Bad Boy: A Memoir

After learning that he had missed graduation, Myers’s depression deepened; he stopped reading and writing, and isolated himself from his friends and family. He particularly feared that Herbert was disappointed in him, though in retrospect he realizes that his father simply didn’t understand him anymore.

Myers agreed to help Frank deliver another package, waiting outside as Frank met with the recipient in a subway bathroom. When Frank didn’t emerge quickly, however, Myers went to check on him and found the two men fighting; Myers intervened, but he and Frank barely escaped, since the other man chased after them with a gun. Once they were safe, Frank threatened to kill the man who had arranged the deal. He also asked whether Myers had enjoyed the fight, which Myers had no clear response to: “There was a danger, I instantly knew, that the feeling of power, even temporary, could possibly draw me in, could trap me the way that the temporary relief of drugs trapped people” (193).

Myers attempted to make sense of the incident by writing about it and then by mentioning it to Dr. Holiday, who in turn (he suspects) told Florence. Only a week later, however, Frank was beaten up, apparently by men associated with the drug trade. Despite the legal risks involved, Frank decided to seek safety in Philadelphia. Myers—devastated by his friend’s departure, and worried about the enemies he had made helping Frank—stopped at an Army recruiting stand on his way home from seeing Frank off. Claiming his parents were dead, Myers arranged to enlist on his seventeenth birthday.

Florence was upset when she learned of Myers’s plans, and Myers found himself unable to explain the sense of shame and despair that had led him to enlist. Herbert, however, approved: “I heard him say to Mama that it would make a man out of me. He wanted me to hear him say that, and I don’t think he meant it in a bad way. He wanted to somehow reassure me” (197).

On the day Myers left, Herbert gave him the Bible that he himself had carried in the Navy, while Florence watched in silence. Myers boarded the train and began writing. This, he says, marked the end of “the first part of [his] life (198).

Although the idea of writing professionally didn’t occur to Myers when he was young, he regards his career, in retrospect, as “amazingly logical” (199). For one thing, he says, he learned to read and appreciate literature young: “All those conversations with Mama in that sunny Harlem apartment, conversations meaningless to anyone but us, prepared me to use language in special ways, making it my own” (199–200). He also credits his success to the quality of the works he read and the ideas they exposed him to, although he admits luck played a role as well; he could easily have been killed or jailed as a teenager.

Myers describes his years in the Army as “numbing” and “non-thinking,” and was relieved when his service ended (200). Afterwards, Myers took jobs in factories, and mailrooms, continuing to read in his free time but no longer writing. He was finally forced to acknowledge his dissatisfaction with his life when a fellow construction worker catcalled a passing woman. As a result, Myers began to write again, “just […] to be able to think of [himself] as a person with a brain as well as a body” (202).

Myers found writing “refreshing” and eventually started sending his work away for consideration (203). He mostly encountered rejection, but he wrote more and more regardless and occasionally began to see his poems and short stories in print. What truly encouraged Myers, however, was reading James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”: from that point on, Myers felt free to draw on his experiences of race when writing—something he thanked Baldwin for when he later met him. Myers was finally able to transition into writing full-time in 1968, when a young adult book he had written won a contest and was published.

Myers explains that writing his memoir has caused him to appreciate his childhood more deeply; it was his family’s and community’s support, he says, that allowed him to grow past the challenges he sometimes encountered as a child and teen. He concludes with an anecdote about visiting his parents as an adult. Over breakfast, Myers says, Florence asked him about his job, and when Myers explained that he wrote children’s books, Herbert remarked that Myers “wrote stories when [he was] a boy,” but that he was now “a man” (205–06). Myers, however, does not hold this against his father, saying that writing has allowed him to “return to that period of innocence in [his] life,” while also ensuring that “the skills [he has] are respected for themselves” (206).