My Busing Blues

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Boston, Busing, Classism, Common Ground (1985), Community, Desegregation Orders, Divorce, Economic Inequality, Educational Equity, Friendships, J. Anthony Lukas, Ms. Hirsch, Nathan Hale Elementary, Ostracism, Racism, School Desegregation, Second Grade, William H. Holmes Elementary, Youth

TFD bus (they're still around?), South Side, Mount Vernon, NY, May 25, 2016. (http://zztalon.tripod.com/).

TFD bus (they’re still around?), May 25, 2016. (http://zztalon.tripod.com/).

Schooling and friendships have been the main theme of my posts this month. I find myself in deeper reflection about my years before the Boy @ The Window years these days. Maybe because I’ve come to realize that those years between ’74 and ’81 were far more influential in how I saw the world than I’d previously given credit.

One issue that I think I’ve had insight into for years before actually becoming an educator is busing. Maybe not so much in relation to school desegregation, though. As a seven-year-old, it would’ve been in terms of friendships and belonging. The only time I faced a no-choice busing situation was my last two and a half months of second grade, between April and late-June 1977. My Mom and Maurice had moved in together and moved me and my brother Darren to North Side Mount Vernon and 616, the house of horrors that would become the central locale of my memoir.

The Soiling of Old Glory, Boston, MA, April 5, 1976. (Stanley Forman/Boston Herald American via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to historical important of photo and low resolution.

The only thing I knew of busing before the move from 425 South Sixth to 616 East Lincoln was that Darren had been taking a bus to Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry every school day since my first day of kindergarten in ’74. Also, the images in my head from national news on the three main networks about Boston Public Schools and protests in ’74 and ’75. I had no idea in the spring of ’77 that many White and more than a few Black parents were fighting a desegregation order that required widespread busing in Boston. All I knew at the time was that a lot of angry people with signs and bricks and bottles were on my TV screen at the beginning of September almost every year.

My spring of busing was one of misery. Not because Mount Vernon was under any desegregation order, which it was. Mom had made the decision to not disrupt second grade for me by keeping me at Nathan Hale Elementary, the school that we had lived two doors down from prior to our 616 move. The other option was for me to start at William H. Holmes Elementary five months sooner, so that my transition to third grade would’ve been easier. Thanks, Mom.

Even at the time, I wished she had. Mom had been sick for half that school year. She and my father Jimme were in the midst of a nasty divorce. We had already moved. It made no sense for me to continue to go to Nathan Hale Elementary. I couldn’t stand my teacher Ms. Hirsch. She was the only teacher prior to Humanities, and especially Humanities at Mount Vernon HS, who thought of me and other students as essentially kids without a future. Ms. Hirsch was the only teacher prior to my senior year at MVHS who told me that I wouldn’t “amount to anything.” I hated, hated being in her classroom. It was a feeling I wouldn’t have again until David Wolf and AP Physics my senior year, and even then, that feeling only lasted for forty-five minutes, and even then, it wasn’t with me every day.

By the end of second grade, I was without any friends. Not because I did anything weird, which I’m sure I did. The constant disruptions in our living arrangements meant that I no longer played in the playground next to Nathan Hale after school, where I could hang out with other first, second, and third graders. (I was scared to go there by myself otherwise, anyway — this issue, to be continued.) A bunch of my first grade friends from Ms. Griffin’s class had left during the summer of ’76, leaving Winston, a first grader, as my only friend at Nathan Hale. Yeah, I talked to Lauren and one other girl in Ms. Hirsch’s class, but that was pretty much it.

Now and Later candies, made by Farley’s and Sathers, October 26, 2010. (Evan-Amos/Vanamo Media via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Taking the bus to and from school for those last fifty days or so of school was torture. Not because kids make fun of me, which they didn’t, or because I was part of some experiment related to desegregation, which I wasn’t. I hated the smell, of bubblegum and Now-&-Laters, of sweat from recess and gym, of exhaust fumes from cars because our little TFD bus wasn’t air-conditioned. Mostly, I couldn’t stand the forty-five minutes or hour that it would take to go from 616 to Nathan Hale, picking up kids all through Mount Vernon along the way.

Fourteen years later, in an upper-level US urban history undergraduate course (my last history class before grad school) at the University of Pittsburgh, one of my required readings was J. Anthony Lukas‘ Common Ground (1985), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on busing and school desegregation in Boston. There were so many powerful parts of Lukas’ book that piqued my interest. His coverage of parents from all sides of the busing controversy. The sense that school desegregation was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory legally, but not so much culturally, because of the “hearts and minds” issues around race. What struck me, though, was the limited perspective Lukas provided on kids who had to ride these buses between Black, White, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to get to these schools throughout Boston.

Front cover of Common Ground (1985) by J. Anthony Lukas, September 3, 2014. (http://goodreads.com).

I imagined what it would’ve been like to bus in Boston during my K-2 years. I had it hard enough as a child of abuse and divorce, with a move to an uncertain future, and with at least one teacher who saw me as little more than human garbage. Add screaming and spit-flying from White parents raging over school desegregation? I really could’ve been written off, never having a chance to become a good student, and more importantly, a lifelong learner. Maybe the only lesson I would’ve learned from busing was that Whites against busing have serious high-blood pressure issues. Or, more realistically, that White parents didn’t want me to become friends with their kids.

Either way, Lukas helped me realize, maybe for the first time, how twisted and evil American society would have to be to expose kids to blatant racism and not-so-blatant economic inequalities as demonstrated through busing.

The Fountain of Middle Age

27 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Aging, Back To School (1986), Beauty, Demographics, Family, Fountain of Middle Age, Fountains, Friends, Health, Philadelphia, Rodney Dangerfield, Self-Reflection, Youth

Alexander Stirling Calder’s “Swann Memorial Fountain,” Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA, August 18, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By most measures, today marks my full transition from relative youth to middle age. Although, when I really think about it, didn’t I really hit middle age in December ’07, when I turned thirty-eight? The average life expectancy of an American male is about seventy-seven, right? And for Black males, it’s barely sixty-five. Given my family history, though, I won’t hit middle age for another two years. My maternal grandfather turned ninety-six three months ago, and my paternal grandfather lived until he was ninety-six. Even my father’s still moving along at seventy-five, despite his battle with alcoholism between the ages of twenty and fifty-eight.

I do feel things in my body and mind that until a few years ago were merely minor aches and pains. My right hip is misaligned with my left hip, likely from years of walking at warp speed, lots of basketball, and six years of my running regime. My L-5 vertebrae is a bit compressed, due to years of activity, including many years hunched over a keyboard trying to make myself into a writer, author and educator. My right knee has been a bother since I was twenty-four, but the issue has gotten worse in the past two years (maybe time for some HGH or microfracture surgery?). I now have white-coat syndrome (because most doctors and nurses get on my last nerve), and I’m mildly anemic. No, folks, forty-six isn’t the new thirty-six, even if I can still run forty yards in under five seconds, pop a three over my son’s outstretched hand or leg press 360 pounds.

Me via Photo Booth, December 17, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

But I still have good health and a mostly healthy body and mind. Since I turned twenty-seven, my weight has never been higher than 241 pounds (including clothes, wallet, phone, and keys) or lower than 212 (I weight 229 now). I can still memorize when inspired to do so, remember virtually anything important from my life from the age of four to the present, and could still probably win at Jeopardy if I ever got the call.

What’s more impressive, though, is whom remains in my life now that I’m no longer “young” anymore. My friends live all over the map, from the DC area to Pittsburgh to the Bay Area and New York, from Atlanta to Athens and from Seattle to Shanghai. I’ve made peace (mostly) with my family and my past, even if they aren’t always at peace with me. There’s my wife and son, of course, who are mostly likely the reason I’m still “young” relative to my age. Though I remain a Christian, I do not have the blind faith or evangelical -isms of my youth, and I’m at peace with that as well. I’m probably further to the left culturally and politically than I was at sixteen, twenty-six, or thirty-six. Because I’ve learned, sadly, that so much of what I was taught or fed growing up was either incorrect or a complete lie. But even with that sad disillusionment, I’ve come to accept the possibility of change for myself and the Sisyphean task that this nation and world always has been.

Me at 45 and 364.25 days, Pittsburgh, PA, December 26, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yet even the idea of middle age has changed in the minds of capitalists as the Baby Boomer generation has begun retirement and all of them have received their first AARP cards. Before 2000, the ad folks and entertainment folks had split up adults into the age demographics of 18-34, 35-44, 45-64, and 65 and up. Now, it’s 18-24, 25-54, and 55 and up. This privileges Baby Boomers (as usual) and props up Millennials (folks who used to be Gen Y). My middle age is not the same as Baby Boomers’ middle age. Even in demographic representations, money-grubbing capitalists give us Gen Xers little respect.

Rodney Dangerfield quipped this funny line in Back to School (1986):

Coach Turnbull: What’s a guy your age doing here with these kids?
Thornton (played by Dangerfield): I’m lookin’ for the fountain of middle age.

Maybe when I’m sixty-five (like Rodney Dangerfield was in this film), I’ll be looking for the Fountain of Middle Age, too. But my choice will be to stand in it for the next thirty or forty years!

Randomness & Faith

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Agnostic, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Buddhism, Evolution, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Love, Mathematics, Mystery, Physics, Randomness, Reason, Religion, Science, Scientific Method, The Universe, Youth

Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Today’s my forty-third birthday (at least, as of 8:37 am EST). It means that I’ve been a spiritual believer of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. With so much that has happened in my life, there are many who wonder why I believe in God, or why I’m a Christian in particular. With my expertise as a historian, my background in math and science (and continuing study of such), there have been many who’ve mocked and questioned my faith in anything other than the randomness of the universe. With the world in seemingly endless turmoil, good people maimed and killed, and evil people able to get away with maiming and killing others, there are those who greet any profession of belief in a higher power with anger and bitterness.

To me, that’s too bad. I can see all sides of this argument. I’ve been a Christian for more than twenty-eight years, and before that, an unwilling, if outwardly obvious, Hebrew-Israelite. In that time, I’ve also been an atheist, agnostic and angry, a bit of a Buddhist and a Muslim to boot. I’ve gone years without prayed and prayed at least once every day for nearly twenty years. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least six times in three decades, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. I’ve gone to temple, to Roman Catholic mass, to church, sometimes every week for years, sometimes not at all for years. I’ve had crises of faith and been almost unquestioning in faith over the years.

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

I’m also a believer in science and the scientific method. I realize that even with all of the advances in biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, that there is much more we don’t know versus all that we’ve learned in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that the universe — that life itself — is some random event or a long-chain series of random events. I’m with evolution on everything except the random. I don’t think that the universe can be seen as random. Even as chaotic as our lives may seem, the choices that we make do provide order. It’s never been sheer dumb luck that has determined everything that has occurred in my life, as other people have made their own choices that can easily affect the range of choices in my own life.

Most of all, while I do believe that there are reasons behind the events that occur in our lives and in world, that these reason are neither random nor something that God somehow came down from on high to make possible. Whether it’s Hurricane Sandy or Sandy Hook Elementary School, the civil war in Syria or a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, somehow so many have it that either God’s angry with us or that God allows horrible things to happen to us. Or that there is no God, because a real God would prevent these seemingly random events from occurring at all.

All this proves one thing, and one thing only. That most of us have little understanding of faith, of God, or of the universe itself. Period. Even those of us who are experts in particle physics or theoretical mathematics don’t know enough to dismiss God or to prove their educated guess (otherwise known as belief) in the randomness of the universe. Most of us who do believe in God — at least, those of us who are Christian — treat God as if he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts to keep us in line.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble/ bronze, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I see God in the universe, in the creation and re-creation of life, and yes, even in the various tragic and apparently chaotic events that have occurred in my life and in this world. That I don’t think these events to be random doesn’t make me any less of a thinker. I just don’t accept the blind faith of scientists in the idea that maybe cosmic rays led to the mutations in the primordial soup of our ancient oceans that led to the spark of life and evolution. I also don’t believe that God is simply presiding over every event on our planet and in the universe, making life-and-death decisions that bring pain and anguish to our lives for enjoyment or as a form of punishment.

Rather, God for me has been about living life by principles like social justice, social and spiritual mobility, love, forgiveness, grace and wisdom. Explaining what may or may not be random, each and every conceivable mystery of the universe or of life? I know that this isn’t in the Bible. But I do know that the reasons behind why bad, ugly, even evil things have happened in my life don’t include the “random nature of the universe.” People made decisions, I’ve made decisions, institutions made decisions, that have had an impact on the course, speed and direction of my life over the last forty-three years.

So, even when I’ve found myself angry with God, I’ve also been cognizant of the role all and each of us play in the heaven and hell that tends to be our lives, separate and together, in this world of ours.

Regis and Donald Earl

12 Thursday Jan 2012

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

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Friendship, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Regis, Relationships, University of Pittsburgh, Weird, Weirdness, Youth

Regis & Kathie Lee cover, cropped, People Magazine, September 30, 1991. (http://people.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because picture is cropped and of low resolution.

In a conversation I had with my mother about sixteen years ago, she said, “I always thought that all your friends were weird.” This after having broken up with a girlfriend a few weeks before, my first serious relationship in three years. Thanks, Mom! Of course, a month later, I began dating my wife of nearly twelve years (and yes, my mother thinks that Angelia’s weird, too!).

But she did have a point, albeit a small one. Some nerve, since I’m her son, after all! I had accepted this reality by my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. This after a semester of attempting to be cool, then to not be cool, then to just close myself off out of picking my old Crush #2 scab.

I began my second semester in January ’88, attempting to meet people more like myself, which often meant meeting people a good five or ten years older than me, students comfortable in their own weirdness. The first friend I made this way was Regis. He was a working-class Western Pennsylvanian through and through, with that guttural Pittsburgh-ese accent. Regis said “jag-off” for “jack-off,” “ruff” for “roof,” “yinz” for “you all” or “y’all,” and “dahntahn” for “downtown.”

Regis had been unemployed for nearly a year, laid-off by Westinghouse, where for the previous five years he guarded a boiler room in one of their plants. He was about five-foot-six, constantly scruffy and disheveled, and sometimes looked like he was a step or two away from insanity. Kind of like a Pitt student’s version of Rasputin.

Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), screen shot -- closest approximation to Regis, circa 1988 -- January 12, 2012. (http://examiner.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws due to low resolution and limited use for blog post.

But Regis was a quick study and absolutely enjoyed going to college, as he was a deeply critical thinker. Heck, he was the smartest person I knew during my Pitt and Carnegie Mellon years! As a result, we hit it off right away in our discussion sections on Friday mornings in Western Civilization II. Me and Regis would often gang up on the rest of the class in the discussion of all things Western European-related, from the French Revolution to the connections between the European slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and European imperialism. It was wonderful not being the only oddball in class for a change.

What made us friends, though, had more to do with the fact that Regis didn’t allow himself to be blinded by my attempts to hide the real truth behind my weirdness. He saw through my coping strategies to mask the battering I’d taken from poverty, abuse and Humanities in Mount Vernon. Regis was there for me my sophomore year at Pitt in a way that any true friend would be.

After my bout with homelessness — which I hadn’t told Regis about — I was broke from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Despite my pride and my mother’s constant mantra of not asking for “handouts,” I first asked Regis for help in November ’88. This after he noticed that we weren’t even hanging out at the Roy Rogers in the Cathedral of Learning anymore.

“To be honest, I’ve only had $205 to my name since September,” I said.

“How’ve you been making it?,” Regis asked.

“Spaghetti one week, pork neck bones and rice the next, tuna fish after that. I’m now down to peanut butter sandwiches,” I said.

“What’s ‘pork neck bones’?” Regis asked, with this incredulous look on his face.

After explaining the intricacies of my diet and poor people’s cooking — especially since this was the first time I’d eaten any pork in seven and a half years — Regis finally said

“I don’t have much, but I can at least bring you some bread and a potata. We don’t want you out here starvin’,” having patted me on my right shoulder as our conversation ended.

Sure enough, later that week, Regis actually gave me some bread and a small sack of potatoes. It would’ve been enough to make me cry, but I was too hungry and tired to do much more than say a weak “Thank you.” That, and make the most of four days’ worth of Russet potatoes.

Regis was in my circle on other matters that semester. We talked, mostly about his Heidegger course, a scary existential philosophy course for anyone to take. I heard so much from Regis about Heidegger’s Being and Time that I felt like I was in the course. Whenever the subject came up, he was always like, “So you got a hot date tonight, right?” No excuse was good enough for him, whether it was lack of money or lack of confidence.

I stayed in touch with Regis for years after that semester and year. We took a Greek History course together in the fall of ’89. I began introducing him to my other weird and not-so-weird friends. He introduced me to working-class White Pittsburgh, for better and for worse. We stayed in touch during the summers I was back in Mount Vernon, through our master’s degrees and my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon.

The last time I saw Regis was in May ’96, just as my fight over my dissertation with Joe Trotter (see my “Running Interference” post from April ’11) was in high gear. Despite two degrees — both in Philosophy — and a professorial disposition, Regis hadn’t secured regular work and was still living at home in East Pittsburgh with his parents. I encouraged him to get a doctorate. But sensing how unhappy I was with my own process, Regis said, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

I wonder how Regis is doing today. Well, I should just look him up. After all, we’re both weird Pitt grads!

Reaching Level 42

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincole Avenue, Darren, Hebrew-Israelites, Life Roles, Mount Vernon New York, Responsibility, Role as Eldest Brother, Youth

We all get used to playing certain roles in life, no matter how uncomfortably those roles fit. Privileged, rich, powerful and entitled Americans are accustomed to shitting on the little guy and using all of their resources to maintain their separation from the rest of us. Attractive women — especially White blondes and Black women with music video bodies — tend to act as if the world’s purpose is to serve them. Religious people who somehow believe that it’s their role to tell every person they meet how to deal with all of the issues they face in life, without a real understanding of those people or their lives.

I’ve gotten used to the role of the eldest sibling over the past thirty years. This despite all of the growing pains I went through in the ’80s to take on this role, in spite of the fact that I have an older brother, one two years and eighteen days older than me.

My older brother Darren, as I put it more than twenty-five years ago, “abdicated the throne” of eldest brother by the time I was in the middle of puberty. That happened twenty-nine Decembers ago. Once our family went off the cliffs of the Himalayas and plunged into the hell of Hebrew-Israelites, abuse, abject poverty, responsibility became my motto. Add to that four more mouths to feed between ’79 and ’84, but with only enough food in the house to feed us twenty out of every thirty days, and it became obvious that someone had to do something.

Darren withdrew into the fantasy world that he’d constructed through his psychological imprisonment at The Clear View School in Briarcliff Manor, a school for the mentally retarded (see “About My Brother” post from December ’07). Except that Darren wasn’t mentally retarded. But he played up that role as life at 616 became tougher after the ’81 no-Chanukah, no-Christmas, no-Kwanzaa season. Darren would rock back and forth in his too-small twin bed, as if in a catatonic state. Or he’d spontaneously jump up and down by himself in our bedroom or while in the bathroom, making a high-pitched “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee” sound while nearly hitting the top of his six-foot frame on the ceiling.

Mostly, my older brother would make himself sound as stupid as he possibly could to get out of anything to do with all of the craziness at 616. His favorite answer to any question from our mom or from our idiot ex-stepfather Maurice was, “I Dunno.” And he’s say it over and over again. For nearly a year, stupid ass Maurice attempted to conduct a version of Torah study with us on Saturdays. Every time Maurice asked Darren what he learned, my brother would say, “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…,” regardless of what book we were charged with reading. By August ’82, Darren was permanently excused from Torah study.

Darren did what he did to get out of going to the store, or washing dishes, or helping out with “those kids,” or anything that meant him acting like his IQ was higher than eighty-five. Some neighborhood guys who knew my brother then would ask me, “What’s wrong with yo’ brotha’, man?,” and I’d say, “Nothing.”

How did I know? Because for three years, every time he boarded his 7:40 am school bus to go to Clear View, off came his kufi or yarmulke. Because outside of 616, Darren ate whatever he wanted, whether it was a lard-based Hostess’ Apple Pie or a ham and cheese sandwich. Because Darren was smart enough to realize that perception for most people — most of us undiscerning and self-absorbed Americans, anyway — is reality, and that acting like he was severely mentally retarded would save him from the worst effects of living with a family that had fallen apart.

So everything fell on me. At first, it was going to the store and watching over my younger siblings Maurice and Yiscoc. By the time I began puberty, it was taking punches from Maurice and tracking down my father Jimme for money. By the time of Michael Jackson’s last single release from Thriller in early ’84, it was cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, protecting my four younger siblings, and maintaining some sense of sanity for myself and them. I did it because I had no choice, but I helped grow a jealousy and competition in Darren that he’s yet to give up on.

It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be who I am today without growing up the way I did. But who in their right mind would want to go through what I went through? At the time, it was so much better to be Darren. Only in the last ten years have I realized how much Darren gave up. His sanity, his piece of mine, his development as a human being, as a Black male. All shredded in his well-practiced Clear View persona.

At forty-two years old today, I’m forever learning and relearning, but my ironic, goofy, sarcastic, contrarian, honest and caring, disdainful and cocky persona is well-marbled. Darren’s, sadly, remains trapped in jealousy and misery, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The Visit

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, A.B. Davis Middle School, Boy @ The Window, Crush #1, Emotions, Humanities, Interviews, Memoirs, Memory Lane, Mount Vernon New York, Mount Vernon public schools, Relationships, Youth

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) Screen Shot, October 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

Over the course of a decade, between January ’02 and December ’09, I exchanged emails, interviewed by phone and visited nearly thirty former classmates, teachers and administrators from Mount Vernon, New York public schools for my book manuscript Boy @ The Window. Not to mention family members willing to be honest about life in Mount Vernon and 616 East Lincoln Avenue. Not to mention my family intervention nearly ten years ago. The saying “you can’t go home again” is such an understatement.

At times, my walks down memory lane have left me verklempt, or feeling that I’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Meeting with a former tormentor from my Davis Middle School days was strangely pleasant, while talking with my class’ salutatorian was both illuminating and a little weird. I met with some former Humanities classmates who seemed more ornery than former Georgetown coach John Thompson after a sleepless night dealing with idiot refs. I talked on the phone with former classmates and teachers who either couldn’t remember details about our school, or flat-out lied about some of the things they had said to me and about me twenty-five or thirty years ago.

But of all of those meetings and time machine-like encounters, none made me more nervous than my interview with Crush #1 five years ago. I was nervous for any number of reasons. I hadn’t seen her in nearly seventeen years when I went to see her in the Old South in October ’06. My plan was to be up front about my crush, my borderline love for her back in ’82, which would make anyone anxious or feel really silly, I guess.

And I was stuck at this point of my memoir, the part about how my crush on Crush #1 came about, and how abuse and domestic violence at 616 brought it to a crashing end, between March and August ’82. I knew what to write. I just didn’t want to relive all of those emotions, as they led me to seriously consider suicide within a year and half of all of that.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931), October 18, 2011. (http://www.moma.org). In public domain.

What I walked into on that rainy October ’06 day mirrored my own Silver Spring, Maryland residence. It was a modern-day carpeted flat in an apartment-home townhouse, appearing as lived-in by the scattered toys in the living room and foyer. Crush #1 was making stew peas. If I’d been in another frame of mind, a look of shock would’ve come over me. Crush #1 cooking? Put that above the fold of the New York Times! Yet since I was willing to expect anything from the new Crush #1, I wasn’t all that surprised.

Her husband greeted me warmly, which was a bit of a surprise. I’ve been around enough couples to get a sense of how these kinds of interactions are supposed to work, regardless of sexual orientation. It’s where the husband or the “man of the house” sizes me up, regardless of my intentions. Crush #1 walked out of the kitchen and gave me a hug, the kind friends give each other after seventeen years apart.

Then I met her daughter, this chip off the not-so-old block, a great combination of Crush #1’s and her husband’s facial features. She was an adorable four-year-old wanting to learn about the world around her. We shook hands and made animal noises for about two minutes. I felt at home. It was as if I walked into my apartment and had to chance to see myself, my wife, and my kid in action, with sarcastic banter and silly noises included.

There was so much to discuss and so little time. So I started where the twelve-year-old in me would’ve if he had a voice. I asked about her mother, her family, her growing-up years in New York, her time in school and in Humanities. What came out was so different from what I expected because it was so similar to my experience and because our similar experiences occurred during the same time frame.

It was all so normal, so typical for people from our respective backgrounds, so, well, human. I liked this real-life version of Crush #1, and not in that twelve-year-old, I-think-I’m-in-love kind of way. That was something else I really didn’t expect. Not only did I enjoy the visit. I enjoyed getting to know one of my ex-classmates for the first time.

A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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

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"Something About You", 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, A Question of Freedom, Blackness, Boyz N The Hood, Coolness, Crush #2, Eclectic Music, Heterosexuality, Level 42, Manhood, Masculinity, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, R. Dwayne Betts, Youth

Boyz N The Hood (1991) Screen Shot, September 1, 2011. (Source/http://freeinfosociety.com). 20 years since this movie, and we still inquisition Black males about their masculinity. By the way, I was NEVER this cool growing up.

About this time a quarter-century ago, I received regular reminders from the people in my life as family and classmates that I didn’t fit their definition of how a heterosexual Black male should behave. At least in Mount Vernon, New York. You see, I didn’t have to be a young Barack Obama or Lenny Kravitz to learn at an early age that I wasn’t Black enough, man enough or heterosexual enough for many folks in my life. The fact that I didn’t run around with the other boys skipping school and sniffing skirts was evidence enough of how different I was.

One of the more subtle forms of interrogation I experienced occurred at the end of eleventh grade, going into the summer of ’86. That day I walked into English class, and Crush #2 asked me about that song of the day, which happened to be Level 42’s “Something About You” Something About You. When I told her who it was, she started snapping her fingers to it. LJ, an on-and-off again classmate since third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, walked by as we were talked. “Are they Black?,” she asked. When I said “No,” LJ shook her head and walked away. The group was White and from the Isle of Wight, no less, a bunch of off-shore British White guys. Somehow I’d violated some kind of code in LJ’s eyes. It was the last conversation we had before we graduated a year later.

South 10th Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York, November 19, 2006. (Source/http://weichert.com). The egg-shell white house in the center of the photo is where my father Jimme lived in ’86, an attic room. Looks better now than it did then.

I received a far less subtle hint that made LJ’s disgust look like romance by comparison. It was an incident just a week before the start of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, something I’ve posted about before. By the time I’d gotten a crush on Crush #2, my sexuality was no longer in question, although I’d never seriously questioned it before. My father, though, still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer of ’86, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I found Jimme that last Saturday morning in August, hanging out on the street around the corner from his place, having already drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking and stumbling down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house in which he rented a room. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again. (see my “In the Closet, On the Down Low” from June 1, 2009 for the full conversation and incident)

As I saw it then, I was a year away from college, and I was still in the streets dealing with my drunk ass father, my jealous and institutionalized older brother, a sham of a marriage at 616 and four younger siblings who were high on sugar all of the time. I’d done so much to change my life and yet almost everything in my life was the same. Up to this point the only things that had kept my head from exploding were God and school. As my senior year approached, I wondered how much longer I could maintain emotional control before I finally just lost myself in years of growing pain, like a volcano about to super-erupt.

As I see it now, it remains a shame that we as Black males have to run a gauntlet in our communities in order

A Question of Freedom (2009) Hardcover Cover, September 1, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

to become Black men, at least in the eyes of others. We can talk about the K-12-to-prison system that is public education in many a community of color. Or the drug trade. Or the sheer lack of quality public services and interventions in our communities or lives, other than police forces. Or even the daily images that tell so many of us that aspiring to be a rapper, football or basketball player, or just to be cool is so much better than knowing anything. The latest good memoir on this is R. Dwayne Betts‘ A Question of Freedom (2009).

But we must also admit that the people who attempted to raise us — our families, relatives, neighbors and classmates — are just as often at fault for turning out Black males who aren’t ready to be Black men, human adult males with ideas and aspirations outside of the box. Until we get serious about the fact that those closest to us have put such idiotic notions of masculinity, heterosexuality and Black coolness in many a Black male’s head, we get nowhere in helping to transform the lives of people like me when I was a teenager.

For we can’t depend on people like me becoming homeless, embracing solitude, and leaving my community as the best way to learn how to be a man, an adult, a really serious yet compassionate (and goofy) human being.