In a straighter realm, a Bay Area wanderer is lost for good

Randy Robinson, circa 2007. Randy Robinson, circa 2007. Photo: Photo Courtesy Of Tracy Ericson Photo: Photo Courtesy Of Tracy Ericson Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close In a straighter realm, a Bay Area wanderer is lost for good 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

It was both a failure and an accomplishment that I kept Randy Robinson's orchid alive for over a year. I'm not otherwise the type -- I barely manage to buy milk -- but a small voice said that flowers given to you by people like Randy are worth the effort; maybe they're as rare and fragile as the people who gave them to you. Anyway, the orchid's a withered bit of straw on my back porch now. Only thing left to do is talk about Randy himself.

I'd needed someone to sublet my dark, stained, depressing little office in the Mission. It was part of a warehouse that had been carved up into individual workstations, rented out to self-employed types. Serious young people working seriously at tidy desks. I'd been offered a preferable office, and I needed someone to finish my last three months.

The man who answered the ad was about 110 years old, and arrived two hours late on a child's wooden scooter. He wore a tattered old raincoat and carried a suspiciously full duffel bag. His bald head gleamed. His eyebrows were dyed blue, and his beard was blue, and his teeth were wild. He rolled the scooter into the warehouse.

"Did you know I'm thinking of raising a Malaysian raven, capable of distinguishing a man in a hat from a man without a hat?" he asked, then transitioned to Niels Bohr. Bohr had sassed back to Einstein. Then he was talking about a shoeshine boy on 22nd Street, and how things might be different in a Chinese watercolor ...

Randy's monologue lasted 20 minutes. It was the kind that's just lucid enough you try to follow it.

"Those watercolors, well, you know how sometimes you throw a so-called road apple up at a tree? A crabapple tree?"

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"Um, yeah?"

"Well, you throw one and then you throw another, but nothing happens. But why would it? And that's my point, with the men up there on mountaintops, but I'm not on a mountaintop, I'm down here in the shifting sands ..."

I finally led him up to my dark, stained, depressing office. His jaw dropped -- it really did, just like Howdy Doody. He loved it.

Randy gave off the unmistakable vibe of near-homelessness. He was also sweet-natured and plainly intelligent, even if his thoughts didn't always connect clearly. He said he was a writer, too, and would be writing up a business scheme for a "Green Grand Prix" -- an extravagant race for alternative fuel vehicles that he was planning for the Presidio. Unbeknownst the Presidio.

I knew he was going to be living on that couch. But so what? Accepting the premise that it's bad to have people sleep in your office -- and overlooking the fact that this was often a badge of honor for the hard-charging Silicon Valley set -- isn't it less bad than contributing to someone's homelessness? If I declined to rent him the office, it was clear he'd soon be on the street. Eccentricity is not a crime, I reminded myself. On the contrary, it's in short supply in our decreasingly bohemian city. Randy handed me two months' rent and a perfect white orchid, and I gave him the key.

The phone calls came immediately. The other workers in the warehouse didn't like Randy's style. Where did I find him, again? Was he crazy? He talked so much, even when their headphones were on. Might he steal from them? And then there were his strange habits. What was with the exotic fish in mayonnaise jars, or the orchids he left all around the common area? The common area!

I became a reassurer. Randy was kooky, but he wasn't going to do anything bad. By this point I'd logged a few days with him, meeting for coffee, helping him move in and get situated, getting him familiar with the neighborhood. He wasn't anywhere near 110, it turned out, but he'd lived a long and varied life -- mostly of extravagant and aborted dreams.

After working on a pipeline in Alaska, he'd spent the next year devising an indoor, simulated beach resort there in the snow. He'd had it planned down to the table settings.

Then there was his salmon project. The idea was to get a hold of several dozen young ones and raise them in gold-colored tanks. When he released them up along the West Coast, they were going to instinctively lead him to actual gold.

Then there were the Thailand years. He went there to get all his organs replaced with younger ones. Then he decided Thailand needed a hot dog hut. That idea grew, as such things do, into an aquarium. He was going to build the world's first million-gallon aquarium.

None of these schemes ever materialized. But Randy was not fazed. On the contrary, he was the happiest man I'd ever met. He had new ideas every day, and whenever I came around -- which seemed to be happening a lot -- he'd pat my arm and laugh with his crazy teeth and offer me a spot on the Green Grand Prix board of directors, which didn't technically exist.

I had my doubts about Randy -- it was rough getting trapped in one of his endless monologues. But hearing these fussy young office workers complain about him convinced me that I had to defend him. The complaints kept coming, week after week -- Randy was spilling water everywhere, Randy's stuff was migrating into the hallway, Randy was overly candid on the subject his swollen testicles. He mentioned casually that nobody there would even talk to him.

I took up his freak flag, waved it righteously: "Hadn't we all moved to San Francisco precisely because of its tolerance for outsiders? What becomes of these eccentrics if they're pushed further and further to the margins?"

It seemed a perfect encapsulation of all that was happening throughout San Francisco, and perhaps the country: the final relics of a more open, curious era butting up an increasingly impatient and straight-laced culture, ostensibly tolerant political views notwithstanding. Rising rents, obsessive productivity, a broken healthcare system and a subtle but inveterate uptightness conspired to make benign wanderers like Randy even fringier than they might have been.

"Anyway," I'd continue in fine, sermonizing lather, "was he really all that strange, or did he just look strange?" That last one was my trump card -- if they answered wrong, they'd appear shallow and small. Of course the truth is that Randy was strange as hell.

By March it was getting harder to prop him up. Someone was forgetting to turn the office alarm on at night, guess who they suspected? I visited Randy to strategize. By now the office was a hovel, with open jars of jelly and assorted medications strewn over the carpeting. The fish fluttered dejectedly in their mayonnaise jars. I pretended not to notice a mouse dart under my couch.

Randy didn't want to strategize. On the precipice of eviction, he wanted to show me the beautiful tie he'd found at a dollar store. At one point it slipped out of his hands. He bent down to retrieve it, and instead came up with a wool hat.

He was more discombobulated than usual, but before I left he took me by the elbow and spoke with a solemnity I'd never heard from him. "You've always shown me great friendship," he said, and then I stepped out the door.

The final call came a few days later. One of the young people at the warehouse had discovered Randy lying on the floor, shirtless and moaning. The office mate had been annoyed to have to wait while Randy found a ride to the doctor.

"What? Moaning? Is he okay?" I asked.

"We're voting him off the island," the office manager informed me tartly.

I e-mailed Randy and left a message on his voicemail. I'd failed. I could've fought more, gotten more involved with his life -- not just the occasional visit, but real friendship. Maybe if I'd cleaned his office for him, it would've jump-started a bigger change. I suspected Randy was having some version of these thoughts too, because a week passed with no reply.

It was on a Sunday night in January of last year that I got the e-mail from Randy's brother. Not mentioned in any of Randy's monologues were his hepatitis, or his HIV-positive status or the growing infection in his leg. Randy died alone at the hospital a week earlier, and nobody had known who he was. He was 62. The only thing in his pockets had been my contact information.

* * *

If you've ever learned that you were the sole lifeline to a strange, gentle man, who died alone at a hospital with nobody to hold his hand, you know what those first two weeks were like. In the spirit of Randy's emphatic ebullience, I'll spare you the gloominess.

I'd like to say the weeks after his death were an uninterrupted plane of sadness, but that would be a lie. Because when the day came to tell the others at the warehouse, and I peddled over one last time, the embarrassing truth is that I found myself bizarrely giddy. I was going to make those people feel so damn guilty.

Yes, they would learn the mother of all lessons. Rather than accept Randy, they'd complained and rejected him, and now look. It was like some after-school special I couldn't quite put my finger on, but I knew there was a moral in there somewhere, and it was going to weigh tremendously on their complaining little shoulders.

But of course you can't change people's minds -- that only really happens in movies. In reality, you bike over to the warehouse, loaded up with your torpedo of truth, but nobody faints in horror, or weeps in regret, or drops out of society to re-calibrate their ethical compass. The folks at the warehouse did what anyone would've done. They said "wow," and they looked off in the distance for a few moments, and then eventually they got back to work.

I work now in a nice communal office a few miles away, and it's not dark or stained or depressing. If I were to dye my beard blue and start a fish collection, I suspect I'd be indulged. But realistically I won't. Without a Randy Robinson around, I list toward normal -- I work too much, I take the bus home, I forget to water the orchid. It takes more than one Randy in your life to snap you out of those habits.

Still, I like to think I'm capable of more. One day, at least in theory, I could push the work aside. I could connect with that stranger, perhaps more joyful way of relating to the universe, and commence raising a Malaysian raven, capable of distinguishing a man in a hat from a man without a hat.

Chris Colin is the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93" and co-author of "The Blue Pages," a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. He has written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, Smithsonian, McSweeney's Quarterly and other publications, and works out of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.

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