...
And he wasn't Dunn's pet until later. Two of the other boys in this shot were Dunn's pets, particularly the one on the far left of the image. In fact, I seem to recall Robin stayed for a third year at the two-year college exactly because Dunn was giving so much attention to the other two until they both graduated. Both were more photogenic than he was, but I hate all these pictures because they don't much look like any of them looked in person and least of all Robin.
He looks almost like he was wearing a bald cap to recede his hairline, and the mustache was just for that play, not a regular fixture on his face. He was made up for this part to look more like he looked twenty years later than what he actually looked like then. He, for instance, was not so spectacularly hairy until later.
I don't like exactly how Dunn says he was a ladies' man either because that implies he was hosing on us. That was part of why I was so afraid of him. The girls were vying for him, but they weren't getting him. None of them were getting him. He wasn't like that. The other two were.
I was extremely daunted by all the girls around me suddenly turning on me out of the wide nowhere at the time. I finally asked my psychology teacher about the problem, why were girls I barely even knew on sight spreading filthy rumors about me? He had to explain "sex identification" to me, said I should wear it as a badge of honor they felt threatened enough by my beauty to make such a fuss. This finally made something approximating sense to me, but I never got used to it. And Robin did have a girlfriend for a while but was not taking everybody up on their offers, not just a kid making hay while the sun was shining.
Anyway, this had a bearing on my terror of Robin, all the girls after him, despite my best friend being buddies with him and telling him I was dying of love for him, and Robin trying so many times to start a conversation with me... each time feeling to me like a lightning rod, short-circuiting my brain and the adrenaline nuking me so hard I could only run.
The night Robin gave me his solo performance for an audience of only me was in the fall after they got back from our big Victory in Edinburgh. It was the perfect opportunity finally to be alone together and enough physical distance that I didn't fizz out, shoot off for the relative safety of Alpha Centauri. The entirety of it passing between us right there. We could hear everyone else banging around backstage — Dunn shouting, "Williams! Quit dicking around out there!" — but Robin ignored him. It was just Robin and me in the whole world for about an hour, not any spiritual distance whatsoever.
He didn't have a dark side.
He didn't have some brain chemical affliction major depressive disorder... like it's not the world and the ugly things people do in it or the situation or the real being smothered or the love being bludgeoned to death with a shit-covered stick, but just a darn chemical imbalance darkening your days. Horse shit. That is horse shit.
He was afflicted by the sickness of the people around him. He was afflicted by the shit like "sex identification" was afflicting me. He was as love-filled and love-driven as I was... am. I might have developed a drinking problem, too, if I could've stood it physically. That's where the men in my life have always been much sturdier than I am... could endure the toxic overload enough to obliterate the real pain for an hour or two every day.
You will pardon me, my dear friends, if I tell you that we have not been the crazy ones. People too dim or dimmed or just plain selfish like to make up these pathetic stories to explain away our divergence from their sacred "normal", but it's horse shit. Pure horse shit. And Robin did not kill himself.
He loved you too much.
always and any time....
