In Memoriam: Randy B.

Yesterday I learned that an old friend had died. He didn't die yesterday, it was earlier in the week. Someone tracked me down online and delivered the news. You have to kind of know People With AIDS (PWA's as we were called in the old days) to understand that many of us share a gallows humor. That sense of humor caused me to question whether I should wait for a punchline or take the hit in my gut.

I got a phone number for who I believe to be Randy's best and oldest friend in Oklahoma. He confirmed the news. I delivered my condolences and was taken into some confidences I might not have otherwise known about Randy's final resting details. I had met this Oklahoman friend of his once - by arrangement, in a bar (like we do) on a business trip years ago. That's one more time than I met Randy.

Years ago, if you picked up a copy of a gay newspaper or - even more years ago - a gay newsletter, you instantly noted the convention of identifying people by a last initial. It conveyed at once shame, anonymity, confidentiality and mystery. Everyone was quoted as "Travis D." or "Martha L." Nobody had real names. Hell, if you met them in a bar and took them home, you didn't always get that much. But nowadays you pick up those same publications and the passage of years and legislation and the maturing of our community has full names printed from coast-to-coast. We've come a little bit of the long way, baby. We're using our names.

Shortly after I was diagnosed with AIDS in 1998, I bought my first computer. I went looking for other people who could help answer the question of "how long do I have?" I found, in the jungle of chat rooms, a few people with whom I bonded over the shared trait of bad blood. We all used screen names that hid, for the most part, our true names. What idiot would put their full name on the internet, anyway? But it reminded me of the old days when our names were cut short for our own protection...or our shame....or that of our family....or our job. In the mix of those with whom I bonded was Randy. Every day, it seemed, for a shockingly long time, Randy was there.

I know what Randy looked like from pictures he shared with the world. But we never met. I know what Randy sounded like from the hours upon hours upon hours we spent on the phone together. We shared a sense of humor in the midst of what might have been a pretty ugly storm otherwise. His voice was thick with the south and I would relax just a little bit more when he started into that drawling cadence that said, "No bad news comes from anything that sounds like this." We would cackle and hoot and gossip until the phones got so hot against our ears we had to hang up and call back later. And we'd always promise that some day - soon - we were going to meet up. Of course we would. Why wouldn't we?

The internet has injected an element into our society that, if not viewed with a cool eye, can be very misleading. Over time, personas that appear backlit on glowing monitors become three-dimensional, the same way that a novel draws you in and for an instant or longer you forget that it's fiction. This internet, this thing, has mixed pure anonymity with creative writing in a way that makes it all but impossible to distinguish the authentic from the purely imagined. As I told Randy more than once about the latest hot guy we had met on the internet, "Remember...all we really know about him is that he can type." Anybody can be anything behind the smoke screen of a keyboard. More than one of us has met an Adonis online and invited him over for coffee (naturally), only to have a troll waylay him and show up in his place. To me, that makes it all the more remarkable that Randy and I shared what we did.

In this venue of artifice, never having shook hands, he was a glowing line of print (usually misspelled or mis-typed, bless his heart) and a voice on the line that walked me through the early years and right up until a couple of weeks ago when he disappeared, the way he would, to re-energize, turn off the backlight and get away from things. I left a couple of messages and sent a couple of emails but didn't flinch when I heard nothing back. Randy protected his privacy and when he got away, he got away. When he re-emerged from his cocoon, he'd call and that conspiratorial excitement mixed with molasses would come pouring through the line again.

I was privileged to learn of some of the final details regarding Randy. He was private, like I said, so I can't share them here. But if Randy were alive today and we knew that anyone else was having the same sort of thing done as a final remembrance, we would hoot and cackle and giggle about it for years to come. It would rarely fail to punctuate a conversation. It would be our newest little inside thing. He took a lot of things with him when he went. He took the other half of my online act and I'll miss it. Randy would mis-type something and I'd call him "Nell", after the Jodie Foster movie. He was proud that he had modified his body in a back-alley type procedure that was the source of most of our jabs at one another. Perfect strangers would have thought we hated each other the way we slung one-liners back and forth through the fiber optics. Quite the contrary.

Anybody who could think such a thing doesn't remember the old queens on barstools in clandestine corners of society who, with wit, a stiff drink, and a few words could topple governments, it seemed. He had a way with words, this voice over the phone. He couldn't type them worth a damn, but it was sure good to see them.

And I can't wait to ask him when we speak next, "Grrrrrrlll.....what on EARTH were you thinking?" Then we'll laugh.