Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [69]
It was the last entry Bobby made.
A week later—Friday morning, August 26—Portlanders awoke to the news that President Reagan might have to send marines to Beirut to keep the peace. Merle Haggard was to play the state fair that night. The weatherman promised warm but cloudy weather.
When Bobby got home from work that day, Debbie could see he was in a blue mood. But that was not unusual. (In the past she had suggested he get counseling, and Bobby had agreed he needed it but said he couldn’t afford it.) They walked together to the corner grocery store to buy something for dinner. Bobby, under legal age, asked Debbie to buy him a bottle of liquor. That struck her as odd, since Bobby was not a habitual drinker. Debbie refused. They cooked up a meal—ground turkey for him and frozen tamales for her. She could sense he wanted to talk, but all that transpired between them that evening was the usual chitchat.
Debbie planned to go downtown to shop later on and invited him to come along. But Bobby joked about not setting foot in her ’73 jalopy; it was too dangerous. He said he would take a bus downtown later, maybe go dancing.
He was still at home when Debbie got back, but left at about 10 P.M., dressed in a light plaid shirt and green fatigue pants, headed for the gay strip on Stark Street.
At some point before midnight he made his way five blocks west and five blocks north through downtown. Jeanette later speculated he might have been headed for a leather bar called the Cell. No one knows for sure why he chose that route, in the opposite direction of home.
At 12:30 a driver and his passenger were stopped at a red light at the Everett Street overpass to the Interstate 405 freeway. They saw a figure alone, walking across the overpass. They watched him pause, looking south over the railing.
Within seconds, Bobby was up and over the railing, plunging to his death, liberated at last.
Why then? Why at that particular moment? Just three days earlier his new bed had been delivered to the house. Two weeks earlier he had purchased new sweats and a couple of jockstraps. These events implied a future. Thus, the leap was not premeditated in the traditional sense. But neither was it sheer impulse. As is evident throughout his diaries, Bobby had been contemplating a drastic solution for years. In those final months—and the preceding years—he was fighting a colossal battle between his strong will to survive and his even stronger drive to be clear of intense emotional pain. It was a courageous battle, fought against high odds and in almost total isolation.
He was seen as unhappy, but no one knew the dark, subterranean depths of his self-loathing and depression. He wore a mask for much of the world, a mask that showed a shy, uncommunicative boy with a wonderful smile and agreeable disposition. Hidden beneath was not just the pathology of self-hatred and fear related to his homosexuality, but the funny, intelligent, and articulate person that Bobby was and might have lived to be.
As with all humans, he had the capacity to be cruel, which showed up in his diaries and in some of his relations with family. But he was at heart the gentlest of souls, unusually fragile and vulnerable, susceptible to external judgment, with an underdeveloped ego. He was an adolescent, typical in most ways, unformed and insecure. The judgment of his mother, his father, and his siblings, no matter how blatant or subtle, had special power, the power to demolish his concept of self-worth. He heard these judgments—at church and at school, from his peers, from the media—and internalized them.
In common with his adolescent peers, Bobby experienced the chaotic surge of sexual energy,