Who Do You Think You Are, The Kaiser?

There is a spot on Interstate 805, as you're driving south from San Diego's Mission Valley toward the south bay cities of Chula Vista and National City, where you come around a bend and the first thing that comes into view is the blue cupola dome that stands over Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery.

For a long time, starting in the late 1970s, whenever I would drive that stretch of 805 southbound, and the blue cupola of Holy Cross would come into view, a passage from the funeral march of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony would immediately make itself heard inside my head.

That was because a short time earlier, on July 1, 1977 to be exact, I had taken part in the funeral, at Holy Cross, of Randy Bendel, who had been my best friend in high school. Every time I came around that bend in the freeway, I'd be smacked in the face with the realization that my closest school friend was now buried up there, somewhere beyond that blue cupola dome.

Most of Randy's family has joined him there now. His brother Fred died in 1990 (of cirrhosis, at age 38) and was interred at Holy Cross; his mother Barbara joined the group following her death from cancer in 1997, and in March, 2004 his father Ron Bendel went into Holy Cross after his death, also from cancer.

But Randy went ahead of them, aged 22. He was born on April 30, 1955 and died 22 years and two months later, in a freak traffic accident in Salmon, Idaho.

Actually, Randy wasn't the first among his generation of the Bendel family to go. Tragically, his younger sister Robin had died several years ahead of him, of a brain hemorrhage. She was only 12 or 13 at the time, I think. Clearly this family had bad karma. But I only heard about Robin's death secondhand. It happened about ten months before Randy and I first met.

We met in (or actually, after) 10th grade English class at Chula Vista High School. It was the fall of 1970. What caught my attention about Randy was his babbling. I'm not kidding: he was a virtuoso babbler. But there was something precocious about his babbling: it was curiously in tune with popular culture and current events. If you're old enough to remember New York Mayor John Lindsay, you might remember that one of the running jokes about Lindsay was how often he was "out of town." This was actually the first thing I heard Randy babble: walking through the crowded high school corridor between classes, I heard him mutter something to the effect that "Mayor Lindsay was out of town." That a 15 year-old kid in southern California would be familiar with jokes about the mayor of New York struck me as...well, precocious. And I was only 15 myself at the time.

A mutual friend once attempted to explain how Randy's mind worked. "He sees and hears things on TV and in the movies. Then later, when his mind goes blank, a little switch in his head gets thrown, and he plays them back." This might make Randy sound a tad autistic, and it was meant with a touch of malice, but there was a bit of truth to it. Randy did not like to read, but he was a passionate moviegoer and watched as much television as anyone in our generation (plenty.) And he did have a gift for absorbing and repeating things that he had heard and seen.

And embellishing on them. In short, Randy Bendel was the funniest guy I ever knew.

He needed to be. Because the home he lived in was utter chaos.

Ron was actually Randy’s stepfather. His biological father, as I recall, was a truck driver by the name of Hutchinson. Randy’s mother was some kind of hot little number when she was young. All the truckers and sailors wanted to get into her pants.

This had not quite spent itself when Randy and I became friends, in 1970-71, as high school sophomores. Barbara was about 40 then, still quite attractive, and juggling the oddest domestic situation I ever saw. She was married to Ray Ferguson, but Ron Bendel, her ex-husband (later they remarried) refused to move out of the house, claiming it was “his” house. She let him stay because he paid the bills. Ron and Ray were both sailors at that time, and strangely, got along fine. Ray was cool about the whole thing, but Ron was neither cool nor especially bright, and I can remember listening in on some screaming sessions between Ron and Barbara, with him shouting, “I LOVE you, dammit!” (which Randy and I, in private, mercilessly ridiculed. I had a crush on Barbara myself in those days, and was jealous to the point where I wouldn’t let his mechanic father work on my car even when he offered to.)

Amidst all this domestic Sturm und Drang, Barbara remained true to her working-class roots and would often frequent The Oasis, a country-western bar which in those days stood at Third Avenue and Naples Street in Chula Vista, on Friday and Saturday nights. That of course meant more sailors coming around. The house was hot with sex in the early 1970s. Sex, frustration and rage. At age 16, Randy and I were witnesses to it all, and protected ourselves in the best way we knew: savage mockery. The hysterical doings of these sex-crazed adults were nothing but grist for our comedy mill. The Bendels, and the neighbors next door. Ha-ha-ha. How ridiculous they all were. And we laughed, and drew cartoons, and yukked it up.

But I think, somehow, even then, I had some sense of how much pain underlay Randy’s jolly mockery of them all. He had lost his beloved little sister when he was not quite 15, and then seen his home devolve into a grotesque hillbilly sex comedy. Some adolescents would have dealt with it via hostility, withdrawal, drugs. Randy’s defense was ridicule, and as he and I were joined at the hip so to speak, the very best of friends, so was mine. We were quite the pair of teenagers, Randy and me. We spared no one. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was sacred to us. Our mockery of those around us became cult-like, a secret joke-book of handshakes and giggles understood only by Randy and me. “No, I never quite penetrated your Brűderschaft, you two,” my "other" best high school friend, Charlie Berigan, said to me in 1978.

It was true. No one ever quite did.

Spent passion. Randy used to tell me of how horribly fat his maternal grandmother was. (“One of her legs was as big around as your waist,” he said.) In her later years, the once-hot Barbara Bendel—I think her maiden name was Forte—went that same way. Indolence, plus a heavy reliance on Pepsi-Cola, caused her to expand to whale-like proportions in the years after the deaths of her two sons. Her teeth fell out. She blamed Dilantin for that. The last time I saw her, in 1994, she was unrecognizable from the “hottie” of 1972, whom Ron had once compared with Sophia Loren. She must have weighed 300 pounds by then. Her breasts were the size of couch pillows; her stringy, thinning hair was pinned close to her head, and she had no front teeth. She had borne four children and lived to see three of them die. I suppose I should not have been surprised at her appearance, and in view of what Randy had told me years earlier about her genes, I guess I wasn’t.

I did attend Ron Bendel's funeral, which was with with “full military honors.” Ron was in the U.S. Navy for 22 years, and not as an officer and a gentleman either, but as a rip-snortin,’ beer-swillin,’ bell-bottom wearin’, brain-dead sailor boy. On one arm he had a tattoo of a woman having sex with a black panther. (Randy once told me that, in addition, his father also had a fly tattooed on the tip of his penis—that was a very drunken night.) After 30 years and more, dropping in on the Bendels had long since become a habit, so I stopped by at the funeral.

It was raining, unusual for southern California. I took a moment and stopped by Randy’s grave. I hadn’t been there in over 25 years. And I saw Fred’s grave for the first time—I was in Brazil when he died. It’s just “south” of Randy’s. Randy was given a traditional burial back in ’77; his parents were both cremated, apparently so they could be interred side-by-side. I didn’t see Barbara’s grave; it was underneath the green tarmac we were all standing on, under the temporary shelter. Ron’s ashes were in a metal box with a crucifix on it, and I could see under the table the tiny white “coffin” into which they would place the ashes for interment after the service was over. There was a military honor guard; Ron had retired from the Navy in 1976 and spent the next 20 years riding around in a Wells Fargo armored car. They fired two salvos and “Taps” was played on a boombox.

I stood next to Randy's nephew Danny. When we were in high school, Randy and I, Danny was a toddler. He was only eight when Randy died, but said he did remember romping around with both of us. Danny surprised me with the news that, after finishing medical school and his residency, he had decided not to practice medicine after all, but came back to California and went into his stepfather’s business. Gus Abatzis, Debra’s husband and Danny and Mark’s stepdad for some 27 years now, was by then in some kind of construction business: when I asked Gus what he was doing these days, he said he was “building airports,” whatever that means.

Everyone was fatter than I remembered. No surprise there. I last saw Gus in 1977 and he had put on quite a bit of weight in the ensuing quarter-century. Knowing what I knew about her mother, it did not surprise me to find Debra quite plump in her 50s. Danny and Mark had both “beefed up” as well, although Mark is quite a handsome fellow at 34. Danny has a bit of a skin problem. They never did resemble each other at all, but of course they had different fathers.

I had my own problems with my own father in high school days, and spent a lot of time over at the Bendel house. Randy and I did indeed form a Bruederschaft of sorts. It was how we survived three years of shuttling back and forth between a high school atmosphere that we both found toxic, and home lives that could be turbulent. We took refuge in our "comedy cult," turning everyone around us into cartoon characters (although neither of us could draw worth a damn) and engineering our private triumph over them, and our world, through our rituals of merciless ridicule.

Of course the whole thing was aggressively, deliberately juvenile. It was our form of rebellion, our way of acknowledging that all the bromides and valedictories we were handed in school about how we were supposed to be adults now were, in fact, bullshit. The very organization and structure of high school are such that, no matter how "mature" the teachers, counselors and vice-principals tell you you're supposed to be, you are in fact still treated as a child. This was Randy's and my response: "If you're going to treat us like children, we're going to act like the most puerile children you ever saw."

It goes without saying that Randy was a gifted mimic. But his tape-recorder mind gave him a dazzling talent for what we would now call "sound bites." He could deliver a three-or-four-word imitation of someone, or something, that would invariably put me in stitches.

John Wayne: "Gee, ol' Dollar, yer the best horse a man ever had."

Stereotypical Hollywood Indian: "Hmmm. This MY land!"

"Radio Beijing:" Capitaleeestic....PEEGS!"

Stereotypical Hollywood "Mexican bandit:" "Djoo cannot kill a PRIEST! Do you want to go to HELL?"

The police dispatcher in a cheap Japanese monster flick: "Car 17! Report to Nakamura district and destroy...A MONS-TAH!"

His own father: "LOVE YOU, BARBARA! (imagine it barked, like a seal.)

My father: "Well, you got yer spics, yer wops, yer kikes, yer dagos," and so on.

As I said, nothing was sacred, and no opportunity was missed.

The star of our show was Randy's next-door neighbor, Armand Silva. Armand was about three years older than either of us. He had dropped out of high school and spent most of his time sitting in his father's basement reading science books from the public library. He refused to get a job, just stayed in the basement all the time. Later he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the last time I saw him (2004) he was a homeless person living on the street. But we knew none of that as kids. To us, Armand was a highly-eccentric and sometimes disagreeable character whose appearance invited caricature. He was very skinny, had long, shaggy black hair and a huge, and I mean huge, nose. Randy and I quickly turned Armand into a cartoon character, essentially a gigantic nose poking out from under a haystack. Then we put gigantic sneakers on him and taught him to march. Armand loved classical music, so to symbolize that, we gave him a violin and drew him waving it over his head as he marched down the street. "Marching Armand" was our standard: we drew him everywhere, the way some kids write "fuck" on walls.

In fact, Marching Armand was so ubiquitous, he almost became Randy's and my "brand." Around school people associated "Armand" with Randy and me. One afternoon when I left class early, I happened to walk by Randy's sixth-period drama class, taught in those days by a man named Bill Virchis, who later became a prominent figure in South Bay theater arts. Mr. Virchis was very cool. The door was open; I poked my head in and asked if I might sit in on the class. "Sure! Come on in!" Mr. Virchis said.

I swear, as I went to take a seat near Randy, I heard someone say, "Oh, no, Here comes the other one."

We created other cartoon characters as well, Randy and I, based on the rest of Armand's wacky Portuguese-American family, and his in-laws too.

We had special fun with Armand's Montana-redneck stepfather Bill, whom Armand despised and behind his back had already nicknamed "Idiot," and Armand's mother Anna. Bill was a loser who worked at K Mart when he wasn't fighting with his stepsons or defending the U.S. war effort in Vietnam; Anna was a mousy character who also happened to have the figure of a sack of oatmeal. Bill hated Armand as well; we quickly drew Bill as a huge, crew-cut wearing, superpatriotic screaming head with a tongue about six feet long. We loved to draw him screaming at Armand, who in turn would simply hold up a sign reading, "Idiot." Hysterical to us.

Improvisation was always in the air. One day Randy and I were standing in the kitchen and Randy happened to reach into the cupboard and pull out a sack of marshmallows.

Holding it up, he went into his "Anna" imitation voice:, "Oh Beel, look. It is just like your Anna. Soft and shapeless." We collapsed in hysterics.

We were walking down the street one day. A helicopter went by overhead. "Hmm. Bill's patrollin' for gooks, " Randy said. (In our cult-world, any and all of Bill's enemies, real or imagined, were "the gooks.") Hysterics again.

One of the most endearing things about Randy was that if something was funny, it was funny, and it didn't matter if he were on the losing end of it. He would laugh at himself just as cheerfully as he would at anyone else.

Randy was vain about his body. At 18 he was solid muscle, hardly any fat on him. One day I caught him shirtless, preening in front of a mirror. Embarrassed, he invited me to join in the fun. "Look at that magnificent body!" he said.

"Yeah, Reptilicus," I replied.

Ever the film buff, Randy of course remembered the cheesy 1961 sci-fi flick about the prehistoric lizard run amuck.

"Reptilicus!" He shrieked with delight. "Reptilicus!" All the rest of that afternoon, it was "Reptilicus" this and "Reptilicus" that. He loved it.

Probably the most detested teacher in our school was Mr. Hummelman, a big, beefy guy who wore a crewcut and who had obviously been off in the john or having a smoke when God was distributing "sense of humor." Randy had him for 11th grade social studies. One day he came around with a story that he couldn't wait to tell me.

"We had a test today, and Mr. Hummelman wanted to make sure nobody could cheat," Randy said. "So he tells us, 'Keep your hands on top of your desks at all times. I want to see what your hands are doing.' So I mutter under my breath, 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it away from thee.' And Mr. Hummelman says, 'What was that, Bendel?' And I said, 'Nothin', Mr. Hummelman, just quotin' the Bible.' And then Hummelman says, 'I wasn't aware that you were capable of quoting anything!'

And he laughed. Funny was funny, even if it was at Randy's expense.

Randy even managed to be funny when he was angry. It was just the way things came out of his mouth. He got into a fight with his brother Fred one day. I don't even remember what it was about, but suddenly they were throwing punches at each other. Now, most other 16 year-olds would have shouted something in rage like "You asshole!" or "Fuck you!"

Randy's tape-recorder mind was capable of better stuff. Throwing a punch at Fred, he said contemptuously, "Who do you think you are, the Kaiser?"

They were fighting, but I started laughing. I couldn't help it.

After we graduated from high school, Randy and I gradually drifted apart. I started college locally, while he went off to Phoenix to study electronics. He only stayed a year and then moved back home, but then he started keeping company with a different crowd, drug users. His parents had moved from a house to an apartment, and while he still lived at home, he had even less privacy than before. We saw less and less of each other as he chose to spend his time with his druggy new friends. He enrolled at the local junior college, but rarely attended class. He got a part-time job at Sears through his father's connections, only to get laid off on Christmas Eve, 1976. He was 21 now, and going nowhere.

Nowhere was precisely where he ended up. Eager as ever to get away from the situation at home, he informed me early in the summer of 1977 that he was going to go off to Idaho for the summer with his group of new friends. One of them knew someone who had an RV park near the Idaho town of Salmon. They would all spend the summer working there, he said, and then in the fall he would return and transfer to San Diego State to continue his efforts at becoming an electrical engineer.

On the night of June 28, 1977 Randy and his new friends, now up in Idaho, decided to go swimming. I heard later that some PCP, ("angel dust") had been consumed. But on the way back to town, the young woman driving the car in which Randy and his friend Bill were passengers, somehow lost control of the vehicle. It went off the road, flipped over and landed upside-down in the Salmon River. Trapped in the back seat, Randy drowned in three feet of water. The girl managed to get out of the car, but Bill died too.

They held a rosary for Randy and I was asked to deliver a short eulogy. The next day I was one of his pallbearers.

I no longer hear Beethoven in my head when I drive past Holy Cross on I-805. But I do still hear the stupid songs Randy and I wrote together about people we knew, and every now and then I'll start doodling and find myself drawing "Marching Armand." Don't ask. But we laughed. Oh, boy did we laugh. And sometimes, while shaving or emptying the trash or starting the car, I'll find myself making up a new joke in the old tradition, reflecting wryly that I have now been at this longer than Randy was alive. He's been dead for coming up on 30 years now, and I sometimes feel like he just left the room, and that I can expect him back any minute.

And I know that if he did return, he'd enter laughing. Soon we would both be in stitches.

And no one would get the jokes but us.