That Was Then, This Is Now, By Bryon Douglas

There is one point in life when everything is different, not the same as back then, that’s when realization hits; everything and everyone changes and there’s no stopping it. In the book That Was Then, This Is Now, the protagonist, Bryon Douglas, experiences many things that cause him to change his outlook on his lifestyle and the way his brother, Mark Jennings, goes about his life. As the story progresses, Bryon experiences many things that change and evolve him as a character.
Throughout the story, Bryon goes through some things that helped him develop an independent opinion on violence. According to the beginning of the story, Bryon claims “I didn’t mind it much, unless I was the one getting mugged. I liked fights”(Pg.24), in other words,

he was indifferent to assault unless it involved him. Later on in the story, Charlie, a fellow friend Bryon is close to, gets killed while attempting to defend Mark and him from two Texans. After this traumatic event, Bryon begins to feel very guilty as he implies by saying, “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.”(Pg.86). Overall, after Charlie’s death, Bryon begins to realize how unethical violence is and decides that he is incapable of purposely being violent anymore.
Toward the end of the book, Bryon faces something that changes his life and his perspective on drugs forever.

Earlier in the story, Bryon goes on a drive with Cathy and the topic of marijuana comes up, Cathy asks him if he enjoys smoking it, to which he responds, “It ain’t much. I’d rather have beer any day. I think a lot of these kids just dig it because it’s in, it’s against the law, and it’s supposed to be cool.”(Pg.92). This means that Bryon was uninterested when it come to drugs. Not that long after, M&M took a horrible acid trip and had to be hospitalized, that same day while looking for a cigarette under Mark’s bed, Bryon finds a bottle of pills, he then discovered this was Mark’s money source. After his shocking epiphany, Bryon begins to think, “M&M was in the hospital, and maybe he was messed up for life- and Mark was selling the stuff that made him that way. Maybe this wasn’t LSD, but it was a step in that direction, and God only knows what all Mark had been selling.”(Pg.146). After this revelation, Bryon does ,the once unthinkable, and numbly calls the police and has Mark arrested. All of this just begins to show Bryon’s newly discovered, distaste with drugs and his own brother, in addition to proving that Bryon’s opinion on drugs has changed drastically from indifference to

disgust.
Clearly, Bryon has drastically evolved and developed as a character due to his experiences. While Charlie’s death changed Bryon’s outlook on violence and M&M’s damaging LSD trip taught him the truth about drugs, at the end of the story, Bryon still yearns for his long lost youth which held all his new unanswerable questions.