Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [50]
To Mark, an agnostic, Bobby’s tale seemed unbearably sad and incomprehensible. He could not remember ever seeing anyone hurting so badly. It was in Bobby’s face, in the way he talked. It was clear that the most important thing to Bobby was that God love him. Yet God was turning away his face, and his mother was telling him he was headed for hell if he didn’t change. To make matters worse, Bobby seemed to want to please his mother as desperately as he wanted to please God.
Mark felt anger building. Here was this gentle, shy, self-conscious, beautiful person who couldn’t hurt a fly. And somebody was telling him he was going to hell because of what he felt in his heart. It didn’t make sense.
They went on a second date, this time sitting in the car in the parking lot at the Emporium Capwell department store and talking so long that the windows fogged up. Mark, who was searching for someone to become involved with, found Bobby highly attractive. He had never met anyone so gentle, so free of hate.
But they merely sat, each hunched against his door, neither touching nor caressing. Bobby seemed distant despite their verbal intimacy, unreachable, absorbed by his unsolvable problem. And it didn’t appear to matter to him that he had someone to talk to about it. To Mark, it seemed that Bobby wasn’t taking in what he was saying. Worse, Bobby seemed to lack the tools to make use of any advice that came his way. Bobby, Mark concluded regretfully, was a lost cause.
Bobby wasn’t interested in Mark “that way,” in any case. In his diary he refers to him as a friend, and they did continue to see each other on occasion. Bobby, going on nineteen in early 1982, was not disposed to settle down, no matter how much he expressed the longing to do so. He was caught up in the erotic swirl of San Francisco nightlife. It was in this period that he began working out diligently to pump the muscles he felt he needed to improve his sexual currency. Before long, he looked the part of the quintessential California beach boy.
San Francisco gay life in this period was a carnal circus in its final spasm of excess before the dramatic changes wrought by the AIDS epidemic. In late 1981 Time and Newsweek had written the first stories about a strange and fatal disease affecting gay men. In March 1982, doctors at the Centers for Disease Control reported 285 cases nationally of what they called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency disease, or GRID; 70 of the cases were in California. Few people took notice.
The city offered something for every appetite. Its streets, back rooms, bars, bathhouses, parks, restrooms, and dance palaces were the backdrop for a bacchanal of epic proportions. Tens of thousands of repressed gays and lesbians had moved to San Francisco from small-town America to engage in the most defiant, clamorous, public, and unabashed expression of sexual freedom since the Roman Empire.
For Bobby, it was a banquet table laden with tainted food. He indulged, propelled by sexual hunger and loneliness, then turned ill with guilt and self-recrimination. “I feel these cravings and I feed them despite their dirty origins,” he told his diary. “I think I’m capable of twisting anything into something wicked…. I feel guilt pangs whenever I do something that gives me real pleasure.”
Soon he knew his way around the streets, the bars, the bathhouses, and the glory holes like a veteran. (He described “glory holes”—adjacent, person-sized compartments with circular openings carved in the walls to accommodate anonymous genital sex—to a disbelieving Diane at work one day. “Really,” said Bobby, “I could show them to you. Wanna come?” “Aaaargh!” was all she could manage in reply.)
One night, borrowing Joy’s car to drive to the I-Beam, a Haight Street dance club, he parked at McDonald’s without noticing the tow-away sign. Later, when he emerged, the car had been towed.
I tried to call the number [of the towing company] but I kept getting the wrong number so I thought I’d go to the police station. I hopped in a cab and said, “To the police station.” The driver had