Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [57]
Bobby said, “That wasn’t so bad,” then added, “I’ve never kissed a girl before.” He was delighted with the achievement. Alethia, who knew Bobby was gay, was just seventeen and sexually unsophisticated. She chalked it up to experience. He and Alethia went out several times. Bobby enjoyed her company, but worried that she might be falling in love with him. “I like her a lot, but I’m not in love,” he told his diary.
Bobby was increasingly obsessed with his looks and got a momentary rush from being admired. His striking appearance got compliments everywhere. A Diablo Valley College classmate, Robin, a woman who went roller-skating with Bobby on the Hayward rink’s gay night, found him “real cute, model cute.”
Feeling empty inside, Bobby saw his externals as a ticket to validation:
I’m becoming incredibly vain. I love it when people compliment me, and it happens a lot. I love love love it. Is that wrong? I deserve it. I work hard to be pretty for everyone. I like being an ornament. See, the thing is that I’m ugly sometimes, so when I’m pretty I take complete advantage.
He agonized over his physical appearance. He thought his hairline was receding, he detected the beginnings of wrinkles around his eyes, and, most irritating, he detested the barnaclelike acne that dug noticeable ridges into his face. Bobby tried to adhere to a health-food diet and devoted hours each week to a bathroom ritual of applying creams, lotions, and antibiotics. (His preoccupation with facial makeover prompted his lesbian friends at CalFrame to begin calling him Cher.) Nothing seemed to work. Like gayness, zits seemed to cling to him with perverse tenacity.
Finally, in November, he opted for a medieval-sounding medical procedure called “dermabrasion,” which promised to sand away unwanted blemishes.
This morning my face was dermabraded. I hated it. The sound of the brush as it scraped into my skin was awful…. The bandages are on my face now and I look absolutely hideous. My cheeks look as though someone threw acid on them.
When the bandages came off, Bobby found that his face didn’t appear any different than before, only redder. His friend Robin noted that his handsome visage was marred with what looked like giant scabs.
Thus Bobby faced Christmas feeling like the Phantom of the Opera. To make matters worse, he was once again out of work, having quit or been laid off at CalFrame.
He felt as if he had hit bottom.
Here it is Christmas. The only things I’ve been feeling are hatred and loneliness. I’m a mess. I feel like a piece of shit…. Fuck you. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. I hate it here. I hate everyone….
I look like shit. Goddamn it all. That’s the only thing that matters to me. How I look in the mirror…. I WANT TO TAKE A FUCKIN ICE PICK TO MY FACE AND STAB IT TIL THERE’S NOTHIN LEFT…. I wish I could take a knife and cut my throat. I’ve gotta get the hell outa here.
His grim mood extended into January. He longed to escape but was terrified of pulling away from his family, despite repeated inducements from Oregon (including a Christmas gift that included a leather carrying bag, socks, and two jockstraps tie-dyed purple by Tina). Unemployed except for a brief stint as a legitimate model for a mail-order catalog, he squirmed through days and nights of boredom, interrupted only by long monologues with his diary.
January 4, 1983. At times my feeling is that my behavior and thoughts are regarded as grossly unacceptable. Everyone around here is under the impression that all I have to do is surrender my life to Jesus Christ. It’s that simple. But they can’t see that it’s not…. It’s an awful feeling to believe that one is headed straight to fires of hell. What makes everything worse is having all these people around you telling you how simple the solution is when it doesn’t really seem to be at all. They will never know what it is to be in my shoes and I don’t think I’ll ever know what theirs are like.
January 6.1 love Jeanette