Robert John Bonney

🎵 One of these things is not like the others. One of these boys became an Eagle Scout. Can you guess which? Not the boys without belts. Or hats.

When given a compass and a sled to drag, the non-eagles, my brother and I, thought it made sense for the route to require lifting the sled over a fence. We dragged it over boulders and through a cemetery before accepting we had to turn around and lift the very heavy wooden sled over the fence again.

Another rite of passage we failed was a winter sleep-out with an egg. We warmed the runny egg over a short-lived fire and shivered in a lean-to, waiting for dawn to take a painfully long time to arrive.

We younger scouts were sent off to hunt for snipe, an elusive bird that did not exist. We waited for the promised viper - the viper is coming, the viper is coming - only to groan when the viper appeared with a roll of toilet paper.

But we kicked ass at feats of strength and agility. This got us no merit badges, but more pride than any badge would give, and I shocked myself when I won the mile swim for our troop.

Boy Scouts was emblematic of my childhood. Merit badges were a thing I was supposed to get and I didn’t know how. I was not about to ask an adult about it, or a kid, either.

There’s a photo of me, age four, looking a little weary. Eyes that said, what’s going on? This was not the face of the gregarious baby I once was, who liked to help his (crying, protesting) baby friend inside of suitcases and garbage cans. Those eyes had seen something. A threat. Did I know I was gay? By second grade it was clear I’d strayed from the other kids. Still, I clung to being me, jabbering invented words with Joey, who had even more energy than I did. We’d jabber ’til dawn, creating game shows. There’s a cassette tape recording that you will never hear.

Cluelessly being me was cured one day in the locker room when I squeaked out an answer and got scorn in return. I set out immediately to learn the proper method of communication, which was grunts. Mostly, though, the new me said nothing. No words, no worries.

And then the former boy scout, former cartwheeler, former solitary woods-roamer, became semi-cool. I had hair down to my shoulders and blasted AC/DC (on the horrible speakers of a Volkswagen bug). I had a girlfriend who should have only been a best friend, who made me laugh ’til I couldn’t breathe. She hoped I wasn’t gay, and I sat in the car while she used her cleavage to get beer.

I thought I’d ride the party train as long as I could. Then, at the dreadfully boring old age of the mid-twenties, mercifully, I’d die of unquenched horniness. Before that happened, though, around my twenty-third birthday, I was told that the next party was not a proper life goal. To get people off my back, I went to rehab and stayed for a month.

Friends were gone, as was college, my best buddy (forgive me, Christine) and my even greater love (weed) (which I’d loved even when smoking it through a potato). But the removal of witnesses allowed me to reinvent myself again.

I’m thirty-eight years sober now, and that only happened after I was introduced to addicts and freaks like me. They’d done hilariously worse things than me (like hiding naked behind a hotel soda machine). After teaching me how to stay clean, they gave me the courage to stick a toe out of the closet.

It wasn’t the losses, though, that saved me. It was the guys with AIDS who got sober, the family who told me they loved me more than ever. It was, yes, love, says the guy who had a real issue with love. Love was uncontrolled, it was vulnerable, it led to... scorn? The word once troubled me so much I'd sing "drugs" instead, which works remarkably well. The Greatest Drugs of All Is Happening To Me, You Give Good Drugs, I’m All Out of Drugs, etc.

What happened was, I'd been told a brilliant secret. You need help and that’s a good thing. We all do. We’re better together. Now let’s sing Kumbaya.

I'm still forgiving that scared, ridiculous child. It's a hard cycle to break. But writing this is a far cry from the kid who said nothing.

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