Bad Boy: A Memoir

During his interview with the city agency, Myers was again cautioned about the possible consequences of skipping school (among other things, he could be put in a juvenile facility). The interviewer interpreted Myers’s reluctance to respond as sullenness, when in fact it was a sign of Myers’s despair: “What we never discussed was how desperately I wanted to hide my feelings from him, or how ashamed I was of my predicament” (156).

After the interview, Myers sought out Frank, whom he now knew a little more about. Frank’s father had been a successful vaudeville performer, so Frank grew up in an elite and largely white neighborhood. When his father died, however, the neighbors became less friendly, and events came to a head when a bus driver tried to throw Frank and his mother off a bus: Frank blacked out and woke up later in a mental hospital, where he learned that he had killed the driver and two passengers with a knife. Although his mother eventually secured his release, a similar incident landed him back in an institution for three years, after which he ended up in Myers’s neighborhood, estranged from his mother and drinking heavily in an attempt to forget his problems (158).

After hearing Myers’s story, Frank suggested that they find their own apartment together. He also told Myers about a job he’d landed that involved delivering a package downtown. Myers decided to come with him, and the two went to an apartment to pick up the package; the people there were shooting heroin, and the man who gave them the package warned them they would be in “big trouble” if they didn’t deliver it correctly (161).

Despite this incident, Myers’s disillusionment with his life caused him to take Frank’s offer about an apartment seriously. On his English teacher’s recommendation, Myers had recently read Camus’s The Stranger, and had grown interested in the main character’s detachment from society. When Myers was referred to a hospital for testing and then sent to a psychologist named Dr. Holiday, he tried to capture his feelings about the experience in writing: “But as I dealt with what was happening to me by becoming more and more the detached observer, I was becoming Mersault, the character, and not Camus, the author” (164).

Myers began attending school again, but struggled to focus on his homework, preferring to write. He therefore returned to cutting classes, feeling guilty about his poor performance but “relieved” to no longer be spending time with students planning for their futures: “In a way I was mourning for the self I thought I had been, and at the same time I was becoming absorbed in the self I had become. Mine was the humiliated consciousness, ashamed of its every face, its every nuance” (166).

Myers went back to spending his days reading. He especially enjoyed Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because it spoke to Myers’s own troubled relationship with his mother; Myers and Florence had drifted apart as Florence became less and less able to understand the “intellectually sophisticated” self that Myers was trying to craft for himself (168). Looking back on that period in his life, Myers mourns how little he really knew about his mother; he recalls a picture he once saw of her as a young woman “in a shimmering blue dress, her dark hair framing her face,” and wishes that he could have spoken to her then about her hopes and dreams (167).

Around this time, Myers had his first appointment with Dr. Holiday, a “beautiful black woman” who praised Meyer’s intelligence and tried to get him to open up about the sources of his delinquency (170). Myers, for his part, said little and “tried [his] best to be as smart as she wanted [him] to be” (170). He was also largely silent when Florence asked how the appointment had gone, instead shutting himself in his room and trying unsuccessfully to read Ulysses.

In the time leading up to his next appointment with Dr. Holiday, Myers brooded over his coming graduation—which he imagined as a kind of “execution”—and got into a fight with the boys who had tried to beat up Frank: “I didn’t mind at all hurting people […] But that wasn’t the life I wanted to lead. It was no better than being condemned to the garment-center labor force” (172). Finally, his next appointment came, and as he prepared to leave Dr. Holiday’s office afterwards, she asked Myers whether he “like[d] being black” (173).

Dr. Holiday’s question startled Myers, but he replied that he did like being black. In reality, however, Myers “really did not know what being ‘black’ meant” (174). He explains that he was more used to thinking about his identity in terms of the job he would eventually hold: not being an adult, he didn’t know what he would like to do once he was grown up, and the tension between his family’s and Stuyvesant’s ideas about “good” jobs further complicated the issue. Myers had also spent a lot of time thinking about gender, and the way definitions of masculinity differed from place to place: “I understood being a man as having some kind of power. In Harlem that power was expressed in muscle, in being someone who wouldn’t take any nonsense or who was good at athletics […] I did [not] see anybody defining a real man as somebody who paid a lot of attention to books” (176).

By probing his ideas about career and masculinity in this way, Myers came to see them as “subdivisions of the larger idea of race” (176). Race, however, was also a problematic issue in Myers’s eyes:

I wasn’t born with a hyphen linking me to Africa, any more than I was born with a desire to dribble a basketball or to write. These were interests that I worked on developing. These were activities I chose. Being Afro-American, or black, was being imposed on me by people who had their own ideas of what those terms meant (177).

Myers’s history further complicated his sense of himself as black: he grew up in a multiracial household that, amidst the patriotism of WWII, considered itself American first and foremost. As a result, Myers didn’t think much about his own race until he began to experience the disadvantages of being black: the parties he wasn’t allowed to go to, the colleges that wouldn’t admit him. Myers, in other words, began to “think about race in purely negative terms,” and to do everything he could to identify as something other than black—for instance, as “an intellectual” (178). Now, however, that identity no longer seemed available to him.