He must have seen the large tractor trailer approaching from under the Couch Street overpass and timed the jump. Bobby executed a sudden and effortless back flip and disappeared over the railing. The driver tried to swerve, but there was no time.
Two witnesses later reported they at first thought it was a prank. They rushed to the railing expecting to see Bobby dangling. No. He had descended twenty-five feet directly into the path of the trailer, which tossed his body fourteen feet under the overpass.
The impact had ripped away most of his clothes and strewn them on the highway. Beneath his body paramedics found a two-dollar bill and seventy-seven cents in change.
The medical examiner said later that Robert Warren Griffith, age twenty years and two months, had died instantly of massive internal injuries.
TWO “What Went Wrong?”
AUGUST — SEPTEMBER 1983
WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA
Bob and Mary Griffith’s stucco-surfaced wood-frame house is part of a 1940s tract, built in the sleepy days when Walnut Creek had both walnuts and a free-flowing creek. The northern California town had graduated from a bucolic suburb to a flourishing nexus of service businesses and clean industry. Just twenty miles east of San Francisco, Walnut Creek had the conveniences of a bedroom community with the gloss of an increasingly sophisticated and congested city.
Still, there remained quiet streets and charming neighborhoods. Except for a disquieting rise in traffic fed by a massive freeway a few blocks away, Rudgear Road was that kind of street. Mary and Bob and three of their four children enjoyed what appeared to be an idyllic life in their compact three-bedroom ranch-style home with a swimming pool out back.
The night of August 26–27, 1983, Mary Griffith, forty-eight, sat up late sewing in her kitchen. Her neatly styled brown hair had begun to assume gray highlights, but she was still slim, in scale with her five-foot, three-inch frame. She had a pleasant but ordinary face with a rather blunt nose and soft hazel eyes hidden behind oversize clear-frame glasses. When she spoke, her speech had a faint midwestern cast, although she had been brought up in Florida and California.
Favorite pictures of her four kids adorned a buffet in one corner of the living room: Joy, the oldest, now twenty-two, large boned and serious; Ed, twenty-one, square jawed and muscular; Nancy, the baby, age thirteen; and Bobby, a tousle-haired Tom Sawyer.
She sewed and chain-smoked Carleton menthols, surrounded by familiar icons of her faith. Next to the telephone was a crammed wooden box of index cards inscribed with Mary’s favorite Bible verses. On the kitchen wall hung a ceramic cross with a little child nestled asleep on the horizontal bar. On the table was another cross, of wood, and a bookstand supporting Mary’s weathered and dog-eared personal Bible.
Bob was asleep in the bedroom. Joy, Nancy, and Ed were out tripping around in Joy’s old truck. Mary loved these rare moments of solitude, feeling safe in an ordered universe in which the rules and regulations had all been codified two thousand years before and bequeathed to humanity for all time. It was like living in a giant compound guarded by angels: the world was an alien and dangerous place, but if you had faith and played by the rules, you and your loved ones were okay.
Her home reflected the warm simplicity and unpretentious-ness of a blue-collar family that had made it to the suburbs: reproduction prints on the walls, doilied tables, family pictures on the refrigerator; in the kitchen, white walls and pink cupboards. Bob, an electrician and a proficient carpenter, had built the kitchen table of plywood and tile and trimmed it in mahogany stain. Behind the house, in a large, cluttered backyard, was a “doughboy” pool — in effect, an oval-shaped ground-level tank of water.
The one jarring note in Mary’s life was the constant nagging worry about Bobby. Since that day more than four years earlier when he acknowledged to them that he was gay, Mary had rarely known a moment free from anxiety. The Bible repeatedly warned that homosexuality is a mortal sin; clearly gay people were doomed to perdition. If Bobby did not repent and change, there would be no reunion in heaven.
The promise of that reunion with her loved ones at the end of earthly existence was at the core of Mary’s faith, the deal she was willing to make with God. Without the prospect of rejoining her family in some celestial paradise, life would have little meaning.
Mary couldn’t help feeling frustrated. Bobby seemed to be getting more and more miserable. She had prayed and badgered him relentlessly, but nothing was happening. She would often ask, “I’ve been praying for four years for Bobby. The change, the healing, Lord, when is it going to happen?” Then, with the knowledge that the deity does not reward impatience, Mary would add, “Not my will, but thine be done.”
She yawned and looked at the clock. It was half past midnight, and the next morning — Saturday — was a workday for her. She rose to go to the sink for a glass of water. As she walked back to the table, an odd thing happened: something flicked inside her, like a light switching off. For an instant a cold blackness whooshed through her, darkening her spirit. Then it passed.
“Lord, what does that mean?” she wondered.
Mary shrugged it off and readied herself for bed, joining Bob in the back bedroom, which he had added to the house a couple of years before.
She uttered a silent prayer, the same one she’d been saying for years: “Dear Lord, bless my husband and children. Hold them safely in thy merciful hand.”
Joy Griffith was driving her ’82 Dodge Ram D50 pickup down Bollingen Canyon Road with brother Ed beside her, and Nancy and her girlfriend Wesley in the open part of the truck. This was what passed for recreation on a Friday night in the suburbs.
The blowing wind swept away a pair of sunglasses plunked in Nancy’s hair. Joy pulled to a stop, and Nancy got out to search for them. At that moment, inexplicably, Joy thought of Bobby. The thought provoked a deadening fear, as if someone had told her she had cancer, as if a tumor had been growing inside her without her knowledge. Nancy found her glasses and they went on.
It was Joy who picked up the receiver of the ringing phone on the wall in the kitchen the next morning. Nancy and Wesley were waiting impatiently outside. Joy had promised to drive them to Santa Cruz for a day of fun on the boardwalk. Her cousin Debbie was on the phone from Portland.
“I have something terrible to tell you,” Debbie said.
“What? Is everybody okay?”
“Bobby jumped off a bridge.”
“What?”
Nancy and Wesley began to walk back into the house from the backyard. Joy, fighting for self-control, said, “Nancy, get out. Go back in the backyard.”
Joy turned back to the phone, hysteria rising.
“Who found him?” she asked Debbie, thinking he had jumped off a railroad trestle or something.
“Joy, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
“He’s okay?” Joy almost shouted.
“Joy, do you know what I’m telling you?”
Joy said, “Bobby’s dead.”
“Yes,” Debbie said.
Joy began to wail involuntarily. “Oh my God! He jumped off a bridge! Daddy, come here quick!”
Bob Griffith grabbed the phone. He seemed to take the news calmly, asking for details. Then, suddenly, he let the phone drop from his hands and walked away. Reflexively, he denied the reality, trying to push it back. Underneath was the beginning of a giant maw of pain.
Joy drove the short distance to I. Magnin in downtown Walnut Creek, where her mom worked as a shipping clerk. It was a gorgeous California summer day. At the employees’ entrance she numbly asked the attendant to summon Mary. “And please tell her to bring her purse,” Joy added. She crouched in a corner to wait, curling herself into a ball of grief.