Take This Man (16 page)

The tree trimmers stripped the branches above my favorite place, a nook at the bottom of our staircase that couldn't be seen by anyone in my house, down to stumps. My grandmother had robbed me of my clubhouse. By high school, her charms seemed vulgar and grotesque; my high school friends, of course, thought she was a total badass. My mother, too, was “awesome.” When she wasn't locked in her bedroom working as a phone sex operator, she befriended my teenage buddies, our high school's only multiethnic alterna-music-loving collective. She peppered profanity into conversations. At first they encouraged her to curse; then struggled to keep up. (“What's a ‘reverse butt plug'?”) She learned their likes—which became my likes, of course—and soon had copies of the Cure's
Disintegration
and Depeche Mode's
Music for the Masses
sitting next to her Buffy Sainte-Marie cassettes.

She was the “cool” parent you could talk music or sex with. Asking questions, though, meant that you had to shut up and listen to her, too.

“Did you know I'm dying?” she'd say, and tell stories about her numerous health maladies: the temporary blindness, the blood poisoning, the ingrown toenails, and the “inoperable brain tumor”: that pernicious beast that shadowed her for years, routinely bursting into her head DEA-drug-bust style and then vanishing like an ice-cream headache. My friends trusted my mother's stories; one friend's sincere greeting whenever I saw him was, “So how's your mom's tumor?”

No topic was off-limits. Nothing, that is, except her job.

“Doesn't your mom ever come out of her room?” one friend asked me.

“When she's not working.”

“It's ten o'clock at night.”

“She's a telemarketer.”

“What does a ‘telemarketer' do, anyway?”

“She's in sales.”

“What does she sell?”

“Office supplies,” I said.

“Who buys office supplies at ten o'clock at night?”

“Someone who . . . really needs paper.” (I wasn't as swift on my storytelling toes as my mother was.)

My friends were old enough to poke holes in this and my other gaseous tales, but one thing that had to remain secret was our identities as Mexicans. I sure was inventing some tall tales of my own to keep that part of my life hidden, though:

“My father was an Indian chief. Yes, that means I'll take over the tribe one day.”

“My name Skyhorse means ‘great warrior.' Yes, just like a Jedi from
Star Wars
.”

“Yes, these blond highlights my mother got for me at the Edward Boye' Salon in West Hollywood are consistent with my Indian upbringing. Indians put sand in their hair as part of their ascent into manhood.”

Not that any of it mattered to my Mexican high school friends, who were more interested in seeing the Cure at Dodger Stadium or hearing the latest Morrissey single than speaking Spanish and discussing our mutual “
cultura
.” We talked of getting Depeche Mode tattoos and lusted after what we called KROQ (pronounced K-Rock) chicks: white and Asian girls named for the local alternative music radio station who wore wispy black dresses on ninety-four-degree days or jean shorts with black tights and combat boots. Our shared culture was English pop music, not
la raza
.

My mother, who was still playing her deck of bad fake ID cards with interchangeable versions of Running Deer Skyhorse, acknowledged being a Mexican only when playacting on the phone with her clients. When my mother's best friend in the phone sex business (her only friend that I knew of) was out of town, the friend's boyfriend wanted some action. Instead of calling his girlfriend's service, which would have let him talk to someone for free, he dialed my mother's service and spoke to her for eight hundred dollars' worth of charges. When my mother's friend got the bill a month later, she asked her boyfriend why he did it.

“I wanted to speak to somebody Latina,” he explained

His girlfriend told him, “The joke's on you, dummy. You were talking to an American Indian.”

• • •

“Who are the roses for?” Pat asked. I'd stashed them in the fridge and told my mother and grandmother that they were a gift to a teacher leaving staff. They believed me.

“Roses for a teacher,” Pat said. “Uh-huh. She must be very . . . pretty.”

I'd crushed for over a year on a casual friend who worked at the student store, but I had no idea what to do next. Buy her something nice, express my feelings in the most over-the-top way possible, and pray that my feelings are reciprocated, right? At her best friend's suggestion, for Christmas I bought her college sweatshirts: soft-hued Nordstrom knockoffs to soften how weird and masculine these gifts were. I wrapped them in shiny foil boxes that I stuffed in my backpack and paired them with a dozen roses I carried to school upside down in a plastic bag like a bouquet of inverted balloons. On the last day before winter break, I assembled everything on her homeroom desk then asked her for a date. Out of sheer embarrassment, she said “yes.”

She found a way to say “no” a couple days later on the phone.

“So what did the flowers you gave me mean?” she asked after an hour-long conversation.

“They mean, I guess, that . . . I love you.” She didn't hear the question mark I ended the sentence with in my head.

“I think we should just be friends,” she said. I was devastated, but by now it was a familiar feeling. This heartache played in a minor key compared to what I felt when a father left. Pat spotted that my sullenness was not, as my mother feared, a defiant act of rebellion.

“Why are you turning into an asshole?” she asked me.

“He's okay. He just misses his teacher.” Pat patted me on the back and yawned, clinging to the kitchen sink. His bus commute was exhausting, but he was stuck, since my grandmother refused to have “another man in my house with a car.”

Surprisingly, my mother, a long ways from her passionate defense of Robert, stood up for Pat. “Maybe it's time for us to go, then. Pat wants to get us a place of our own. I really don't want to die in this house,” she said, convinced that her tumor was acting up again like a pulled tendon.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” my grandmother retorted. “You aren't going
anywhere
.”

Sharing a house with my mother and grandmother had always been like shuttling between two divorced parents. They drifted apart when a husband arrived but came back together when he left, two land masses forever separating and colliding. No one had ever seriously threatened—or encouraged—us to move out before now. Pat's work ethic meant that he might be a man my grandmother had to take
seriously
.

“Let Pat support us if he wants,” my mother said. “If he can't buy himself a car with his own damn money, it's time for us to move out on our own.” My grandmother backed down. That was the easy part.

“You see this here?” a salesman told Pat. “This is a ‘red flag.' You have three of them on your credit report.”

When the salesman left, I asked Pat, “What's a red flag?”

“Oh, it doesn't mean anything. My report should have been cleaned up by now. It's an old college loan thing. I took care of everything in Tahoe,” he said. His reply was itself a red flag, but before I could respond, he patted my shoulder and said, “We'll get there, Brando.”

Pat at last found a “new” used Subaru with power windows, power locks, power antenna, power sunroof. It was the most extravagant four wheels our family had ever, or would ever, own.

“Would you drive this car?” Pat asked me with a wry grin. I was exhilarated to ride in a not-piece-of-shit car. Could our family
afford
this?

“My parents will wire transfer me the three-thousand-dollar down payment,” Pat said. “We can take it home today.”

We drove off the used-car lot under a bright sun, a clear spring Los Angeles sky with the power windows and power sunroof open. I tuned into my favorite radio station just as it played my favorite band Depeche Mode's new single—and thus my new favorite song—and Pat high-fived me. Being sixteen, I thought that life's happiness came from lining up as many of your favorites in a row as you could. Here they all were, together, with my new favorite father.

The next day, a Saturday, Pat gave me my first driving lesson in the rambling paved valleys of Dodger Stadium's acres-wide parking lots. The car was a feather-touch automatic, and Pat, a patient, encouraging teacher, but I was still the slow learner I'd been when Oscar had tried to teach me how to ride a bike.

“We'll go out again next week,” he promised.

Three days later, I ditched school with permission from my mother—who warned me to “be safe and take care of myself” if anything bad happened, and whose habitual premonition for catastrophe I shrugged off—and got into a line with a group of four friends and over three hundred other kids at eight in the morning to earn Depeche Mode autographs at a record-release in-store signing. In that pre–cell phone era, we passed the next thirteen hours listening to the new album on state-of-the-art CD boom boxes and dispatches from the radio station organizing the event. We made cardboard
Honk If You Like Depeche Mode
signs that we waved at confused motorists and had awkward, parrying conversations about who we liked in school. I wandered through the bright, clean aisles of the Beverly Center mall across the street with Cristina, a new crush, not talking, and imagined us sitting at a food court, sharing deep secrets while her black tights and Doc Martens brushed against my ultra-cool Zodiac shoes.

Nightfall swelled the waiting crowd to an estimated fifteen ­thousand people. The line became a surging, bottle-throwing sea that carried me several feet off the ground and dropped me hard against a concrete shore. The signing, unbeknownst to us, was canceled. We'd waited hours for nothing and were stuck in an angry mob. My friends didn't want to leave, but my mother's survival instincts kicked in. I fought through the crowd and called Pat from a pay phone a block away. Where that instinct to call him for help came from, I don't know. It might have been desperation or a sincere belief that here at last was a father figure I could turn to when I was in need.

“Stay safe,” he said. “I'll come and get you as soon as I can.” It took him almost two hours, but Pat found us, materializing from around a corner.

“There were police barricades on the street, so I had to park a few blocks away,” he said.

“How did you get past them?” I asked.

“Oh, I have my ways,” he said and smiled. He drove me and my friends to the restaurant he managed. It was past closing time, but he opened up the kitchen, sat us at a booth, and took our orders like a waiter. Starved and dehydrated from waiting all day in line, we wolfed down sizzling hamburgers coated with shaved onion rings and swallowed oversized glasses of delicious, ice-cold sodas.

“You have, like, the coolest dad ever,” Cristina said.

“She's right, Brando!” Pat shouted from the kitchen.

Pat crammed us into the car—there wasn't enough space for us, so Cristina sat on my lap—and drove each of my friends home. We pulled up to our house around three in the morning.

My mother let me sleep in late and miss school the next day, too. Pat was home early, the car cutting almost an hour and a half off his commute. When I joined everyone for dinner that night, there was this eerie peace; a sense of joyous calm that settled over the table.

“I'm glad you're okay,” my mother said. “It must have been like the sixties for you out there!”

“I should've listened to you to be careful,” I said.

“Pat was there when you needed him,” my mother said and stroked his arm.

That dinner, there was joking without cruelty, laughter without maliciousness. Some kind of spirit was there in that dining room binding us together, protecting us all from unexpected misfortune that had nipped our every step for years. Good things
could
at last happen to us. We were
going
to make it.

Two days later, Pat called from the restaurant.

“I'm coming home late tonight on the bus. Somebody stole the car.”

• • •

“Let's see you steal this one,” Pat said as he attached a theft protection club to the steering wheel of a crippled 1970s yellow Honda hatchback that with his seat pushed way back put Pat's knees right under the steering wheel. The car lost power at odd times and filled with engine smoke when put in reverse.

“This is only for a while,” Pat said. “I'm expecting another wire transfer.”

When the new round of transfers cleared, the Honda was traded in for a large Pat-friendly Ford Bronco SUV. He found new work at a family-style restaurant chain that let him take home “overstock” food destined for the trash and crammed our freezer with steaks, burgers, and chicken breasts. An “asshole manager” from his old job who had accused Pat of a nebulous financial impropriety found his car damaged.

“Instant karma,” Pat said.

The red flags were thick as wildflowers, and yet I can't remember a time when we, as a family, were less alert or more content. I'd never see my mother happier or watch her anger dissolve faster. She cared less about the plight of American Indians and more about new patio furniture and aromatherapy. My mother let Pat string Christmas lights around the security bars on our front windows as he tortured us with a high-pitched rendition of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

“Invite your friends for Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “I want to cook for them.”

When my friends arrived, Pat set out a spectacular multicourse “overstock” feast catered with large restaurant-sized cartons of steak and lobster, along with five different whole pies for dessert. Sitting himself with my mother and grandmother at what he called the “kids' ” table on the back indoor patio, he served me and my friends in the dining room wearing his chef's whites.