Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: A Memoir

By Randall Neece

Randall Neece had it all - a successful career in television, a perfect marriage to his husband, Joe, and a future that was all mapped out. That map was suddenly run through a shredder when Randy was diagnosed with AIDS at a time when there was no hope of survival.

Yet, something remarkable happened. Guided by Joe's love and commitment, and by tackling obstacles and facing his own fears, Randy realized that he had found a place he'd forgotten existed. He found a placed called tomorrow.

Written with humor and unflinching honesty, Randy's story unveils the triumph of the human spirit and reflects the true meaning of love, companionship, and marriage. Gone Today, Here Tomorrow is an inspirational love story for our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798823021081

Randall Neece

Randall Neece has created, produced and directed a diverse range of programs and documentaries for broadcast television and education. His work as a producer and director has been honored with more than twenty national and international awards including an Emmy Award for the AIDS drama Secrets, winner for Outstanding Achievement: Children's or Youth Special. Neece has co--created several game shows, and also produced and directed shows for CBS, NBC, Lifetime Television, The Family Channel, and for Syndication. He lives near Malibu, California with his husband, Joe Timko. Together, they own and operate Canyon View Ranch for Dogs.

Book preview

GONE TODAY,

HERE TOMORROW

A MEMOIR

RANDALL NEECE

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2024 Randall Neece. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   01/24/2024

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2109-8 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2110-4 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2108-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024901469

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Song lyric excerpts are used by permission from the publishers.

He Touched Me by Ira Levin and Milton Schafer

What I Did for Love by Marvin Hamlisch

That’s Life by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon

Cover designed by Melissa Yoes and Victor Mingovits

To Joe, who always lives for today

and believes in the bright promises of tomorrow.

And to our Max, a little dog who

made big dreams come true.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Yesterday

PART ONE

Before yesterday

Chapter 1

Life in Ozzie and Harrietville

Chapter 2

On the Avenue I’m takin’ ya to, Next stop, Puberty Street!

Chapter 3

A Solid Six

Chapter 4

I’m a Yankee Doodle Randy

Chapter 5

From Mothballs to Disco Balls

Chapter 6

The Parent Crap

Chapter 7

Life’s a Game

Chapter 8

The Stars and the Moon, and the Boom Boom Room

Chapter 9

The Devil Can Cite Scripture for His Purpose

Chapter 10

The Only Way Round Is Through

Chapter 11

Once Upon a Time

Chapter 12

In Good Times and Bad

Chapter 13

Calls in the Night

Chapter 14

Stormy Weather

PART TWO

Gone Today

Chapter 15

Rides on the Midway

Chapter 16

Trouble with a Capital T

Chapter 17

Memo to Pat Robertson: My end is near. Kiss It!

Chapter 18

Promises to Keep

Chapter 19

Loose Ends

Chapter 20

Let’s Make a Deal

Chapter 21

Heads, I win. Tails, I lose.

PART THREE

Here Tomorrow

Chapter 22

The Turning Point

Chapter 23

We Went to a Garden Party

Chapter 24

Canyon View Ranch

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PROLOGUE

Yesterday

JULY 19, 1988

I COULDN’T SHAKE the strange mood I was in from last night and sat staring out the window during the entire flight back home to Los Angeles, lost in my thoughts. Yesterday began like all the others, another perfect day in paradise. The water was as warm as the air and so blue it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. It was a blissful ending to our honeymoon on the island of Kauai.

We spent our last day snorkeling around coral reefs and sitting on the sunbaked sand hoping to spot a sea turtle or a school of dolphins. After a few days in the tropical sun, Joe’s olive Italian skin had become so tan that he could have been mistaken for an Islander. My skin stayed so white that people would shade their eyes from the glare as they walked by. We looked like a pair of salt and pepper shakers sitting there on the sand, but after five years together I was used to the differences between us, and skin tone was just one of the many.

We decided to have a wedding on the fifth anniversary of the day we had met, followed by ten romantic days on the island of Kauai. As usual, Joe was always on the move, waking at five in the morning and rushing off to the resort’s gym for several hours each day, with the body to prove it, while I crawled out of bed at around eight with the excuse that I was allergic to exercise—also with the body to prove it.

I would sit under an umbrella and read a book from sunup to sundown, while Joe would get through the first page of his book and then go for a long jog along the beach.

There were two television sets in our suite with mine usually tuned to CNN and Joe’s usually tuned to a rerun of I Love Lucy, while he laughed at the same lines he had heard a hundred times before. It was a perfect honeymoon and we were having the time of our lives. Not a care in the world.

And then came our last night.

We set off on a hike all the way to the top of a cliff to watch the sunset one last time before heading home the next day, and arrived just in time to see the sun melting into the ocean and fiery clouds so vivid that they looked as if they had been processed through Photoshop. As we stood there taking in all the beauty, a sudden overwhelming feeling of despair hit me with an invisible fist to my soul. The sunset blurred as tears began filling my eyes, and I couldn’t understand why this was suddenly happening. I had made it all the way through the wedding and then our honeymoon in good spirits. So why now? Why this sudden wave of sorrow that seemed to come out of nowhere?

And then it all made sense.

The beauty of this island became a painful reminder that there were far fewer months and years ahead of me now, and we would never again return to Kauai and experience this moment together, or see a thousand other dreams fulfilled.

This wasn’t at all the way I had mapped out the rest of my life; the rest of our lives. I was supposed to become a television director and Joe was going to run our enterprises. We would own a big house with lots of dogs running around and maybe even a few horses. But now that I had tested positive for HIV with no hope of survival, I felt as if I had been handed my death sentence and that map of our future was suddenly run through a shredder.

Joe saw that I was somewhere else and put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t say a word. He just took hold of my left hand and touched the wedding band around my finger, reminding me of the words engraved inside: Grow old along with me.

Inside Joe’s band the inscription read: The best is yet to be.

PART ONE

BEFORE YESTERDAY

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

The important thing is not to stop questioning."

ALBERT EINSTEIN

CHAPTER 1

Life in Ozzie and

Harrietville

THE 1950’s

GREENLEAF AVENUE WAS the kind of neighborhood where you could borrow a neighbor’s lawn mower if yours was broken. Hell, for a quarter any kid on the block would mow the lawn for you and rake up your leaves too. I had allergies, so my job was to clean our pool and a couple of the other neighbors’ pools for a dollar each. It paid to be allergic to grass.

I was born and raised in southern California in the early fifties and spent the summer months with my friends swimming in our pool or going to the beach for the day, which was about forty-five minutes away. I was slightly pudgy as a young boy, a towhead with freckles and lily-white skin that would turn bright red after about twenty minutes in the sun. My hair was as white as snow and sheared in a flattop haircut with Butchwax to make it stand up in front. I looked like a radish with the top chopped off.

When it came to sports, I was always the last to be picked to be on a team when the captain got stuck with me by default. My older brother loved baseball and tried valiantly to turn me into a Dodger fan by tossing a ball back and forth with me on the front lawn, but all I really wanted to do was produce a play in the garage and star in it too.

Like most of the neighborhoods in the area, our little cul-de-sac street of fourteen houses was once an orange grove, but acre by acre it was turning into Ozzie and Harrietville with young mothers and fathers raising their baby boomers. On our street alone there were forty-seven kids all under the age of ten, so we were big business for the milkman who came by as the sun was coming up, the Helms Bakery man who came by around mid-morning, and the ice cream man who showed up every afternoon at four o’clock sharp with his truck chiming Pop Goes the Weasel as he drove up the street.

My parents paid $14,000 for our three-bedroom house, and my father lived there for the rest of his life until he passed away 55 years later. He owned Whittier Paint and Wallpaper and worked six days a week mixing paint while my mother ran the wallpaper department.

Our second home was Granada Heights Friends Church. It was a Quaker church, but we didn’t dress like the guy on the container of Quaker Oats—we were just a normal family who wore normal clothes. The minister, Verl Lindley, and his wife, Lois, started the church in an old American Legion Hall in town and our family was the first to join.

At the crack of dawn every Sunday morning, we’d pile into our ‘56 green-and-white Buick and show up at the hall early to sweep the floors and pick up the beer bottles left over from the American Legion meeting the night before. Verl and Lois also had three children, and their youngest daughter, Joyce, was my best friend at church. Everyone was sure that little Randy Neece and Joyce Lindley would grow up and get married to each other one day, and have lots of kids.

As the small congregation of Friends grew, Dad became the choir director and Mom was the church secretary. I could understand my mother’s contribution to the church since she once worked as a secretary at the Goodrich tire factory before she got married and had kids, but my father didn’t read a note of music and could barely sing. What he was doing standing up there leading the small ten-member choir is still a mystery to me.

Despite my resentment toward organized religion as I got older, I cannot imagine what my childhood or our family would have been like without that church. During the forty-five years Verl served as our pastor, he performed the wedding ceremonies of my brother to his wife, Marilyn, and my sister to her husband, Jeff. Verl and Lois were with us in the hospital as my mother took her last breath and wept with us as they said goodbye to their lifelong friend, with Verl presiding at her funeral and memorial service. A year later, he officiated at the wedding of my father to his wife, Juliana.

Verl is now in his late eighties and is retired from the pulpit. Two years ago he spoke at Juliana’s memorial service, and a few months later, he stood before the same congregation and spoke at my father’s service.

Joyce went on to marry another guy from church and they became missionaries in some remote corner of the world—along with their five children. Not much has changed about the church except that it now sits on five acres of land and has hundreds of families in the congregation. And there’s not a single beer bottle on the floor.

* * *

Trevor Taylor was my best friend and lived a few houses up the street. Mark Russell and his brother Charlie also lived up the block, and the four of us formed a club we called the Wildcats. We built a clubhouse out of scraps of lumber and plywood behind the Russell’s garage. Someone donated an old worn out rug for the dirt floor, Mark made the sign, Charlie slapped on paint, Trevor hung gunny sacks on the windows for curtains, and my big contribution was building the clubhouse door. It was an unsightly shack, but to us it was a thing of beauty. It was our castle!

Mark, Charlie, Trevor, and I had our share of fights, as all kids do. But while other boys usually resolved their disputes by shoving each other until one went down, I had a more novel approach. I would unscrew the clubhouse door from its hinges and take it home.

To get to the clubhouse, you had to walk down the Russell’s driveway, past their kitchen to the back of garage where it stood. Mark and Charlie, and their parents, George and Jan, would be sitting at their kitchen table having a nice evening meal together, when suddenly they’d see me come charging up their driveway with a screwdriver in hand. They would sit and watch me out their kitchen window and nobody would say a word. Then, a few minutes later I would come stomping back down their driveway dragging the clubhouse door behind me.

After a few silent beats, their father, George, would turn to Mark and Charlie, and ask, Did you boys have another fight today?

They’d look at each other and just shrug their shoulders.

I don’t know, Mark would answer.

I guess so, Charlie would add.

And then they would all go back to eating dinner as if nothing had ever happened.

Most of the time we really didn’t do much inside the clubhouse but sit around and talk, and play Go Fish. Then we’d get bored and go outside for a game of hide-and-go-seek—which I loved—or a game of baseball or football with the other neighborhood kids—which I hated.

We published the Wildcat Clubhouse newsletter and sold it to the neighbors for a nickel, and we washed cars and mowed lawns to raise money to go to the movies or to play miniature golf now and then. But we always seemed to be short on cash to do all the things we wanted to do. I had an idea for a way we could make lots of money.

We could put on a show in my garage! I said leaping up off the ratty old rug on the clubhouse floor. I began to pace. We could sell tickets. And with all the money we’d make, we could go to other neat places like the zoo and Skateland. And then I added the pièce d’résistance. Maybe we could even go to Disneyland!

Disneyland had opened just a few years earlier and that caught them hook, line, and sinker.

Trevor, Mark, and Charlie voted unanimously to go along with my idea, and a major fundraiser on Greenleaf Avenue was born. The headline in our next Wildcat Newsletter proudly announced:

LIVE! ON STAGE! ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY!

PINOCCHIO starring the Wildcats

Limited Seating, so get your tickets early!

The first thing we needed was a script, so my mother set up the card table in the family room, opened the black box containing a Royal typewriter, and she and I began to hammer out the script. Soon we were into rehearsals, and the four of us sold tickets for ten cents to every kid for blocks around.

Bedspreads were used as curtains, and my sister painted the sets and scenic backdrops. The night before the big performance, I remember standing all alone on stage, practicing my bow before rows of picnic benches and patio chairs that lined the driveway. I could almost hear the cheering crowds that would soon fill the theater. Tomorrow was the big day. It was Showtime!

I thought my casting was quite good. I played the starring role, of course, and also produced and directed the play. Mark played the part of Geppetto and also doubled as one of the bad boys along with Trevor. Poor Charlie got stuck playing the part of Pinocchio’s fairy Godmother. I thought he was stunning in the role, and even though his wand kept breaking, he never dropped a line. What a Trouper!

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At the curtain call, everyone in the audience leapt to their feet. Unfortunately, they couldn’t wait for it to be over so they could race home to watch Spin and Marty on the Mickey Mouse Club. A few even demanded their dimes back.

As if I hadn’t already suffered enough rejection from the audience, the cast complained bitterly that I was too bossy. Charlie threw his broken wand to the ground, and as he was taking off his fairy Godmother dress he had the audacity to tell me that he preferred mowing lawns and washing cars for his Skateland money, thank-you-very-much.

And so, as fast as the curtain went up, it came down on the Wildcat Clubhouse Theater, forever. But that wasn’t the end of my career in showbiz. It was only the beginning.

I organized other events such as carnivals and bicycle parades, and spent days constructing floats which consisted of sheets of plywood on wagons. Then I would cover them with crepe-paper flowers. One of my more elaborate creations was when the girl next door played Betsy Ross sewing an American Flag while riding atop my Fourth of July float. All the older kids, who were too cool to be in the parade, would stand along the curb with the parents and cheer as we proudly marched by.

As we got older, my friends no longer cared about parades or plays. All they wanted to do was spend the afternoons playing baseball or a game of football on the fenceless row of front lawns. I retreated to my back yard with my menagerie of rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, my spider monkey Tina (named after my grandmother), and best of all, my dog Daisy, who loved me just the way I was.

I desperately wanted to fit in and even tried out for Little League once. But after a year of striking out and sitting on the bench, I traded in my cleats for a pair of tap shoes and signed up at a nearby dance studio. I was the only boy in the class.

My friends were pretty cool about me taking tap dancing lessons—at least to my face. Only Robbie Carmichael’s mom seemed to have a concern about it. I overheard Barbara Carmichael whisper to another neighbor, If you ask me . . . little boys just shouldn’t be taking tap dancing lessons!

CHAPTER 2

On the Avenue I’m takin’ ya to,

Next stop, Puberty Street!

THE 1960’s

GROWING UP IN a Quaker household, sex was never a subject of conversation. Sex Ed consisted of a father-and-son meeting one evening at Starbuck Junior High School with approximately three hundred other pimply red-faced boys and their dads to watch a film about puberty. About the only thing I learned from the movie was that my voice would deepen and I was going to start sprouting hair in lots of different places besides my head. I think my dad was kind of embarrassed by the whole evening too, because I don’t recall either of us saying a word to each other during the whole drive home.

By the time I was thirteen, I still hadn’t felt that certain spark for girls. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. On the contrary, I often felt more comfortable around girls than around other boys. Two of my very best friends were Jenny Hall, who lived next door, and Joyce Lindley, at church. They were girls, so maybe there was hope. But I didn’t get that fluttery feeling for them, or for any girl—not the way all the other boys seemed to feel. Jenny and Joyce were more like sisters.

I tried to be as normal as possible, which included taking Joyce to Disneyland on our first and only date. My father drove us to the park and dropped us off, and then picked us up at the front entrance later that night. I walked her to her front door while Dad drove around the block. After giving Joyce a quick peck on the lips, I said, Well, goodbye. See ya tomorrow in Sunday School.

It might have helped in my efforts to be a boyfriend if I had been a little more informed by my parents, or at least by my friends, especially when it came to filling me in on matters of sex. For instance, I knew a penis was also