Take This Man (6 page)

My eyes started burning, and I gulped the remaining air as if wringing it from a sponge. The other kids, all girls under ten, watched silent while I cried and screamed to get out. The lodge leader tried to soothe our circle (me) with a calming prayer, but nobody could hear her over my shouting. My mother restrained me from leaving, so I poked a small breathing hole in the lodge's deerskin wall. How clever I was! Then we crawled out into the sun, where none of the baby squaws with long, dark knotted braids would look at a coward like me.

• • •

Just as I was learning how to be an Indian, my kidnapped, white-as-snow sister reappeared, another of my mother's magician tricks. I was nine when my mother and I flew across the country to meet Helen, a woman my mother said was my long-lost abducted sister, Janaine.

“She's family,” my mother said. “You'll be ‘Uncle' Brando to her kids.”

“Why does she have a different name?” I asked.

“That's what the kidnappers named her,” my mother said.

I mailed off a signed school photo, “Love, from your little brother” as if
brother
were a new pen name. I thought family members were like trading cards. You collected names, and maybe you'd stumble onto one you cherished, but otherwise they'd just sit there crammed away somewhere, to be brought out simply as something to make other people envious. I was a full-blooded Indian boy in a Mexican neighborhood who now had a white older sister that lived on another coast. It made perfect sense to me. There was no bar for admittance into our circle. Those who wanted to be a part of our family could just attach themselves to us as if they were Lego bricks.

When Helen picked us up from the airport, she was ten years older than Janaine would have been and had two young children. We stayed at a large two-story house down a long dirt road deep in the woods. I slept in a room with my very own bed, opened the window at night to air out that strange “new house” smell, and soaked in the roar of grasshoppers and silence. I grew homesick for noise and my grandmother.

It was fun at first. I played backyard games and drank apple juice with Helen's daughter and son, my “niece” and “nephew,” played a family round of Clue in the heat of a summer afternoon, visited a lawyer's office with lots of books to distract me, oblivious to the “giving Brando a better home” discussion shuttlecocking over my head, and won a stuffed dog in a German lederhosen costume at an amusement park for the trip home.

Then I noticed Helen acting more like a mother than my big sister. She assigned me chores, giving me specific instructions on how to set the table, fold my bath towel, and take out the trash. Why was she telling me what to do? Was I going to collect mothers now the way I'd been collecting fathers? I already had a mother, and she didn't act like a mother at all. She was my best friend. Why did I need a new mother when I already had my grandmother? Were all mothers so distant and formal? Helen was like some kind of . . . authority figure.

Our stay ended with a fight over an innocent comment Helen made about American Indian history. My mother locked herself in a bedroom and told me to pack while Helen crouched on the floor by a closed door and pleaded apologies for “offending your people.”

I'd get occasional letters and Christmas cards from Helen throughout the years but didn't learn until my twenties that she'd answered an ad my mother placed in a magazine dangling me out for adoption—the same venue my mother frequently used in her efforts to find me a father and an identity. Perhaps my mother thought her life would be easier without me—“No one else feels any obligation to stay!” my mother would scream—but when she looked into the abyss of letting her child go, unlike Candido, she flinched. When as an adult I confronted my mother with Helen's truth, she dug into her Janaine story, not deviating one detail from the narrative she'd been living with for years.

“She told me she was my daughter,” my mother said. “I don't know what else to tell you.” She paused. “At least it's never boring.”

• • •

But my mother was bored. She'd been single for almost a year after Frank left her, so we hit the road, with prepaid Amtrak, Greyhound, and airline tickets, looking for dads for me, and men for her, but not really in that order. When you're a child, you go where you're pulled and trust whoever's doing the pulling. What started as a couple trips to visit Paul was now a full-scale cross-country manhunt.

“We'll always stay safe as long as we're together,” she said. “Nobody's fucked up enough to hurt a mother
and
her child.”

My mother dated three-dimensionally, keeping track of the men she met through her evolving singles ads like a chess master in the park playing five games at once. She chose prospective suitors based on what parts of the country she wanted to visit. New men meant new adventures on buses, trains, and planes, with phonics workbooks and “early readers” to cover my short “vacations” from school. Staring out the large airport windows, my mother, always a nervous flyer, would watch a plane take off and whisper, “Come on, Big Bird. You're gonna make it.”

Our visits were measured in days or hours, accommodated sometimes—but not always—with our own beds, and garnished with healthy dollops of charity and good luck. We traveled to Oakland, where Larry, a kind, wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, introduced me to Pong. There was an Amtrak trip on the Coast Starlight to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Karl, a man in his early sixties, loaded us into his pickup truck and drove to a literal shack with a tin roof and newspaper insulation where he and his three children slept in one common bed. In Oxnard, California, we stayed with Stan, an obese man whose bratty tween daughters hissed at me through their retainers and kept their sunglasses on indoors. A man in Albuquerque, New Mexico, tried to teach me the harmonica. A scary redneck named Rick, who lived in a San Antonio trailer park, served me milk in glasses with topless Playboy models on them. I named a stuffed rabbit bought at a Greyhound bus station Redding, in honor of the California town we fled at four in the morning. By my tenth birthday, my stuffed animal collection—one toy per man—had grown into a Versailles menagerie of felt ears, cotton bellies, and button eyes.

A disabled man in Atlanta never got us home from the airport. My mother spotted him from the Jetway and, thanks to her habit of never sending photographs of herself, walked right by him, made a U-turn, and headed to a ticket gate saying that we needed to return to Los Angeles because she'd forgotten my insulin.

“Look sick,” my mother said. I frowned and sucked in my cheeks.

We had our pick of seats on a boomerang flight back to LA, during which a crew of concerned flight attendants checked up on us throughout, complimenting my mother on how “calm and strong” I seemed.

Whenever a prospective man didn't work out, I nurtured a small, flickering hope that my mother would abandon her cause and choose to remain single; that she would remain mine alone but that we could continue our fantastic journeys together. I loved them. I had ­elaborate fantasies of a life spent with my mother rail tripping to far-flung American destinations. In my dreams, instead of searching for men, we were stars of our own television show: a mother-and-son detective duo out for adventure, new people to meet, and new stories to collect. Each “manhunt” included a cast of warm ancillary characters: relatives, shopkeepers, waiters and waitresses, bus and cab ­drivers, Amtrak dining car companions—all of them with intoxicating accents and strange-sounding American hometowns and ­festive backstories so unique and memorable in our moments together. Then, after a flurry of information exchanged on loose napkins and floating sheets of scrap paper, they were lost and forgotten, like names scrubbed clean from a headstone.

Impermanence was both my mother's ally—“Don't make friends with anyone,” she said—and my own fiercest foe. For me, if any man was nice for more than a day, he was a potential father. If a woman smiled and rubbed my head, she could be my mother's new best friend. I couldn't help it. Sometimes neither could my mother. Her compassion and tenderness toward total strangers were a constant surprise. Something about the road, being away from the claustrophobic house and a codependent June, revealed her deeper generosity and stripped away her characteristic fear and disappointment. I'd love to tell you all these strangers' names and stories here, how each one of them was crucial in helping us make a connecting flight or a just-about-to-depart train, or covering a meal in a diner when we were short of cash, or buying me a chocolate bar “for the road,” but they're all a jumble of receding faces and closing doors to me now. (Whoever you were, and wherever you all are, I thank you.)

The children were, for me, harder to forget. We met men who'd been set adrift by their younger wives and who were simply too old to keep up with their kids. I saw the loneliness in these children's eyes and imagined them kindred brothers and sisters, siblings that could come home with me and replace my stuffed animal forest. We'd hide away together from my mother when she was angry, and laugh, play, and clutch one another tight in my closet when her thunderous footsteps got too close. These kids, forced to be adults before they were ready, weren't authority figures like Helen. They were just like me, searching in their own fathers for the same thing I had traveled halfway across the country to find. Little kids also ask brave questions: Why was my hair long like a girl's? Did I live in a teepee? How come I didn't wear feathers? My mother ignored these questions or sometimes invented her own answers, but she always left town with the same encouraging words: “We'll be back.” Sometimes the men followed up with notes from their kids, who told us in large capital ­letters that floated like balloons across three-hole-punched paper how much they missed us, asking when they'd see us again. My mother never answered them. She was writing her own letters, too busy singing to me the virtues of a new and coming father to listen to the dreams of children.

4

“Y
ou wanna play catch, Son?” Robert asked.

My first live-in stepfather, Robert, took me into the backyard with a baseball and a pair of gloves one smog-crusted afternoon when I was ten years old. Bored with the repetitive play, he roughhoused me atop his shoulders and then hoisted me over the neighbor's fence, dangling me by my ankles above a gully filled with broken glass.

“Say ‘Catch'!” he said.

“Catch!” I said.

“I can't hear you!” he said and dropped me down a couple inches. I swayed aloft in midair like a pendulum, the tips of my hair grazing shards of cracked windows, and howled with equal doses of giddy joy and shrieking terror.

“My arm's feeling tired, Son! Say ‘Catch'!”

“Catch!” I screamed. “Catch! Catch! Catch!”

I was lifted back over the wall. He handed me my baseball. “Boring game,” he said and ran in the house. Robert was a lightning flash: hot, blinding, and gone before the thunder came.

• • •

Robert was serving his fifth year of a five-year sentence at Arizona State Prison at Florence when he met my mother through one of her personal ads. He was born on St. George Island, Alaska—his Aleutian name was “Tall Fox”—and sent to the Chilocco Indian School in northern Oklahoma, a boarding school created by an act of Congress aimed at “educating” Indians with a useful trade. When he was sixteen, Robert was expelled from Chilocco for driving over a cop's foot. He graduated to a series of youth authority camps and second-string county jails before arriving at “Arizona State,” which is what he called the prison in conversation, as if he were discussing his alma mater.

He appeared late one night in a taxi at our front steps with a canvas duffel bag and the musk of an all-day Greyhound trip. His was a weaselly physique, with cords of stringy shoulder-length hair and a splotchy complexion set off by hollow-point-bullet cheekbones. Sitting at the bottom of our staircase, Robert lit up a tracer fire of Camel cigarettes, tripping into a dry-heave stutter but full of a stand-up comic's confidence.

“I brought something for you, Son,” Robert said.

Who
is
this man?
I thought. I'd never heard of him before. He made
Son
sound like a punch line. From his tight jeans pockets, he scooped out moist dollops of dollar bills. Money like this, I'd learn, was meant to befriend.

The next morning, Robert moved into our house as my mother's fiancé, having proposed marriage in a letter from prison. They'd known each other maybe two or three months.

“Why not marry?” my mother said. Frank had never asked. Paul had done nothing more than give her his “name.” (She was never formally divorced from Candido.)

“We don't have to move anywhere,” she said. “Your grandmother doesn't want to be alone.”

My grandmother said, “Your mother doesn't want to pay rent somewhere.”

I was ten years old when I “gave” my mother away as acting father of the bride in a Baha'i faith marriage ceremony—a religious flirtation that would end as soon as my mother had redeemed her member's discount for the wedding space. Robert wrote several pages of vows, which took him almost a half hour to read.

“O Mighty Grandfather to the North,” he said, and gave thanks to the wind that protected his ancestors.

“O Mighty Grandfather to the South,” he said, and blessed the clouds that the Great Spirit gave us to nourish Mother Earth. His filial piety extended gratitude to sixteen different grandfathers.

“Oh, mighty grandfather,” my grandmother intoned at the wedding dinner, “was that a lot of Indian bullshit.” Our celebratory feast was at the Love's Bar-B-Que down the road, the same branch of the restaurant chain where Candido first worked as a busboy.

Robert wasn't a worker. He had a “Let's Spend the Night Together” swagger that young, lean, and confident men use to get away with murder, though he didn't indulge my mother's high bar of outlawness by pretending to be a killer. He was a lover. As in, he loved himself and loved others to love him. He ingratiated himself to strangers with a stutter and a smile and traveled shirt unbuttoned to his waist, flaunting his muscular, jaundiced smoker's skin as a healthy “beachcomber's tan.” His maxillary dentures became, in his hands, half of a clown's set of chattering false teeth. “If I forget these at home,” he'd say, “I'll just gum my dinner to death!”

Every day, Robert invented his itinerary from scratch. He didn't work a full-time job. Life with us filled his schedule. Before I met him, I thought that men worked reliable hours, being neither seen nor heard, like my grandfather Emilio, or they jealously guarded their “private” time like Frank, who'd show up at our house cranky and tired, close my mother's bedroom door, and then leave fast in the morning. When I needed a father, Robert was there. He was
always
there—at first. It took some getting used to.

I was seduced again and again by watching a man doing “man” things around our house. On a rotating monthly basis, Robert negotiated money from my grandmother for odd job house repairs. I wanted “in.” He'd do a two-thousand-dollar roof retarring for five hundred dollars, including essential supplies: cartons of Camels and tall-boy Buds. Off went his plaid western shirt, and up he went on top of the house while I eagerly ferried large purple buckets of roofing tar up a rickety broken ladder. Then I kept his supplies “clean” of insects with endless hours of spraying layers of Raid ant poison that congealed into cold, thick foam that clotted on the ground like fine snow, breathing in the sweet pine-scented clouds of nozzled death until I was dizzy.

In his jeans, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, swabbing his mop in sloppy athletic circles, he resembled some kind of construction-site cowboy or desert-camp-honed outlaw. He painted our house with haphazard bursts of attention and cheap paint. Robert “repaired” our crumbling gazebo by dismantling it and repurposing the boards into a makeshift fence to hold back mounds of dirt he'd excavated from underneath the house's concrete and wood support pylons in the basement. Who cared if the leaks in the roof got worse or if his plans for a “rec room” were literally undermining the house's very foundation with each shovelful of dirt that I obediently wheelbarrowed into the backyard? This was what a man at work looked like.

There were long “errand” drives into cinder block neighborhoods by the airport to meet “friends” he'd made chatting on his new CB radio. Or beach trips—boardwalk “trick” hustling—where our feet never touched the sand or the ocean. Danger never looks as sexy as when it's young; when it has the blush of not recognizing its own recklessness. Each trip somewhere with Robert—outfitted in ass-tight blue jeans and seventies porn-star frames that covered a third of his ruddy, angular face—had the potential to spiral out of control, but the tensile pulse of a chase scene throbbing underneath lured me out with him anyway.

A good report card once earned me a promise to visit to Golf N' Stuff, a miniature golf complex in Norwalk with go-karts, bumper boats, and a water slide. Instead, we took a long detour to a housing project by the airport with shirtless tattooed men hanging out on street corners. There were security bars and gates on every window and door. (My grandmother added similar ones to our house right around when Robert moved in, which later came to seem like a deeply ironic gesture.)

“Stay in the car,” he said. “You'll be safer here.”

I locked the car doors behind him, slid down the shotgun seat, and pretended to myself that being motionless made me invisible. He emerged from the house many minutes later with a twitchy, juiced energy—Robert in double time—and a couple large, taped-up boxes that went in the trunk.

We drove home. I stared out the window at the gray expanse of Los Angeles freeway. On a road like this, you were moving somewhere, yet everything appeared identical no matter how far you drove. In the mirrored reflection, I saw Robert and me dueling in tiny Indy style go-karts to see who was the fastest, ramming each other on life preserver–shaped boats on a chlorinated blue lagoon, and knocking Day-Glo-colored golf balls into an oversized windmill. It looked like a great day. There'd be a hundred more days like this, perfect father-and-son moments reflected in a car window I stared out of while I sat in a parking lot in a bleak part of town. I was learning, though, that imagination could always give me the father I wanted when my own imaginary father couldn't.

• • •

My mother loved to laugh. She'd forgive anyone of anything if she was laughing. And there were just two men on the planet that could make my mother laugh: Richard Pryor, and Robert. He wasn't a comedian, but it's funny to watch someone try to talk his way out of a lie even when he's caught red-handed. Robert could joke his way out of anything with her. When our beloved German shepherd, Punky, died, Robert said he'd remove the dog himself to bury him “the Indian way” and disappeared for several hours. He returned with a moving story about how he'd put Punky to rest “underneath a spreading cherry blossom tree” and had uttered an ancient Aleutian Indian prayer to Mother Earth.

“Where in the hell is there a cherry blossom tree around here?” my grandmother asked.

The next day, animal control removed Punky's bloated corpse from where it had been dumped in our neighbor's glass-strewn side yard, the same spot Robert had dangled me over the fence a year before. Our street's resident drunk, Mike, cried in the street as a cherry picker crane moved Punky's corpse to a truck.

“I was praying for the Great Spirit to come and soften the truth,” Robert said. My mother laughed.

Once, after an all-night drunk, Robert took a long wake-up piss in my mother's garbage can. Robert said, “I didn't want go out there last night and face your grandma's eh-eh-evil eye!” My mother laughed, so I laughed. Then it was my job to empty out the bucket in the toilet, pick his beer cans off the front lawn, and bring him a plate of my grandmother's breakfast. There wasn't time to resent or hate Robert. I was just trying to get through every day without getting yelled at. Anger was a luxury for those without chores. Messes were made, my mother said. Somebody had to clean them up.

“I don't cook, clean, or do windows,” she said. “I'm my own woman.”

With Robert around, my mother and I were no longer the tight traveling unit we'd been. On a Vegas getaway with Robert, we stayed at the Stardust in a ten-dollar-a-day 1950s “atomic era” bungalow at the rear of the hotel's property, next to the trash dumpsters. My mother said things like, “Not now, Brando,” and “I'm talking to Robert.” I'd been demoted from being her “little big man” (“a brave Lakota Sioux warrior, like you”) to the child I actually
was
but never had to act like before.

Our first day, Robert hit the blackjack tables and by suppertime was up over a couple thousand dollars and climbing. He checked us into a suite as large as the front half of our house, on a high floor with a glittering night view. I stared out into the Vegas night and knew how the hotel got its name. This view, I thought, was what stardust was.

Robert asked my mother to hold on to his money in case his luck changed. Instead of handing it to me for safekeeping, she ordered us several rounds of room service and made reservations for all-day spa and hair salon treatments. The next day, the losing streak hit like a storm front. My mother had spent the money as fast as she could, but what Robert didn't ask for back, he lifted from her purse. Two nights later, we were back in the bungalows with twenty dollars in cash and nonrefundable return bus tickets (bought specifically so they couldn't be exchanged for cash) that wouldn't get us home for another two days.

Robert treated for breakfast at the Westward Ho casino next door with a coupon book offering free donuts and orange juice for breakfast and “hot dogs anytime.” He played nickel and penny slots with what money was left, and then disappeared for the day. My mother and I gorged on hot dogs and, when the coupons ran out, salivated over casino prime rib buffet TV commercials.

Robert reappeared an hour before our bus trip. We fed him the cold hot dogs we'd stashed in the dresser drawers to lure him back to LA. When Robert walked back to the bus bathroom deep into our drive through the saltine desert, my mother said conspiratorially, “Look what I have.” She reached into her bra and extracted an egg roll of money, hidden the same way she'd done with Paul's.

“Why didn't you buy us some food?” I asked. I hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours.

My mother was confused. “Because he would have known I had money and taken it from me,” she said. “Did you want
that
?”

Once we were home, she and Robert locked themselves behind her bedroom door. The empty fridge glowed a delicate Kool-Aid cherry red from the pitcher inside; my grandmother said Robert had stolen her grocery money.

“He took all the goddamn double coupons too,” she added. From then on, she kept her checkbook wallet tethered securely around her neck during the day with an elastic band.

The next morning, Robert rushed outdoors and down the stairs, too fast for me to hitch a ride with him. My mother offered to order a pizza and reached for a small silver buff cloth polishing bag where she kept her money stash—bills with the scent of polish on them. The bag was empty.

“Robert, fucking come here!” my mother shouted to the empty space he'd left behind.

I asked, “What happened? What did Robert do?”

“He's Dad, Brando,” my mother said. “
You
call Robert ‘Dad.'”

• • •

In the meantime, my other in-state “dad,” Frank, had vanished. He had reason to stay away. A few months earlier, my mother had asked Robert to break into Frank's house while he was at work. Robert stole a circus-cart-shaped popcorn maker, a Leonard Peltier poster, a “Free Paul Skyhorse–Richard Mohawk” button, a silver Gemini pinky ring, and a cheap watch. These were, in their entirety, every item my mother had given Frank in the course of their three-year relationship. If Frank knew what had happened—and how could he not?—he never pressed charges. But he also didn't come around to see me. My mother offered me up for day trips, but, claiming to respect her marriage, Frank's visits were few and brief. We did go out together once, though, waiting several hours in a parking lot to buy Billy Joel tickets.