The Story of Me and my Dad (part 2)

The days of my father and I going to the movies almost every weekend and being close friends hit a big snag as I started growing up. As I approached puberty, my interests began to change. Instead of wanting to be with dad, I wanted to spend my weekends with friends, by myself, whatever. Hanging with dad started to become very uncool and embarrassing in my eyes. My father has been a big man all my life and being seen with him in public, for the first time, became an irrationally bad reflection on me all of a sudden. I started liking baseball more than anything my dad wanted to do with me. I stopped sleeping on my half of the double beds my father had in his apartment and turned the living room in my bedroom in part because he snored like a treecutting beast, but mostly because I wanted the privacy that all teenagers start to want. And girls held my attention a lot more than papa did!

: )

These changes bothered my father because his buddy was slipping away from him. Instead wanting his company, his buddy wanted his allowance to do other things. Dad was no longer as relevant to his son and it hurt him as a person. At the same time, my father was undergoing his own transformation. No longer drinking, dad picked up the next time natural thing--smoking. From smoking, he became a passionate reader of books, newspapers and magazines and this led into my father becoming more socially active in the black progressive movement within Harlem. Growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father already seen and had all the racism he would ever need exposure to. Jim Crow and meager job prospects in North Carolina eventually brought him north, only to find over the years, more racism in the Big Apple. With alcoholism in his past, my dad wanted to feel like he was doing something to effect change in the way people saw life as it was.

And more than anything, he wanted his young black son to understand how racism works and manifested itself, and to be prepared for it.

However, there would be major clashes between my father's educational desires and my actual life experience with people. I didn't grow up during Jim Crow, but in New York City in the 80s and 90s. More to the point, between attending a school that essentially taught its students the value of critical thinking about everything and a mother who preached (and showed) the importance of judging all people on a character basis, I had long developed my own means of viewing people. This allowed me to have friends from all walks of life regardless of race and I preferred the diversity. My father saw this as me being being ignorant of racial issues, or more often, as me being a 'sellout' for having genuine friends of other races.

(BTW, I clearly had and continue to have black friends. I met my best friend to this day back in 8th grade. He's black and grew up one block block down from me in Harlem).

The difference between our ideals ate away at our connection. I rooted for the Mets largely because I taught Darryl Strawberry and particularly Dwight Gooden were the greatest baseball players on earth, but my father always accused me of likely the team because they have more white players than the Yankees. When it came to women, my father also got into his head that like a black male sellout, I only had eyes for white girls with flowing blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. In truth, I didn't (and still don't) discriminate. I had (and still do have) an eye for all kinds of women of every shade. Even now, my father will feign resignation that he will be grandfather and father-in-law to some white woman he will have to grow to love.

It got so bad that I actually lied to my father as a high school senior about the color of a young lady (who is one of my best friends today) just to get him off my back...and like all juicy lies, it blew up in my face when he came to pick me up in Jersey and saw my "black" female friend with her father.

By the time I was making choices about colleges, I knew I wanted to be away from my father. Oddly enough, despite the distance that developed between my father and me, a part of me wanted to finally please my father with a decision I made. Going to Morehouse College, a well-known all-male black college in Atlanta, famous for graduates such as Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., became the solution to ideally cover the wants of both father and son.

To be continued...