Bad Boy: A Memoir

Myers’s speech impediment serves as a symbol for his figurative struggles to find his voice as he grows older. Myers lingers on both the shame his impediment causes him and his own inability to hear himself misspeaking, describing his first meetings with a speech therapist as follows: “The therapist kept trying to get me to pronounce my words clearly, but apparently I did not. The trouble was that to me, the words seemed clear […] I would become very angry if kids laughed at my speech, or even if I thought they were laughing. My first instinct would be to yell at them, quickly followed by punching them” (25).

This difficulty with oral communication is part of what first sparks Myers’s interest in writing: “If I couldn’t speak well, I could still communicate by writing. If the words didn’t come easily from my mouth, they would, I hoped, eventually come from my writing” (120). Ironically, however, Myers’s childhood and adolescent efforts to become a writer are also shaped by blindness and self-doubt. The authors Myers studies and grows to love are uniformly white, and without a black writer to look up to, Myers attempts to copy the style and interests of the works he reads in school. However, these works are detached from Myers’s experiences of life in Harlem, and as time goes on, his love of reading and writing leads him to reject his racial identity more and more. It isn’t until Myers begins to read works by writers like James Baldwin that he is able to find a way of writing that reflects both his love of language and his lived experience.

The typewriter Myers’s father buys for him is a symbol of Myers’s growing disillusionment with his future. By the time Myers begins saving up to buy himself a typewriter, he is uncomfortably aware that he likely won’t be continuing his education. Having a typewriter, however, would give him the means to continue writing regardless. Myers is therefore devastated when his mother spends the money he has saved up, and not at all consoled by the used typewriter his father buys for him instead: “It had glass sides and looked as if it might have been used to write memos during the Civil War […] It was not the machine I imagined, or the machine I had worked so hard for” (128). These words apply almost equally well to the future Myers was facing at the time; a life of blue-collar work and financial insecurity was not, in Myers’s mind, what he had worked to achieve in school.

The garment center is a group of factories on New York City’s Seventh Avenue, which Myers describes as producing and shipping much of America’s clothing. Over the course of Bad Boy, the garment center provides off-and-on employment to Florence, Myers’s sisters, and eventually Myers himself. However, because the garment center largely employs immigrants and African-Americans, it is linked in Myers’s mind to the working-class black life he wants to escape; he initially avoids seeking work there and, after taking a job there, bitterly resents being transferred to one of the “outdoor jobs” held mostly by black workers (115). Perhaps most tellingly, Myers comes to associate the garment center with other fixtures of life for many working-class black men:

The garment center and fighting were connected in my mind, and I couldn’t sort them out. I hadn’t been nervous in the bathroom [when Myers saved Frank from being beaten up during a drug deal]. I wasn’t nervous until I got home that evening. I wrote down what happened, making it seem more an intellectual exercise than it was […] I was not walking down a beach and encountering a stranger. This was a possible reality, a kind of life that existed all around me (192-93).