Brother & Sister

by Diane Keaton

  “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.

  As he sat on the edge of her hospital bed in the living room overlooking the ocean, we recorded him saying: “Mom, this is your idiot son. Do you remember when Dorrie, Robin, you, and I were driving the car across country? Remember the Ford Econoline van? We were all going to New York to visit Diane. Remember when we spent the night at that crazy lady’s place in New Jersey? It was a real dump. She had that blind Chihuahua named Rickie Lee. She was one weird piece of work, but she loved that Rickie Lee. Remember how she kissed that slobbering thing? Do you? Do you remember any of that?

  “New York was quite a place. We went to the Museum of Modern Art, where we saw the Jasper Johns, Picassos, Turners, but most of all those Joseph Cornell boxes—remember? I’m sure you do. Come on, Mom. Give me a wink, just a little wink. You know I’m here, don’t you? Yeah, you do! You’re chirping—see, you’re chirping! Come on! Wake up! Get up. Get up and at ’em.

  “Hey, Mom, I want you to know that I’m living in the best place in the world. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I hope to live there till I die. I finally get to do what I want to do. I’m still writing, and collaging. Hey, you should come see my house now. There’s a little living room with a kitchen, and a bedroom and bathroom.”

  He kissed her, and that was it. Randy never saw her again.

&nbs
p; Mom did not die as expected. She lingered. After a few weeks, Robin, who’d flown in from Georgia, had to go home to Riley, Jack, and her husband, Rickey. Dorrie and I came down on weekends to spend the nights at the house with her. One month later, we got a call from Mom’s primary caregiver, Ann Mayer: “Come soon.” She was near the end.

  On the night Mom passed, Dorrie, Robin, and I were with her. After the purple-draped Mom was rolled into a van on a gurney in one of her go-to-dinner outfits, I woke up knowing there would never be another person who would love and care for us Hall kids the way she had. I was going to have to rely on myself. I would never again watch her fry up homemade tacos, or take a walk on the beach, or collect seashells, or feed her crippled seagull before sitting down to hear one of my sad stories of being misunderstood in an unfair situation. She was my once-in-a-lifetime compassionate listener.

  Dexter and Duke wanted to know why Gramma had to die. I told them Grammie’s heart had slowed down, her circulation was weak, her hands began to look like beautiful purple plums, and then, without a hint, she quietly stopped breathing. I told them she had left to go on a special journey into an unknown wonderland.

  On the drive to Mom’s memorial service at Casa Romantica in San Clemente, I turned the radio up to hear a woman’s voice. In a clipped British accent, she was saying her father had a birdhouse where he kept white doves. Every morning, he would get up early and care for the doves. When World War II came, it changed their lives. There was always a peaceful, quiet quality in the air before the bombing began. People stayed in their homes. They were told not to go out. Despite this, her father still went to the doves every morning. One day, she wanted to go to work with him, but he told her to stay in the house. She watched him walk off in the early-morning light. Fifteen minutes later, the bombs came. Suddenly big men came looking for her mother. They found her at the bakery. She remembers her mother sobbing. She remembers her sinking to the ground in a river of tears. On the day of her father’s funeral, her mother went to the birdhouse and let the doves go, one by one. The girl didn’t understand: why did her mother let the birds her father loved so go? Her mother said, “I had to let your father go. Now I am letting them go too.” At the funeral procession, friends and family carried her father’s casket to his burial ground. And the birds, all of them, followed the casket in their own winged procession to his resting place.

  That’s what Mom’s memorial felt like. It felt like we were the birds she’d taken care of, and even though we couldn’t fly, we were following her to her resting place. Randy led the way.

  When I dropped by Randy’s a few months later, I asked him if he ever thought about Mom.

  “Yeah, I do. It’s hard for me to picture her dead.”

  “When you do, what do you see?” I asked.

  “I see the end years, when her hair was really white,” he said. And then, “I don’t know, there was something about her. I really never knew much about Mom, not really. I wish I did, but I didn’t.”

  For Randy, arranging brutal words into poetry may have been a way to explore his anger, and his self-hatred. In his darkest hours, maybe he used some of his poems as confessional mirrors—places where he felt safe to confront and even forgive himself for his sadistic urges; places where he explored murder, mayhem, and sexual brutality. In such a place, he also wrote about Mom.

  I am my mother’s Homunculus;

  a little girl with a penis,

  running about on clawed feet,

  lost to the alchemy of love and emotion,

  a bastard thing she chose not to see or hear

  or take in hand and lead to an acceptable life.

  What do I know about her?

  She had a strict, religious upbringing,

  her father walked out the door when she was sixteen

  later a car accident mangled her inner thigh,

  and her mother hated men.

  She did not release this information (as little as it is)

  until she had enough wine to relax the demons,

  her face would soften,

  her speech became fluid, her eyes moist.

  Out came torn up pieces of her history.

  They didn’t always fit and were never explained.

  I got the picture of a fragmented woman

  trying to fill in the spaces with her own family,

  a loving woman who couldn’t quite love,

  a caring mother who was never cared for.

  If today were my last day on this planet

  I would have one wish;

  To be inside my mother’s head for an hour.

  God the pain and freedom of knowing the core

  of one who created me,

  kind of like seeing my own future.

  But today is not my last day

  and human secrets are deep and terrifying.

  It is my job to figure out the rest of my life without her.

  It will be a maze lacking a center.

  But there is satisfaction in testing new paths.

  I can learn where I begin and mother ends—

  CHAPTER 12

  HILLARY

  When Randy first began knocking on his Laguna Beach neighbors’ doors, asking them to please take him home, they were sweet and concerned, and responded with kindness. When it became a nightly routine, the police were called. They kindly drove him home. One night, Randy had a big fall. An ambulance drove him to Mission Hospital Laguna Beach, where the diagnosis included a small stroke, but the treatment seemed more like a plan for long-term-care solutions related to dementia. We transferred him to the UCLA Medical Center.

  Dorrie and I sat with the neurologist, in his office at UCLA. “Randy’s doing well with eating and drinking. Since the two weeks he’s been at the center, he’s settled in. His memory is a little better. He’s done pretty well with counting, especially counting backwards. He’s not going to get all his memory back. Let me put it this way….If he had a twenty-dollar bill for the purchase of a six-pack of beer, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how much change he’d get in return. The MRI shows evidence of a narrowing of the blood vessels from alcohol abuse. It’s hard to define what kind of dementia he has. There are patterns that have taken a toll on his brain. If his dementia is only related to alcohol use, there’s a possibility it could go away. But when he was tested, the deficits were significant, especially with memory. He may only recover slightly. In the end…he shouldn’t be by himself. With that in mind, he needs to be closely supervised. He needs consistency. He has tremors. He’s imbalanced. We’re not saying he has the beginning of Alzheimer’s, but we’re starting him on Aricept.”

  * * *

  —

  After Randy was discharged, Dorrie and I were given another list: (1) he should not take Ativan; (2) he can’t drink ever again; (3) he should take Lipitor; (4) take one aspirin a day for stroke prevention; (5) he can’t live alone; (6) assisted living would work best. Whether he likes it or not, he needs people. People are therapeutic.

  The Belmont Village Senior Living facility, located at 455 East Angeleno Avenue, was within walking distance of downtown Burbank. Standing four stories high on a residential street, Belmont had a sense of community. The apartments were light, even airy. When Dorrie and I told the manager Randy was an artist, he ushered us into a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor with a friendly-looking work space framed by a large picture window, where Randy could collage and write. We took it on the spot.

  Downstairs, we saw residents eating lunch. The ladies were dressed up, and the men seemed to accept the formality. Belmont’s dining room didn’t smell like some of the ones Dorrie and I had encountered in other assisted-living facilities. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a pool table and a popcorn machine in the activities room. We’d made the right decision.

>   In the years Randy lived at Belmont, he participated in more socializing and had more crushes and more friends than he’d experienced in his lifetime. Best of all, he had that light-filled apartment, enhanced with a long, durable work table that Dorrie and I bought at Ikea. Outside his window was an old sycamore tree. In the eight-hundred-square-foot, three-room apartment, he listened to music, ate, wrote, cut up portraits of blond-haired women with hot red lips, and pasted them on canvases he bought at the art-supplies store. We hired a young caregiver named Hillary McFarland, who was full of ideas. She single-handedly reinvigorated him with a mountain of projects, doctors’ visits, and friendship—real friendship.

  Since Randy was a lot younger than the other residents, he took on the role of a cool-cat James Dean outsider who’d dropped in on parties. He even created his own special style of gliding some lucky woman around the floor. The ladies adored him.

  In an e-mail to me describing this time, Hillary wrote:

  Randy’s feeling great about himself. He looks at things like he’s seeing them for the first time. He loves to go on walks. I asked him how come he likes to walk so far. He said because he doesn’t think about where he’s going. We usually start off with no destination in mind; just walk to walk. Without a goal he feels free. Maybe that’s why he enjoys it so much. Randy loves texture. He’ll stop and feel the trunk of a tree. He’ll pick up leaves just to touch them; to marvel at their size, their color. They say one of the qualities of dementia is a hoarding or collecting behavior. Randy’s started collecting gum wrappers, rocks, coke bottles, and even an abandoned baby sock. What looks like trash to me is art to him. All of these odd collectibles have brought him happiness. He’s seeing things he’s never seen before; feeling things he’s never felt before. This is probably one of his best times, in that he’s been given the gift of not remembering the debilitating past.