Take This Man (13 page)

Had a father—
my
father—finally protected me? I tiptoed to my room, afraid that peace in our house was a delicate glass I'd drop and shatter if I made any sound above a whisper, and started to unpack. Then, in the midst of my gratitude, I wondered, why had Paul told my mother about my tests at all? Why not lecture me separately? It took awhile before I fully understood what the lesson was. My father wasn't mad that I'd cheated. He was mad I got caught.

• • •

Paul had been living with us for about a year and a half when he earned enough money hustling to buy a two-door brown Ford Maverick with black plumber's tape trim. It was a car that needed fixing up to become a lemon.

My grandmother hated it. “I don't need cars. I take Brando everywhere on the bus,” she said. She knew she couldn't compete with four wheels and a man.

“It's time you got out of the hens' nest,” Paul said to me. “Just you and your ‘dear old dad.'”

I called Paul “dear old Dad” after hearing the cartoon dog Augie Doggie use that phrase. Paul was the first man I lived with that felt comfortable calling himself my dad all the time. I knew Candido was my biological father, but that revelation didn't change my life at all. The word
father
was something I attached to a relationship, not to any one particular person, and I decided I'd keep using that word on someone until it stuck. Finding out about my real dad that was nowhere in my life didn't mean nearly as much as a fake dad that could be present every day.

Manhood lessons began that summer. We spent late afternoons drifting in the slow lane, eating McDonald's supersized Value Packs for an early dinner, listening to 1950s oldies that Paul remembered from his childhood (the tinkling piano opening of Johnny Ace's “Pledging My Love” moved him to tears), and installing car parts outside the local Thrifty while I fended off the fire ants that swarmed the parking lot. There was rust in the sky as Paul stared off at a concrete wall opposite the lot and reminisced about fun things he did growing up: street fighting, popping off fly balls in the park, shooting his BB gun.

“A boy needs a gun,” Paul said. “You ever been in a fight?” he asked, and held up his palms.

“Show me how you'd hit someone,” he said. I jabbed with a balled fist.

“Don't do that,” he said, motioning to how my thumb was stuck inside my enclosed fist. “You'll break your thumbs doing that. Next time you get in an argument, don't say anything. Take a swing first.”

I had shelves of books, games, and stuffed animals, but since Nina moved away, I'd made just one best friend in junior high. Daniel rode the same school bus to the valley but lived in a grittier area wedged between Echo Park, Westlake, and downtown near the shadows cast by soaring freeway overpasses. Dandruff dusted the shoulders of his fake Members Only jacket, and a Milky Way constellation of whiteheads inflamed his face. He named his backpack “Anthony” and gave me “thigh crushers” when we sat next to each other on the school bus.

“
That's
the best
friend you could find?” Paul asked.

Paul was driving us home when he stopped at a strip mall auto parts store. Daniel squeezed my thigh. He smiled, waiting for me to squirm away in laughter. I threw a punch that glanced off the side of his head. I met Paul's eyes in the rearview and punched Daniel again, this time in the shoulder. Again, I didn't connect. Daniel cowered with his arms over his head, stunned, and waited for me to finish sliding my punches off his back and onto the seat cushion.

We dropped off Daniel a half hour later. He cheerfully waved good-bye without a bruise on him.

“Did you see our fight?” I asked Paul, expecting to check “Get in fight” off my manhood list.

“You were getting some good shots on him,” he said. “He wasn't fighting back. You were in control. I would have stepped in if it'd gotten too bad. Maybe we should get you some boxing gloves and go to a gym?”

Gloves?
A
gym
? I hadn't expected to “fight” again, let alone every time I had an argument. I'd sucker pummeled my best friend, done a poor job of it, and was scrounging around for any sliver of the pride Paul felt.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and stared out the window. We didn't talk about it, but, of course, I'd never fight again. Next time Paul took me out, he bought me a Crossman BB air rifle.

He set up a cardboard box target mount in the backyard and brought out a folding stool to sit by my side.

“Don't jerk it when you fire. Lean in a little more,” he said, his hands gentle as they made tiny corrections. Shooting was boring; practice time with an instrument I hated. Maybe Paul could sense this. He too lost interest after our second lesson. I left the gun leaning in the closet like an old mop.

My grandmother moved the gun to her room, and on nights when couples made out in parked cars under our jacaranda tree, she waved the rifle around on the front porch to scare them away. Then she took the gun on daytime patrols to shoo away people who ate sandwiches at the bottom of our stairs during lunch hour and left their garbage behind.

“You could get shot doing something that dumb,” Paul told her.

“Nobody's gonna shoot an old woman,” she said. “I'm too old to be afraid.”

She was also too old, I decided, to play catch, though she was in better shape than Paul. I had him drive us up to the end of our street and then down a hill to Elysian Park with some gloves and a bat.

“Don't be afraid to pull one,” he said. I popped flies that he hobbled after. Later, on a drive to McDonald's, he cut across traffic to park on the side of a busy road.

“Got one coming,” he said, and stretched himself out on the backseat as if it were a couch. Paul was about to have a seizure. He'd been having them since he moved in with us. His body gave him a good minute or two warning before one hit. Beatings from sadistic guards, he insisted, had exacerbated his condition. When we picked up his prescription bottles at the pharmacy, I'd read aloud, “Not to be taken with alcohol.”

In Paul's front jeans pocket was a tongue depressor made from a pink toothbrush handle with hospital tape wrapped around the brush head. I kept one hand on the stick in his mouth while his seizure rode in like a stampede, trampling his legs, my other hand dabbing rancid yellow foam off his cheeks. When his shaking ebbed, I wiped off the depressor while Paul got a postseizure Budweiser and whisky from the trunk. He drove home tipsy with alcohol on his breath.

We were now spending
too
much time with each other, my mother decided.

“Are you sure you don't see him drinking?” she asked. I hadn't—just saw the empties—but wouldn't have turned him in if I had. I saw him now as a fellow soldier trapped in the same trench. Both my mother and grandmother considered this a betrayal. Their problem wasn't my problem, though. I was becoming a man, I thought, and it was time to take my side by one.

• • •

Besides Paul, I stockpiled other men as prominent father surrogates.
Just
in case. Paul drank like a thirsty river. His belly was distended and, like Frank before him, he punctuated the ends of arguments by revving his car's engine and speeding away. So I kept an eye out for other eligible fathers. One was Jose, a thirtysomething Mexican who had a weird maternal crush on my sixtysomething grandmother.

“Jose's too
old
to be a gigolo,” she said, “and I'm too poor to give him any money. Maybe he can do something for you.” He failed the father test when he took me to a drive-in theater, but I had to pay for our tickets and pizza.

There was Allan, a kind, elderly Dartmouth College graduate I met while he was canvassing our neighborhood for the 1984 Democratic presidential ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. My grandmother told him he should talk to her in-house political expert. He looked at her oddly when she returned with an eleven-year-old.

“I didn't realize you followed politics,” he said.

“Mondale won't win,” I said. “Because of the ‘wimp' factor.”

After a long discussion about the presidential election, he befriended and hired me as a part-time employee at his West Los Angeles company, which manufactured enclosures for electronic equipment. He drove me out to his offices and back, paying me $4.50 an hour for filing and roaming around the grounds unsupervised. Each visit ended with a paycheck in my own name and, for my birthday, a Commodore 64 home computer.

My grandmother said, “I thought he'd do more for you.” There was no gesture she couldn't compound into disappointment.

Then there was Uncle Oscar, my mother's half brother. He'd stop by unannounced a few times a year. My mother would stay in her room with the door closed until he left.

One Christmas, Oscar brought over a BMX bike. “Here's how you ride it,” he said, and then hopped on it and pedaled up and down the street. “Now you try.”

I wobbled around unsteadily for ten minutes. When I was unable to learn on the spot, he got bored. “You don't seem like you're really trying,” he said, and ended the lesson. The bike went into the basement.

“Let me teach you kung fu,” Oscar said, and demonstrated some moves. I thrust out my fists at a crooked angle. He was unimpressed.

“If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm not going to waste my time teaching you,” he said.

My mother said he used drugs and took money out of her and her mother's purses growing up. For a while, he was a member of the Reverend Jim Jones's People's Temple branch in Los Angeles but dropped out when he realized he would have to hand over all his money and possessions. He lived in a small, junk-cluttered Silver Lake bungalow and sometimes brought over tall, leggy, beautiful white girlfriends with strange, exotic names like Renee who stroked his hands while he and my grandmother argued on the couch about everything. When he was alone, they argued about his father, Emilio.

“You never treated Papa right,” Oscar said at the dining room table. My grandmother sat on the opposite end. I sat in the middle, ­spectator to a Ping-Pong match between a father figure angry about his dad and a mother figure angry with her son. “You cheated on Papa and lied to him. You hated him,” Oscar said.

“Papa hated you too,” she said. “You didn't visit him once in the hospital before he died. You only showed up at the will reading. You were always an ungrateful child.”

“How about all those women you used to bring over here into your bedroom?” Oscar said, his voice trembling. “Me and Maria had to sit here as little kids and see a parade of women come through the house when Papa was working.”

“Okay, so I was a bad mother that gave you a rotten childhood and you turned into a rotten human being. We're not going to get anywhere talking like this all night.”

“I concur,” Oscar said.

“What does ‘concur' mean?” I asked.

“It's a fancy white man's way of saying, ‘You're right,'” my grandmother said.

One afternoon Oscar showed up in a gray hoodie and sweatpants. His face was gaunt, his eyes sleepless. His sweats drooped off him like curtains. He was itchy, bouncing from room to room, confused by Paul's presence. It was the first time Oscar had visited since Paul moved in.

Oscar asked my mother if he could borrow fifty dollars. “I'm not giving that asshole shit,” she told me. “He's using again.”

When he got into an argument with my grandmother, Paul asked Oscar to leave.

“Who are you?” Oscar shouted. “This is my mother I'm talking to! I don't know who you are.”

Paul stepped in front of my grandmother in the living room and tried to push Oscar toward the front door. Oscar pushed back, and Paul went into a defensive fighting stance. Oscar assumed a kung fu pose. Paul's bum leg sent him stumbling backward while Oscar punched air. What should have been an old-school rumble became a slap fight, their heavy fists punching the empty space between them.

It seems comical now, but it was terrifying then. I was sobbing when I grabbed my baseball bat and, clutching it to my chest, screamed, “Get out!” Here I was, thirteen years old, with a chance to defend my house and my mother. My grandmother could handle herself, but I'd once been my mother's “little big man.” We both knew that I'd since become a fat, wimpy, smart-mouthed nerd. I hadn't grown into Al Pacino from
Scarface—
my mother's favorite movie character—­meaning she still couldn't find, or create, a man interested in or ­capable of protecting her. That broke off the first part of her heart. I knew I wanted to guard the parts that were left. I just didn't know how.

Paul knocked Oscar off balance toward the front door. Oscar looked at me and said, “See what they're doing to me, Brando? They'll do this to you! This is what these women are going to do to you!”

My grandmother grabbed the bat and leveraged Oscar out on the porch, but he yanked the bat from her as we slammed the door closed behind him. He swung the bat hard at the door's glass-and-wood middle section, splintering it into large chunks. A large flapping shade kept the glass from spraying on us.

Then it was quiet in our house. The sound was so unfamiliar it was deafening.

Oscar drove away. My grandmother and I collected the largest glass shards. This was the second time, along with Robert's smashing through the sliding glass door, a window shade had “protected” us. The next week, my grandmother would install shades on every available window and leave them drawn day or night. We debated whether the police should be called, but the one thing my grandmother wanted her son charged with—theft—was moot when the bat was found tossed at the base of the hillside's retaining wall.

My grandmother turned on Paul. “You didn't land a single punch on my son,” she said. “Didn't you fight in jail?”