Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  On her photo backs, Maria Teresa was becoming Running Deer Skyhorse, a name she said Paul bestowed on her. No formal applications for an official name change necessary, just a new signature and a deck of fake mail-ordered ID cards. She alternated between Maria and Running Deer, but for a woman who dreamed of being an Indian somebody instead of a Mexican nobody, how she introduced herself was an easy choice.

  My grandmother liked being a Mexican but loved telling a good story more. So when she found herself in a boring conversation, she’d christen herself an Indian too, calling herself “Big Bear,” a name she borrowed from the local TV weather reports that covered Big Bear Lake, a mountainside community two hours from Los Angeles. To go along with her name, she created her own Indian greeting.

  “Haita hay!” she would say, accompanied by a horizontal sweep of her arm out from her chest like some military salute in an army of very short men. “It means ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye,’ just like ‘aloha.’”

  It was a bastardization of the Navajo “Ya’ ah’ tee” (often mispronounced as “ya ta hay”) that my grandmother and I learned from Running Deer. June taught her new Indian greeting to countless unsuspecting Mexican and Chinese women in Echo Park; people who had only a threadbare grasp of the English language learning a fake welcome in a nonexistent one.

  • • •

  “Running Deer” now had created two fathers for me: one incarcerated Paul Skyhorse (Johnson) in Illinois writing me letters, and another incarcerated Paul Skyhorse (Durant) in Los Angeles whom I had seen from behind a courtroom screen. What good were two fathers, though, when neither could help my mother actually “father” me every day? About as good as what my mom called “a long-distance dick.” Then she met Frank, and both our problems were, for a while, about to be solved.

  My mother needed work, so she joined the California Employment Development Department as a temporary claims assistant in late 1977. She hated being tethered to a desk. Her hair, back to red, blazed through the office like a wildfire, dangling alphabetic hints of her story: she was F-B-I (Full-Blooded Indian), A-I-M, and F-R-E-E (romantically available) because her husband, Paul Skyhorse, was on trial for murder.

  Frank Zamora, an employment and claims assistant at “the State,” wanted to know more. Sensing my mother wouldn’t become a permanent hire, he invited her out for lunch. They ate together a couple times a week, meals that my mother often paid for. Frank took this as a sign that she wasn’t interested in him—though he did the best he could.

  “I can’t believe you’re thirty,” he said. “You look great for your age.”

  “Sure, I’m not a Pilgrim. Pilgrims crack,” my mother said.

  “Come again?” he asked.

  “Whites. ‘Pilgrims.’ Their looks disappear when they hit forty. White women don’t last.”

  In my mother’s dictionary, whites were Pilgrims, cops were “pigs,” Indians, like her, were “skins,” men were “braves,” and women, “squaws.”

  What a sexy squaw, Frank thought.

  He followed the ongoing Skyhorse-Mohawk trial but wasn’t deterred from pursuing a woman whose husband was an accused murderer. Over their shared lunches, she confirmed the rumors (that she herself had started) and as proof gave Frank the Thundercloud newsletter with Skyhorse Johnson’s poem. She presented these two different Pauls as one singular Paul Skyhorse who, she believed, would be found guilty at trial and never get out of jail. My mother also gave Frank, an avid souvenir collector, a poster drawn by incarcerated AIM activist Leonard Peltier, which she received because she was in AIM, too, and glossy black-and-white Marlon Brando photographs that she insisted weren’t publicity stills (though they could be nothing else).

  “Marlon Brando gave me those pictures. He’s my son’s godfather. Because of everything Paul did for ‘the movement,’” my mother said. “Would you like to meet my son?”

  Frank came to the house and chatted with my grandmother in the living room while she watched television. Emilio was at work; when he was home, he was asleep. Any intersection with the rest of the family was an accident.

  “Do you like the Beatles?” Frank asked my grandmother.

  “They’re a bunch of pretend goody-goodies. Give me the Stones any day,” she said.

  “Oh, you like their music?”

  “Hell, no,” my grandmother said, “I just like the way they move.”

  Frank liked her on the spot. She reminded him of his own lively and opinionated grandmother, who had recently passed away. Frank had been sent to live with his nana at the age of three or four, when his parents divorced and neither was in a position to take care of him. His father, Frank Sr., drove trucks at night, called Frank “Junior,” and was generous with everything except affection and time, since exhaustion stole his hours for parenting. On days when his father was supposed to visit, Frank spent long, hazy Los Angeles afternoons “father fishing” on his nana’s porch, dressed in the Dodgers uniform his father had given him for his eighth birthday. Sometimes Frank got a bite, but most of the time he didn’t.

  Frank played football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and his father would keep track of his son’s accomplishments by checking the box scores in the newspaper. Drafted by the army in 1971, Frank had poor marksmanship that kept him out of Vietnam. He served out his nineteen-month, twenty-two-day hitch at Fort Ord in Northern California, smoking dope and forging a lifelong passion for the Beatles and his favorite songwriter, Paul Williams, a 1970s version of Pharrell Williams with better lyrics.

  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 wha
t 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 safekee
ping 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.