Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [67]
Mary was shocked. Even she wouldn’t go that far. “Oh, no, Bobby. I don’t believe that.”
Bobby paused, then said, “Well, I might be better off dead anyway.”
Mary took that as a provocation. Lately their discussions always seemed to end in arguments. She had a fleeting, exasperated thought she would come to regret for the rest of her days: “Maybe he would.”
But she said only, “Well, maybe when you’re twenty-one I’ll stop being a mother.”
“I doubt it,” Bobby replied.
Bobby’s cavalier response to Mary’s mention of AIDS hid a real concern. By late June 1983, the numbers were threatening to hit epidemic proportions: 1,675 Americans infected; nearly 750 dead. Demonstrations and speeches were getting more frequent and beginning to be covered in the media. Still, the Reagan administration’s response was minimal. And many gays were still in denial. Bobby never mentioned AIDS in his diaries, but Jeanette remembers him talking about it. The epidemic undoubtedly weighed on him as yet another land mine in his vaguely charted future.
Around that time he wrote to Dora Arnold, his Rocky Horror pal, saying that “things are getting real depressing around here. Send me a little bottle of California sunshine.” She responded by mailing him a tiny crate of gum balls made to look like California oranges.
Actually, he was scheduled to go home to California for a five-day vacation. He looked forward to seeing the family, but resented paying two hundred dollars for an airline ticket “just to hear a damn sermon.”
He went anyway, leaving behind an entry in his diary on July 25:
I must deserve everything that happens to me. The funny thing is that I didn’t realize until now how bad a person I must really be.
Bob drove Mary to the Oakland Airport to meet Bobby. Mary was shocked at how down her son looked. He moved as if just breathing were an effort. “All those cheery letters, and he seems no better than the night he left,” she thought. They exchanged pleasantries and hugged, but Bobby’s heart was not in it. Throughout the stay he was hair-trigger sensitive with his mother and would go off at the most minor provocation. Clearly, he was not going to tolerate any “damn sermons,” even though Mary had left a copy of Newsweek on the kitchen table, opened to an article on AIDS.
She tried to make small talk. Seeing that Oregon obviously had not made the changes he had hoped for, she asked if he wanted to return to California.
“No,” he answered. “You wouldn’t want me around. I’m too obnoxious.”
“That’s not true, Bobby,” she protested.
They talked about his job future, and Mary, trying to be helpful, suggested he might want to become a paramedic.
Bobby snapped, “What’s the hurry? Why are you pushing me?”
Mostly, Bobby seemed to want to hang out and perfect a California tan. He spent hours at the backyard pool. Then he’d join Nancy and Joy (Ed was busy with football summer camp), and the three of them would trip around town, once going to Berkeley and on another occasion spending a day in Santa Cruz, a beachfront town about a hundred miles south. He had little contact with his father, with whom relations remained awkward.
Nancy, thirteen at the time, and Joy enjoyed Bobby’s company, but they were conscious of a kind of glaze around his spirits. Nothing excited him. The three of them went to see Risky Business, the Tom Cruise movie, which both Joy and Nancy thought was pretty depressing. They felt even more depressed when they noticed that it seemed to have lowered their brother’s already sunken spirits.
Once, walking on Main Street in downtown Walnut Creek, Nancy asked Bobby, “How would you feel if you found out I was gay?”
Bobby replied, “I’d be devastated.”
“That’s funny you’d say that,” she responded, “’cause I don’t feel devastated about your being gay.”
Bobby said, simply, “Thanks.”
He showed up with some friends at gay night at the skating rink in Hayward. Mark Guyer, the Las Lomas High School student