Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [3]
As I dug deeper, another subtext asserted itself. What I was discovering was more than the story of Mary’s overcoming prejudice; it was also the story of her liberation as a thinking, adult woman, at age fifty. Mary had grown up with a deep-seated insecurity, clinging to the approval from her husband, her mother, and her church. The awful impact of Bobby’s death undermined all of her old assumptions. She had to start over. In re-creating herself, she not only found justification for Bobby’s life (and death) but learned to value herself.
In working with Mary and developing the story, I came to think of the scene from The Miracle Worker in which the young Helen Keller has a furious temper tantrum, spilling a water pitcher at the supper table. Her teacher, Annie, ignoring the pleas of Helen’s parents, drags her roughly to the courtyard and forces her to refill the pitcher from the pump, at the same time repeating over and over the hand signal for water in Helen’s palm.
Suddenly, after months of drilling and helpless noncomprehension, Helen gets it. Water! That’s how you say water! Things have words attached to them, and words are the way out of the tunnel. Helen is spontaneously transformed—a seeing, hearing, talking butterfly soaring from the chrysalis. It is a moment of supreme grace.
That moment, the triumph of the human spirit, lives for me in this story. It is not merely about gays, or religion, or suicide, although it is about all of those things. It is about family, about redemption. But, in the end, it is about a victory of the human spirit that transcended tragedy. That, I realized, is what I always wanted to write about.
Leroy Aarons
ONE
The Plunge
AUGUST 27, 1983
PORTLAND, OREGON
Bobby Griffith left the Family Zoo lounge about midnight and walked northwest through downtown Portland, past office buildings and lofts that still bore the ornate imprint of another century. It was a warm but cloudy western night in late August 1983. Blond, green eyed, six feet tall, and muscular, he wore a light plaid shirt and green fatigue pants, and walked with a deliberate, loping gait. To a passerby he would have looked like any other young man on his way home after a night out.
He headed up a hill and onto a plateau through which sliced Interstate 405, the main north-south artery. From this vantage point one could see most of the city, aligned on either side of the Willamette River. Lights flickered in the foreground, yielding to patches of darkened residential neighborhoods where most of Portland slept. The steady roar of freeway traffic played counterpoint to the still night.
Bobby approached the Everett Street overpass. Once on the bridge he could see the 405 traffic rush by, then disappear beneath the concrete span. The fragrance of diesel and petroleum hung in the air.
What was he thinking? Perhaps he voiced the silent wish, often repeated in his journals, to lift off, set sail to the heavens, forever drifting. Perhaps the familiar dark depression engulfed him, strangling hope.
“My life is over as far as I’m concerned,” he wrote in his diary exactly one month before. “I hate living on this earth…. I think God must get a certain amount of self-satisfaction watching people deal with the obstacles he throws in their path…. I hate God for this and for my shitty existence.”
He must have seen the large tractor trailer approaching from under the Couch Street overpass and timed the jump. Bobby executed a sudden and effortless back flip and disappeared over the railing. The driver tried to swerve, but there was no time.
Two witnesses later reported they at first thought it was a prank. They rushed to the railing expecting to see Bobby dangling. No. He had descended twenty-five feet directly into the path of the trailer, which tossed his body fourteen feet under the overpass.
The impact had ripped away most of his clothes and strewn them on