charles Schulz and Peanuts couldn’t have developed without the help of MVPL’s weekly Bookmobile visits at Nathan Hale on Tuesdays or William H. Holmes ES on Wednesdays, usually between 1:30 and 2 pm.

But by the summer of ’80, I began to realize that not all libraries were like the enormity of Mount Vernon’s. Nearby Pelham Library was on the ground floor of Hutchinson Elementary School. It was the size of a small bookstore, with maybe two tables and six chairs to sit in (they didn’t move into their own building until 1995). New Rochelle’s library was 1970s-style modern, with ugly shapes and colors. But both had more air conditioning and bathrooms that didn’t smell or weren’t under repair half the time.

From high school on, I used libraries mostly as a form of escape from my then-idiot stepfather and a gaggle of younger siblings. Or to escape the desperate poverty and chaos that enveloped my life at 616, and to a lesser extent, parts of Mount Vernon and other parts of the New York area. I first got the courage to go into the vastness that was the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd and Fifth in the fall of ’84. I infrequently went to White Plains’ public library. At least once between 1984 and 1988, I went to nearly all of the libraries between Wakefield in the Bronx and the various tiny libraries in southern Westchester County. But no library outside of NYPL’s main branch had both the collection and as easy access to the stacks as the one in Mount Vernon.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Oakland (Main) Branch, front entrance, Pittsburgh, PA, April 5, 2008. (HoboJones via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-BY-SA-3.0.

I had more appreciation for one of the few pleasures offered by my original hometown during my twelve years in Pittsburgh. Within 230 yards of each other were the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s main Oakland branch. If it weren’t for their extensive collections and my alumni status after the spring of ’91, I couldn’t have attended graduate school. Pitt’s policies toward alumni alone saved me $3,000 in book and printing costs, as well as from an additional year of dissertation research. And as many times I could pick up a book, any book, go to the African American Literature section of Hillman, put two lounge chairs together, read, fall asleep, and read some more? The only other thing I could’ve asked for was a blanket and room service!

Since moving to suburban Maryland and DC in ’99, I have been struck by the lack of in libraries around here. Lack of books, lack of extensive interlibrary networks, and a lack of substances over style. The Montgomery County library system had two new ones built in Silver Spring and in Rockville. Each has enough space for a half million volumes, it seems as if their designers built them on the assumption that everyone uses a tablet or an iPhone to read books these days. If it’s nonfiction and a bestseller, they likely don’t have it. Though DC Public Library’s main branch in Gallery Place — the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library — has an extensive collection of DC artifacts and histories, and African American nonfiction and scholarly volumes, patrons cannot borrow these volumes at all. Like the Library of Congress, the MLK library is mostly a museum with books. And by the way, the main branch is now closed for the next three years for modernization, leaving the homeless, researchers, and book lovers like me with even fewer DC area options.

Silver Spring Air & Space Museum, er, Public Library, Silver Spring, MD, June 2016 (http://www.adtekengineers.com/).

Georgetown and Johns Hopkins both have wonderful main libraries with friendly security guards and extra-helpful librarians. But they’re not Hillman. Even as a professor, if I fell asleep in a lounge chair, I’d likely get kicked out. Plus, in our era of smartphones and tablets, most patrons are stuck in social media in between hectic moments for exam cramming and last-minute paper writing. This, though, is still way better than George Washington’s main library, or NYU’s and Columbia’s, for that matter. You can’t walk into either without a form from a staff or faculty member giving you permission to walk through the door.

The building that houses MVPL, built interestingly enough with Andrew Carnegie’s money between 1897 and 1904, is in serious disrepair. The men’s bathroom is nearly always out-of-order, and the collection of Mount Vernon history materials has been closed for years. A friend recently commented on the fact that an older man relieved himself in the snow after leaving the library before going back in to do his whatevers. The money is simply not there to build a brand-new home for one of the largest collections in New York State.

Still, I know how good a library Mount Vernon has. It carries the first three of my former advisor Joe Trotter’s books. I have to go to a university library for that around here. It also has my memoir, and it may have Fear of a “Black” America as well (not so sure about that). I just know that the affluent of Montgomery County have never put that much in resources into the library system I frequent now. I hope and pray that the folks raising the money MVPL so desperately needs for a major renovation, maybe even a new building, are able to meet their goals before my son is old enough to remember when libraries actually held bound books in their collections.

My Muhammad Ali

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Meme of Muhammad Ali quote on "impossible" combined with iconic photo of Ali in 1st Round of first fight with Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964. (Getty Images via Twitter).

Meme of Muhammad Ali quote on “impossible” combined with iconic photo of Ali in 1st Round of first fight with Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964. (Getty Images via Twitter).

There is so much I could say about Muhammad Ali. His greatness. His contradictions. His imperfections and frailness. And all of them would be true. He was both a great man and a deeply flawed man at the same time. But, from 1964 through 1980, Muhammad Ali was the most recognizable person on the planet, with every aspect of his complicated onion on display in every corner of the world.

I have a few childhood memories of Ali’s headier days and nights. One was in ’74. It was the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Ali and George Forman. My father Jimme took me and my brother Darren over to his drinking buddy Robert Farmer’s house to watch the fight on closed-circuit TV (yep, Mr. Farmer spent good money on this fight). I do remember seeing bits and pieces of the fight, with Ali using the ropes around the ring like they were a trampoline. But mostly, I remember my dad and Farmer and Lo and others drinking and smoking away while watching the fight. October 30, 1974 was also the night that I learned my first colloquialism, the “rope-a-dope.” I know that the “dope” was Foreman, but I’ve seen lots of people as dopes in the four decades since that fight.

The Rumble in the Jungle poster, October 29, 1974. (Armbrust via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution for reproduction.

The Rumble in the Jungle poster, October 29, 1974. (Armbrust via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution for reproduction.

I remember watching the “Thrilla in Manila” nearly a year later between Ali and Joe Frazier, either at Mr. Farmer’s place or at a bar, I’m not sure. Again, smoke, drinks, beer cans, sunflower seeds and cigars, all in the midst of two fellas knocking the hella outta each other. My father sure knew how to show his two young sons (I was five and Darren was seven at the time) a good time.

These two fights became vague but embedded memories, perhaps two of the greatest bouts of all time. Although, Jack Johnson-James Jeffries, Joe Louis-Max Schmeling I and II, and Ali (née Cassius Clay)-Sonny Lister also come to mind in terms of historical significance.

But where I remember seeing Ali in a context beyond the right was in this movie The Greatest in May 1977. Believe it or not, my soon-to-be idiot stepfather Maurice took us to see this mediocre docudrama of a biopic on Muhammad Ali’s through 1974. (So I guess I was wrong when I said my stepfather had only done two good things for me growing up). At seven, there was no way I could know how bad the film was, between scenery chewers Ernest Borgnine and James Earl Jones. Still, the movie put those hazy memories from ages four and five in better perspective. After having seen Roots a few months earlier, I was really conscious of the wider world, of race, and of Muhammad Ali’s importance for the first time.

Muhammad Ali tweet re: Prince's death (pic is from their first meeting in 1997), April 22, 2016. (Twitter).

Muhammad Ali tweet re: Prince’s death (pic is from their first meeting in 1997), April 22, 2016. (Twitter).

Unlike Natalie Cole, David Bowie, Prince, and going back before 2016, Michael Jackson, I’ve been expecting Ali’s death for quite some time. His Parkinson’s wasn’t just Parkinson’s, but likely brain damage the likes of which NFL players have come to fear. That it took Ali until 1984 to announce what millions had suspected as far back as 1978 told us that he had taken a long time to come to grips with what would become his second act, his new reality. That Ali became a symbol of philanthropy, activism, and humanitarianism during this second act suggests that his strong will and support system deserves way more credit for the quality of his life than anything he did in the ring.

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy” comes from the 1920 mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald. If he were to write Muhammad Ali’s story, it would likely read as a tragedy. Luckily for us, Fitzgerald isn’t around to do so.

We have glossed over a few things in our millions of small eulogies for Ali this weekend. His sexism and occasional misogyny and abuse, both in words and deeds. His obvious colorism, calling Joe Foreman a “gorilla” and most of his somewhat darker skinned opponents “ugly” as a euphemism for their failure to pass the brown-paper-bag test. His rejection of Malcolm X at the very time when Malcolm needed him the most. Ali in the years between his biggest bouts and his mostly silent second life expressed regret about these -ism words and actions.

Despite this, Ali was still a father, a husband, a Muslim, a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, an author, a poet, an actor, an anti-war activist, a civil rights advocate, a social justice leader, a humanitarian, a hostage negotiator, and a Parkinson’s survivor. Ali was a fighter, in the most panoramic sense of the word. And yes, he was a Black man, in the narrowest and most intersectional senses of that two-word phrase. And all of that made him an icon. RIP.

Striking members of Memphis Local 1733 hold signs whose slogan symbolized the sanitation workers' 1968 campaign, March 1968. (Richard L. Copley/http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/).

Striking members of Memphis Local 1733 hold signs whose slogan symbolized the sanitation workers’ 1968 campaign, March
1968. (Richard L. Copley/http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/).

My Nuanced History as a Historian

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Road Less Traveled quote, via Robert Frost (with me adding, "but it's not always good to get lost in the woods"), May 16, 2016. (http://www.chicagonow.com).

The Road Less Traveled quote, via Robert Frost (with me adding, “but it’s not always good to get lost in the woods”), May 16, 2016. (http://www.chicagonow.com).

Right now I sit between two important dates in my life. One was a few days ago, the thirtieth anniversary of my triumph on the AP US History exam in eleventh grade. Two will be in two days, the nineteenth anniversary me of graduating from Carnegie Mellon with my PhD in History. Both are signifiers of my achievements, my ambitions, and of my becoming a professional historian. But in the decade after earning my first college credits and the nearly two decades since earning my doctorate, I’ve still had a few lingering questions about where and who I am professionally.

One of those questions I’ve discussed ad nauseam here. Am I a writer who’s also an academically trained historian, or am I a historian first and a writer second? Or, can I be both at the same time? For better and worse, I am always both, but can emphasize one or the other at random, depending on context.

Sliced onion layers, May 7, 2015. (http://www.medicaldaily.com).

Sliced onion layers, May 7, 2015. (http://www.medicaldaily.com).

Other questions, though, have lingered even after spending more than a decade in the nonprofit world and another eight years teaching a full slate of undergraduate history courses. Do I still enjoy teaching history? Does my experience working on real world issues in civic education, social justice, and educational equity cloud how I see myself when I’m lecturing on the Agricultural Revolution or the Middle Passage? How is it possible for me to reconcile myself as a freelance writer who wants to take my academic historian experience, combine it with my other professional and personal experiences, and write about it for editors with little clue about the roads I’ve traveled? Is it even possible to un-layer the onion of my life and write about it to my or anyone else’s satisfaction? And if so, am I still a historian when doing so?

To that next to last question, I think that’s already a yes-no answer. Since 2013, I’ve written articles for publication with newspapers and magazines, and am working on my first new scholarly piece in six years. It’s difficult, to say the least, to explain to an editor what in academia or even among US or African American historians is a settled issue. Editors always believe that any story has two equal and opposing sides, because that’s how most ordinary people see most stories. As an academic historian, I’m trained to see nuance, to know when one side has a stockpile of evidence, while another one has a stockpile of bullshit.

Or, more often, to know that the no man’s land of gray present several or even multiple perspectives on issues like racism, poverty, college retention and graduation, American individualism, or the rigging of the federal election process. That no man’s land, I have found, more often than not scares away an editor, even ones working for intellectual magazines. They think their audience is incapable of getting nuance, when I think that they often reflect their own narrow and elitist view of the world.

Timeline of Europe and the US, March 2015. (http://www.worldhistorycharts.com).

Timeline of Europe and the US, March 2015. (http://www.worldhistorycharts.com).

As for teaching history, I find myself literally bored with the basic facts of any survey or even upper-level history course. To me, history is a panoramic lens through which students and experts can study human beliefs and behaviors in all its glory, ugliness, and ordinary-ness. Understanding how and why a person or a group of people did x, y, or z is much, much, much more important than knowing the exact date a specific event took place or coming up with some interesting but irrelevant fact in the process.

Which was why I began to teach my undergraduate courses with far more discussion and less lecturing than I did when I taught history as a grad student. (I taught a bunch of graduate-level education foundations courses in between my various nonprofit stints between 1997 and 2008.) I decided it didn’t matter if my students had done the readings, hated history, or were tired and ready to nap through three hours of lecture. I will facilitate discussion. I will make sure to make this process one about human interaction. Even when the lack of independent thinking among my students has me near ready to strangle a few of them. Why? Because understanding how people think and why they draw the conclusions they do can be as eye-opening as the knowledge they pull from one of my classes, maybe more so.

So, do I still see myself as a historian, or more as a psychologist or sociologist? Does it really matter how I see myself? Probably not. I just know that after years of teaching, writing, and all of my ups and downs professionally, that I remain two things most of all — a writer and a learner. Those two callings fuel my ability to raise my game, to want to be a better professor, a more expert historian, and an insightful writer. That, I hope, won’t change as I continue my long march toward fifty.

Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Peterson Events Center (where they do all the commencements now) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2008. (http://www.rosser.com/).

Peterson Events Center (where they do all the commencements now) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2008. (http://www.rosser.com/).

I can’t believed that I’ve lived long enough to make a quarter-century since my end to undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh! It makes me sound old, at least to the twenty-one year-old I used to be. The one who couldn’t decide between a J.D. and an M.A./Ph.D. program. The person who worried that they would have an MA before their driver’s license. The young ‘in who believed that my advanced degree choices would define my career and life more than anything else.

That person was wise beyond his years, and yet stupid at the same time. He believed in the American meritocracy, in the triumph of hard work, talent, and a Christian faith over every obstacle. He believed that any costs incurred on the path to the MA — and later, the PhD — would be covered in the Bank of a Great Career. He believed, most of all, that professors as advisors and mentors would be there to guide his path every step of the way, the trustworthy individuals that most of them had proven themselves to be.

Me & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. (Lois Nembhard).

Me & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. (Lois Nembhard).

So much of that belief system was poisoned by the e. coli bacteria of academia and by the leaching lead pipes of American -isms. From my trials at Pitt to my tribulations with Joe Trotter, Dan Resnick, and Bruce Anthony Jones. The fact that my entire nineteen years of teaching, consulting, and nonprofit work has been cobbled together out of necessity and constantly changing circumstances, on which ground has rarely been solid. That after eighteen years and six months of payments, and I’m still a decade or so away from paying off student loans I began borrowing seventeen days after graduating from Mount Vernon High School in ’87.

If I had to talk to my twenty-one year-old self now, I’d say, get the MA in history, then get certified to teach at a high school somewhere. Spend the precious moments not in the classroom reaching high school-age students honing your craft as a writer. Jump headlong into putting down in words your experiences growing up, your times as a Hebrew-Israelite and in Humanities. Get that ms turned into a published work. Work hard at understanding the larger issues and contexts that make America the seething contradiction that it has always been, between racism and freedom, individualism and multiculturalism, social control and narcissism. Then, somewhere between the age of twenty-five and thirty, maybe, go back to school and earn that PhD in history, or in education, and take a few social psychology courses focused on personality disorders along the way.

That is the benefit of 20/10 hindsight (I’d say 20/20, but I still see most things at 20/15, and with warp speed at that!), of course. One big barrier I faced twenty-five years ago is a thorough and excoriating understanding of myself and the life I had to live. I remembered so much of my past that I never questioned the things that I’d forgotten. About abuse, physical and sexual. About deprivation, real and imagined. About people, the layers of yellow onions that most sheepishly are.

Unfortunately, I’d learn the most about what I’d forgotten in my forties, well after most people reconnect with the bitterest parts of their past (if any ever dare to). That I know what I know now is in the category of “better late than never.” Some things, though, I needed to know much sooner than 2014 or 2002. Like my discovery of my ambivalence toward academia. Not teaching or publishing per se. But the idea that I could only be taken seriously by publishing scholarly works that mostly would be read by a few dozen colleagues or when I assigned them to my students. I didn’t figure out how to make my ambivalence work for me until I was thirty-seven, and then, with me at mid-career, fighting to move forward.

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2x4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2×4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

The silver lining is, that if it weren’t for my time at Pitt, I simply wouldn’t be here to write these words at all. The pressures and pollutions of this world would’ve killed me. Or worse still, killed my inspirations and aspirations, rendering my imagination, my sense of what makes a just and wise world, dead. I’d be as bitter as a cup of Italian roast coffee mixed with vinegar and raw horseradish.

I’m sure that even among my more successful colleagues — and even more sure among my less successful ones — their journeys since the halcyon times of undergrad and even graduate school have been bittersweet. That is life. Especially in a nation in which others encourage us to have aspirations beyond the stars, a complete contradiction to that cracked concrete-reinforced reality that is America.

But even if all of the remaining highs in my career and life outnumber the lows by ten-to-one (who knows, right?), two truths are clear. One is that most people who experience any depth of success in their lives tend to remember the lulls and ruts more than their moments at the top of the mountains. Two is that without me having climbed that first mountain, the college degree mountain, I would have a story to tell, but would lack the words to tell it. I would still be living vicariously through the music of others, whether U2, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson (RIP), Prince (RIP), or Mary J. Blige. And for me, at least, as genius as they are — alive and dead — I still need to tell my own story.

Prince, circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

Prince (1958-2016), circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

The Temptations of Pizza

12 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Pitt logo, the one closest to what was on their brochures in April 1986, April 12, 2016. (http://pitt.edu).

Pitt logo, the one closest to what was on their brochures in April 1986, April 12, 2016. (http://pitt.edu).

It’s been a full thirty years since I received a big envelope in the mail from my future alma mater. No, not that one. It wasn’t the big packet about my life-changing. No, it was their introduction.

It was at the end of a school day, and like clockwork, I went downstairs to check our mail. There it was. It was always news whenever I got mail, at least to me. It was a packet from the University of Pittsburgh, or rather Pitt. It was more the latter because the Pitt logo was gigantic and on the back of the large white envelope.

I opened the packet immediately. I barely began to read the form letter introducing me to Pitt and all of its eclectic buildings, wonderful faculty and staff, and precocious students, when I saw the brochure. On it was writing that formed a circle, something like “Pitt, a world of possibilities” (I say “something like” because I don’t really remember what it said, but that’s what I translated it to mean).

A cheese pizza similar to the one used on that '86 Pitt brochure (only a LOT less orange), April 12, 2016. (http://student.plattsburgh.edu).

A cheese pizza similar to the one used on that ’86 Pitt brochure (only a LOT less orange), April 12, 2016. (http://student.plattsburgh.edu).

The writing circle surrounded a large, traditional, New York-style plain cheese pizza. The background of the brochure was set in Pitt’s traditional medium light blue. With the writing all in white, that pizza pie stood out like it was in 4D. I could smell it, taste it, lick it, eat it at that moment. My sixteen-year-old bean pole ass probably would’ve eaten a slice or two, too, if I hadn’t already planned to go down the street to a pizza shop for a Sicilian slice.

Never mind the letter that mentioned that I had been identified because of my 1050 SAT score from October ’85 and because of my National Honor Society membership. Forget about the fact that I didn’t even know where Pittsburgh was or what kind of city it was. Did I even notice that Pitt was starting a new academic scholarship program to attract more students of color and women to the university?

No, I was focused squarely on this picture of culinary beauty, a pizza after my own stomach, er, heart. I wanted to be at a college where I had an opportunity to eat that pizza, to feel my teeth bite down on that rich combination of tomato sauce, olive oil, basil, oregano, bread, mozzarella, and parmesan. I needed to feel those tidbits fall from the back of my mouth and into my throat before gravitating their way into my waiting stomach, to have that enzymatic orgasm.

But then I remembered the last time I made an academic decision on an empty stomach. That was in May ’81. Right after the Humanities Program had accepted me into their fold for middle school, I had to pick a language. The only choices were between French, Italian, and Spanish. My muy estupido culo picked Italiano over the other two. Why? Because I loved, absolutely loved, spaghetti. I loved spaghetti the way some people love their dogs. That’s not a reason, that’s literally a gut decision! I imagine that I would’ve picked Mandarin Chinese if it had been on the language menu because I loved Papa Wong’s egg rolls and chicken fried rice!

I decided to do some serious background research on Pitt and Pittsburgh before I would even suggest the idea of applying their to anyone. They was only the first college to invite me to apply, after all. I hadn’t planned on going out-of-state. As desperate as I was to leave 616 and Mount Vernon, I pretty much only saw myself applying to schools within 100 miles of New York City, like Columbia or Yale or Concordia College. Obviously I hadn’t yet thought through the places I really wanted to spend four or more years of my life. I just knew I didn’t want to spend most of it under the same roof with my insane family.

*************************

Mineo's Pizza House, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, November 22, 2008. (http://thepodanys.blogspot.com/).

Mineo’s Pizza House, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, November 22, 2008. (http://thepodanys.blogspot.com/).

Fast forward to my junior year at Pitt. At that point, I’d been in Pittsburgh for nearly three years, and had yet to find that elusive New York-style cheese pizza pie they used to lure me to this po-dunk town. Oh, they said the pizza they used in that brochure was from The ‘O’, The Original Hot Dog Shop on Forbes Avenue in Oakland near the Cathedral of Learning for those unfamiliar with Pitt and Pittsburgh. Except their pizza was wack. It was a greasy pile of limp cheapness, with mozzarella that probably came from an arthritic cow, olive oil that was strained from Wish-Bone Italian dressing, and dough made out of Wonder Bread. Since Pittsburgh’s water came from reservoirs or from the Allegheny or Monongahela River, it didn’t come close to tasting like that pizza on the brochure either.

But at the end of ’96, the same month my advisor finally said he’d sign off on my doctoral thesis, I finally found my elusive pizza in Pittsburgh. It was at Mineo’s Pizza on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill. I’d probably passed the joint three dozen times in nine years, but never at night. I stopped there with my girlfriend (now wife) Angelia, and we bought a couple of slices. Not only were they good, but they had an added bonus. They specialized in Sicilian pies! After nine years, I finally found a slice of food heaven in Pittsburgh!