Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [40]
Joy could get to Bobby. “I hate Joy,” he wrote once, with exquisite melodrama.
I want to claw her eyes out with a sharp stick. I hope she dies fat and alone. She hurts me. I hate everyone, but mostly Joy at the moment. When she makes her fucking remarks it slashes a raw bleeding wound deep deep. It will never heal…. If anyone says anything to me from now on, I’ll try my hardest to slash them with my voice and my choice of words.
Those moments passed, leaving the core of affection between brother and sister intact. But to Bobby, the contrast with earlier days was palpable, the days when brothers, sisters, and parents seemed joined by an unbreakable bond of togetherness. Something had irrevocably changed. Bobby was loved, but was simply not okay. To be acceptable and accepted, he would have to change. It occurred to no one at the time that it might have been the family’s responsibility to change, not Bobby’s.
Another irony unrecognized by anyone in the family was the contrast between the way the family embraced Joy’s endless efforts to snare young George and its disapproving response to Bobby’s adolescent explorations.
Mary, in fact, was ashamed of having a gay son. Once, he arrived instead of Joy to pick her up from a pizza lunch with some women friends. Mary saw him entering and practically bolted with him to the door. She was terrified that Bobby’s gayness would somehow telegraph itself.
Despite Bobby’s differences with Joy, they remained simpatico. With Joy he had no need to hide his gayness, and she did not constantly harangue him about it. Bobby could in fact confide in her, talk about his infatuations, and compare notes with her in her pursuit of dream boy George.
They delighted in cruising around together. Joy liked nothing better than climbing behind the wheel of her truck and hitting the road with a brother or sister along. Main Street, Walnut Creek, was the weekend cruise choice for local kids, a real-life evocation of American Graffiti. One weekend night, Bobby dressed Joy in some of Granny’s jewelry, including several big zircons, and a period dress, and tied her hair in a turban. They piled into Bobby’s fire-engine red “Little Jewel” and tooled downtown. Joy hung out the window, attracting attention and camping it up, greeting everyone with a ludicrously pompous “Good evening!” They had a ball.
Joy loved animals. The family had a menagerie of chickens, dogs, cats—and goats. She bought three goats and bred them, tending the family in the backyard: Esther, Sweepea, and Clyde, and offspring Bucky and Bud. Bobby would help feed them, or go for walks with Joy, with Esther on a leash. (Joy actually had Sweepea trained to use a cat box.)
On a typical day they might watch reruns of “The Brady Bunch,” have dinner, then go downtown or watch Ed play baseball. For all his brooding, Bobby had a manic side. When with Joy, he loved quoting the camp movie stars, mimicking Crawford or Davis, reveling in their bitchy “up yours” attitude. “Fasten your seat belts, darlings. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” This would send him into gales of laughter, his head thrown back in momentary glee.
Bobby would sometimes accompany Joy on her motorized pursuits of George (he, too, thought George was good-looking), and she on a couple of occasions went with him on gay jaunts. Once, they combed Berkeley and parts of San Francisco looking for someone Bobby had a crush on. On San Francisco’s Polk Street, a popular and somewhat sleazy strip where gays congregate, Joy for the first time saw same-sex couples touching, even kissing. The sight of openly amorous lesbians was particularly shocking for her.
Joy enjoyed the outing as another adventure, yet she felt depressed by what she viewed as a decadent slice of the gay scene. She wished her brother would find young people of similar upbringing, interested in art and other high-minded things.
She wrote in her