493. Bad Boys

BROWDERBOOKS

My new historical novel Forbidden Brownstones is about the struggle of a young black man to realize his dream of living in a brownstone and even possessing it -- a fantasy that becomes an obsession facing many obstacles in racially prejudiced nineteenth-century New York.

 

It is now available from Amazon for $16.95 (paperback) or $5.99 (e-book).  And from Barnes & Noble for $16.95 (paperback), and from WiDo Publishing for $15.75 (paperback).

                             Bad  Boys

They're arrogant, insolent, aggressive, and mean by nature.  Gifted too, perhaps.  Primarily a male tendency; in my own life I've only encountered males, though I'm sure females of the species exist.

In my college class there was one, wiry.   He was cocky, good-looking, muscular, aggressive, and disliked by most of his classmates.  Yet the girl he went with, and perhaps married, was one of the nicest, most likable girls on campus.  Which brings us to another point: bad boys make out.

Recently I rewrote an article about the writer Norman Mailer that had been deleted from my nonfiction title Fascinating New Yorkers.  I described Mailer as the literary bad boy of his age.  What qualified him for this role?  A host of things.

• He was by nature aggressive, always in a fight (usually when drunk), and relished it.
• He stabbed his second wife twice, and when someone tried to help her as she lay on the floor bleeding, Mailer yelled, "Let the bitch die!"
• Angry because writer Gore Vidal had given one of his books a bad review, he assaulted Vidal verbally and physically when they met to appear on a TV show together.
• A foe of feminists, he dismissed women's writing as "Quaintsy Goysy, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque."

Yes, clearly a literary bad boy.  But they come in many forms.  The sixteenth-century painter Caravaggio, renowned for stunning light-and-dark effects, saw fit to decamp from Italy for Malta, because in an argument he had killed a man.  Hollywood has had a surfeit of them, both onscreen and off.  The unruly behavior of actor Errol Flynn was the delight of columnists, since he provided them with endless copy, while onscreen he was dashing, bold, passionate, and galant.

Recently I've been playing CDs from my deceased partner Bob's collection, recordings of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Three Penny Opera, especially the song "Mack the Knife."  Mack is a thief and a murderer -- the ultimate in bad boys -- yet his girlfriend adores him and he is respected and feared in the seedy underworld.  No doubt because, at least for a while, he gets away with it.

Are there bad boys in finance?  All over the place.  In several posts I chronicled the career of a young New Yorker, Martin Shkreli, a financial hotshot characterized by boyish looks, online self-promotion with hours of livestreaming, and a teasing smirk.  This boy wonder had a way of starting one company, getting into ruinous debt, then starting another company and using its investors' money to pay off the first company's debt: a sort of Ponzi scheme.  Some of his enterprises involved pharmaceuticals.  When he raised the price of a drug from $13.50 to $750, he was reviled as the most hated man in America, and relished it.  It made him that much more attractive to women, he insisted, and he was probably right.  If a girl asked him for a date, he warned her that she would have to get in line, and the line was long.  

If we don't hear much about Mr. Shkreli now, it's because in 2017 the feds indicted him, not for the drug price outrage, which was not illegal, but for misrepresenting his assets to investors.  Convicted at age 34, he was hauled off to prison, and at last report was launching a lawsuit from durance vile against someone whom he claimed had slandered him.

Are there bad boys in politics?  Of course.  I have characterized this financial whiz kid as a smaller version of a noted and controversial political figure of our time.  Need I say more?

Once, having become the pen pal of a gay inmate in North Carolina convicted of child molestation and crime against nature -- charges that I thought inappropriate and overly severe -- I hoped that, however belatedly, I might become the bad boy of my college class.  But when I mentioned this by e-mail to an older woman on the staff of the college alumni magazine, she replied, "Oh no!  We've got murderers and international drug dealers."  Which immediately and forever shot down my aspirational folly.  With competition like that, I didn't stand a chance.

©  2021 Clifford Browder