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9.14.04

Randy's Part in the Ongoing Thing

By Lee Wilkins

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Life is full of starts and finishes. As it happens, there are many more starts than finishes. And I will tell you up front that this will be how you think of this story once you finish it.

For I have all the questions and only a limited number of answers, all of which only seem to breed more questions. And questions are beginnings, and answers are endings, and so it goes.

We’re always looking for someone who has the answers. I found Randy, and he became my collective answer.

“When we were young,” he said, “we spent every moment in the moment.”

He meant when we were young as in when we were ten, not as in when we were in our twenties. I know this because when Randy said this to me, we were still in our twenties.

But I didn’t really understand. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I mean that if you had time you took it. You could lay around, nap, watch tv, and there was a contentedness about it. Now, if you lay around or nap or watch tv, there is a nagging sense of guilt. You can’t not follow your agenda anymore, without feeling as if you ought to be doing something more.”

He said this to me between two lines of coke, one in each nostril.

I told him, “No, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Okay,” he answered.

We did the drugs in order to recapture that feeling from childhood; that feeling that there was no day past today, that current happiness could not be influenced by future accomplishments. We chase time, these days, instead of reveling in it.

Semicolons, by the way, are something I have just recently discovered. You would think that I, with all of my half-formulated ideas and half-completed projects, would have made use of them long ago. But no, it is just in the recent past that I have learned to voice one part of a thought, then insert a semicolon, then voice another part of the thought, with no segue but the semicolon. It’s a copout, really. But that won’t put me off. Semicolons are an effortless bridge from point A to Point B; just like drugs.

And I am no different from you. I like shortcuts.

I was already famous when I met Randy.

Randy had it all figured out. He came from California, and the second he landed in New York he made friends, which I never could have done. But it had nothing to do with his being from California. He wasn’t even from there originally; he grew up in Illinois.

Any noise that I heard in my apartment, my first thought would be that it was an animal. Animals scared me worse than people, even though I liked them better than people. Randy told me to calm down, and I did.

I’ll tell you how I met Randy, but there is nothing interesting about it. I was belly up to the bar, and so was he, and somehow we started talking about Pynchon. We never had sex, so don’t expect any excitement in that arena, either. Randy stopped writing because of Pynchon.

“The key to success,” he told me, “is to surround yourself with the people you care about, and then to pretend you don’t care about them. It gets them every time.”

And I had to figure that’s why he was spending time with me.

* * *

“In this world today, falling in love is more important than ever,” he told me. Like always, I asked him what he meant exactly.

“I mean that in this world of seclusion. It’s this world where we value our individuality and our privacy to a completely unprecedented extreme. So there is a proportionately extreme amount of importance placed on falling in love, because it’s become our only escape from ourselves.”

“Then how do you explain me to myself?” I challenged. Me, who never falls in love.

“You’re the anomaly. You’re famous.”

I’m famous for tenuous reasons. There was no make-it-or-die-trying attitude in it for me. I was quite resigned to my life as a completely inconsequential toiler, which sounds a lot worse and a lot more Dostevskian than it actually was.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that fame isn’t good. Fame is a godsend. The adoration the famous receive may be superficial, but no more so than any other adoration that has ever been heaped upon a person. You can keep in mind that all of these people don’t really care about you, but your position among them is still a thing to die for.

I’m famous because I wrote a strongly worded letter to the great writer Alfonzo Lander, and because he proceeded to fall in love with me.

So in that sense, falling in love is more important than ever, even for me.

“But it’s not so different, being famous,” I tell him, even though I know that it is vastly different.

“It’s everything. You would be nothing without your fame.” Randy never was one to mince words.

“I was something before I was famous. To me, I was. I had my things that made life livable.”

“You had your hope of something bigger to be discovered.”

“I never chased after this.”

“It was what you wished for.”

“It was like money. You don’t realize how much you need it until you have it. I used to be poor and happy.”

“I still am,” Randy answered. And I envied him and became nostalgic for something I can never get back. Randy knows I need him. He wants what I have, but I need what he has. It’s not a balanced relationship. He would talk about going to Argentina, and I would ask him what on earth Argentina had that he couldn’t find here in New York. And his answer was “uncertainty.” I told him nothing was certain anywhere, ever. And especially not in New York, not now. He said for him personally New York was not a challenge. He was lying, though. He was scared of New York but had himself convinced that it was something else he felt when he was here. He’d never go Argentina. He’d move on to the next crisis without ever leaving New York.

“Let me explain things to you,” he said. And I drank his words.

There comes a time to understand. That time comes when you are ready for the truth to be less than ideal.

* * *

It was in a bar. It was always in a bar with Randy. I never saw his apartment, which was three blocks away from my own. We only went to an apartment if it was for the sake of his beloved lines of coke. But if it could be managed in the restroom of a bar, all the better.

His explanation was simple; maybe not even anything new, which by the way was one of the things he explained to me.

“There’s nothing new. Everything you ever tried to do, don’t for a second think you’re the first to do it.”

“No shit, Randy,” is what I told him. It’s all plagiarism, one way or another, and I knew it. “But why do I want to do it anyway?”

“Because it’s never been done through your eyes. Someone else did it, but it wasn’t your experience.” Fair enough. We all just want to take everything and claim it as our own, don’t we.

But big deal. We’re selfish. It’s our most prominent trait. Why else do you think I would love fame so much. That’s not an answer to anything. If you ask me, it is instead the problem that needs an answer. But I kept my mouth shut. Randy had a way of silencing me. Me, who usually talks so much and with so much authority.

And then the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen walked straight into this bar on the Lower East Side that may have once really been a down and out sort of place, but was a now a place that played a joke on the patrons who fancied themselves to be slumming. I see beautiful women and I want to be them, not be with them. She walked straight up to the bar, blithe and delicate and guy-like all at the same time. She looked my way and I saw the glimmer of recognition. I am famous, after all. But I’m still impressed when people know who I am. I’m famous because of something literary, so any stranger who knows my face must be literary themselves, and for a girl who looks like this one did to be literary is something truly impressive.

Randy thought so too, I could tell by the way he shifted back and forth on his barstool and tapped his foot against the wall, all the while keeping a look of utter indifference painstakingly arranged on his face.

Randy never did make a move on the beautiful girl.

“You should have talked to her,” I said to after the beauty was long gone into the living night of this downtown world.

“Nah,” he answered as if he knew something about this girl that I didn’t, something that made it wise to steer clear.

“Well, maybe next time.”

“Are you saying, my dear Dolce, that I should learn in the future from a present mistake?”

“Well, I suppose. Only without the flare for drama.”

“Not that you’re right, but just supposing that you were, you are acknowledging a link between the past and the present.”

“Only if you want it to be,” I reasoned.

“No, no, that’s not it at all. It is all linked, whether you wish it or not. And whether you notice it or not. The trick is noticing it.”

“So, Randy, have you noticed that that girl is now in your past?”

“I notice that I can only appreciate her beauty in the present because I saw it in the past. You can only understand the present through its links to the past. You need the past. We all need the goddamned past.”

And this little fact, that we all need the goddamned past, is key. People say we can’t escape it, but this is not the truth. We would never let it go. We need it like we need clothing.

Without either, we could never make it in this world.

And now, with Randy in my past, it all seems clear enough. So let’s begin again, moving on.

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© 2004 Me Three