Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [51]
What little pleasure he got from these events was subverted by self-contempt. If he was doomed to decadence, Bobby seemed to be saying, he would embrace it with a fury. But at the core of his personality he was not good at debauchery. He was too much the innocent, the naïf. Some could immerse themselves in the life with self-affirming intensity. For Bobby, inoculated with the serum of abhorrence and disgust, there was no joy to be had.
He wrote:
Dear Lord. I wish making you happy was the only thing that I lived for. Unfortunately, it’s not, as you well know. Sometimes it seems like you’ve given up on me and all these rotten things that happen to me, and then I don’t care what I do, because it doesn’t matter.
Other times I get the feeling that you love me so much that I can’t even see it when it’s right in my face. Like your love for me is so big that there’s nothing else to see, but I’m too ignorant to see it.
I’m sorry for being so inadequate. You are so good to me and then I get like this. I could be good and obedient if I wanted to, but I don’t. I want things my way. I wonder if you’ll send me to Hell for this.
His sexual nature expressed itself as lust, for which he felt ashamed. Feeling unlovable, he could not perceive how love might transcend lust, how sexuality could be gay and also healthy. He was adrift, incapable of expressing his longings for love and affection beyond a series of minicrushes.
At home, there was little respite. The deeper Bobby’s gloom, the closer Mary believed him to being cured. After all, didn’t the church teach that misery is the surest sign that God is “convicting” the sinner of his sin? Like a boil ripening to its bursting point, the unhappy sinner demonstrated symptoms that clearly indicated he was experiencing God’s cleansing pain. If he could maintain, be diligent in prayer, release would be imminent.
In this way, Mary misread Bobby’s deepening depression. Convincing herself that success was within range, yet increasingly uneasy about his secretive night and weekend outings, she kept up a nagging mantra: “Bobby, are you praying enough?” “Bobby, don’t underestimate God’s power to change lives. Just when things seem darkest and most despairing, he works his glorious ways”; “Don’t give up on God. He is constantly testing our faith. Look at Job. God knows who are the faithful and who are not. But, without faith, we are lost.”
Joy, who was just beginning to question the total validity of delivered doctrine, would challenge her mother: “Mom, you’re not God. Speak for yourself.”
But Bobby’s journal echoed his mother’s litany.
Why did you do this to me, God? Am I going to Hells’ That’s the gnawing question that’s always drilling little holes in the back of my mind. I’m really not that bad, am I?…Lord I really hate myself for being so weak…. Lord I want to be good. I want to amount to something. I need your seal of approval. If I had that I would be happy…. Where’s my faith? I need to know that this world isn’t spinning around and around for the hell of it. I need to know that you did make it and everything for a good reason…. I don’t want anyone to ever read this. They would hate me. I’m rotten inside, and then everyone would know…. I make myself sick. I’m a joke.
Not untypically, he rebounded from those depths, telling his diary the next day: “Today I feel better. Last nite I was just clearing some bad thoughts.” As he himself noted often, he turned to his diary when most depressed. But this began to happen more and more often.
Bobby sought relief in the company of a band of new friends, a group of self-identified outcasts from Walnut Creek and Concord who took defiant pleasure in dressing and acting outrageously. They formed, cultlike, around the weekend midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the El Rey Theater on Main Street in Walnut Creek.