Take This Man (11 page)

Presumably, she had used her real name because, in case of a visit, she'd have to present official ID. My mother was listed as Paul's “friend” and next to her name was a
Q
, indicating a questionnaire had been sent to her that required her signature before she could receive formal approval. The prison's annotation points to her name with the word
money
atop it, which certainly means she'd been sending Durant cash. Her mailing address has been redacted from the visitors' sheet, but my mother kept a PO box in Glendale for many years where she'd collect her phone sex checks and singles ad responses. My mother stayed in contact with Durant because she wanted a backup man, but there was bigger game with him, too. Durant could give her something she never felt she had before: legitimacy. As his potential wife, she could be, unquestionably, at last, an American Indian.

When I met Paul Skyhorse Johnson again as a twelve-year-old, I'd mixed up his CV with what my mother had told me over the years about Durant. He sensed my distance but not my confusion. Our first conversation was about prison fights; he'd been in many of them with both guards and convicts.

“I always get the best of 'em,” he said. His laugh burned slow like his Pall Malls, and he made clear, penetrating eye contact over his hump of a bulbous nose.

“Your old dad's a lump head,” he said. “Feel.”

He ran my little fingers through a mist of blackish hair, across a phrenologist's dream of bumps and ridges. “I was mistaken for dead a lot of times. But here I am, a dead man talking to you.”

On his dresser was an arm's-length stack of vintage
Playboy
magazines. “When you get old enough, these magazines will be yours, and you can sell them.” My mother and I were silent, each waiting for the other to lead the conversation. Paul was unsettled. “I know both of you can talk more than this. I had plenty of quiet inside jail. Brando, I want to hear how you're doing in school.”

“I'm doing good,” I said. Pause. “Dad.” I knew he wasn't, but whether I was Candido's son or not, it was time to play along. I sat by his side and tried to make conversation with a man who'd abandoned his own son but who was clearly trying to become some
kind
of father to me.

• • •

Paul stayed several weeks at the convalescent home and introduced me to several of his ward friends, including another wheelchair-bound patient, a man in his seventies whose head resembled a large snowball with a ring of tufted clouds for hair and chin scruff. When we left for lunch, Paul's friend asked me to sneak him back a small order of onion rings, which he paid for with a gentle appreciation and shoulder hugs. After the fourth batch of rings and hugging, Paul asked me not to bring him food unless he paid money for it.

“He's a child molester,” Paul said. “Did time for touching small boys. He won't touch you because he knows I'd ‘take care of him,' but I don't want you going near him.”

I wondered if he was just lying, the way my mother did. But if he wasn't, why would he have introduced me to a pedophile to begin with?

When Paul was discharged, he moved into my grandmother's house with us. He emerged from his cast with a gimp leg and a permanent limp that made my mother wince when he hobbled too far in one direction.

“He takes longer to get up the hill than I do!” my grandmother said.

My mother said to her, “This motherfucker lied to me. He's much older than I am.” They were just a year apart. “If I wasn't going to get a week's honeymoon in Vegas after we get married, I'd kick his ass out.”

The wedding, her third, was at the Circus Circus's Chapel of the Fountain on my mother's thirty-eighth birthday, April 7, 1985. My mother, who never divorced any man, applied for a license with an assumed name and a fake ID.

I was the wedding's sole guest when I stood again to give my mother “away” as I had in the Baha'i ceremony with Robert. “No more weddings for me!” my grandmother had said.

In our group picture, I'm wearing a metallic silver suit with a clip-on necktie and white sneakers. My mother looks dazed, dressed in pink, a color she hated, marrying a man she doesn't love. We're posed on a midnight blue shag mat in front of the altar, in front of a cardboard church backdrop, with Paul holding on to both my mother's and my shoulders for support. My hair is long enough to brush Paul's hand. It's easiest here in this picture to see how people would mistake Paul for my actual father—matching long, dark hair, the same bittersweet orange skin tone, and a similar facial structure around the eyes. His, though, were often pinched, narrowed, squinting, as if focused on some faraway mountain peak.

We had another family picture taken in Las Vegas in the fall of 1986 at a showroom in the Frontier Hotel. It was a double bill of oldies acts Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Righteous Brothers. In those eighteen months, both my mother and I have swelled, saturated with a fat that has rounded out our faces and plumped up my mother's arms. (She hated seeing herself overweight; this is the last photo I have of her.) My mother's hair flows to her bust and has been styled with a crimping iron bought from an infomercial, her primary shopping outlet since she grew afraid of “being fat in public.” I'm wearing plastic eyeglasses, and my genuine smile from the wedding has dissolved into a saccharine smirk. Paul, originally seated on my left, has since been excised from the photo through a clean vertical rip. What remains is his saddle-tan hand on my shoulder, as if he's offering his condolences or steadying me for a hard, coming blow.

• • •

It was ten o'clock on a school night when my mother gave a quick knock on my bedroom door and then barged in. I was twelve years old, hunched over a TV tray loaded with books, reading.

“It's past your bedtime,” she said. “Go to the bar and get your father.”

My mother wasn't a drinker and underestimated what being an alcoholic meant. She had two glasses of champagne on New Year's Eve and then went to bed until late morning. Paul rotated daily among the half dozen bars within walking distance of our house. Little Joy Jr. on the corner was good for pool hustling and a gay cruising spot. A block away, the Short Stop was popular with off-duty police officers, who, as it turned out, were the easiest marks for Paul to hustle. Stadium Bars #1 & #2 were for Dodgers fans brave enough to park on curbs lined with broken passenger car door glass, as if frozen pools of water had been dropped and shattered.

My mother also didn't realize how much Paul hated living with us.

“I'm in a jail worse than the one I was locked up in,” he said to me a month after the wedding. He hadn't once confronted my mother about her phone sex job or me about my “American” upbringing. “This place is run by two hens who want to cut the balls off this rooster. Looks like they already got to you,” he told me. My father was right, I thought. My father was also a total stranger who wasn't even my father. How quickly should I trust him?

Paul's local was The Sunset. With its grenadine neon sun signage and marbled brown stucco exterior, it's the first bar seen in the opening credits for Barbet Schroeder's
Barfly
, a 1987 movie written by Charles Bukowski
.
(When your father's local is the first bar seen in
Barfly
, you
know
how this story's gonna turn out.) Sandwiched like a hunk of bad roast beef between Roy's Market (more
carnicería
—butcher shop—than market) and the Echo Park Trading Post (more pawnshop than trading post), The Sunset was a mix of white and Mexican toughs who'd been softened up by age, disillusionment, and cirrhosis, and out-of-area slummers looking for a dive bar with gums but no teeth. It was here that Paul found his greatest success as a pool hustler, or, as he called himself, a “professional gambler,” who earned money through hours-long pool games and tricking people in the hoariest of bar bets. Paul tried teaching me a few of them, most involving cigarettes, playing cards, and number memorization, but I was never as impressed as he wanted me to be.

“Too bad we don't have a pool table at the house,” he said. “You could finally realize I'm good at something.”

I sat on the curb outside the bar for an hour, blackening my palms and the ass of my jeans, praying that Paul would come out on his own. He didn't. I was more terrified of going back to my mother empty-handed than of whatever was in the bar, so I sucked in air like I was about to dive underwater and then rushed the front door. Thick, pilled velvet curtains with cigarette smoke and BO trapped in their folds parted to reveal murky blue and red lights undulating over my head. Noise and smoke everywhere, it was impossible to breathe. Then someone shouted, “
Get that fucking kid out of here
!
” and I was pushed back out the door and onto the street.

Paul limped after me aided by his cane with a duck bill's head.

“Tell your mom to stop treating you like a dog,” he said. “She already treats me like one. Go home. I'm making money for her to spend.” If Paul had a good night's winnings, he'd stumble back before midnight. If he lost, he'd drink until close. He was simultaneously an irresponsible drunk and a practical manager of his money.

“What do you mean you left him there?” my mother said. “You can't take on one crippled old man? What the hell good are you? Go back there and
wait
for him.”

I sat on the curb outside the bar past midnight, yawning, trying to stay awake. When he came out, tipsy, I drifted alongside, unacknowledged, a phantom son.

The crooked stairs to our house, perched atop a slanted hill, gave Paul trouble sober, so tonight he decided to scale the sliding right angle of our front lawn. He staggered to his feet on the grass, but then he twisted his bum leg, tumbling him through dry, ashy weeds down to a retaining wall like a broken top. His cane flew like a javelin. Finally, Paul let me help him crawl up the hill on his hands and knees. Our neighbors across the street watched and laughed from darkened porches.

A stench of sweat, dead grass, dirt, cigarette smoke, and alcohol floated with us like a noxious fog. “You smell like a drunk,” my grandmother said to me and then steered Paul onto my mother's empty bed, where he slurri-naded my grandmother with Ray Charles's and Willie Nelson's duet “Seven Spanish Angels” before passing out. My mother had lost interest in Paul the moment he hit the front lawn and was asleep on the couch. She didn't really want Paul. She just wanted him home.

When my grandmother closed his bedroom door, I asked her why people were laughing at Paul.

“He's a
payaso
,” she said.
“A clown. Everybody laughs at clowns.”

• • •

On my sixth-grade graduation day, I plucked out pins from a cellophane-wrapped stabby-collared shirt, tugged at an asphyxiating clip-on tie, squeezed into pinching-sharp dress shoes, and assembled, with a small multiethnic chorus, at the front of our graduating class to sing the refrain from “We Are the World.” I was chosen for volume, not ability. When I auditioned in front of our music teacher, Mr. Farina, he said, “That's not singing, that's shouting.”

Paul stood and nodded his head when I received my diploma, his face inscrutable. At the edge of the auditorium was a cluster of parents unable to find seats. Who was that man in the corner, holding his fingers up to his lips and going “Shhh”? Was it Frank? Had he figured out when my graduation was and, as if in a Disney movie, appeared when I needed him most?

No. He wasn't there. He either didn't know the date or stayed away because of Paul, but that didn't matter. Like the child of a divorced parent, I started to realize that his being in my life depended just as much on his relationship with my mother as it did with me. I kept expecting him to think like a father. Instead, he acted the way my grandmother said men acted.

“They never do what you want them to do,” she said. “Only boys follow orders.”

In a warm, shady courtyard, my classmates and I shuffled autograph books among us, signing assorted colored pages with pens that didn't work, scrawling phone numbers and promises to K.I.T. in crooked lettering.

“You can't just sign your name in an autograph book!” a friend told me. “That's just for famous people. You have to write something.”

Somebody handed me Nina's autograph book. Nina was Vietnamese, with large, inky black eyes and an unflattering Prince Valiant done at home bowl cut that hadn't changed since second grade. She wore a white and saffron dress, socks with a doily fringe around her ankles, and shined patent leather shoes.

I retuned her autograph book with a signature that overflowed the entire folded paper triangle. “You're not supposed to write a whole book, Brando!” she said.

Nina, along with most of my friends, applied to a gifted and talented program at a junior high in the San Fernando Valley, so I did the same, ignorant of the forty-minute bus trip to Granada Hills. Out of habit, I forged my mother's signature on the school application in the same way I'd signed my own report cards since second grade.

“You don't need to prove to me how smart you are,” she had always said, dismissing my grades with a wave and a laugh.

Junior high, I'd learn, was a collection of kids who didn't know who the fuck they were, all of a sudden desperately trying to believe or convince others they knew
exactly
who they were. Those warm months before seventh grade were ripe for summertime Cinderellas. Ugly-duckling sixth graders shed baby fat and stupid clothes, maturing into gawky young adults with too much confidence and makeup. I gained thirty pounds, transforming from cute sixth grader with an Indian name to an overweight four-eyed seventh-grade blob with a mullet. My father's “legal” last name, Johnson, was now my last name too. At my almost-all-white suburban San Fernando Valley school, my records transfer caused Skyhorse to slide to my middle name.