Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  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.

  “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.