Take This Man (24 page)

You're a good man, Charlie Brown, she said to me when I was a child.

“I'm trying to be a good man,” I said now. “I'm trying.”

There was nothing in that darkness but her breathing. I was a toddler when my grandmother's warm breath blew across my neck. It's my first memory. Now I was hearing the last of her breath that she had fought so hard to preserve for me.

Her breath said,
I waited for you to come home.
Now take my breath and be free.

I thought about sleeping in the chair next to her but couldn't ­handle spending the night by her side like I had as a child. Around midnight, I turned off the light in her bedroom.

My grandmother died sometime before I woke. Her death ­certificate says five thirty in the morning, but this was a guess.

If my grandmother dying mere hours after my arrival sounds too coincidental, that's because we've been conditioned by liars to believe that extraordinary strength is always bullshit. My grandmother was pure strength. No bullshit.

• • •

In the morning, two of my grandmother's friends, an elderly couple bearing get-well flowers, became her first mourners. They collapsed by her bed with an inconsolable wail of pure grief. Why couldn't I join them? Their pain seemed too overwhelming, too messy, too mobile to include a safe place for me. My mother's death stunned me stiff. Her death came clean, by message, the way it does in Shakespeare. Here, death arrived the same night I did, breathing the same air I did, taking the soul from my grandmother's body and leaving her mouth agape and her eyes half lidded while I slept. From the front porch, my grandmother's favorite place to watch life come and go, I saw her body carried out of her house and down the complicated staircase the same way that my grandfather Emilio had been. My grandmother watched me walk to school on a thousand mornings from this porch. When I went to New York, she'd set me free from this porch. I clutched the railings, watched her body loaded into a wagon, and waited for the parade of mourners to pay their respects to the mayor of Echo Park. My grandmother had made so many friends in the neighborhood. I wanted more people around so I could cry and mourn her. My grandmother was a public person. She
was
Echo Park. I didn't want my grief to be private like it was for my mother. Would I have enough time to run to the supermarket and fill up the house with food and drink?

I welcomed just one next-door neighbor that first day, and nobody else on the days that followed. Her friends had passed on, moved away, or been exiled in petty arguments.

“Your grandma was something else,” this neighbor said. “I remember my kid was out in front of your house playing, and she said, ‘Why don't you get the fuck away from my house and play in your asshole father's yard?' I was just out of sight and said, ‘June, it's all right.' She said, ‘Fuck you, too!' Man, she was something.”

To that, my grandmother would have said, “You're going to complain about a dead old woman hours after she's been carried out of her house? I always knew you were an asshole.”

What I said was, “Yeah, she was a handful.”

• • •

Four people—my grandmother June, my mother, Maria, my grandfather Emilio, and my grandmother's lover Tata—died in the house I grew up in. I didn't want to be the fifth. Every memory would become some kind of ghost trapped in its walls whose impression would leak back out over time if I'd stayed. Oscar and I agreed to sell the house.

On my last day there, I walked through its hollowed-out rooms in a sleep-deprived daze as if visiting the empty set of a sitcom that had gone on too long. The rooms were dark, the floors warped and creaky. I paused before I closed the front door, waiting for a shout from my mother's room—“Don't get kidnapped!”—or my grandmother's jangling keys signaling she was ready to hand hold me down to the bus stop. There was just quiet.

At last, quiet.

• • •

Every day since I was ten or so, my grandmother had said, “Don't give me a funeral. And please don't bury me in the ground. Just cremate me and throw my ashes in the sea.” My uncle disagreed.

“We should bury her,” Oscar said. “Because of the resurrection. So she can have a chance to come back.”

“Do you have money to pay for a burial?” I asked coldly.

“Oh, Brando, man, you know I don't.”

“Do you have any money to contribute for a service?”

“No.”

“Then we should do what she wanted us to do,” I said.

I charged her cremation to a credit card, picking up her ashes in a gold box that resembled a mantelpiece clock. They handed my grandmother over in a white gift bag with a pleasant air, as if I were picking up a package I'd dropped off to be gift wrapped. I wanted to scatter the ashes before I left Los Angeles, but Oscar said he'd hold on to them for a while because he wasn't ready to let her go. When I returned to New York, in one of our last conversations, he said he'd buried her ashes in a cemetery plot but didn't reveal where. He left some voice mails and sent a card asking me to call him sometime, but I never did. We were each other's last known relative, but I wanted to be free from my family. I wanted the right to choose my own.

Nowadays I get messages from aggressive collection agencies about once a year, like Christmas cards, looking for Oscar.

“I don't know who he is,” I say.

• • •

I had dinner with Frank and Stephanie the night before I left Los Angeles. She asked me, “So how does it feel to have Frank in your life after all these years?”

I smiled and said, “I really think we can have a better relationship now.” It sounded promising, us no longer having to hide from my mother our being in contact, as if she had been the sole obstacle between us having a father-son relationship all along. Of course, she wasn't, but I didn't want to see that what was coming for us looked just like what had gone before. A desert of long absences—punctuated by a birthday phone call or a Father's Day card—that we'd still had to march through together, and alone, still in search of the perfect name for each other.

• • •

My family was gone. Over the next ten years, I dealt with that loss by searching for mother and father surrogates (in my stepfathers' case, substitutes for substitutes) in temporary people: Kitt's mother, whom I lost when Kitt and I broke up; a boss I endowed with a nonexistent paternal streak. I searched for family everywhere in everyone, too, holding on to friendships for years, turning coworkers into friends into brothers and sisters.

I learned, slowly, how to acknowledge and embrace being a Mexican who happened to be raised as my mother's kind of Indian. This was just as difficult as inventing a new family. My upbringing was cobbled together from so many different parents, I identified with almost no culture except “pop.” Who was I, really? My name itself seemed like a celebrity construct borne from a hallucinogenic orgy in a field: “Were your parents hippies?” I spent a third of my life as an Indian, a third denying I was Mexican, and this current third asking, What kind of Mexican am I? (Don't put the emphasis on
kind
. Put it on
I
.) Yet a truth that once felt too complicated to explain in an easy, pat way isn't anymore. There's a fluency that comes with sincerity and repetition.

You could say—and four of my five stepfathers might agree—the same about running a con. A Latino professor from Texas confronted me at a booth at a Modern Language Association conference when he saw my name badge.

“Your mother had to be Latino,” he said. “There's no way you're a ‘Skyhorse.'” He badgered me to confess my background. I felt like a fraud, but he was both more right, and wrong, than he knew. While on a book tour for my first novel, I was approached at a reading by a woman related to Paul Skyhorse Durant, who would pass away later that same year. She confronted me as some kind of imposter who had stolen the Skyhorse name. I told her my story. She'd never heard of Paul Skyhorse Johnson but believed that while he might have been an Indian, he certainly had no claim to the Skyhorse name. We continued talking. She didn't buy a book, but she heard what I had to say.

Just before she left, she said, “We Skyhorses have to stick together.”

• • •

I'm intact, but the scars are there. Some, from a losing battle with acne that gave me pimples on my fortieth birthday, are easy to see. Others aren't. I'm irresistibly drawn to people from my past in spite of the challenges in reestablishing contact and the inevitable pain when they drift out of my life again. I'm prone to hurting people, and being hurt by people who hurt people. I can disappear from contact with friends for weeks or months at a time. I have severe chronic and ­undiagnosed stomach problems. There are “intimacy concerns” and “abandonment issues.”

On alcohol, which I avoided for years, I have the personality of a loose tire, driving smooth and reliable for hundreds of miles and then flying off and careening into a group of friends like a cannonball shot with belligerence and self-pity. I'd get blinding drunk at parties or out with friends and then be dry as a bone at home. I could hear my mother say, “You're not even an interesting alcoholic,” and she was right. I had none of the harrowing tales of an addict I'm convinced my mother would have encouraged me to mine, just assorted acts of jackassery: too much loud mouthiness and puke.

Several years of therapy and Wellbutrin kept depression a restraining order's distance away but has left me mindful of its existence, somewhere around the corner, in the dark. One time I had a panic attack that I was drinking too much water and checked myself into a New York City emergency room with a self-diagnosis of hyponatremia. When the interns performed their evening rounds, I heard the litany of urban horrors—blocked arteries, septic shock, broken limbs—before they reached my bed, which had been discreetly curtained. “This is a case of someone who believed he had poisoned himself by drinking too much water,” the gentle voice said, “so we're going to skip this one.”

Sometimes there are night terrors. I'm in a maze where my mother and grandmother are at opposite ends, brandishing weapons and trying to kill me. Some nights I confront my mother. I say, “I'm glad you're dead.” Here in a place somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, my mother listens and, I think, understands.

• • •

In 2010, right after I mailed my letter to Candido Ulloa, I traveled alone to Istanbul, Turkey. There I followed a great parade of gypsies and revelers through cobblestone alleys to a traditional spring gypsy festival by the shores of the Bosphorus Strait. In its center was a fifty-­foot-high maypole with tendrils of many-colored scrap paper that fluttered and rattled, a giant
shhhhhhh
in the breeze. For a few dollars, you bought scraps of paper and wrote messages to loved ones, living or departed, pinned them to a cord, and then let the wind blow these sheets out to the water.

Under a sunset like flecked gold leaf, I wrote messages to my mother and grandmother. I was seven thousand miles away from Echo Park, California, but I had carried them with me—their voices, their prejudices, their ribald humor, their unpredictable cruelty, their astonishing capacity for kindness, their torrential fears—and I knew this was where I could let them go. If a single sheet of paper found its way to my father after thirty-three years, these scraps could be carried aloft to a place where pain and sorrow have passed away and all spirits are welcomed with love and forgiveness.

On those papers was a simple message: I will give something back to you, every day, wherever you are.

Mother, take the first words you gave me to speak.

Grandma, take my first breath you gave me to breathe.

I want to believe your souls are free.

11

M
y father was calling. My father
Candido
was calling. It had been a week since I'd sent my letter. His first message, left on my relic of an answering machine, was the sound of a
telenovela
in the background and a man speaking to someone in another room before the receiver was fumbled and hung up. I knew it was Candido, but I didn't pick up. I wasn't ready to talk to him yet. He didn't say anything on the message. Maybe he wasn't ready either.

The second message, a day or two later, was the same as the first. On his third call, I picked up. He asked for me by name and then spoke in Spanish.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and stopped him. “I don't understand Spanish as well as you're speaking it.”

“Oh, your letter was so good in Spanish.”

“I had a friend write it.”

“I am the man you are looking for,” Candido said. He didn't use the word
father
. He wouldn't use it in our conversation. I wanted him to—
once
. Just once.

“I have been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said.

“Well . . . good!” I said, half laughing. “Um,” I said, and paused.
What should I say?
I hadn't prepared a list of questions, rants, insults—nothing. I had a sudden urge to hang up. Did I just need to know he'd call me back and hear his voice?

“You live on the East Coast now?” he asked.

“Yes, near New York City. I left Los Angeles when my grandmother died years ago.”

“Oh, I am very sorry to hear that,” he said. His tone was patient and kind. “She was a beautiful woman. I loved her very much.”

“My mother is dead, too,” I said.

Candido said nothing. I didn't know silence could sound angry.

“Do you remember my mother?” I asked.

“Yes, but I don't want you to be mad if I say something bad about someone that is dead.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I've said many bad things about my mother.”

“She is why I left,” he said.

How many times had my mother told me
I
was the reason my father—or any of my fathers—had left? I couldn't believe what I heard. I had to hear it again.

“You left because of her?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “She told me if I ever came back, she'd call immigration and get me deported.” Then he told me his story, about how impossible his and my mother's marriage was and about the last day he lived in our house. He chose his words the way an old man climbs a flight of stairs. His memory was exact and bitter, reciting events as if they'd happened last week, not over thirty years ago. How much could I trust his version of things, I wondered. Then he said, “The last time I tried to leave, your mother attacked me with a knife.”

“I believe you,” I said. I had no more doubts. I was listening to
my
story. “She pulled a knife on me too.”

“Oh,” he said. He seemed unfazed, so I volunteered another piece of my past.

“My mother remarried after you left,” I said.

“Oh, did she like him?”

“Well, she married four more times, so . . .”

“Four more?” he said and laughed. “That is a lot!”

“Yeah, it's a lot,” I said. It
was
a lot, and, really, what more was there to say about my other fathers to my father? How could I explain to him what at the time I barely understood myself?

“Where did you go when you left?” I asked.

“I lived with some friends in an apartment in East Los Angeles for a while,” he said. “Sometimes when I wasn't working, I'd go to Dodger Stadium with friends to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch.”

“Would you ever drive by the house?” I asked. Our street intersected with a major thoroughfare to the stadium, a five-minute drive away.

“Mmm, maybe sometimes. I don't remember.” Had he thought about me when he drove to the baseball game? Did he sit in the stands holding a beer and think,
My only son lives just a short ways from here?
Or had I not crossed his mind at all? The same impulse that keeps you from jumping off an edge when you look over it kept me from asking these questions.

“Living in East Los Angeles, I met my wife, Aurora,” he said, “and we moved down to Whittier. It's close to Echo Park, you know? Only thirty minutes away by car, very close.”

Yes
, I thought.
Very
close
.

“This whole time, all these years, we have been working, me and Aurora,” he said. “Work, work, work. There is always more work to do.”

There it was. The answer I wanted for thirty-three years. What had happened to my father? He went away, he stayed away, and then his real life began.

“How about you?” he asked. “Are you married? Do you have children?”

Here was the chance to tell my father what happened. This was the opening I'd waited years for, to flood him with all the details of my life. The path it took
because
he left me. I'd wring out on top of him every drop of pain, anger, dysfunction, and chaos his abandonment caused, introduce him to the secondhand fathers I had to learn to love in his absence, hand him, piece by jagged piece, memories of the broken family I assembled over a lifetime and lost for good when my grandmother died. I wanted the father I knew from pictures, that beautiful young man in his twenties, to open a door for me, so I could rush him. But that man—that
father
—was gone. In his place was a simple, happy man in his early sixties, weary from the toll of a full, ordinary life spent providing for, caring for, loving, and being loved by others. I'd brought the bullets to destroy him, but the gun dissolved right in my hands.

“I never married,” I said. “And I don't have kids. Not yet. Someday, I hope.”

“Mmm, I thought I might have more grandchildren. I have one already.”

“What is your grandchild's name?”

“Your nephew's name is Dillan. He is your oldest sister's child.”

“
Oldest
sister?” I asked.

“Yes. You have three sisters.”

• • •

Candido's wife read my letter first. Her formal name is Maria Ulloa, the same as my mother's first married name, but she goes by her middle name, Aurora. After a thirteen-hour workday, it's her responsibility to start dinner and open the mail.

Aurora knew who I was—had known before she and Candy started a family of their own. She'd ask why he hadn't reached out to me. “You have a son,” she said. “Why don't you try to get in touch with him? Send him a letter or a card for his birthday?”

“You don't understand,” Candido said. “If my old wife knew where I was, she would have me sent back to Mexico. She would make our lives hell.”

When Candido came home from his work as a groundskeeper for an apartment complex, Aurora handed him my letter and said, “Your son is looking for you. Now will you contact him?”

Candido read the Spanish version and was impressed by my (nonexistent) command of the language. My last name explained why a Google search he'd done the year before for Brando Ulloa came up blank. He knew he'd call me, but there was something more important to do first. He gathered his daughters Adriana, then twenty-nine, Kereny, twenty-four, and Natalie, twelve, in the living room of his compact two-bedroom house and, rubbing his sweaty palms together, blurted out, “Our family just got bigger.”

The girls were confused. Adriana thought,
Mom's pregnant again? Isn't she too old for that?

“You have an older brother,” my father said.

• • •

Candido gave his daughters my email address to contact me if they chose. To Natalie, the youngest, the idea of a much older brother on another coast was an abstraction, something that didn't mean much amid a teenager's burgeoning desire for independence, privacy, and her own cell phone. For Kereny, a behavior therapist for ­autistic children, the situation was perhaps the most complicated. A self-­described tomboy who grew up watching soccer with her father, she'd considered herself the son he'd never had.

“God gave you three daughters,” Kereny joked with Candido, “because you always wanted a son.” He doesn't remember, but I wonder what crossed Candido's mind when she said this. Did he flinch? Smile weakly? Excuse himself to the kitchen? I'm sure his appearance betrayed nothing, but I'd like to think he sat uncomfortably in his chair and felt just a little sick to his stomach, the way men with secrets in movies squirm and perspire as proof that they have a conscience.

Adriana, a schoolteacher with both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from UCLA, maintained the greatest composure because this revelation was not a total surprise. When she was nine (around when I started high school), she was told at a cousin's birthday party, “I know something about your father. He has a son he ran away from. You have an older brother. Go and ask your father. Go and ask him about the son he never sees.” Adriana was sure it had to be one of those horrendous lies that kids say to one another to be cruel, yet she never forgot it. When Candido told her about me, she thought,
Of course
. She wondered what would have happened if she had asked her father about me when she was a little girl.
Maybe
, she thought,
if I'd said something, we would have been reunited sooner. Maybe I wouldn't have had to go my whole life not knowing that I had an older brother. Was this thing somehow my fault?

“I wanted to say thank you for searching for my dad,” Adriana wrote me. “By the way, the ‘my' is just a Mexican thing. People always ask me why I say ‘my' even when speaking to my own sisters. I think it's a direct translation from Spanish, since we say ‘mi mama o mi papa.' I know Candido is truly happy to have finally reunited with you. I am very happy to know about you and have you become part of the family. I always wanted an older brother. I am sorry this did not occur sooner in our lives, but it's never too late, and we need to think of the now and the future.”

When I picked up Candido's phone call, I was the last son in a dead-end family. When I hung up, I had a resurrected father and three new sisters. Their emails revealed them to be open, loving, generous, and willing to adopt me as a family member sight unseen. They were so unlike the women I grew up with. Their openness with a complete stranger was startling, like the way a cold, clear morning can leave you breathless. I had sisters who
wanted
a brother. They wanted
me
. When I last dreamed of siblings, I was playing in my magical stuffed animal forest, wishing for total strangers to give me a family I'd never thought I'd get a second chance to have. Here they were at last. I began imagining futures with Adriana, Kereny, and Natalie. Candido almost was an afterthought. He was
their
father, but these women were
my
sisters. I tried to keep my heart tethered to the ground. It didn't do any good. I knew I was falling in love.

• • •

“Be careful,” Frank warned. He and I had been in sporadic contact over the past ten years, as each of us took turns not returning the other's phone calls, but my “real” father's reappearance seemed to rouse in him a dormant responsibility. It was May 2010, three months after my first letter to Candido. I had just flown into Los Angeles and was talking to Frank in a hotel room the night before I would finally meet Candido's new family. Frank would then pick me up outside Candido's house when the meeting was over.

“So where has he been this whole time?” Frank asked.

“Whittier,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. “So he could have sent you money for years or stopped by whenever he wanted. He was just over in Whittier.”

“That's right.”

“Huh,” Frank grunted again. “So I guess you have a father now,” he said.

“Frank, this changes nothing between us. But I don't even know what to call you. You're so bound by rules that whenever I call you ‘Dad,' you flinch, since you never married my mother.”

“How could I have married her?” he asked. “I never saw a way to make it work.”

“I know,” I said. “She wishes you had.”

“I know that,” he said.

“No,” I said. “That was one of her last wishes.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

My mother's will was a typed letter addressed to me. It was in a box of papers I'd taken back to New York but hadn't sorted through until several years later. She'd written her will like a suicide note, itemizing in specific detail which of her few possessions were to be left to whom. This was the first time I'd seen Frank in person since I'd read the will. She left Frank a handful of books, a framed Emmett Kelly clown print, a water-damaged Native American poster of a squaw riding on a horse, and some compact discs. These items were Frank's only if I didn't want them first, but there was one thing in her will that belonged to him and him alone.

“In my mother's will,” I said, “she wrote in pen, ‘Frank, you should have married me.'”

“Huh,” he said. “I've thought about that a lot. I'm really happy with Stephanie. Things are great. It would have never worked out with your mother and me. But you know something? She was probably right,” he said, and started to cry.

• • •

Kereny picked me up at the hotel with her boyfriend Pedro, who'd come along to calm her nerves. Our first hug was more of an enthusiastic nudge. On the drive to Candido's house, we struggled for small talk like picking up pennies wearing oven mitts.

“Are you hungry?” Kereny asked. “We can stop for breakfast at a Denny's if you like.”

“No thanks,” I said.

A few minutes passed. “Do you want to get some coffee or something?”