Bobby Girl In A Bobby World

About 7 years ago there was a certain photo swarming various internet sites. The photo is of nursing students appearing to be elated that they are in nursing school. Maybe they are taking a group graduation photo. Two of the students are easily noticeable because they appear up close and personal in the lower part of the photo. For the most part, though, all the subjects look alike. All the students are wearing the same white lab coats, and all have long hair that flows past their whopping smiles, and all stare open-mouthed directly into the camera—except one who appears to have other matters to attend to.

On a staircase surrounded by a multitude of women is that singular man named Bobby. He is easily detected not by his manhood—and the others’ lack of one—but from whatever the others are having that he is not. Bobby was in the U.S. Marine Corps before entering the nursing program where this photo was taken. Military apologists and hypercritics could spend hours discussing or debating the incongruence of Bobby being a marine and a nurse. This picture is not about either one. It’s about Bobby’s averted gaze of dissimilarity and whether it comes from a former marine or a future nurse. His empty but wooden stare is probably birthed from the later.

The name Bobbie is derived from a Greek word that describes something foreign or that refers to a traveler from a foreign land. Irony is demonstrable in this picture because Bobby appears to be a nonlocal. His eyes hollow and dazed, Bobby glowers away from the camera into an imaginary land while perhaps contemplating life choices. His stare is of a man who knows everything about The Bachelor and The Handsmaid’s Tale although he has never seen a minute of these television shows that women love. It is that sulky and sullen stare that makes this picture mesmerizing. It is not the kind of stare a unabomber type person presents; rather, it is the thousand-yard stare of a person questioning how he is going to save lives when he is already dead inside. A picture says a thousand words, but Bobby’s visage in this one produces a thousand questions.

Is he humming “macho macho man” in his head because he’s gay and regrets leaving behind all his male buddies in the military? Is he thinking he’ll have to effeminize himself to fit into the social structure of his new employment? Is he going to pick the user name Str8Nurse so people will see his computer log-on and understand he’s not gay? Is he wondering if the other staff are going to call him a murse instead of a male nurse? Is he going to get a bathroom all to himself? Is his period going to sync with theirs?

Is he thinking when someone sees this photo he’s going to look like he’s in some kind of reverse cheerleader effect? That is, if he were surrounded by males instead, would he look like a douchebag? Is he their certified sister? Is he a Bobby who desperately wants to be Bobbie and this is his cry for acceptance? Come on Bobby, you can be a star no matter who you are!

Or is Bobby showing us what the facial appearance of PTSD looks like? Is Bobby broken to the point that he’s just one oorah away from going full marine again? How many actors in war movies have that same thousand-yard stare on their character’s face? This ex-military man looks like he needs a medic because he is dying. But he’s a marine, and the U.S. Marine Corps does not have medics. So who’s going to help him? Does he really need help though? Maybe Bobby’s stare always looks like this? Maybe he just does not like having his picture taken?

Maybe he’s married. If he is married, then maybe his is a fearful expression of his wife finding this picture later on some Facebook page. Maybe this is just what married marines look like when they are fenced in without their wives. You know if a group of college boys got together to discuss this photo, this would be the joke because it’s like being stuck in a candy store but you are not allowed to eat. It’s not a combat situation, but marines love a target-heavy environment. This photo is ground zero, and the objective is clear. See the hill, take the hill! How’s about a little friendly fire? No, he’s a married marine, and that would be a double dishonorable whammy.

Bobby looks reasonably intelligent enough to know that he should not go cohorting with coworkers. My mother was a registered nurse for 20 years. She has told me stories about how nursing departments “eat their own.” Fraternization is folly and, as my father would say, you don’t shit where you eat. Maybe that is what Bobby’s deportment in this photo is suggesting. Despite the puerile jokes made earlier, it is unlikely Bobby is in a harem from which he can choose any girl he wants and, paradoxically, the reason he cannot is because he is a male nurse.

My mother worked in various hospitals in her career. Her best friend at work was a gay male nurse, and one day I am going to write a short story about their exploits together in the emergency room. What follows is all anecdotal evidence from her, but my mother always sounded empirical to me. She had a knowing laugh when I showed her this photo.

According to my mother, but not in these impolitic words, any female nurses working with Bobby are going to consider him a gay friend and unfuckable. It’s not that they would not fuck him because they think he’s gay. My mother continued to explain that just as women prefer to marry up, female nurses prefer to fuck upwards, too. They will be looking for the doctor or, at the very least, the physician’s assistant. They certainly are not going to have sex with someone they think did not have the abilities and acumen to be the doctor. Along the same lines, male nurses are probably going to have the sex with lab technicians or nursing assistants.

My mother then asked me if I knew why in this photo they were all wearing white coats if they were nurses. She asked me in the manner that showed me she already knew the answer. I had to reply I did not know because I did not, but I knew that doctors usually wore the white coats in any hospital I had ever been in. She told me these students were probably taking a graduation photo because nursing schools today are putting their graduates in white coats to make them feel they are equal to doctors. She scoffed and stated that no white coat would band aid that misconception. Mom said those schools were doing the nurses a great disservice by setting them up for a very “big disappointment when they start working with doctors in a hospital for real.”

Plot twist. What if Bobby is not even in nursing school but is instead an engineering student. That would make sense, too. Bobby The Engineer appears discomfited in the photo because he’s unaccustomed to being around women outside his male-dominated classes. Depending on which study you go with and from which year, about 20% of engineering students are female. However, if any of the males were actually asked what they thought the male:female ratio was, they might tell you it seems 40:1—notwithstanding other studies that say it is closer to 2:1. There are studies that show similar statistics in the paralegal field in that 23% is male. Yet, I can affirm that in a class of about 20 that I was the only male paralegal.

In the late 1990s I was majoring in paralegal. Before entering the program, I remember finding from the only state association at that time that 98% of the paralegals in Mississippi were female. The statistic was neither deterrent nor impetus for me. I knew I wanted to go to law school and I knew I would have to have full-time employment while doing it. Working as a paralegal—even part-time—seemed the apposite path to travel along the way. I thought having a paralegal degree would help me find employment in that field and win entrance into law school—even though the most-accepted students into law school at that time curiously were English majors.

None of the college professors I asked could explain to me why law schools were taking so many English majors. I inquired because I considered minoring in that field to further increase my chances of getting into law school. Several professors tried but none could produce an answer. So I chose criminal justice instead and probably would have looked just like Bobby does in this photo had someone taken a photo of me with my classmates. But I would not have looked disheartened because of them.

I did not start college until I was 27 years old. I looked like Bobby’s picture because I was the oldest student in almost all my classes . . . not just in the paralegal classes. It turns out that Bobby is older than he appears in the photo. So maybe he was questioning his career, which at that time had become college student. I began questioning mine immediately after I started college, and I continued cross-questioning myself for the remainder of my college career. Students constantly said “yes sir” and “no sir” to me because of how much older I looked. I really was like a fish out of water, but I still felt that way because of my age rather than my sex or my gender role. Bobby, also being older, was in a Bobbie world and a blooming one.

Earlier I jokingly asked if Bobby was going to get his own bathroom. That is unlikely to be needed in his profession, but never say never. The first job I obtained when I started college was a records clerk position for the local police department. Both supervisors and the other 9 clerks were female. I, the only male and the first male employee the Records Department ever employed, was given my own bathroom. I never complained nor did I ask for a separate bathroom; I was instructed that was how it was going to be. The Records Department and their bathroom was on the second floor. My bathroom was on the third floor, which had been closed and cordoned off due to unsafe conditions that antiquated building engendered. It is quiet amusing to me now because the “new” police department was placed in the original hospital building that was deemed too unsafe to keep using as a hospital. Apparently the mayor’s office thought it was benign enough for police officers . . . and the third floor was apparently safe enough for me in my own little Bobbie world.

Bobby was my familiar. He started college later in life and entered an educational program in which he was the only male. Through some quick internet searching, I learned that this photo of Bobby was taken at a university in Texas. The main photo on the webpage for the nursing program in that school shows about 50 females with 3 tie-wearing males. These men are standing contiguously. Not one of them looks as moribund as Bobby. To the contrary, their smiles are contagious and cavernous. No regrets apparent. Perhaps they know that when they walk into a patient’s room they will sometimes be called doctor even though that never happens to a female nurse. (Physicians prescribe; Nurses provide!) Perhaps they know, depending on which study is cited, they are going to make about $6,000 more per year than their female counterparts. We’ll never know if money was a motivation for Bobby’s new career choice.

His career was postponed. A picture is worth a thousand words and I have derived many from the photo that is on the cover and at the top of this story. It’s often what’s not shown in the picture that is more significant though. Bobby is actually a happy husband and a father of 4 children, and he was all that when this photo was captured. A couple of years after it was taken and put all over the internet, Bobby was diagnosed with a rare form of neurological cancer. The marine had a new fight to fight. Two years after that discovery and after completing radiation, Bobby rang the bell. His war against cancer won, Bobby got his life back and returned to work in a Bobbie world.

I spent a great deal of time in this fragmented memoir speculating why Bobby’s soul appeared in a photo to be dying. Innumerable scenarios were given that other viewers might come up with upon seeing the photo for the first time. I saved my personal belief for last. I don’t think this is a picture of women surrounding a marine who is Semper Finished with their shit—even though that is what it appears to be. I choose to believe his demeanor is intentional humor because he is generally a fun person to be around . . . and his wife is probably the one taking the photo.

This photo of a seemingly distraught man engulfed by Bobbies was just a few brief seconds in time. Real nurses are great people with boundless empathy who practice the Five C’s—compassion, competence, confidence, conscience, and commitment. They make other people the center of everything that nurses do. They care and they give. They don’t live in plastic, and their life is fantastic. So if living in a Bobbie world fosters all that, I want to live in it, too. That is the real world that Bobby moved to, and it is not a foreign place. Nor does living in a Bobbie world make us Bobby girls; it does not make either of us lesser men. It makes us better people.