When I was 13 my best friend died of cancer. It wasn't good. And he was the only person I knew when I was young to have died until last Thanksgiving when I visited my family. My mother told me a friend from my childhood had committed suicide - Treavor Jolley.

Oh how the memories have come back today. I've been putting off looking it up until today. Here is his obit.

"Jolley, Treavor D.
Treavor D. Jolley, 33, was born August 26, 1971, in Provo, Utah. He returned to his Father in Heaven on October 22, 2004, and was greeted with open arms by his infant son, Dylan, and his Grandpa Black. He was raised in Orem and lived a short time in Lindon. He met and fell in love with his best friend and true love, Marniee D. Allen.
They were married February 21, 1992; later solemnized in the Salt Lake LDS Temple on August 12, 1994.
He loved his Heavenly Father and from the time he was a young boy, he had a deep love for the outdoors, and all animals. He worked at Christensen Auto Dealership. He later became a respiratory therapist; and, most currently, worked for Union Pacific Railroad as a conductor."
"Published in the Daily Herald on 10/24/2004."
http://files.usgwarchives.net/ut/utah/obits/dh/2004/oct/dh24oct2004.txt
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2016/187/150899089_1467858358.jpg

What a strange history Treavor and I had. In grade school he was a bully but he sort of didn't bully me. I say sort of because he was violent and verbally abusive to me but we were friends. I can't tell you how many times he punched me. But I took it. I liked him. He was tough. He was a rebel and I thought that was cool.

His family situation sucked. When I was friends with him his mother was going through a divorce from his violent father. Treavor told me how his father beat him regularly. We didn't hang out at his house until his father left and his mother remarried an retired cop and they started a blind cleaning business. A few years after that they moved to North Orem and then Lindon. His obit says a short time in Lindon but that isn't true. He was there 5 or 6 years. Maybe that is a short time.

He and his stepfather got along okay. I assume his step father left him alone a lot but his mom was really nice once they had moved. They moved into a big ranch house with horses. I remember going to his house in Lindon (I lived in Orem) many times and she would make us food and was very pleasant to me.

She wasn't always so nice. Before she rekindled her interest in the Mormon Church she was a bitch to me. She either didn't talk to me or told me that she didn't like my clothes (I was pretty poor looking) or she would tell Treavor she didn't like my face and stuff like that. But Mormon Jesus made her a nice lady. And I loved going to their ranch. Treavor and I would spend hours riding their horses in the foothills.

He had broken his horse and bragged to me about how violent he had been to it. It was a male horse and I was afraid of it. His hair color and its mane were pretty close the same color. I had the 12 year old brown mare and she suited me just fine. Only once did she spook and almost took my head off with a branch but Treavor rode up and reigned her in.

Ah, the memories.

And to skinny down this post I'll just give you their highlights.

Treavor suspected my bisexuality and once told me that he wouldn't be surprised if I had sex with men. It didn't disgust him but he said that it did surprise him.

We used to hang out a lot at his girlfriend Shannon's house in the poor hood across the street to the North from the Baseball fields in Orem near the Orem Public Library and City Building. It was a shack but they had a Super Nintendo and I would watch more than play. Treavor loved kicking ass on that game. He also loved Shannon's ass and talked to me about hitting it. He thought he was in love. We would listen to the Led Zepplin song "All of My Love" over and over so he could here the "Shannon" part.

Sometimes his older brother Shaun would drive up places in his jacked up truck (suspension.) I thought he was awesome. He blared Def Leppard on his supped up stereo system. I thought he was good looking but never told Treavor that.

The beginning of the end for our friendship was Shaun's wedding. Treavor wanted me to come because there was going to be drinking. We could get stupid for free there. So I went to the wedding. Treavor's mom and stepfather didn't drink but Treavor, Shaun, and I did. And then in the middle of the party when Shaun came over to talk to Treavor, Shaun told Treavor to tell his fag-got friend to leave. He didn't want any of my kind at his wedding.

I never knew how he knew. Treavor must have told him what he suspected. I denied my bisexuality until I was in my 40s so it wasn't like I admitted to it. Anyway I was drunk and I had to walk close to 5 miles to get home. It had a sobering effect. I can place the month and year thanks to the fact that in my searching for Treavor I found this.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/150768472/shaun-david-jolley

Sad. I don't know if Shaun committed suicide and I only suspect Treavor did because of what my mother told me.

The last time I spoke to Treavor was right before entering the MTC in 1991 and he called me to ask me if I could get some pot for him. I would have never suspected that 3 years after that he was sealing in the Salt Lake Temple.

And I had to laugh at this from his obit.

"He loved his Heavenly Father and from the time he was a young boy..."

Treavor never was religious. He didn't care of there was a god or not and thought his mother was a hypocrite for becoming an active Mormon. Maybe he did convert. I don't know. And if you click the obit link and read the full thing there is something about a Japanese exchange student being like a brother to him? Strange but cool. Maybe he changed a lot when he became a father.

Anyway, thanks for reading this if you made it this far. We were two troubled kids back in the 80s. I was a child of neglect, sexual and verbal abuse and he was a child of verbal and physical abuse. Funny how circumstances make for strange friendships.

Elder,

Please excuse me if this takes your thread in the wrong direction, but you got me thinking about Mark (my best friend during my sophomore and junior years in high school).

Mark’s family moved to our area shortly before the start of our sophomore year. We were in a school play together and quickly became close friends. He had lived the previous two years in Utah, an he HATED Mormons, but somehow he liked me. He even occasionally went to Mutual with me (I was very TBM then).

Unlike me, Mark was very popular with girls. Although he could have probably dated almost any girl he wanted, he tended to date unpopular, not so attractive girls. He seemed to take it as a badge of honor.

I wouldn’t say that he came out of the closet during the time we were friends, I think he more came to terms with his sexuality. At first, I thought it was an act (he seemed to thrive on any kind of attention), but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was just being real. I’m fairly certain that he wasn’t romantically attracted to me, but from the beginning, I could tell he was jealous of my male friends. Even as a TBM, his sexual orientation didn’t really bother me, but I’ll admit that I didn’t like people wondering if we were lovers, and I did slightly distance myself from him (in my defense, this was the 1970s, and I was 17). By the end of our junior year, he dropped out of school. By then, we really didn’t have any mutual friends. I rarely saw him after that.

A few years later, I asked a mutual acquaintance (who was gay) if he knew what was up with Mark. He said that he heard that he was a prostitute. Years later, in the early years of the internet, I searched for him and discovered that he had died in his early 30s. Since he was a prostitute when AIDS appeared on the scene, I wonder if that might have been the cause of his death. In any case, I hope he found some love and happiness along the way.

Wow. EB may have struck a deep vein with that post. As you'll see from my post, which I was writing when you presented yours, there is a lot of overlap.

Just think: the 1970s were when BYU was torturing gay people in dark basements.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2019 07:08PM by Lot's Wife.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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>
> Just think: the 1970s were when BYU was torturing
> gay people in dark basements.

But that (the 1970's) was during free wheeling golden age of MORmONISM when being a MORmON was a breeze ......and it was (reportedly) much easier than it is now (said somebody else). ......and what role did "publicizing" have ????

It didn't. I appreciate your reply.

I dropped out of high school twice. I was kicked out of my home twice. I could have easily become a male prostitute if a groomer/pimp had found me back in those days. But Provo probably didn't have many of them back in the 80s.

Mark sounds like someone I could have really connected with on a few levels. I was a wingman to all of my friends. I never scored but helped them.

Elder Berry Wrote:
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> I dropped out of high school twice. I was kicked
> out of my home twice. I could have easily become a
> male prostitute if a groomer/pimp had found me
> back in those days. But Provo probably didn't have
> many of them back in the 80s.

Did you check out the MTC, especially the sub level maintenance accesses? because action is where ever a person can find it, ask Joe Bishop !!


https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/08/13/judge-tosses-lawsuit/

That is a touching story and rendered with a respect for detail and contradiction that makes it entirely credible. That's how humans are, ambivalent and confused creatures to the core. There are few truly simple personal histories.

My children have two godfathers. I met one of them through work; we became extremely good friends, and my friendship with his partner came through that relationship. They have been together for decades and speak of the sadness of the late 1980s and 1990s when they saw so many of their dear friends succumb to AIDS. The stories sound like those of old military veterans, recounting the losses they suffered at the hands of a distant enemy.

In any case, the older of my two friends was like you. Back in a time when everyone was straight, he did not realize he was gay until his early or middle twenties. His family never spoke about sexual matters, and he unconsciously did what he needed to "pass." Everything was good, everyone fit in.

Anyway, several years after they became effective family to us, that older man confessed to us that in his teenage years, well before he realized his sexual identity, he converted to Mormonism. He loved the community. In fact, he wanted to go to BYU and on a mission.

But as he started applying to colleges, his father, who had never expressed much interest in Mormonism either way, put his foot down. While he intended to help his son finance college, he said, he would not do so for BYU. Anywhere was okay but BYU. So my friend went to a different college.

Hearing that story perhaps three decades after it happened, I said, "Your father knew you were gay." "Oh yeah," my friend replied, "he'd figured that out long before I knew."

That old man is a hero to me. He was a white, middle-class, traditional American. He was also a man of great love and respect for his son, whose sexuality was neither here nor there. The father knew who his boy was and what he would become, and he was determined not to let anything get in the way of his personal development as it ran its natural course.

There are many great people in this country and in this world, and often their character manifests unobtrusively. Sometimes not even the beneficiaries of their strength recognize how they have contributed through action or inaction, a word of advice or tactful silence.

"That old man is a hero to me."

Me too. I never met anyone in Utah growing up who would have defended a kid who was gay. No one. I came out to my friends at 17 as bisexual but they didn't understand. A friend of mine hooked me up with his brother-in-law. That was the only "good" thing they did? His BIL could have been arrested for what we did. They ended up making me a pariah. It pushed me toward the church. I eventually crawled back to my parents and went on a mission at 20.

Life is so interesting. People can change but I always hate when others take it upon themselves to spruce up an obituary and make them out to be a different person. I'm glad you had a good friendship despite the bully aspect. It's really difficult to have normal friendships when you've grown up with abuse (at least for me it was). You are forced to grow up fast & deal with so many things that other kids can't begin to comprehend. It's sad to have that type of connection, but it's also nice when someone can relate.

Funny thing.. I'm pretty sure I knew his parents and grew up with his extended family & cousins from AF. If it's the same family his grandparents lived on state street in AF and used to own the old Reams store. In fact I think his dad worked there. Later down the road one of the uncles turned it into the Jolley store for a while. Some of his other cousin lived down the street a ways in a log cabin.

mahana Wrote:
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> It's really
> difficult to have normal friendships when you've
> grown up with abuse (at least for me it was). You
> are forced to grow up fast & deal with so many
> things that other kids can't begin to comprehend.

WOW! You speak the truth. It is hard for me to acknowledge that to myself. My kids were raised without abuse. I suffered a lot and my wife just a little bit. We have kids for whom it is a foreign concept.

I tend to gravitate to people who have suffered it. There is a sharing in personalities significantly affected by it.

> Funny thing.. I'm pretty sure I knew his parents
> and grew up with his extended family & cousins
> from AF. If it's the same family his grandparents
> lived on state street in AF and used to own the
> old Reams store. In fact I think his dad worked
> there. Later down the road one of the uncles
> turned it into the Jolley store for a while. Some
> of his other cousin lived down the street a ways
> in a log cabin.

Interesting clan. I saw many of them at that long ago wedding of Shaun. Really interesting. The generational aspects of abuse. It is like a genetic meme.

Elder Berry Wrote:
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> WOW! You speak the truth. It is hard for me to
> acknowledge that to myself. My kids were raised
> without abuse. I suffered a lot and my wife just a
> little bit. We have kids for whom it is a foreign
> concept.
>
> I tend to gravitate to people who have suffered
> it. There is a sharing in personalities
> significantly affected by it.


Crazy isn't it? I knew I didn't fit in but didn't realize that was the reason until I was older. As much as I wanted to, I had little in common with kids who were living regular lives and thinking about normal kid things. I was too worried about surviving.

It's awesome you've beat the cycle of abuse and your kids are growing up differently! Great job!! :D



> Interesting clan. I saw many of them at that long
> ago wedding of Shaun. Really interesting. The
> generational aspects of abuse. It is like a
> genetic meme.


For sure!!

So your story really hits home with me. My mother worried about whether I had friends or not and she said I used to walk around the playground at lunch alone. She'd go by the school hoping I had a friend. (I had an older sister, go figure.) Anyway, in second grade, I met a girl named Kim. I'd give her last name, but I want to keep her privacy for her mother's sake. She was actually in my ward and lived 2 blocks from my house or less. I may have kind of known her before. She was really good to me. Her family was, too. HEr parents weren't active mormon. I think her mother wasn't even mormon at all. They smoked and drank, and my parents never limited me on who my friends were. But her parents were always nice to me. They had a lot more money than my parents and she was an interior designer. Beautiful home.

When we hit jr. high, we went our separate ways as she started running with the wild kids and quit going to church. But there always seemed to be a connection. I believe strongly if I would have seen her when she asked to see me, we would have been good friends as adults.

So my aunt somehow ended up being her mother's realtor. That aunt. The TBM aunt. Her mother lives in SLC now. Bizarre. So I get this e-mail from my aunt asking me if I knew them and I told her the story. I asked her to have her mother give Kim my e-mail address and my aunt told me, "I'm so sorry, Colleen. Kim committed suicide a year ago." Okay, A YEAR AGO TO THE DAY. She never married. She was a marine biologist. It makes me sad just writing about it. Oh, how I would have loved to know her as an adult. I've been to visit her mother and I send her mother things. Her sister died of cancer (only sibling) a few years before that) and her father died of cancer a few days after her sister. So her mother is alone.

I've had many other deaths of people I was close to who were my age. Too many.

Thank you for telling us about your friend. We just never know WHY.

cl2 (not logged in) Wrote:
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> I've had many other deaths of people I was close
> to who were my age. Too many.

Too many and you missed an old friend by just a year. I'm sorry for your loss.

> Thank you for telling us about your friend. We
> just never know WHY.

I would never have guessed. But his childhood was Hell. Seriously, his mother is one of the few people for whom I think the morg had a positive impact. I hate to say it but just her sobering up and leaving an abusive husband might have been the reason but her devotion to the church plays a roll I think. She traded an abusive husband for an abusive organization but became a lot nicer in the process.

Thanks for sharing your memories. Made me--and perhaps others--think about some similar long-ago memories. We are about the same age and it's good to look back, remember, and think.

TX_Rancher Wrote:
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> We are about the same age and it's good
> to look back, remember, and think.

And think some more. My best friend died at 13. This friend at 33. I'm 48. Remembering your dead is remembering your life. And your life is filled with people.

Yeah, the people we know really make our life story.

I've had to say goodbye to too many people who meant so much to me. A few died suddenly and unexpectedly, but most suffered. Some died way too young, others lived longer, but other than my parents, I really haven't been all that close to anyone who died at an old age (my grandmothers were sweet, but I didn't live close to them, so I never really connected closely with either one).

Two of my closest friends told me that they loved me near the end when their prognosis was grim. I'm sorry to say throughout my life, I've fallen into the trap of me (a heterosexual man) being so reluctant to tell another man that I love him.

The lesson for me is to experience every day. None of us know when we'll die so we need to experience life and relationships. Don't put off doing the things you want to do, and saying the things you want to say.

Despite my experiences, I have yet to learn that lesson to the extent I need to.

CrispingPin Wrote:
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> Two of my closest friends told me that they loved
> me near the end when their prognosis was grim. I'm
> sorry to say throughout my life, I've fallen into
> the trap of me (a heterosexual man) being so
> reluctant to tell another man that I love him.

Great lesson. Homosexual men have the same problem. Men and many women have this problem. It is like exposing oneself that intimately is a problem.

My mother has never to my knowledge told me that she loves me. She has said things like "Robert knows I love him" to other people.

she loves you. I started out when my kids were young. I'm not as quick to tell them now, but they tell me and then I reply. I'm quite reserved in real life. My parents didn't tell us they loved us much either, but I didn't realize it. My dad ALWAYS made us give him hugs. Now I am very grateful for that. Right after I found out my ex was cheating on me, I went to my parents' house for my mom's birthday and my dad said hello, and then started to walk into another room. He came back and gave me this HUGE hug. He had no idea. I'll never forget.

I have a cousin who is 3 days older than I am. My dad's family always did things together and I went to school with her. She died at age 37 of LUNG cancer. I found out just before my aunt died that they thought she would survive--the doctors did. She had 6 children ages 3 to 16. It effected me deeply and still does. She would be 62 this summer, so it has been a long, long time. My ex was talking about leaving at the time and being able to raise my children was always in my mind no matter what I was going through. Her husband remarried a month after she died to a woman he had been DATING for months--by meeting her at the temple and doing a session together. She treated my cousin's kids so bad that most of them had to find other places to live. She was a wonderful person and was always really good to me.

"He came back and gave me this HUGE hug. He had no idea. I'll never forget."

That would be nice. My parents don't hug. I love hugging.

Interesting that you should post.

Today is the funeral of a high school classmate.

I am thousands of miles away.

I can't say that we we close but in the miniscule UT town I grew up in (and where age groups, for some reason didn't mingle) our classmates were about all we had, for some 12 years.

We were debate partners when no one else wanted to debate but we both had the balls. We did simpler things together like decorate home room for Christmas while listening to Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Now which of you have ever heard of the them?

Later, I worked with her mother for awhile. They shared a trait in common, outspokenness.

She's the 4th of us to die but this one seems to be bothering me more. I guess because we had a few ties. Perhaps because we are all getting older and one by one someone will be the next to go.

I got home from my mission in the last third of 1967, so yeah, I remember this group.

This is the song of theirs that most impacted me... Why? I still don't know... Maybe because angst has always loomed large on my horizon? Oh, it's not that I sing it to myself every day; n'ah, it's just that listening to it always struck something inside me.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71qvuAIu9Yg&list=PLWORr53OD3R6hzA7Aombvg95VnOmQpQCs&index=9

Interesting song. Kinda sweet.

I just noticed, while listening to it again, that Gary is covering a Glenn Campbell song!! I swear I didn't know it; you can't pin this on me!!

I like Glen's better.

I can relate to the part of your story about your friend's mother not liking you, your clothes or her approval of you as a human being. I had a childhood friend (non-member) whose mom acted similarly. His mom was often at war with my friend's older brother and her moodiness or bipolar disorder was often directed at me as well as my friend. I was the goody two shoes kid that went to the church that had visits from angels. I had lots of unexplained experiences that now make sense.

Some things that I experienced at my friend's house

-being thrown out of the house at 5am because his mom was going to work (summertime)
-having to walk home after she assured my own wacky mom via phone that I would be dropped off. Then she realized that she didn't have any gas. Before I could call my mom back, she ripped the phone off the wall. The phone company came out to repair the damage

I can also relate to being called names and being punched by friends. Being called a f-a-g was an everyday occurrence by both member and non-member kids. It was part of the vernacular of a teen in the 1980s.

Eerily the same kind of experiences but your take is so refreshing. Yes, the 80s was totally a time like you described.

I'm sorry that you lost your friend, Elder Berry. It seems as if he had a habit of punching you because that's what he saw and experienced at home. My thinking about his mom is that once she got away from her abuser, she was able to relax more and become a kinder person.

summer Wrote:
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> My thinking about his mom is that once she
> got away from her abuser, she was able to relax
> more and become a kinder person.

I think you are right and the church had nothing to do with her miraculous change. She became empowered by running her own business. She became wealthy enough to afford the things she wanted (ranch, horses) and her poor sons were victims of their past lives with their horribly abusive father.