Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [70]
Still, he battled for five years. He fought back at home, gamely standing up for what at some gut level he knew was the real Bobby. He at first went the religious route, trying to exorcise his demons by a kind of hair-shirt spiritual penance. He went to counseling. He grazed through gay society, attaching himself temporarily to different groups of friends; he flirted with a few gay organizations (MCC, the community college’s gay club) and experimented ultimately with every variety of sexual expression in a loveless search for sensory release.
Obsessed with this singular struggle, knowing that his family was equally obsessed, Bobby found himself handicapped in every other aspect of his life—school, career, simple day-to-day living. He drifted through a series of menial jobs. He saw no future other than what took shape in unrealistic fantasies.
The one constant was his diary. There he could say the things he chose not to or dared not to say as part of the perfect-little-boy mask he showed the world. The diary was a map of Bobby’s inner landscape: the excesses of libido; the violent extremes of anger, hate, cynicism, superiority, and condescension; the uncharted depths of fear and pain. Here he could say, again and again, “I want to die,” “Let me crawl under some rock and just waste away,” “My life is over.” Here he could rail at God, his mother, the world. Here he could rail against himself, mirroring the world’s verdict he had come to accept. Having written all of it down, he could struggle on. It was as if he found in the use of words a talisman that gave him permission to keep fighting—words as agents to the heavens.
It may be that Bobby was doomed from the beginning. But he did not go gently. His impulse to live coursed through his every word—even in his deepest doldrums and moments of self-pity. He took to the pen, urging himself on, crying his misfortunes to the heavens like an angry Job. He had a vision of what his life could be, a glimpse of what self-acceptance would mean. Yet in the environment he occupied, dominated by his mother’s nagging presence, it remained beyond his reach. The circuits could not connect.
By the time he fled to Oregon, Bobby may have been beyond salvaging. Old patterns of depression and hopelessness rapidly reasserted themselves. His mother’s remonstrations followed him to Oregon by letter and telephone. The appearance of the AIDS epidemic may have seemed the ultimate condemnation. The final judgment.
Most of all, Bobby was exhausted. The struggle had been unrelenting, his persona totally battered by the effort. He could pump it up no longer. Gasping for psychic oxygen, Bobby decided on that summer night to exercise the ultimate option. That he chose a peculiarly brutal death, one that would shatter his body, is emblematic of how he felt about himself.
Jeanette would wrestle with thoughts like these for months and years to come. She was in the shower that Saturday morning when Debbie called. She grabbed a towel and picked up the receiver in the hallway. Debbie told her that Bobby was dead, that he had jumped from a freeway bridge in front of a truck. Jeanette burst into hysterical tears and shouted for Tina. When Tina heard, she could only repeat, numbly, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
Neither of them could. Jeanette, devastated, had thought she knew Bobby as well as anyone. And yet, along with everyone else in the family, she had underestimated the power of Bobby’s misery. Suicide was the last thing she ever would have thought of.
Later, after having read the diaries and been astonished by the depths of despair in those pages, she would spend hours turning her cousin’s life over and over in her mind. A jumble of thoughts ping-ponged in her head: Bobby was a raw heart with no defense walls. He simply