Take This Man (4 page)

When he was discharged, Frank lived briefly with his father, whose idea of demonstrative love hadn't changed, and then moved back in with his grandmother, shuffling between colleges before landing at the University of Southern California. One day on campus he saw on a bulletin board an ad posted by the California Employment Development Department seeking fluent Spanish speakers to work part-time as claims examiners.

“Must be Mexican,” the ad said. (Because, its writers assumed,
who else in Los Angeles would know how to speak Spanish
?)

Worried that he'd face competition for the job, Frank ripped down the ad even though the only Hispanics he saw on campus were athletes on scholarship who didn't need jobs.

The state job offered a salary higher than minimum wage and a promise for job security, but that wasn't what interested Frank. He had
plans
, focusing at any one time on: the police academy, the comedy club circuit, the theater, and, ranking above them all, the recording studio. He couldn't play an instrument and knew he had no voice, but he took songwriting classes and workshops, entering songwriting contests and festivals with knockoffs of popular songs. He wrote a ­variation of Paul Simon's “Kodachrome” with the lyrics changed around and an original tune called “Little Miss Emotion”: “You have my love, you have my devotion / C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, Little Miss Emotion.” Working for the state turned out to be a good temporary job—he'd met his “babe” Maria there, and the mother sitting across from him was so much like the
abuelita
he'd lost—but he needed to remind himself that he was destined for big things.

Frank felt a small tug at his side. I'd approached him, holding a book. At that age, books held my hand everywhere.

“Look it,” I said. “My grandmother is reading this.”

“Really?” Frank asked. “What is it?”

“The Lincoln Conspiwacy,” I lisped.

Frank looked at the book jacket. “That's right,” he said and smiled.

He'd tell his friends, his stepmother, anyone who would listen, about the Kid That Reads Adult Books, but nobody was as impressed as he was. What was wrong with them?
C'mon
, he thought,
this kid is really something else
. What they couldn't see was how a little boy could remind Frank of himself just by holding a book.

• • •

“That's my tiger!” Frank said, and held me aloft in his arms.

If you asked what my first “father” memory is, there is just Frank. Six foot, more than 225 pounds. “Tall and big for a Mexican,” he liked to say.

He spoke in a warm, un-Latino-accented declarative voice full of confidence that could make asinine pronouncements sound like jazzy traffic reports: “The Beatles didn't
make history, they
are
history.”

He fire-rubbed his palms together and schoolboy “
Woo-hoo
!
”-ed before a drive anywhere. He revved up his 1970s avocado green Dodge van, with its wood paneling, shag carpeting, leather bench seat in the back, and Beatles-fan license plate reading LENNMAC, and played “Macca's”
Band on the Run
or Jackson Browne's
Running on Empty
. If it was cold, Frank wore a custom-made nylon silver jacket with the title of his favorite Jackson Browne song, “The Pretender,” stitched across the back.

If Candido is a blank space, memories of Frank are like flashcards. Pictures of a young man, madly in love and maybe in a little over his head, becoming an actual father a piece at a time. There he is, driving us down I-5 to suburban Buena Park on Halloween, where the houses had glowing orange jewel doorbells, there were no security gates on the windows and doors, and the candies handed out weren't loose single pieces but packed in actual
bags
.

There he is again, dropping me off at an overnight summer camp in the afternoon and then driving back that night to take me home when I wouldn't stop crying in my cabin.

He's got an ice pack on my head in the next one. A spunky tomboy named Carrie invited me to her birthday party, and, when I laughed and told her I didn't want to go to a “girl party,” she creamed me on the head with her metal
Land of the Lost
lunch pail. Later Frank drove me to her house bearing apology Hostess Ding Dongs.

I'm at a Paul Williams concert with him and my mother. She's brought pajamas and a bathrobe for me to change into in his van if I get sleepy on the ride home. Williams is hours late, so my mother changes me in the concert hall's ladies' room. Frank's holding my hand while we return to our seats amid chuckles and applause, when somebody shouts out, “Enjoy the show, Hef!” Frank thinks he's making fun of me and snaps back, “Hey,
thanks
, pal!”

Then he's running, panicked, carrying me to hard asphalt. I had dived into a backyard pool, unaware I needed swimming lessons first.

Each day with Frank was our own parade where I marched in his footsteps, shooing my mother's hands from his belt loops. I idolized his manner of being a man. He called my mother—and tall, skinny blondes—“Babe” and ordered Heinekens, “No glass,” in restaurants, which for years afterward I considered the classy, sophisticated way to order beer. There were warm, milky baths in his ancient oversized tub after hard days of sweaty horseplay, sleepovers on the couch in Frank's drafty childhood home, and backyard barbecues of frugal cuts of steak on a grocery-store-bought hibachi.

“He loves you two,” my grandmother said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “Too bad he's so cheap.”

• • •

They'd been dating for a year when my mother told Frank she was taking me on a trip to meet my father: Paul Skyhorse.

Frank felt like he'd grown into some kind of father to me, but he didn't want to come between me and my “real” dad. Paul Skyhorse, my mother said, had moved to Chicago after his acquittal in Los Angeles, and while things were over between her and Paul, she wanted her son to know his father. (This, of course, was Skyhorse Johnson. Skyhorse Durant stayed on the West Coast, first in Seattle and then San Francisco.) How could Frank refuse that?

There's a white-bordered photo taken at Los Angeles's Union Station that has, written in my grandmother's hand, the date, September 8, 1978, and three names: Frank Zamora, Maria Banaga Johnson, and Brando Skyhorse. We're packed for a trip on the Southwest Limited, headed east. My mother still enjoyed posing for photos then.

She sits in a throne-like leather armchair while I'm astride her lap. By her feet are two large suitcases, one of which has bulging sides, packed in what would become my mother's characteristic “rush and stuff” style when visits to my father became manhunts to
find
a father.

I had just turned five. I'm dressed in white overalls, a checkerboard shirt, and am holding a kids' Amtrak travel pack, a cross between a doctor's bag and a purse. I keep trying to brush the itchy long hair that I hate off my shoulders.

“All American Indians wear their hair long,” my mother explained.

Perched on the armrest behind us is Frank. He couldn't stop ­thinking about how I was going to see my father and that this might be the last time he ever saw me. One of his hands grips my mother's arm as if he's trying to keep her from leaving. His other hand braces him up so that he doesn't fold over like a pocketknife. Frank stares at the ground, visibly mourning our loss and already fatigued from the long journeys that he seems to understand lay ahead for us all.

• • •

I remember that two-day train trip in filmstrip bursts: a desert at sunset; creaking through mountainous passes; filling out the phonics workbooks my mother bought by the stack; my first kiss, with an older African-American girl (she must have been seven or eight) who told me if we kissed under a blanket, nobody would see us. In full view of everyone in the coach car, she threw a blanket over our heads and brushed her dry lips against mine.

We changed trains in Kansas City, Missouri, and then connected to Saint Louis. There we met Paul's friend Nakome, who'd let us stay at his trailer and then drive us to Paul's prison, the Vienna Correctional Center in southern Illinois. His affectionate behemoth German shepherd nuzzled my hand.

“That's Botchi,” he said. “Trained him to attack FBI agents.” Botchi, the World's Friendliest Dog, jumped up and licked my face.

Nakome, I was told, was an Indian medicine man. The night before we visited Paul, Nakome sat us in a circle on an upholstered bench in his trailer and passed around a peace pipe filled with peyote. I sucked long puffs and told Nakome what I saw: the trailer disappeared around my body while I flew into the clouds. A large bird circled over my head three times.

“You're having a vision,” Nakome said. “That bird must have been an eagle. Only the son of a chief like your father would see an eagle.”

My father, a chief? And me, the son of a chief? Why hadn't my mother told me? I looked at her, dragging on the pipe, with wide, expectant eyes. She looked back at me, giggled uncontrollably, and then passed out.

• • •

The morning we drove to Vienna was cloudless, the way all mornings on eventful days are in memory. That name, “Vienna,” had an exotic, magical lilt to it, something that made me think we were visiting some kind of castle. In the back of a pickup truck, I was spread out on top of the vicious FBI-hunting Botchi, who patiently cushioned the rocky ride.

Paul was brought into a large fluorescent-lit waiting area with long metallic benches and tables. He jangled like loose change, wearing wrist and ankle cuffs, and his hair, which drooped to his waist, reached the top of my head when we stood side by side. Vienna was a level-six minimum-security prison, meaning we were allowed one greeting hug and kiss. There was no divider between Paul and us.

“My little big chief,” he said, and picked me off the ground.

I felt I was soaring at the top of a flagpole. His voice was a low rumble from the mountaintop of his head. I could see him in our now tiny seeming Echo Park house, bending down like an ancient oak while he rustled between rooms, and, with his massive arm span, wrapping our entire family in a protective turtle shell embrace.

I had found my father.

• • •

Frank, waving us off in Union Station less than a week ago, wasn't even a memory while we packed for our trip home. I couldn't think about anything except Paul. When would I see him again? How long before he got out of jail? Would he come home to Los Angeles to live with us? On this trip, my mother had already gotten in the habit of giving me responsibility for safekeeping important documents, checks, and tickets, which became routine as I got older. “You're already five years old,” she said. “You're not a child anymore.”

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes had a special promotion that allowed kids to travel free on Amtrak if they had a pair of box tops from specially marked boxes of the cereal. My mother thought she'd given me the box tops for safekeeping. She hadn't.

“What do you mean you can't find them?” she screamed. Calming her down was impossible. Nakome and I were trying to decelerate a moving train. I was filling with a drowning panic, triple-checking under cushions and in my pockets for what I knew wasn't there. I had jeopardized our trip, and now neither of us could go home, ever.

“We can't leave now! I don't have any money to buy your ticket!” (Once we were back home, I'd see her pull from between her breasts an egg-shaped clump of blood-stained twenty-dollar bills Paul had slipped her during our visit.)

“I'll just leave you here!” she shouted. “You've taken enough of my life from me!”

My mother grabbed my throat. Then she pulled me across the trailer the way a girl would drag a lifeless doll up a flight of stairs. She threw me shivering onto the bathroom floor and then snatched one of Nakome's leather knife holsters and stabbed at my neck with it. It was empty; the holster tip didn't cut, simply folding inward. She tossed it aside and yanked me over to the toilet like a mop.

My mother wrapped her hands around my neck again and pushed my face in the toilet water while I flailed my short arms trying to reach the flush handle. My resistance frustrated my mother; her grip tightened, and her nails pierced my skin. I was drowning and choking, and it would be seconds before I lost consciousness.

Nakome wedged himself in the bathroom doorway, grabbed my mother's shoulders, and uncorked her off me. My head slapped in a wet puddle on the ground. There was a synchronous sound of shallow breathing from us all, our chests rising and falling at different rates, our breathing a relay game.

When the box tops were found, an apology was grumbled, but my mother explained to me that being strangled had been a natural consequence of my “carelessness.” Not being given the box tops wasn't an excuse; I should have
asked
for them. Later, as I got older, whenever my mother got unwelcome mail from the welfare office or the IRS, when I couldn't unjam a tape from her VCR or “fix” her wonky phone line, when I was the closest male at hand on whom to take out her frustrations with men, or, above all, whenever she was afraid, she'd bellow for me from her bedroom.

“Brrrrraannndo!”

It was a chain-saw howl, a concussion blast, that to this day makes me jump at loud noises. When she called my name, I stopped being her son and turned into a hunchback lab assistant scurrying through our horror B-movie castle, searching for the one essential ingredient she needed to complete her experiment. Of course, I'd
always
lack this one crucial piece of her puzzle. It was, like those box tops, something she'd already forgotten she'd never given to me.

• • •

Paul was paroled in November 1978, two months after our visit, but instead of moving to Los Angeles to be with us, he went to the Saint Louis area to live with his wife. A wife my mother hadn't known existed.