Bad Boy (9 page)

I needed to work and found another job. L. Einstein & Co. sold costume jewelry, and I worked there through the Christmas holidays and into the spring. I wrapped, logged, and put the postage on packages of jewelry, which went to stores throughout the country.
I read
The Foxes of Harrow
, a novel by Frank Yerby (at the time I didn't know he was black) and
The Well of Loneliness
, a novel given me by a shopkeeper on Fourth Avenue. I wasn't sure exactly what was going on with the sex in either book, but the conflict and longing between the women in
The Well of Loneliness
were interesting.

My response to my problems was to immerse myself in literature. 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. What I had to hide was the self who was a reader, who loved poetry. This self was not the real me but was a very important part of the real me. And this was an idea that people around me could not seem to easily accept. People wanted to look at me and make a quick and simple decision as to who I was. I was big and I played ball and I fought, and those qualities meant, to a lot of people, that I must have a very limited intellectual life. Others were satisfied to label me as a black person and attach to the label any definition they might have as to what that meant. There were those who accepted me as a reader but then would separate me, in their thinking, from anything they accepted as black. But my life was filled with the cultural substance of blackness. I lived in a Harlem I truly loved. I went to church there,
and grew up in the richness of Harlem's colors and smells and the seductive rhythms of its energy. Books, on the other hand, provided a dialog between me and the authors who had written them. They spoke to me, and I responded, not in words but in appreciation and consideration of their thoughts. More and more, I would respond with my own writing.

Buying a typewriter was part of the process. It was easy for me to imagine myself hunched over a keyboard, pounding out reams of deathless, hard-boiled prose. I made fourteen dollars each week in my part-time job and planned accordingly. Each week I gave five dollars to Mama for the household, I used four dollars for lunch, school supplies, and transportation, and the remaining five dollars also went to Mama to save until I accumulated the forty-five dollars I needed for the typewriter.

Working for the typewriter got my mind off college. When Eric called the house to ask if I wanted to do something on the weekends, I would say no, that I had to work to get the typewriter. Eric and I still talked from time to time, but things were difficult between us. In April 1952, by my calculations I had enough money to buy the typewriter and asked Mama for the money. She didn't have it. She had lost it chasing the numbers. I was crushed.

When my dad found out what had happened, he was angry. Mama's betting on the numbers, her chasing dreams, was out of control, and he knew it. She was also growing more and more depressed. She told me that she couldn't see a future for herself. Dad was working as hard as he could, but as in many black families, life had ground down to a bitter struggle for survival. Mama was also drinking heavily. I was filled with the bitterness of not having the typewriter for which I had worked so hard.

Dad decided to take on the task of buying me a typewriter. He went to his job and asked a secretary what kind of machine he should buy. She helped him find an old office-model Royal in a pawnshop. It had glass sides and looked as if it might have been used to write memos during the Civil War. When he brought it home and put it on the kitchen table, I wouldn't touch it. It was not the machine I imagined, or the machine I had worked so hard for. For the next months I hardly spoke to Mama, or she to me. I think that her hurting me made her feel worse than I felt. She began drinking even more.

It was almost May before I finally took the typewriter my father had bought for me into my tiny room. I wrote columns of I hate this typewriter and posted them on my walls.

I was doing badly in school, as I had expected I would, and so I stopped going. The school sent notes home, and I answered them by writing excuses on the unwanted typewriter and signing my mother's name to them.

H
ow old are you?” The guidance counselor had put on her stern voice.

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen? Fifteen?” She acted as if she were surprised that someone that old still needed to be called to Stuyvesant's guidance office. “At fifteen you should know that you need to be responsible for what you are doing in school. Do you want to transfer?”

“No,” I answered, subdued.

“Then you will have to get yourself on the stick, Mr. Myers. And you had better do so fairly quickly. I expect you to be in school every day for the rest of the year and on time, young man.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

“Nothing,” I said, surprised that her voice had softened somewhat. “Nothing.”

I had been out of school three weeks, leaving home each morning and walking to the subway, sometimes fully intending to go to school, only to get off the A train time and time again at 59th Street and wander into Central Park. I had discovered the pleasure of comparing different translations of the same work and would search them out. It was fascinating to me to see the small changes in language and phrasing from one book to the next.

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

Sometimes, if I had the money, I would go to the movies on 42nd Street. The Apollo Theater, the one on 42nd Street, showed foreign movies. I saw a film of Gorky's
The Lower Depths
there, and fell in love with Greta Garbo in
Camille
.

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

Sometimes I would go to Riverside Drive and look out blindly over the dreary Hudson River. I would take my notebook and write dark poems, which I would often later discard. They always said too much about me, and then again, never quite enough.

“So, young man,” the counselor had said, putting on her the-interview-is-over voice, “I expect quite a lot of improvement from you. You have this end term and
one more year to get yourself together and go on to college. Now report back to your homeroom teacher first and then your class.”

I nodded, gathered my books, and walked out of the school. Years later I saw a movie,
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
, in which Ferris, the hero, was happily defiant and disdainful of the system. Everyone in his school was a cut below Ferris, as were his parents. His day away from school, replete with all the money he needed to enjoy the romp with his friends, was one of triumph. I didn't want to be defiant. I wanted to be in the system that I was walking away from, but I didn't know how to get in.

The school sent the end-of-the-year report card, and I read it, surprised that I had passed some classes I had rarely attended. They were looking for a way to pass me, and if I had passed the end terms, they moved me on. I resolved to do better the next year. Again.

Summer. The
Amsterdam News
assessed the chances of the Brooklyn Dodgers. If they lost again, it would be a blow to the chances of blacks in the major leagues, they said. The Dodgers had more black players than anyone, and the Yankees had very few. The Yankees were a white team. I had lost faith in the Dodgers' ability to win a World Series, but I still loved them.

I played little ball during the summer. There was a coaches' tournament up at City College that I did get into, but my growing depression was affecting my game. I didn't believe in myself anymore.

I was thin, weighed less than 175 pounds, and fast enough to play guard, but the guys in the tournament were good. Some players came up from Philadelphia. Wilt Chamberlain was one of them. Ballplayers knew where the important games were going to be held, and the best ballplayers from all over the city were at the games. Coaches or scouts from around the country also attended. There were a few professional black basketball players in the National Basketball League, but not that many. The big push was to find players who might play college ball. I watched, mostly from the sidelines, and got into one game briefly, only to discover that the players were a whole level better than me. I got caught in a blind switch and found myself standing behind Chamberlain. He backed into me, and I felt his butt in my chest. I grabbed him when the ball came into the paint, and he went up as if he hadn't even noticed me hanging on.

There was a lot of talk about basketball scholarships, and I thought about trying to get up my interest in ball again. I played more that summer than I had for a while and began to see weaknesses in my game. Or
perhaps it was just that whenever I looked at myself, I saw weaknesses where a few years earlier I had seen strengths. Fatty, my basketball coach, told me that my first step to the basket was good but that my second was weak.

“Your first step has to get you into position to get past the defender,” he said. “The second step has to be strong enough to prevent him from recovering.”

I went to the playground every morning to practice that second step.

On my way to one of these practice sessions I saw Frank for the first time. It was early morning, and the park was still empty of the hordes of kids who filled it each day. I was headed toward the first court when I saw a fight at the far end of the courts. There were three guys circling one. They took turns swinging at the guy in the middle, who was clearly not a good fighter. I went closer. One of the attackers had a chain, and the other two were using fists. They were all about my age, maybe a year or so older.

The fight wasn't my business, but somehow I was drawn to it. I moved very close to them, getting into their space, and was told to get lost before I got my face broken. I hit the guy who spoke to me, the one with the chain. His knees buckled, and he went down. The fellow being attacked, given a moment's respite,
fiercely attacked one of the others. In a moment the three attackers were running toward the fence surrounding the basketball courts and climbing over it. They stopped long enough to issue threats from where they stood on the grass surrounding the basketball courts. Then they moved on.

The guy who had been attacked thanked me, and I asked him what the fight had been about.

He was six feet, with light, mottled skin and sandy brown hair with a streak of even lighter hair near the front. His eyes were large and pink rimmed.

He told me that the guys had wanted to rob him and had started the fight when they found out he didn't have any money.

He told me that his name was Frank Hall, and I told him mine. We walked out of the park together, and he thanked me again for helping him out.

“You don't mind fighting?” he asked.

I shrugged. No, I didn't like fighting, I thought. But something inside me was happy about being in the fight. It hadn't mattered so much that it was three against one, or that one of Frank's attackers had used a chain. It was more a feeling that, when I was fighting, I stopped feeling the sense of helplessness that seemed to be overtaking me. I had hoped to become part of a special way of life. That life would have had to do with ideas and
people who took those ideas and shaped them into a kind of power. But that life seemed, in my growing isolation, ever more remote. It was as if I were standing on the sidewalk on the main drag of my existence, looking through the glass at all of life's goodies, but could not find an open door. Smashing the window would not make me welcome, but it would say that I was there.

Frank offered me half of the money he did have, and I refused it. He told me he lived near 116th Street. I didn't make much of the fact that he didn't give me an exact address. We said good-bye in front of my house.

At home two women friends of my mother's sat with her in the kitchen. Miss Dailey and Louise were drinking beer. Mama's speech was slurred as she told me to say hello to Jean, Louise's granddaughter, who was in the living room. I went to the living room, said hello to Jean, who was about my age and thoroughly unlikable, and went to my room. In my room I lay across the bed and listened to the radio. I thought about what had happened in the park and knew that I liked hitting the guy who had the chain.

I also thought about Jean. I didn't like her, 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. They talked as if sex were the greatest thing that
had ever happened and that it was normal to have sex foremost in your mind. I hadn't had sex, didn't know a thing about it except what I had learned from Eric (or thought I had learned), but I knew I didn't have the same degree of interest that was being expressed by some of the guys around the edge of the basketball court. Although I didn't know the ins and outs of sexuality, I did understand that there was a connection between homosexuality and being called “faggot.” Faggots were often pictured, especially in the black community, as speaking with exaggerated precision, reciting poetry, and listening to classical music. Logically, I knew that loving books and writing did not make me homosexual, but more and more I hid those interests.

The church was the center of my community when I was a child, and much of who I was came from what I had been taught at the Church of the Master. What I understood, my philosophy, was based on the New Testament. I believed in this great sense of fairness, overseen by God Himself, that would reward the good and the pure of heart. But now things weren't turning out in the way I thought they should, and I didn't know what to do about it. I wondered if God was truly on the watch or whether religion, as well as my belief in God, would turn into yet another disappointment. I wrote
a long letter to Reverend Robinson expressing my doubts. Two weeks later I received a letter from him that said, in effect, that when he, too, sometimes had doubts, he relied on his faith to carry him through.

That wasn't what I wanted to know. I wanted him to give me a telephone number that I could use to call God directly and get the straight scoop. I wanted to hear a big voice on the phone say “Yea, verily, this is me, God. It's all good, my man, and will be ultracool in the end. Don't worry about it.”

Over the summer I read a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman. I liked the book because much of it took place in areas of New York with which I was familiar. I was particularly interested in Leon Czolgosz, a young man who had tried to join the anarchists but had been rejected by them. Goldman said that he was a troubled young man looking for a cause to join. When he was rejected by the New York anarchists, he tried to prove himself by killing President McKinley.

“I killed McKinley because I loved the people,” he is quoted as saying. Like Czolgosz, I considered myself an outsider and longed to commit the heroic act that would make me “belong.” It was the same reasoning that some friends of mine used when they joined gangs.

We had read
The Red Badge of Courage
in school, and over the summer I read and enjoyed a history of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. This was my first major encounter with historical nonfiction, and I found it fascinating.

I was still trying to figure out the business of race. Most of what I read and heard was negative. Blacks had been slaves. Blacks had been lynched. Blacks could not eat in this place or that. There was little positive published about blacks except in the black press. The
Amsterdam News
ran stories about Negroes who had made good, and about some who hadn't. A new beauty parlor opened; “Bumpy” Johnson, the dope dealer, lost an appeal; and Langston Hughes, described as “the poet,” gave a party.

Walking with my brother along Seventh Avenue, I once saw a gathering around a brown-skinned man who was being interviewed by some white reporters. Mickey and I went over and found that the man was Langston Hughes. We listened to him talk. He sounded like any black man on the street. There was nothing extraordinary about him, nothing that lifted him out of the ordinary. His humor was gentle, thoughtful. I was disappointed. When I pictured the idea of “writer” in my mind, pictures from my schoolbooks came to mind, and Hughes did not fit that picture. What I didn't
admit was that neither did I. It would be years before I would meet Hughes again, and even longer before I would understand what we had in common, what we suffered in common. I didn't tell him that I was a writer. I wish I had.

I also heard, for the first time, the poet Dylan Thomas on the radio. He read some of his poetry, including “In the White Giant's Thigh,” and “It Was My Thirtieth Year to Heaven.” He was said to frequent The White Horse, a bar down on the West Side. I went down to the bar, wearing my blue sports jacket, which I thought made me look older. The bar was full of beer drinkers, all white and at least in their twenties, if not older. I ordered a Coke, but the bartender, who wasn't a bit fooled about my age, told me to leave. I asked a bearded man sitting at the bar if Dylan Thomas was there. He had been, the man said, and had already been carried out drunk.

The man who related the story seemed disgusted by Thomas, but the whole scene was exciting to me, and that the man who had written and recited his poetry had been carried out drunk was wonderfully romantic.

I wanted to do something wonderfully romantic, to fulfill my idea of what I thought a writer should be like. Dylan Thomas, with his high, ethereal voice and poetry
that was, at times, incomprehensible, fulfilled that idea, whereas Hughes, writing about ordinary people and about a very mundane Harlem, did not fulfill that idea.

“What are you writing about?” a student asked me in Stuyvesant when I returned in September, full of hope and resolve. “What are you trying to do with your poems?”

What I was trying was not to do anything. What I was trying was to be somebody I could recognize as having the values and interests that I had learned were good. I wanted to be the person who wrote poems that moved the hearts of wicked men and made beautiful women swoon at my feet. I wanted to be the person who wrote with such a passion that all people would turn away from injustice and embrace the Sermon on the Mount. I wanted to write my poems and read them in a bar filled with shiny-faced admirers and then fall drunk and be carried off to a movie star's bed.