Take This Man (22 page)

I had tried accepting Rudy in the role of a father and a contributing part of our family even when his contributions didn't add up or sometimes went missing. He was still on the hunt for the elusive gun card that would raise his salary tenfold and magically transform his and my mother's lives. He was still pocketing my gas money to fill up his car with the malfunctioning gas gauge that magically drifted to
E
whenever I drove it. (“I
swore
I filled up the tank.”) Our “dates” together were easy and unmemorable. I invited Rudy to “father and son” steak dinners where the sound of our knives scraping the plates substituted for conversation. He sweltered on summer days wearing Stanford sweatshirts I'd bought him as Christmas gifts.

“He's proud of you,” my mother said.

“It's just for your benefit,” I said. “He's showing off.”

“Why shouldn't he?” she said. “He's paying for most of your education, anyway.” (Stanford's financial aid package was a generous mix of scholarships, grants, and loans. Rudy's total college contributions equaled maybe five hundred dollars.)

Rudy offered movie dialogue as a stand-in for insight or comment, which seemed appropriate, since I'd just learned how to shave properly from a touching father-son scene in
Lethal Weapon 3
instead of asking him for help.

My mother: “Brando would make a great lawyer.”

Rudy: “
You can't handle the truth
!
”

Rudy wasn't a father. He was a Big Brother volunteer matched to an angry, unreceptive inner-city young man who had been told one lie too many. Rudy hadn't reached me because he couldn't. Pat had closed that door. Only Pat could walk through it now.

“So how about a movie?” Pat asked again. “Anything you'd like to see?”

“I like
Pulp Fiction
,” I said. I'd seen it five or six times. It was the one piece of entertainment that gave me any joy or happiness during my insidious black depression. I took off my sunglasses and watched Pat watch the movie. He laughed in the right places, scoffed at the medical inaccuracy of the stabbing-the-hypodermic-needle-in-the-heart scene (“That's not how it's done; I used to be an EMT”) and shifted uncomfortably in the final diner robbery scene. An older overweight restaurant manager—someone Pat could physically resemble in a few years—was pinned on the counter with a gun to his head. I laughed loud enough that it was obvious I imagined it was Pat.

“I was in a restaurant robbery once,” Pat whispered. I felt a blush of shame before I realized Pat had also robbed a restaurant himself, though without a gun.

On the drive back to campus, Pat said, “I'd like to come to your graduation. Is that something you'd feel comfortable with?”

I had no reason to trust someone who had lied and abandoned me, but I couldn't help myself. I missed Pat, what he taught me, what we shared, and the life he promised me: one free from the burdens of having to be my mother's full-grown man when I hadn't even learned how to be a boy. More than Frank, Paul, or Candido, I saw Pat as a victim whose good intentions had been hijacked through circumstances beyond his control. My mother had pushed him into an impossible corner. Hadn't she done the same thing to every single man in her life, including me?

“I don't know if you should come,” I said. “Rudy will probably be there. My mother said Frank might come too, but I haven't spoken to him in a while, so I don't know if she's telling the truth.”

“Your mom can be a little flexible with facts,” Pat said. We both laughed. Then I heard my grandmother's voice again:
So can Pat. Don't give your trust so easily just because he's a man. All men lie.

“So what do you say?” he asked. “Can I come?”

“Let me think about it.”

“Brando,” he said again, “you're never too old to need a father. Don't miss out on having one because of pride.”

He was right. He
had
to be right, I thought, because he was still some kind of father to me. He knew just what to say that would hurt the most, a gift that biological and stepparents have in common.

He also knew what to do that would hurt the most, too.

• • •

Pat's phone was disconnected a week before graduation. Every day, I'd redial at a different time, sometimes as many as three or four calls in an afternoon, hoping he'd pick up and knowing he wouldn't. How could I let myself be heartbroken and disappointed again and again by men who were just half a father?

The day before graduation, Frank left a message. He sounded distant, stilted. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard his voice.

“I thought about coming up,” he said, “but I don't want a fight with your mother to spoil everything.” It was the first graduation he'd miss since sixth grade.

“Remember, I'm proud of you, Tiger,” he said.

This time I felt there wasn't anything to be proud of at all. I'd “walk” my graduation ceremony and finish up my last college credits in summer school. Instead of three fathers rooting for me when I made my processional entrance into the football stadium and onto an immense green field to collect my empty diploma case, there was Rudy, an unfather, somewhere in a blurry sea of cardinal red. And yet, I couldn't stop craning my neck deep, looking for
all
my fathers—Candido, Paul, Robert, Pat, and Frank—imagining a row of ghosts way up in the stands, each man rooting for the son I was to him.

“There he is,” each of them would say proudly. “
My
son.”

9

“T
urn the wheel,” Frank said. “You gotta turn that wheel, Tony.”

Tony, the used-car salesman, backed up to the car lot's entrance. I'd asked Frank to come car shopping with me, since he was the one adult I knew with a credit history good enough to be a cosigner. Counting his graduation message and Sofie's prank call about me becoming a father, we'd “spoken” twice in about three years.

On the drive to the car lot, he asked, “So she was never really pregnant?”

“No.”

“Then why did she call me?”

“Mom asked her to.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” he said. “I didn't think you'd get a woman pregnant like that. You're not that irresponsible.” He paused. “You know about condoms, right?”

I almost laughed, but then Tony opened the passenger side door of the Toyota Corolla for Frank. He had to squeeze into the backseat.

“You understand, Frank,” Tony said, “that I gotta ride up front with Brando. It's their rules, not mine.”

“Of course,” Frank said.

While I drove, Tony asked Frank, “What line of work are you in?”

“I work for the state of California,” he said. Frank played with the holes in his sneakers and stroked his graying goatee. He dressed and looked like a man fifteen years younger than he was.

“What do you do, Brando?” Tony asked.

“He's a college graduate,” Frank said quickly.

“Ah,” Tony said, “nothing beats a great education.”

We drove under a bridge. “Let me turn off the air conditioner,” Tony said. “So you can hear the engine.”

“Sounds like a good engine,” Frank said.

“So how were you planning to pay for this?” Tony asked me.

“Well, I was gonna cosign for him,” Frank said before I could answer.

“You know, Frank, it would really be better for the both of you if you bought him the car. I'm sure your credit is better than his,” Tony said.

“I have excellent credit,” Frank said. “But I'm just here to cosign for him.”

We drove back to the lot. “Okay,” Tony said, “Let's see how excellent that credit is.”

Tony led us through a series of offices with no doors and floor to ceiling windows. He set down a stack of carbon-copy forms at his desk and then turned his back to me.

“So, Frank, are you gonna buy this car for Brando?”

“You know, Tony,” Frank said, “I really just came here to cosign. He really wants to buy the car on his own.”

“Yes, I know, but this is the reality,” Tony said. “You have the job, you have the credit. If you buy this car for Brando, you'll have smaller monthly payments. He can pay those to you. Nobody cares as long as the monthly payment gets made. Also, when you buy insurance for Brando”—Frank flinched when he heard this—“the payments will be a lot smaller.”

Tony looked at us and said, “I'm just trying to help you guys out.”

“Sure, Tony,” Frank said.

“Now, remember, if you do buy this car, it has nothing to do with him,” Tony said, and brushed his hands at me. “This will be your car, and you'll be giving it to him.”

Frank glanced at me, rubbed his double chin. “Yeah, let's go ahead and do it like that.”

“You wanna do it like that?” Tony asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Frank said, and pulled out his wallet. Tony pushed over a long form. “Okay, I need you to fill this out, here, here, and here,” he said, making large blue
X
s on the sheet. “Frank, I'm gonna pull your TRW report.” Tony pushed back his chair, clicking a ball-point pen. “Are you Brando's father?” he asked Frank.

Frank and I blinked at each other. Then we blurted out together:

“Yes,” Frank said. “No,” I said. Then we flipped our answers.

“Hey, yes, no, it doesn't matter,” Tony said, taking it in used-car-salesman stride. “You two will figure it out.”

I was twenty-two years old. I'd known Frank as some kind of father for eighteen years. We still froze whenever anyone asked if we were father and son. We were still trying to figure things out.

• • •

The average shelf life for a stepfather was two to three years. Yet Rudy was heading into his sixth year without any signs that he was leaving. My mother was enjoying the delusional tranquility of her fifth and longest-lasting marriage.

“Rudy's loyal,” she told me. “You could learn something about loyalty from him. Every day you become less and less my son.”

For her forty-ninth birthday in April 1996, I treated her to an expensive restaurant she'd read about in a magazine. It was a reconciliation dinner. I was living an hour's drive away in Irvine, California, attending a creative writing graduate program I started right after college. She was furious that I hadn't moved back into the house and commuted, and we'd had a series of increasingly bitter phone arguments that led me to cut off communication with her and screen all incoming calls. First, there were angry voice mail messages, followed by ten to fifteen hang-up calls a week over the next two months. Then one morning I found a manila envelope stuffed under my car's windshield wipers. In it was a collection of short stories I'd written in college. My name was written in my mother's hand on the envelope. She had Rudy drive her forty miles to tuck the package on my car and then had him drive her back home. I couldn't tell whether the gesture was an attempt at reconciliation or a threat.

There in the restaurant, out of the house, out of her bedroom, away from my grandmother and Rudy, I found a woman who was funny but not crude, vivacious but not loud, smart but not caustic. She flirted with our waiter, drank good white wine, and ate Cajun pizza. She listened as often as she spoke.

“Rate me,” my mother said. “On a scale of one to ten, how good a mother was I?” She asked me this now each time we talked.

“A seven?” I answered, unsure. I saw her as a ten when I was a child. Now in my twenties, she was a two or three, tops. Truth is, she
was
a seven that night.

“I would have gotten mad before if you didn't say I was a ten,” she said. “But I think you're being generous. Why couldn't it have always been like this, the way it is right now?” my mother asked. “This is nice.”

That night, she wrote to herself in her long-gestating memoir: “For a while, I felt normal. Even though I know I can never be normal. Never. As you know by now, I'm dying, and for the first time in a long time, I cried for my position. I've always read about people dying in books, and now I'm writing my own. I have blood poisoning that's made a tumor that's exploded in my brain . . . I know
nobody
believes me, but it's true.”

Her book, called
The Beginning
, had been in process since Robert lived with us. She'd been typing up her fears on a Sears manual typewriter with a sleek plastic lid that let her carry it from room to room like a suitcase, filling up pages margin to margin without paragraph breaks or spelling corrections. The writing had brought her happiness in a way that few other things did, but her journal entries, prose poems, and chapter fragments had now degenerated into amorphous paragraph blobs intended to “say good-bye” and “make amends” to the people in her life because she believed she was dying. She wrote Sofie a letter apologizing for her behavior and telling her how much she loved her. The rest of what she didn't tell Sofie, she wrote in her book: “I miss her and love her. I hope she forgives me because I was a fucking cunt, acting like I had some kind of power over her I didn't have.”

She spoke to my grandmother and Rudy daily about how she'd “die young” like Kurt Cobain and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora from MTV's
The Real World
and urgently shared the deaths of famous celebrities as if updating me on the family business. Her life was confined to a single room with a telephone and a TV—this information
was
the family business.

My grandmother told my mother, “You know what happened to the boy who cried wolf, don't you?”

For some reason, probably simply because she said so, Rudy was convinced that Maria, in her late forties, was pregnant. He “felt movement” in her. She wasn't, but she now carried over 230 pounds on her five-foot-two frame. She'd stopped exercising and refused to take walks with my grandmother down the hill, complaining of excruciating migraines, severe exhaustion, foot trauma, and failing eyesight. When I took my mother out for Mother's Day, she was walking alongside Rudy arm in arm on their way to his car when she stumbled on a flat sidewalk and crumpled to her knees. She walked off the fall with a laugh and a jittery sluggishness.

At my grandmother's birthday dinner a few weeks later, my mother, belligerent and disoriented in public—something I'd never seen—challenged June to shut up for being too boisterous. In the round-robin slotting of alliances, I took my grandmother's side.

“Maybe you should have taken her out for Mother's Day instead of me,” my mother said.

“Are you kidding?” my grandmother said. “You would have
killed
me if Brando had taken me along, even though I've been as much a mother to Brando as you.”

“Do you see what you started, Brando?” my mother said. “You're the most selfish person I've ever known. I wish—”

“You wish what?” I asked. “Are you going to storm off and leave me here?”

“I wish I had left you like your father,” my mother said.

“I wish you had, too,” I said. “I might have had a chance at a normal childhood.”

“Fuck you,” my mother said.

“Oh, for God's sake, I don't know who the bigger baby is, you or Brando,” my grandmother said. She hailed a waiter. “Give me a grasshopper fast, so I can get my fucking birthday party started.”

Round and round it went—it would
always
go—and then: apologies and laughter.

More than once I'd succumbed to fantasies where my family disappeared—gone in some Disneyfied plunge into a dark chasm where the ground wasn't visible—but I assumed this was simply what parents did when they aged, finding new ways to embarrass and mortify you by revealing, but not acknowledging, their limitations.

• • •

“You have to keep this between us,” Frank said. “The news would ­devastate your mother.”

Frank was getting married, and I was invited. It felt sudden, though the last time we spoke, he'd alluded to a having long-term girlfriend. He didn't share too much out of fear I'd report back to my mother. Being out of the house made it easier to keep things from her, like my having moved in with a girlfriend named Kitt. We met in my writing program, which she'd joined after leaving her job in New York City.

I brought Kitt to my house for dinner just once. It was so . . .
quiet
. Our family didn't do quiet. Intimidated by Kitt's education and age, nine years older than me, my mother said nothing. In our house, my mother's silence could blow out your eardrums.

My grandmother served Shake 'N Bake chicken on reused paper plates to save water. “I don't ordinarily cook ‘white' food,” she told Kitt by way of half-hearted apology.

“I had Shake 'N Bake growing up, too,” Kitt replied and smiled.

I promised Frank I'd keep his marriage a secret. “Any woman in my life has to accept you too,” he said. “That's the deal. Nothing's going to change between us.”

He meant well, but the fact that things
hadn't
changed was the problem. Who would I be to Frank now that he'd have a wife? How would we introduce me to Stephanie? In front of others, we scrambled to define what our connection was, but our answers were never consistent. Sometimes Frank called me a “close friend”; other times, after a couple beers, I was “the son I never had.” Frank was, to me, “an old buddy,” “my stepfather,” or, on a rare night, “my father.” We switched up what we called each other depending on the social situation: the more august the ceremony, the “higher” we elevated the other in rank.

At the wedding reception, Frank worked up a great beer buzz fast. He walked out to the street in his tuxedo with a Heineken and sat on the hood of an unoccupied LAPD car. When he came back inside, Stephanie brought him over to my table.

“I'm so happy to finally meet you,” she said and hugged me. “It was really important to me that you came.”

“I'm glad to be here,” I said, and then looked at Frank, hovering over Stephanie's shoulder.
What do I say?

“I know exactly who you are,” she said. “And you're always welcome in our house.”

Frank and I said nothing, both of us relieved. She knew who I was even if, after close to twenty years, Frank and I didn't.

• • •

“You're moving to New York City?” my mother asked. “I don't know how you're going to make it. You've always relied on me for everything.”

“I'm done with my writing program. Kitt got a job offer there,” I said. “A long- distance relationship won't work.”

“A long-distance family won't work either,” she said.

My mother couldn't see that we'd already become a long-distance family. In the two years since I'd moved an hour's drive away, I visited her and my grandmother maybe four or five times, while ignoring about two or three dozen of my mother's “emergencies.” Every visit ended with the two of us in a fight. I'd race down the stairs and drive off in the car Frank and I bought together, running away from my mother the same way that Frank did when I was a child. One Christmas I mailed my family their presents instead of driving an hour and spending the day with them. That's what my family had become: a “them.”

When the time came to move to New York, I signed over my car to Rudy for a dollar so he could get rid of the deathtrap he drove my mother around in. I didn't feel comfortable with Rudy possessing the title, but he had lived with her now for six years, longer than any of my stepfathers or even my
actual
father. How could he possibly pull a Pat after all this time? Or a Paul? Or a Robert? Where was he going to go?