Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [36]
She had problems with her weight. Her teenage journal is filled with frequently broken vows to go on one or another draconian diet. Joy’s was a caretaker personality. She grew up with a strongly developed sense of responsibility for the well-being of others, especially her immediate family. As soon as she could drive, she became the chauffeur of choice, not only for her mother but also for her brothers, even when they had licenses and cars of their own.
As a giver, she was hurt when her gifts were unreciprocated. She had brother-sister squabbles with Ed, whose interests lay in sports and friends outside the home. Once, when the family went to a concert together, she resented the fact that as soon as they got there Ed disappeared with his friends. She wrote in a journal she kept as a teenager: “Mom called Ed over and said something to him about being rude. Then I said, ‘Well, Ed, what do you care? You got your ticket.’ He said something snotty, then left to go join his friends again.”
Joy’s concerns with Bobby were more serious. Sometime past his seventeenth birthday in June 1980, Bobby began making contacts with other gay men. His first sexual experience was with a man he met in the Walnut Creek Safeway store. As Bobby later told his friend Andrea, he went to the man’s house and they had sex on the living-room floor. Then Bobby began getting calls from male friends. He’d disappear on weekends to all-night parties. Frequently, to avoid his mother’s lecturing, he would lie about his whereabouts.
To Joy, Bobby’s gay orientation was less worrying than the notion of gay promiscuity, which she viewed as sleazy, vaguely immoral, and, worst of all, potentially dangerous. She fretted about his safety. And, still her mother’s daughter, she wrestled with religious and moral judgments:
For Mary, this new phase of Bobby’s was extremely threatening. As long as Bobby was relatively home-bound, the situation could be controlled and the correct measures applied. But now he had a car—a 1950 Nash Metropolitan he called “Little Jewel,” which his parents had helped him buy and which Bob had helped get in shape. And now boys were calling, and occasionally coming to the door to pick Bobby up. Mary maintained a civil demeanor toward these callers, not wanting to alienate Bobby. But she cringed underneath: this was not the way it was supposed to go. Bobby had to want to change for change to happen. “What is God doing?” she wondered. “Why does Bobby want to go out with gay people?” This going around with other homosexuals didn’t demonstrate desire to change. It was more of Satan’s work, she was convinced.
“Bobby you’re not trying hard enough,” she would say. “You’re not praying hard enough. You need to have more faith.”
“You’re right, Mom,” Bobby would say. “I’m just doomed to be a roasted marshmallow in the next life.”
“Don’t say that, Bobby.”
“Well, that’s what your damned Bible says!”
“Don’t use profanity. And the Bible also says a person can change.”
“And what if they don’t want to!”
“With God nothing shall be impossible,” Mary quoted. Bobby groaned.
“Bobby, you may want to think that what you are doing is the right way, but that’s only Satan working his ways,” Mary said. “I know you don’t truly believe that God meant for man to be lying with other men—”
“I don’t know what God meant for anybody anymore,” Bobby interrupted. “And I wish people would stop watching my every move to make sure the family pervert is locked up for the night.”
Joy exasperatedly pitched in, “Sure, Bobby, just so you can go out and screw your head off.”
Bobby had a sympathizer in Andrea Hernandez, a school friend of Joy’s who had attached herself to the Griffith family as an antidote to her own toxic family situation. Andrea spent most of her week with the Griffiths, and actually moved in for several months in 1981.