Two stories.

I have told the story of Ian and the one eyed black cat.

Then, there is the story of me and the Black pimp at the Port Authority who got me into Harvard.

Not for real, but its a good story.

I had run away from home

segue

I ended up at the Port Authority, spent the night there, then was getting on a bus to my high school in Connecticut.

As I waited in the ticketing area, a pimp approached me. I knew right away what he was and what he wanted.

We struck up a conversation. He showed me pictures of his girls all dressed up in nice dresses.

After a while he asked me “Do you believe in God?” I said “My parents are atheists.” I was carrying a copy of “Crime and Punishment,” which was the summer reading assignment.

It’s been such a long time now. I wish that I could remember better. I got away from him and got on the bus in my red striped cotton t-shirt and jeans with my large yellow backpack.

I did not include him, or the man in the van who gave me a ride when I was lost on the highway and tried to molest me, in the personal essay I wrote for my college applications.

I called my parents from the P/A and said that I was at Kent.

In other words I was a skillful liar. (at that time.)

At Kent, they took me in, treated me for poison ivy, and let me stay at the Alumni House for a week and then I went back home.

So, I wrote my college essay in the style of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (which I mentioned in it) and Ecclesiastes (in the Bible) which I had not read yet. With the help of a sharp tweaking from a friend of my parents who was a professor in Political Science, the essay got me in everywhere except Yale, where I had had a weird interview. Two interviews, in fact, and in the second one I was told I would get into Harvard. Or at least, that was what I figured.

So, at that time, as I have said, at that time, I was a liar. The interview with the Yale man was off the cuff. I didn’t really have one with the Harvard interviewer, a woman, she was out of time, I was last in line and all she wanted to know was where my parents stayed when they visited, which was a lovely piece of grace because we summered near there since I was a child and I was able to refer her to somewhere really nice.

I figure that the pimp was watching all this.

And now I see what I need to see for my life to be what it needs to be.

As that Black man talked to me he saw me and my family and my father.

I see my father crying not knowing what he had done.

It was the pimp.

When he “could barely keep his hands off of me,” et cetera

He didn’t know it himself. Of course not. That man was sly. Like any Black man, at that time, he was fighting the Revolution.

He (the pimp) took me over through that silly incident in my bedroom in New Jersey. My father was “caught” by the pimp for something. In his mind. Like me, my father had no idea who was watching. I saw something without seeing it and I don’t remember whether it was literal or not but I flung myself to the floor and laid there for hours. After my father came up to my room with a tray of tea and tried to explain himself. For why he reached for my breasts. After the unwanted backrub in bed. And Dr. Penn said 5 or 6 years later, “Why did that upset you so much?” And I couldn’t believe he could ask me that question. But now I see it. It really was, no big deal. In itself. It tipped off other things and one of them was the presence of that Black man at the Port Authority, a pimp by profession, who captured me in a way that I did not understand and led me through life at Harvard in his mind as whore. I understand now about being captured by a man in his mind. I was a fancy runaway. This was not all of Harvard for me but it was a part of it.

I was ready to make changes after Sophomore Year. I was thinking of taking time off. But then the offer of the Presidency of the Dove magazine came up and I went into a meltdown.

My father and I were a duo after that. I looked like him, walked like him, talked like him. For a long time, everything worked. But then I blew it over the Dove; went home. Now I am expunged just as I am retroactively emancipated from my mother and father retroactively to age 16 when I ran away. It’s best. I have had too heavy a burden of responsibility for too long. This is how I prefer it. So I have the room and the time and the place for my little son in his heart and mine who needed help over all these years AND I JUST COULDN’T GET TO HIM!

Now, his f.ather has been tamed by 10 years on his own from us (me n Ian). Maybe we will be able to all talk a little again some time.

I am so severely compromised. I have so many serious issues on my plate. Not sure what to do about it. R. v. W. is down. Thank God for this and praise him to the skies. but, Now What? I was too weak to follow in the immediate aftermath and have lost the thread. I know to let the Lord lead me.

Trust in the Lord’s timing and also in his leading. That’s all anybody can do.