Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [65]
Jeanette was thrilled to have Bobby in Portland at last. Her lover, Tina, liked Bobby a lot, and the three of them became a tight trio, occasionally augmented by Jeanette’s sisters, Debbie and Stephanie, who also lived in Portland.
Bobby had his own room on the second floor of Tina’s house in northeast Portland, an older, tree-lined neighborhood of well-kept, venerable homes. He got jobs in quick succession as a server at a Dairy Queen and as an orderly at Crestview Convalescent Home, and worked both of them, trying to accumulate some cash. He signed up with a local gym and resumed a rigid schedule of weight training.
He and Jeanette would jog together, running and talking in the same rhythm. They seemed to have endless things to discuss. They felt natural together, connected. On weekends they’d go dancing, sometimes just the two of them. Sweating, exhilarated, Bobby would remove his shirt, even though he was shy.
Bobby made a major effort to curtail his sex drive. He wanted to break out of the California pattern of sex for sex’s sake. One Saturday night in late February he went alone for the first time to the Family Zoo, one of the bars on Stark Street. He felt stared at, felt he was being rated by “all those old men.” “I haven’t been so nervous in my life,” he confided to his diary. “I had to press my water bottle against my stomach to keep my hand from shaking.”
Finally he ran into someone he knew, and together they planned to go to the Continental Baths.
But we didn’t have the money, so he just dropped me off home. I’m so glad. My virtue is saved. I can’t let myself get desperate. Desperate people do crazy things. I can’t let anything ruin my new life, especially something as dumb as sex.
Refracted through Bobby’s prism, sex was exciting but dangerous at best, sinful at worst. He couldn’t imagine it as the expression of loving intimacy, despite the fact that he was exposed daily to Jeanette and Tina’s solid partnership.
He told Jeanette he had never had sex with anyone he cared deeply about. “What is it like to have sex with someone you love?” he once asked.
“It’s wonderful,” she replied. “It’s a lot different. You just can’t compare it. Eventually you’ll get tired of running around, Bobby, and want to settle down,” she reassured him.
March turned unseasonably warm. Bobby wrote a cheery letter home, telling his family about how he enjoyed dressing the elderly women at Crestview: “They look so much prettier in a flowered dress and a pink sweater than in a pair of pants and a shirt. That’s the most fun—dressing them and picking out pretty dresses and sweaters and jewelry for them, and fixing their hair and putting make-up on them.”
He especially liked a charming woman in her nineties who tended to speak exclusively in rhyme: “My head is on the bed.”
He admitted to being homesick, but insisted he was going to stick it out in Portland. “I’m not a quitter. A lot of people have it a lot worse than me and if they can do it, so can 1.1 think I’m a much more disciplined person than before.”
Bobby soon found, however, that the furies had pursued him to Oregon. His facial acne returned. He again fixated on thinning hair and lines around his eyes.
As each day passes I get uglier and uglier. I think someone put a hex on me.
He resumed his active nightlife. One weekend he stayed away for two days, frightening Jeanette, who had asked that he inform her when he would be sleeping out. The situation was exacerbated when Bobby’s weekend partner showed up at the house demanding back some cash he claimed Bobby had lifted from his wallet. Jeanette was irritated that the dispute had found its way to her door, as well as disturbed at the accusation. (Bobby later admitted to her that he had taken the money, saying he felt he “deserved” it.)
After that incident, it was agreed that Bobby would move in with Debbie across town, ostensibly because where she lived was much closer to Crestview Convalescent and Bobby could walk to work from there. In reality, the money incident had put a strain on Bobby’s relationship