I've said this before and I'll say it again, Bobby's in pain. It seems like everything in Bobby's life revolves around what happened to him. I guess that really isn't surprising. Years and years of humiliation, powerlessness, and grief will do that to you. He's so angry; not a day goes by that doesn't think about what happened to him.
When a girl doesn't feel the same way about him, he thinks about all of the kids in school that called him ugly, said that they he would never be with a pretty girl. Whenever he watches a TV show or a movie that glorifies gang violence, people intimidating and humiliating people that aren't in a place to fight back, he gets pissed off because he knows what that's like.
Whenever older people or people in authority are basically saying "shut up! I'm right and you're wrong," he loses it because he thinks about all the times he trusted in an authority's guidance. Where his parents and every teacher in school would tell him that whether they're right or wrong, you shut up and take it. That it's ok because they're in authority.
They don't have to treat you with respect or dignity, they can say and do whatever they want and get away with it.
Whenever he's in his hometown, he thinks of everything. When he's in the house he grew up in, he thinks about how his dad treated him. How his dad would say that it's not ok to fight back, that whenever someone is mean to you, just smile and say "thank you." When he drives by his middle school, he thinks about the constant humiliation and isolation that he felt. Where someone pushed him, he pushed him back and got beat up in front of the whole 7th grade class.
But he didn't fight back, like he was suppose to. He got suspended from school and grounded for doing what his parents told him to do, for pushing him back. His parents would say that if he got in a fight, he would "suffer the consequences." Now he thinks "why in the absolute fuck did I listen to them. Granted, I was smaller than the other kids but why didn't I work out? WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T I DO SOMETHING?!"
But he knows the answer, "I thought that was my place. I thought that's what God wanted me to do. I thought he would get the 'last say so.' I thought I was suppose to let God handle it. I thought my place in the world was that of a nerd. Someone that had low self-esteem, someone that couldn't get girls, someone that was weak but that wasn't me and it never will be. All of my childhood I listened to what motherfuckers told me what I should do, what I should be. I'll never let that happen again."
