This is not good news. My brave friend Randy Hoffman, who I met in 2017 in the back of an ambulance when I joined the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association, has died. He died this week of blood cancer, which knocked him down only this past winter, after he had heroically fought his way back from an incredibly difficult quadriplegic paralysis following a routine spinal surgery gone wrong in December 2019. How one remarkable person — who had done so much good and burned so brightly — could be stricken by such a chain of cruel fate, I really don’t understand. Randy never did do anything small.
“Maverick” is a kind of stupid adjective to apply to a man; it’s almost been ruined by advertisements for beer and pickups. But that’s the word that comes into my mind the morning after hearing the bad news from another former member of E.H.V.A.A. on Sunday night. I never knew Randy that well, but when you ride together in the emergency services, you form a bond of kinship that is evident and undeniable. And then, too, Randy was honestly unforgettable.
He was really handsome, for one thing, like Harrison Ford. He raced vintage motorcycles, listened to classic punk, and built beautiful modernist cabinetry in his woodworking shop. With derring-do, he performed as an E.M.S. “critical care” paramedic, both volunteer and paid, working in one year or another since 2006 for the volunteer departments in Springs, Amagansett, Montauk, Sag Harbor, and East Hampton Village.
Randy cared for thousands and thousands of patients, running thousands and thousands of calls. Think about how many people he helped, in ways very practical, hands-on, and often very intimate, during moments of utmost vulnerability. He would run two or three times the number of calls per year than the average E.M.T. Randy just was not average in any sense of the word. He would be the first to tell you he didn’t necessarily perform every duty entirely by the book, but he always treated the patients with respect, whether they were a homeless person who’d hit their head on a curb passing out drunk or a Fortune 500 C.F.O. who had cut their hand while barbecuing. He took everyone seriously. He gave the job his heart and he passed along his skills to newcomers like me. He had many “saves.” He didn’t suffer stupidity or mince words. I can see him sort of squinting his eyes in a sly Han Solo half-mouth wry expression, shrugging with his face, when someone said something stupid on a car-accident call or during a membership meeting.
What happened to Randy with his paralysis is tangled up in my memory with the pandemic. He went into a two-hour procedure at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York in December 2019, to address a pinched nerve in his neck, and woke up 30 hours later paralyzed from the neck down. “There was some bleeding around the spinal cord that caused pressure and put me into spinal shock,” he explained to The Star in 2020. He could literally move one finger. The doctors said he’d never walk again; he told the doctors they were wrong. He went into acute rehabilitation and, by January, was transferred to San Simeon, a sub-acute rehab facility at Greenport. “At this point I’ve regained most of the use of my right arm and quite a bit in my left arm,” he reported on Facebook. “I’m now beginning to regain some movement in my left leg but the right is still lagging. THIS IS ALL GOOD NEWS!”
The very last public gathering I attended before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown was the Pasta With a Purpose fund-raiser held for Randy’s benefit on March 7, 2020, at the Bridgehampton Fire Department. The air was nervous with fear of the virus and I remember lingering outside with a creeping sense we shouldn’t be gathering indoors in large groups, but this was before we understood the virus was primarily airborne, so no one wore a mask. My kids and I joined a throng eating spaghetti in a room filled with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and balloons. In the door-prize raffle, I won, of all things, a gift certificate to have my face injected with Botox or something at a medi-spa in Bridgehampton; I never had a chance to use it (not that I would have, anyway). I know Randy felt weird about being the recipient of others’ attention, much less charity. I mean, the man was a critical-care provider who raced a 1948 Velocette and a vintage Vincent Grey Flash (like the motorbike in the Richard Thompson song “1952 Vincent Black Lightening”). He was used to being the one doing the good deeds, and doing them with swashbuckling bravado.
On June 19 of that lockdown year, we rolled the ambulances past his house with lights flashing to welcome him home to East Hampton from his months at San Simeon, in a parade of vehicles from the police departments and every ambulance corps from Bridgehampton to Montauk. We followed Randy’s improvement via his posts on social media. Now he was standing. Then walking with two canes, then walking with one cane. Designing and building a cane with a stiletto dagger hidden under the palm. Getting up, without assistance, from the floor to standing. Building cabinets again. Taking calls again in the ambulance. Machine-tooling things like specialized bolts for motorcycles. Riding a bicycle by August 2022. Riding a motorcycle. Casting mechanical engine parts with some specialized casting process I didn’t understand, involving wax and poured metal. More than four years into recovery from paralysis, Randy raced an MJC Special, a pedigree sidecar motorcycle, at Roebling Road Raceway in Georgia; at the Pittsburg International Race Complex in September, and at the Barber Vintage Festival meet in October in Alabama, finishing second in his class.
Then, last winter, a shocking announcement: Randy had a rare blood cancer called primary myelofibrosis. “WHAT?!” he posted on Facebook.
What?! Doctors found a donor for a stem-cell transplant and, according to Randy, he was lined up for 10 days of radiation on the spleen, a week of chemotherapy, and received a donor’s tissue two days after Christmas. “Enjoy every moment and don’t hesitate,” Randy wrote on Facebook. He lost his hair and cut it into a mohawk. He was building a Norvin — a combination Norton frame with a Vincent engine — and planning to race again at the New Jersey Motorsports Park when he went back to Stony Brook Hospital for an infection on June 16. He had “yet another” transfusion on July 3. I’m sure he must have complained to those closest to him; what mortal wouldn’t? But I never heard or saw him complain. Among his hashtags on social media were #SpinalCordInjurySurvivor, #LetsGoRacing, and #IKnowICan.
It seems to me a good thing that my own kids came to that spaghetti supper at the Bridgehampton firehouse back in 2020, because they knew who it was for, and they understood why Randy was a hero, and especially to be emulated for his bravery. What will our town do as fewer and fewer residents step forward to serve as he did? To Randy’s children, sister, family, and fellow E.M.T.s I send heartfelt condolences.