Randy’s not tall, 5’6” or so. His left shoulder was badly hurt in an incident and is hunched 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 wine stain with makeup; in conversation, he talks with one eye, turning his face to hide the purple. This spring, he had brain surgery for cancer and wears a net bandage over his head, tufts of his growing hair poking through the medical-white netting.
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 couple of years 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 and bar sink are still there and above the sink, 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 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 are 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 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 pebbled rocks. 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 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 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. I met James and George, they were thrown out of their living situation by Jame’s sister, Loretta. She owns the house in town they were living in. 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. They don’t have a car and were waiting for Loretta to pick them up the morning I rode away.
Randy’s liberalism exists in a harsh environment. It’s an earned liberalism, a tough liberalism, an existential liberalism, an honest, clear-eyed and knowing liberalism. There’s nothing cloistered or naïve about it. He talks about it in terms of policy, his voice taking on the cadence and tone of a seasoned politician, accomplishments, failures, constituents, infrastructure, environment, law. But it’s in his patience, gentleness and generosity towards other people, in his care and love for his environment, in his acceptance of struggle and disappointment, in his toughness, idealism and understanding of human nature and human frailty that his liberalism is most evident, most impactful, most profound.
I wrote this a couple of years ago, it seems fitting to our moment, and a reminder of what liberalism truly is.
