As he picked up several spiral-bound notebooks, I reminded myself I was there to check in, listen to some of his poems, and above all to persuade him to visit our ailing mother. He sat down with a beer in hand and read:
“Today there is nothing in the sky. It is easy to imagine myself spread like blue enamel above the earth. Easy too are the winds that wash my hands, and stir my fantasies.” Listening, I began to imagine how it might feel to be spread like blue enamel above the earth. For a moment, I let go of my duty to Mom, and thought about Randy’s use of words. Endless words. He read a poem he calls “Bits and Pieces”:
“My yellow chair is a living thing. It feeds me fairy tales. My chair pulls me away from the darkness I wandered in when I was young. My life was the nightmare I hid my dreams from.”
For Randy, words were up for grabs, playthings, a form of diversion utilized in an atmosphere filled with meaning and emotion.
Joining Randy with a beer, I wondered how a six-foot-two-inch man could sleep on a love seat and be comfortable in such a filthy mess. Once more, I asked him to go see Mom, promising to drive him there and back.
He smiled. “Did I ever tell you about the lawn-mowing thing? I was thirteen or fourteen. We lived on Wright Street. I’d been given a job. Every week, I’d mow the lawn. When I was done, Mom would come out and re-mow it because I did such a lousy job. She couldn’t stop herself. She did that kind of thing all the time. Why was I mowing the lawn if she was going to do it over again?”
He paused. “Mom was a sweetheart—she’d just gotten in with a weird guy. She did have her moods, though. Remember how she’d boil up inside when Laurel Bastendorf would drop over for coffee and a talk? Remember how she’d complain about how Laurel would never shut up? People bored Mom. Who does that sound like? Me, I know. I hate it when people talk too much.”
How had Randy come to find himself sitting in a rental on the wrong side of the Pacific Coast Highway, bordering on old age? How had I, the eldest of four Southern California kids who grew up in the 1950s, become an ambitious eccentric who couldn’t stop worrying? There was something about Randy’s traipsing around his apartment that reminded me to try to let go. No matter how truncated and seemingly lost, Randy was fine, living his life with a mind let loose. Sitting across from him, I thought: There is no scale tipped in either direction that can measure the worth of one person over another. All of us are, as Randy put it best, “a blink between here and never.”
Looking back, when I try to reconstruct the past into a cohesive explanation for Randy’s indifference, his lack of gratitude—especially toward powerful men, including the doctors at UCLA, not to mention the liver donor, who gave him another twenty to thirty years of life—I get confused. Perhaps it has something to do with his total disregard for reality.
As I sat there, I wondered if his writing’s principal purpose was to soothe. Once again, he said it best: “I have no need to be known for the words I put to paper like food to an empty mouth longing to explain a life unknown.” Then I thought: If you’re Randy, and you’ve lived your whole life hiding clandestine fantasies, yet you haven’t let your impulses fully realize them, like Dennis Hastert, the former wrestling coach who allegedly had sex with an underage male student, or Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child molester who had been assistant coach at Penn State University, what does that say? How about Josh Duggar, the Christian reality-show star who was accused of having sex with one of his sisters and other young girls, even though he paraded around as a role model for the stellar Christian family man? All three of these so-called good men acted out their fantasies, then hid their crimes. All were accomplished, their public records a glowing example. Yet Randy, a semi–homeless-looking man who didn’t comply with normalcy, was guilty of nothing. Not only that, Randy never lied about who he was. Even to himself, about his fantasy life. He once wrote me a letter describing the role fantasy played for him.
Dear Diane,
In puberty I started getting into fantasies. They were pretty innocent in the beginning, but they progressively got more graphic. I became addicted to watching horror movies, hoping the films would have some gruesome murder of a woman. I saw one that made an impression. It was called The Zodiac Killer. A man stabs this woman with a switchblade. He continues stabbing her as she screams. Screaming became my idea of heaven. My fantasies began to focus on the concept of stabbing mannequins because it would be more effective and they were more human than watching a movie. Mannequins have breasts. As my fantasies progressed they got pretty messy. I’ll never forget the day I found the Playboy magazine hidden in some bushes in a field. I looked inside and saw a woman with all this cleavage leaning against a fence. I took it home and kept it under my bed. Of course, guess who saw them? Yeah you. At that time, you were somewhat of a fink. When you showed the pictures to mom I was horrified. I didn’t want to tell her I was whacking myself. I hated getting caught, mainly because the fantasies were startling, and violent. When I thought about sex it was always with a knife. It had to be a knife, you know; the phallic symbol. My dick. You can’t imagine what it’s like to actually start planning how to get a pretty woman and kill her. I did Diane, I had scenarios of doing just that. I figured I would sneak into a room where a woman was sleeping and stab her to death. My fantasies are even worse now, but at least I know they’re fantasies. I’m not going to do anything. I never wanted normal women. All I could think about was sexy women. They had all the stuff I wanted to get a hold of. If I couldn’t have them at least I could kill them. It got really weird. But I have to say, holding it back all those years makes me believe I am a moral man. James Ellroy used to break into houses and steal underwear. I can’t even do that. I can’t even break into a house and steal underwear. I couldn’t, but boy could I dream of it.
Love, Randy
Randy’s confession came to me just after I had finished shooting Reds, in Europe. As disturbing and unexpected as the letter was, I trusted what he said and chose not to show it to anyone—not even Robin and Dorrie. Until now. I felt he had a right to his fantasies. After all, I was someone who played parts, living out fantasies in the safe realm of movies.
CHAPTER 11
SURRENDERING TO
THE RUSH OF WINGS
In David Shenk’s book on Alzheimer’s, The Forgetting, he quotes Morris Friedell, who died from the disease. Alzheimer’s is “the best lens on the meaning of loss,” but it’s also a condition that “acquaints us with life’s richness by ever so gradually drawing down the curtains.”
This was true for Dorothy, who in the last throes of Alzheimer’s became a haunting shadow of her former self. By this point, she had round-the-clock hospice care at home. Robin, Dorrie, and I continued to prod Randy into making a visit. In 2008, when it looked like there wasn’t much time left, he finally was forced to show up.