by Diane Keaton
He loves chewing gum. He puts his chewed pieces on the lamp base next to his bed to save for later. As sure as hell, I’ve caught him grabbing a week-old piece of gum, popping it in his mouth and starting to chew it again! A few weeks ago, he started complaining that he was going deaf. Off to the doctor we went. The nurse flushed his ears with warm saline and alcohol rinse, then got a tool and pulled out these big black chunks of earwax and dirt. Suddenly he could hear again. The doctor had to remind him to cut his nails. The dirt underneath could cause an infection, so I started giving him manicures. At first, he resisted, but eventually he liked them. A lot.
Randy’s time at Belmont has brought him out of his hermit state. He’s learned to tolerate people in small groups. Once, I accompanied him to the dining room to try and help him socialize over a meal. That didn’t go over well. He likes bingo though. Just a couple of months ago he came back from one of his walks and sat down with a resident who was playing Kings in The Corner. He began playing with her. She’s 97 years old! Every time he joins her, she has to teach him to play the game over again. One day, she asked him what her name was. He said he didn’t know, she shook her head, “You sit here and play cards with me all the time, you’re young enough to be my grandson, and you don’t know my name?” He said, “No, I don’t, but I’ll play cards with you anyway.” Sometimes he just sits and watches her play. I think he feels comfortable just being around her. Maybe she reminds him of his mother.
As the youngest one in the joint, Randy’s begun playing some serious pool. He’s taught me a lot of pointers and I’ve gotten pretty good at some shots. Now, when men come to visit their family members, they look for Randy to shoot a game. His favorite saying for missing a shot is “I screwed the pooch.” He can curse with the best of them. Sometimes he yells “fucking shit,” and has to be calmed down. I’ve seen him take his hat off and throw it across the table after a lousy shot.
We’ve been on some great adventures, like driving to the beach, and putting our feet in the sand. We visited the LA Zoo in Griffith Park. We saw the Autry Museum, and the Observatory, too. We went to the Natural History Museum, LACMA, MOCA, The La Brea Tar Pits, Watts Towers, The Getty, the Adamson House, and the Manhattan Beach Pier. We’ve ridden the Metro from North Hollywood to Union Station and walked to Philippe’s for lunch. Randy cracked me up when he tried to convince me we were in New York riding the subway. He marveled at how we got to New York so fast! I loved seeing the wonder in his eyes. He really relishes going on an adventure.
All the Best,
Hillary
Randy fell in love with Hillary. One of the poems he wrote at Belmont is titled “Lady H.”:
I like the nature of Hillary, her forward Ho! Lady H. is my Island. I sail in her direction. Hell-o my curvaceous colors of a rainbow. I only hope my words touch her essence and speak gently. She is harmony in every move she makes. I want to waltz in her shadow, humming like a comet between the open spaces of unknown planets.
CHAPTER 13
FOSTER’S FREEZE
Randy and I began to develop a weekend ritual. Down the block and across the street from Belmont was a Foster’s Freeze, home to our very favorite soft-serve vanilla cone with nuts on top. Once we had them in our hands, we’d get into my car and tool around Burbank, looking for a neighborhood we wanted to explore. Much to my surprise, Randy would often lead the way. “You know, my work has gotten better, Diane, mainly because I’ve been forced to deal with people. Before, I was in my own one-sided world. Now I’m seeing the other side. Whether I like Belmont or not, I’m learning.”
One Sunday, we passed a church where people were exiting in their Sunday best. Randy hated the suits and ties, which he was sure the men had been forced to wear. “You want to know what I believe, Diane? Here’s what I believe: I believe God exists in human art. I believe in our struggle to explain what can’t be explained. I believe people are the essence of beauty brought together by wonder. Living in itself is an act of courage.”
Sometimes, after I parked the car to drop him off, he’d have me come in so he could read one of his recent pieces. “I always thought I would love sitting on a hill overlooking the vast meadow of God’s best creations. I was certain my poetry would take great leaps forward. It didn’t happen, thanks to God’s distractions. Here’s my question to Mr. God: Who will bleach the stars when the heavens go black? Who will wash my socks on the day I die?”
On one Foster’s Freeze outing, we were surprised by a house at Olive Avenue and Ninth Street. Randy wanted to get out of the car and walk around the stone-covered California bungalow, built with what must have been tons of indigenous river rock. According to him, the cozy landmark was a scientific venture into new building practices. As he rambled on, another subject came to mind. “You know, I read about these scientists who worked twenty years in an attempt to find a sign of Pluto, even though there wasn’t any. When they finally found it, no one believed them. They’d spent all those years looking for a planet the size of a sharpened pencil. How could anyone dedicate their lives in search of something that abstract?”
Those weekends of looking without an agenda gave me a glimpse into the wonder of Randy’s imagination. Welcoming every direction on impulse led us in and out of the perimeters of Burbank. Being with him helped me let go of old habits and tired routines. For the first time in years, I began to take in his face. I noticed it was getting better with age, just like Mom’s. Maybe their beauty had been enhanced by the pain they endured, or the depth of their feeling—I don’t know. I do know this: Randy was giving me a path to new perceptions.
* * *
—
One day, about to cruise through a new neighborhood after we’d finished our vanilla cones, Randy said, “I’ve been at Belmont for ten years now.”
I laughed, saying, “More like six months, Randy, not ten years.”
“No wonder I’m crazy, I’ve been getting a lot done. In a certain way, Belmont has been nice. I wouldn’t call it home, though. Home is where Mom and Dad are in Laguna Beach.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I miss them, Randy. I miss Mom especially.”
“Mom?” he said. “Mom and Dad are still around, Diane. I know ’cause I talked to them a couple of days ago. I talked to one, then the other, but I didn’t talk to them in unison.”
One of my favorite excursions led us to Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, a broken-down resting place to thousands of deceased residents. Wandering through a sea of headstones illustrating photographs of the departed, I couldn’t help but compare it with the National Cemetery in San Francisco, where a sea of white crosses frames the great Pacific Ocean. As we sat on a concrete bench under a drooping oak tree, Randy began a description of an encounter with Brenda, the friendly, unassuming receptionist at Belmont Village.
“Are you ready for this one, Diane? It’s unbelievable. One day, Brenda and I walked into this empty room, and she did something that utterly amazed me. Remember, now, this was Brenda. Anyway, she said, ‘Randy, do you wanna dance?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I put my arm around her and we started dancing. There was no music, so I started humming a very pretty song. For the life of me, I can’t think of it now. Anyway, we danced for four or five minutes. When it was over, she looked at me and said, ‘I think I love you.’ The next day, she greeted me at the front desk with ‘Hi, kiddo.’ The romance was off. The following week, she asked me if I wanted to dance again. I think that’s why she fascinates me. She’s truly a puzzle. Now, here’s the tricky part….Brenda doesn’t want me to get near Miriam. As Miriam, Brenda is more matter of fact. She’s Miriam. She’s not some dreamer like Brenda. Can you believe it? They are exactly the same person.”
Not knowing exactly how to respond, I said, “What a great story, Randy. So detailed.” I got up and walked over to get a closer look at an etched granite headstone incorporating a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired
boy with a big smile who had died on July 17, 2005, at the age of seven. It made me think of little Randy’s constant blank-faced smile. As I looked up to see him lumbering toward the broken-down mausoleum, I thought about the insane story he had so flawlessly woven. Did it mean that having dementia opened up new vistas, new perceptions? Randy had never been more content. He’d never been more affectionate, available, and even vulnerable. Was it that he finally felt free to live with people, to be instinctively aware of how lucky he was to have a “Hillary” in his life? But I did know one thing for certain—that for the first time in a long time I looked forward to seeing Randy. I even began to anticipate the weekend visits and what surprises Randy would share with that inimitable mind of his. Our unexpected bond began to grow. Perhaps his highly inventive, newly scattered brain enriched his ability to share feelings and thoughts without impulsively erecting walls that protected him from people.
One Sunday, about a year after Randy had arrived at Belmont, I took the elevator to his third-floor apartment and knocked on the door. Once inside, I noticed that all the collages had been taken off the walls. “Yeah, I took them down. I don’t see myself as a great artist. You know what I want? I want to be part of the unexpected surprise. If I were to take a photograph of a person, I’d want to catch that person out of character. That doesn’t mean looking goofy. It means I’d want to catch him or her when he or she is not being who they pretend they are. I’d like to grasp—‘grasp’ is the right word, right?—anyway, I’d like to be a witness to their unseen beauty.”
This time, our drive took us to my friends Josh Schweitzer and Mary Sue Milliken’s house for dinner. When we arrived, Randy seemed distracted. Josh shook his hand and ushered him in, but Randy looked puzzled. “I can’t remember your name,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. What is it again?” Later, when Duke and I were talking to him, he said, “That’s your son?” He hadn’t recognized him. After dinner, he told me he was uncomfortable because he couldn’t keep up with the conversation. He was beginning to lose the battle with memory in an all-too-familiar way.
In 2014, at the end of his third year at Belmont, a letter from Hillary told us what was already becoming clear: this golden period for Randy was coming to an end.
Dear Diane, Robin and Dorrie,
In a lot of ways Randy continues to try to rediscover himself, while also losing himself all over again. His past is beginning to catch up with him. As you all know, this last year Randy’s slowed down, and so have our adventures. He forgets where we’ve been by the next visit. He continues to look at his writing as a job. He still puts pen to paper, sometimes staying up all night, or walking early in the morning. He thinks he’d go crazy if he couldn’t write. He loves his table and the street below with the light coming through his window making crazy shadows in the room. Cutting out magazines, writing, listening to music, and eating dry cereal with honey and oats makes him happy.
As his memory fades, he started doing strange things, like putting Vitamin Water in his coffee because it makes it sweet. Sometimes he has the heat so high it feels like a sauna in his room. Sometimes he answers the door naked. Things are becoming more of a crap shoot. What will I find as I walk into this room?
I continue to write on his calendar to try and help him keep track of time, but somehow the calendars have started to disappear. I have to take him for an outing, or to get lunch, so the staff at Belmont have enough time to come in and vacuum, change the sheets and towels and clean the bathroom. It is absolute hell if we come back to someone in his room. He’s been observed by the staff getting extremely frustrated and upset if even the slightest thing is wrong. For example, he was reading a play and couldn’t follow where the characters were or what they were conveying. He became very agitated. Another time he was playing a game that involved little tile pieces. He had to put down a 5 but he couldn’t find it, even though it was right in front of his face. He was so mad he threw the tiles across the table, got up and stormed off. He hides things. He hoards them, too. He hides his money because he’s afraid someone will take it, and then gets horribly upset when he can’t find it. He won’t let me throw away his old coffee bags because he might use them in a collage. These are difficult days.
All the best, Hillary
CHAPTER 14
KICKED OUT
Two major events secured Randy’s removal from Belmont in 2015. One morning, he fell out of bed, hit his head, and was rushed to the USC Medical Center, where he was put in a medically induced coma. The doctors determined he’d had a stroke. Once he returned, he began lashing out at people, even Hillary. He kicked trash cans, threw chairs, hit walls. His anger was back, full-force. There was no explanation. Hillary and I took him to a highly recommended psychiatrist in Westwood, who suggested we arrange a physical examination. The results revealed signs of advanced dementia, as evidenced by rigid muscles, tremors, trouble with balance, and even hallucinations. And so to his list of woes was added, above all, Parkinson’s disease.
A few weeks later, Hillary called and said that Randy was in a rage. He wanted out of Belmont and was freaked about his keys. Someone had stolen them—not once, but twice, maybe three times, actually. The next morning, she opened the door to punched-out walls, collages flung all over the floor. Hoping to escape from his fury, Hillary decided to take him to see one of my movies. When they came back to Belmont, he got all riled up about the keys again. He started screaming. Hillary found them inside a door hinge. She also opened a drawer and found a half-eaten yogurt, collecting mold, next to important meds, Aricept, which was supposed to help with his dementia symptoms, and Seroquel, for his bipolar disorder. Because he hadn’t been taking his medications, Randy’s week had been horrific.
It was then that Dorrie and I were politely informed that Randy’s impulsivity had forced the staff to request his departure from Belmont. Perhaps he needed the kind of care provided by a convalescent home. The place they recommended was out of the question for me. Hillary lived in L.A., and so did I. We started looking for something closer. Sunrise Villa Senior Living, for older adults who value their independence but need some assistance with daily activities, was located in Culver City. After Hillary and I took a tour of the Spanish Revival facility, we agreed this would become Randy’s new home.
As Hillary and I began packing up Randy’s belongings, something strange happened. Dorrie called from the 405 Freeway in Valencia, and she was shouting into the phone. “Diane! Listen to me. I just turned away from looking at Six Flags’ world-record nineteen roller coasters when, I swear to God, I spotted a random office building with a large gray sign on top spelling out the words Hall and Foreman. Can you believe it? Dad’s old company sign in Valencia? Can you believe it?”
“Slow down, Dorr. How could there possibly be a Hall and Foreman sign, much less one on top of an office building across the street from Magic Mountain? There is no more Hall and Foreman. Not possible.”
“Diane, I’m telling you it’s true.” And with that she started crying. I listened to her sob into the phone, with the sound of cars behind her, until she was ready to hang up.
The very next day, I drove to Valencia and looked across the freeway from Six Flags. Sure enough, there, on a frontage road lined with office buildings, stood a seven-foot-high sign with letters spelling out our father’s company’s name. Like Dorrie before me, I burst into tears. Jack Newton Ignatius Hall—Mary Hall’s son, Dorothy’s husband of forty-six years, our father, USC graduate, civil engineer, president of Hall and Foreman, “breadwinner”—had returned in the form of a seven-foot-high gray sign in bold white letters. I took one last look at Dad’s sign, picked up my iPhone, and called the owner of the building. When his assistant put him on, I asked if he was interested in selling the sign. As of one month later, Hall and Foreman stands in my rented warehouse, waiting for me to step up and buy the horse ranch across the street from Mom and Dad’s old Tubac, Arizona, home, which
Dorrie owns. What a tribute that would be…right there where their ashes rest under a variety of crosses.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Dorrie joined Hillary and me in packing to move to Sunrise. I came across one of Mom’s old eight-by-ten-inch portraits. Randy has to be in his early twenties. His hair is greasy, and he’s beginning to gain weight. His full body sits in profile on one of those cheap scalloped Mexican chairs we must have bought in Tijuana. He looks down at a piece of paper in his hands. Mom’s photograph has not aged well. As for Randy, I can see he’s beginning his long journey into isolation. Superimposed over his body by Mom in collage form is a poem he wrote, “the study of birds’ eggs.”
The ribbon on Mom’s typewriter must have been running out of ink, because quite a few letters have disappeared and others inexplicably stand out. Who knows, perhaps she was thinking of clever ways to seduce editors at literary journals like Granta and The Kenyon Review with an intriguing mystery.
It’s hard to believe Randy wrote:
A delicate hand is preferred for reasons obvious to anyone with eggs in mind. The fingers must be narrow, soft and able to fit through small openings in all but the younger trees, because when all’s said and done, a closed fist in the Lab isn’t worth an egg in the pan. With steady nerve and careful transport, the label V for various markings of the dodo, dove, and duck is just the beginning of the hard part. Each bird egg is individually wrapped in a felt jacket and sent to x-ray for proof of age and estimated release. If there is the slightest scratch the egg is sent back to its mother and she decides in what fashion it must be raised. This brings out the woman in all of us, and the sudden urge to nurse anything made of porcelain becomes painful and downright obscene.
