The Life of Saint Randolph

One Good Friday, Randy crucified a lizard in the schoolyard with Popsicle sticks and push pins. By age fourteen he was an avowed atheist, yet entered a Benedictine monastery until he was expelled for heresy. He liked to piss in the Church's baptismal font and tell elaborate lies in the confessional. His father was a petty criminal, his mother a hopeless schizophrenic. Randy, himself, was committed to a mental hospital on several occasions when we were in high school. This memoir is a record of our life-long friendship, compiled from dusty old memories, letters, and photographs. While I pursued a career in writing and teaching, Randy achieved world-wide fame as an insect physiologist and author of several definitive works on the lives of bees and wasps. -David Ohle, 2024