I don't remember which class it was when I first encountered Randy. Might have been Sixteenth Century British Lit course (mostly Milton). Randy loved Milton's blindness. He once said to me that Milton thought his poetry was improved after his blindness set in. Something about the cadence and word thought process. It sounded plausable. Randy was a bright fellow. Had a lot on the artistic side about him. His music, poetry, passion for older women.
But Randy did a terrible thing. Horrendous by any standard that include psychosis on the ruler.
I'm guessing about the diagnosis. Could have been anything I'd read in those University Psych texts.
Any doctor of any worth would agree Randy was not well, but he was a high functioning not well.
The Honors English Degree was not a walk in the park. So, by the time fourth year arrives, the herd's been well-culled, and classes got smaller, and those attending more intimate. I'd shared classes with these people for three years, by now we had long finished feeling each other out, and time outside class, and campus with one, two or three others for a beer in the pub, or someone's digs, was happening more often. We were serious students, so our party time was limited to one night a weekend.
It was really never planned. A few beers at the Grad House, and so on.
Randy was somewhat of a hanger on. On the fringe of our conversation, and interjecting just off the bubble of reason. And he didn't handle alcohol well. This one time, the girls were talking about wanting to **** an uncircumcised guy. Well, as it happens, being born at home in Ireland, on the farm, with a midwife attending, the brothers and I are in the hood. I mentioned this, and the lasses started with the teasing, but Randy missed the tease. I could see in his eyes the strain as he held back from I don't know what. But he was on hold. We left the Grad and I went one way across an open field of one foot snow,
to grab a bus. Randy and Nicole left on a divergent path in the same field. Randy didn't hold back.
A few minutes after parting, I heard a scream. I did. I looked back and saw Randy, Nicole pinned down as a kid would be pinned by a bully sitting straddle on the victim's stomach to flick his nose. It took me a minute to run back through the snow, and by the time I got there, Randy was past her outer coat, and digging deeper. I pulled him off. Sent him on his way, and walked Nicole home. She was ok. Shaken, but it was a different time. She knew they had talked that way purposefully in front of Randy. Randy had, in one of his interjections, admitted his skinning.
Anyway, this isn't the worst of it. Besides walking in on my girlfriend when she was on the toilet, washing his hands and having a conversation with her while she was, yep, speechless. This girlfriend was as pure as the driven snow. We met when we were fifteen, and planned on marriage at the end of my Degree. She was the original model. I was the only driver. Continued with that model for forty years too. And never drove another. So, she tells me what happened. Here we are. I've got all my old buddies from my home town at my apartment. I invited Randy. I admit it. Thought he could use a little time with some reasonable friends. They weren't university students. Just my old high school buddies. Plumbers, electricians, sheet metal workers, construction workers. I was the only one of the lot that went on to school. They met Randy. Some asked me what's his problem. Now I must tell Randy he has to leave. My girlfriend is embarrassed; worse, she's mortified. She really was. So Randy says he understands and leaves, but insisting he meant nothing by it. I let him know I believed him, but it's time he call it a night at my place. A few days later, when I'm at the library, researching, Randy drops by my place and gives my mates a bottle of wine and a joint to apologize for his inconsiderateness. In retrospect, I'm lucky to be alive today.
No one knew how volatile Randy could be.
We had finished our Honors Essays and our comprehensives, and we were ready for a party. We knew that our times together had come to an end. Each of us would be going to our respective hometowns, and after the summer, we would pursue courses in Grad School, Teacher's College or Law. A few of us had marriage plans on the table, and would be saying goodbye to our University years and loves. Rhonda offered her place for our last hurrah. We numbered eight, including Randy. The beer, scotch, wine and **** were abundant. At one point, sitting around listening to Phoebe Snow's rendition of “The Poetry Man,” and winding down, I suggested we heighten the fun with a bathtub party. I didn't know what that was, in fact I'd never heard of one before, but the group began *******, and one of us went to turn on the taps. In a flash, all were naked, standing in ankle deep water. Randy was ecstatic and frantic. It was harmless fun, and some nice skin. Everything came to an end, a drunken ****** end, around one a.m. Randy said he had some scotch back at his place, and I, with early onset alcoholism, walked back to his ground floor apartment for more.
Randy had two guitars, headphones and an amplifier. We drank and played live. I still had to get to my place, and left Randy on the guitar, with headphones plugged in, between two and three in the morning.
That was the last I ever saw of Randy, but not the last I heard.
Two weeks passed since I left my University digs. I was at my parents' home, in the massive garage my brothers and I built with our father, re-finishing an antique sideboard as my wedding gift to my girlfriend. You know how it is when you feel someone before seeing them. I looked up, and heading towards me on the drive was my life-long friend and roomie at school, Jim. Jim knew Randy from association. And he had quite a story for me.
“Did you hear about Randy?”
“No.”
“He murdered his landlady.”
I heard the remainder of his story, and was able to deduce he murdered her soon after I left him playing his guitar, wearing his headphones. I'm lead to believe that the landlady, who lived upstairs from Randy, came down to complain about the noise and the hour. Randy followed her upstairs, and with a plain kitchen spoon, took out her eyes, dug too deep, and managed to scoop out parts of her brain. The police followed the trail of blood back to Randy's downstairs apartment. They woke him from a sound sleep, covered in blood and gray matter. I understand Randy was found incapable of being tried, and was subsequently incarcerated in Penetanguishene, a facility for the criminally insane.
Fast forward twenty-five years. I'm at a house party. Present was a police officer from my University town. After some social conversation, I ask him if he was on the force when Randy did his deed.
“On the force? I was the lead investigator. Horrible story.”
He filled in many of the details, some mentioned above, the rest I will leave out.
“Is the case closed?”
“Long since,” he said.
I asked him a few detailed questions about the night, which grabbed his attention. He had already told me about the students at the party Randy was with that evening, and the many interviews he conducted with them.
“You never interviewed me.”
“You weren't there!”
“I was there. I was at Randy's apartment too... that night.”
At first he was incredulous, but I told him about the homemade peanut butter and the emptied bottle of Johnny Walker's Red Label sitting on the kitchen table. I also mentioned the guitars, amps and headphones centered in the living room. He believed he'd interviewed everyone at the party. Why my name was never mentioned by the others, I don't know.
“I know why he did it,” I suggested to the cop. “John Milton. If the landlady was blind she'd have a greater appreciation of Randy's early morning music.”
It's been fifteen years since I had that conversation with the cop. To this day, I still expect a knock on my door, or a rap on a nighttime window, and there, looking in, like Jack Nicholson,
"Here's Randy..."
A long, very long, found poem.