Tag Archives: Self-Discovery

“It Is Done” – 15 Years Later

21 Monday Nov 2011

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Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The next twenty-four hours will mark a decade and a half since my former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter wrote today’s title quote in a God-like-pronouncement of an email to me regarding my final content-based revisions to my doctoral thesis. With those revisions following my committee meetings in October, I was now officially Dr. Collins. I knew that. I just didn’t feel it.

Working on a book-length research project with an abusive advisor and disinterested committee members at a school as conservative and isolating as Carnegie Mellon University left me exhausted. For I never felt I could ever be all of myself there. I made myself into the scholar I hoped that I wouldn’t become. At least, the twenty-one version of me that began graduate school back in ’91 held that hope. Five years later, I felt alienated from my own purpose and calling, and was more than unsure about becoming a full-time professor and historian. Especially given the wonderful examples of scholarly inhumanity and hypocrisy that Trotter, Dan Resnick and so many others had proven themselves to be (see “You’re Not Ready” post from November ’08 and “And Now, A Plagiarism Moment” post from September ’10).

I was burned out. I felt numb, with a boiling mantle of rage underneath the surface. If Trotter had said the

Arching fountain of a Pahoehoe (like my post-PhD rage) approximately 10 m high issuing from the western end of the 0740 vents, a series of spatter cones 170 m long, south of Pu‘u Kahaualea, September 10, 2007. (USGS via Wikipedia). In public domain.

wrong thing to me at the wrong time in ’96, I probably would’ve laid him out with a right hook to the jaw. And Resnick’s lucky that I didn’t own a car, because I might’ve run him down with it.

As it was, when Trotter attempted to meet with me a few weeks later to discuss “my future,” I refused. Especially given his suggestions for job applications. One, a one-year position at a University of Nebraska branch campus. The other, a CUNY school in Queens with a proposed position that wouldn’t begin until July ’98. I told him, “You don’t get to determine my future, certainly not without me.”

What should’ve been a period of rest and repair between Thanksgiving Week ’96 and graduation day in May ’97 was hardly that at all. It took me, really and truly, six months to recover from the dissertation process, and probably close to two years to not pass by or go on Carnegie Mellon’s campus without wanting to strangle my dissertation committee with piano wire. By then, I’d moved on to the rather mundane task of figuring out how to cobble together a career that wasn’t dependent on a full-time faculty position in academia.

And over the past fifteen years, I have pieced together several careers. As a part-time college professor, as a nonprofit program officer and as a consultant. It helped to have people like the late Barbara Lazarus and my dear friend Cath Lugg in my corner in those first years after I’d finished my doctorate. It helped that I expanded my career options from merely pursuing a history professorship wherever Joe Trotter’s winds could’ve taken me.

But it helped, most of all, for me to start trusting my instincts, my own heart, again. The irony of my complete disillusionment at the end of my degree-earning journey was that it left me with the time to contemplate whom I thought I really was, what I really wanted to do in life, and how I wanted to do it.

It was far from an immediate process of epiphanies and revelation. It took me nearly six years after finishing my dissertation to see myself as a writer, cutting through twenty years of denial and abuse in the process. It took me a little longer to see myself as a writer first and foremost, with all of my other professional hats second, third, and so forth. To understand that mine was a concern far greater than multiculturalism in education. My role as a writer and educator was also about aspirations, academic pathways to success, racial and ethnic equity in education, access to and success in college.

Barbara Sizemore, 1927-2004, circa mid-1990s. (http://sesp.northwestern.edu).

Now, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t looked back to wonder what could’ve been. If I were a White male with my credentials, I’d long ago been doing what I’ve been fighting to do as a writer and educator for years. If my advisors had been someone like a Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates. Or if I had attended an Ivy League school in undergrad. Or if I’d earned a master’s degree in journalism or communications, or a doctorate in a school of education or in psychology.

The late Barbara Sizemore once warned me about earning my doctorate in history some two decades ago. “You always have to do things the hard way, don’t you?,” she said to me with disapproval when she learned of my acceptance into Pitt’s history PhD program. I should’ve said, “Yes, I do.” Because the last fifteen years have been a hard road, as all roads to enlightenment are.

Beyond The Asexual Me

14 Tuesday Jun 2011

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Janet Jackson & Justin Timberlake, one second from revealing more than concealing, Super Bowl 2004. Source: http://www.eurweb.com

The art of the personal essay or larger memoir is the balance between revealing and concealing. You don’t want to reveal too much, but just enough to tell a good and compelling story. You also don’t want to hide too much, because concealing degrades the honesty of the work. For me, though, today’s post reveals a bit more than I’m comfortable with, even though it may not reveal enough for some of you.

This time twenty years ago, even as much as I’d become a more open person and young man in most respects, I still struggled with my heterosexual identity. I’d dated off and on as an undergrad at Pitt and had a few sexual encounters. But I really wasn’t comfortable with any woman within three years of my age. They were often confused about men, themselves, and life in general. I had enough confusion in my life already from my Mount Vernon, New York years without spending time with another confused twenty-two-year-old whose goal in life was to be a professional student.

The personification of “another confused twenty-two-year-old” was my sometimes friend, sometimes more in “Another E” (see my post “The Power of Another E” from April ’09). By the time June ’91 rolled around, she’d bitterly disappointed me — again. E had stood me up for a date to see Godfather III, had stopped returning my phone calls, and somehow managed to duck me for lunch for more than two weeks. I was angry, more with myself than her, about how turned around I felt about this sudden loss of contact.

I wanted to move on, to get over the pedestal-building, damsel-in-distress paradigm that had been my relationship with girls and women since the days of Crush #1 (and the need to save my mother from my ex-stepfather) from so many years before. So I deliberately sought advice, deciding for once that I could live with the shame and embarrassment of liking a female who may have liked me well enough, but also enjoyed the thought of taking advantage of me.

A Black guy I worked with at the PAARC project at Western Psych was my key counsel. We’d become good acquaintances over the previous couple of months while he complained about his doctoral courses and I complained about the flat-butt Whites in charge of the project. On the first Saturday in June, he invited me and a couple of his closer friends over to his place on the North Side for barbecue and basketball. He killed me on the court, not telling me until he won 21-12 that he’d played as a starter on Grambling’s basketball team.

Later we talked about my troubles with E, in between the ribs and the beer on his over-leathery couch. After

Woman on a pedestal, with a man on his knees, in this case, me from '82 to '91, June 14, 2011. Source: http://elephantjournal.com

two minutes of hearing me pine and opine, he said, “She’s trifling, dude. Just ignore her and move on.” I said, “I’m not sure I can,” thinking, I don’t want to play games here. Then my friend explained that I needed to see E exactly the way I saw myself, as a flawed human being with human needs. That if she really liked me like she said, then she’d eventually give me a call or try to contact me. If not, then get out there in the world and find someone else to hook up with.

I left, reluctant about the man’s advice, but determined to do something besides feeling lonely all summer. For nearly a year, I’d lived in the East Liberty neighborhood, about a block away from a hole-in-the-wall bar that’s now a CVS on Penn Avenue. I’d thought about going in before, but that second Saturday in June ’91, I finally did, by myself, with no plans other than to observe the wild life. I witnessed two fights, at least two women too drunk to stand up, and a bartender that mixed drinks about as well as a seven-year-old making Kool-Aid.

Then I met her. An older woman — at least by my twenty-one-year-old standards — who was in much better shape than anyone I’d been in undergrad with. She started a conversation with me, and I engaged, something I usually avoided. After about fifteen minutes, our small talk that suddenly became very direct. We left, for my place.

It turned out that she was thirty-four, had been married once, and had two kids between ten and fifteen years old. She also had experience (no, not just that kind of experience) that taught me quite a bit in those months before my first year of grad school at Pitt. I learned that I liked older women — if by older, women between twenty-four and fifty — and that I was much more of a butt man than I was a breast man.

But I learned something much more valuable than developing a mental tape measurer. I learned that I could be intimate, really intimate with another person, with a woman, about who I was and wanted to be, without putting them on a pedestal and making them untouchable, heavenly beings. I learned that a sexual encounter could be both awkward and fun at the same time. I learned to see myself as a man, not just a young man or a man-child, but as a man and only a man, in no small part because of that encounter and that summer.

Walls and Secrets

11 Wednesday Nov 2009

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Crane removing part of Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate, December 21, 1989. (SSGT F. Lee Corkran/US Dept of Defense). In public domain.

Crane removing part of Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate, December 21, 1989. (SSGT F. Lee Corkran/US Dept of Defense). In public domain.

This Monday should’ve been a momentous occasion for us in the US. It was the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Although it would be a bit more than two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the Warsaw Pact. Still, it meant that the fear that I and millions of others grew up with — the one about having a day of mushroom clouds and shock waves, gamma radiation and the end of civilization — was over, or at least, abated somehow. But knowing my fellow citizens as well as I do, I know that most of us gave as much thought to this as we do to where our tap water comes from.

More of us give more serious thought to Chris Brown and Rihanna, my Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants, and who our friends date and break up with than we do of our world beyond ourselves. Which is sad. Because if gave the larger world even a modicum of thought, maybe we would have the better world that so many of us want, but don’t want to work for. While the idiot American media spent as much time talking about where they were when the Berlin Wall began to come down, the rest of the world, at least, spent a bit of time thinking about what’s actually happened geopolitically speaking in the past generation.

When President Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” in Berlin in ’87, even our bungling fortieth president was talking about more than a wall. He was speaking of a geopolitical and cultural wall between peoples who otherwise had so much in common, so much so that it was disheartening, even criminal to maintain separation because another superpower needed nation-states as buffers. Really, what Reagan was speaking of was well beyond his own neo-conservative thinking. For the wall that really needed tearing down was the one in our own minds, the one that says that we can’t do or say or be a certain way because the cultural and political norms of our society say otherwise.

It’s what I took from the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and Reagan’s speech in ’87 anyway. Sometimes, though, we must put a wall around those things in our minds that would keep us from thinking, being and doing those things that others in our lives would ridicule. In my little case, it was majoring in history, finishing my degree and possibly going to grad school for more degrees that would lead to steadier employment, if not high-paying jobs. In our money-is-everything world, that’s an invitation for family and so-called friends to clown on us, to say that what were about is like spending another decade in school to “earn another high school diploma.” It’s limited thinking, the kind of thinking common behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War era. Or at least, that’s what our leaders and the international academic community have said.

It’s tough to walk to beat of our own drums, especially if we know in our bones, minds and spirits that we were born to do and say certain things in which others in our lives vehemently disagree. And when we become side-tracked by the pressures of people and events and things of this world, it becomes doubly-hard to find our way to our proper path. Without folks in our lives who can help, or at least listen, it can be a lonely, if rewarding road.

Not too many weeks after I was swept up in end-of-the-Cold-War-fever, I realized something about the previous eight-and-a-half years of my life. That I’d been living my life for the sake of others, be it God, my mother, my younger siblings, or for the euphoria of an A or A+. That just about all of the real friends I had came out of my Pittsburgh experience. That I was no longer living in fear of having my chest caved in (as he liked to say) by my now ex-stepfather.

At the beginning of ’90, I did a bit of an experiment. I still kept in contact with about a half-dozen or so of my former classmates from my Humanities days. Which in my case meant that I wrote them far more often than they wrote or called me, if they did any of that all at. I stopped writing. I only wrote them or called if they responded in kind. I found out fairly quickly that I really only had one friend from my gifted-track days.

So I built my own wall in the first few months of the 90s. I deliberately yet unconsciously managed to put everything bad that happened between April 13 of ’81 and September 2 of ’88 inside of that wall. I only opened it up to a handful of my closest friends, and often revealed the most gut-wrenching of events in the most academic and dispassionate of ways. It worked very successfully for nearly thirteen years. But in having a child, being a married man, working with thousands of students and doing work to benefit thousands more, I realized it was time to tear down this wall.

I couldn’t write and revise Boy @ The Window without tapping into this past, and all of the emotions involved with it. For most of us, it unfortunately takes an event like the fall of the Berlin Wall for us to be introspective and conscious of the world beyond our own nose. For me, that’s an everyday thing, something I think we all should aspire to at least a few times a year.

Top Cook

25 Monday May 2009

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I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the Bravo show Top Chef, hosted by Padma Lakshmi and with head Italiano judge Tom Colicchio. It’s been a reality-series-mainstay for five years, with chefs in constant competition over the quality of their dishes and the ambiance with which they present them. When I do watch — it’s one of my wife’s shows, not so much mine — I find myself thinking, “I can out-cook most of these people, no problem!”

But as the mafioso-like Colicchio has said numerous times, “the show’s called Top Chef, not Top Cook.” Given the fact that most of the contestants don’t even bother to taste what they cook, I don’t think that they should be in competition for either title. I should know. I have twenty-five years of experience to prove it.
One of the consequences of my youngest brother Eri’s birth in the spring of ’84 was that I learned how to cook, at least enough to make sure that seven people actually gained weight and enjoyed eating my food for the next two months. It was a time of irony and hypocrisy (as if any other time during my Boy At The Window years wasn’t), putting another nail in the Hebrew-Israelite coffin in which my stepfather was prepared to bury himself. It also gave me the opportunity to see myself as an adult beyond my academic abilities. It provided a level of confidence that would be helpful in my Pitt years.
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My conversion to Christianity and my developing interests in sports, music and girls in the spring of ’84 couldn’t have come at a better time. The week before Memorial Day ’84 was when my mother gave birth to my baby brother Eri. The little porker came in at just under seven pounds. Two weeks before that, my stupid stepfather invited his Hebrew-Israelite matriarch “Balkis Makeda” (she believed that she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Sheba, the one who would marry King Solomon of ancient Israel) to stay with us. She was moved in before my mother could seriously object. What a situation! Six kids, including me, plus Mom, Maurice, and an old woman living together in a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment. We now needed to behave like good little Hebrew-Israelites with this woman in our house, so as to not embarrass my stepfather.
One of the wonderful rules of our absurdly orthodox practice was that my mother couldn’t cook or do any familial tasks for the next three months. She was “unclean” because she’d just given birth to Eri. This might’ve made sense in the deserts of ancient Canaan, with no antibiotics and drugs to deal with unclean “issues of blood” and other bodily fluids. It didn’t now. Plus I didn’t remember my mother not cooking for three months after Yiscoc and Sarai were born. This was suck-up time, plain and simple.Maurice made what was an abyss-of-bad even worse by cooking dinner for three days. Three straight nights of overboiled and under-ripened cabbage drenched in its own juices and seasoned to high heaven with red and black pepper. My stepfather could’ve been the founder of the cabbage soup diet if he’d actually eaten his own cooking. Man, a week of cabbage like his would’ve left skinny me in an emergency room in need of an IV. As it was, my younger siblings couldn’t even eat a mouthful of the gruel. We needed someone else to cook, and soon. My mother knew just who to ask.So from the end of May until mid-July, I cooked dinner night after night for my family of eight. Makeda refused to eat my food on principle — the man of the house or a female servant was supposed to cook, not me. Before this crisis, I’d only cooked a few things, like baked chicken leg quarters, fried and boiled eggs, sticky-bad grits, and toast with butter. I immediately learned to control temperatures on our gas stove to fry chicken Southern-style, started making spaghetti and meat sauce, and figured out how to season meats and the difference between that and seasoning veggies. All while still doing my other chores, helping out with my siblings and getting ready for Regents and final exams.

I learned how to make the five-dollar-spaghetti meal for eight. For that amount of money, I’d shop at C-Town, buy a pound of ground beef (two dollars), a box of Ronzoni spaghetti (eighty-nine cents, often on sale for fifty cents), a can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce (ninety-nine cents), and a box of frozen chopped broccoli (fifty-nine cents). With the fifty-four cents left over, I could buy two packs of grape and lemon Kool-Aid or a pack of Wise Crunchy Cheese Doodles as payment for my shopping expertise and culinary services. Sometimes I’d even squeeze a Twix candy bar out of the remaining change.

It was a sharp learning curve, but I wanted to learn. I’d been asking my mother to teach me how to cook since I was nine or ten. Now I was learning under a bit of pressure. Our health and my continued psychological wellness depended on me making food we not only could eat but enjoy as well. By the middle of my second week as 616’s master chef, even Maurice was complimenting me on my skills at the stove and oven. My mother was the only holdout, constantly saying that my food was only “okay,” or “It needs more seasoning,” or that my gravy was “oily and lumpy.”

I did the best I could under these difficult circumstances. My grades remained consistent all year and remained that way even through Regents and finals the third week in June. I managed an 86 on the Geometry Regents despite seeing too many proofs, a 91 on the Biology Regents, and scores in the high-80s and 90s on my Literature and History exams. I got a 73 on my Italian final, a sure sign of things to come with me and Romance languages. My fourth semester GPA was a 4.48, and for the year it was a 4.26. If I could keep this pace up, Humanities in high school would be “as smooth as a milkshake,” as a former classmate would’ve said.

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I’ve added quite a few dishes to my repertoire since ’84. I can make everything from broiled salmon to  veal stew, from wine-drenched pork tenderloin to wok-cooked vegetable fried rice. The most important thing I’ve learned as a cook is the ability to walk in a kitchen, look at a bunch of raw ingredients, and come up with something to cook, without a recipe or without it being something I normally make. I figured out how to make good gravy from scratch one time in ’93 when the only thing I had to work with was water, oil, flour and seasoning. I combined ketchup, soy sauce and chili sauce to make barbeque sauce one day in ’99 when we had only $10 to work with while living in Pittsburgh. Learning this, and that my palate is pretty good in discerning seasonings and tastes, is what makes me as good a cook as I am.
None of this would’ve likely happened, though, without going through those years of malnourishment and wanting for food. None of my ability to cook would’ve been converted to actual cooking without those weeks of cooking in volume for hungry mouths at the end of my freshman year of high school. I likely wouldn’t have finished college or grad school without the ability to cook my own food — it would’ve been too expensive to go to school otherwise. Like reading, critical thinking and creativity, cooking to the point of chef-like ability is a skill that always comes in handy, that makes the most boring of meals worth eating. It also revealed a lot about my character and my sense of initiative than I knew before, especially outside of the classroom.

On Catherine Lacey

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

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Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

This month marks fourteen years since my plans for earning my doctorate were all but assured by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. It was a one-year fellowship, only $15,000, but it meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, that I didn’t have to do grunt work for my advisor Joe Trotter, and that I wasn’t beholden to the history department at Carnegie Mellon for much of anything. It was a great triumph in my little world of graduate school. But of all the things that resulted from that award, one thing that I didn’t count on was another mentor and friend. Without a doubt, Catherine Lacey has had the longest lasting impact on my career and on my thinking, in and out of academia.

Catherine was the Senior Program Officer and Director of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program when I applied for it in the fall of ’94. She had taken over the program in ’93, with the apparent charge of making the program more inclusive and more dynamic for its participants. I’m not sure what the foundation’s dissertation fellowship program was like before. All I know is that Catherine’s seven-year-long tenure running it was one in which she practiced compassion, humility, optimism, and quiet leadership. She never sounded like an academician in directing the work, although she was a bit philosophical at times. She never sounded like a bureaucrat or a senior foundation officer who practiced the power of “No,” even though that was certainly a major part of her job. Almost from my first conversation with Catherine, I realized that she was different from anyone I’d met with an academic background or in the foundation world.

Her background was as a Catholic nun who at one point was a Catholic school teacher, at least through the late ’70s, if I remember correctly. At some point she decided to go back to school, to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Even though she was no longer a practicing nun (whatever I mean by that, I’m not entirely sure), I’m sure that this training and philosophical approach to life and work helped her a lot in her position at the Spencer Foundation. Maybe it was also the fact that she grew up in the Midwest, North or South Dakota I believe. Whatever the case, I think that this combination of experiences made her a more flexible and generous person than most of the foundation program officers and academic bureaucrats I’d met before and have come to know since.

The first time I ever heard from Catherine was right after a two-month research stay in Washington, DC and visit home in Mount Vernon, New York. I’d just come off of weeks in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research collection at Howard University, the Sumner School Archives for DC Public Schools, and several other places doing research on my dissertation topic, multiculturalism in philosophy and practiced among Black Washingtonians. It was the end of March ’95, and it had been five months since I’d submitted my application packet for the Spencer fellowship. When I went to my Carnegie Mellon mailbox in the history department, there it was. A standard #10 envelope with only a one-page letter inside, which I knew because of the envelope’s thinness. I knew it was a rejection letter. Except that it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It had a handwritten note at the bottom of it from Catherine, asking me to give her a call as soon as I received the note.

So I did. Catherine did most of the talking, asking me about my research stay in DC, about my definition of multiculturalism and how it had or hadn’t changed because of my research. Then she talked to me about the selection committee. Apparently out of eight committee members, six voted in favor of awarding me the fellowship, one against, and with one in absentia. The sticking point was how I defined multiculturalism in my research proposal, putting me on the fence between award and no award. Although I would learn later that there were some academic and cultural politics involved in the two non-Yes votes, at the time Catherine told me that she would do everything she could to see if she could still fund my work. “I’m not making any promises,” she said before we got off the phone.

I didn’t know what to make of the call, other than the fact that Catherine cared about funding my work. That it wasn’t everyday that someone with her responsibilities called a student who had technically been rejected was also something I took away from that call. Two weeks passed. On Friday, April 14 of ’95, I got a call at home, right after 9:30 am. I assumed it was my mother or one of my friends. I hadn’t even taken the time to spit and rinse my toothpaste when I answered the phone. After the pleasantries, Catherine excitedly blurted out the good news. And I swallowed my toothpaste in response before asking how and saying thanks.

It turned out that Catherine thought that in addition to the 29 awards that were granted fellowships by the committee, that there were four others (including me) who should also receive the fellowship. Catherine had spent the previous two weeks asking the foundation for additional monies for the other four of us, and found that at least two of the original 29 awardees had accepted other fellowships. As a result, she could then give out four additional fellowships as part of her discretion as the director of the program. I was happy, to say the least about the award. But I was even happier that someone would fight for me and others the way Catherine did.

As a Spencer fellow, I learned a lot from my “fellow Fellows,” as I constantly called our group. That I wasn’t the only one whose advisor was acting as a roadblock toward our degree and career aspirations. That our colleagues on our campuses stared us all down with daggers in their eyes after learning about our awards. That hours upon hours of lonely research and intense writing and editing didn’t make any of our significant others or spouses particularly happy. Still, I learned as much from Catherine as I did from my fellow Fellows. About balance between life and work. About the realization that academia wasn’t our only career option, even as much as we thought it was at the time. That it was all right to feel ambivalent about pursuing an academic career.

This last one was of great importance to me, because my worries about becoming a publish-or-perish professor had always been there. I wanted to do something useful with my degree and life, something to benefit others, something that would allow me to help people who grew up like me, poor, possibly abused, and with the world thinking that I’d sooner go to jail than graduate high school. The one thing that Catherine’s work revealed to me was that it was possible to have a job and career that you could fall in love with, that helps others, and that enabled you to prosper financial. Her job allowed her to do all three, and very well at that.

It was that realization that enabled me to stumble my way into the nonprofit world, doing work on everything from community computer labs and civic education to a social justice fellowship program and education reform work on college access and success. Even after my fellowship ended in June ’96, I kept in contact with Catherine, attended Spencer gatherings and asked for advice. I even took my wife with me on a business trip to Chicago once to, among other things, have her meet Catherine at the Spencer offices in the John Hancock Building. I haven’t had quite the same luck of finding work that is as fulfilling as Catherine’s work was with Spencer. But I haven’t given up trying, and hope that what I have done and am doing does actually help others.

I haven’t talked to Catherine since the end of ’04. Not for lack of trying, though. Catherine decided after two years as a high-level administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that it was time for her to retire, to move back to the Dakotas, to live in seclusion, I guess. She didn’t particularly like Philly, or the grinding work that is almost pure administration. She missed Spencer, Chicago, and all of the people that she had met over the years. I think that the Bush years and 9/11 depressed her greatly

I miss Catherine. I miss asking her advice on everything from my job to whether I should turn Boy At The Window into a fiction novel instead of keeping it a memoir with narrative nonfiction elements (I know, that’s redundant) or even continue to pursue finding an agent. I miss sending her pictures of Noah or talking to her about her days at Spencer. Most of all, I miss telling her how much her friendship and unofficial mentoring have meant to me over the years. To Catherine, and really, all of my friends, many, many thanks.

On People and Stress

28 Saturday Feb 2009

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Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

As February draws to a close, I’m reminded of the fact that, like now, the last days of February in ’89 and ’90 for me represented small yet telling changes in my life. Like buying my first CD player in February ’90. It changed my relationship to music forever, as I never fell behind any trend I wanted to keep up with again. It gave me more opportunities to experiment with and experience jazz, smooth jazz (formerly known as jazz fusion), rap, Latin music, and even grunge. That Aiwa player lasted me through all of grad school, and made it easy to forget that there was ever a time when I didn’t have access to music.

But enough with more pleasant experiences in late February. Overall, the two and a half years between my five days of homelessness at Pitt and a semester of financial woes and the start of grad school were fun times, but were stressful times, with a steep learning curve to boot. Obviously, they weren’t as stressful in most ways as now — but they reflect how my world view began to grow up in the months after recovering from being on the edge of dropping out from Pitt.

By the end of February ’89, I found myself in a bit over my head as a student and worker. It was manageable only because I had already begun the process of leaving all things 616 and Mount Vernon at 616 and in Mount Vernon when I wasn’t home or on one of my weekly phone call listening to my griping mother. Even though I could see that the day was coming when my stepfather would no longer be my stepfather, I had decided to leave that situation be — unless he was attempting to hurt my mother again, of course. It was a pattern that would continue beyond my mother’s second marriage until the summer of ’91, when I had made the switch to Pittsburgh as home. It’s funny to think about now. Having pushed all of my past, my feelings and thoughts about Mount Vernon to the back of my brain stem during those school years. Putting aside what was going on at Pitt during the summers I worked at home.

I did slip up sometimes. I paid a heavy price when I slipped up in Mount Vernon, especially around my mother. I had to explain away my anger, changes in language (it was harder for me to code switch back then), and education whenever I displayed the Pitt version of me. It scared her that I was “puttin’ on airs,” as if I could hide years of accelerated education. It was hard enough hiding my rage against all that had happened at home after ’81.

At Pitt, I acted as if I didn’t have a past before the summer of ’87, so my slip ups were pretty rare. But when I did slip up, it usually involved a woman at some level. The spring of ’89 was no different. I had already set myself up for a rough semester. Sixteen credits of courses in existential philosophy, macroeconomics, Shakespeare, the second half of Biology, and the writing seminar for history majors. The last was a course I’d been advised to wait to take until my senior year. On top of that, I was working for Pitt’s computer labs on a near full-time schedule. From the end of January through the second week in April, I averaged thirty-six hours a week. And all for $4.15 an hour. We were short-staffed, and after a semester of near starvation, I needed the money. That I had a 4 pm to midnight shift at the Cathedral of Learning labs on Mondays and an 8 am Tuesday macroecon lecture on Tuesdays didn’t help — I rarely made it to that class. Other than the occasional outing or movie, I had no social life for most of that jam-packed semester.

It was during my work days that I began working with P. She was a twenty-six-year-old peroxide-blond party girl who’d come back to school and ended up an Information Systems major. Sometimes I ended up paired with her on my Monday evening shifts. I liked talking to her during those shifts to pass the time when I couldn’t concentrate on evolutionary theory in second-semester Bio or didn’t feel like reading more existential philosophy. But I wasn’t interested in her. Despite the fact that she was the first White woman I’d met in Pittsburgh that had anything other than a flat butt and that she’d occasionally said something interesting, P. was out-of-sight and mind when my shift was over.

Three weeks into the semester, the reason we became so short-staffed had thrown a party at his apartment on North Craig in North Oakland. This co-worker had taken a job to work for AT&T somewhere in Virginia, a job that would start at the beginning of March. He wanted to celebrate, so he invited all of us over. I liked the man, so I went. I got there and it was as insane a scene as I’d seen in the dorms my freshman year or with my father at the bars in the city. The place was barely lit. It had this moody dark red glow in his living room, with every other room lit for making out. Booze and boozers were everywhere, and almost everyone was in some phase of inebriation.

I got in, and P. started talking to me all crazy, as if we’d been in conversation about our sexual preferences in the past. I pulled away from her, had conversations with my former computer lab boss and a few co-workers, had a customary drink—my first beer since just before Thanksgiving ’87—and left.

At least I was trying to. As I began putting on my coat and scarf, P. came out and put her arms around my neck and her left leg in between mine, pushing me up against the foyer wall in the process.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, her eyes glazed and bloodshot.

I didn’t say anything, I just tried to get her arms from around me.

“I know you’re attracted to me . . . that you like this White girl,” P. said as she tried to kiss me.

“You’re drunk!,” I said in response as I finally managed to unhook her from my neck and body.

“I might be drunk, but you can still get laid,” she said as I shook my head and left.

I assumed that P. had too much to drink and that what happened at the party was the end of it. It wasn’t, not by a long shot. All through February and early March she worked hard to bait me into conversations that were all about sexual innuendo. During one Saturday project when we were installing new PCs and new software, P. called me a “useless prick.” I responded, “Just because you think you have a nice butt doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be attracted to you!” I pretty much tried to avoid her after that.

That was hard to do, because I worked so many hours that semester, and because our new boss was a high school friend of P. Once I finally cut my hours so I could concentrate on being a student again, at the beginning of April, my boss, who knew what was going on, told me that I had a “bad attitude” and that I needed to settle up with P.

My response was to resign my position before I found myself fired or accused of sexual harassment by the very person who was harassing me. I sent a detailed email at the end of that semester to my boss’ bosses about the incidents with P., about the lack of persons of color on staff, about the state of computing labs at Pitt in general. It made me a bit of a muckraker, but I noticed that there were more students of color on staff when I came back to Pitt that fall.

It didn’t really help my view of White women either. Not that I had formed any real opinion about them. It did make me realize how difficult it would be to be in a mixed relationship, especially in the conservative world of Western Pennsylvania. The race issue and all of the innuendo and stereotypes would likely get in the way, unless both folks in the relationship were far more enlightened than a twenty-six-year-old party girl and a nineteen-year-old discovering himself for the first time. I wasn’t even ready for a relationship with my nerdy yet attractive Black female friends. Anything more complicated, even a one-night stand with a White woman, was the equivalent of achieving peace in the Middle East, that’s how alien it seemed to me at the time.

Still, I was kind of thankful to be done with computing labs and being seen only as a “computer guy.” I had changed my major to history, been journaling on my own for the first time since I was fifteen, began hanging out with a diverse group of friends and acquaintances, and discovered myself as attractive for the first time in years. I left Pitt more content than pissed about what happened that semester. I left that semester knowing that I had the capacity to handle any situation, even the adult ones, as an adult.

To My Ex-Stepfather

29 Tuesday Jul 2008

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

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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.