Stinking Up The Joint

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

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

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Brandon Lee, Classmates, Deodorant, Geometry, Gym Class, Humanities, Looney Tunes, Louis Cuglietto, Pepe Le Pew, Poverty, Puberty, Smell, Speed Stick Deodorant, Stench, Stick, Swimming, The Crow (1994), Tough-Love, Underarm Stench, Underarms

Pepe Le Pew stinking up the flowers, April 15, 2014. (Chuck Jones/WB, via http://www.animationartwork.com/). Qualifies as fair use because of picture’s low resolution and related subject matter.

Puberty is often a confusing and scatterbrained time even for the most well-adjusted of folks. Changes in body chemistry, hair growth, body parts, height, weight and sleep patterns are all part of this excruciating rite of passage. When thrown in with the realities of poverty and the cruelty of Humanities and Mount Vernon High School, puberty was also a long march of embarrassing moments.

One of my last embarrassing moment strictly thanks to puberty came around this time three decades ago. It was an unusually warm early April Tuesday in ’84, one in which I was hardly prepared. I’d just started using deodorant the year before, once spring had sprung in ’83, with basketball and softball as a regular part of gym class. In gym for ninth grade, we were in the swimming pool for March and April.

We just happened to be out of deodorant at 616 while I was in the midst of this class. It wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except for the fact that the cool weather of early spring had given way to a sudden heatwave, bringing temps into the upper seventies the second week in April. On that fateful Tuesday, I tried one of my Mom’s home remedies, and put a baking soda paste on my armpits, hoping to conceal my still new manly smell.

Well, it actually did work, at least from periods one through six. Then it was time for gym. I didn’t count on the fact that the high level of chlorine in the pool would completely wash away my makeshift deodorant. Nor did I consider that the swimming pool area would be about ten degrees warmer than it was outdoors. Nor did I think about the fact that we ordinary students weren’t allowed to shower after swimming or any other gym activity, for that matter. That was reserved for the school’s athletes — equipment must be protected from the “animals,” as some administrators and parents saw fit to describe us.

Speed Stick (green) deodorant by Mennen, 1980s edition (en Español), April 15, 2014. (http://www.b2bsupply.co/).

So, no deodorant, in a hot area of an already warm school with the air conditioning turned off, and with no opportunity to rinse off — what do you think happened eighth period? I went to Geometry class, completely unable to conceal my underarm stench. From about the second minute on, my equally sweaty classmates complained about “the smell” and “the stink,” all the while, fanning themselves with manila folders. Even with Mr. Louis Cuglietto’s windows open, it didn’t help — there was no wind to speak of.

But of all the sweat and smells, mine was the one that stood out most. Why? Because, despite it all, I remained an engaged student, and raised my right hand to answer questions. Which meant that I raised my right arm, and anyone within a six-foot radius could smell me. After ten minutes of complaints, I put my arms down, and held them close to my body for the remainder of class, looking forward to the end of the school day.

After class, Cuglietto pulled me aside to tell me, “You’re a man now. You need to get some deodorant,” as if he was offering sage advice or tough love. This wasn’t the first time Cuglietto played his version of poor assumptions about race, class and gender, and it wouldn’t be his last. I ignored him, and went on my way home.

But I didn’t stop there. I went over to Jimme’s on South 10th that evening. It was the middle of the week, a time of hungover sobriety for my father, which meant he would be home early from work. I bummed $20 off him while taking a stick of his surplus Speed Stick with me.

Is there a lesson here? Remember to keep deodorant in stock no matter what? Don’t swim with baking-soda-for-deodorant under your arms? That some teachers and classmates wouldn’t understand a moment of my life even if I passed it onto them like Brandon Lee’s character from the movie The Crow (1994)? That I was poor and in puberty, and things like this sometimes happen? Yeah, sure, I guess. The real lesson here is to remember, not for revenge or retribution, but so that younger others like me know that they’re not alone, so that the story can be told, later and better.

First Day of High School, Thirty Years Ago

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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

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Educational Inequality, Educational Leadership, MVHS, Paternalism, Principal Leadership, Principals, Racism, Richard Capozzola, School-to-Prison Pipeline, Tough-Love, Violence, White Paternalism

Oz (HBO) poster, September 5, 2013. (http://www.brain-dead-blog.blogspot.com).

Our/my first day at Mount Vernon High School (New York) was the first Thursday after Labor Day thirty years ago, which means the exact date was September 8, ’83. It was mostly a very good day, except for our third period assembly with then Principal Richard Capozzola. He pronounced at least half of our class dead on arrival not quite two hours into ninth grade. Capozzola said, “There are 1,075 of you here today. Four years from now, only half of you will graduate” from MVHS. It turned out that he was wrong. Only 545 of us were eligible to march by September ’86, and 509 of us ended up doing so in June ’87. Even when accounting for the twenty or so Class of ’87 folks who decided to take their nineteen credits and graduate in ’86 instead of ’87, less than half of our original cohort graduated in years.

In Boy @ The Window and on the five or so occasions I’ve had to talk about the late Richard Capozzola and MVHS, I’ve attributed much of this to “the reality of self-fulfilling prophecies” and “the damage that low expectations can do.” There isn’t a single word that I’d change in my description of Capozzola and in my thoughts about what he said, thirty years ago or right now. When you run a school as if the students are inmates and security act on your behalf as corrections officers, it is really a surprise when students drop out? When your security measures have the effect of increasing tensions so that more fights break out, shouldn’t it mean that the head school building administrator re-evaluate such measures? Apparently not.

That’s the principal and school that I remember outside of my Humanities days. Where girls ripped off each other’s earrings in the process of slugging each other. When witnessing one or two fights a week in building was a normal part of the process. When White potheads would sneak a smoke in between classes in the courtyard, but no security would intrude.

Mount Vernon High School main entrance, Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

I have no doubt that trying to curtail this was a difficult job for any principal in ’83. But MVHS wasn’t Ft. Apache, or Jersey City, or South Central LA in this era. No MVHS student had brought a gun to school to shoot someone, at least in my time there. Short of a Swiss army knife, most students used their words to cut each other down, or in threatening to use a knife, maybe, off school grounds, after school.

Over the past couple of years, I received comments about what I’ve written about my late principal from one of his children, who has repeatedly defended his father as a hero of sorts. He has disagreed, and rather bitterly, about what I’ve written, as if his experience with his father actually negates my experience with him as a principal. As part of my response to Capozzola’s son two years ago, I wrote:

Make no mistake, I for one, didn’t feel one iota safer in my four years at MVHS because of security sweeps, the closing of the courtyard to student use. Not to mention the general feeling I had that people who looked like me — regardless of my grades — weren’t welcome, whether that was intended or not. It’s a bit paternalistic to suggest that a heavy-handed approach to security “saved my life” or led to a national award for educational excellence in 1983 [It was actually a Blue Ribbon School in 1987]. As an educator myself, I know all too well the politics involved in such descriptions of schools like MVHS and with such awards.

Lion eating wildebeest - "animals" was what administrators & White classmates sometimes called MVHS students, but ironically referencing themselves, September 5, 2013. (YouTube).

Lion eating wildebeest – “animals” was what the White administrators & classmates sometimes called MVHS students, but ironically referencing themselves, September 5, 2013. (YouTube).

I’d add to this, though. I don’t really think that Capozzola actually cared about learning or the closing of achievement gap, either, not based on how he treated Humanities. And “tough love and a firm hand?” Really? That’s how you describe a father or an overseer — it should never be how you describe a principal. There was no love in his so-called toughness, and not enough firmness to prevent fights and slights that were a frequent part of my four-year experience at MVHS. And yes, many of MVHS’ students lived in poverty, but there was a sizable number of middle class Black students who attended as well. To forget that would be to, I don’t know, lump MVHS as a monolithic block of Black (and Latino) kids ready to start a riot. How is this different from a stop and frisk policy that targets poor neighborhoods and Black and Latinos between sixteen and thirty?

Which, in the end, is what both the late Capozzola and his son have done, thirty years ago and much more recently than that. To think that I put up with this for four years, at least one year too long. The embedded racial paternalism and institutional bigotry, in their words and deeds — it just takes my breath away.

“I Marched With Dr. Martin Luther King!” – and Other Record Scratchers

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

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

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American Dream, Bill Cosby, Civil Rights Generation, Civil Rights Movement, Disillusionment, Don Lemon, Estelle Abel, March on Washington, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Tavis Smiley, Tough-Love

Dr. Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock leading antiwar protest, Chicago, IL, March 25, 1967. (AP via LA Times).

Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Benjamin Spock leading antiwar protest, Chicago, IL, March 25, 1967. (AP via LA Times).

I’ve posted about my last official contact at Mount Vernon High School in June ’87 before graduating several times, and documented it well. The brow-beating I took from one Estelle Abel moments after my last day and last class of high school was one of the most puzzling and humiliating moments of a long series of them up to that point in my life. As I’ve written in both Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window:

I walked down the second floor steps and the first floor halls of the high schools to my locker one more time. While clearing out my locker, Estelle Abel walked by and asked to meet with me. I went over to her office, and for the next fifteen minutes, she attacked me for being a slacker.

“You’ve been a disappointment, young man,” Abel said.

“What?,” I said, completely shocked.

“Your work this year is nothing to be proud of.”

I stood across from the tall, witchy-looking lady, speechless, but telling her “Fuck you” in my head. Abel claimed that I had underachieved throughout my four years as a student, that I should have been ranked in the top ten of my class, and that my performance in AP Physics was beyond abominable. All I could focus on was the amount of anger and emotion she possessed in her voice and eyes. You’d have thought that I’d been expelled from school or had raped her daughter!

“By you not graduating in the top ten of your class, you’ve let everyone down. Your family, your friends and our community,” she said, as if anyone around here really cared about me.

Abel continued. “You could’ve been a shining example of achievement to us,” all but hinting at Sam as the person I should’ve been like.

I guess I did let my Black classmates down. I only ranked second in GPA among Black males and eighth among all African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in my class. I guess I should’ve been taking out back, blindfolded, with cigarette in mouth, and executed by a firing squad.

Abel finished her soliloquy. “You don’t have any excuses! There is nothing going on at home that could justify your performance!”

“Well, that’s not true…” I interrupted. I felt rage rising up from the pit of my stomach. If she’d been anywhere near my age, I would’ve taken all of the Jimme-ese I knew and laid it all on her stupid ass.

Her face turned stern as she cut me off, determined to make some sort of point, to prove that I was a worthless Black man in her eyes.

“Nothing going on in your life would ever compare to what we went through back in the ’60s . . . I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King!”

My mind clicked off my eardrums at that point. Short of showing her my war wounds and having her meet my family, what could I possibly do or say to that? I left her office feeling like my years at MVHS and in Humanities were just bullshit. Abel’s tirade reminded me of the fact that I simply didn’t fit in anywhere.

What I’ve never discussed in all my posts about Abel and her tough-love speech is how this incident — and others like it — have shaped my thinking about the Civil Rights generation. Those local Urban League or NAACP members who gave talks at MVHS or at Pitt or at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh who said, “I’ve got mine. Now go and get yours” — a reference to businesses, jobs and higher education, as if we were all well financed enough to achieve their American Dream goals. Those usual suspects on the local or national level who gave the same speech year after year about the one time they shook Dr. King’s hand, or about their personal experience at the March on Washington in ’63. As if their experience would be more inspiring than the fact that folks like Medgar Evers and MLK actually gave their lives for the movement.

So many folks like Abel have used their kernels of experience with the March on Washington or the Civil Rights Movement more broadly as a club to beat over the heads of other African Americans, particularly those of us born after 1965. What they thought of as inspiration felt like damnation to me. The idea that nothing was worse than fighting for civil rights in the ’60s would be humorous to the four million slaves who lived in the South 150 years ago. It’s certainly an insult to so many deeply impoverished Blacks, White and other people of color who would have to stretch themselves like Plastic Man just to touch the first rung of the American middle class ladder.

Would I had been able to attend Pitt without a Challenge Scholarship for high-achieving Blacks in ’87? Probably not. Would I had been a part of a gifted-track program for six years without the NAACP filing a desegregation lawsuit against Mount Vernon public schools in ’76? Of course not. But those small windows of opportunity do not a movement make. Nor should it make me forever grateful to folks who considered me a waste of space to begin with — I wasn’t righteously “Black” enough for them, respectable enough for them, and obviously did not come from a home well-resourced enough for them, either.

So what if Abel or anyone else marched with Dr. King? What have you done with your life and for the lives of other since then besides discouraged where you could have encouraged, disillusioned where you could’ve provided comfort, or acted as if people like me owed you libations and gratitude? Estelle Abel represented for me in ’87 what folks like Bill Cosby, Don Lemon, Tavis Smiley and so many others have done in recent years — condemning those most in need of help and inspiration. They’ve all in their words helped turn the most hopeful and rhetorical part of “the Dream” into a nightmare.