Bad Boy: A Memoir

In January of his senior year, Myers was “still hoping for a miracle” (180). Once again, he turned to the Dodgers for consolation, although he didn’t truly believe they would win: “Baseball teams will allow you to love them and to show emotion when people turn away from you. And when the team wins, when the team gets the needed hits and the runs flood across home plate, the love is returned, and there is satisfaction” (181). He also continued to spend time with Frank, whom he saw as a fellow “alien” (181). Although Myers was still seeing Dr. Holiday, he dismissed her attempts to “help [him] see [his] strengths,” believing that he “knew [his] strengths well, and they were killing [him]” (182).

Meanwhile, Myers continued to read obsessively—particularly the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, which allowed him to “imagine [himself] lying in the trenches, weighing [his] words against the pain of dying, thinking that death could be a satisfactory answer to failed promise” (183). Myers wrote as well, but his work had become “removed from the logic that had once made [his] stories and poems easily accessible” (184). On one occasion, he got into a fight with the gang he’d fought before, taking pleasure in getting back at some of the “idiots intruding on [his] life” (185).