Pebbles
Randy’s not tall, 5’6” or so. His left shoulder was badly hurt in an incident and is hunched forward and sits 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 birth defect, sometimes he covers the stain with makeup; in conversation, he talks with one eye, turning his face away to hide the color. This spring, he had brain surgery for cancer and wears a net bandage over his head, tufts of his white hair poking through the gauze.
Randy owns and manages The Mineral Springs Motel, a rundown 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; 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 obvious in their tones and silences.
At the motel, Randy lives in a two-story apartment. The upper story had been a bar, the dance floor is now his bedroom. The bar is his kitchen. Randy closed the bar after a few years because of the drinking and the fighting; his shoulder he’d crushed chasing a customer down the stairs, he and the customer both drunk. The bar and bar sink are still there and on the wall above the sink, rows of glass shelves and part-empty liquor bottles fuzzy with dust.
In the corner of his dance-floor 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, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, empty pop cans, pizza boxes and all the rest. His paintings, framed and unframed, hang on the walls. On both pebbles 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 are still under the bar. I’d bought hamburger, tomatoes, 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 and talked until past two in the morning.
Randy does the landscaping. The motel sits on two acres of tall, shady sycamores, close cut grass, and island gardens filled with lilies and hardy lilies and phlox and small evergreens dammed out of the grass by rings of pebbles. In a rectangular garden spaded into the lawn, he grows sunflowers; last year he came within five inches of having the tallest sunflower in West Virginia, twenty-three feet and change. A pebbly 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 the neck and bare arms, the sensuousness, the perfection of the moment is overwhelming.
For decades, Randy has allowed indigent people passing through Webster Springs to spend nights in his motel for free. James and George are HIV positive; James was diagnosed in 1991, George was diagnosed in 2001. James has a Parkinson’s-like tremor in his jaw and hands from the HIV drugs and has blackouts, dropped conversations and a straight-ahead stare that lasts many seconds until he blinks and shakes his head and says, “Sorry, sorry.” George has osteoporosis and arthritis from his treatments, the pain is constant. His doctor tells him that one day the bones in his legs will collapse from his body weight. He doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds and walks with a cane.
James and George were born in 1964. James went to West Virginia Tech where he joined a fraternity and had a first boyfriend and dropped out of school. He worked in retail, as a model (he went to modeling school), and as a writer and editor for the “leather press” (who knew?). George worked as a florist. His dad was killed in a coal mine. He and James have been together for 16 years. They live on disability. George told me that they used to drink a liter of vodka a day, they’ve switched to wine because it’s healthier, they have their first glass for breakfast. George smokes cigarettes and James, who dislikes the smell, walks across the parking lot for an ashtray and lays it in George’s hand with a gentleness and intimacy that catches the attention.
For several years, they’ve been living in Webster Springs with James’ sister, Loretta. The history’s messy; James had a fling with Loretta’s now-deceased husband, it happened forty years ago when Loretta was first married but the betrayal’s still raw, that’s what James said. She’d thrown them out for a reason they don’t describe, they’d been staying at the Mineral Springs Motel for a few days when I got there. Randy had been negotiating a reconciliation; it sounded like he and Loretta had arrived at an agreement and that James and George were going home. A relief for them, they have three older cats and miss them terribly. And they’d been wearing the same clothes for a week.
James and George don’t own a car. The morning I left, they were sitting outside their room waiting for Loretta to pick them up. As I was hauling my gear downstairs and packing the bike, James poured me a glass of wine, a chardonnay. It was a water glass from their room and he filled it to the brim.
