Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [54]
Further along, Bobby’s humanity asserted itself, and he wrote one of his most eloquent passages:
The fat old men with glasses and false teeth. The taste of efferdent; sleazy apartment building with creaky old stairs. Always a smile and caressing hands that tremble. Spitting on the sidewalk after to get rid of the horrible taste that lingers in memory. Always pushing the guilt deep inside where it can grow into a parasite to feed on healthy brain tissue. Pretending to be an actor playing a part in some forgotten movie. Never realizing the impact of what’s really taking place. This isn’t happening. Hating my parents and my family. Hating. Always hating. Counting the money and wanting more. Afraid right before. Afraid of the door as it opens. Pounding heart. Afraid but smiling and pretending….
I look at myself and I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. Can it be? Is this a dream? Or is it real? Most important, why? Now I have something to hide, like a jagged scar. I’m an outcast, unclean. Leper. How sick.
Despite his revulsion, he continued for several months, earning money and giving part of it to his mother. “I think she’s going to catch on before long. That will be very sticky when it happens. I wish they would leave me alone and stop asking so many questions.” Over the next month he made enough to pay off the loan for truck-driving school several months before it was due.
During one of his trips to San Francisco, Bobby saw a familiar face on the subway train. Blaine Andrews was a boy about his age whom he had noticed with admiration a year earlier in a downtown Walnut Creek restaurant where Bobby had been a counterman. Now Bobby shyly began a conversation that would quickly lead to a hot romance.
Bobby found Blaineto be
a perfect little doll. On the outside he’s a boy but on the inside he’s very grown up…. He’s so intelligent and sophisticated that next to him I feel like one of the Beverly Hillbillies…. Elaine’s the most wonderful cook in the world. This morning he cooked steak and eggs and hashbrowns. He’s so sweet and good to me.
Blaine, slender and handsome, with dusty, dirty-blond hair and hazel-green eyes, was precocious and sophisticated for his age. An only child of a broken home, he had been brought up in Los Angeles by his mother, a high-ranking corporate executive with connections to the Hollywood elite. Accustomed to the good life, Blainetook affluence for granted and dressed the part. At sixteen he moved in with his father in Walnut Creek and completed his final two years of high school at Accalanes, where he unapologetically came out as gay.
To Elaine, Bobby was a turn-on. He especially loved his smile, which he found enormous, sweet, almost impish, an “I know something you don’t know” smile. Sexually, Bobby was traditional but versatile and seemed to Blaineto enjoy the act thoroughly. In youthful ardor, Blainewhispered, “I love you” to Bobby, who records in his diary:
It always scares me when he says, “I love you.” I’ve never been able to say that to anyone without feeling a little bit like a liar. That’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s true. Whenever I say, “I love your” to anyone, a little piece of me inside says, “No, you don’t, you don’t love anyone, not even yourself.”
Inevitably, it was not to become a love match. Within two weeks Bobby was telling his diary that the relationship was downgrading to friendship. Nonetheless, the two continued to enjoy periodic sex and socialized for many months. They went to movies and galleries, hung out in Walnut Creek and Berkeley, dressed up and went to the clubs (Bobby snuck Blaineinto the I-Beam and introduced him to his first bathhouse). Blainewould throw frequent parties at