Tag Archives: Uncle Sam

Too Close for Comfort

30 Friday Dec 2016

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

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Skyline of downtown Houston from Sabine Park, Houston, Texas, July 15, 2010. (Jujutacular via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

Skyline of downtown Houston from Sabine Park, Houston, Texas, July 15, 2010. (Jujutacular via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam are in Houston, Texas/Bradley, Arkansas this week, burying their father and my grandfather, who died ten days ago, just three weeks after his 97th birthday. Given what they’ve told me so far, it seems like they’ve been treated as outsiders by my extended family of uncles, aunts, grand uncles and aunts, and cousins that I barely know or whom I’ve never met. They’ve learned some embarrassing stuff as well, details that I will not go into here. I had been conflicted about going versus not going, especially given that I’d only met my grandfather once, in June 2001, and that wasn’t a pleasant visit, at least environmentally speaking. After the past few days, I’m definitely glad I didn’t go.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam Gill, Jr., Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

My Mom and my Uncle Sam Gill, Jr., Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

I do feel bad for my Mom and Uncle Sam, though. And not just the natural empathy of feeling for your kin when their father passes away either. I feel for them because they are part of a family dynamic that has gone on for nearly a half-century without their input and with a limited bit of shunning as well. Some of this may well be deliberate, but most of this is natural, as time and distance has meant limited understanding and inclusion between my uncles and aunts with the New York Gills since the time of my birth in 1969. But some of this is about embarrassment, too. My Mom and my Uncle Sam’s lives haven’t exactly been a bowl of pitted cherries with whipped cream, either.

This is a topic that I’ve known all too well with my own family over the past three decades. One example would be the next to last day of 1988, the first year in which I rediscovered myself as someone other than an emotionally wounded twelve-year-old. It was a day of both eye-opening lies and hidden truths, a moment of unexpected boldness and moments of seeing familiar faces and places with different eyes.

It was the day my friend and former high school classmate Laurell decided to pick me up from 616 to spend time with her, as well as her friend Nicole, our former eighth-grade Algebra teacher Jeanne Longerano, and eventually, our mutual acquaintances JD and Josh. It was a day I was forced to code switch, to traverse my 616 world, my former Humanities world, and maintain my new conception of myself at the same time. It wasn’t exactly my Miles Davis moment:

screen-shot-2016-12-30-at-11-01-32-am

What I discuss in different parts of Boy @ The Window, but not in this particular scene, was the exact nature of “too disgusting” at 616. Let’s see. Blotches of gray and black stains on a salmon-colored area rug around a 19-inch television set in the living room. On top of the rug was my then stepfather Maurice who was laid out in nothing but his size-54 underwear. This meant that most of his 400-plus pound fatty bulk was exposed for anyone to see. A cobble of broken down sofas, busted chairs, and a

Deepwater Horizon oil spill aerial, Gulf of Mexico, May 6, 2010. (Reuters/Daniel Beltra via Flickr, http://motherjones.com).

Deepwater Horizon oil spill aerial, Gulf of Mexico, May 6, 2010 (same color as area rug with stains). (Reuters/Daniel Beltra via Flickr, http://motherjones.com).

kitchen table with hanger wire connecting each of its three remaining legs to the tabletop. Kitchen, hallway, and bathroom walls stained with grape jelly, crayons, and even feces. Dust balls the size of Matchbox cars in the hallway, lined up as if in rush-hour traffic. And the never-ending smell of cigarette smoke, overused cooking oil, and farts from eight human beings between the ages of four and forty-one. Seriously, what would anyone else have done under the circumstances, especially now that I was a fully awake college-aged student? I wasn’t acting just out of embarrassment or just to protect my Mom from embarrassment. I was acting to protect Laurell as well.

Contrast 616 with what happened next on December 30, 1988, between The Price is Right’s first Showcase Showdown and the end of The Bold and the Beautiful on CBS (roughly, between 11:25 am and 2 pm):

screen-shot-2016-12-30-at-10-05-18-am

Afterward, we went down the street to the nearest pizza shop, and hung out until midafternoon, telling each other what we thought would be the best thing to say. Even me. I didn’t talk about homelessness, or a semester without money for food, or living in a deathtrap in the South Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Laurell did give me a heartfelt hug after dropping me off at 616, still puzzled about why I wouldn’t let her and Nicole visit with my family. Hopefully, after years as a high school math teacher, she understands better now.

Biohazard symbol (orange), May 29, 2009. (Nandhp via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Biohazard symbol (orange), May 29, 2009. (Nandhp via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Even though my Mom and Uncle Sam are obviously just as much Gill as the rest of my extended family in Texas, Arkansas (and Washington State, Louisiana, and elsewhere), they’re not part of the everyday that my other uncles, aunts, grand aunts and uncles, and cousins have had with each other for decades. So the extended Gills cannot see my Mom and my uncle and their struggles the same way they see their own. Nor can my extended Gills see those things that may be embarrassing to my Mom and my uncle the same way either. It makes for a bewildering family dynamic. And this in many ways explains well why so many families have a hard time being families, in the closeness (and closest) meaning of the word.

Dysfunction is so much a part of families these days. but even in dysfunction, you can learn truths about yourself, especially in moments of life, death, and in my case, rebirth.

Poverty, Violence and PTSD – But What About Racism?

07 Monday Jul 2014

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

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Chicago Police fatally shot a 16-year-old boy in the city’s Gresham neighborhood Saturday night and distraught family members are questioning the incident, July 6, 2014. (http://nbcchicago.com).

Chicago Police fatally shot a 16-year-old boy in the city’s Gresham neighborhood Saturday night and distraught family members are questioning the incident, July 6, 2014. (http://nbcchicago.com).

Over the past two weeks, thanks to Chris Hayes’ reporting on the state of Chicago for MSNBC, not to mention a horrific July 4th weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s lie of declining violent crime in the metropolis has been thoroughly exposed. In the past eighty-four hours, dozens of shootings in Chicago injured at least sixty people, with between nine and eleven killed. Six of these shootings involved the Chicago PD, as they killed two teenagers over the weekend. But if we leave it to the mainstream media and the moralist Black elite to explain, the Blacks on Chicago’s South Side are just immersed in a “culture of violence.” Black youth simply live careless, nihilistic lives, that “gang, drug, [and] gun violence” is the root of the problem

For those White, bright, and bi-racially White, though, there’s the knee-jerk reaction of media and caring adults that comes with it. For mass shooters apparently with much better aim than folks in Chicago, like Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Wade Michael Page, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, mental health and mental illness, along with gun control, is the mainstream media’s topic of the day. Even their explicit racism and misogyny can become the media’s evidence for their mental illness. White and Black moral leaders don’t then speak of cultural deficiencies or of an enjoyment of crime and violence as reasons for their shootings.

It’s terrible that we afford one group of young men every benefit of the doubt because they were/are affluent or White, and the deny humanity of another because they were/are poor and Black or Brown. Yet recent sociological and psychological studies indicate what anyone who has lived in poverty and with violence has at least sensed throughout their lives. That many (if not most) growing up in these conditions experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), leading to more poverty and violence in adulthood.

I know this better than most. Below is a short sample of the violence I witnessed or experienced from birth through adulthood:

September ’70 – my father, drunk and jealous, attempted to attack my mother with a knife. My Mom with me and my brother Darren in tow, picked up a heavy quartz crystal ashtray and threw it at my father as he charged her in the kitchen. He was apparently struck in the head and knocked unconscious. The ashtray had detached the retina in his left eye, which he never had repaired. Nine years later, my father had to have his left eye removed. I don’t remember this attack or my Mom defending herself — I was all of ten months old. I do remember my father’s eye being removed, and the headache and vertigo he had prior to the surgery in the summer of ’79 The research indicates, though, that there would have been a psychological impact on me and my nearly three-year-old brother nevertheless, and not a good one at that.

July ’75 –  from Boy @ The Window

Screen shot 2014-07-07 at 1.08.28 PM

December ’76 – when my father stomped in a brand-new glass coffee table and had to go to the hospital with several serious bloody cuts in his legs.

April ’77 – when my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father after his months of psychological and abuse toward my Mom had landed her in Mount Vernon Hospital with kidney problems.

April ’82, May ’82, July-August ’82 – my then stepfather beating me up in a Karate studio in front of a group of men because I refused to call him “Dad,” beating up my Mom for not “lovin’ him,” and beating me up for the first six weeks of my summer between seventh and eighth grade for me defending my Mom.

January ’86 – the last time my stepfather actually laid a fist on me, damaging or chipping three of my front teeth and busting my lip in the process.

June ’89 – the last fight between my Mom and my stepfather, where the same crystal ashtray my Mom used in ’70 easily could’ve fractured her jaw and left cheekbone. Thankfully, my then stepfather had terrible aim.

If it were just a matter of domestic violence and child abuse for me alone, that would be tragic, but not necessarily relevant. The violence of 616 East Lincoln Avenue, sadly, wasn’t contained to A32. Domestic violence was the way of the A-building at 616, starting with our adjacent next-door neighbors. In the two-bedroom department immediately below us, the husband and wife had a violent, alcoholic relationship, so bad that it was a rare weekend in the years between ’77 and ’87 where a plate or wine glass didn’t break or the police weren’t called. Their son once pointed a gun at me on my walk up the front steps of 616 when I was a senior in high school and claimed he’d secretly pointed a gun at me in the past. Muggings and robberies, including the four that I experienced, were as common as the common cold

At the near-door apartment building, 630 East Lincoln, the drug trade had been alive and well years before the arrival of crack cocaine. Fights involving knives and baseball bats were normal, often involved a crowd of kids as spectators. Sometimes these fights would spill onto the front lawn of 616’s A-building, where I could witness it first-hand.

That violence was a frequent companion in my life wasn’t surprising. I never lived anywhere growing up where the majority of the people around me weren’t welfare-poor, working-poor or working-class Blacks, where the heating oil came in time for winter, and where maintaining mental health was a topic of conversation. To act as if employment practices, education policy, public health access, police neglect or brutality or housing policies had nothing to do with the sheer concentration of poverty and violence around me would be at the least naive. Fundamentally, it was the benign neglect in the chain between individual racial assumptions, the soft bigotry of mainstream media, and the hard concrete of structural racism in play.

What was my constant companion growing up in Mount Vernon, New York has remained the story of poverty, race and violence in Chicago’s South Side for a century. Don’t feel sorry, for me or for all of those shot up in Chicago this past July 4th weekend. Do something, say something, or don’t. But feeling sorrow without saying or doing something about shouldn’t be an option.

Visiting My Uncle Paul in Georgia

31 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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Stone Mountain Park, lake side view/photo (was within visual range on the road side view of Confederate-ana back in '94), Stone Mtn, GA, May 31, 2014. (http://new.gwinnetteconomicdevelopment.com/).

Stone Mountain Park, lake side view/photo (was within visual range on the road side view of Confederate-ana back in ’94), Stone Mtn, GA, May 31, 2014. (http://new.gwinnetteconomicdevelopment.com/).

The second leg of what would eventually be five visits with my extended Gill and Collins families as an adult occurred the month after meeting much of my extended Gill family in Houston in April ’94. This second visit was very different from the first. It was part of a three-city trip, between research for my dissertation in DC (and a visit with my friend Laurell in the process) and going up to Mount Vernon to visit my Mom and siblings. Plus, like the Houston-New Orleans trip, I’d come to the Atlanta area to present at a conference, one at the University of Georgia on the 40th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

I’d been invited to talk about multiculturalism as it related to desegregation in terms of curriculum by Layli Phillips, then an Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Psychology at the Athens campus, about sixty miles from my uncle’s place in Gwinnett County. It was an invite and acceptance my advisor Joe Trotter wasn’t happy about, as it was “too soon” for me to discuss my topic “in front of strangers.” But Phillips had already bought the round-trip tickets for me to fly from DC to Atlanta, and then from Atlanta to LaGuardia, per my request. Oh well!

I came to Hartsfield all tired and stuffed up from hay-fever-heavy DC that Saturday afternoon in mid-May, a couple of days before my UGA presentation. There, I met my Uncle Paul right at the gate, along with his seventeen-year-old son. Like my Uncles Sam and Robert, Uncle Paul was taller than me, a still wiry six-five at thirty-eight, still fit enough to stop, pop and hit a J despite his swollen knees. His son was built just like him, and a star basketball player at his high school in Gwinnett County.

They didn’t give me any time to rest. I was immediately taken to their two-bedroom apartment in some off-the-main route beaten path, a gated community with stucco walls and plastic pink flamingos to boot. There, I’d also meet one of my uncle’s girlfriends, an older woman who apparently understood that my Uncle Paul wasn’t exactly ready to settle down.

My Uncle Paul’s playing days in Houston (college and NBA) and overseas had ended long before I’d learn how to shoot a J myself. He’d gone back to school — specifically ITT Technical Institute — in the mid-1980s and become an A/V expert who specialized in special effects, including laser lights, smoke and other technologies meant to enhance the concert-going experience. He’d worked before on tours, with Earth, Wind + Fire (when Maurice White was still healthy enough to tour) and New Edition. That’s how our family learned that Johnny Gill was a distant cousin, as his great-grandmother and my great-grandmother were sisters, one staying in the Texas-Arkansas area, the other moving to Seattle for some reason or other.

Panoramic pic of the Georgia Dome, Atlanta, GA (where was on the left of the field back in '94), August 30, 2008. (Latics via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Panoramic pic of the Georgia Dome, Atlanta, GA (where was on the left of the field back in ’94), August 30, 2008. (Latics via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

There was a jazz and blues extravaganza going on at the Georgia Dome in downtown Atlanta that evening, and so within hours of landing, we were back in the heart of the city, setting up equipment on what normally was the playing field for the Atlanta Falcons. I was so mesmerized thinking about losing a football in the lights of the Georgia Dome that my uncle yelled at me to “get my ass in gear,” because he needed help unloading some heavy equipment. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the quality of music, but having a backstage view of the whole thing, and to see what my uncle Paul did for a living, I was truly, truly impressed.

That Sunday I spent in my uncle’s home, hearing about his playing days, his knee issues, his knowledge of basketball as a game, his travels to play in Europe, and indirectly, his sexual conquests. That last part I could’ve done without — I’d spent two days hearing the same thing from my other uncles the month before. Then he grilled me with questions about Mount Vernon, about New York, about why I didn’t play sports, about “the chicks in college.” My Uncle Paul assumed, incorrectly, that living in New York was heaven compared to being tenant farmers in southwestern Arkansas, and that I was in grad school for the sex. “I wouldn’t have made it to where I am if that was what it was all about,” I said in shocked response.

Waffle House, off UGA's main campus (and across street from seedy motel I stay in night before conference), Athens, GA, June 1, 2011. (http://www.123rf.com).

Waffle House, off UGA’s main campus (and across street from seedy motel I stay in night before conference), Athens, GA, June 1, 2011. (http://www.123rf.com).

He made a jambalaya dinner for us and his lady friend, all the while talking about each other’s work. My uncle’s son was bored to tears. Then, after dinner, and after his girlfriend had left and his son had gone to hang out with friends, my uncle took me out in his vintage Porsche 911 (it had been covered in the parking lot up to that point) to some high-class, late-night, members-only club somewhere in Gwinnett. Between him doing somewhere around eighty in a fifty-five and taking me to this place to “meet a girl,” I was in more shock. “I like looking for women on my own, thank you very much,” I yelled through the Mary J. Blige at one point.

I went off that Monday morning to Athens for the Brown Decision conference, and was gone for thirty hours. I did get a ride back from a presenter, and then a ride back my uncle’s place. That’s when I walked into the place to see my cousin on the black-leather living room couch, stripped down and on top of a young woman. He only stopped when I yelled for a second time, “I’m back!” Then, the proverbial scattering of two youngins’ caught up in lust occurred. They left, presumably to finish what they had started.

I left for New York that Wednesday morning, having enjoyed my time with my Uncle Paul, but also seeing some downside to a lifestyle that left him busy and his son without supervision. That some dumb thug killed my cousin four years later was still very much a surprise, as he wasn’t a violent person, at least the person I met in ’94. I felt so horrible for him and for my Uncle Paul, as I couldn’t imagine the totality of the pain of such a tragedy.

But good, bad or otherwise, it felt good to get to know my people, my family. I’d grown up with a family that was one in name only. Poverty, religion, abuse had all rendered the meaning of family useless for me growing up, and seeing more examples of the same thing in my time in Mount Vernon didn’t help. I knew that my Uncle Paul wasn’t perfect. Nor were my uncles in Houston. But I knew they loved each other, had dreams and plans for their lives, and had acted on many of these things in living their lives. I knew that I needed to keep doing the same.

Boy, Interrupted

16 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, race, Religion, Youth

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Oz (HBO series) wallpaper, July 15, 2012. (http://blabla-series.com).

As I continue on my blogger’s journey reliving parts of my summer of abuse from thirty years ago, I’m reminded of some simple truths. That in terms of time, while I certainly remember everything that happened to me in July ’82, I don’t remember being outside the confines of 616 at any point during that month, even during those times when I actually was. Mount Vernon had become my prison. I don’t recall a single moment of laughter or goofiness, a single song or thought beyond surviving my ordeal. It was as if someone had kidnapped and then tortured me for five weeks. It was the longest interruption of my higher ordered thinking that I can remember.

Not only did my stepfather Maurice/Judah forbid me from the outdoors or from reading because I refused to acknowledge him as my father, but he forced me to do every conceivable household chore (see my “Whipped And Beaten” post from earlier this month). He invented them on a whim to keep me busy every day. His justification, of course, was the Torah. “Honour thy father and thy mother…” was what I’d allegedly violated as a sinful Hebrew-Israelite. I scrubbed behind our two refrigerators on a Saturday afternoon in mid-July — our so-called Sabbath day — while they were turned on, burning myself on coils and cleaning walls with plain water. I whitewashed the bedroom, living room, foyer, and hallway walls on Saturdays and other days, again without any soap or other cleansers.

Maurice inspected my work for any mistake, and if there were any, I’d get beat with a belt or punched in the chest or gut and would have to start the whole thing all over again. All while he laid on his unemployed ass farting and watching the ’30s Tarzan movie series starring Johnny Weissmuller on WNEW-Channel 5. On a Sanyo TV set my father Jimme had bought us the year before, just before his Louisville Slugger incident! I scrubbed those kitchen walls as if I were scrubbing Maurice with a steel rake tipped with Brillo pads. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have anything but water to clean them with.

A modern jail cell (numbering modified by author), Brecksville, Ohio PD, January 3, 2006. (Andrew Bardwell via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

Both Jimme and my Uncle Sam tried to see me during this torture. My stepfather threatened to kill Jimme, practically running him off. I got in trouble for chasing after my father down East Lincoln Avenue after Maurice threatened him. Maurice yelled at me, “If you go after him, you betta keep goin’!” Mom stopped my Uncle Sam from confronting my stepfather about his abuse of her and me when he came over for a visit at the end of July. He was obviously frustrated beyond belief. Uncle Sam said, “Don’t expect me to keep comin’ over here while that son-of-a-bitch’s still here!”

I was completely exhausted by then. I dreamed every day of slaughter. I thought about cutting up my stepfather in his sleep with a steak knife and feeding him to wild dogs. I’d start with his balls, then his whale-blubber belly, and then his throat. Then I would stuff his balls down his throat. These wonderful thoughts probably kept me from committing suicide.

Despite it all, the idiot had failed to break me. Off and on throughout my month of torture, I did think of Crush #1. She’d sometimes show up in my dreams. Or I’d think of her as I walked the streets of North Side Mount Vernon, as I passed her  block near East Prospect, on the way to pick up a new stroller for Yiscoc or to go to Waldbaum’s or some other grocery store. Then I started thinking that this was a pitiful waste of time. After all that had happened, there was no way someone as great as Crush #1 would ever be interested in me, I thought one day at the end of July, just a couple of days before my five weeks of continual abuse had ended.

I assumed that I was damaged goods, a person no self-respecting individual would see as having any value. Kids, even poor kids, made fun of me all the time, my religion was a sham since my stepfather had become a worse person, Mom was making dumb decisions, and my grades despite my end-of-the-year rally didn’t meet my usual standards. It was July ’82 and I didn’t know if I’d make it to my thirteenth birthday.

I was so stressed out that I hadn’t noticed that I was in the midst of growing four inches in two short months. I missed my foot growing a full size in a span of a month, my first pubic hair growth. I even masturbated without knowing what it was I was doing, having made it my way to release all of my fear and stress. If a psychiatrist had evaluated me on July 16 of ’82, they would’ve put me on antidepressants. That’s how out of sorts I was.

Graduation

19 Saturday Jun 2010

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Me and My Uncle Sam, June 18, 1987. Source: Donald Earl Collins

Twenty-three years on, as the British would say. To think that it’s been that long since the Class of ’87’s graduation from Mount Vernon High School. Wow. I’ve talked about various aspects of the last days of my time at MVHS, in Humanities and in Mount Vernon already. This one’s only about the actual ceremony.

My high school graduation ceremony at Memorial Field in South Side Mount Vernon went well enough, except it didn’t. It was a hot, hot mid-June day, about eighty-seven triple-H degrees. It was likely hotter for the guys, as many parents — my mother included — made us wear suits underneath our heat-absorbing burgundy polyester gowns. The girls, at least, wore yellow, the other school color for caps and gowns. It was a good day all right. Except that an eighty-eight year-old White guy stole the show. George Gibson graduated with our class, having fulfilled his requirements for a high school diploma some seven decades later than the kids from his generation. At least the few who made it to high school back then, as most kids in early twentieth-century never made it past middle school.

My father Jimme showed up to the ceremony drunk as a skunk. My mother and my Uncle Sam, whom I hadn’t seen in almost three years, had to keep him from insulting the other parents. In retrospect, in might’ve been good to take him Capozzola, Prattella and Estelle Abel’s way. Valedictorian and salutatorian got the opportunity to represent our class on stage, each giving overworked  and unimpressive speeches. That wasn’t bad, for they had stolen the show the week before at MVHS’ Honors Convocation. That was the good thing about the old White guy. Local TV news covered Gibson instead of the Class of ’87’s top two students, which I laughed about when I watched the 11 o’clock news later that evening.

The picture with me and my Uncle Sam was the first non-school related picture I had taken in something like eight or nine years. Who knew that it’d be the last picture taken of me in Mount Vernon for the next two decades? If I’d known that twenty-three years ago, I would’ve bought a camera that spring, at least before graduation.

After throwing our burgundy and yellow caps in the air, we went over to our now former classmates — who were now friends, lovers, acquaintances, and in some cases, foes — to say good-bye, to embrace and hug, to cry and scream and dance and twirl around in the air with. Afterward, I walked home, minus family and friends, trying to make sense of the moment. Not fully realizing that the moment we threw our caps in the air, Mount Vernon was no long my home, and I was no longer welcome.