Randall Handsome at 22. Photo taken in 1959, according to his Facebook page

I’m thinking back to 1987

I was thirty four. Married. Recently married to a German Woman I’d snatched away from Colonne during my year spent wandering around Europe. She was eager to come to America. We settled in San Francisco. We had no money but I knew how to make money, hustling Coupon Books door-to-door.

I found us a pad down near the freeway. Across the street from a Project called the Pink Palace.

The Pink Palace in the 80s

Fell street was four lanes of rushing one way traffic. You never stopped hearing the traffic. A neighbor responded to my complaint by saying, “after a while it’ll sound like ocean waves.” It never did. We lived there three months. The Fell Street pad was nothing to brag about.

Then…I found us an upscale pad.

Same rent, whole different atmosphere. Our new pad occupied a posh little neighborhood called Buena Vista Terrace between the Haight and the Castro. We lived on Alpine Terrace. In a three story queen anne building comprising four units.

Randall Handsome occupied the rear unit from us. The dude had a nice view.

Randall Handsome is the reason I’m writing this post. I find myself writing about him, in part, I suspect, as a way of being done with him…in any case, back to 1987.

A shot of Randall Handsome from the mid 80s

Randall Handsome lived in one of the units that looked out on the city.

Same floor as ours.

Here’s a view from his bay windows.

LIke I said, the building had four units. Three of them, including Randall’s, had views.

Our apartment was the exception. We had a view of Alpine Terrace, a vast improvement on Fell Street, for sure. There was almost no traffic. None to mask the chirping birds and squirrels and laughing children. We lived there in tranquility. Tranquility. I’m referring to the environment, not our relationship, which grew more strained by the week. I don’t have a single picture of my former wife. I did find a picture of our apartment building. It’s currently on Zillow.

Currently valued at 4.5 Million

That’s our place on the ground floor. windows nestled in flower beds. Nice but no panoramic views, like the other units. We had a view of the street. Oh, and the backyard tennis court of the mansion at the top of the hill.

The Hormel Chili King lived in that Mansion.

The Chili King Mansion faced Buena Vista Park.

Buena Vista Park

Ah, Buena Vista Park. The second oldest park in San Francisco. Opened to the public in 1890 after they chased out the squatters.

This was a Victorian Park. Thirty six acres. Densely forested. A haven for squirrels and stray cats and coyotes and one or two feral pigs…and a haunt for Cruising Gay dudes.

If, say, you took a Goldilocks stroll through the dense woods, you emerged onto lawns, where mothers brought kids. The lawns spread placidly down to a normal sidewalk with a bus bench and a fire hydrant and cars whizzing by on Haight street.

Reaching the bench on drugs you could believe you’d escaped the nightmare realm of the woods. You could relax in broad daylight. Sit and feel normal. Back there on the hill were the hidden things. People went there with secrets. I sometimes walked my dog through the park or around it down the hill to Haight Street and farther down a couple blocks to the Panhandle. I was afraid of nothing in those days. I don’t remember walking through the park at night.

Paved trails winded through the wild woods of Buena Vista Park. Yes, and there was something highly unusual about those paved trails.

The rain gutters were inlaid with gravestones.

That’s a fact:

The remains of headstones line the walkways and stairs of Buena Vista Park in San Francisco, California. The headstones, unclaimed when Victorian cemeteries were relocated outside the city, were repurposed for use in several of San Francisco’s parks and public areas……Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

Sometimes, as I strolled the perimeter of Buena Vista Park, following Bugs, our black spaniel, I’d play find-a-grave, catching a name and date…or fragments thereof.

The paved path..

The rain gutter of the paved path, inlaid with gravestones.

These were unclaimed headstones, so it goes. Somebody died. They got a nice ivory stone. A hundred years later nobody is left alive to claim them. The City re-claims them. Presto! The get “repurposed” as a shard in a rain gutter. That’s something to look forward to? I don’t know. I think I’m good with being cremated…

Hundreds of bits of dead people line the rain gutters of Buena Vista Park paths.

Parts of a name. A date. Sometimes an initial…

Somebody died at thirty I think.

My German wife was thirty. Thoughts of my German wife were not always so morbid. Only towards the end, when I imagined tipping her plugged-in hair dryer into the tub while she bathed.

Am I kidding? Yeah…I’m kidding…no, I’m not kidding…yeah…

Meanwhile, I grew more and more fond of our black spaniel, Bugs.

This was the summer of 87 and into 88.

Going on 40 years ago.

My, how time flies…

Call me Randy

Fast forward to 2023.

Mid-october. I’m getting ready for a bad-ass winter. Lots of rain. I’m sort of making preparations. At least I got old Scruffy tarped….

I don’t remember the exact day. I remember I’m sitting at Joan’s dining room table. I’m on the internet and somehow. It always works this way. Somehow, I stumble onto Facebook. There, staring me in the face, is the name:

RANDY HANDSOME

And a face:

I’m not sure it’s him. The same name, except he’s calling himself Randy not Randall. Then, as I’m staring at his face a memory comes to me. Maybe a false memory. I don’t know. I remember him telling me when I first met him, “call me Randy.” I think I remember that…

He’s living in Chicago now.

He’d been there all this time. Since the late 80s. It wasn’t long after we moved into that front apartment, maybe six months, a year, no more than a year, that he gave up his apartment and moved back to Chicago. How do I know this for sure?

He gave me his Apartment.

My wife and I split up

Thank god.

I didn’t murder her. She moved back to Germany, where she belonged. Not long after, Randall informed me his place would be available and I should grab it. I told him no, I certainly could not afford his place, not with that fabulous view he had.

“I’m paying twenty five bucks a month less than you are,” he explained.

So I petitioned our landlord, who lived in the flat upstairs. I was shocked when he agreed. He could’ve upped the rent for a new tenant, but he let me have the place for my current rent. I’ll never forget what he did for me. The best landlord I ever had. And Randall, the best neighbor I ever had. Because he gave me his pad when he left.

Overnight, I went from being a long suffering husband to a swinging bachelor. I bought myself a used car to match my new pad with the fabulous view.

I lived in the pad until 93.

These articles, the Pad, the car, made me quite popular with the Ladies.

The only straight dude in the neighborhood

So I’m thinking it must be him.

I send Randy a facebook message and he gets right back to me.

Gives me his phone number. I call him up.

“My God Donny, all these years. How are you? I’m eighty seven years old. Can you believe that? And you. You must be in your seventies. God, what didn’t we do! I’m so happy you’re still alive. They told me you died of AIDS. I knew it wasn’t…”

I cut him off. “We were never lovers. You got me mixed up with somebody else!”

I explain I”m the Donald he gave his apartment to.

“Oh, my God! You’re the straight one with that beautiful blond wife.”

“That’s me.”

“OMG, was she beautiful! So statuesque!…and of course she went away, left you with the little black dog.”

“That’s right.”

“My God! That dog would bark when you were gone. Drove us crazy. I didn’t mind so much but the people downstairs were livid. OMG, I’m remembering now. She was so beautiful!”

He’s laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“You were the only straight man in the neighborhood.”

That was a long time ago

He tells me what he’s been up to. Living in Chicago. I’m trying to follow his conversation. I tell him I wrote a novel. Working on a Blog. He wants to promote me. I can help you with your publicity, he says. I’m real good at that. I can get you noticed, he says. I’m thinking he’s a little cracked.

Cracked like a very old man.

While he rambles on I’m remembering things. How he liked to sing in Karaoke bars. He’d have men over and I’d hear them singing. He liked to sing this Righteous Brothers song. Unchained melody. He even invited me out one night to a gay karaoke bar where he sang unchained melody. I went with him because I felt obligated. I liked him. And he gave me his fabulous pad.

I remind him of the Karaoke bar.

“OMG!” he says. “I remember. I told the guys you were straight. They looked at me like I was crazy. They didn’t believe me!”

“I think I made my sexual preference perfectly clear.”

“They kept buying you drinks!”

“Yeah…but I went home alone.”

They kept dying

He’s still on Facebook. Randall Handsome. He’s on there every day, posting shit. He won’t go away. He posts about his cat. Little Missy, he calls her. He posts his memories. Life as a child, growing up in Chicago. Life as a young man, cruising the beaches for gay young men. Pictures of him with these men. His life as a photographer in San Francisco. Pictures of his friends from the Castro.

I once tried to recognize one or more of these people in his San Francisco photographs. I couldn’t. I only hanged out with him that one time at the Kareoke bar.

Then he was gone and I had his pad.

Four years I lived in that Pad.

During that time many of them died. And they kept dying. My perfect landlord died. His lover died. The neighbor downstairs died. A dozen or more men on the block died. They all died of the same thing. Then they stopped dying. New drugs came out to keep them living. But by then most of the ones I knew were dead.

Mosts of them nameless to me now. Like “repurposed” grave stones.

I do remember Randy.

Randall Handsome.

He’s still among the living. Posting on facebook. Sometimes posting all day long. I don’t follow him. I’d like to forget about him. Except for this memory I have of him singing at the Karaoke bar.