And there was this.
Mother gave me his shoes for my birthday saying she had no use for them. They are white Reeboks with long laces and thick off-white soles. They fit me perfectly. When putting them on, I think of my father’s feet; Yellow cracked toenails, callused heels. It feels strange to walk in his shoes. Each step echos like a bone striking the taut skin of a drum; each stumble is a forewarning. Yet I continue to wear them, believing a gift is some kind of—any kind of love. Perhaps one day I will nurse the love we never bonded with the love that was always there.
* * *
—
As for Hall and Foreman, Dad’s legacy, it continues on as a division of David Evans & Associates. At his memorial service, Hugh Foreman described Dad as having “a great impact on the development of Southern California, especially to the development of Orange County. We shared thirty-five years together as very close friends and associates. It’s a sad moment. Losing Jack was like having a right arm cut off.” Hugh Foreman said, “You couldn’t ask for a more honest partner and associate.” Hugh had it right.
CHAPTER 9
THREE SISTERS
After our father’s passing, Dorrie became an antiques dealer specializing in Monterey furniture. Robin married, moved to Atlanta, and adopted a baby girl, Riley. Five years later, she adopted a baby boy. She named him Jack. Following Robin’s example, I adopted my daughter, Dexter, in 1995, and then my baby boy, Duke, in 2001. One day, over lunch, my friend Nancy Meyers told me she was going to make a movie, and I was going to star in it opposite Jack Nicholson. I told her point-blank she’d lost her mind. Jack Nicholson in a chick flick? No way. Nancy was right, though, and with that lunch my professional life took a turn for the much better, reversing the sharp turn it had recently taken for the worse. In 2001, I starred in a couple of TV movies. In the aptly named On Thin Ice, I played Patsy, who turns to dealing drugs and becomes addicted to crystal meth. If that wasn’t enough, in Crossed Over, the teenage son of my character, Beverly Lowry, is killed by a drunk driver. As she sinks into a deep depression, she forms an unusual friendship with Karla Fay Tucker, the first and only woman executed on death row. Both films proved to be notable failures.
Mom worked at Hunter’s Books while volunteering at various charity-owned thrift shops. With her beloved cat, Cyrus, in the backseat of her car, she enjoyed driving to her getaway home in Arizona. She had slowed down quite a bit, but she was still writing in her journals. And she missed Dad. In 1997, she wrote him a letter on Valentine’s Day:
Dear Jack,
I regret the things I’ve learned too late, but I can’t live with regrets. You wouldn’t want me to. I look at couples bickering about some small matter and I want to say, “Don’t take your living time fighting & fussing over nothing—be happy you have one-another.” I still feel your presence with me, and when that feeling comes I look up to the sky (as if that’s where you are) and think if I feel you so intensely you must have a sense of me also. If that’s true you know that I am feeling old. I hate to confront the fact that I’m slipping in my mental capacities too. It bothers me. My eyes are weakening even with my recent surgery. I haven’t gone to the dentist for two years and I know what you would say about that. I am so grateful to you for the life you gave us, all the comforts and material things. I am more grateful than I can say. I’m trying to keep it all going the way you wanted. You know, of course, that 3 months after you left me I bought a 535 BMW, black and beautiful. I do like everything about it, and I do thank you on this Valentine’s Day—Feb. 14. I still have the red heart you gave me last year full of See’s Candy Chocolates. Or was that a few years before? Oh God Jack, you see what I mean. It’s all slipping away.
I would like to request a favor from you. Please be with me for I am very much in need of you, only you. Force your way through to me when I need you, please. I am lonely. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to tell you how much I loved you when you were sitting across from me on the bar stool, drink in hand, music playing, dinner cooking, all things working? Maybe you know all the answers now that you’ve gone to the other side. I LOVE YOU JACK HALL.
Your Dorothy
* * *
—
Mom took care of Randy financially. He did not work. He continued to drink too much. He wrote, collaged, and saw his therapist, Dr. Markson, four times a week for fifteen-minute sessions.
On a visit to Randy’s rental in Laguna Beach, where he’d moved after the Tangerine Street house, Dorrie recalls walking up the stairs to his unit over the garage. The place was, as expected, an all-too-familiar mess. When he asked her if she minded the way he kept spitting chewing tobacco into a glass filled with brown fluid, she shrugged. His clothes were grimy. His skin was soft and flabby. In the middle of an awkward conversation about the possibilities of working at a bookstore, he walked out and didn’t come back. But not before he’d shown her collages of women, their body parts cut from magazines and photographs.
The longer Randy lived, the more he became that Boo Radley character who lived down the street. The man the neighbors gossiped about in whispers…I imagined what they said: “Does he ever change those greasy clothes? What does he do all day?” “He doesn’t even have a job.” “He’s always alone. Sometimes his mother or one of those sisters comes by. But that’s it.” “He never fixes that damn van he keeps parked on the street. It’s an eyesore. And that smile, he always has that smile plastered over his face.” “It’s so weird. It’s too weird. I keep my doors locked even in the day.” Randy, the predator that never was.
At the beginning of filming Something’s Gotta Give, I took little Dexter to meet her uncle. When the door opened, a bloated, gray-haired Randy, looking much older than fifty-four, missing a front tooth and sporting a long ponytail, ushered us in. As expected, a musky heaviness filled the air inside.
I was surprised when he took Dexter’s hand, brought her to the kitchen area, and told her the secret of how he’d made his last night’s meal. “Number one: put a chicken breast in a cup of orange juice inside a microwave. Number two: after zapping it to perfection, chop the orange-flavored chicken, add shiitake mushrooms, dill, salt, and pepper. Number three: introduce the lettuce last. It’s delicious.” Dexter stared, dumbstruck.
He went on to describe his routine of watching TV until twelve noon every day. In the early afternoon, he’d hit one of several supermarkets he frequented, driving the old VW van. Once there, he’d stock up on the cheapest generic beer.
At some point in the conversation I asked Randy how he was doing.
“Living actually makes me sick sometimes. I tell you, Diane, I get emotional over the weirdest things. People’s lives just kill me. It’s strange. It’s like we’re living on a razor, and when we fall we split in half. I feel like I’m eight years behind with my anger.”