[11] LORD JEFF REALITY CHECK So this is my world when the threat of cancer rears its head. I’m 20. Doctors remove a tumor from my neck the size of a golf ball in June 1978. On the operating table I make a deal with God and the nurse that if I pull through I will take her dancing. But in reality I’m scared and my deal with God is not only I’ll go dancing but that I will collect as many stories I can to entertain Him in heaven. I just want to experience life first. As much as possible. The first time the doctors speak to my family after the operation they tell them the tumor is cancerous. I wake up with my head bangaged like a mummy and groggy but hear my mother and my great aunt Sophia talking and crying that I’m going to die. As I drift back to sleep I ask God, “We had a deal?” “It’s All Right.” The second test came back negative and I report back to Amherst in the fall of 1978. Be careful what you pray for you just might get it. Amherst College recruiters come calling during my senior year at Cardinal Hayes H.S. and I enroll in 1975 with my boy John Russell. His family lives across the way from Harlem hospital on 137th Street. I never visit Amherst before I go there. Like they say, that’s on me. I figure it’s like Hayes except without the priests. Both places are all male. Both offer high academic standards. Attending a multi racial Catholic High School in the South Bronx erases boundaries between Puerto Rican, Black and White boys who graduate as Hayes Men. In fact, more white students attend Cardinal Hayes than comprise the entire four-year student population at Amherst. The difference between the two schools is the working class hope that exists at Hayes versus the elitist confusion that permeates Amherst when I get there. Class difference, my friends, is the proverbial “nut to bust” but if I concentrate on complete precision you might loose the essence of my Amherst Experience: The greatest change in life Often comes on the edge of chaos The greatest reality is that you cannot see Amherst is a rich white boy party school in transition. A lot of well off upper class white guys are in business at Amherst selling marijuana, mushrooms, LSD and later big heaps of cocaine. This includes a blind undergraduate working out of Pratt Hall who sells hashish you get to weigh out yourself, “Aren’t you worried someone might rip you off?” “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to cheat a blind guy?” Yeah, right. He can pretty much tell if the chunk of hash is the weight you say it is by just touching it; his eyes are now in his fingertips. Nothing is as it seems in this part of God’s little acre. Think that’s weird. I hook up with a black undergraduate from Detroit who later burns a cross outside the Black community house on campus in order to make a political statement. It took me years to understand it was about self hate. 1960’s Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael is in town at the time for a speaking engagement and suggests to this brother that a cross burning will force racial awareness at Amherst. Carmichael’s theory is that it will serve not only as a statement about racist white views in the Pioneer Valley but also force Amherst’s 3rd World community to react. He tells the brother not to let anyone know he's the perpetrator. Funny stuff like this goes on at Amherst College all time. The morning of the cross burning I barricade myself in the campus radio station with Amiri Baraka's daughter Kellie Jones to send out an S.O.S. convinced the KKK and end times are here. About 50 students at the same time chain shut Converse Hall, the main administration building and are later joined by more than a hundred other campus activists convinced that white supremacists at the Chi Phi fraternity house nearby are to blame. I size up the situation and ask myself, “Poppy, quien te manda?” (“Pops, who told you to come to a place like this?") I've gone from Tilden Street and Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx to locking myself in a small radio booth in the middle of pendejoville Massachusetts because the boogeyman is coming. What kind of place is this?" About the third day into the takeovers, the truth is discovered about the cross burning. What a surprise when the boogeyman behind it all turns out to be a brother and one I'm tight with as a political ally. Now why would a brother go and do a thing like that? “That nigger’s crazy.” It’s funny when Richard Pryor breaks out with that in 1974. But in 1979 it’s no laughing matter at Amherst. Yeah. Crazy enough to blow up the spot, manipulate Amherst legally to grant him his diploma and attend law school. He later represents Tupak Shakur right before Tupak gets shot. Funny stuff goes on like that in the gangsta rap world all the time too I suppose. I ride the wave of affirmative action to Amherst. Part of the theory behind affirmative action is that a Puerto Rican -- like, I don’t know? Ah, me! -- is a culturally disadvantaged student who deserves a shot at an academic paradise. That’s not really the case at Amherst College. I enter a paradise lost. If you want to get an idea of the White guys who attend Amherst at the time I suggest you rent a copy of Carnal Knowledge starring Jack Nicholson. The games played in the film are still going on at the College. This is the first movie I see on campus and I leave the showing feeling grimy. But a lot of what’s going on at Amherst is grimy as I find out my first day there. My initial meeting 3rd World people at Amherst is a Black orientation session in the Octagon and lectured ad nauseum about the alleged murder/drowning of Black freshman Gerald Penny several years earlier. His portrait looms over us as the meeting drones on and on about the dangers of a campus I haven’t even experienced yet. Quien me manda? There is reason for concern. The culture clash going on campus is not exclusive to white/black relations. That afternoon I get to know an Asian sophomore who is forced to take on the two sons of a prominent campus English professor in his freshman year after they attack him in the gym. Robbie Ong is not only good academically but a martial arts student as well. He soundly beats them but is on guard from that day on. La Causa’s (The Latin Student organization) founders Tomas Gonzalez and Les Purificacion tell me about Harry Laracuente, the first inner city Puerto Rican to graduate Amherst. By an odd coincidence, Harry attends graduate school with my cousin Belen at Harvard. She says that Amherst almost overwhelms Harry and he is reluctant to even talk about the place. When the Dean of Students - a good looking, very British Peter O’Toole kind of chap - welcomes me to Amherst with a vacuous “pip pip cheerio” hello outside the freshmen dorms that evening I get this sick feeling that I’m in for a bumpy ride. Thirteen Latinos from across the United States enroll at Amherst in 1975. The majority is made up of Inner City Puerto Ricans who excel at various public, prep and Catholic Schools throughout the states. Suffice to say it is an interesting road to graduation. We all get our diplomas despite the regular round of disagreements that come up within such a confined group. I am at odds whether to complete Amherst as early as my first semester and leave campus for a week to decide. A dean’s assistant tracks me down to the city and convinces me to return. He reveals what he goes through in his four years as a clean-cut super preppy man who survives Amherst as a gay man in the closet. This takes guts. I think he’s starting to come out of the closet at the time because he’s gone by the next semester from the Administration offices. Ever hear someone’s crisis and makes yours manageable by comparison? I return to continue at Amherst but still stress for home. Contrary to reactionary political belief, the majority of Puerto Rican and Latino students in the nation's top colleges achieve superlative grades to get into places like Amherst. We start arriving in the seventies at Amherst by dominating academically at various diversified high schools. Many of us are in the top tenth of our H.S. Graduation classes. Affirmative action enables the top schools in the nation to harvest the cream of the crop Latin intelligentsia before local colleges can get their hands on them. In the grand scheme of American life, it’s a good business opportunity for upper class institutions to rake some intellectual profit from the 3rd world community. Besides, who’s kidding whom; the financial aid loans (granted in addition to the scholarships awarded) at places like Amherst are pretty steep so no one is getting away without paying the piper. There are moments I wish I attend an inner city college during the seventies rather than attend Amherst College. I live only 10 minutes away from Fordham University. But at the time I believe in the formula for upward mobility taught in my home -- graduate high school and get a scholarship to a top school away from home where you can see another life. What I see stops me in my tracks. My family in New York has far more common sense than the lot at Amherst and they’re half-baked as it is. I witness three years of social stress capped off by a black man burning a cross. Well, so much for the American dream. I go on the ten-year graduation plan eventually getting the diploma in 1986. My family doesn’t believe it at first. They know what’s gone on up at Amherst but I'm driven to finish because that's the way my parents teach us. You finish all on your plate, "lo que no mata engorda" ("what doesnt kill you will fatten you up.") Still they’re skeptical and my mother hides the diploma after it arrives in the mail. My mother actually takes it to our parish priest to verify its authenticity since the script is in Latin. “Your brother Ronnie’s Harvard diploma is small and in English. This thing from Amherst is big with writing nobody understands.” Go figure. In a Puerto Rican household you go to the parish priest for everything: spiritual guidance, financial help or if the toilet is on the blink. You might think of it as multi tasking ministry in an era of luminescent saints. My father has the diploma laminated and hangs it in the upstairs hallway outside his room. Not everything at Amherst College is such high drama between 1975 and 1979. There’s this guy in my freshman dorm that says he admires my feet. Imagine that, a guy telling me he admires my feet. I guess my girl Leyla is right. I must be some kind of flaming hetero. Fetishes are new for me. I quickly take to wearing heavy boots. Later in the semester he calls me to visit his room. I arrive, open the door and he's naked in bed except for a pair of yellow Izod socks – you know, with a little green alligator on them. “This not for me. Esto no es cosa Puertoriquena – This is not a Puerto Rican thing! Where are the babes?” In the fall of 1975 my grrrllll Isa Diaz visits me at Amherst College. Amherst is all male at the time. James Dorm is what any freshmen all male dorms are: geeks and full of testosterone bravado. Isa parks this loud lime green and white Mustang in front of the dorm and not only breezes past the stumbling jocks on the first floor with this dumb coed routine but also charms the loopy janitor Joe to open the door to my room by practicing her Blanche Dubois lines from Streetcar Named Desire. She then takes a shower in the community bathroom to surprise me (much to the amazement of the other guys on my floor who walk in on her.) Isa definitely marches to the beat of a different drummer. The entry always reads under occupation for any form she fills out drop dead gorgeous rising star. All this and red lipstick too when I return to my room. Yes, I am not ashamed to say she pumps my ego. Here’s the kicker. I’m still a virgin and fumble the pass. Ah, a lost opportunity. That changes after I meet Sandy. She’s from Nicaragua and attends Mt. Holyoke College. I loose my virginity with a Mayan legacy. She’s that beautiful and tender in my eyes. Your first time should always be special and Sandy makes it so for me. We meet at a dance and break night together holding hands. The other guys think it’s cute but they don’t know I still have my warranty. I take the bus back to Amherst that morning and return to Holyoke for dinner. We spend the night talking and then make love. Her caramel skin and Indian features are outlined by the white and light blue sheets. Candles flicker in the bankground and Minnie Ripperton’s voice drifts from the stereo speakers. We hold and kiss each other a long while. When it comes time, I got to tell you, if she didn’t take charge and relaxed me it would have been a disaster. It does hurt a little the first time but damn, it’s a nice hurt. When I got too lonely I arange to bring twenty of my friends up from the neighborhood at the College’s expense. Picture that, twenty Ricans from the city running around in the woods. We have a Theater/Dance group called Adoracion in the Bronx and since there are only a handful of Latinos at Amherst they fill out the first Palante (Straight Ahead) Latino cultural show at College. That annual show is still running 21 years later. Thank you God. I befriend a third generation legacy early on at Amherst. His goal is to graduate and attend Clown College in Florida. His decision is rooted in something different from being just a fool in make up. He explains he achieves higher truths for himself through the discipline of his movements and timing in his clowning. Little do I know that Ramsey is already experimenting with the new vaudeville that Bill Irwin rides to commercial success in the 80’ s. Sometimes quests for higher truths backfire. One Amherst legacy pulls off a stunt I still marvel at. He rolls an entire ounce of marijuana onto the giant paper leaf provided in the Cheech and Chong Big Bambu record album. This project takes more than an hour. He meticulously cleans the reefer and executes a smooth Philadelphia roll with squared corners -- no less -- at the ends of this gigantic joint. He smokes this pre-blunt monstrosity in its entirety within thirty minutes. Sterling gets up from his chair, floats down to the campus radio station WAMH and proceeds to do a near flawless five hour overnight Quiet Storm like show. I still cannot believe the performance. Of course stoner flawlessness can’t last. He later looses it in his senior year during an acid trip at the campus radio station. Medical workers escort him from WAMH after an infamous program where he where plays one Public Service Announcement close to thirty times in a row. He says he likes the sound of it, “Every night I dream that I’m really from another planet and that I am here to study everything around me to report back with. Now a team is coming to pick me up for that report.” They took him away in a straight jacket. Next time I speak with him by phone two semesters later I ask if he’s all-right. “Oh, I went away and got a lot of rest. It’s very wonderful there. The doctors are wonderful … the countryside is wonderful … everything is won…der..ful. But you know what? They’re still coming for my report. Gotta go! I love you, man bye.” I live in the same dorm with a hard drinking mushroom eating future mercenary who later serves in South Africa for the apartheid government. He’ s a “bandolero” who goes away to learn life on his terms. I always think its more of the adventure for him rather than the politics. But he does learn some harsh lessons. He sends back letters during his South Africa tour to his old roommate. One of the letters describes how strange he feels after a firefight with African freedom fighters. One of the dead guerillas wears a University of Massachusetts at Amherst tee shirt. I guess you can’t run away from home to do some dirt and not expect someone to turn up. “Poppy, quien te manda?” In sharp contrast to the mercenary is my man John Russell (’79). We attend both high school and Amherst together. He is a native from 137th Street in Manhattan who survives not only Harlem and Amherst College but graduates Harvard with a doctorate. John and I begin collaborating as writers while in high school and he publishes my first spoken word piece in The Polemic – a short lived 3rd World publication (1977) at Amherst. His dissatisfaction with racism prompts him to become an expatriate in, of all places, Japan. I understand the move. I believe John prefers to be somewhere where racial lines are clearly drawn other than the hypocrisy he encounters stateside where White fair weather liberals or malicious Black extremists are apt to do anything to further their own personal agenda. Future film director and producer John Coles (’80) invites me one night to see a terrible high school pre-punk rock band playing at Smith College in Northampton. John features me in his first project produced at Amherst (1976) – a three minute music film (pre-video) he uses as part of his proposal to do a film about campus life. “Come on. It’ll be fun. The band is so bad its great. You’ll get a kick out of it.” Crazy white boy bands are not new to me. A strung out Ramones play on campus the previous semester. England’s Sex Pistols are just around the corner preparing their punk assault on musical tradition. Johnny Coles anticipates their message with his own film aesthetic. He’s responsible for a candid film about Amherst College in the late seventies that’s blacklisted by the College Trustees after two showings. The movie, This is Amherst, captures the school during its social deconstruction from a predominantly white male bastion of superiority. It’s not a pretty picture of life on a campus in serious transition. He has an eye for the absurd and a take on life that is more non-judgmental than anyone I meet until that point in my life. We come across his friend ‘Gibby’ one evening in the hallway of our dorm sitting completely drunk and naked outside his room. His stereo is blasting some Pink Floyd. He looks at him and asks, “What’s going on?” He looks at John and puts his hand to his mouth, “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh There’s a concert in my room.” “Gibby’s” father is later president of the college following the cross burning. Life is strange isn’t it? Amherst College blows up socially during the spring semester of 1979. Senior year student Robert Ellis torches a cross outside Charles Drew House that caps a year of transition on campus. He claims a senior thesis gone awry Others claim he’s a stooge of the FBI Few know the truth What motivates him What kind of place is this? There’s a significant influx of women on campus the preceding year. Amherst women match Amherst men note for note in brilliance, naivete and motivation. I fall in love with one Amherst woman, an Antigua island girl no less, who grows up in New York and arrives at the college in 1977. Carole’s from the same neighborhood I’m from in The Bronx though we never meet until Amherst College. Life is definitely strange and wonderful. I’m fortunate to meet Carole when I do. She’s fresh air at a time when the rest of the joint is stinking. The walking embodiment of Jean Toomer’s description of love in Cane © 1923 whose work I bite for memory, Speaking for hours Over a small table In our own world Her breath moist against me Appears on my cheek with The imprint of an island knowledge Her words play delicately Encircle the passages And bulletin boards of my mind As her tongue unwinds A tape of devotion Presses her lips to mine Until they glow Of vaporous heat That escapes as small beads From the lights on the horizon Swaying in the night Just outside her window The presence of women on campus challenges the near homoerotic bond that exists among many of the elite segments of the campus community. The extent of these fears differs from set to set. It drives Rob Ellis and his ilk to extremes. Ellis and his "boys" become more entrenched in their wannabe pseudo Black Power philosophy as the influence of women grows on campus. The elitist reactionary cell he heads within the Black student campus organization remains all male throughout his tenure at Amherst. He tastes political success in getting the campus radio station to open its prime time opportunities for minority disc jockeys. Subsequently he achieves social success by organizing a heavily attended 3rd World dance at the campus. But then he conspires to burn a cross outside Charles Drew House. The plan to burn the cross is hatched at Black Studies Professor Andrea Rushing’s home in the days following the Battle of the D.J's blowout held in December 1978 at Amherst. Ellis says his thesis advisor (another black professor denied tenure that year at Amherst) supports his decision. All is not well on campus anyway. The first sign of trouble that fall at Amherst comes during fraternity pledge week. A Chi Phi pledge disrupts an Asian Studies seminar posing as a demented martial arts expert. I know the pledge involved. He’s an Irish American student from my old high school in the Bronx who is caught in the same cultural cross fire I feel I’m under. A working class kid who manages to get out of the Bronx despite coming from a difficult neighborhood. Kenny does not hold his liquor well – especially after his father dies -- and wants to be included in the notorious party fraternity. But the “boys will be boys” explanation is confronted by a new wave of activist students on campus who rightfully say it’s stupid. Amherst’s tiny Latino community (about 25 students out of an overall Amherst student population of 1700 undergraduates) asserts itself earlier that academic year by aggressively campaigning for increased funding and office space. This leads to a La Causa takeover of Fayerweather Hall. The takeover is successful but taxes the social tension already present on campus. There are several “incidents” after the takeover including verbal assaults against Latino men and women on campus and racially derogatory graffiti left behind on the doors of La Causa members. Regardless, La Causa is immediately involved in the protest the morning after the cross burning; not knowing of Ellis’ involvement in the incident. A small group of Charles Drew House members suspect Ellis is the culprit. But it’s just before graduation and the bulk are seniors who don’t want to let anything – rightfully so -- spoil their exit. Silence on their part cuts La Causa (and other social activists on campus) out of the information loop. At least seven hours pass before the takeover of Converse Hall and WAMH wherein the house realizes it’s Ellis who sets the fire. Even the hapless Dean of Students Jim Bishop (the Clarence Thomas of his day at Amherst) suspects house involvement since Charles Drew reeks of gasoline inside the building and the wood used comes from the basement of Charles Drew. No one reveals the truth either at Charles Drew or within the Dean of Students office about what they suspect really went on. Subsequently the situation tumbles out of control among unsuspecting students and faculty. John Ward is President of Amherst during the period of transition for the College. Poor rat bastard. The cross burning and its aftermath lead to his ouster and echo in his suicide several years later. About eighty students are tried at Johnson Chapel for breaking the Student Code by taking part in the takeover regardless of how they are duped into taking action. Many subsequently transfer permanently out of the College leaving the social consciousness of the College in fewer hands. I leave for six years before returning to complete my senior year. But nothing really bad happens to those who withhold information in the early hours of the incident. Nor are the faculty involved reprimanded. Rob Ellis gloats in later years that he mounts a successful legal strategy to force the college graduate him the next semester. The administration and trustees decision mandating that minority student organizations integrate non-minority members after the incident launches political correctness (P.C.) at Amherst to ensure better social relations. But P.C. really is a tool to monitor groups and is set up to execute social and political control. It’s the new segregation prompting individuals to declare themselves racially under an ever increasing series of options. You know. Hispanic White, Hispanic Black. Hispanic Quienmemanda. In the case of La Causa, it detracts from an effective development of a Latino student community center that can catalogue and derive solutions from the experience of Latino Amherst graduates. In short it becomes a social club where the groups politics are watered down to dampen administrative fears. The group of Latino men I arrive with and the subsequent two graduating classes of Latino men and women are primarily urban working class intelligentsia. Amherst’s Latino undergraduates come from environments where there is a greater mixing of social classes. Some are hip to the Amherst lifestyle from their experiences at various prep schools. Others like myself are making it up as we go along. Since classes at Amherst bore me at the time, I embark on finding out what makes life on campus so strange. The fraternities, administration and student organizations at Amherst act more in keeping with ethnic gangs at war in the Balkans. When it comes time for my daughter to attend college in 1998 I don't promote the school to her even though she has better grades and higher SAT scores than I ever do. She writes better, looks better and handles herself better. Well, that’ s the way the cookie crumbles. I lost my sexual virginity with Sandy at Mt Holyoke. I loose my drug virginity with Kathy at Smith College in the spring of 1979. How’s the saying go, “Holyoke to bed Smith to wed.” I delinitely got hitched to something different that night. Fairy tales do come true They can happen to you When you’re young at heart And if you should survive Until a hundred and five You’ll thank God you’re alive When you’re young at heart I never use an illegal drug until I’m 21. See them all around after arriving at Amherst but I’m on such a manic buzz when I’m a teenager that I really don’t need much beyond a canvas, dance studio or jam session to get me off. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t pop. When the shit hits the fan that spring after the truth behind the cross burning is discovered I split campus. I get to thinking what my next move will be after the administration announces there will be charges brought against those who take over campus buildings, “Damn. Rob was my boy. That’s one dumb mother. Well, fuck it. He’s dead now. He’s of no use to us anymore. Shit, I broke federal law commandeering the radio station. If the Dean gets get a hard on I can be in big trouble. Classes are fucked. I’m so screwed up I’m facing academic dismissal.” “Ring, Ring. “Hello, yeah, it’s Louie. Listen how are things at home?” Cut your loses and go home. “Well, we didn’t want to tell you but poppy’s real sick from drinking and he’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good. It’s better you stay up there and finish the semester … that should be soon and we’ll let you know if anything happens.” I guess it’s true … you never can go home again at least not the way it was before. I left home after fighting with him and now he’s going. Damn. Kathy is from Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. We get tight at Amherst and hook up on the island when I visit there. I head for her place at Smith. She knows about the incident at Amherst but keeps a safe distance. Kathy thinks the 5 Colleges are a strange place and creates her own circle to survive. Funny, in retropect I head for the only piece of the island I know is immediately safe. Kathy’s room is a little Puerto Rico. I’m a kid again sitting before saints behind crystal glass but this time the soothsayers are a different breed than my Grandma Cristina. Kathy’s boyfriend leaves an ounce of weed in her room and a couple of her girlfriends are smoking and screwing around with tarot cards. I’m agitated by both the incident on campus and the news from home. It doesn’t help I’m riding a wicked manic episode either. And in that moment In a heartbeat I hold my breath I just go for it And The Great Game Takes on A New Dimension I smoke a half ounce that first night out of a big wooden pipe; endless coughing hides my tears and masks my shaking. With each puff I compromise every truth I learn along the way. Only to open up a whole set of new ones. The Supremes play on Kathy’s record player and take me up the ladder to the roof where Otis Redding serenades me while I cry, cough and shake some more. Here’s the deal. I felt betrayed socially at Amherst in a way that no one disrespects me or my people before or I have allowed since. Certainly not the neighborhood I’m from, the teachers I have in Catholic school, my family (even with my dad’s goofiness and all); no one. I will forever agitate until all of us who leave there because of the weirdness going on that spring get an apology. Some acknowledgement it’ s wrong. The hearings wrong. Judgement wrong all around. At the time I say to myself I’ll get through this but, I never buy Into the American Dream Ever again It dies that Awful spring I light into the American Darkside and Vow to tell my story About the humility of Hookers Hoods and Homos While I Drink Smoke And Gamble With Booze Broads And Blow I live the life I love I love the life I live Sing Otis Sing I got dreams I got dreams To remember Nobody knows how I feel inide I just walked away and cried Listen to me These eyes of mine They don’t fool me I got dreams Rough dreams To remember I leave Amherst after “the incident” in the spring of 1978 to take a job at WFSB TV in Hartford. A year later to the day of the cross burning at the College I interview the Grand Dragon of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan while he’s on a recruiting drive through Connecticut. One of Fred Wilkerson’s men threatens to kick my ass while on camera when I challenge them to come out from behind their hoods if they really believe in their message. It doesn’t help I have a West Indian cameraman with me. Godfrey the cameraman tells me I’m crazy after the interview for confronting the Klansmen in an isolated hotel room. “Fuck those guys. Godfrey, you just don’t know about crazy when it comes to this kind of thing. Did I ever tell you about the time a black man burned a cross at my campus?” The cross burning catches me off guard but by the spring of 1979 I believe that a greater reality is already guiding me. Or perhaps I’ve become delusional in an overwrought reality. Either way, I move on recognizing the whole affair as the end of the beginning. |
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