by Diane Keaton
Randy, ignoring the fuss, said, “I’d like to go home, Diane. Even if I don’t get well, I’d like to go home.”
Days later, at 8:25 a.m. on July 25, 2003, I got the call from Randy’s doctor. “I’ve got a liver for your brother, John. We’re going to be transplanting him today at noon.”
When Dorrie and I walked into Room 601, an almost skeletal Randy looked at us and said: “This is a great day. I’ll be able to go to therapy. I’ll walk. I’ll play my guitar. I’ll do my collages and get back to writing.” Dorrie and I gave him a big kiss. Robin called to send her love. The three of us decided to help keep Mom free from worry by hiding the full truth of Randy’s condition and operation. When Randy looked at his reflection in the TV on the wall, he laughed and said, “Geez, I’m an old fart. I hope the surgeon doesn’t do anything stupid. Don’t forget, after they close the curtain, we can go to the movies. We’ll be able to see Seabiscuit with Tobey Maguire.”
That night, Robin, Dorrie, and I got messages from the surgeon. Mine said: “Hi, Diane, how are you? I just wanted to give you a follow-up. It’s about ten-thirty on Friday night. I just left Randy from the ICU. He looks terrific. Hopefully, we’ll get the tube out, probably in the morning, and the liver’s working great. Everything’s going super.”
The intensive-care unit was like being in a full-service 24-7 city of last chance. When I spotted Randy, looking pink, with clear eyes, I wondered why he wasn’t semi-comatose and groaning in pain after seven hours under the knife. Later, I learned he was on steroids.
Almost immediately, he started in with one of his monologues. “So it worked. I’ve got a liver, and it’s a dandy. Did you know Danny DeVito’s here? I hear he’s going to rally. I sure could use a drink. Nurse, you don’t happen to have a cup of water, do you?”
The nurse, who handed me a swab of water on a green sponge that looked like a Popsicle, said, “He’s a real character, your brother. He’s doing well, very, very well.”
In the middle of his steroid-infused monologue, Randy went on: “She undid my legs; the only trouble is, I can’t walk. The damn nurse undid my legs, Diane. Man, I wish I had more water. I don’t know where my stilts are. Have you seen them?”
* * *
—
After several weeks, Randy began getting prepped to be released. There was the lesson on how to use the commode, the oxygen tank, the wheelchair, and even the walker. Dorrie and I were ushered into the belly of the medical center to have our own lessons on physical therapy.
We began to notice that the better he got, the more he became the same old Randy. Dorrie begged him to cut his nails—the same nails the surgeon had warned him about. Randy chose to inform the doctor who’d saved his life that he was the tenth idiot to give directions he had no intention of following. The surgeon responded, “Yes, but I’m your doctor.” At least Randy had the smarts to stay silent as he looked up at the TV set to watch Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady sing and dance his way through “With a Little Bit of Luck.”
* * *
—
My friend Carol Kane let us rent her California bungalow just off Sunset Boulevard for Randy while he recovered. Robin recommended we hire a nurse named Treena to look after him, a no-nonsense gal with a great sense of humor. Dorrie and I trusted her implicitly.
In an effort to help Randy make good choices with his new life, Dorrie and I decided to schedule a meeting with Dr. Markson to see if he could give us more advice. He graciously agreed. We were taken aback by his concern.
“I told your brother that when he got to the hospital he needed to call me. You know what he did? Two weeks later, he finally called and said, ‘Help,’ then hung up. That’s Randy. Look, I couldn’t get him to go to the store to buy a pair of pants. If his DVD player was broken, I’d say, ‘Bring in the DVD player—we can figure it out.’ How many times did he bring it in? None. None.
“Let’s face it, the major thing with Randy is, he needs space between him and other people. If that space is easy, it’s okay. If there are demands, he can’t take it. When he was writing, he didn’t want people to read his work. He needed an editor. I wanted to enhance his socialization, but he took criticism very badly. If someone asks him a question, and he can’t answer it, it fills him with panic. If challenged, he can’t even get into a car, ’cause he’s afraid someone might ask him a question and he’d shut down. One question and he collapses. ‘What are they asking? How can I answer?’ He does have a real thirst for knowledge. He thinks his work is terrible. He’d bring in a collage. I’d get some meaning from it. He’d say, ‘That’s interesting,’ and that was it. He was finished. He didn’t talk about it again.
“Toward the end, he’d come in here filled up with fluid, and more fluid. I told him dying of a corroded liver is a terrible way to go. It’s amazing how that early problem of being pushed around by your father has never been resolved. He used to say he lived in a metal sphere orbiting the earth. That was his fantasy, to be completely protected. We have to know when to stop pushing. He’s so self-destructive. He’s deprived himself of so much. He’s suicidal. He doesn’t talk about it, but he thinks about it. He talks about being helpless.”
Dr. Markson ended our session with these words: “You have to continue to be gently supportive, but also know when to stop pushing. As I’ve said, he has a real thirst for knowledge. Look, my advice is…forget about hygiene. Just concentrate on three basic things with Randy: one, no drinking; two, take pills; three, see doctors on a regular basis.”
Was there a name for Randy’s mental illness, if that’s what it was? In later years, one doctor described Randy as a schizoid personality—i.e., emotionally cold, detached, apathetic. I don’t remember Randy as apathetic or cold. I do remember it was hard to understand what was going on with him. If there was a problem, if he was under pressure, if a situation called for him to step up and be a man, Randy consistently refused to take arms. Yet his fantasies were the exact opposite of his actions. In his fantasies, he was a warrior, even a murderer. How do you explain that?
In his early twenties, some of those fantasies began to make their way to written expression as he sat on his favorite yellow chair and wrote down sentences like “I like to think of Time as a joke no one can hear.” Or “Learning how to love is slow, like molasses. I doubt I’ll ever find its foot prints in the dust of my attempts.” “I do not want to be born again. Once is enough. Why would I want to feel this sadness for a second time?” “Give me whatever death is. It can be nothing but comfort after years of twisted feelings that can’t be explained, only endured.” “I love this room where I sit in my yellow chair and purge. If I wait long enough it feeds me fairytales. I pull them from the darkness I wandered in when I was a little boy.”
Looking back on Randy’s symptoms has been like opening up an old crime-scene investigation. I asked myself again and again: Was I guilty? Or, rather, how guilty was I? Searching for clues has been a losing enterprise. When I’ve tried to assemble Randy’s past into a cohesive explanation for his so-called indifference, I get sidetracked; I can’t quite place the events or the details.
Markson wasn’t wrong about aspects of our brother’s condition, but Randy was not apathetic. Fearful, yes. But not indifferent. Pinpointing a mental illness is like finding a needle in a haystack. I wouldn’t want to be part of a team that labels the most complex organ of our body with a name. Randy was not a category, and medicine is not an exact science. Part of his saving grace came from the outlet he found in expression, whether it was seemingly negative—visualizing women in sadomasochistic positions—or something aiming for transcendence: writing lyrical poems on the wonder of birds. Yes, he explored the dark side, but he also wrote:
All the voices of my past are here tonight in this grassy clearing at the foot of the mountains, where I came to sleep. At first I thought it was the rattle of nesting birds, perhaps rocks falling from a cliff. But,
like bells, the words took shape. Paragraphs echoed out of trees. Stories of other lives hung sadly in the air like pages of failure. I did not want to listen, until I heard my own voice high on the flat face of the mountains. I heard it barely stumbling over the meadows. I heard it echoing out of the trees, one more sad voice, I heard my story reverberating in the air along with the other voices of failure at the foot of the mountains where I came to sleep.
* * *
—
Once he was settled in Carol Kane’s bungalow, the problems began to rear their ugly heads in a small, progressive, yet persistent series of events. Nurse Treena reprimanded Randy for eating too many protein bars. She insisted on cutting his fingernails. She was on him to take the pills the doctors had prescribed. She didn’t want him smoking cigars. After a couple days off, Treena came back to find him smoking cigars with the fill-in nurse, Ophelia. She was not happy. Randy didn’t appreciate her concern. He didn’t want some “Bible-toting woman” bossing him around. He also didn’t want his sisters harping at him about the necessity of reading the red pamphlet his transplant coordinator had given him weeks before. He didn’t care how important it was to understand what the pills did and why he should adhere to a strict regimen in order to stay healthy. As Randy began to walk on his own, he discovered the ATM up the block. And that’s when he started buying beer from the 7-Eleven across the street.
I was in New York, in a car heading uptown—I’d just finished a joint interview with Gus Van Sant on the Today show for the movie Elephant, which he’d directed and I’d been a producer on—when I got a call from Dorrie. “Treena, the nurse, found an empty tequila bottle next to Randy’s bed.”
Poor Dorrie. She’d had it. Although she’d reminded him how much he needed Treena, he went so far as to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that Treena was out. He wanted Ophelia to come three times a week to check in, buy some groceries, and take him to the hospital on Mondays and Thursdays. Dorrie, knowing full well Randy didn’t know what pills to take and when, expressed concern about his readiness for independence. Randy began screaming, saying Treena was a controlling bitch, and hung up.
What could we do? Treena quit, and Ophelia continued as a sometime check-in nurse. I called him from New York, leaving a benign message. I called again and again. There was no response.
Randy’s insistent refusal to take even the slightest responsibility for himself drove Dorrie crazy. I couldn’t blame her. Robin and I weren’t there to help. “He doesn’t think of the implications, Diane. He was on his way out. Is he grateful in any way other than a general nod of appreciation in our direction? Does he know the names of the twenty-five pills he has to take daily? Does he read the booklet his transplant co-coordinator gave him? Has he memorized the phone numbers of his lifeline? Does he clean himself? Has he written anything? Is he a writer? Does he address the huge financial expenditure that has been made on his behalf? Does he even worry? Does he think about his future as he watches E! Hollywood and True Story? Yesterday he asked me if I knew who really killed Thelma Todd. Thelma Todd!!!!! Some twenties party-girl actress? A day isn’t a day without Access Hollywood?”
Weeks later, when I was finally back home, Dorrie and I found Randy sitting under a pepper tree drinking a quart of Cuervo Gold tequila in Carol Kane’s front yard. As we approached, Dorrie spoke first. “How are you doing?”
“I knew you two would come by. I wondered how long it would take.”
“We’re concerned about you, Randy.”
“Fuck you. You dress like a couple of dykes. Fuck you both. I don’t give a rat’s ass about anybody. I hate people. I don’t want to live. Why should I?” As he spun around, he grabbed his bottle, went inside, and slammed the door. Dorrie and I followed as his stammering outburst continued. “See these teeth? Yes, they’re rotten, I know. Do you think I’m an idiot? No. You never listened to me.”
Dorrie interrupted. “We want to listen now.”
“Fuck you. And fuck you too, Diane.”
I tried to take the bottle out of his hand, saying some stupid thing, like “Randy, we need to take you to the hospital.”
He began swirling it as if he was going to throw it at us. “Leave me alone. I don’t want your help,” he shouted, his eyes defiant. We called the paramedics.
After Randy was admitted to the lockdown wing of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, I called him. He hung up when he heard my voice. A few weeks later, while I was getting Dexter ready for school, the hospital called; my brother, John, wanted to talk to me. A sober Randy got on.
“I want you to come here and take me to Laguna. I want to go home and drink.”
“I can’t do that, Randy.”
“Why not? Don’t you want to help me do what I want to do with my life?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me live it the way I want and stop interfering.”
“Yes, Randy, it is your life, but you made a deal. You wanted the transplant. It was your decision. A dying man gave it to you. Did you ever consider that??? He gave it to you instead of someone else. You’re alive because of him and his anonymous generosity. You owe him.”
Randy shot back, “I was waiting for you to say that. Let me tell you something….I never wanted this, ever, and I don’t owe anybody anything.”
I immediately called Robin, who, as a former nurse, had a better way of handling Randy’s moods. When she called back, her advice was to let him go. It was his life, and his decision.
A week later, in October of 2003, I picked up the phone to hear: “Hello, Diane. Come and get me, ’cause they’re going to let me out. I want to go to Laguna Beach. I’m not going back to Carol Kane’s. I’ve never felt better in my life. I’ve never felt more free. I’m an alcoholic. And I don’t care. Just get me out of here. Don’t mess with me. I’ve been screwed twenty million times since I’ve been here. I will never stop drinking, ever. Come and take me home. It’s my body. Just say yes and drive me home. I want to live on my own terms. These holier-than-thou doctors are nothing but Bible thumpers. I don’t like people. The only thing I like is my writing and my art. Don’t bother with me, Diane. Okay? Just take me home. Please.”
I did.
CHAPTER 10
SLIPPING AWAY
In 1998, Mom had been formally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Even though she admitted she was having trouble with her ability to recall names and events, she vowed she would overcome her memory issues. But, following her decline, Robin flew in and helped us hire Ann Mayer, who would become Mom’s assistant. Ann in turn gathered together Susie Dionisio and Irma Flores, a couple of wonderful women, to care for her. Randy, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in Mom’s state of mind. His wish was to be left alone. We honored the request.
Dorrie called: “Mom is freezing Pablo and J.C.’s cat food. I found two tea bags next to several loaves of molded country white bread in the freezer. She’s fine, she says, as she wanders around the house holding on to the walls. She can’t get her balance. She doesn’t remember to drink lots of water. She doesn’t remember to prepare food. She doesn’t want to see me. She doesn’t want to play Scrabble or take walks on the beach. What she is, is quietly struggling on the perimeter of thoughts that won’t express themselves.
“I see she’s hiding what she can’t remember. She’s afraid to drive to Los Angeles. She’s afraid of falling. She’s seventy-seven. It’s a hodgepodge mess. Random books line the back wall, next to dozens of collages by Randy, including a metal roadrunner I bought her in Tubac. There’s a new look in the living room: sterility. It’s like Mom is disappearing. She’s beginning to let go.”
Later, I got a call from Mom herself. “Oh God, Diane, I’m awful. I’m not doing good. People are over here. I don’t know how to focus, Diane. I don’t trust my walk. I get up in the morning with the intention of doing things, but then I can’t remember. I don’t go an
ywhere. I don’t want to do anything. It’s terrible. Just wait until you’re old.”
* * *
—
Years later, breaking a long silence, I finally called Randy and told him he needed to visit his mother. After all, he was the love of her life. I’d drive him there—anything. He said he was busy working on some new collages and writing at night. I asked if he had any feelings for her distressing situation. He said if he did he would have mentioned it. I told him how much she missed him. Randy was silent on the other end of the line. I was still waiting for a response when I got a call from someone else, and took it.
On New Year’s Day, after a visit with Mom, I forced myself to drive to the apartment off the Pacific Coast Highway where Randy had been living. He opened the door. A gangsta-style beanie was pulled over his forehead. His white beard touched his chest. As expected, he was wearing a greasy sweatshirt, and he shook. His hands shook. His head shook. His whole body shook. When we sat down, I looked at the filthy floor in front of the love seat he slept on. The Monterey coffee table I’d given him years before was piled high with photographs, paint, brushes, and hundreds of magazines. The entire room was a gallery of collages he’d Scotch Taped, hammered, and glued to the walls. They also lined the floor, in stacks that reached the ceiling. As in the old Tangerine Street days, he even stored them inside his oven. Coffee cups filled with chewing tobacco rested on the arm of every chair. When I took note of a pink background framing a woman whose eyes had become pins, her mouth spewing out hypodermic needles, I could see clearly that he took the art of collaging very far.
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: