Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [71]
She and Tina packed Bobby’s few belongings,, including the four volumes of his diaries, and Jeanette began the long sad drive to Walnut Creek.
Andrea Hernandez was the young woman who had lived at the Griffith home in 1981 and had befriended Joy and Bobby. She had subsequently broken with Joy and drifted away. But she retained her warm affection for Bobby, and they had kept in touch. She saw him right before he left for Oregon just six months ago. On August 27, she was driving in Walnut Creek when she spotted her brother Nick at a bus stop and gave him a lift. Nick had a grave look on his face. “Andrea, I’ve got something to tell you.” Andrea immediately had a premonition. “It’s Bobby, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Bobby is dead.”
Andrea’s throat constricted and she began to hyperventilate. She felt as if she were moving through a dream. She dropped Nick off and drove aimlessly. Having been cut off from the Griffith family, she didn’t know whom to call or what to do. She decided she would go to the funeral.
At CalFrame, Diane Haines’s boss gathered all the warehouse workers in the office and announced that Bobby Griffith had killed himself. Diane was stunned and saddened. She could not understand why he would do such a thing. She made it a point to find out when the funeral was.
Dora Arnold doesn’t remember how she heard, only that it shocked her to the core. She and another of the Rocky Horror crowd, a boy named Vern, who also had had a crush on Bobby, decided to go to the funeral. Dora wanted to be there for Bobby.
Mark Guyer, Bobby’s friend from Las Lomas High School, got a call from a mutual acquaintance. “Mark, you need to know that Bobby Griffith killed himself and the funeral’s today.”
“Oh my God!” said Mark. He felt sick to his stomach. Instinctively he thought, “Another one of us has died that way.”
“But why Bobby?” he asked himself, even though he was sure he knew the answer. He flared with resentment at Bobby’s mother for all the things he imagined she had done to hurt her son. He was angered, too, that he had learned of Bobby’s death so late, and attributed this perceived slight to the family’s rejection of everything gay in Bobby’s life, including his friends.
“The hell with it,” he thought. Impulsively, he jumped in his car and headed for Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church.
In that way, they converged—some of the people in Bobby’s other life, unknown to one another, most unknown to his family. Most of them sat way in the back, feeling almost like intruders. In the atrium sat Bobby’s closed casket, a photo of him resting on top. His startling smile beamed at the gathering of a hundred people.
Assistant Pastor Daubenspeck, a friend of Ed Griffith’s, gave the eulogy. Its message, to Bobby’s friends in the rear, to Jeanette, and even subliminally to Mary, was that Bobby had killed himself because he was a homosexual.
Diane Haines sat in disbelief. “Who in the hell is he to say this?” she thought, getting furious. “The reason Bobby killed himself was because he wasn’t accepted by his family. Here it is, Bobby’s final send-off, his final memory, and all these people are being subjected to an untruth.”
Andrea Hernandez was having a similar reaction. She thought, “Even after he’s dead, they’re still killing him. They’re saying, ‘All you people here, this is what happens when you’re gay and go against God: you die and isn’t that too bad.’” She reflected angrily that this kind