Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [49]
Diane felt that Bobby needed friends, a group to hang out with. He went night crawling with her and Alice once—to a gay bar in Sacramento called Bojangles. But their social life off the job never jelled. He wanted community, yet he seemed to hold back.
Still, they fell for Bobby’s sweet nature. Diane found him lovable—a very soft, warm man. Alice felt both love and compassion. Bobby was at a turning point, she believed. He was struggling with the decision to go with his sexual leanings and risk losing the acceptance of those he loved. For her, Bobby wanted to be good and was genuinely good, yet faced a life that would go against everything he was raised to be.
For Bobby it was going to be a hard road ahead, Alice thought.
Meanwhile, Bobby and Joy were toying with a wild new idea. Joy, who loved nothing better than driving, saw an ad for truck-driver training and convinced Bobby to sign up with her for the three-month course. Think of it! They’d have a truck driver’s license—a passport to anywhere in the country. Freedom! Flexibility! Money!
So they traveled, nightly, the twenty-five miles to the truck-driving “academy” in Hayward. At first, Bobby was incredulous. He noted in his diary,
Sometimes when I’m sitting behind the wheel of one of those big rigs, I think to myself, “What in the fuck am I doing here?” God, I must be insane. The very last thing I see myself as is some big butch truck driver.
But he started enjoying himself: “I had a lot of fun driving last night. I got a C-plus, which I suppose isn’t bad for me.” The final test fell on Christmas Eve. Joy watched nervously as Bobby executed the difficult back-up maneuvers, steering the truck effortlessly but incorrectly off the blacktop and onto the grass. But he got a chance to try again. Joy held her breath. “He needs to pass this,” she thought. “He needs the confidence.”
Bobby did it. “Joy got a 93 and I squeaked by with a 75…. If I hadn’t passed I probably would have killed myself.”
The two newly licensed truckers started scanning the want ads. But the available jobs required senior drivers and involved rigorous schedules to remote cities. Joy and Bobby dropped the idea as fast as they had embraced it—an expensive fling. Bobby had taken out a fifteen-hundred-dollar loan to pay for the lessons.
Around that time he revisited his old campus at Las Lomas, where his gay teacher friend walked him over to the tennis court to introduce him to Mark Guyere, a senior. Mark, a year behind Bobby in school, remembered him, but had never spoken to him. His impression upon meeting Bobby was of someone timid, soft-spoken, “like a lamb,” he later recalled. Mark asked Bobby for his phone number and soon afterward called him. They planned a date.
They went to a matinee showing of On Golden Pond, a four-Kleenex film starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an aging married couple. Bobby was near tears throughout. He made a private wish that he, too, would have someone with whom to share his life when he got old.
Afterward, they drove to Heather Farms Park in Bobby’s red Nash and walked around the lake. It was a foggy afternoon. They played on the swings and slide and rode on the merry-go-round and talked. Mark, slender and short, with brown hair and sharp features, stood in strong physical contrast to Bobby, with his gangly blondness. Mark talked about his home life, about his fanatic, survivalist parents, their rejection of his gay-ness, and his struggle to assert his independence.
Something in the moment—Mark’s candor, the emotional impact of the film, the misty beauty of the day—prompted Bobby to lift the curtain and reveal himself. He told Mark about his religious dilemma, about his mother’s Bible-pounding moralism, and, as Mark remembers it, about a time when Mary had told Bobby to burn his