Randy and Bullet

Randy, 63, likes to remind people to reflect on the fact that nearly everyone is a paycheck away from being homeless. Therefore, people are too quick to judge those who find themselves without a home or a safety net, he told me one day, sitting next to the trolley line downtown.

Randy was born and raised in San Diego, a graduate of Sweetwater High. His father was a carpet installer and his mother was a waitress. His mother eventually bought a restaurant and it nearly killed her managing it, Randy said. As a boy he remembers helping her bread chicken for chicken fried steaks. His father ended up managing an apartment complex for 35 years, doing all the construction, plumbing, etc. Randy learned those skills from his father, developing a knack for roofing and framing that served him well later in life. In high school he took advanced algebra and in college he studied calculus, developing a love for anything that involved math.

When he was a teenager, then-president Nixon was talking about reinstating the draft. His father, a veteran, told Randy he would be wise to enlist and thereby choose his preferred branch of the military. He was a long haired surfer at the time, so he chose the Merchant Marines with a promise to be stationed in Hawaii. “I was in Hawaii for two whole days before they shipped us off to Saigon,” he said. They were in charge of ushering people fleeing the fighting onto transport ships in the harbor. “People were just tossing babies to us. I swam past things in that water that you couldn’t even believe if I described them,” he added.

Because he and his fellow Merchant Marines were in good shape, the visiting E-6s who came to Saigon looking for new recruits from all branches of the military were all over them. Randy chose to go with the Army Rangers so he could jump out of airplanes. “In four years I did 129 or 130 jumps,” he said.

“One time we did a night drop into a forest of pine trees,” Randy told me. It was dark, so when the team did a roll call and one person didn’t respond, he went searching for the missing Ranger with a flashlight. They found him in a tree, with a branch going all the way through his body, back to front. “We got him down, and the branch hadn’t touched any vital organs. He was jumping again two days later.” A lot of those problems can be avoided now that they have foil chutes that the jumper can be steer.

Randy was 23 when he completed his four years of service. His daughter was eight weeks old. His son was born two years later. Because he served but didn’t retire from the military he wasn’t eligible for a pension, so he attended Coleman College and in 1981 good a job in Houston working on disc drives for large corporations like Exxon and ADT. He shook his head at the way sensitive personal information was handled back then. Sometimes they would be called in to fix a paper jam and whole stacks of payroll checks would be wedged somewhere in a printer.

He arranged a transfer to Irvine because he missed San Diego. But that commute and long hours were taking a toll on his marriage. He eventually left that job and started doing construction so he could work in San Diego. One day he was doing clean up at a site, and noticed one of the designers trying to understand the readings on a calculator. Randy recognized it as the same calculator he’d used in college, so he explained to the man how to measure the proper pitch on some trestles he was building. The designer turned out to be the foreman, who hired Randy on the spot as his assistant, doubling his salary. All good construction jobs end, however, when a project is complete. Though Randy always found a way to pay the bills and even save some money, his marriage broke up in 1987. He started drinking too much and got a DUI in 1992.

A fellow veteran on the street rolled up in a wheelchair while we were talking. Randy immediately grabbed the hamburger he had just bought and handed it to his friend, assuring him he hadn’t touched it and wasn’t even hungry. Randy continued with his story. Doing construction jobs and working on people’s cars not only kept him afloat by was a source of joy, he said. “Give me a Harley and the parts, and a six-pack of Sam Adams… basically if you give me a weekend, I’ll give you a bike,” Randy laughed.

He doesn’t want to talk about the details, but Randy admits he was in a biker club from 2005 to 2016, and that not only formed his identity but consumed much of his daily life. He got in primarily because his brother was in a club. He left when he got beat up by a new guy who didn’t like him. Riding his bike home from that encounter in San Bernardino, he said his face was bleeding so much that the cars behind him had to use their windshields.

It was about that time he broke up with his long-time girlfriend, who was also in the biker life. They had been together for 16 years, but merely co-existing for the last few. They had a disagreement over a gun, and she moved out, leaving him with the bills. He wasn’t making enough money at the time to pay the lease, so he stayed in his daughter’s garage until the day she sold his Harley without his permission because “she didn’t want to pay the insurance.” He still hasn’t forgiven her. Without his bike he has no transportation when someone asks him to help work on their bikes, or on a construction job.

He leased a car so he could drive for Uber, but wasn’t making enough money to keep the car.

He tried to get into the veteran’s tent shelter and walked all the way from the Sports Arena area to VVSD headquarters on Pacific Coast Highway, where the person at the door told him he needed to register at the tent. He asked for a ride back down there on the VVSD shuttle but was told since he wasn’t in one of their programs he wasn’t allowed in the van. He walked all the way back. They were serving dinner when he got there, so he asked for a plate and was denied. A friend who was in the program appeared and said he’d get him a plate, but was told by a staff person that if he got a plate of food for Randy, he would love his bed in the shelter.

After working security for several years at Stand Down, the annual event for homeless veterans, in 2018, he attended as a participant. He found that he was good at being homeless. He had three places he slept where he felt secure. The people who owned businesses nearby knew they could trust him to keep the place clean and keep drug dealers away.

At one point an outreach group got him into an SRO, the Clairemont Hotel. He woke up in the middle of the night covered in bedbugs and threw the mattress out the window. “I’ve been in the jungle and seen stuff you wouldn’t believe,” Randy said. “But bedbugs scare me.” He went back to the street, but three months later the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. He was offered a bed in various shelters, but his recent experience made him isolate outdoors instead. “My tent and my dog and that’s all I want,” he said.

Currently a representative from the group Brilliant Corners is trying to help him navigate the paperwork to parlay his monthly social security check into a housing unit partially funded by the Veterans Assistance Supportive Housing (VASH) program. In the meantime, he and his dog Bullet are living at a different SRO downtown, one that doesn’t have bedbugs.