Bad Boy: A Memoir

Up until 1951, Myers explains, his family had been working-class but not poor: they had never lacked food or basic comforts, they could always find ways to pay rent, and they could splurge a bit for Christmas. That summer, however, money became tight, even with Myers himself working odd jobs; Herbert’s father, William, had moved in with the Deans after his eyesight deteriorated too much for him to live alone, but his presence caused both financial and emotional tension in the household. William had old-fashioned habits and opinions, particularly regarding women, and tended to treat Florence as a servant. In retrospect, Myers regrets not being more of an “ally” to his mother during this period: “I had already grown apart from her in so many ways that our conversations, instead of deepening, had become more and more guarded” (105).

Myers was also preoccupied with his own problems: his relationship with God, for instance, had become “tenuous,” and William’s strict religiosity made him nervous (105). What’s more, he was struggling to fit in at Stuyvesant; its heavy emphasis on the sciences proved unexpectedly challenging, and its hours prevented him from socializing with his friends back in Harlem. Although he continued to spend time with Eric (mostly doing homework), Myers felt increasingly lonely and longed for a friend who would truly understand him.

Things grew worse as time went on: Myers’s grades suffered, and he spent more and more time reading, as well as following the “romp of the Brooklyn Dodgers through the National League” (108). Myers describes himself as a highly competitive person, and the eventual loss of the Dodgers at a time when he was investing so many of his hopes in them left him “devastated” (109). Although Myers continued to enjoy English class (particularly creative writing), he began to skip speech therapy.

Race and racism were also becoming more prominent forces in Myers’s life; Myers knew, for instance, that his friend Eric could go to parties that he himself couldn’t. Although both Florence and Herbert had tried to talk to Myers about race, their own experiences hadn’t equipped them to prepare Myers for his own. As a result, Myers increasingly struggled with the realization that most of the authors and figures he admired were white, and questioned how he could “fit in to a society that basically didn’t like [him]” (113).

As Myers began his junior year, he was more cut off than ever. Myers’s classmates shared their school’s assumption that they would go on to attend college and pursue prestigious careers. Myers, however, had fewer options; many schools rejected black students, and Myers didn’t like the idea of “voluntary segregation” at a historically black university (119). Compounding the problem, he had few ideas about what he would like to do, and he feared that his speech impediment would close many career paths off to him regardless. And while Myers’s difficulty speaking had drawn him to writing, “the idea that creative writing could be anyone’s job never entered [his] mind” (121).

Financial difficulties also loomed large as Myers looked forwards. Myers initially resisted an offer from his cousin to help him get hired at a clothing factory; although he knew many people (including his mother) who had worked at the “garment center,” he resented the idea of taking a job at a place that largely employed black and immigrant workers. However, when he failed to find work elsewhere, Myers relented. To his frustration, he was soon transferred to an “outside” job, where the majority of the center’s black employees worked “hustling through the streets with huge racks of dresses, or pushing hand trucks taller than they were” (116).

Even with Myers working, however, money remained tight; Myers wasn’t able to afford the clothing necessary to join Stuyvesant’s track team, much less go to college, and he feared that he would end up “join[ing] the army of black laborers sweating and grunting their way through midtown New York” (122).

In the midst of these difficulties, Myers took solace in reading: “Books are often touted by librarians as vehicles to carry you far away. I most often saw them as a way of hiding one self inside the other” (126). He also continued writing, hoping to buy a typewriter with the money he was saving up from work. He entrusted this money to his mother, however, who eventually lost Myers’s savings playing the lottery. Herbert attempted to make things up to Myers by buying him an old typewriter from a pawnshop, but Myers remained dissatisfied. Increasingly depressed, Myers began to skip school, “writing excuses on the unwanted typewriter and signing [his] mother’s name to them” (129).

A few weeks after he began skipping school, Myers met with Stuyvesant’s guidance counselor. He said little to the counselor about why he was skipping school or what he was doing instead (reading or going to the movies), but denied wanting to transfer and resolved to do better the following year.

That summer, Myers spent a lot of time playing basketball in the hopes of earning a scholarship; he even qualified for a tournament, although he quickly realized that most of the players were “a whole level better than [him]” (133). Nevertheless, Myers continued to practice, and on his way to the playground one morning he saw a man struggling with three teenage boys. Myers fought the boys off, and the man—Frank Hall—explained that they had begun to beat him up when they learned he had no money. The experience left Myers slightly more hopeful: “When I was fighting, I stopped feeling the sense of helplessness that seemed to be overtaking me” (135).

When Myers arrived home that day, Florence was drinking with two friends, one of whom had a granddaughter approximately Myers’s age. Once inside his room, Myers began to think about both girls and his fears that he was somehow effeminate: “I didn’t like [the granddaughter], but she was a girl, and girls interested me. When I heard older guys talk about girls and sex, I was more taken with the way they talked about it than with what they said […] Logically, I knew that loving books and writing did not make me homosexual, but more and more I hid those interests” (136-37).

Gender wasn’t the only thing troubling Myers at this time; he was also questioning why the values he had learned in church weren’t translating into real-world success, and his pastor couldn’t explain this to Myers’s satisfaction. He also continued to grapple with race. Myers had few black role models, and when he stumbled across an interview with Langston Hughes, he was disappointed: “There was nothing extraordinary about him, nothing that lifted him out of the ordinary […] When I pictured the idea of ‘writer’ in my mind, pictures from my schoolbooks came to mind, and Hughes did not fit that picture” (139). Myers instead admired Dylan Thomas—particularly after he went to a bar to hear him read, only to learn that Thomas had been carried out drunk.