Out There In The World

13 Saturday Dec 2014

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcoholism, Camping, Camping Trip, Drug Abuse, Drugs, Father-Son Relationships, Mother-Son Relationship, Overnight Stays, Pam, Walks

Last week, my son went with his classmates on his first overnight trip without me or his mother, a middle school “camping” trip in the forests of Montgomery County, Maryland. He was gone fifty-two hours, just a bit more than two days, checking out wildlife and sitting around a campfire. My son came back on his bus, worn out with equally worn out sneakers and clothes, smelling of river and bad cafeteria food. Boy did I miss him. But at least I knew where he was, more or less.

Some of the dorms at Lathrop E. Smith Environmental Education Center, Rockville, MD, December 12, 2014. (http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

I did no such trips like the one my son did until the day I went off to Pittsburgh and college, some twenty-seven years ago. Let me repeat. Not one overnight trip on my own or with my classmates growing up. The closest I came to being out in the world, other than my 10,000 walks to the store or up Route 22 or down in the Bronx, was in the years my father Jimme would take me and my older brother Darren for a day, only for it to turn into a weekend. With a couple of exceptions, all of these extended excursions occurred before we started working with our father in the city in the fall of ’84. Most of them happened before I turned thirteen and had to resort to hunting down my father every Friday or Saturday for a few extra dollars, for me and for helping out my Mom.

At least a dozen times between April ’79 and September ’84, we ended up with Jimme overnight. In the days without cellphones and with my father never having his own landline, he’d and we’d have to call my Mom from a pay phone to let her know how we were. There were plenty of those nights in which I didn’t want to call my Mom or go home.

Lionel Richie on a mock-missing-person’s flyer, March 20, 2011. (Chris Glass/Flickr.com).

This despite the fact that every time we did an overnight or, on three occasions, back-to-back overnights, Jimme was lit. How it happened depended on at what point during the weekend he’d pick us up. If my father came over early enough on a Friday evening to take us out for a pizza or Mickey D’s or a movie, he’s sometimes have a Miller or a Schlitz with him, in his coat pocket, ready to drink after the sober version of himself had picked us up from 616. Or, much more often, Jimme would fulfill his Saturday fatherly duties by picking us up, usually between 10 am and 1 pm, take us out to eat, and then swing by one or more of his drinking buddy’s places, where he could get his fill of beer or malt liquor, move on to stronger stuff, and lose track of time.

Ida’s place, Lo’s stoop, Pam’s den, it really didn’t seem to matter to our father. These were his easy places to drink, to hang out, to tell the world how much of “a big shot” he was. All the while, money would spill out of his pocket, scooped up by his hosts to cover groceries, rent, mortgages, car notes, and street drugs. But we didn’t really notice that until I hit thirteen.

Our last extended weekend with Jimme was in August ’84, right after my j.v. football tryouts, just before the start of tenth grade. We went over to Pam’s apartment off South Fulton, just a couple of blocks away from Adams Street, where we had lived as a family before I started kindergarten. Those days were long off by now. Instead, I saw my father in a completely sloshed state, really, for the first time, with the mind of an adult. Pam, for her part, was wasted, on some form of cocaine, crack or powdered, I didn’t know for sure.

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (2009), screen shot of him drinking, drooling, December 3, 2010 (http://dudleydoody.com).

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (2007), screen shot of him drinking, drooling, December 3, 2010 (http://dudleydoody.com).

By the end of the day that last Saturday in August, he could barely stand up. Pam had some music on, Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” as it was in the middle of the bridge portion. While it was playing, Jimme tried to dance to it, with a thick string of drool hanging from him bottom lip and all the way to his right pant leg. He stumbled to his left, then his right, as the song went, “dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, du-du-dat-dat-dun-dun-dun,” via a guitar string and a synthesizer. We had to sit him down on Pam’s ’70-style couch to let him snore and drool for an hour and a half before taking him back to his place that Saturday evening. On the way out, we bumped into my classmate Dahlia and her grandmother. They lived in an apartment complex across the street. How embarrassing!

We didn’t call my Mom to let her know what was going on. So when we came home late that Sunday afternoon, she was pissed. But she didn’t seem that concerned about her safety. Instead, it was all about, “What? You think Jimme’s a good father now?” and “I need someone around here to go to the store.”

As much as I loved my Mom, she didn’t realize that we needed moments to escape, even if it meant being with our alcoholic father and being around his equally drug-addled friends. Those were our overnights before we reached adulthood.

My One and Only College Visit Before College

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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

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"Party All The Time" (1985), Black Males, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Classmates, College Visits, Concordia College, Eddie Murphy, HBCUs, Humanities, Rick James, Self-Discovery, Walks

Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, November 5, 2013. (http://concordia-ny.edu).

One of the many pitfalls of poverty in the midst of striving toward college was that I didn’t do a single formal college visit prior to taking the Amtrak to Pittsburgh in late-August ’87. (Ironic, then, that I’ve been on at least sixty college campuses to teach or lecture, for graduate school, for conferences, talks, interviews and other events in the past quarter-century). The only options for doing any college visits at all while at Mount Vernon High School (NY) were either the schools in the area or to go on the HBCU college visit trips to Howard and Hampton University. I had no interest in applying to an HBCU (which I’ll talk about later), and the prospect of visiting Columbia or NYU never really occurred to me until years later.

But I did have one inadvertent encounter with a college campus prior to arriving at Lothrop Hall on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus in ’87. It was in the fall of ’85. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I discovered something rather interesting about myself toward the end of the year. I understood, maybe for the first time, how much walking and nocturnal self-pleasure had replaced sitting on the radiator at the living room window as my after school and weekend distraction. Walking allowed me to continue to contemplate my future, to make sense of my senseless world. Very early on in my junior year, I went on a Saturday walk straight up Route 22, from East Lincoln and North Columbus. I ended up at Concordia College in Bronxville, a small liberal arts school in the middle of one of the richest towns in America. It was a cloudy and crisp early fall day, those first series of gray days you experience after a long, hot summer. I wore my gray hooded and zippered sweat jacket with my beat-up multi-colored and checkered long-sleeve shirt and some cheap, made-in-Taiwan blue jeans.

Even with that and my tall, Black male self on a mostly White campus, I seemed to blend in. Not a single person looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. Some of the students actually said “Hi” to me, and not that overly enthusiastic greeting, either. I walked across the campus, walked into some of the buildings and walked around some of the empty classrooms. After a bit more wandering around, I ended up at the library. It was surprisingly small, but the books it did have were the kinds I used to like reading. Old and dusty historical texts and subjects of interest only to old writers and historians. I saw students at tables studying or talking softly while studying. Then it dawned on me why the students didn’t automatically assume that I wasn’t a college student. I was dressed like they were, or,I guess, they dressed like me. Sloppy, but not too sloppy. It also dawned on me that you needed a college ID on the campus in case the guards suspected that you weren’t a college student. So I made my way from the campus and trekked back home.

This was my first and only college visit. And though I hadn’t stopped by the admissions office or spoken with a financial aid counselor, my wandering walk gave me much food for thought. The visit reinforced my thinking on what I needed to do in eleventh grade to guarantee both college acceptance and a scholarship. I assumed an academic scholarship, but an athletic one was still in the realm of possibility. I knew, again, that this was my make-or-break year to bring my grades up as far as possible. I had no idea what my class ranking was, but I assumed that I needed to be in the top fifteen or twenty to have my best shot. So I set the largest goal possible – making it to the top ten of my class.

Eddie Murphy (with Rick James), “Party All The Time” (1985) video (screen shot), November 5, 2013. (http://vimeo.com).

In the back of my mind, I knew even then that I didn’t want to attend a school with any of my classmates or with any reminders of Mount Vernon. So many of my Black classmates were already talking about attending HCBUs or New York area school. I knew that despite their relative maturity as eleventh graders, I didn’t want to be in classroom settings with the Rick James “Party All The Time” set or with White and Black classmates who thought of me as a caricature of a human being or Black male.

That walk to Concordia reminded me of a simple fact. That my path to college was my path, not to be determined by anyone else, and certainly not the people I didn’t even trust with a smile.

On Hugs and Walks

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Bronxville, Chester Heights, Child Abuse, College Plans, Crush #2, Dreams, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Pelham, Poverty, Puberty, Self-Discovery, Shuckin' an' Jivin', Tuckahoe, Walks

Commodus hugging Maximus as he plunges dagger into back (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution of picture.

The beginning of August for me thirty years ago was the beginning of adulthood for me. I had little choice. After five weeks of emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual abuse, my choices were to either allow myself to be broken or to find something to hope for. Otherwise, my life would’ve been over before my thirteenth birthday.

I thought hard about how to end the summer of ’82’s abuse. I figured that I could pretended to be something I wasn’t — a loving, wayward stepson. I begged for my stepfather’s forgiveness and even called him “Dad” while he beat me for the sixth time in a month, on August 1, ’82. He stopped, finally, and gave me a hug. I cried tears of rage and hate, because I couldn’t even stand to touch or smell the man, much less being pressed against his overabundance of fat. I prayed for his death to be long and painful, as if I had a dagger in my right hand, ready to plunge into his back left ribs.

Dagger through back rib and heart (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution of picture.

If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on a boring early August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616. We walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

“We don’t know where we’re going,” Darren said.

“Yeah, and?,” I said in response.

“Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,” Darren said.

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, August 1, 2012. (http://slc.edu). In public domain.

We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester, and then Bronxville. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into several ritzy communities without any warning.

I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. “Look at these houses!,” I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, “I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.” Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

As we meandered our way back toward Mount Vernon, we ended up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22. That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was “P,” my eventual Crush #2, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere down South to visit family.

“Do you live around here?,” P asked.

“Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said.

“Okay,” she said in response.

The Denzel Washington Walk, American Gangster (2007), August 1, 2012. (http://variety.com)

“In the neighborhood.” Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, were all one gigantic neighborhood! After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing my eventual Crush #2 and her sister than I was.

I wasn’t unexcited. P was far and away the nicest person to me in 7S all year. She stepped up when others made fun of me. I just took her being nice to me the same way Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie probably took it when Mrs. Olsen was nice to her.

Still, I finally had a plan. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, though. But in looking at where P and her sister lived, I at least knew that someone in their family must’ve taken similar steps in the not-too-distant past.