* * *
—
My friend Carol Kane let us rent her California bungalow just off Sunset Boulevard for Randy while he recovered. Robin recommended we hire a nurse named Treena to look after him, a no-nonsense gal with a great sense of humor. Dorrie and I trusted her implicitly.
In an effort to help Randy make good choices with his new life, Dorrie and I decided to schedule a meeting with Dr. Markson to see if he could give us more advice. He graciously agreed. We were taken aback by his concern.
“I told your brother that when he got to the hospital he needed to call me. You know what he did? Two weeks later, he finally called and said, ‘Help,’ then hung up. That’s Randy. Look, I couldn’t get him to go to the store to buy a pair of pants. If his DVD player was broken, I’d say, ‘Bring in the DVD player—we can figure it out.’ How many times did he bring it in? None. None.
“Let’s face it, the major thing with Randy is, he needs space between him and other people. If that space is easy, it’s okay. If there are demands, he can’t take it. When he was writing, he didn’t want people to read his work. He needed an editor. I wanted to enhance his socialization, but he took criticism very badly. If someone asks him a question, and he can’t answer it, it fills him with panic. If challenged, he can’t even get into a car, ’cause he’s afraid someone might ask him a question and he’d shut down. One question and he collapses. ‘What are they asking? How can I answer?’ He does have a real thirst for knowledge. He thinks his work is terrible. He’d bring in a collage. I’d get some meaning from it. He’d say, ‘That’s interesting,’ and that was it. He was finished. He didn’t talk about it again.
“Toward the end, he’d come in here filled up with fluid, and more fluid. I told him dying of a corroded liver is a terrible way to go. It’s amazing how that early problem of being pushed around by your father has never been resolved. He used to say he lived in a metal sphere orbiting the earth. That was his fantasy, to be completely protected. We have to know when to stop pushing. He’s so self-destructive. He’s deprived himself of so much. He’s suicidal. He doesn’t talk about it, but he thinks about it. He talks about being helpless.”
Dr. Markson ended our session with these words: “You have to continue to be gently supportive, but also know when to stop pushing. As I’ve said, he has a real thirst for knowledge. Look, my advice is…forget about hygiene. Just concentrate on three basic things with Randy: one, no drinking; two, take pills; three, see doctors on a regular basis.”
Was there a name for Randy’s mental illness, if that’s what it was? In later years, one doctor described Randy as a schizoid personality—i.e., emotionally cold, detached, apathetic. I don’t remember Randy as apathetic or cold. I do remember it was hard to understand what was going on with him. If there was a problem, if he was under pressure, if a situation called for him to step up and be a man, Randy consistently refused to take arms. Yet his fantasies were the exact opposite of his actions. In his fantasies, he was a warrior, even a murderer. How do you explain that?
In his early twenties, some of those fantasies began to make their way to written expression as he sat on his favorite yellow chair and wrote down sentences like “I like to think of Time as a joke no one can hear.” Or “Learning how to love is slow, like molasses. I doubt I’ll ever find its foot prints in the dust of my attempts.” “I do not want to be born again. Once is enough. Why would I want to feel this sadness for a second time?” “Give me whatever death is. It can be nothing but comfort after years of twisted feelings that can’t be explained, only endured.” “I love this room where I sit in my yellow chair and purge. If I wait long enough it feeds me fairytales. I pull them from the darkness I wandered in when I was a little boy.”
Looking back on Randy’s symptoms has been like opening up an old crime-scene investigation. I asked myself again and again: Was I guilty? Or, rather, how guilty was I? Searching for clues has been a losing enterprise. When I’ve tried to assemble Randy’s past into a cohesive explanation for his so-called indifference, I get sidetracked; I can’t quite place the events or the details.
Markson wasn’t wrong about aspects of our brother’s condition, but Randy was not apathetic. Fearful, yes. But not indifferent. Pinpointing a mental illness is like finding a needle in a haystack. I wouldn’t want to be part of a team that labels the most complex organ of our body with a name. Randy was not a category, and medicine is not an exact science. Part of his saving grace came from the outlet he found in expression, whether it was seemingly negative—visualizing women in sadomasochistic positions—or something aiming for transcendence: writing lyrical poems on the wonder of birds. Yes, he explored the dark side, but he also wrote:
All the voices of my past are here tonight in this grassy clearing at the foot of the mountains, where I came to sleep. At first I thought it was the rattle of nesting birds, perhaps rocks falling from a cliff. But, like bells, the words took shape. Paragraphs echoed out of trees. Stories of other lives hung sadly in the air like pages of failure. I did not want to listen, until I heard my own voice high on the flat face of the mountains. I heard it barely stumbling over the meadows. I heard it echoing out of the trees, one more sad voice, I heard my story reverberating in the air along with the other voices of failure at the foot of the mountains where I came to sleep.
* * *
—
Once he was settled in Carol Kane’s bungalow, the problems began to rear their ugly heads in a small, progressive, yet persistent series of events. Nurse Treena reprimanded Randy for eating too many protein bars. She insisted on cutting his fingernails. She was on him to take the pills the doctors had prescribed. She didn’t want him smoking cigars. After a couple days off, Treena came back to find him smoking cigars with the fill-in nurse, Ophelia. She was not happy. Randy didn’t appreciate her concern. He didn’t want some “Bible-toting woman” bossing him around. He also didn’t want his sisters harping at him about the necessity of reading the red pamphlet his transplant coordinator had given him weeks before. He didn’t care how important it was to understand what the pills did and why he should adhere to a strict regimen in order to stay healthy. As Randy began to walk on his own, he discovered the ATM up the block. And that’s when he started buying beer from the 7-Eleven across the street.
I was in New York, in a car heading uptown—I’d just finished a joint interview with Gus Van Sant on the Today show for the movie Elephant, which he’d directed and I’d been a producer on—when I got a call from Dorrie. “Treena, the nurse, found an empty tequila bottle next to Randy’s bed.”
Poor Dorrie. She’d had it. Although she’d reminded him how much he needed Treena, he went so far as to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that Treena was out. He wanted Ophelia to come three times a week to check in, buy some groceries, and take him to the hospital on Mondays and Thursdays. Dorrie, knowing full well Randy didn’t know what pills to take and when, expressed concern about his readiness for independence. Randy began screaming, saying Treena was a controlling bitch, and hung up.