That Was Then, This Is Now

“I never have been able to accept authority. I don’t know why. I figure it was because of this cop—these two cops—who beat me up once when I was thirteen years old. […] I never forgot it. It didn’t stop me from drinking, but it sure ruined any respect I ever had for cops.”

Questioning authority is a hallmark of coming-of-age literature, and Bryon is no exception. The lingering effects of his encounter with the officers who beat him demonstrate that violence only breeds resentment. It takes a long time and opportunities for practice for Bryon to gradually accept that some respect for authority can be helpful, as when he seeks employment.

“I got the idea that she was fed up with getting walked all over by white people. I could see that. I get fed up with getting walked over by the fuzz, teachers, my old man, and the upper-class kids at school. So I could see that.”

Here, Mike describes Connie’s hurt and anger at the racist treatment she experienced in empathetic terms. His unwillingness to condemn Cathy demonstrates a maturity and wisdom that leave a lasting impression on Bryon, showing him the way forward toward breaking the chain of violence. At the same time, Mike’s injuries show that even the best intentions can’t prevent others from acting cruelly.

“Man, if anybody ever hurt me like that I’d hate them for the rest of my life.”

Mark’s reaction to Mike’s story is one of incredulity. To Mark, empathy and compassion for one’s supposed enemies are foolish, since they seem to ignore hurt and injury. What Mark does not grasp is that such violence need not be inevitable, provided someone can step back and defuse the situation. Mark’s words also foreshadow his eventual hatred of Bryon.

“You know what the crummiest feeling you can have is? To hate the person you love best in the world.”

When Cathy makes a passing comment about how “beautiful” Mark is, Bryon momentarily feels a flash of anger toward Mark. Narrating the event in retrospect, Bryon highlights the moment as emblematic of his later, present-day relationship with Mark, whom he both loves and hates. His recognition that love and hatred are not always mutually exclusive shows that he is passing from the innocence of childhood to the puzzling paradoxes of adulthood.

“Bryon, you’re the only family I got, you know that? I mean, your mom’s been great to me and everything, but I don’t feel like she’s really my old lady. But I feel like you’re my brother. A real one.”

While Bryon comforts Mark in the aftermath of his injury, Mark opens up to express his sense of kinship with Bryon. Ironically, the closest relationships carry the greatest potential for hurt; Bryon learns this later when his new perspectives make it impossible to sustain their friendship.

“‘We were like brothers, not just you and me, but all of us together. We woulda died for each other then. And now everybody’s kinda slipped away, and then we woulda died for each other. Really, man, remember? It was great, we were like a bunch of people makin’ up one big person, like we totaled up to somethin’ when we were together.’

‘Now we total up to something by ourselves just as easy.’”

Here, Bryon and Mark reminisce about an earlier period in their lives during which they felt closely bonded as part of a group, while they now have begun to drift apart as individuals. Their relative uniformity of thought and behavior at that time contrasts with Bryon’s increasing divergence from the norms of their group. While Mark laments this development in his words, Bryon’s pride in becoming his own person is clear in his reply.

“Now I saw it clearly. They didn’t like me. The truth is they were probably scared of me. But I was a ‘poor white,’ and they were ‘liberals,’ so I got invited to the parties so everyone could see what hip, hip people they were.”

Following his thought-provoking conversation with Mark, Bryon sees the world with new eyes, as his comments here demonstrate. Bryon realizes that some people who claim to be his friends are only using him to demonstrate their own supposed political awareness. His comments show that some advancement has taken place since the events of The Outsiders transpired, which saw the rich Socs pitted against the poor greasers in gang warfare, but also hints at how far there is left to go.

“Shut up, O.K.? As long as they ain’t doin’ nothin’ to you, it’s O.K. I guess you can get away with anything.”

When Mark is arrested for hotwiring the principal’s car, Bryon fears the worst, but, as in times past, Mark is released with barely a reprimand. Bryon is relieved but also angry at Mark for knowingly taking such a significant risk, given his criminal record. Their difference of opinion shows that Bryon is beginning to think more seriously about risks and consequences, while Mark deliberately resists the impulse to focus on such concerns.

“Mark—can’t you see? This ain’t some story, some TV show, bang! you're dead, big deal. This is the real thing. Charlie is dead! He was all set for life, he wasn’t gonna get drafted, he had his business, he was all set, and then we blew it for him.”

While Bryon is devastated by Charlie’s death, Mark moves on quickly and with minimal emotion. Here, Bryon emphatically explains his feelings, revealing his tendency to linger on past events and to assume responsibility for them, just as he does as narrator. His words are intended to break Mark’s conception that nothing bad ever happens to him, but there is a key difference between them: Bryon cared about Charlie, while Mark apparently did not.

“I guess I just couldn’t see standing there—alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being—one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn’t the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain’t the same.”

“I guess I just couldn’t see standing there—alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being—one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn’t the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain’t the same.”

“Now I wish I had told him how much he meant to us, to me and Mom, how he made us seem more like a family. But I never have been able to say things like that, to tell people I loved them, unless it was some nitwit chick I couldn’t care less about.”

Bryon finds that he has difficulty expressing his emotions verbally, especially when they are deeply felt. This reaction is possibly related to inherited cultural notions of masculinity, which suggest that a man is supposed to be strong and silent. Looking back, Bryon comes to regret the moments when he could have said or done something to strengthen his relationship with Mark but chose not to.

“All of a sudden it seemed like I was a hundred years old, or thirty at least. I wondered if, when I got to be twenty, I would think how stupid I was at sixteen.”

As Bryon observes the silly behavior of some young kids across the street, he suddenly feels older than his years. His awareness of the cadences of life shows that he is maturing, even as he admits the possibility that he may someday find his present self to be equally immature as the kids whose behavior he now ridicules. This idea proves prophetic; just a few months later, he finds plenty to critique and regret.

“You can’t just say, ‘This is a stage,’ when it’s important to people what they’re feeling. Maybe he will outgrow it someday, but right now it’s important.”

As part of her message of The Choices and Responsibilities of Adulthood, Hinton explores the relative value of living in the moment versus dwelling on the past. Here, Cathy scolds her father for glossing over the present in anticipation of the future by ignoring M&M’s current struggles with the rationale that they will eventually pass. Her comments imply that parents must start with empathy if they are to overcome the generation gaps endemic to modern society.

“I had always taken her family for granted—they weren’t so different from most of the families in our neighborhood. But now that I had seen Cathy’s home—not rich, not much more than poor, but where everybody cared about each other and tried to act like decent people—the picture Angela was painting was making me sick.”

Under Cathy’s influence, Bryon realizes that some things he has taken for granted throughout his life, such as the dysfunction in Angela’s family, or the violence in his own life, are not inevitable. As he gravitates toward the new kind of life he envisions with Cathy, whom he plans to marry, Bryon views his past with increasing distaste. His realization that Cathy’s family is happy (prior to M&M’s departure) despite poverty reflects his growing understanding of how happiness can be obtained.

“How come things always happen like that? Seems like you let your defenses down for one second and man, you get it. Pow! Care about somebody, give a damn for another person, and you get blasted. How come it’s like that?”

Here, in a moment of drink-induced frankness, Bryon laments what he sees as a fundamental unfairness of life. Citing Mike as an example, he asks a question to which neither he nor Mark can provide an answer. Bryon’s increasing ability to feel love and empathy for others is accompanied by an increasing fear that, in so doing, he will open himself to be hurt by them. As his fears are later realized, this speech serves as foreshadowing.

“You can’t walk through your whole life saying ‘If.’ You can’t keep trying to figure out why things happen, man. That’s what old people do. That’s when you can’t get away with things any more. You gotta just take things as they come, and quit trying to reason them out.”

Frustrated with Bryon’s increasingly philosophical outlook, Mark urges him to give up analyzing life’s twists and turns. Here, Mark reveals that his knack for getting away with things has more to do with attitude than it does with any good luck charm. Mark gets away with things precisely because he does not let the bad turns bother him. His insistence that only “old people” reason things out shows that he, unlike Bryon, wishes to cling onto the vestiges of childhood for as long as he can.

“I am the first to admit I’ve got hang ups. I don’t think I’d ever consider myself really free. But I’m not sure I’d consider them free, either.”

Here, Bryon evaluates the assertion made by a resident of the commune house that the members of their community are free. To Bryon, the concept of freedom is a puzzling one, as he finds that he is placed into situations without any easy solutions, such as the metaphorical tug-of-war between Cathy and Mark over his perspectives and development. Though Bryon is free to choose between them, he may only do so within an existing framework of choices and consequences. Similarly, the “hippies” may have escaped some of the confines of society’s traditional rules and expectations, but they also adhere to their own set of rules, even as some of them develop substance use disorders.

“I don’t want to keep this up, this getting-even jazz. It’s stupid and I’m sick of it and it keeps going in circles. I have had it—so if you’re planning any get-even mugging, forget it.”

Bryon’s clear instructions to Mark after he is assaulted are to refrain from any form of retaliation against the Shepherds. As Bryon explains his reasoning, he explicitly recognizes that violence is never really the end—it only incites more violence. However, for a violent conflict to end, one party or the other must pass up on a chance to attack the other, which proves frustrating to Mark.

“Mark had absolutely no concept of what was right and what was wrong; he didn’t obey any laws, because he couldn’t see that there were any. Laws, right and wrong, they didn’t matter to Mark, because they were just words.”

Bryon’s analysis of Mark’s morality, or lack thereof, shows that he is beginning to differ from Mark on a deeper level. Fundamentally, their values no longer align, which is what moves Bryon to betray Mark by reporting him to the police. Bryon finds, however, that living a principled life is not so straightforward as he had imagined, as his actions cost him the friendship of his best friend.

“I seemed to have become a mixture of things I had picked up from Charlie, Mark, Cathy, M&M, Mom, and even obscure people like Mike and the blond hippie-chick and the Shepherds. I had learned something from everyone, and I didn’t seem to be the same person I had been last year. But like a mixture, I was mixed up.”

Bryon concludes that he is a product of many and varied influences, some of which he lists. In trying to become his own person, he has been influenced by many different people; as a result of these competing influences, Bryon finds that his internal conflicts become nearly impossible to resolve. After the moment of clarity in which Bryon reports Mark to the police, his certainty shatters, leaving him to wonder and drift.

“Bryon, you got even with Mark for Cathy, then you got even with Cathy for Mark. When are you going to stop getting even with yourself?”

Bryon’s mother accurately identifies a pattern of getting even underlying his behavior. Thus, despite his resolution to break patterns of physical violence, Bryon continues to act in ways that are hurtful to himself and others, and a way to break this cycle is less clear to him. Bryon’s inability to forgive himself leaves him floundering in search of relief, but none appears.

“He laughed then, and his eyes were the golden, hard, flat eyes of a jungle animal. ‘Like a friend once said to me, “That was then, and this is now.”’”

During his final visit with the now-imprisoned Mark, Bryon pleads to rekindle their friendship, but this is Mark’s response. His reuse of Mark’s earlier statement lends finality to his words, showing they have come full circle from that earlier moment, with Bryon now wishing for the past that Mark rejects. Mark’s impersonal reference to Bryon as “a friend” makes it clear that he no longer considers Bryon his friend, and the animalistic imagery highlights Bryon’s full realization of Mark’s true nature.

“I don’t seem to care about anything any more. It’s like I am worn out with caring about people. I don’t even care about Mark.”

In the end, whether consciously or otherwise, Bryon decides it is easier not to care about others than it is to deal with the pain that comes with caring. Despite his best efforts, however, after having lost so much, he cannot return to the carefree attitude of his youth, so his tone is one of grim resignation. His claimed indifference to others thus serves as a shield and a mask.