Take This Man (19 page)

I would legally change my name to Brando Skyhorse and steer clear of El Centro Chicano, Stanford's Latino student center. The name change was a faux stab at independence from my biological father's name based solely on embracing the persona my mother had invented for me. I was as much in her thrall now as I was when we shared a house, since my college life revolved around avoiding her and keeping her howling anxiety at bay.

I would join the long line of men who'd abandoned my mother, but unlike her husbands, she wouldn't let me go. She called ten to fifteen times a week, sometimes multiple calls a day. We spoke for hours, racking up two-hundred- or three-hundred-dollar monthly phone bills. If I ended the conversation to study, she'd hang up on me or call back to hang up on me if I'd hung up on her first. Every call, early morning or late night, was an emergency. Every emergency required my immediate attention and could be resolved only by me. Every failure to respond led to more calls and more angry messages on my answering machine. Studies and exams weren't considered valid excuses; she called minutes before I rushed off to take tests, or during midterms, or every day during finals week. I was excommunicated as her son dozens of times and then reembraced when her fever had passed. Once, there were seven messages, each over five minutes long, left during a one-hour period in which my mother had an entire conversation with herself:

“Where are you, Brando?”

“You are fucking worthless, Brando!”

“Forgive me, Brando?”

“I have no fucking son! Go fuck yourself, Brando!”

“Really—please—where are you, Brando?”

I would do poorly at Stanford, sometimes dropping classes on the last day before finals. My English major classes weren't too hard; I was just always exhausted or out of time. My mother, not my ­studies, swallowed whatever free time I had, and it was never enough. ­Whenever she called, I was strangled by a constricting depression and lost ­consciousness, sleeping away the hours in bulk. When I mentioned my depression, she'd say, “You inherited my madness,” and then warn me to be on
her
death watch. There was her brain tumor (“I can't let them cut off all my beautiful hair to open my skull,” she said), her failing eyesight, or her blood poisoning, all of which were ­jeopardizing her fragile health. She wanted to say “good-bye,” since every conversation could be her last, and wanted to know if I had anything to say to her before it was too late? If not,
why the fuck
not
?

Frank would visit Stanford once more, sophomore year.

“How are your grades?” he asked. They were adequate. How could they be anything else?

“Do they have magna or summa cum laude here?” he asked. I didn't reply.

“Nah, I bet they don't even have that at schools like this,” Frank said, his way of giving me an out.

In an exit interview with my Stanford freshman advisor, he said, “You never did quite find your place here.”

When I hear the word
Stanford
, I see a clear picture of my arrival on campus and wince. There's a part of me that still thinks I can warn that boy I was on his first day and say, “Disconnect your phone. Don't rise to anger's bait. Cut off ties if you have to.” I can't reach him, of course, the same way that nobody at Stanford—friend, girlfriend, professor, counselor, or “father”—could reach me.

• • •

The fog outside had lifted when Frank woke up an hour later. “I gotta hit the road,” he said. “I only got one day off from work.”

“Do you want to get some breakfast? Maybe walk around the campus?” I didn't want him to leave this soon.

“I really have to go,” he said. “But I can come back. We can walk around and check things out then. As long as your mom says it's okay and she's not with anybody that might think it's a problem, you know where to find me. I'm always there if you need me, Tiger.”

I was four when Frank first held me up in the air and called me Tiger. Now I was seventeen and living away from my mother, the excuse that Frank and I both used for why we didn't stay in touch. Were we ready to be each other's father and son? Or would we dance around the holes we were waiting for the other to fill?

We'd dance.

We'd wait.

We'd age.

We'd forget about each other sometimes. We'd grow embarrassed over how much time passed between phone calls. We'd let so much time pass we went beyond embarrassment right back into that nostalgic buzz you feel before ending a long estrangement that says, “We'll make it work this time.” Then Frank would pick up the phone.

“Hello.”

“Let's do something.”

“That was fun.”

“Love you, too, pal.”

“See you soon.”

Disappear.

Repeat.

• • •

I returned home freshman winter break to a doll's house, everything grossly reduced in size and painted over in loud, unfamiliar colors. When had my house sprouted giant foundation cracks, grown yellow and red paint skin boils, and pitched its front stairs at hunchback angles? When had it gotten
old
? The Christmas lights Pat strung last December were left up the whole year, coated with dust. (They would stay hung, untouched, for the next eight years.) The rooms seemed smaller and darker; windows that Pat had cracked open were weatherproofed shut, with the shades duct taped to the walls.

My mother had made vague threats before I left for college about finding someone new. In the span of three months, she had met, moved in with, and gotten engaged to a man from a homeless shelter who had replied to my mother's Christian singles magazine ad. (My mother had never been a Christian, nor was she ever technically “single,” since she had never legally divorced any of her husbands.)

Before, whenever I met a new father, he made the house feel alive, enormous, full of life, even if I didn't like him at first. My fifth stepfather, Rudy, brought with him barricades to the outside world that shrank the house's dimensions, making plain to me how small and petty our family really was. We weren't a castle bathed in light on a hill, the way I'd seen our house from the street as a child. We were a dying Golden Rain tree, one of the common street trees lining blocks in Los Angeles, thirsting for a breeze in the autumn shadows.

These shadows said, “At least it's never boring.”

8

“Y
ou have to sleep with the man you're living with. It isn't right,” my grandmother said. Ignoring how she'd exiled Emilio from her bedroom for years, my grandmother and my mother were arguing about what to do with Rudy. When Rudy moved in two months after I left for school, he got a temporary job as a security guard and surrendered his pittance of a bimonthly paycheck in exchange for a spot on the couch or my empty bedroom. Now that I was back from school, where would he sleep?

“Why can't he stay in Brando's room? He doesn't live here anymore,” my mother said.

“I'm here right now,” I said, “and I don't want a stranger in my room.”

“
You're
the only stranger here,” my mother said.

“Stop it, you two,” my grandmother said. “Don't you love Rudy?” she asked my mother.

“Of course I don't!”

“Then what the hell is he doing here in
my
house?” my grandmother asked.

“I can't find anyone else,” my mother said. “I don't want to be alone.”

“Then take your future husband into your room.”

“I don't want to sleep with a dead lay!” my mother said.

Rudy had ended up in a homeless shelter by following a woman to Los Angeles. One morning he awoke in their motel room to find the woman and his money gone, with a scrawled message in lipstick on the mirror: “Limp Dick.” Later my mother's version of the story had Rudy as an obsessive phone sex client who had migrated west to woo her.

“I don't want any more men in my house,” my grandmother said.

“He wants to be my husband,” my mother said. “He wants to be a dad to Brando.”

“I don't want anything from Rudy,” I said.

“I don't see
your
father helping you out,” my mother said. It was hardly worth wondering anymore which father she was talking about.

• • •

My grandmother and I nurtured an escalating defiance to each consecutive stepfather's introduction into the house, a familial hazing that unified us until the man asserted himself and I eventually “adopted” him as a real potential father. Whenever my mother pushed one of her men—often, literally—there was a certain amount of pushback that she both rebelled against and craved. Even Pat's chattiness and constant stream of positive energy was in itself a kind of challenge to my mother's relentless anger and negativity. He refused to let her get him down.

Rudy, however, offered no resistance. He was an absolute blank slate. With a cherubic face, jagged smile, stout body, tufted crown of clown's hair, and a hiccup of a laugh, Rudy resembled a giant Robin Williams balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, guided by my mother's tethers, drifting whichever way she pulled. He laughed at every joke at his expense, posed no challenge whenever his opinion was invalidated, and made no defense of himself when my mother and grandmother gored him with some weeping dissatisfaction of theirs or confronted him with his own pathetic backstory.

My first night home at the end of freshman year, my mother called me into her room and said she'd been contacted by the woman Rudy claimed had swindled his money.

“She said Rudy screwed
her
over,” my mother said. “She sent me letters Rudy wrote while he's lived with us.”

We convened a family tribunal in the living room. My grandmother actually shut off the television. This was serious business. I sat and listened while my mother presented the letters.

“You don't get a vote, remember?” my mother told me.

“I am with a family of Indians that live in a manshun,” Rudy wrote. In his illiterate hand, he detailed his elaborate plans for wresting the house from my grandmother once he'd married my mother. Then there'd be the honeymoon.

“‘I want to tie a red ribbon around my dik while we fuck 69,'” my grandmother read aloud from the letter, adjusting her bifocals. Rudy stood in the center of the room while we spoke about him in third person. “God, he's even less of a man than I thought,” she said.

“She asked me to write those letters, Grandma,” Rudy said. “I don't know why I wrote those things. I won't speak to her again.”

My mother encouraged thuggish behavior from her men, but this wasn't Pat taking food from his restaurant to feed us. This was madness. Our family was falling backward into a Jerry Springer abyss. Wasn't it just a year ago when Pat was working toward buying a house (apparently on stolen funds) to move my mother into a place of her own? Yet Rudy's steady paycheck of $218 every two weeks meant that my mother could—nay,
would
—look the other way, and I had to look with her. Rudy could stay, and the letters were not to be brought up again.

I was furious he'd been let off that easy. But that didn't mean amnesty for everyone. At least once during every school break, my mother would cackle, “Remember the time Brando lost my welfare check and asked, ‘Should I put back the Ding Dongs?'”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked my mother. “Kick him out. You can do better.”

“You're not giving any money into the house,” she said. “You're just taking money out of it. Rudy and I are supporting you at school, and you haven't called him ‘Dad' once.”

Rudy never asked me to call him Father, nor had he complained about the money he'd sent me at college throughout that first year—about a hundred dollars total. An important token contribution of his total earnings, but not really support. My mother's college contributions—aside from a bike and a stereo bought from a catalogue on her Spiegel credit card—went into her silver cloth money hoard bag that, depending on her mood, was either for “my future” or “escaping from this fucking madhouse.” She'd reduced her phone sex business, forced out by a never-ending roster of number prefixes (976 begat 1-900) that my mother said emphasized “quantity over quality,” and had stopped receiving welfare and food stamps, but her overhead was low. She lived rent free in my grandmother's house for years, and grocery money was optional. How big had her stash bag grown?

“That's none of your business,” she told me. “But when I die, you'll see how much money was in there and know how much I really loved you.”

• • •

Over summer vacation, I woke to the sound of Rudy dry heaving in the bathroom. For thirty minutes every morning, an undiagnosed condition left him vomiting clear bile into the toilet while my mother mocked him in the hallway.

“You hear this, Momma?” she asked my grandmother, laughing.

“Take some Tums and go to work!” my grandmother shouted through the closed door.

Rudy worked as an unarmed security guard for nine dollars an hour. His salary, he told my mother, would double—
triple!
—with a “gun card” that somehow just remained out of reach for reasons that were neither consistent nor logical.

“Rudy seems confused,” I said. “I think he's lying.”

“I believe him more than I believe you,” my mother said. “What do you ever do for this house except criticize it? Why don't you try making Rudy more a part of your life? You finally got a father in the house that isn't going anywhere. Isn't that what you always wanted?”

There wasn't much free time for Rudy and me to talk alone. He worked long hours and came home exhausted. At dinner my mother worked Rudy like a puppet, ordering him to “shut the fuck up,” or getting him to retell her favorite story of his about how he evacuated his security post at a Smart & Final food warehouse during the recent LA riots without permission.

“They started looting the place,” Rudy said, “so I called my boss and said we have to get out of here. He said, ‘Yeah, do what you gotta do.' And I got out of there!”

“You couldn't remember to grab any shit out of the store for us, you dumb fuck?” my mother asked. Rudy laughed along with her laughing at him.

I loathed Rudy's shady patheticness but felt some kind of small urge to stand up for him. I just didn't know how. Can you defend someone who is impossible to offend? What was he like? What
did
he like? I had no idea. I couldn't engage Rudy in any meaningful way like I had Pat and couldn't have a single conversation that didn't get stuck in silence. However, he went to work every day and was predictably docile in every encounter with my mother, an anti-“Terminator” programmed for complete submissiveness.

One afternoon there was a soft
tap-tap-tap
on the front security gate. My grandmother and mother were sitting in the living room chatting, watching the sun move a rotund shadow across the drawn shades that covered our porch windows.

“Who's outside?” I asked.

“Shhh,” my mother said.

“We don't know who it is,” my grandmother said.

“Why don't you go to the door and see?”

“I don't feel like talking to anybody today,” my grandmother said.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Maybe it's Rudy,” I said. “Did he lose his keys?”

“He doesn't have keys,” my mother said. “He hasn't earned them yet. Don't go to the windows and see!”

“When is Rudy supposed to be home from work?”

“About now. He had to work a sixteen-hour graveyard shift.”

Tap-tap-tap.

“It has to be Rudy. Can one of you please open the door?” I asked.

“What do you care? You don't live here anymore, and you don't like Rudy anyway,” my mother said.

I sat with them on the couch for a minute. Rudy never called out, raised his voice, or moved from the spot he stood in. He just tapped on the front security gate, like a pebble shook in a tin can.

“Why don't
you
open the door?” my mother asked.

The best way of challenging my mother, I thought, was to not challenge her. I left Rudy on the porch, went to my room, closed the door, and plugged into a pair of headphones. That was how I solved problems at home, the way Paul had when he'd retire to the laundry room and smoke. I knew I was capable of acting better than this—so why couldn't I at home?

Tap-tap-tap.

I told myself Rudy would get in somehow, but I also knew my mother
wouldn't
give in, content to sit on the couch and see just how long he'd stand there knocking. Who'd break first? I played songs for maybe an hour or maybe the rest of the afternoon, and in the silence between each track heard the faint
tap-tap-tap
of Rudy's knocking, like the steady drip of a leaky roof just before it gives way.

• • •

My mother married Rudy under the name “Maria B. Skyhorse” the following year, in June 1993, at a quickie wedding chapel on Wilshire Boulevard. It was her fifth marriage; I gave her away for a fourth time. I invited Sofie, whom I'd been dating for two and a half years. She was the wedding's sole guest, acted as a witness, and signed the cardboard printout “license” that my mother treated as if it were real. My mother and Rudy had been “engaged” for about eighteen months, though there seemed no difference from their engaged life to their married one.

The priest asked my mother about her name after the ceremony. She said she was originally from Arizona.

“Oh, whereabouts?” he asked. “I've spent a lot of time on reservations over the years. What tribe are you affiliated with?”

“I don't remember,” she told the priest. Where her fantastical explanations would once have dazzled me and silenced any skeptics, she didn't have the energy to defend her lies anymore and was unable to spin herself out of the corner she was in. I snickered at her then, unaware that my mother was showing me what shedding your dreams looked like, one broken hope at a time.

We drove to our wedding reception dinner following the ceremony in Rudy's “new” car, a 1985 cream-colored four-door paraplegic Buick Skylark bought from a lot that sold used cars to illegal immigrants and bad credit risks. The car had one tinted rear passenger-­side ­window, as if it were being customized on layaway by a drug dealer, and a host of mechanical problems that Rudy had no idea how to repair, including a broken gas gauge. The car died several times in the freeway's fast lane while I was driving, the steering wheel locking, its pedals unresponsive. On three occasions, I was seconds away from a major rear-end collision.

“Rudy's never had any problems driving it,” my mother said. “For a Stanford student, you sure are fucking dumb sometimes.”

Robert's wedding banquet had been a rowdy family dinner at a Love's Bar-B-Que; Paul's, at a fancy Vegas steakhouse. This meal was in the parking lot of Pink's Chili Dogs. Four chili cheese dogs each for my mother and Rudy, and two dogs for me and Sofie eaten out of greasy cardboard boxes. We drove back to the house with two cold chili dogs for my grandmother, who, once again, had refused to attend the ceremony.

“This is all you brought me back?” my grandmother asked. “Did everyone only have two hot dogs?” she asked Sofie.

“I think Mom and Rudy had four,” Sofie said in complete innocence. How could she think that a mother and a daughter would fight over hot dogs?

“You and Rudy had four hot dogs apiece, but you could bring me back only two?” my grandmother asked.

“It's my fucking wedding day!” my mother screamed. “You're actually fighting with me because I had two more hot dogs than you did on my wedding day?”

“You've had five wedding days!” my grandmother shouted. “How many more weddings do you need?”

“I feel really bad for your mother,” Sofie said to me later. “I thought you invited me so I could see what our wedding day might be like. If this had been my wedding day, I'd have killed myself.”

“Our wedding day won't be like this,” I said and laughed. “This is Rudy's fault,” I added. How did my family devolve into this hellish caricature? Had they
always
been this way? “We're in this together,” I said.