Chapter 29

Huntington, West Virginia

September 1986

Six days after his eighteenth birthday, Robert packed all his belongings and crammed them into his Volkswagen. He began, working furiously, as soon as his parents departed for work. He left a long letter for them on the desk in his bare bedroom, pouring out his feelings and frustrations and asking them not to look for him. Paralyzed by his need to be the good boy and unable to face any kind of interpersonal conflict directly, Robert could do it no other way.

He had started college earlier that month. Two better, out of state schools had accepted him, but he decided to attend the mediocre local university instead. He could go there without paying tuition. His desire to sever all reliance on his parents trumped getting a good education.

As long as they were paying his bills, Robert reasoned, he would not be free. Late in the summer, he got a job hauling ice and kegs and cleaning up at a bar near the college. On the eve of his birthday, he rented the shabby little apartment to which he transported his things on this late-September morning.

Robert was spent, physically and emotionally, after unloading the car and stacking everything at one end of the apartment’s living room. He had no furniture. He rolled his sleeping bag out on the wooden floor and crawled in. As he drifted off to sleep, Robert considered it a good sign that his stomach did not hurt. He had been devouring antacids all day every day for a year.

The next morning, when Robert emerged from his French class at the university, Tom was standing in the hall. He looked distraught, his eyes puffy and red.

“You need to come home, Buddy,” Tom squeezed out of his dry throat. “Your mom is just sick about this.”

“I … I can’t,” Robert said. He swallowed the powerful urge to cry. “Didn’t you read my letter?”

Tom reached into the inner pocket of his blazer and withdrew the folded letter. “Of course I read it, about ten times.” He unfolded it and began to read from Robert’s missive.

“Don’t,” Robert said. “I don’t want to debate it with you. I … I said what I had to say, and … and—”

“Just come home with me,” Tom pleaded.

Robert was not prepared for this face to face confrontation. He had believed naïvely that his parents would read the letter, understand his position and leave him alone. Now, standing in the narrow hallway as students bustled past to their classes, he did not know what to do.

“At least show me where you’re living,” Tom said. “Let me drive you back.”

Robert could resist no more. “Okay,” he said, and they walked together in silence to Tom’s car in the university parking lot. They drove in silence to Robert’s apartment.

“Oh, Buddy, you can’t stay here,” Tom said as they entered the apartment. He pointed to the old, unventilated natural gas heater in the fireplace, its row of blue flames whooshing. “That thing’ll kill you in your sleep.” Motioning to the sleeping bag on the wooden floor, Tom added: “And you don’t even have a bed.”

“It’s not that bad,” Robert said. “And I can’t come back. I just can’t.”

Tom stood in the middle of the gloomy living room, looking around with his hands in his pockets. Robert’s overflowing suitcase was open in one corner. A row of books sat on the floor beneath the drafty windows looking out on the wet, grey day. “Just think about it then,” Tom said. “You don’t have to live like this, and we want you to come home.” He could not contain his agony any longer. With “home,” Tom gasped and wept. He grabbed Robert and hugged him tight. “Come home,” he choked out through his tears.

Robert’s head was swimming. Too many emotions were competing for dominance within him, which left him feeling numb to all of them. He hugged Tom back. “I’ll be okay,” he told Tom as they released each other. “Don’t worry.”

Tom wiped the tears from his face with his hand and opened the apartment door. A cold draft swept in, and the blue flames of the space heater flickered in the rush of air. “Turn that thing off when you go to sleep tonight,” he said. “I’ll buy you a safe one tomorrow and have it installed.”

* * *

Robert quickly settled into the routine of taking classes at Marshall during the day and working in the Hunter’s Run bar at night. He had always been outgoing and precocious with adults, but agonizingly shy and awkward with his peers, so the lack of the traditional college freshman life agreed with him. Robert got on well with the bartenders and cocktail waitresses, who treated him like a younger brother. Most of them were already bar-work veterans in their mid- to late-twenties. Several took an occasional course at university and maintained at least the public fiction that their saloon jobs were temporary, but for most this path was permanent.

Robert’s social life consisted primarily of regular visits after work to an illegal after hours club in the basement of an old warehouse by the railroad tracks with the other denizens of the bar community. On this Saturday night a week before Christmas, already three hours into Sunday morning, he and one of the Hunter’s Run bartenders who had befriended him tromped through slushy, new snow to their regular stools at the end of the bar in the dingy after hours club.

“Oh, Robby, that’s fabulous news,” Bobby said as he fired up another Parliament cigarette. “Just fabulous.” He reached over and squeezed Robert’s forearm with his thin, pale hand. “You should be very proud of yourself.”

He was. Robert had received his grades in the Saturday mail for his first semester of college: A’s in all four classes. Bobby was the first person he told. Robert’s relationship with his parents remained strained and complicated to the degree that he would not pick up the telephone and call them about anything, let alone something that seemed like a major personal milestone. And Robert felt a strange kinship with Bobby.

The skinny, haggard, pasty-skinned, chain-smoking bartender was the first openly gay person Robert had known. It was the mid-1980s, but in socially conservative West Virginia, most people still considered gays and lesbians to be fringe deviants. Robert empathized with Bobby’s sense of marginalization and estrangement from mainstream society, and he appreciated the compassion and concern Bobby always showed him.

“My mom wanted me to go to college when I was growing up, but I never really took to school,” Bobby lamented. He looked around at the motley crowd packed into the after hours club. “Since I was younger than you, I’ve always felt more at home in this world anyway.”

Robert was glad he had become friends with Bobby, and he was intrigued by the nocturnal subculture he had discovered over the past months. As he always did in whatever circumstances, Robert fit in somehow—or at least did not clash—without making any particular effort. He coped with an agonizing social anxiety by adapting to those around him and remaining unfailingly amiable. Still, Robert did not feel any more at home among the bartenders and waitresses than he had in any other community or situation in his life.

It had been the same in high school. Robert maintained friendly relations with nearly everyone in all the different cliques—so much that he was elected school president, a victory that had caused his first open conflict with his parents—but he had no friends with whom he truly shared himself. And he always felt like some observer from another planet, completely self-contained, navigating without a compass through an alien world.

“What was your favorite class?” Bobby asked.

“Oh, introduction to ancient philosophy, without a doubt,” Robert said.

“Ancient philosophy,” Bobby said. “Wow. That sounds interesting—and hard.”

“It was wonderful,” Robert said. “I never knew such a world of thought and ideas existed. The Bhagavad Gita, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible as literature. We read and read and discussed and discussed. I still feel drunk on it all, and like I am beginning to see the world for the first time.” Robert gesticulated so animatedly that he knocked his drink over on the bar.

“Jesus, Robbie,” Bobby said, laughing as he helped mop up the amaretto sour with a handful of bar napkins, “I don’t think I’ve ever been that excited about anything in my life.”

“It’s incredibly exciting, and a bit frightening,” Robert said. “The professor, Dr. Vanderfelde, told us in the first class that if he did his job well, by the end of the course we’d be questioning everything we believed, and I certainly am.”

“That does seem to be the point of getting an education,” Bobby said.

“It is!” Robert agreed. “Although I didn’t understand that until now. I always just saw it as the road to a good job. I feel so strongly the opposite that I’m going to change my major to ancient philosophy.”

“What is it now?” Bobby asked.

“International Relations.”

Bobby laughed so heartily he nearly choked on his amaretto sour. “That’s quite a change.”

“I mainly declared IR because I won a scholarship to go to Egypt on a study program this past summer, after I graduated, and I didn’t know what else I should major in,” Robert explained.

“You won a scholarship to study in Egypt?” Bobby was astounded. Such experiences were not in the background of the typical Huntington bartender. “What the hell are you doing slinging booze at the Hunter’s Run and going to Marshall? You should be at Harvard or someplace.”

“Well, no,” Robert said. “Harvard is way out of my league, but that is a long, different story. Egypt was a bit of a fluke—the guidance counselor recommended me and nobody else from here applied—but it was fascinating, and it gave me a taste of being abroad. It is a big world out there, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been more interested in international things than domestic ones. Plus, I really like the International Relations professor at Marshall I met through the Egypt scholarship, so I thought I would study with him. But philosophy is … is inspiring and beautiful and true unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I can’t imagine staying with IR now.”

“I don’t know a damned thing about either of them,” Bobby declared, “but if you’re that passionate about philosophy, you should do it. Life goes by too quickly to get stuck in one you’re not crazy about. When I was your age, I used to think about getting out of Huntington and finding something I loved to do. I even considered joining the navy—see the world on a ship full of cute boys!—but I never did.”

“Why not?” Robert asked.

Bobby drained off the last of his amaretto sour, bit off the maraschino cherry and tossed the stem into the empty glass. “Oh, first my mom needed help taking care of my grandma, then she needed help taking care of herself. And my friends are here and my life isn’t anything to make a movie out of, but it’s okay. And now I’m too damned old and set in my ways.” He waved to the bartender. “Kim, give us two shots of peach schnapps.” Turning back to Robert, Bobby added: “But enough of my sob story. It sounds like you’ve made a big, life changing decision, and that deserves a toast!”