Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers

Author:Walter Dean Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061974939
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE GARMENT CENTER

I was fifteen, starting my junior year at Stuyvesant, and I was lost. I didn’t know where I was going or even where I should have been going. The other boys in the school began the term talking about college. There was an excitement in the air, as some were applying to a program at Yale that allowed them to skip their senior year in high school. There was quite a lot of talk about jobs. Future engineers, physicists, doctors, all sat around me while we waited for the beginning of the annual “Beat Clinton” rally. We wouldn’t beat DeWitt Clinton’s football team, but the rally was fun. A new friend, Stuart Miller, wanted to run a sporting goods shop. I could only think of him as the best writer in the school.

“I can get you a part-time job, man,” my cousin Joseph had promised once when we met at my aunt’s house. “Come on down to my place.”

“I have to get a job through the school,” I lied. I knew Joseph worked in the garment center, pushing a hand truck through the busy streets.

“Well, if they can’t get you anything, come on by my place.”

He wrote down the name of the company he worked for in the garment district. His handwriting was crude, childish. I took the paper and put it in my pocket, intending to discard it as soon as I could.

The garment center was once one of the busiest places in New York City. Located largely on Seventh Avenue between 28th and 41st Streets, it was where America’s clothing was made and assembled. Successive waves of immigrants filled its factories, working for little above minimum wage as they cut, sewed, and hustled the garments into trucks to carry across the country. Mama had sometimes worked in the garment center, and so did my sister Geraldine. Gerry had a good job as a color matcher in a button factory, mixing dyes to any color a retailer wanted to make his dresses distinctive.

There were indoor jobs in the garment center, and outdoor jobs. The indoor jobs were represented by every race under the sun. People who spoke little or no English, but who could do one of the many jobs associated with putting a garment together, flooded into the buildings each morning and out again each night. On the edge of the garment district was the fur district, where the pay was somewhat higher.

The outdoor jobs, the men hustling through the streets with huge racks of dresses, or pushing hand trucks taller than they were, were largely black. Later, in their turn, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics would move into these outdoor jobs. No, I didn’t want a part-time job in the garment center.

The junior and senior years at Stuyvesant were morning sessions, beginning around eight and ending at one without a lunch break. It was possible to work after school, and many of the needier kids did. I heard about kids working in private offices in the neighborhood or at one of the insurance companies on 23rd Street.

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