Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [38]
A motherly school secretary named Grace Lewis befriended Bobby, offering a sympathetic ear. She saw him as a tortured soul, deeply unhappy. Handsome, almost pretty, unathletic, and not gregarious, Bobby fit the pattern of the oddball, a deadly ranking in the vicious high school caste system. Although not obviously effeminate, he was a stark contrast to his older brother, who enjoyed all the benefits of a jock ranking. Bobby became the target for cutting remarks by some of his classmates, remarks questioning his masculinity.
Either Bobby revealed himself to Grace Lewis or she found out some other way; in any case, she was worried enough about him to refer him to a male schoolteacher who she knew was gay. There was (and still is) no formal counseling outreach to gay youngsters at Las Lomas. The teacher made an effort, even introducing Bobby to another gay student, but the tatters of Bobby’s relationship to his high school were beyond repair.
His grades slipped, and he slackened his composition writing, turning more and more frequently to his journal.
The anger never erupts…. My timid nature would never allow a full fledged thunder storm to occur, but it is there, looming quietly on the horizon…. Sometimes my only refuge is sleep, and yet sometimes my sleep is invaded by nightmares which break the only quiet and solitude I have.
I can feel God’s eyes looking down on me with such pity. He can’t help me though, because I’ve chosen sin over righteousness.
His mood vacillated from depression to grandiosity. “It’s very strange, but despite my gloomy outlook I still feel that one day, maybe very soon, I will be a success,” he wrote in early March.
Barely a month later, just weeks short of graduation, Bobby dropped out of Las Lomas, telling his parents after the fact.
“Bobby, you don’t want to be a quitter,” his mother protested.
“Well, I will be, because I’ve gone to my last class.”
His parents decided it would be useless to try to force their son to return to school.
“I won’t be graduating in June,” he wrote in his diary, even though he had paid for his yearbook and placed an order for his graduation gown. In fact, his picture appeared with the rest of the graduating class, with an inscription from George Bernard Shaw that Bobby had apparently chosen himself: “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”
He told his diary, “I feel sad about this…. I’ve quit my job and pretty much withdrawn from the mainstream of suburban life. These days I can be found whiling away the hours daydreaming and progressively growing more and more lonely.” (Actually he was not that inert. He had started jogging several times a week to Alamo, a town nearly five miles away. “I feel a sense of accomplishment when I jog. Like my life is worth something.”) He found himself staying up till the early morning hours, raiding the icebox after everyone was long asleep. Then he’d stay in bed till ten or eleven the next day.
The usually placid Bob—classified by the experts Mary consulted as the essential male role model, and fired up by Mary’s nagging—made a special effort to develop father-son rapport, with ludicrous results.
Bob went with Bobby to an art show. They attempted to develop a mutual interest in photography. They hiked together on Mount Diablo, a lovely peak not far from their home. That outing was a disaster, most of it spent in silence or stilted conversation. Bobby talked about wanting to be a writer. Bob, strong on the work ethic, tried to discuss strategic career planning. Bobby zoned out, uninterested in the long view. Bob felt he was playing at being a father. Bobby apparently did, too. They both dropped into silence, wordlessly acknowledging that the whole effort was basically phony.
After that, the rift between them widened: their interactions became polite, infrequent, awkward. To Joy, hypersensitive to family tensions, it felt horrible. “Bobby can’t stand (at times) to be near my Dad,” she wrote in her journal. “I’m going to fast until