A lesson from the bad boys

Rockstar's Lego Bad Boy

MJ is a guy I used to know from Way Back When… Class clown, full of energy, gumption and chutzpah, he used to drive our teachers nuts. I remember my mum remarking he was such a tall good-looking little boy and couldn’t imagine him being a terror (so yeah, I suspect all the mums knew of him, from all us little kids coming home with the stories). I was the kind of child who was eager to please and hungry for approval, and therefore quite a goody-two-shoes, and as we grew and drifted in and out of touch, I lapped up his stories without it ever occurring to me how dangerous in reality some of that rather self-destructive behavior might be.

BK is a long-lost cousin of mine, half Malaysian and originally half German on his mum’s side. I vaguely remember in my teens hearing he was decorated after serving in the British Army during the Iraq War where he was sent on active duty, I think it was. He described how they had to go for counselling re how they felt about killing other people. Our late maternal grandmother got very upset by the pictures of him in full army gear complete with camo warpaint because he was her first grandson and so she threw all the pics away.

I remember him and a British buddy of his visiting me in my dorm in Singapore and taking me out one evening – he then got picked up by a girl in the quiet bar they brought me to (he was always such a ladies’ man), but still sent me home in time for curfew before considering going back to the bar. This is someone who at the age of 16 left home and shacked up with a 21 year old girlfriend whom, he chuckled conspiratorially to my mum, “Taught me a lot of things.”

Their (mis)adventures were, to me, just this side of cool. Once, they got arrested and fined like, 100 GBP. That is to say, my cuz was fined, his friend was not. It was an attempted mugging in London, and the would-be thief deserves points for stupidity, trying to rob 2 guys with a knife or broken bottle or something. “We gave him the royal salute” which is apparently an uppercut to the jaw. The police arrived while they were kicking him on the ground. The thief pressed charges. My cuz got fined because he refused to plead guilty, unlike his friend. “No. He was trying to rob us.”

Then one of the “bad boys” told me right before a big school exam, he moved out because his parents were just nagging the hell out of him. Renting a seedy room outside, he’d called home and when his folks started screaming, he hung up. Did he call back? Of course, several days later.

“This time they didn’t yell. So I told them I was fine and needed to be left alone to study for the exam… They said nothing. But I was really happy when a couple days later I realized my dad had transferred more money into my account. I was running low.”

Later on, I would marvel at the incredibly humble and hardworking person he would become. He felt he might have been spoiled by such “love” from his parents in earlier years, but when I recalled his description of events above, I felt….. He was “loved.” How much restraint it must have taken, for his father not to yell at him, that second phone call. To realize his son would probably go looking for odd jobs just to make enough money and stay outside (thereby taking time away from his studies that crucial exam time) rather than come back home.

It cannot have been an easy decision, I keep thinking it must have taken some courage to wordlessly transfer more money into his son’s account so the boy could carry on living outside.

When the exams were done, the son came home. I remember him remarking he would probably have done much worse in his exams if he’d been taking them under his parents’ roof with all the nagging and his fighting back.

The other “bad boy” got kicked out of school after a search of his locker turned up a gas gun. He’d gotten it, he said, as “protection” after taking on a fight that was not his. He’d seen a friend/ acquaintance getting beat up and gotten involved. It was decades ago that he told me, I think it was simply because without knowing anything else, he thought it wasn’t a very fair fight.

Gas gun bad. Fighting bad. Right?

But how many guys you know would’ve walked by a park, seen a half doz guys kicking around one guy he knew, and jumped in to help?

They got away, but after learning he was now officially on whatever the List Of Guys To Get Beat Up is, he decided to get “protection.” School authorities knew to search his locker because he’d mentioned to a “friend” attending the same school that he kept a gas gun in there, and she tattled. He went on to become a chef. He described his stepfather’s attitude to his hard work and corresponding rewards as being “fair.” As in, “he is a very fair man.” I admire the “parenting ability” of whoever his stepfather is, at least for the ability to earn the respect and listening ear of his willful stepson.

Both were tattooed, one of em with an image of Felix The Cat that I absolutely loathed, both are strapping, charming, and about 6 feet tall, but the thing that really had me about these two was that they were “by definition” bad boys who were really not bad people. In the sense that they were a lot less selfish and more trustworthy than some of the “by definition good boys” out there with the great grades and jobs. I know at least a few “good boys” who cheated on girlfriends or spouses. I remember a biography I once read, about the daughter of a Yakuza in Japan. She described how the worst bullies in school were the kids whose parents had the most respectable jobs – investment bankers, lawyers.

You might wonder why I would believe the bad boys’ “noble” motives in the above misdemeanors (bet there were many more they didn’t tell me about). It’s because neither one could care less whether they came across as good guys. Willful, nuts, but unpretentious. Rather ironic I know a lot of “good guys” who’ve lied and cheated because they care what people think of them. Not that it necessarily keeps them from being bad, it just motivates them to pretend at being good. To conform to what society defines as “good” – grades, jobs, earning power.

For someone like me who has never “dabbled with the dark side” (that is not to say RMs don’t tell me stories about USD 5,000 call girls or How To Cheat Via HK Jockey Club’s No Cellphone Policy By Leaving Your Car There, Then Taking A Co-conspirator’s Car To Where You Really Want To Go Looking For Girls), it isn’t that easy for me to imagine how deep the rabbit hole down there goes. I have never even taken an exploratory puff of a cigarette. (If it were healthy and you couldn’t get hooked, I might.) But…..

When one of em told me he moved out during the exams… I couldn’t help wondering wistfully what it would’ve been like if I’d had the guts to stand up to my parents when they told me to take a major at Uni that I had neither the interest nor aptitude for (it was simply what my older ASEAN scholar cousin and various top students took, therefore I was to take). My failure to stand up led to so much anger and resentment on my part, in the years that followed. Of all things, would you believe a recurring nightmare I have is that I was still stuck in that course in Uni, unable to graduate and get away? It is by far not the worst thing that has ever happened to me, yet when I’m asleep, this is where my mind takes me. I wonder why I never, in this dream, just change majors.

One of these guys regretted his own craziness so much, “I gave my parents so many white hairs I’m seriously scared to have kids now because of the karma.” Yet….. in his telling, don’t you think his parents achieved at least some of their parenting goals? I was amazed at the humble, hardworking, down-to-earth individual who emerged from making his own mistakes, albeit some must have been horribly painful. Yet he was loved throughout. In my deepest, darkest moments, I remember wondering if I would have been loved if I did not achieve. Maybe that’s why the nightmare is I can’t finish my hateful major and get away. In my own head, hungry for parental approval as I was, I can’t ever get away by changing majors – because I have to complete what my parents want first. It’s so crazy and shallow in the telling it has to be true or I just wouldn’t tell you. There are so many things near and dear to me, there are so many tragedies, yet one of my most recurring nightmares remains about the “trapped” feeling in my major. 

Maybe because “the major” represents to me my parents’ expectations. I can rationalize as much as I want, I can be “coldly logical” (I daresay I am a bit more so than Kings haha) and I can be outspoken and seemingly defiant nowadays. But subconsciously I cannot escape that I was raised from a very young age to believe I had to achieve, to complete the things my parents wanted, to have their approval. I. Just. Had to. (And I can see how Tiger parents out there might go Hmm! Bliss!)

The “easier” way is actually to blindly push. Push, push, push, because if your child gets As and plump spots in music recitals you must be doing something right, right? The way I see it, it’s harder to back off and stop pushing. And that’s not perfect either. Your child could grow up and go Damn Why Did You Spoil Me Now I Have To Work Even Harder.

Sigh. Not easy, this. It’s a fine line, knowing when to push and when to back off. And now we all become parents and swear we won’t repeat our own parents’ mistakes and of course the temptation is to swing wildly in the opposite direction and so we have to keep checking ourselves. And look for lessons anywhere we can find them.