Home of the Brave
Randy’s not tall, 5’6” or so. His left shoulder was badly hurt in an incident and is hunched and lower than his right shoulder causing him to lead with his left when he walks, like a boxer, the good shoulder back and cocked like he’s about to throw a haymaker. One side of his face is swollen and pocked and port-wine purple, a condition that continues down his neck into his shirt collar. Sometimes he covers the wine stain with makeup; in conversation, he talks with one eye, turning his face to hide the color. This spring, he had brain surgery for cancer and wears a net stocking cap over his head to hold the bandage in place, tufts of gray hair growing through the medical-white netting.
Randy White owns and manages The Mineral Springs Motel, a twenty-three-room motel in Webster Springs, West Virginia, population seven hundred. He bought the motel on a contract-for-deed in 1978, he was 24 years old. He was elected mayor of Webster Springs then to the West Virginia House of Delegates then to the State Senate. He was defeated by a Republican in 2011. He was the first openly gay elected official in West Virginia.
He’s divorced and has a twenty-seven-year-old son, Clark; millennial blond and multi-colored hair, millennial wardrobe, fair skin. Clark was bullied in high school because of his dad’s figurement and identity. He works at the motel and lives in Randy’s house on the other side of town. Randy lives at the motel. Their love and resentments are painfully loud in their tones and silences.
At the motel, Randy lives in a two-story apartment. The upper story had been a bar, the lighting is bar-lighting and the glazy-brown walls haven’t been painted. Randy closed the bar a couple of years after he bought the place because of the drinking and the fighting; his shoulder he’d crushed chasing a customer down a flight of stairs, he and the customer both drunk. The bar is now his bedroom, his bed is where the dance floor used to be. The bar and the bar sink are still there and above the sink, glass shelves and part-empty liquor bottles fuzzy with dust.
In the corner of his bedroom, there’s a flat screen tv mounted to the wall, a recliner and a stool face the tv. The floor around the chairs is covered with paint tubes and brushes and stretched and rolled canvases and paint pots and an easel and pebbles and big pebbles and works in progress and all manner of art detritus with only small spaces in front of the chairs for his feet. In the room, not just the floor, every flat surface is covered with painted and partially painted pebbles, unhung paintings, paintings in progress, junk mail, important mail, IRS mail, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a screw gun, a screwdriver, empty pop cans, pizza boxes and all the rest. His paintings, framed and unframed, hang on the walls. On both rocks and canvas, his art is good enough that selling it helped him through the pandemic. He gave me a painted rock although what I really wanted was one of his canvases. I hinted but he didn’t offer.
The stools were still under the bar. I’d bought ground beef and tomatoes and buns and beer. We grilled the burgers outside and he heated up cheese dip in the old bar oven and we sat at the bar and pushed pebbles and mail aside and ate burgers and chips and dip and drank beer and smoked weed until past two in the morning. I asked him about his politics.
Randy’s liberalism exists in a harsh environment. It’s a street-level, street-wise liberalism, a tough liberalism, a clear-eyed and knowing liberalism. He didn’t talk about politics in terms of ideals but in terms of policy, his voice taking on the gravely tone and acronym-punctuated cadence of a career politician; campaigns, votes, personalities, accomplishments, failures, constituents, schools, roads, sewers, jobs, environment, law, losing. I got lost in the acronyms and county and small town names and nudged the conversation along.
For decades, Randy has allowed indigent people passing through Webster Springs to stay the night in his motel for free. He’s more careful now. People passing through are harder on his rooms than they used to be, more violent. But he still gives rooms away. While I was there, James and George were thrown out of their living situation by an irate sister. She owns the house and they live with her. Randy gave them a room and acted as an intermediary with Loretta as they patched things up. James and George are both sixty and HIV positive and crippled with the disease and its treatments and living on disability and drinking heavily. And they miss their three cats terribly. They don’t have a car and were waiting for Loretta to pick them up the morning I rode away.
Randy does the landscaping. Beyond the buildings and asphalt parking lot, the motel sits on two acres of tall, shady sycamores, close cut grass, and island gardens of lilies and hardy lilies and phlox and small evergreens dammed out of the grass by carefully placed rings of pebbled rocks. In a large, rectangular garden spaded into the lawn, Randy grows sunflowers; last year he came within five inches of having the tallest sunflower in West Virginia, twenty-three feet and change.
A rocky trout stream, a branch of the Elk River, runs along one side of the property. He’s placed metal chairs and benches along the bank; at dusk, as the shadowy dark crawls over the Appalachian Mountains and the soft, cool air settles on the back of your neck and your bare arms, the sensuousness, the perfection of the moment, is overwhelming.
