Take This Man (8 page)

Tourists gawked, pointed, smiled. I had a minute of happiness before a knotting fear plunked in my stomach.
Where did he get the money to buy this?
On the other side of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, a Japanese couple asked if they could take their picture with Mickey. They posed with him on the guardrail next to the castle moat. Robert charged them five dollars and then carried Mickey up to the railing that surrounded the grotty moat surrounding the castle and pushed him in. I was heartbroken as Mickey—snout up, arms spread—drifted under the drawbridge upriver, like a gangland corpse.

“Quit standing around,” he said, and took my hand. “We're leaving.”

Robert quickened his pace as we pushed our way through the oncoming crowds on Main Street, U.S.A. to the exits. Why were we walking so fast?

We were almost at the railroad bridge where you cross back into “the real world” when three men in ties, business suits, and dark sunglasses—
Men in Black
ringers—materialized and shoved the three of us down a side pathway to a bungalow office with the words
Disneyland Police
stenciled on a window. My mother and Robert were brought into the office, and a door was closed in front of me. I was left alone, outside, again.

Where, I wondered, was the kindly Disneyland police officer with a coloring book or a piece of candy? Weren't we at the Happiest Place on Earth? Of course, I realize now what I didn't as a child: we were “backstage.” Backstage didn't have to be happy.

Robert signed statements agreeing that in exchange for never returning to Disneyland, no charges would be pressed. My mother was already crafting how the tale could be less “boring” in its retelling. In her version, someone in a Goofy costume busted us by doing a somersault to entertain a group of children and pushed us into the suits.

Years later, on the night of my high school graduation, I returned to the Tinker Bell Toy Shop. Seated on the same platform was an identical oversized stuffed Mickey Mouse, now ensconced in a Plexiglas cube and tethered by his neck and belly to a post. I rapped on the glass and, filled with a bizarre storyteller's pride, wanted to tell someone, “One of my dads did this.” But how could anyone with just one father have understood?

• • •

First, the Christmas tree flew through the air. Not much of a tree, more of a long upright branch on a cross of wood, really, with bits of puffed tin for decoration. Then the decorations followed, one at a time: shiny Charlie Brown and Snoopy orbs, plastic Jesus-in-manger scenes, and, on a string from my kindergarten art class, a brittle clay handprint that cracked into large clumps.

“He's not coming back!” my mother screamed. “Are you satisfied?
Are you satisfied
?!?”

Of course, my grandmother wasn't satisfied, because he
was
coming back. My mother always let him back in the house. In the year and a half he'd been with us as a father and husband, Robert had been arrested six or seven times, for everything from drunk-and-disorderly
,
to petty fraud, to driving on the highway wearing an oversized pair of radio headphones, and had slept with a handful of women in Echo Park, including the ex-wife of a neighbor. He bought himself a pinky ring and a watch on my mother's in-store account at a jewelry store, and then hocked them. He shoplifted from the neighborhood supermarket and racked up hundreds of dollars of Levi's on my grandmother's script account with a local clothing store, and then sold the jeans on the street.

He stole several thousand dollars in rare gold Krugerrand coins from my grandmother's bedroom. “
Brando's college education
!
” she screamed, but didn't report the crime. In a weird defense, Robert insisted that, by his count, what he stole was worth closer to several hundred dollars, not thousands.

“I wouldn't rob you out of your school,” he said. “If there had been that much there, you think I'd have come back?”

At one point, two burly muscle men with long hair from the Indian center on skid row came to “talk” with Robert about the van he borrowed to drive his “dead mother” back to the reservation. The stripped and burned-out van was found a few days later abandoned on I-5. Robert was lucky that Indians didn't talk to cops and luckier still they never returned.

Robert joined Alcoholics Anonymous, winning people over with his mostly true tales of inebriation, sobriety, and redemption. On receiving his white six-months-sober chip, he gave a thrilling keynote “hitting rock bottom” qualification/testimony to a large assembly of San Fernando Valley AA groups. He spoke with compassion and energy, without stuttering, and got a standing ovation. Robert let me bang the gavel that brought people back from the midsession break. Later someone discovered a significant short count in the collection plates. Robert wasn't arrested because his sponsor Mitch believed in second chances. Robert repaid him by cleaning out his wallet too.

There were at least three active warrants for his arrest. Police detectives brandishing good manners and crisp business cards were regulars on our front porch, asking for Robert and for his aliases too: my absent uncle Oscar, my poor dead grandfather Emilio, Frank.

None of this mattered to my mother. No one ever turned him in.

“I'm not a snitch,” my grandmother said. “I hate Robert. But I hate pigs more.”

• • •

If Robert's sloppiness with the law meant he was getting restless, I was growing bored with my “father” too. I'd visited him three times so far in his stints at the “Glass House.” Located in the junkyard sheet metal badlands of downtown LA, the local metro jail wasn't, to my disappointment, a see-through house but had earned its nickname just because it had big windows. Trips to jail were like navigating the school cafeteria, following colored lines on the floor that snaked you here, then there, and then here again, with just as many loud and unruly kids.

“Mind your mother,” Robert said.
You're in
jail, I thought.

“Okay, Robert,” I said. I'd dropped the “Dad.” Neither he nor my mother noticed.

Robert always got out, eventually. We celebrated at Chuck E. Cheese's—
Where a kid can be a kid!
A costumed “Chuck” asked us to leave when Robert was caught stealing rolls of game tokens from other children to keep me playing arcade games.

“Robert's always getting busted by rats, isn't he?” my mother said when we got home. “First, Mickey Mouse, now Chuck E. Cheese!”

“I think both of them are mice,” I said.

“God, you're no fun. How'd you get to be my son, anyway?”

For my tenth birthday, Robert drove me to a regular hangout of his, the Hollywood Fun Center on Hollywood Boulevard and North Western Avenue, an all but abandoned husk by the early 1980s, like the rest of the neighborhood. The “Fun Center” was a half-block-long series of dim, smoky arcades that the writer Charles Bukowski described in the documentary
The Charles Bukowski Tapes
as a place where “there used to be cement benches out front and all the insane people would sit there . . . The street people they'd talk to each other all day long.” In the street fronts near the arcades, “they used to have women that'd sit in the windows, [and] you could say, ‘I want you.'” Across the street was the Le Sex Shoppe porn store, and halfway up the block on Western was Pioneer Chicken, which was “open all night [and] lots of hookers [would] go up there late at night, guys, thieves, murderers, get a late snack at three thirty a.m., get a little bite of something after they've rolled somebody.” When Buk talked about these places, you could hear the love in his voice for the “dirty action” and the people like Robert whose sordidness made Bukowski feel alive.

Robert parked next to the transient hotel known as the La Paula Apartments, the first place in Los Angeles where a slumlord was sentenced to house arrest in his own decrepit property. Then Robert dashed into the arcades, giving me quarters that I was swiftly hustled out of by older kids with matted hair and taut skin.

I asked him for more money. “All out,” he said, and gave me a money holder birthday card my grandmother's TV repairman friend had sent me. The cash was missing.

“I took you to the arcade with that money!” he said. “But let's stick around awhile.”

I wandered the arcade in hopeful circles, and then sat on a bench outside and watched city buses come and go, imagining they were airplanes I could board for distant lands. When I came back in, I couldn't find Robert. It felt like a hide-and-seek prank at first. Was he playing video games? No. At the air hockey tables? Not there. Maybe in the adjacent pool hall? Nope. The men's room was the last place to check. “Don't use them because of chicken hawks,” Robert had warned me.
Chicken hawks?
Did he mean that small brown bird that tries to eat Foghorn Leghorn in the old Warner Bros. cartoons? In the bathroom, old men loitered by the stalls, smoking cigarettes. The smoke and eye-stinging piss smell drove me out.

I drifted like scrap paper back to Robert's car. A habitual thief himself, he nonetheless trusted others and never locked doors. I crouched down in the backseat under beach towel seat covers, counting down from large numbers until his return.

He could have been gone ten minutes or four hours—my kid's concept of time was little help—but when Robert returned, he started up the car and took it out of park, ready to drive off, before he saw me cowering in back.

“Hey, there you are!” he said. “Why are you hiding, Son?”

• • •

Robert lived with us for almost two years. On the day that he left for good, he spent most of that final morning doing household chores—something that should have aroused immediate suspicion. When he had finished waxing the kitchen floor, he placed the mop handle in the kitchen doorway like a barricade. He shouted to my mother not to walk across the floor.

“I don't want you to break your pretty little head!” he said.

In the bathroom, he padded himself down with soap bars and rolls of toilet paper (he'd already pocketed my mother's emergency cash), went through the back door, jumped a short chain-link fence on the side of the house, and ran down the street.

• • •

Robert was gone. What I'd come to call “daddy gone.” Not “running from the cops at the front door” gone or “out for three days God knows where” gone. Gone for good. It hit my mother fast how love crazy she'd been. “What the hell was I thinking?” my mother said, shedding her two-year marriage like dead skin. She and my grandmother hugged and cackled at life together again like drinking buddies reunited after a long sobriety. To celebrate, she bought herself velvet hats and Victorian-style dresses and dabbed on her neck hand-blended fragrances she'd sent my grandmother and me to buy at the Mlle. Antoinette's Parfumerie in Disneyland's New Orleans Square. My mother became
my mother
again. We did word search puzzles together; she was brilliant at finding the words, no matter how hidden, snaking, or contorted they were. She'd come into my room and say, “Let's see who can play their stereo the loudest!” Or she'd take the last Shake 'N Bake pork chop off my plate and run while I chased her through the living room.

Then, inevitably, a quiet moment would pounce on her; a ghost whispering in her ear, “You will always be alone.” She'd open the shutters to her security-gated window and let a cool breeze swish around the potpourri-scented air in that small bedroom wallpapered with Laura Ashley vertical stripes.

“Bars on the windows and the walls,” she'd say.

The cycle began anew: personal ads were reinserted into magazines (or had never been withdrawn), and any trace of Robert was expunged. Pictures were ripped in half, letters crumpled and trashed. I learned, starting with Robert, that when a “father” left, he was never to be discussed again. Between fathers, my “father” didn't exist.

Except that he did exist, inside me, hidden from my mother. Robert hadn't been much of a father. He wasn't even
my
father. But Robert was proof that I
could
have a father every day and—when he remembered to come home—every night, and not just have a father in a letter or on a random Saturday every three or four months. What Robert took with him when he left was the small piece of me that wanted to be a man's son. With each successive father, that piece was regenerated, much larger than before, emerging each time with a tougher casing, a more cynical skin, buried deeper to guarantee its security, though nothing I did kept it safe for good.

Robert was scrubbed so cleanly from our lives, it's a miracle I have one photo left: a Polaroid of him sitting with my mother on her bed. I took the picture, shooting him as if he's slid into the photo for a moment before slipping back out again. My mother and Robert held the picture together as it developed, thrilled to see themselves appearing in seconds. They both hated things that took time.

• • •

One Saturday morning, not long after Robert left, my grandmother called to me from the backyard, where she stood in one of her signature extra large impressionist patterned caftans, leaning on my aluminum baseball bat for support, wearing a too-big Dodgers baseball cap, with a catcher's mitt and a softball by her feet. She must have been sixty-four. I hadn't touched my baseball since the game of catch with Robert where I ended up dangling over the neighbor's wall.

“Let's play ball,” she said.

I should've hugged my grandmother and said, “Batter up!” Pitched her a ball or two.

Instead, I said, “I don't feel like playing,” and went to my room. Later, when the shame hit me, I peeked through the back door window to see that she was still out there, staring at the backyard, bat leaned against the wall. She sat on one of the concrete planters, but a trick of the sun gave her a silhouette of a much younger woman standing tall.