by Diane Keaton
Why did Mom type this poem and place it here? I can’t begin to imagine what she was thinking when she transcribed the bizarre reference to being raised by a woman who needs to nurse anything made of porcelain, a process not only painful but also “obscene.” She couldn’t possibly have thought this was one of Randy’s engaging page-turners. Was it a reference to his hypersensitivity and abandonment? Layering such a bizarre statement over a photograph of her son staring down into what must have been the poem itself, if it was a poem—who was going to be the audience of this ill-defined project? No one. Only me. And only fifty years later.
The two of them, Mom and Randy, were “the Almost Artists.” Randy didn’t have to follow the rules and learn. He took his form of expression, collage and poetry, to the limits of his ability. No matter how misguided he became, Mom flew to him without question, celebrating what he described as his “mad gathering of words in an attempt to explain black wishes set against the earth’s silence.”
CHAPTER 15
LET IT GO
After Randy settled into Sunrise Villa, he began knocking on the neighbors’ doors. Imagine their surprise to find a tall, elderly man with a white beard. After “Hello,” and “Can we help you with anything?,” Randy asked them if they would mind driving him to his mom and dad’s house at 905 North Wright Street in Santa Ana. He needed to go home. Despite being turned down several times, Randy continued knocking on several other doors, until the police arrived and took him across the street to his new, real home.
Now deemed a risk, Randy seemed to be repeating patterns that created the same problems he had had in Laguna when the police were called. It was like he wanted to be given a chance to go back to Mom and Dad, to find a way into a safe world that removed him from responsibility. Some things never change.
The next day, Randy was taken out of his community suite and moved into a studio apartment on the first floor of the “Memory Care” wing at Sunrise. According to Sunrise’s brochure, each resident in their Memory Care program has a “life enrichment manager.” All tenants have access to everything, with the notable exception of both entrance and exit doors, which feature keypads with secret code numbers to prevent independent strolls outside the perimeters of the kindly detention center for seniors with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. There are no views from inside the seven-thousand-square-foot walled-off living quarters. Most travel takes place within the six-foot-wide corridor. Randy’s fellow residents John and William must have put in a few miles the day he passed them to enter his new one-room apartment. A former Air Force pilot turned stockbroker, John didn’t cotton to people. As for William, when he wasn’t walking the halls, he liked to sit next to female residents and stare at them for hours.
Randy’s first night in Memory Care was noteworthy. At 1:00 a.m., he took the liberty of exploring bald-headed Bob’s room. Once inside, he removed his clothes and defecated in Bob’s trash can. Completely naked, he proceeded to the next room, pulled down the sheets, and got into bed with eighty-one-year-old Lillian, who woke up screaming bloody murder. Lillian, a former bookkeeper from Boston, rarely spoke, much less screamed. Residents didn’t talk much unless they were spoken to. When one of the staff members asked Randy what the heck he thought he was doing in her bed, Randy claimed he had to get Hillary’s car keys, because he was going to drive to his mom and dad’s house in Santa Ana.
* * *
—
I began visiting Randy and his new friends every weekend. On our way to lunch in the dining room that first Saturday, we passed wheelchair-bound fifty-seven-year-old Mark, an entertainment lawyer who prematurely wound up in Memory Care after several strokes affected his ability to walk. Frisky Monty, a former race-car driver, had short-term memory loss. One of her twin boys fell off a rooftop and died at fifteen. She never recovered from his demise. Everyone agreed that Elizabeth Taylor’s alleged former seamstress, Eleanora, was a “tiny pistol” ready to explode; one staff member quit because she repeatedly tried to attack him. As petite as Eleanora was, she’d consume three helpings of food at a sitting, and always with her hands. If she didn’t like what was on offer, she tossed the entire plate across the room. If someone gave her the wrong juice, she’d throw it at them. It took three caregivers to shower her. After several months, she was politely escorted out of Memory Care.
Sitting in Randy’s room with his weekend caregiver, Delia, I was surprised by Randy’s insights on Eleanora. “I try to steer clear of Eleanora, because I find her an abstraction. But, today, she struck me as informed, for a change. Someone said she caused people to say weird things. I don’t understand the big hoopla. They’re dead wrong. What she does is cause people to think. Eleanora’s someone I would like to write about in the future.”
Suddenly Smitty walked into Randy’s room, enraged. He didn’t belong in this zoo. He’d been falsely diagnosed with a so-called serious case of Alzheimer’s, which, he said, was on the brink of being cleared up in a matter of weeks.
The Memory Care residents were much more entertaining than the “Independent Living” seniors on the other side of lockdown. One could say that Randy and his new friends were on the losing side of life, but the truth was, they shared a unique capacity to respond in the moment without fear of consequences. The “Independents” seemed stuck in a routine that boxed out extemporaneous behavior.
After six months, Steve, the new occupational therapist, Delia, and I were walking Randy around the hallway when he suddenly blurted out, “Don’t talk, ’cause I’m swimming.” When he had blown out the candles on his sixty-ninth birthday, Randy paused to make this announcement: “Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I’m really confused. I remember my girlfriend wandered off. It was inevitable. It just didn’t work. It wasn’t meant to happen. Remember Sally? She used to live in San Diego. Now she lives in the expensive area. I don’t begrudge her anything.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his ex-wife, Sally, had died in 2006 after a botched surgical procedure.
One Sunday, in an effort to capture Randy’s attention, I brought in my black-velvet-covered photography book, The Plot Thickens, in which a host of master photographers present the opportunity to look and think about the art of photography in this cell-phone age, “when paying attention may become a disappearing art.” When I pointed out an August Sander photograph of an eye staring into the camera lens, he couldn’t get over it. “I like this one because the eye got created by a bird building her nest. That’s where the eggs are laid, in nests, right?” For a moment he paused, then looked at me. “I don’t know if I’ve accomplished what I wanted in life. I think I’ve challenged people. But there have been some I couldn’t put a dent in even if I took an atom bomb and stuck it in their ear.”
Soon after, Randy stopped mentioning collages or poems. His hands shook more predominantly. He no longer joined the other residents to cut and paste art projects with glue and crayons. He stopped writing words on paper.
In the fall, we sat down in the lounge and watched Gone with the Wind in a room full of mostly sleeping friends. At a certain point, I asked Randy if he thought Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable had been acting out something more moving than the words in the script. Did he think they were using their own life experiences, perhaps even their longing for a love they couldn’t allow themselves to feel in real life? Randy looked at me like I was crazy.
Smitty, sitting next to him, looked my way and started in with “Why are you wearing a hat? You look like an ugly old man. Get out of here.”
Before returning to the wonder of Rhett Butler riding away from the wreckage of Tara, Randy said, “I keep forgetting that when I die there will no longer be live television.”
“Good point, Randy. Good point,” I said.
I’ve heard that if you keep a parakeet in a cage for years and you take it out, it will die. I guess sometimes the best idea is to stay in the cage. Randy did. I’ve also heard that once
you’ve spent a life in solitary confinement you’ve lost a part of who you are. Curiously, it was this kind of social death, combined with being excluded from society and all of its rules and expectations, that Randy sought out. Looking at it from a distance, you could say his near-total isolation exacted a terrible price. And yet it also had a certain value.
* * *
—
Revisiting Randy’s past feels like an investigation composed of hundreds of clues, often leading nowhere. The new version of an old story doesn’t assure validity, but the reality of the present does. While visiting Randy in lockdown, I couldn’t help being engaged by the fact that life is inexplicable, in myriad ways. No one can predict who is going to touch your heart in a way that changes your very being. And there are no concrete answers to why any of us are the way we are. Randy was a mystery. But so was I. So were Mom and Dad. Would Randy have had such fantasies if he hadn’t had a mother who worshipped him? And would he have been obsessed with making collages from torn paper and found objects if he hadn’t had a father who insisted he go to Toastmasters until the age of twenty-three? Would it have made a difference? There are no answers.
Time passes. Week by week, day by day, and moment by moment, Randy began to use one less word in a sentence. Eventually, he was down to “Yes,” “Right,” and “No.” Six months earlier he’d said, “It’s getting tough, this age stuff. I’m sixty-three or sixty-four.”
“You’re sixty-nine,” I reminded him.
“Am I really? That doesn’t scare me….Sixty-nine, huh? Okay. Sixty-nine. What am I going to do about it, cut off a finger now that I’m sixty-nine?”
Full sentences were a deeply appreciated, rare form of communication. Soon, I began to take the liberty of holding Randy’s long fingers in my hands. I’d kiss his forehead, or touch his white hair, and pinch his cheeks. After a lifetime of self-imposed barriers, I finally gave myself permission to be close, quiet, and intimate with my brother.
CHAPTER 16
HOMEWARD BOUND
I’d taken a few days off to visit Dorrie in New Mexico. She picked me up at the train station in Lamy, a small town just outside of Santa Fe, and we enjoyed a few easy days together. She’d sold a rare cast-iron rabbit ashtray stand by Thomas Molesworth, and, even better, her high-end Monterey club chair went for more than she expected at the yearly Objects of Art show held at Santa Fe’s El Museo Cultural. She was feeling good. In celebration, we shared a drink on the rooftop of the La Fonda Hotel and watched the evening clouds gather as in a Maynard Dixon landscape. It had been a dream trip. While Dorrie sold, I’d walked around the plaza, hit the galleries, and visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where I was taken with her painting Patio Door with Green Leaf.
When it’s time to go back to L.A., Dorrie drops me off in Lamy, at the train station. After waiting an interminably long amount of time for Amtrak’s Southwest Chief to arrive, I go for a walk along an abandoned railroad track, which leads to an old Pullman sleeping car resting in front of a nineteenth-century adobe chapel with a bell tower. Lamy, population 219, would be right up Randy’s alley. I begin to envision an extended family, maybe ours, living peacefully there. We’d have to include Delia with her new dog, Elvis, and Hillary plus her sons, Dylan and Owen. Of course, Robin would join us with her husband, Rickey, her daughter, Riley, and son, Jack. Dorrie would arrive with her two dogs, Milo and Willa, but also her Monterey furniture, Western paintings, road signs, and her rare collection of Indian jewelry. I’d greet them all, accompanied by Duke, Dexter, and Emmie, our fourteen-year-old dog.
After he acclimated to a rural life in our new digs, Randy could sit in his wheelchair as Hillary or Delia, or I, pushed him past the historic plaque in Lamy’s park, the one I know he’d never get tired of reading: “In March of 1880 one of the locals sighted a fish-shaped balloon which contained ten human occupants singing and shouting in an unknown language. A large red rose was reportedly dropped from the floating dirigible.”
As the train finally pulls into the station, I resist picking up my luggage. But life at home calls. Reluctantly, I roll my black suitcase toward the tracks.
Once inside, I let go of yearning for a future that can’t be realized, sit down, pick up the Southwest Chief Route Guide to read about our first stop, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since 1946, the year I was born, it had been home to Sandia Base, at the time the United States’ principal nuclear-weapons installation. Atomic bombs were developed and tested in secret within its perimeters. Sandia bore the responsibility of keeping the country’s covert military operations safe from danger. I can’t help but think of Randy and how he kept his fantasies hidden in spiral notebooks, also safe from danger. In them he scrutinized fantasies of revenge, but also the mystery of love.
It’s pitch-black as we pass Flagstaff, Arizona, home to the Lowell Observatory. In 1958, the city passed the nation’s first ordinance governing outdoor lighting in order to preserve its dark skies. Dark skies used to terrify little Randy. The sheer vastness of night was a problem he couldn’t solve. What if he fell into the darkness and disappeared forever and ever? These days, his eyes are full of unapproachable thoughts. It’s as if he’s living the effects of a waking dream.
What a contrast to fat Randy at Belmont, smiling into my camera lens with two missing teeth. I ask myself if my early disdain for his ever-ready smile was based on the fact that I copied it. Even in his darkest days, he wore it to great effect.
At least Randy’s gift was not mean-spirited. For some people, harmlessness is all they have to offer. My brother and I have done a good job selling our brand of the innocuous encounter. I’m well aware I’ve made a career out of it. Behind those countless hellos, those challenging yet friendly dinner conversations filled with struggling attempts to join in, behind all that, Randy and I succeeded in arming ourselves against the vicissitudes of intimacy.
* * *
—
Percival Lowell, the descendant of a Boston Brahmin family, established his observatory in 1894 to study the possibility of intelligent life on Mars. The observatory’s astronomers made discoveries that altered our understanding of space, including Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930.
Dad made a discovery the day I walked with him along Le Conte Avenue to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was going to get his radiation treatment. He wasn’t in a hurry. Not anymore. At one point, he bent down, picked up a cigar band in the gutter, and gave it to me. He then wandered off and stopped to look at a cluster of crows in an old eucalyptus tree. I tried to engage him with the new ring, but Dad was having none of it—he was looking at the crows. Though known for their intelligence, the shiny black birds are considered bad luck and even harbingers of death, yet some say the presence of a dead crow means the end of bad times, and the beginning of good.
In decline, both father and son became seekers of the absurd. Afflicted with a brain tumor that would kill him in just a few months, Dad said from his seaside bedroom, “You know, Dot, it looks like I’ll be taking over the Ronald Reagan job for Northrop soon. Hey, you know what’s interesting about perspective? See the top of the glass there? Let’s assume the top of the glass creates a perspective with an illusion created by another line. Oh, and, Dorothy, you missed something last night. Fergit Fillman, Frog’s father, was here. I told him Dorrie and Randy were coming on Sunday. I want to see their joyous faces when they dance around the lobby.”
* * *
—
A friendly Amtrak attendant knocks on my door and announces that breakfast is being served as the train arrives in Riverside, California. Having read my Southwest Chief Route Guide, I know that in the late nineteenth century a certain Eliza Tibbets received two orange trees from a friend and planted them in Riverside, where they thrived. I remember Randy and me sneaking into the Rohrses vast grove to steal as many oranges as we could. We’d hide them in our pockets so we wouldn’t get caught. As time went on, we
became witnesses to the grove’s gradual disappearance. When the last tree was finally chopped down, all that was left was a twenty-five-acre mound of dirt.
Like Marie Rohrs’s old orange grove, Randy is disappearing. The inevitable truth of goodbye fills me with remorse and also guilt. If only I could find one paragraph in Mom’s journals that describes me as helping him out with his ABCs, or letting him go before me to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. If only I could find one photograph in the dozens of Hall family scrapbooks that documented me patting him on the back for a job well done or, I don’t know, giving him my very own box of See’s candy as a gesture of kindness. Did I ever crawl down the ladder from the top of our bunk bed at night and help him brave the dark he was so frightened of? If only.
Before my brother slammed his fist through a wall; before he tried to commit suicide by gassing himself inside his Volkswagen van in the garage of his Tangerine Street town house; before he threw Dorrie and me out of Carol Kane’s cottage—before, but also after, he’s been what many would call a crazy brother. Yes, his mind has always been his torture, but also his treasure. And mine. I just wish I’d seen it sooner.
Like the sparrows, hummingbirds, and blue jays who flew into our glass windows, Randy has had his share of catastrophes. Birds spoke to him; their flight soothed his way. Maybe he was thanking them when he wrote:
I’ve always been the never-ready boy, the stunted boy. Slow to catch on to the world and the people in it. It took time to find out where I belonged. The simple answer is…nowhere. This morning, in front of my window, seabirds glide. Their feathered bodies lay grace to shame. I watch and think how clumsy I am; how my abilities do not suit me. I’ve spent a life nesting on fear and regret. I am not an airborne soul. I never once reached for what is just beyond my window.
