Take This Man (7 page)

“How old are you?” a guy assigning randomly numbered cards asked me. The cards guaranteed your space in line. Frank and I answered together.

“Ten,” I said.

“Twelve,” Frank said.

I glared at Frank. The guy shrugged his shoulders and gave me a card.

“Why'd you lie?” I asked Frank.

“You have to be twelve to get one of these,” Frank said by way of apology. “It's okay to lie if you're not hurting anybody or if you don't want to hurt somebody's feelings.”

I hated the thought of him lying, though I didn't mind helping my mother lie or (unknowingly) lying about who I was. I had different standards for Frank. I knew parents lied, but he was more than just a parent. He wasn't the father my mother had chosen for me. Frank was the father
I
was rooting for.

Later I told my mother what happened.

“See, he lies to you the same way he lied to me. You don't need him anyway. You have someone in this house right now ready to be your dad,” she said. “Give Robert that chance.” Robert, I realized, was a fresh “father” who seemed eager to work and try harder than Frank. After some resistance, I gave Robert his chance. With enough time, I'd give that chance to every man that asked for it. I was a willing son.

Robert soon found out that his new “son” wasn't like most ten-year-old boys. I passed my hours in three solitary places: the backyard, where I chased stray cats; sitting under a rain of jacaranda blossoms on the front stairs with a library book; or playacting inside parts of my cubicle-sized bedless room. In a skinny closet behind a wood-grain vinyl folding door was my recording studio—a Fisher-Price tape recorder—where I replayed
Fraggle Rock
episodes I taped off TV to “watch” later, along with movie excerpts that I interspersed with my own fake commercials and “play-by-play” commentaries of Stomper toy truck races.

On bad days, when my mother veered from playful to angry, that closet became a makeshift bomb shelter. On good days, I'd wait for the all-clear siren of my mother's coyote-yelp laugh and corral a pair of mismatched, peeling dining room chairs to role-play lives different from the ones we lived. It was my mother's game—“make pretend,” I called it—for just the two of us, which started after Robert moved in. It was a chance for me to act out stories that kept my mother from being bored, because I knew that her boredom led to arguments. There were roving-reporter monologues outside famous murder trials throughout history; courtroom lawyering scenarios with me in the role of the good-guy prosecutor; and frolics in an enchanted forest where she played a skunk named Sheree, who had the misfortune of falling in love with me, a human. (She killed off Sheree in a forest fire when I tired of the storyline.) I created an anonymous orphan who, in a baby falsetto, answered every question she asked with the word
unknown
.

“Your name?”

“Unknown.”

“Your race?”

“Unknown.”

“Your father's name?”

“Unknown.” (I'd tire of this game too when I realized how close to home I was cutting.)

I took this love of role playing to school, where I had to be cautioned by my teacher for reenacting the Kennedy assassination during charades.

On a long wooden toy bench was the plush zoo that spilled into forests of stuffed animals—my father-hunting trophies—throughout the room. As an extension of our game, my mother gathered teddy bears, sweet-faced tigers, and
Sesame Street
refugees onto her bed, where, in helium-soaked voices, we said the things to each other that we didn't say in our real ones. She told me through a blue-eyed teddy bear named Sunny that she was pregnant with Robert's child and was going to have an abortion.

I squeaked through Redding, my bunny rabbit, “Murderer.”

My mother stopped the game. That night, she wrapped up all of my stuffed animals in airtight plastic bags and placed them away on a high shelf. “I'm not playing with you anymore,” she said.

• • •

“Stop playing faggot games with your mother,” Robert said and pushed me outdoors with the neighborhood bullies for street football, rock fort wars, and box sled racing. “Dirt and blood's good for a boy,” he said later, examining a deep gash earned on my left ankle, which healed into a patch of permanently hairless scar tissue.

“I need to study,” I said. The school had identified me as gifted/talented in early second grade. Math was my weak subject. As a gifted student in an Echo Park elementary school, I had the privilege to leave my classroom in the mornings twice a week to sit around a large set of tables in the school's auditorium with six or seven Asian kids, talk about commercials we saw on television (“Honey Smacks, dig 'em!”), and play board games with missing pieces.

Robert said, “I'm good with numbers.”

He helped me tackle four-digit multiplication and long division. When he went out nights alone on “business,” I'd wait for him to come back to check my work. If I was lucky, he'd return between midnight to two in the morning. If I wasn't, he'd be gone for two to three days without a phone call, and then reappear without house keys and tell jokes through the security gate until my mother opened the front door with a slap and a kiss.

“You can't keep staying up for me,” Robert said before going out one night. “A boy needs his sleep.”

“You're the only one here who can do math,” I insisted.

“Know why?” Robert asked. “I'm a jailbird. Counting's your life in jail. Gimme the book.”

He penciled the solutions in my textbook before he left. I checked my work against his and realized I'd gotten most of the problems wrong. In a delirious late-night panic, I copied Robert's answers and scrubbed them out of my textbook, their faint shadows popping sweat beads on my forehead when I opened the book in class. What would happen if such a big rise in my grades gave me away?

I got a D on my homework. Robert had completed every fourth or fifth problem correctly and made up random answers for the rest.

Never ask a con to help you con someone else. And always learn your lesson. Next time I “checked” my work with a friend over the phone by asking him what he put down for each problem and wrote down all his answers.

I didn't get caught. This was easy! Robert taught me well.

When a kid dared me to break my LCD digital watch, which he'd (accurately) sneered was “cheap and plastic,” I smashed it in anger on a tree planter in the school's concrete playground and pinned it on him. The watch had been an honorable-mention prize from a candy drive, earned for “selling” four cases of hard-as-calcium World's ­Finest Almond Chocolate bars. My mother and grandmother, ­disappointed with “stingy” local shop owners buying just one or two candy bars and afraid of my traveling in the neighborhood alone, bought over one hundred dollars of candy themselves and stored it ­Armageddon-style in our freezer. Money was tight enough already from both bimonthly welfare checks and colorful coupon booklets of food stamps, but my grandmother had a perverse sense of pride at being able to “game” the system to try to win the drive. What she hadn't counted on was the mega-choco-capitalists in the upper grades whose parents worked in factories and could sell three hundred chocolate bars in an afternoon.

“Someone just took that watch off your wrist and broke it?” my grandmother asked. “You know how much damn chocolate we still have in the freezer?”

I knew. But I was convinced that, like Robert, I'd get away with it. Then my grandmother burst into my classroom before recess and interrupted my teacher midlecture.

“Why'd you let a kid take my grandson's watch and not punish him?” she shouted. Kids froze in terror, like someone had set off a discipline bomb. “If you won't do anything, hand the boy over to me so I can spank him right here out in the hall!” Mrs. Perkins fire-blanketed my grandmother and then spoke with her quietly for a minute. They looked over at me and laughed. Whenever adults laugh together, a kid knows trouble's coming.

“Can you talk with me and your grandmother a moment?” Mrs. Perkins asked. Then she left me alone with my grandmother.

“Are you a bum like Robert?” she asked. “Don't
ever
lie to me again.” Just before she left, she said, “I thought you were a man.”

• • •

“Let's skip your grandma's breakfast and get corn dogs at Venice Beach,” Robert said. I'd already learned not to go anywhere with ­Robert without (a) a bus pass, (b) emergency cash, and (c) spare change to call home. I didn't have emergency cash that morning—Robert knew every one of my piggy bank hiding places and had cleaned them out—but I didn't want to stay behind and listen to my mother and grandmother argue. I could be out exploring uncharted worlds with “my” father. Or, at least, a father
figure
.

“Okay,” I said.

Robert pied-piper strutted up and down the Venice boardwalk in oversized sunglasses that covered his face, scoping out “bikini babes” and disappearing into men's rooms for minutes at a time.

“When are we getting corn dogs?” I asked.

“I didn't come here to eat!” he said. “All I got is this,” he said, and showed me a dime.

“I'm starving,” I said, and pocketed the coin.

He picked a clear spot on the boardwalk and approached a stranger. “Can you help me get sha-sha-something to eat for my shun?” he asked. Robert was skilled at conversations when he had time to gauge the gullibility of his mark, but in a cold approach where he needed directness, he was sometimes out of sync. I stood mute by his side like a mangy German shepherd nestled at the feet of a homeless person. In a half hour, he collected four cents. Stuttering panhandlers don't make much money.

On the ride back, two transit cops pulled our bus over a couple miles from home. They stepped hard into the stairwell like they were boarding a boat with contraband. Robert sat at attention. I heard a cop say “sunglasses.” Robert threw his shades to the floor and kicked them under the seats.

One cop took the lead, patting his hand upon each seat rest back as he walked up the bus, while the other stood by the front exit doors. He walked right to our aisle, and then asked Robert to stand up and walk off the bus. I followed. This was my father now, right? You stick by your father.

“Look, I just wanna go home,” I said in a cracked voice that made the cop laugh.

We got off the bus, and I sat on the grimy curb as Robert was cuffed against the transit police car. The passengers stared at us from behind the scratched tinted windows, and then grew bored and were driven away. The cops ran his name and found an outstanding warrant. An LAPD car arrived. Robert made a futile gesture to ask one of the cops to “give his sha-sha-shun” a ride home, but cops ignore men in handcuffs. Nobody spoke to me, so I walked down the street to find a pay phone. The cops drove Robert off.

With Robert's dime, I called my house from a pay phone a block away.

“I think I can walk home,” I said. “But it's really far.” Two miles on Sunset Boulevard was about an hour's walk, which could have been Mount Everest to a Los Angeles boy, even one raised without a car.

“I'll come get you,” my grandmother said.

When my grandmother arrived, she found me crouched in a ball near a parking lot dumpster. I was curled up trying to stop myself from going to the bathroom in my pants, but my grandmother thought I was cowering in fear and I didn't correct her. We got into Mike's car, the drunk from across the street. He had a beer in a brown bag between his legs and drove us home with a surprisingly steady hand.

“You doing okay?” Mike asked, and took a swig.

“Forget okay,” my grandmother answered for me. “Brando, why in the hell did you get off the goddamn bus?”

• • •

“You won't believe what they pulled me in for,” Robert said when my mother bailed him out.

“What did they—” I asked.

“Uh-uh-uhn-believable,” he stammered, cutting me off. Robert never talked about what got him in trouble. He'd only talk about what he'd do
after
he got in trouble.

“Let me make it up to you,” Robert told me. “Disneyland?”

Somehow Robert acquired a car—there's not enough evidence in my memory to use the word
bought
—and he, my mother, and I headed to Disneyland. I'd gone over a dozen times with my grandmother, though she hated the place. “I like roller coasters, not baby rides,” she said. My grandmother couldn't drive and hated cars but could plot out a bus route from Echo Park to anywhere in the Southland. She and I would catch the Disneyland special on skid row, a block away from the Greyhound bus station on Sixth and Los Angeles Streets. We waded through bum fights, ignoring harassers or harassing them back. “What kind of man begs an old woman for spare change?” she'd shout. Later, as the park was closing, she'd get us to the last bus out, parked outside the tall hedge walls, and then ask the bus drivers to inch up the curb until we had a good view of the closing fireworks.

At Disneyland with Robert and my mother, I felt I was part of a real American family, like one of the dozens of grumpy, nagging trios slogging around the park. How happy they must be elsewhere when they're not at the Happiest Place on Earth! I led Robert to the Tinker Bell Toy Shop underneath Sleeping Beauty Castle so he could “make it up” to me by adding to my stuffed animal collection. The shop was a maze of Eeyores, Tiggers, and Winnie the Poohs that frolicked throughout in soft mounds. Atop an open, dramatically lit platform sat a monstrous five-foot-tall Mickey Mouse. Robert picked up a doll here, a Donald Duck there, weighing them in his hands as if they were loaves of fresh bread. He bought me nothing. I went outside with my mother to sulk.

Imagine that first burst of delight, then, when Robert emerged carrying the enormous Mickey Mouse itself, a stuffed animal that weighed as much as I did. Was this really mine? For a stuffed animal menagerie, here was the Hemingway trophy kill of a lifetime!