My Neighbor Randy

I was cared for by one of the South's greatest heroes, and I had no idea.

On Christmas Eve 2020, I returned home from dropping Bear, my teenager, off with my soon-to-be-ex-husband and didn’t even make it through the first room before I crumpled against the doorframe and began to cry, enormous, heaving sobs wracking my body right there on the floor. Not only were we nine months into a pandemic, but I was six months into a separation-that-was-to-lead-to-a-divorce and this was the first Christmas Eve away from Bear. We’d made this arrangement because I’d just returned home from seeing my side of the family in South Carolina and Bear wanted to spend the next morning with both of us at the home we’d all shared until recently.

It was my first Christmas Eve alone, but for my cat Benny who had been my sole form of tangible comfort as I had been working through the tremendous grief of this breakup in the extreme isolation of the pandemic. I pulled him close, put on Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” (because I enjoy a soundtrack), and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I pulled myself together enough to trudge out the back door, hopeful about trying Christmas as a family even though our marriage was over. We were desperate to hold onto the good things that had kept us trying to make this mismatch work for more than 12 years, and we were still reasoning that, if we just adjusted the parts that weren’t working, we could still have a happy, close family.

It was annihilating what was left of me.

I pushed my back door open and felt a stop. I looked down to find a clear plastic bag of wrapped gifts just outside my storm door.

“Whaaaat is this?” I murmured into the cold.

I pulled the roughly-wrapped boxes out one by one and looked at them before unfolding the note.

It was from Randy, my next door neighbor, an elderly gentleman who greeted me with “Hey white girl!” whenever I saw him even though he, too, was a man whose folks clearly hailed from greater Caucasia. He called himself “The Vampire” because he only came out at night, and clearly suffered from post-Vietnam PTSD, as he always clutched a knife as he took out his trash or traveled back from his car across the 30 ft from his doorstep to the shared parking lot of our apartment building. He was always quick with a witticism or a filthy joke and had teased me about us running off together, although his flirtations were never inappropriate.

Inside the gifts were treasures he’d clearly scrambled to find amongst his hoarded apartment. A book from the mid-80’s about microwave meals. Another about space travel that featured my heroine, Sally Ride And an incredible, reversible Columbia jacket that was the brightest neon pink I’ve still ever seen.

I started sobbing again. It was so perfect. I wore the jacket all day, wrapped in the long, long hug I’d needed for so much of the last year.

Over the next couple years, I’d occasionally wake up to gifts. On Mother’s Day, I found a branch of our landlord/mayor-of-town’s azaleas stuffed into a crystal vase on my doorstep with a note about not letting Mr. Byrne know or he’d be “onto us!” Randy consistently checked in on me, gave me his calling cards, made sure I was eating. When I got a part-time job at a nearby bakery, I started leaving loaves of day-old bread on the doorsteps of my elderly neighbors, but Randy always got a box of cinnamon rolls topped with cream cheese icing as well, just so I could hear him jokingly rage about “some drunken crazy man” who always ate the frosting off at night before Randy could get to them in the morning.

The few times I went to visit Randy in his apartment, my heart hurt for him, too. He looked much much older than his 70 years, and his apartment was a hoard - filth sometimes splattering the walls, bottles of Jack Daniels cluttering corners, piles of clothing and mountains of books blocking the hallways and windows. His place in our historic building faced the sun, but you’d never know it given how dark he kept it. He often talked of going back to work as a pilot, which is why he was holding onto so many polyester suits piled in his bedroom where knife handles protruded from under his mattress. “In case I get jumped…” he explained, never making eye contact.

When I’d ask him about his life, he’d only tell me about the women he’d loved, the weird ones that got away - like his ex who wanted him to act like a dog in the bedroom so he left, but then one of his friends got together with her and loved it apparently. There were never talks about his time in the military, any children, any memories that weren’t silly anecdotes about his love life. He would point to a crinkled postcard on the wall of a topless, huge-haired 80’s model in a neon thong under the words “Missing you in sunny FLORIDA” and wink. “I’m just trying to get back down to see my girlfriend. She’s been naggin’ me.”

I’d notice that, on the nights when I’d come home late, he’d coincidentally take his trash out to the can just as I was getting out of my car, even at 1 AM, with enough time for him to offer the crook of his elbow to walk me the short distance from my door. The nights I walked home from work at the bakery or nearby arts center, his porch light only went off once I closed my front door behind me. There was a caged security light between our building and the back of the property that illuminated the small walkway. Randy had fought to get it installed, and if it burned out, Randy was the first to notice, nagging Mr. Byrne to replace it so “nobody got jumped in the dark.” If I went through a depression and didn’t leave the house for more than a few days, a text from Randy would appear, usually in the form of a joke instead of an inquisition as to whether or not I was alive.

I didn’t put the pieces together until he was gone- that he was acting as a guardian for me.

One morning in spring 2023, his car was crooked in its spot, and our upstairs neighbor Rachel was scrubbing the seats. Randy had had a stroke behind the wheel and was in the hospital. A 30-year-resident of the building and not at all understanding of Randy’s trauma, Rachel was furious at the state of Randy’s apartment; she took it upon herself to purge and clean out his home while he was away. When he came home a month later, Randy was 40 lbs lighter, a shell of himself and too exhausted to feel much of anything about the radical intrusion of his home. A couple months later, he passed.

At the time, I was unwell and had been mostly stuck in bed with Long Covid for many excruciating months since late 2022. I hadn’t had a chance to care for anyone in that time as I was struggling just to hold down a work-from-bed-and-not-in-a-sexy-way job, tend to Bear, and function. My heart ached at not being able to visit or help Randy - someone who lived just on the other side of a wall of my apartment.

I learned of his passing because suddenly, there was a group at his place to collect his things. I stopped a woman about my age to ask about funeral plans. She gave me a time and date, and told me the military would be present, honoring him with some enormous symbolic ceremonies. I was shocked.

“You know he was a war hero, right?” she said.

I didn’t.

“Oh yeah. He airlifted more men out from behind enemy lines than anyone in Vietnam. Got shot down over there and was a POW for a bit. Got some medals. But also, when he came home, he basically invented LifeFlight.”

“The hospital helicopters?”

“Yeah, he and a bunch of pilots he knew were the first to do it in the nation. He also worked for WRAL. He was incredible.”

I don’t remember what I said. It certainly couldn’t’ve been intelligible. As quickly as I could, I got myself in front of a computer to read his obituary.

Randolph Stuart Diuguid “Randy” died on August 11, 2023, age 74 years. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 19, 1948, the son of Blanche Heyser Diuguid and Frank S. Diuguid, Jr., he grew up in Raleigh, was active in the Lutheran Church and in the Boy Scouts of America, achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, and graduated from Broughton High School in 1966. Randy was an avid reader. Beginning in his youth, he had a keen interest in theology and, particularly, the teachings of Martin Luther. He retained an intellectual curiosity throughout his life.

He attended ECU for one year prior to enlisting in the US Army. He trained as an aircraft mechanic and an air traffic controller before being selected for Army Flight School. In March 1969, he graduated as an officer and pilot, and was assigned to the 175th Assault Helicopter Company in Vinh Long, Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta. Randy flew over 1,082 flight hours in combat and was shot down by the North Vietnamese one mile from the Cambodian border in November 1969. After the war he served a year in Stuttgart, Germany, and returned home where he was decorated at Fort Bragg in May 1971 with the Bronze Star, the Air Medal for Heroism, and with the Army Commendation Medal for his war-time service and for the medical evacuation of wounded in Vietnam.

Randy flew with the NC National Guard while continuing his education at NCSU. For the next forty years, he continued in aviation, flying helicopters, turbo-props, and jets all over the globe. He believed in and helped pioneer the LifeFlight concept and spent a significant part of his life saving lives through helicopter medical evacuation. He also flew the SKY 5 TV helicopter from 1982 to 1984. He aided in the development of safe TV helicopters and the use of microwave, reporting from the cockpit, and filming from the air, as well as beaming local news nationally via satellite. In 1984, only five helicopters in TV news nationwide had this capability--SKY 5 was one of these.

Safety was his overriding concern, even at a time when the helicopter industry ran up the worst accident record in aviation history. His helicopter flying encompassed all uses of the helicopter. Trained as a test pilot, he spent five years as a pilot flying for offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico; two years flying off a tuna fishing vessel in the South; fought forest fires in the West, and with the NC Forest Services in 1985; three years as a dedicated LifeFlight pilot; and two more years flying cardiac care LifeFlight—the highest level of helo-medical care. He was a Captain and Chief Test Pilot for the only helicopter airline in the world, Pan Am Helicopter Airways, flying over New York City. In 1986, he was the recipient of an Air Ambassador award for five consecutive life-saving LifeFlights in one day in Tampa, Florida. Overall, he logged over 8,800 flight hours without an accident.

Randy is survived by three brothers, Frank “Scot” Diuguid, III, of Bracey, Virginia; William H. Diuguid and Bruce D. Diuguid, both of Raleigh, North Carolina; and preceded in death by his brother Douglas T. Diuguid.

A graveside memorial service with full military honors will be held at Raleigh Memorial Park, Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 26, 2023, at 10:00 a.m. The attendance of veterans and other service members and the general public, in honor of this veteran’s service to our country, would be greatly appreciated.

I sat, tears flowing freely, reading about his life through the kindnesses shared by his friends and colleagues across Facebook posts, celebrating the life of “Outlaw 13” and shaking my head. I had no idea. I had no idea.

This man lived his life in service to folks right up until he passed, despite the demons that haunted him. I know this because he’d quietly been doing it for me in a season when I needed a hero the very most.

In the month after his death, I brought a bottle of Jack Daniels black label to his stoop and sat to talk with him. I’d never shared a drink with him before, and whiskey isn’t my jam, so I just poured him a little glass with some ice while I told him how much his care meant to me in those first few years of living on my own, how deeply grateful I was for those gifts and his care. I also ranted about how pissed I was that he never told me he was great, but told him how grateful I was that I got to see it for myself. I apologized for being so stuck in my own life’s troubles, I couldn’t give anything back when he needed someone. I hoped he could forgive me.

These days, when I come home late, I ask the ghost of “the vampire” if he’ll watch me walk inside. I tell him about what I’m getting up to, and I laugh at the memory of him listening to my adventures and shaking his head, “mmmmmmmhm! Gonna keep my bail money ready!”

Sometimes I feel insane talking to myself at midnight in a parking lot, but I never feel alone. Randy’s light on the walkway keeps burning, so I never come home in the dark.