Take This Man (10 page)

There were so many movie dates, I began keeping track, writing movie reviews on the bus ride back home in pencil on notebook paper, complete with crooked check boxes, a line for an overall score, and ample space for thoughtful analysis:

“I really liked this movie! Too bad everybody died in the end.” (Commentary on
Scarface
.)

If we weren't watching movies, we were reading—books, magazines, newspapers, comic strips—or making plans to read. We were regulars at the Central Library downtown. The towering corridors and bathrooms of this public landmark were as rough and urine soaked as the streets of 1970s New York; once, my grandmother was almost attacked by a homeless man in the ladies' room.

“I don't like this place,” I said.

“Those bad people don't belong here. This is
our
library. We come here so you can understand the value of a book,” my grandmother said. “If anyone tries to ‘touch' you, slap them hard with your book.”

When my mother's phone sex money began rolling in, trips to bookstores replaced the library. There were no bookstores in Echo Park, meaning we had to ride the bus a half hour down Sunset Boulevard to the Crown Books on Sunset near Fountain Avenue, or ride forty-five minutes to Glendale. My grandmother insisted I start my own personal library and left me responsible for my own purchases. It was just as important that I owned books as well as borrowed them. My first book was
A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney
. I bought it because his segments on
60 Minutes
made my grandmother laugh. I understood the words, but it took me much longer to understand what they meant lined up together.

When homework was done, I'd read books to her aloud. My favorites were the
Peanuts
strips. I read each panel and voiced each character differently except Snoopy, whom I gave my own voice. I wanted to be Snoopy because, just by imagining it, he could turn into anyone. One week he was a World War I flying ace, the next, a world-famous novelist. What power! What freedom!

“You can't be a dog,” my grandmother said. “You're more like Charlie Brown.” Whenever I held open a door for a lady or helped carry her groceries upstairs, she'd say, “You're a good man, Charlie Brown.” I
hated
that.

“He's a loser! I don't wanna be him!”

“No, he always does the right thing. He's a good man. Just like you're gonna be. You're a good man, Charlie Brown,” my grandmother said again.

• • •

The money for these trips with my grandmother came, of course, from my mother. I didn't understand this then. My mother knew I didn't understand this and hated it. Arguments between the two women raising me were a steady rain, which was building in intensity to a horrific downpour. The closed door between my mother and the rest of the world was like a dam. When it would open in an air-­grabbing
whoosh!
I never knew whether what poured out of her room would lift me up to higher ground or drown me.

Between the welfare checks and the phone sex money, my mother's finances were robust. There were token rent and utility payments to my grandmother, but the majority of my mother's money went to her silver buff polish bag “savings” account in her bedroom, a mythical “cash stash” that, with Robert gone, she claimed she would nurture monthly and that would be my inheritance when she passed. The rest went either to my grandmother to spend on me or to my allowance. At the height of her phone sex earnings, I received eighty dollars a month, an absurd amount for an eleven-year-old to spend on himself. Yet I did find a way to spend it. I loaded up on an Intellivision game system that consumed a steady diet of forty- and fifty-dollar cartridges, ­dozens of Matchbox toy cars, and a gaudy, overpriced Lazer Tag setup—complete with separately sold vests—without realizing that the game required two people to play. When I tried it with a friend indoors (the toys were too fragile and too expensive to be played outside), we ran around the house in pointless circles shooting each other, a boring riff not unlike the one my mother and grandmother acted out daily.

Since my mother's shopping trips were rare, part of being paid such a hefty allowance meant that I'd use a portion of that money to buy “gifts” to give back to her. Some of her wants were simple. Mom's favorite perfume was Tabu, a fragrance I couldn't find in a single department store but that appeared in tall display stacks at the local Thrifty, a drugstore discount chain. (On an old David Letterman clip, Cher said Tabu was a favorite, as it's a smell “good girls don't wear.”)

When the department store Buffums announced a pilot program to issue children twelve and older credit cards, my mother falsified my age and signed on as my enthusiastic guarantor despite having no credit history herself. I roamed the creaking belle of a department store, browsing the “gold-inlaid dusting powder set,” maxing out my two-hundred-dollar limit in an hour on oversized sunhats, sunglasses, and a jewelry chest in which my mother could store tarnished silver bracelets, turquoise pendants, and cherished boxes of mounted rock collections purchased from the Ghost Town souvenir shops at the Knott's Berry Farm amusement park.

“Rocks stay put and don't talk back like you,” she'd say.

What she couldn't send me out to buy she ordered from catalogues and television: a steady column of exercise records, videotapes, and equipment. My mother exercised alone in her bedroom-slash-office, and nowhere else. Through her closed door,
Jane Fonda's Workout Record
played on repeat. The Jackson 5's “Can You Feel It” was overdubbed with Fonda's direct, never-short-on-breath orders on how to warm up (my mother often didn't get further than that): “
Can you feel it?—
Stomach pulled in, buttocks tight
—Can you feel it—
Really
stretch
it out
—Can you feel it?—
Go for the burn!” She replaced Jane Fonda's album with Jane Fonda's
Workout
video, which was replaced by
Jane Fonda's Workout Challenge
,
Jane Fonda's New Workout
, and Jane Fonda's
Complete Workout
. Then an endless march of UPS deliveries: stationary bicycles, and treadmills, bouncing balls, and rubber bands, step boxes and trampolines, wrist weights, baby barbells, slant boards, and jump ropes. My mother sweated to the oldies, stopped the insanity, and shuffled herself countless losing hands of Deal-a-Meal portion-control cards. She did everything but lose weight.

This was not the first time her body had betrayed her. Because of the blood poisoning scare she'd suffered as a child, she was convinced the remnants of her infection had created an inoperable brain tumor that was the cause of her severe headaches. She'd give us updates on the tumor as if it were an old friend visiting from out of town.

“It's back! I can
feel
it taking up room!” she'd say.

• • •

There were other routines. The first and the fifteenth of every month were welfare check days. She didn't need the money—she had plenty from her job—but felt it belonged to her and would hit a hyperbolic panic if she didn't get it
on time
. I was my mother's shakedown man. If I was home from school, I met the mailman at the curb, scanned the mail quickly, and, if the check wasn't there, ask him if he'd “forgotten anything else.” If I didn't, I'd be the one that got shook down when I walked through the front door:

“Did the check come?”

“Did you ask the mailman if he had any more mail for us?”

“How did you ask him?”

“You mean you just asked him if he had any more mail and didn't ask specifically if he had a check?”

“What do you mean, he said, ‘No, not today'?”

“Are you lying about asking him?”

“Don't you fucking know how to ask questions?”

If I was lucky enough that it wasn't a gray-envelope day—an official summons for my mother to appear with paperwork before a caseworker under penalty of funds being cut off—we'd go to Pioneer Market to cash her check. Hating purses, she trusted her cleavage or the lining of special “welfare check boots” she wore just on the first and the fifteenth.

The money-starved recipients, both legitimate and criminal, swirled together with frustrated, menacing patience in slithering lines, their checks and the just-ripped envelopes that contained them held in balled fists. Hustlers and thieves trolled the aisles to harass, snatch, pickpocket, knock down, and beat up those with the longest string of kids behind them; like the largest of Spanish treasure galleons carrying the most plundered loot, the largest families were sure to have the biggest checks. The thick, caked-on stench of processed sugar and an embalmed scent of fresh bread mingled with the smells of graying meat and spoiled fruit waxed to a purchasable shine. The checkout line belts were loaded with cellophane-wrapped junk that didn't need heat, refrigeration, or a rush to prepare and was exchanged for bright food stamp coupons ripped from what looked like a Disneyland ticket book. (A food stamp “E-ticket” was a coupon worth fifty dollars.) Other families buying a healthy cornucopia of foods played a different game, calculating with each swipe of the cashier's scanner what the total bill would be and would they have enough cash to cover it. Math was a mystery to me everywhere except in the checkout line, where I learned how to guesstimate a shopping cart's contents to within a couple dollars, a trick that my mother and grandmother came to depend on.

When my mother took the check out for the store's endorsement, she slipped it into a sweater's decorative slit pocket instead of asking me to hold it, forgetting that the pocket didn't have a bottom. The check must have fallen somewhere in the hair products aisle; she hadn't gone to any other part of the store.

In the checkout line, my mother asked me for the check. I told her she'd never given it to me. She patted her sides in panic. I cradled a box of Ding Dongs in my arms as if protecting a baby. I realized the check was long gone, long cashed, perhaps at the “No I.D.” check cashing place with bulletproof glass dividers a block away. My mother's voice dropped fast. Like a falling barometer, it warned me that an enormous storm was coming. What could I do to stop it?

Panicked, I asked, “Should I put back the Ding Dongs?”

She slapped the snack box on the conveyer belt and then left the store, walking home several lengths ahead of me without saying a word. Seeing us on the street, you'd never have known we were mother and son.

“Can you believe how fucking useless he is?” my mother said, tagging my grandmother like a wrestling match.

“Should you
put back the Ding Dong
s
?” my grandmother said. I fake smiled at her laugh. “Good thing you have us to take care of you. You wouldn't last a day on the streets!”

“He only thinks of himself,” my mother said. Her anger always rendered me in third person. “How can a smart kid be so fucking stupid?”

My mother had to get a replacement check. She called a cab—she refused to travel to the welfare office any other way—and I heard the familiar stomp, slam, and loud cuss-talking to herself in her room as she changed outfits to leave the house.

I met her at the front door in tears and reached out to her. Hidden behind an almost clown-sized pair of sunglasses, she put her hand on my chest, gave it one swift, firm push—like closing a stubborn drawer—and then slammed the front door.

There would be ten thousand more afternoons where my mother bellowed in anger, escalating in fury until she'd ransack her room to pack an oversized burgundy suitcase to nowhere, screaming, “Your father got to leave you! Why can't I?”

She had a point, one that through repeated use would dull my love for my mother into sorrow, and whittle that sorrow into anger. This time, though, I ran crying to my window and watched her wobble down the staircase to the street on unsteady shoes, zigzagging amid straight concrete lines in the soft, hazy sunlight.

6

I
t was sometime during my last year of elementary school that I learned Paul Skyhorse Johnson was not my real father. Inside a faux-oak dresser in my mother's bedroom were colorful binders of photographs glued onto pages of what felt like sticky flypaper, ­covered with a transparent plastic that when peeled back made an anxious ­
shhhhh
. It was the right sound: there were secrets here.

“How did you meet my dad?” I asked. There were no photos of my mother and Paul together.

“I was a paralegal and met him at an AIM community meeting,” she said.

“Where?”

“Downtown, at the Indian center.”

I thought about that. Later I asked, “Why are there no photos of you two together?”

“There weren't cameras on the reservation where we met,” my mother said.

I thought about that. Later I said, “I thought you met Paul at the Indian center.”

“Pictures steal an Indian's soul,” my mother said.

I thought about that. Later still I said, “But here is a picture of Paul alone.”

“He had to give his soul to me to keep,” my mother said. “He was going off to Wounded Knee to fight and didn't want the white man to have it if he was captured.”

I
really
thought about that. Then I asked, “Why would he go to Wounded Knee if you were pregnant?”

“What are you asking me, Brando?”

“Why did Paul leave us?”

My mother thought about that. Then, after months of the same rounds of questions and answers, she said, “Paul isn't your father.”

In a photo album was a page-sized portrait of a light-skinned Mexican man with wavy hair, a trimmed beard, and the same naïve, soft eyes as mine.

“Who's that?” I asked.

“This is your father,” she said, her voice scary in its even-temperedness. “He lived here with us for a couple years when you were a baby. His name was Candido Garcia Ulloa.”

“Was?”

“I think he's dead. He
must
be dead. Or went back to Mexico. He was a wetback. He was your father, and he left you.” Not her—
me
. She was quite specific on this point.

“Does this mean Paul's not my father? I'm not an Indian?”

“Of course you're an Indian. Your name is Brando Skyhorse. Paul is your father because he
wants
to be your dad.”

“Did Grandma know?”

“Sure. She liked him more than I did.”

“How come nobody told me?”

“Why did
you
need to know?” my mother said. “This wasn't any of your business. I'd already given you some fathers. Why did you need any more?”

“Does this mean I'm a Mexican?”

“I raised you Indian, not Mexican. Why, do you
want
to be fucking Mexican?”

“So Candido is my real father?”

“I don't know what ‘real' means. Maybe he is, maybe not. I don't
want
him to be your father. So he might not be. Who knows? But he probably is.”

“Will Candido ever come back?”

“No, he won't.”

“What do I tell people when they ask what I am?”

“Damn it, don't tell
anyone
anything,” my mother said. “You act like a white person, telling everyone everything. This is family business, and nobody outside needs to know because they're not family. Try to be more like the Mafia,” she said.

“The Mafia? What do you mean?”

“Stand by your
family
. And quit being so goddamn honest all the time.”

• • •

“This is your father.”
I'd been hit in the same spot with that line so many times I'd gone numb. There was no impact left in that declaration. I didn't have any feelings about a discovery I wasn't even sure was real. What I had were questions. I wanted the
story
. I'd been raised on my mother's stories and knew how skilled she was in telling them. Now here my mother was, refusing to give me, in essence, my first story. The story of who I was. Why?

“If you want,” my grandmother said in a low whisper, “I'll help you write to Candy's parents in Mexico. Maybe they'll have answers.”

She'd helped Candido write letters to his parents during the three or so years he lived with us. We began one afternoon when my mother got a call with a repeat client, knowing the call would go long. At our cracked, painted-over layaway dining room table, my grandmother suggested what I should say and then translated it for me to write in Spanish. “They're from the old country and wouldn't understand English. They're dirt poor,” she said. I imagined a house with floors, walls, and roof made of actual dirt.

“Candido was a good, simple man,” my grandmother said while I wrote. “He liked to scare you by reaching for his belt when you misbehaved, but when you ran and hid behind a table, he laughed and cradled you in his arms.”

“That sounds scary,” I said.

“No, he loved you,” my grandmother said. Only in a family like ours could a story about a man reaching for a belt be considered loving.

“Candido would say, ‘Don't be scared,
Pappitas
.' He liked to call you
Pappas
. That means ‘potatoes' in Spanish,” my grandmother said. “Okay, let's pick the stamps you like for the envelope.”

I enclosed some school photographs, part of my allowance to help with the dirt house. At the check cashing place, my grandmother gossiped with the cashiers in a mix of English and Spanish while I slid dollars through the cold metal tray and got back a satisfying array of play-colored twenty- and forty-dollar international money orders.

“You're a good man, Charlie Brown,” my grandmother said.

In a couple weeks, I received a photograph of a man and woman in their early sixties standing in front of a green curtain in a studio. Their faces were carved with hard, primitive cheekbones, their skin the color of sun-sopped oak. Their clothes were frayed, their dress shoes new. Their faces were too far from the camera to tell whether their eyes resembled my own, but I could see in them breathless hardships and poverty I'd never know from my home in Los Angeles, a daily grind they never mentioned in their letters, which my grandmother translated.

They were happy to get a letter from me, thanks to God, they wrote, but they had no idea where their cowardly and worthless son, who clearly wasn't a man, was. Thanks to God, they now had extra money to spend on food and electricity. I was welcome to visit them and my many relatives in Mexico anytime and, thanks to God, wished me well in school and in life.

“Why do they keep thanking God instead of us?” my grandmother complained.

Soon I grew bored with letters I couldn't read from people I didn't fully understand how I connected with, spending money on something that didn't show an immediate return. There were movies to see and Transformers toys and video games to buy instead. So I stopped writing. I thought if I simply ignored something I didn't want to deal with, it would disappear as long as I kept pretending it wasn't there.

It worked. For a long while, it worked. I told myself that Candido was doing the same thing I was.

Like father, like son.

• • •

Father's Day in a fatherless year became a second Mother's Day. I'd buy cards for my mother and grandmother, sign them with variations of “To the only father I've ever known” or “I never needed a dad” (the cards and signatures my mother's idea), and then listen to both women argue over which of them needed men less
or
hated men more.

Sometimes Frank stopped by. Now when we spent afternoons together, we split our time between things he picked—baseball games, waiting in line for concert tickets, Olympic pin conventions, Spalding Gray spoken-word monologues—and what I picked: theme parks. I loved their perfect “reality” of spotless sidewalks, razor-sharp grassy lawns, junk food on every corner, and a world where kids seemed to be in charge. Frank hated them: having to actually
pay
for parking, and endless mazes of what my grandmother called “sneaky lines” for attractions that lasted minutes or, in many cases, seconds. He felt that theme parks brought out the worst in people.

The Father's Day I was eleven, I convinced Frank to take us to Universal Studios. A kids' promotion handed out “scratch-off” back lot maps that promised a special prize to eagle-eyed children who spotted animatronic characters on the tour and scratched off the appropriate locations on their game card. The tram ride was long, and I got bored. I saw that by scratching a thin line down the middle of each scratch spot, you could find out where the characters were without having to wait to the end of the tour.

Frank was gamely playing along, pointing out a mannequin, when he saw I wasn't hunched over my game card scratching along with the other kids.

“What did you do to yours?” he asked.

He held it up to the sun. My thin scratch marks looked fatter and more conspicuous in the light.

“You cheated, Brando! Why did you cheat?”

“I didn't cheat,” I said. “I just didn't have to wait like everyone else.”

“No, this is cheating,” he said. “You cheated yourself out of a good time. Your impatience ruined the day. God, Brando, sometimes you're just like your mother.”

The comeback—“And you're nothing like a father!”—got lodged in my throat and stayed there. I hated Frank, so I punished him with silence on the rest of the tour and the drive home. I'd already demoted him from father, but to what? What was the right word for Frank, someone less than a father but more than a friend? Frank stared ahead, shoulders hunched, muttering about traffic when he dropped me off. He drove away before I'd unlocked the front door.

In my room, I wished that he'd disappear. I got my wish. It would last for three years.

• • •

A few months later, my mother's footfalls thundered across the house to my room. She had news. Big footsteps.
Big
news.

“Paul's coming.”

“Here? When?”

“Two weeks,” she said.

It was early 1985, seven years since I'd last seen Paul Skyhorse Johnson. What would he expect of us? Did he know we weren't Indian? How “Indian” would we have to act? Would Paul confront my mother for raising an “apple”: red on the outside, white on the inside?

Since turning to phone sex, my mom's Indian-ness had lost its blush, and any sense of cultural identity I had went with it. She'd stopped leaving the house, so she didn't meet new people to introduce her Indian self to. She maintained her Running Deer identity for her coworkers but had so many faux lives to embody for her calls, her clients gave her the performative space she needed for her own cascading personal narratives. Becoming someone else wasn't questioned or challenged on the phone, it was encouraged and rewarded. My mother could be Cara Lee on one call or an Indian squaw getting raped by a cowboy on the next. She could be anyone on call. Off the phone, she still couldn't be my birth mother Maria Teresa.

I didn't think about being an Indian anymore until someone reminded me of it: well-intentioned white teachers, African-Americans who wanted me to know they were “one-eighth Cherokee,” total strangers in search of a good story from their ride on the city bus. For me, being “Indian” wasn't different from what any other kind of ghetto raconteur in Echo Park did: talk fast and hide the truth. Or tell my mother's version of the truth that I had memorized:

“My father is Paul Skyhorse. My mother is Running Deer Skyhorse. They are both full- blooded American Indians. My father was falsely arrested for killing two FBI agents. My mother was a lawyer helping with his defense. I'm the son of a Indian chief and will become a chief one day myself. Any questions?”

Then I went back to my ordinary, homogenized American favorites: McDonald's French fries, video games, Transformer cartoons, and lying. I knew my mother's story about me was total fabrication, but I kept telling it anyway. My mother told me to. My grandmother told me to. Eventually, in his own way, Paul would tell me to as well. Truth is, I'd have kept telling that story even if my family had given me a choice. People smiled when I told them my name. They paid attention to me when I told them my story. The more I told my mother's lies, the less I felt like I was just an extension of her. The truth about Candido seemed like another way for my mother to control me and define who I was. In the shade of absolute falsehoods, I realized I could grow up.

• • •

Thirty-nine-year-old Paul Skyhorse Johnson resurfaced in a seniors' convalescent home in Torrance, a town two buses away. Fresh off parole for another undetermined crime and needing to recover from an injury without insurance, he'd been placed in a state-subsidized home to recuperate.

The Paul I'd remembered meeting in jail and in Saint Louis had been a “Thunder Warrior” Indian comic-book superhero hulk with billowing, untamed locks. In Torrance, I found an aged man creaking into his forties with a broken leg and short, thinning hair. His muscular upper body had atrophied into a firm, compact potbelly scarred with slash marks, looking like the tread of an old tire. One of his legs was in a cast up to his hip, and he maneuvered through the bleached flourescent yellow halls in a wheelchair. What I wanted most from a father was a buffer between me and my mother. How would this man stop my mother's hysterical slides off her emotional cliff, when he couldn't stand on his own without a cane?

Had Paul really changed so much in the past few years? Or had I confused him with my brief courtroom memories of Paul Skyhorse Durant, with whom my mother was still in contact? After Durant's celebrated acquittal, he'd been rearrested for armed bank robbery, pled guilty, and was sent in 1984 to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he underwent a psychiatric evaluation. While there, he filled out a visitors list that authorized only five people: his attorney of record, his brother, his mother, an investigator, and my mother, “Maria Banaga.”