Take This Man (5 page)

While he was incarcerated, Paul began a correspondence—interestingly, under the name that my mother might have helped him create, Paul Sky Horse Johnson—with a high school girl named Frances. They'd been married in prison several months after my mother received Paul's first letter, in the fall of 1977. Paul told his bride he had a son named Brando in Los Angeles and proudly hung a picture of me as a toddler—taken back when Candido was living with us—on his wife's apartment wall.

My mother now had to share a second Paul Skyhorse with his own legitimate wife. First, she was stunned, then angry, and then . . .

“That's what Frank is for,” she said.

In my memory, the transition between fathers happened that fast. Paul's holding me one week, and Frank's back to holding me the next, loading me into his van's prized shotgun seat for a ride to the drive-in.

“Babe, he's five,” Frank said. “I don't think a child his age should watch a horror movie.”

“Brando's not
like
children his age,” my mother insisted “He'll be the first to tell you that. And don't talk about him like he's not here. I hate when people do that. Brando, do you want to see
Halloween
?”

“Halloween! Halloween!” I said. I didn't know what the movie was about. I just wanted to go everywhere my mother went. (My unintentional love of horror films and the macabre comes from her.)

“He won't remember a thing,” my mother said.

My mother and Frank “watched the movie” from the van's rear couch bench seat while I sat stupefied as a forty-foot Michael Myers stabbed his way through, and then disappeared into, an ethereal fog that steamed up the inside of the windshield.

We drove to a supermarket to get chips for the ride home. Frank said I could keep my seat up front so that I wouldn't have to sit in the back of his darkened van. I hadn't moved, spoken, or (it felt like) breathed since the credits. My mother dozed off in the rear while we idled in the blackness of an empty parking lot. Off in the distance, I thought I saw a shadowy figure. There was the boogeyman by that light pole! Or pushing that row of shopping carts!

Suddenly a huge pumpkin shot up from the passenger window inches from my face as the tall figure holding it screamed, “Boo!”

I shot out of my seat, knocked my head against the roof of the van, and started screaming, loud gasping whoops of terror. I couldn't breathe. My mother rushed me to the van's couch bench and cradled my head in her lap.

“What the fuck is the matter with you, Frank?” she shouted. Being a pal instead of a parent had its limits.

Frank understood my mother's temper protecting me, but her explosiveness defending
herself
made him afraid. He stumbled into it face-first when, in a silly fight over whether Warren Beatty was “Mr. Hollywood” or a hack womanizer, my mother, a foot shorter than Frank, leapt up at him with her nails out and tried to dig into his cheeks. Frank had his hand out to protect himself.

She screamed to June, “Call the pigs, momma, this motherfucker tried to hit me!”

At first Frank laughed it off, thinking this was a weird, twisted play on my mother's unusual sense of humor. Then he realized she was serious. Figuring the best way to defuse her anger was to leave fast, Frank got into his van, revved the gas, and sped off.

Their relationship disintegrated over the next year, with a series of breakups and hasty reconciliations. The sound of Frank's loud, gunned engine would sometimes be my only good-bye. I chose the front bedroom window when it was my turn to “father fish” the same way Frank had as a boy, exhaling disappointment on its glass, tracing endless circles in my breath with my finger. I sometimes knelt there looking for Frank's van even on days I knew he wouldn't come. Even when he did, he could stay the night or leave in an hour. His shortest visit was six minutes—enough time to plop on my mother's bed, exchange words with her, threaten to leave if they continued to argue, and then take off.

In early 1979 Paul sent us train tickets to come visit him. My mother knew already about Frances, but Paul made no mention of her in an accompanying letter. With Frank around less, my heart ping-ponged back to the man I believed was my “real” father. Our train was waylaid in Kansas City because of a massive blizzard that piled snow as tall as the engine. When we arrived in Saint Louis, Paul had a pregnant Frances drop him off at the station and asked that she not accompany him inside. Instead, he sent her to “go buy my son a coat.”

She returned with an oversized gray wool overcoat, its sleeve ends covering my hands like gloves. My mother called it my “Mafia coat” because wrapped inside it I looked like a tiny “don,” a perfect little “Brando.” It was much too warm for Los Angeles, but when we got back home, I'd wear it on windy days, let my sleeves flap in the breeze, and imagine my coat filling with enough air to carry me aloft like a kite. Flying in the air, “a real Skyhorse” in my mind.

Paul's wife gave birth to a real “Sky Horse”—a son, Dustin—in September 1979. Abusive and alcoholic, Paul left Frances and their son a few months later, headed to Minnesota, maybe, but still not to Echo Park. His letters from parole—invariably thin ones without money—promised some kind of reunion, but between that Saint Louis visit and my early adolescence, I'd see Paul just once, possibly, in a horror film called
Wolfen
.

“Your father's in this,” my mother said, playing a tape she had recorded off of cable. In the credits, “Paul Skyhorse” is listed in a group of “Native Americans” that appear, true to stereotypical Hollywood form, in a bar called the Wigwam. Was this, in fact, Paul Skyhorse Johnson? Or was it Paul Skyhorse Durant? Perhaps
another
Paul Skyhorse entirely? The credits list neither surname, but that didn't stop me from rewinding and replaying the barroom sequence, squinting close into a nine-inch television set, trying to steal a one-second glimpse of Paul—whichever one it might have been—in a Hollywood movie about murderous superwolves.

He continued sending me gifts (one year a set of Lincoln Logs) and letters admonishing his “little chief” to do well in school. Paul “Skyhorse” had abandoned his biological son but still found a few minutes here and there to be a father to his fake one.

• • •

My mother had already left her state job in 1980 when Frank tapered off their relationship He figured that as long as he didn't move the relationship to the next stage by moving in together or proposing marriage, he could indulge their fights because he could leave whenever he wanted. His greatest fear was being trapped in our house with her and my grandparents and having nowhere to go if my mother tried to attack him again. How would he explain to anyone at work why his face was covered with scratches?

Frank hid his drifting away to another woman because he felt it would have cost him any opportunity to stay in my life. In this little boy he'd practically adopted, Frank saw both an echo of who he was at my age and a way for him to pass along a part of himself. Here was a chance to mend his brokenheartedness over his beloved nana. The price would be wrestling with my mother's rabid heart and ignoring the feelings he still had for her in his own.

They tried an uneasy friendship. On the day that John Lennon was killed, Frank called my mom in tears. She cried on the phone with him. The next time they spoke, an argument flared up like a rash. “What kind of man cries about a man—a musician—he never met?” my mother said. “You have fucked-up priorities.”

My mother thought these were box steps in a breakup waltz where Frank would lead them right back to reconciliation. It took her a while to realize that Frank's dance would continue on just with me, not her. She'd plead for them to reconcile, and then, when he rejected her proposals, unleash an indiscriminate wrath that was as cruel as it was boundless. She tried to ignore him, but she never learned how to
stop
loving him.

“I'll never stand between you and Brando,” she declared. Over the coming years, this would prove true enough when she was married to someone—there were four husbands ahead—but less so when she was single. Those times, she'd invite Frank over to “spend some time with Brando.” If he accepted, he'd drift to my mother's room instead and close her door. Sometimes he'd emerge with cheeks flushed, sometimes with eyes glazed from smoking a jay out of the stash he brought. Then he'd pat my head, and we'd launch into our day together, adventures in which Frank was more careful about his time and money than I remembered. When I was a tween, he'd introduce me ambiguously as his “friend, Brando Johnson,” never using Skyhorse unlike every other adult so eager to latch onto that name. When we talked, he asked superficial questions, like a prospective college student visiting a campus. Frank acted like an ex-husband who, I noted angrily, hadn't even bothered to marry my mother. I was turning into a child of “divorce,” learning to resent Frank as an absentee father rather than my “real” father Paul or the father I didn't know about, Candido.

When Frank left, I learned that in each broken heart lies what we know we should do to heal and move on. Then there is what our hearts are capable of doing instead. This is what both my mother and I called love.

3

I
was watching
Psycho
with my grandmother—I was her reliable nine-year-old movie-on-TV date companion—when I heard a gurgling from my grandfather's Emilio's room. We rushed in and found him choking on rancid foam bubbling out of his mouth. My grandmother called an ambulance.

“I'll have to go to the hospital,” she said. “You're old enough to stay here on your own.” My mother was out with a man I'd never meet, like every man she saw right after Frank.

The paramedics came and maneuvered Emilio's gurney down our uneven flight of stairs. Neighbors fluttered to their front porches like moths.

“Mind your own goddamn business!” my grandmother shouted as she followed him down the hill.

Months before he was due his pension, Emilio had been fired from his line cook job because of chronic incontinence and forgetfulness. Before he was let go, he'd been robbed on the city bus twice, once by a cross-dressing prostitute who jabbed him with a sharpened wire coat hanger that gouged a cut deep into his suit jacket and ended up sticking out the back like a broken wind-up key. Gout, from a lifetime of his beloved pigs' feet dinners, left Emilio bedridden. He regularly soiled his mattress, which my grandmother often chose not to clean—she'd tend to the sheets three times a week if he was lucky. In the kitchen, my grandmother and mother laughed at Emilio's messes while I crept into his bedroom and asked him to play. Emilio's rough, putrid-smelling hands wrapped around my neck in a game I'd created when I returned from Illinois called “I choke you!” I'd ask Grandpa to choke me for doing something wrong, but he never wrung my neck with conviction, breaking down into laughter as his arms folded me into a warm flannel-bathrobe hug. I loved my grandfather Emilio, but I never counted him as a father figure. He was already a ghost to me, living in the bridge from the 1970s to the 1980s, caught between senility and death.

I opened his bedroom window to air out the smell of shit and bile. When my grandmother returned from the hospital, she said, “Grandpa's had a stroke. He won't be coming back. This is your room now.”

I stared into that empty blackness of space where Emilio had lived much of his life, alone, as June's husband. A vacuum of air from the opened window caught the door and snapped it shut.

• • •

The difference between a leap of faith and a leap of madness depends on where you land. Where my family landed at the end of the 1970s was in a halfway house: that is, halfway between the routines of my grandmother's normalish life and the freedom waiting in my mother's “at least it's never boring” one.

We were a lower-middle-class trio subsisting on money from temporary office jobs, and welfare and food stamps in an intolerant Reagan-era environment that packed our Sears Kenmore fridge with government cheese (sawed off in peanut brittle–like chunks), briny rectangles of government butter (wrapped tight in cardboard, drug-style kilo packages), and plastic gallon pitchers of tooth-tinglingly sweet cherry Kool-Aid. These were the staples of a diet that left you ricocheting off the ceiling with an empty stomach.

My mother hated cooking. “Takeout” was how she said, “I'm sorry.” Her actual apologies came with a meek knock at my door and the greasy nepenthean scent of pepperoni pizza. She collected delivery menus like trading cards and was the first to order from any new restaurant in the neighborhood. My mother couldn't be trusted with supermarket trips. Instead of buying ingredients to cook, she opted for finished meals themselves. Once, when my grandmother sent her on an errand to buy bread and sandwich meat, my mother went to the deli counter and ordered eight sliced-to-order sandwiches for three people. A man at the checkout line said, “Looks like someone's afraid of the stove.”

Of course, this set off a huge fight between my grandmother and mother. In one corner, my mother, who'd saved us crucial sandwich-­making time because I'd said I was hungry. In the other corner, my grandmother, who would have actually
made
the sandwiches because my mother didn't “cook,” and done so for less money. I had to take a side—but which one? It was a familiar problem. Every day, I was caught in a dangerous elastic-magnetic field. Move too close to my grandmother, and my mother's rage siphoned the air like a backdraft. Drift too far toward my mother, and my grandmother froze over the shipping lanes that fed affection and love. Their alliances formed and dissolved like waves crashing ashore, often in the same conversation if I could somehow be made the object of their anger. (“Brando said he was hungry! That's why I bought so many sandwiches! Then he didn't defend me when this asshole insulted me at the checkout line!”) When the fights were over, both the loser and the winner retreated to their rooms with thunderous footsteps that shook the whole house. Their bedroom doors were deadbolt equipped, which left me stationed postargument in the living room in front of a muted and always running television.

At night, I shared a room and a bed with my grandmother, where I'd slept since I graduated from my crib in my mother's room. When my grandfather's bed was replaced with a small couch and a desk for schoolwork, my grandmother said there wasn't enough space for a new bed of my own. She was right, kind of, though the couch had been her idea. My mother said I should stop asking questions and keep my grandmother company.

While I waited for her to finish reading for the night, I performed a list of security checks in the house before bedtime.

“Did you lock all the doors?
”
she'd ask me.

“Yes, Grandma.”

“Did you fit the security pipes into the sliding door tracks?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“Did you turn on the back porch lights and see if you saw anyone out there?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

Asleep, I was wedged between a faux-wood-paneled wall and my grandmother's hilly sand dune range of a body. Awake, I was sandwiched between my mother's mania for Indians and the Mexican culture in which I was immersed, oblivious that I was anything more than an observer of the people and places around me every day. I felt like an alien, an “Indian” boy with only the vaguest sense of what being an Indian meant, and unable to connect with other Indians like me, living in a Mexican neighborhood filled with boys and girls
exactly
like me whose language I couldn't speak and whose large families I didn't understand because they didn't look like mine.

Although she never confronted my mother directly, my Spanish-speaking grandmother tried to tease out clues for me—some small, some
very large
—about my identity. When we were alone, she taught me Spanish words like a call-and-response song:

“Napkin?
Servilleta
.
Servilleta
, napkin. See? Easy.
Facil
.
Facil
, easy.”

When my mother caught me practicing, she said, “I don't want to hear you speaking that language.
Ever.
” The Spanish words never stuck.

On weekends, when my grandmother wasn't hand flipping tortillas on the gas range burners and singing along with
ranchera
music on her tinny AM kitchen radio, we'd go out for
huevos rancheros con chorizo
at El Rodeo restaurant. She'd play Lucha Reyes and Chayito Valdez on the jukebox and drink an ice cold Bohemia. She watched Raúl Velasco on the popular in Mexican households Sunday-night musical variety TV show
Siempre en Domingo
and took me to Mexican vaudeville shows at the Million Dollar on Broadway with full mariachi bands, or Vincente Fernández, the ranchera music king, riding onto the stage on a horse with blinding silver accoutrements. She rooted for Latina heroines in the movies, a scarce commodity in 1980s Hollywood, and was heartbroken when she discovered that the badass
Chicana
marine alien killer Private Vasquez in
Aliens
had a Jewish surname.

Together we saw a live performance of
Zoot Suit
, a landmark fictionalized play about the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, in which a group of twenty-one Latino males received one of the most lopsided racist show trials in Los Angeles's history, and the subsequent zoot suit riots, the flashpoint of which centered around a group of thuggish sailors attacking and stripping random Mexican zoot suiters.

For the show, she bought and dressed me in a sailor's outfit, complete with a Dixie cup hat and a whistle. The path to our seats was a sea of hostile looks and double takes. Seeing
Zoot Suit
dressed as a sailor is like wearing a Nazi uniform to
Schindler's List
. The sailors are the bad guys.

“I was a
pachuca
,” my grandmother said when we sat down. She had joined a loose street gang that preyed on white girls leaving war factories, jumping women coming from jobs that
pachucas
couldn't get. On her bicep was a gang tattoo she got in her early twenties of two intertwined hearts with a banner wrapped around them. I mistook her hearts for two train engines colliding in an explosion of barbed wire.

The lights dimmed in the theater. “This is my history,” she said. “Pay attention.”

The sailor suit helped me remember the moment but not concentrate on what I was watching. I think that was my grandmother's plan. I was just too young to know it then. Frightened, confused, I quietly puffed on my whistle and scratched at the shaggy Prince Valiant haircut that always got me mistaken for a girl and not the stoic little Hiawatha my mother was trying to make me into instead.

• • •

I was an unconvincing Indian brave from the start. In first grade, when my teacher asked me to rise with my Mexican and Vietnamese classmates for the Pledge of Allegiance, I stood and recited from memory the words my mother had drilled into me the night before:

“Because of this country's treatment of my race and my people, I cannot pledge allegiance to this flag or this country.” Then I sat down.

Unsure what to do, Mrs. O picked a child to lead the pledge. He fumbled with the words as the rest of the children craned their heads back at me, staring and mumbling through their recitation, unsure of whose lead to follow. Sensing she was losing control of the room, Mrs. O ran to my desk, yanked me out of my chair, and grabbed my hand, placing it over my heart in time for the pledge's final words: “with liberty and justice for all.” (My mother savored this detail.) Mrs. O had me stand outside our squat bungalow classroom until recess, where I listened through a closed door to my classmates sing counting songs we were learning in English, Spanish, and Chinese.

I'd never been reprimanded, let alone touched, by a teacher before. What had my mother made me say? I started to cry. What kind of Indian brave was I?

“Did she really put her hands on you?” my mother asked that night, incredulous that I'd been punished, as well as overjoyed with possessing, at last, her own personal story of nonviolent resistance and accompanying Indian persecution. She asked me many times to replay what had happened, as if I were a favorite song. I loved it. No matter how old I got, I'd cherish the extra attention I earned for telling stories that weren't boring.

“It's time,” my mother said, “to call your father and tell him what happened.”

“Paul?” I asked. “I don't want to get my teacher in trouble.”

My mother rustled a few papers in her filing cabinet and, like a magician, conjured Paul's voice on the phone. She knew how to get in touch with him whenever she wanted but kept her distance because of Frances. His voice was just as I remembered it: robust, deep, and slow, like a coffee drip; his words had the tautness of crisp linen.

“You did nothing wrong,” he reassured me. “Your teacher is to blame. This too will pass,” he said.

My mother arrived after class the next day with a tall Indian man wearing denim jeans, a black cowboy hat, and long hair that unfurled to his waist like a ball of sable yarn. Was it Paul? Could she make him appear at her will, too?

Like most of my mother's men during this time, he came and left without a name. I was ushered to stand outside the bungalow classroom again, but this time I knew I wasn't the one in trouble.

Raised voices soon flowed like a river into a warm ocean of laughter, that calming sound that always overtook my mother's public conversations. Outside the house, my mother's anger never crested the dam of appearances. She never lost her temper in public; she'd just misplace it and find it at home later. What had been conceived as a lunch counter act of civil disobedience became, in my mother's hands, a simple cultural misunderstanding. She'd charmed my teacher into the belief that an American Indian radical's son was a student in her classroom. Now here was her chance to teach the teacher, a well-­intentioned white liberal woman teaching in an ethnic neighborhood, what it meant to be a “skin.”

The next morning before class, Mrs. O said I could read, color, or rest my head during the pledge—whatever I wanted, as long as I was quiet.

Flush from her victory, my mother prepped me with fantastic tales of Indian rituals I'd eventually participate in as the son of a chief, such as periodic fasting and a chief-making ceremony in which I'd be tied to a pole by my hair and swung around like a tetherball. (I'd learn much later, when I saw the ceremony in person from a safe distance, that my mother's misappropriation of reality was tamer than real life. The “hair-swinging” ritual was her interpretation of a sacred sun dance ceremony in which men's chests are pierced with wooden pegs attached to ropes that are pulled over a high tree branch, hoisting the man into the air until the skin breaks.)

She took me when I was nine to a sweat lodge in the San Bernardino Mountains. The site was guarded by an “AIM Checkpoint”—a wooden sign and a log stretched across two sawhorses—which, when we arrived, was moved out of the way by two young ponytailed whites in their twenties in T-shirts and jeans. After stripping down to towels because “nothing white,” my mother said, could come into the sweat lodge (the actual rule was nothing metallic, to prevent burns), participants were divided by gender into two wooden structures shaped like inverted bowls. Young children, like me, went with their mothers. Hot coals were pitchforked into a hole in the center of the lodge. Then water was splashed onto the rocks, and the lodge's entrance flap flipped shut. In the darkness, a librarians' army of
shhhhing
­exhalations rose from the smoldering hole.