Growing up in the mean streets of Brooklyn, I wanted to be– of all things– a writer. I had read that famous book by the Russian author Vladmir Nabokov. The one in which the main character, a dirty old man named Humbert. Humbert falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl before he is sent to jail. But that’s another story for another time. What intrigued me most about the novel—Lolita–was the author’s style, which to me felt something like diving into a swimming pool filled with my favorite ice cream.
Back then school was not for me. In fact, I was absent four out of five days of the week before finally dropping out in the tenth grade. In an effort to hide my truancy from my mother and older siblings, I had developed the routine of preparing for school and even took my binder and backpack as I left the house, only to ride the 3 train from Brooklyn to the Bronx and back again. I often found a cozy donut shop where no one would hopefully notice the skinny kid having coffee and a bagel at an hour when someone his age should be in school. After breakfast, my next stop was Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park, where I met with my fellow misfits and dropouts. We huddled together on the cold park bench drinking, smoking and watching the preppy white kids on their way to class at NYU. When the weather was too much to bear, we often window shopped along Eight Street with its trendy thrift shops and shoes stores, all specializing in 1970 and 1980’s British Punk dress code that I later adopted.
Whenever I had run out of money or friends or places to hide, I took refuge in the warm and sedated confines of the Brooklyn Public Library. Like a tourist lost in a towering city, so was I lost inside the narrow aisles and high shelves stacked with books I had never heard of. This is not to say, however, that I was new to the world of books. Back in Trinidad my father had purchased a set of Encyclopedias for the family which I spent many sleepless nights engrossed after I had wet the bed. One magical night, under the big yellow moon that shun through the sheer white curtains of our living room, all the windows and doors of my mind suddenly flew open. I had discovered that I was no longer learning to read but reading to learn.
Upon arriving in America in the 1980’s, I was placed in the large local junior high school not far from our apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I was excited by the opportunity to meet new friends as well as my teachers; so much so that I wore my Sunday best to school –a tan suit my mother had bought me for the trip to America along with my pointy dress shoes with argyle socks. The school guidance counselor was a tall Jewish man, who shook his head when he talked. He administered a test which consisted of reading a series of word lists that went from 6th grade up to high school. I raced through the list and with apparently good enough pronunciation that the guidance counselor’s eyes lit up. “Your boy should be placed in gifted and talented class” he said.
Unfortunately, “Gifted and Talented” was not what it seemed. My first culture shock occurred upon entering the class where I witnessed several students talking during the lesson and within ear shot of the teacher. I had never seen such a thing. In the Caribbean we were routinely flogged for dirty fingernails or an unkempt unform. Seated in the classroom that day, I came to me like a flash of lightening that I would not make it here. And indeed my prophecy was right in that by the end of my first year of 7th grade, my grades plummeted to the bottom of the class. Our class skipped 8th grade. And the following year I was prompted to 9th grade despite my chronic truancy. Somehow, I graduated.
In high school things got even worse. It had somehow gotten into my head that I should study engineering and so I applied and was accepted into Lafayette high school located at the edge of Brooklyn in Brighton beach. This decision would spell the end of my formal education. For one the train ride each way took over one hour, and to make matters worst, missing the scheduled train meant that I would be late. Moreover, the racial tension between black and Puerto Rican students on one hand and the Italian, Jewish, and Asian kids on the other hand was hardly an inviting school culture. One cold morning, I missed my stop and never looked back.
Books became my teacher and the public library was the school house. I read everything —fiction, non-fiction, history, religion, science, physic, philosophy, psychology music and art. I read as if I had something to prove. And I did. I had something inside me that needed to be expressed and that something was more, much more than the negative images of black males paraded on the six o clock news.
Eventually I completed my high school equivalency diploma at age eighteen before going on to earn several advanced degrees. Today, I teach English at a high school not far from the streets I once roamed. In between whatever else is going on in the classroom that day , I often share with my students some important lessons I have learned. Chief among them is becoming one’s authentic self at whatever cost. By way of example, I readily confess to my students that as a teen I was a black nerd. I share with them my constant experimentation– listening to white rock bands like Led Zeppelin and U2 along with Public Enemy and Eric B and Rakim and Living Color as well as learning to ski and even ice skate—all of which I have advised them to try. And most of all I advise them to read.
Thank you for reading!
