![]() ![]() Bobby would always sacrifice himself to save others he cared about. ![]() His sister was living with a coke dealer who regularly beat her up and kept her paychecks as " rent money." Their lives were in chaos, and what I knew about Bobby from our childhood became clear again. Bobby's brother lived in a brooding silence. What my mother knew from her talks with Bobby's mother became clear to me, and nothing could be hidden. Bobby told the entire sordid tale and then went public with it. He had also used physical violence and the threat of murder to keep them from speaking. Fred had been systematically raping his children for years. He was put under psychiatric care.ĭuring his period in the psychiatric ward, Bobby revealed the dark truth about his family. Bobby went AWOL from the Army and was found huddled in an abandoned shack somewhere in Tennessee. I had my own problems to deal with at the time and thought little of it. I didn't understand and told her that Bobby and I rarely talked, but my ever-perceptive mother knew that I had a kind of relationship with Bobby's sister Monique. My mother, being a one woman army when necessary and a kind and gentle person when matters called for it, told me one night that I had to help convince Bobby's siblings to move out of their house and to support her in convincing Bobby's mother to divorce Fred. There was much said in muffled tones and they stopped speaking when I entered the room. His family and mine remained close, but as Bobby's mother came by our house for afternoon coffee I could hear my mother telling her to leave Fred. I had since dropped out and was working for the post office. A few years later he opted to join the United States Army. I was sixteen.Īfter high school I went to college and Bobby went to work at his father's fish market. That was the day I began to seriously wonder what Fred was all about. One year after Bobby and I had stopped talking regularly Fred came up to my mother in the kitchen, firmly grabbed one of her buttocks and asked her if she was "getting enough at home." My mother, being about 5'10" and not at all slender, threw him against the wall. I never gave much thought to Fred again, but we always went to Bobby's house for Christmas Eve. When Bobby told me the woman in the films was his mother when she was younger, I felt sick to my stomach and told him I never wanted to see them again. The films were the most raw and disturbing form of porn and we thought we were stumbling upon something crudely special. After we were finished he brought us to a hole in the wall bar and handed us both a glass of beer saying we "deserved it." He had a room in the basement with a film projector. When we were thirteen he payed Bobby and myself to help him wallpaper one of his buildings. ![]() He ran a fish market and owned apartment buildings in the most rancid parts of town. What I never managed to understand was the nature of his father.įred always scared me a little as a kid, but I figured it was because he was extremely outspoken and said things I never heard an adult say before. We did science projects together in grammar school and regularly slept over each other's houses. For almost ten years I thought Bobby and I knew everything about each other. It didn't seem to make sense that he had entered into a downward spiral, spending the bulk of his time with users and losers, but eventually I would understand. While I visited with the "downtown crowd" that dealt drugs and made alcohol plentiful, he was attached to them. We stopped being able to relate to each other and we hung with different crowds. From when we were seven until some point in high school we were like brothers. ![]() I had met Bobby, but it had been a long time. ![]()
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