by Diane Keaton
Randy
* * *
—
Writing continued to be the medium Randy expressed himself in. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Letters, poems, fantasy-driven stories. Several stick out from that time:
Billy Seven Fingers had a wicked father whose name was Fat Boy Todder. On Tuesday he punished his son with silver tools while Billy screamed and fingers flew. When Billy grew up he killed Fat Todder with electric wires and bathtub water. Billy buried Fat Boy near an orange tree where every morning he goes to pee.
Here’s Uncle George under an apricot tree, feeding a blue jay with an open hand. The bird is perched on his fingertips, its head cocked to one side. You can see George’s teeth protruding from a wide grin. George is sixty years old and knows he is dying. He spent his last six months coaxing hope out of the sky and feeding it.
Truth is I was one scared shitless kid who cried on the first day of school and ran out of the classroom three times before Mother was allowed to take me home. Truth is my father stuck a broom handle up my ass simply by calling my name. Truth is I died at the age of ten but just kept walking around wondering who would slap me next. Truth is my mother lay naked in the bathtub while I asked her questions about my home work as I peeked at her breasts. Truth is I was a chip-off-the-old-block that quickly turned to sand under my father’s heels as he stomped his way to a fortune. Truth is I grew up confused by passion and confused by desire so much so I hated my flesh and feared my thoughts. Perhaps part of my brain was missing at birth. Truth is the doctors replaced it with fish gut and extension cords. Truth is the sadness inside my head was shrapnel from a distant parental war or maybe lack of supervision. The truth? My family was, and is, a crowd of strangers.
CHAPTER 7
BIRDMAN
By the mid-1980s, when Randy I were both in our thirties, we’d stopped sharing experiences. My success was an uncomfortable reality I didn’t know how to navigate. Instead of retreating back to the familiar terrain of my family, once again I pulled away. I sensed that my absence, coupled with such good fortune, may have caused regret for Mom, maybe even for Dad. Still, I once more convinced myself I didn’t have time to engage with their ongoing plight to save Randy.
In 1986, while shooting the film Crimes of the Heart in North Carolina, I had a day off and decided to visit the Tregembo Animal Park in Wilmington. I remember coming across a cassowary stuck in a small cage. His massive body seemed too big for such short legs. Bright-blue feathers peppered with chunks of orange stuck out from his dark-gray plumage. Unkempt and uncomfortable, he looked like he was about to topple over. As I read the brief description outside his tiny enclosure, I learned that in the humid rain forest the strange bird was quite adept at disappearing. I had to smile. The cassowary, I thought, isn’t so different from Randy—or me, for that matter.
Randy was still living on Tangerine Street, still unemployed, and still hoping for more publications. The screaming jets flying above continued to drive him crazy. From Randy’s point of view, Dad had bought the Tangerine Street town house to make sure he would suffer. Mom privately met with his psychiatrist, Dr. Markson. After a while, she felt comfortable enough to open up her thoughts and feelings. She told him that Jack was convinced Randy was the source of all their misery. She claimed that if he had any feelings for his son he would be more empathetic. Nothing had changed. It was as if they were stuck in an endless Sandy Meisner Repetition Game.
In her journal from June 1989, Mom described an unexpected call from Randy. Dad answered, began arguing with him, and slammed the phone down. Mom drove to Randy’s town house in an effort to patch things up. Randy, well into his drinks, confessed that he was beginning every day with a six-pack of beer, followed by tequila at night. Yes, he knew it was bad, but he couldn’t quit. Mom called Dr. Markson, who told her point-blank that Randy needed to be hospitalized and also told her where to take him.
As soon as Dad got wind of the costs at the Capistrano by the Sea Hospital rehab, there was the expected blowup. “That’s 10 thousand dollars and 80 cents a month thrown down a rat hole,” Mom quoted him. “He’s shined me on for years and I’ve had it. I’m through. He can go to work just like everyone else has to.”
Mom reiterated how much Randy needed help. Dad started yelling. She ran outside, gave it some thought, came back, and pleaded with him to stick by Randy through thick and thin. Dad, still furious, ended the conversation with “He trashed a house we own. He’s never said thanks for anything I did for him. I’m not going to support him anymore. Got it!?!”
Later, alone at her desk upstairs, she picked up her pen and wrote in her journal what she’d basically written thousands of times before: Randy was going to get better. He was writing. He would drink less. He would thrive in the healing atmosphere of Capistrano by the Sea. He would dutifully take Buspar, a pill Dr. Markson ordered to treat symptoms of anxiety, and fear.
Randy was admitted two weeks later. At the first group session, the group leader asked how Randy was doing. “Fine,” he said. Asked if he would care to expand on that, Randy responded with “Finer.” The next day, the group leader told Randy he had to say more than one word. Randy got up and walked out.
It was hard for me to identify with Randy’s pain. I couldn’t put myself in his shoes. It was easy for me to let him remain in the background of my life. As life went on, Randy occasionally sent me some of the pieces he’d written. One, titled “Seahorse,” brought tears to my eyes.
Delicate little creature with the plunger mouth, and beer belly. What is it you ask of me? Yes, I found you in an orange grove frozen in the dirt. Your prickly leather skin caught my eye as I stooped to pick up a fallen orange. How remarkable you were, so far from your tropical home, so strange among the ants and green leaves that surrounded you. I put you in my pocket. Today, nearly three years later, I look at your boney frame, your tiny eyeless sockets and wonder at my love of “death-preserved.” Is it my own mortality? One day I too will be frozen in dirt, my bones the only definition of my life. Is that the answer to the question your body forms? On a shelf full of bric-a-brac, you are the only object that once existed, your little shape among stone and glass is a terrifying truth, even a reminder that we come to our God in fear, our bones dripping with answers which our bodies are not ready to accept.
I hadn’t thought of Randy’s seahorse piece until recently, when I opened the kitchen door and found a fluttering hummingbird on the ground outside. I ran inside to see what I could do for the little thing. Was it hungry? Frantically, I searched the Web to read up on what to feed a hummingbird: place a few drops of nectar on the end of its beak. I didn’t have nectar. I decided to boil sugar, put it in an eyedropper, and try to get it down the little guy’s throat. After several attempts, I could see it was on its way out of this “old world,” as Grammie Hall would have said. And, sure enough, after a few moments it stopped fluttering its wings, and died. I went upstairs, took the small box Mom had made in her silversmithing class at Santa Ana Junior College, and gently placed its body inside. I put it on the bookshelf in my bedroom. Every morning, as I make my bed, I look at Mom’s box, honor the little hummingbird, and thank Randy, whose words have come to be my guide into the exploration of mysteries I’ve avoided all my life.
CHAPTER 8
A LAST KISS
On Tuesday, April 3, 1990, Mom wrote:
Robin and I loaded up the car for a few weeks in Arizona. Jack was to follow later in his truck. When we arrived at 10:30 PM we were so tired we couldn’t think straight. I called Jack. He was supposed to be on the road. He answered sleepily. “Are you alright?” He said something about not getting ready as fast as he thought he could, he’d decided he would start out the next day. We said goodnight. I went to bed. The next morning I called to see if he was about to begin the eleven hour drive. He said he’d be on the way soon. When I called him late that night he was speaking in vague sta
tements. Robin and I called Dr. Copelan. Upon hearing the symptoms, he told us we needed to get Jack to St. Joseph Hospital for an MRI brain scan as a precaution. I knew Jack would not like the idea of Robin and me flying home for his brain scan. But we did. As soon as we saw Dr. Copelan’s face, we knew the news was bad. He told us of two cancer masses located in the frontal lobe of Jack’s brain. He showed us the pictures. In no uncertain terms, we needed to drive to UCLA, where a certain Dr. Black would be waiting for us.
In those brief five months of illness, Dad was looked after by an onslaught of caregivers who came and went. Mom had no false hopes of a recovery. The days were filled with duties that drove her half mad. She resented all the people in her home, night and day. She began to rewrite her marriage. Suddenly Dad had been her leader, her friend, her counselor, her courageous husband. She bemoaned the loss of the hands she loved so much. They were not there to hold her. She felt she’d become half a person, wondering how to live out the rest of her life.
Dad didn’t want to die; he didn’t want to leave a good day behind. He’d spent his entire adult life worrying about his little bunch of dreamers and how they would get by. Not one of us had or has a practical bone in his or her body. Five knuckleheads. Five useless people at sea in the real world. As head of the family, he had no room for dreams. He had to make sure we were taken care of.
Randy joined our family around the dining-room table on Cove Street in Corona del Mar, in our parents’ last house, overlooking Dad’s beloved ocean view. We listened to our father try to hold his thoughts together as he described the details of his last will and testament. We all looked on with solemn concern. Dad’s greatest legacy, his biggest success, the acquisition of money, would be distributed evenly, but only after Dorothy passed. While he struggled with his words as he tried to describe the allocations, Randy suddenly got up, left the table, and bounded out without so much as a goodbye. He never came back.
Not long after, I was sitting next to my bedridden dad, looking at the waves through his picture window, when he said: “Dianie, did you hear about my biopsy? I was sitting in the audience of this theaterlike room when the doctor asked if there were any people with glyoma, my kind of tumor. So I raised my hand. I told them about the two and a half dollars growing on either side of my brain. This doctor, the chief surgeon, had me come to the stage. I sat in the center and they put a cage over my head, a small cage that fit tight. They hammered something into my skull. They didn’t give me anything for the pain. I don’t think they did. It hurt some, but mainly the sound of them hammering into my skull bothered me the most. Then they took a needle with an even longer needle inside the needle and injected it into the tumor, so they could take out the fluid and study.” Suddenly he stopped talking. He’d noticed something, and turned his head so that he was facing the television set. His favorite show was on, Major Dad.
A month later, on September 1, 1990, he died. He was sixty-nine years old.
* * *
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Randy avoided Dad’s memorial. He never called Mom to see how she was doing. He remained silent.
Twenty-eight years later, as I rummaged through my journals trying to piece together Randy’s response to our father’s passing, I came across a letter I never sent.
Dear Randy,
You missed Dad’s memorial. Robin said he went like a broken bird. It made me think of all those sparrows and blue jays mom tried to save over the years; all those little winged friends who’d flown into our sliding glass doors, or fell out of the sky for one unknown reason or another.
When I’d looked at Dad in his hospital bed just five months ago he seemed fine except for the bandage covering a shaved section at the top of his head, and the long plastic leash filling his body with clear fluid. It reminded me of those bird feeders you buy at The Builders Emporium. Dad, like the birds we tried to save, had a bad fall. Mom said he died facing the window that framed the ocean slit in half by the blue of the sky.
It’s hard to imagine what our dying bird saw. Hands adjusting his head on the pillow? The shadow of Dorothy’s face gliding in for a last kiss? Did death at the very least grant him a final glimpse of the world through a hazy blue tint? Do you think he had hopes? Or was hope a thing with feathers?
As you know only too well, Dad didn’t struggle to connect through feelings. His words, the things he said, the lessons he wanted us to learn, constitute a rigid, blank slate; it’s almost as if the spoken word had no place in his relationships. Words were not to be trusted. Perhaps all those multiple meanings led Dad to his almost religious belief in sound bites. Am I on to something here, Randy?
You are one of four people who can help me remember Dad in sentences and paragraphs. You’re the only one who’s written down your woes on long nights of unhappy days. Remember when we were the only two Hall kids, in diapers? We had a couple of years there when it was just you and me, our bunk bed, and Mom and Dad. Remember how he used to curl up on the beach when he was just a kid himself, when he was still part of an ordinary family making his way to success before all the complications that ensued. Do you remember seeing him so obviously in love with his “Mud”? Maybe the responsibility of accomplishment was too much. All those Toastmasters torture sessions, all those right things to do for the family in order to get ahead. Ahead to what? I know it’s been rough for you, Randy. If you’ll let me, I’ll help you try and remember his eyes spinning visual rhapsodies as he stared, drink in hand, at the waves coming and going for hours at a time. Remember?
When I die, as you know the oldest goes first, I promise to give you a pair of his fins, and the snorkel from the old Bob Blandon skin diving days. I also promise you the striped tie I stole from his closet and the button-down cashmere sweater. Oh, and even all the nickels and dimes he collected in all those jars over the course of a lifetime.
I also intend to include two jars of sand, one from Huntington Beach, the other from Dad’s final resting place in Tubac, Arizona. These mementos are for you to remember, not just the difficult times, but the times his face lit up with joy on those rare occasions he let himself appreciate you for who you are. I know I’m reaching here.
What are we, but aspects, infinitesimal aspects, both good and bad, of who our father was. You have to forgive him while you can. Someday we’ll be joining him, just a couple more broken birds on our way to where.
Love, Diane
* * *
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Over the course of several decades, Randy kept hidden a host of impressions based on his perceptions of the father/son relationship. The truth of Randy’s unspoken rage in “Letter to Pop from a Suicidal Son” is hard to read, hard to understand, and hard to forgive.
Now that you’re about to eat the big one,
now that you are curled like a fetus, helpless
in your tent of bone and flesh…let me tell
you how I love you; I love your worthlessness,
your money crumbling in its hiding places,
your body full of drugs that keep you out of my
life. I love your clothes with the stink of your
death. I love the stink of your death, how it sweetens
my life, how it makes you small enough to crush
under foot. Father you are a balloon about to
pop. I love you enough to hold the pin, waiting
to poke you when you open your mouth. Open your
mouth Pop and I’ll kill you.
I’m so tired of you, I’m so tired of me. We are
fossil fuel for our own driven madness that feeds on itself.
We have come to an intersection
in which there is nowhere to go; you are turning
toward death. I’m turning toward reluctance.
We are bound to each other but lost to any
reconciliation. Pop, w
e are fucking Siamese twins,
and I mean that literally, I mean cock-tied. I mean
useless dead things; prehistoric reptilian
flesh turning to oil with unmixable water. I fuck you.
You fuck me, and we are never satisfied. I didn’t
start this and when you die, you will not end it,
and for that there is a certain finger I give you long and hard.
I’m spam in a can, dad; food for the populace.
You were the chief slice and dicer.
You took my potential and burnt it,
You carved it into dollar bills and fed it to human
Dogs fresh from the fluff factory. Your death is not only staring me in the face,
it is eating me inside out.
Sonny Spam is my name, suicide’s my game.
And I do so much want to thank you.
* * *
—
Later, among Randy’s papers, I found a less tormented perception of their relationship. With time, Randy had had second, even third thoughts. A lifetime of unexplored feelings and memories on the subject of Jack Hall began to creep in.
I will not forget September 1, 1990. A broken bird left the earth. The living could not follow, could not see the wings expand, nor hear the sweet song echo in the heavens. Until now I have never thought of my father as a bird, but something about death makes us small and fragile. “Our father who art in heaven,” you trundle us with the wind of your feathers, you make us cry with fear and love. Destination, oh destination, what manner of nest awaits our troubled bodies? If we too are birds what happened to our song in this hour of absence?