Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  “Why do they keep thanking God instead of us?” my grandmother complained.

  Soon I grew bored with letters I couldn’t read from people I didn’t fully understand how I connected with, spending money on something that didn’t show an immediate return. There were movies to see and Transformers toys and video games to buy instead. So I stopped writing. I thought if I simply ignored something I didn’t want to deal with, it would disappear as long as I kept pretending it wasn’t there.

  It worked. For a long while, it worked. I told myself that Candido was doing the same thing I was.

  Like father, like son.

  • • •

  Father’s Day in a fatherless year became a second Mother’s Day. I’d buy cards for my mother and grandmother, sign them with variations of “To the only father I’ve ever known” or “I never needed a dad” (the cards and signatures my mother’s idea), and then listen to both women argue over which of them needed men less or hated men more.

  Sometimes Frank stopped by. Now when we spent afternoons together, we split our time between things he picked—baseball games, waiting in line for concert tickets, Olympic pin conventions, Spalding Gray spoken-word monologues—and what I picked: theme parks. I loved their perfect “reality” of spotless sidewalks, razor-sharp grassy lawns, junk food on every corner, and a world where kids seemed to be in charge. Frank hated them: having to actually pay for parking, and endless mazes of what my grandmother called “sneaky lines” for attractions that lasted minutes or, in many cases, seconds. He felt that theme parks brought out the worst in people.

  The Father’s Day I was eleven, I convinced Frank to take us to Universal Studios. A kids’ promotion handed out “scratch-off” back lot maps that promised a special prize to eagle-eyed children who spotted animatronic characters on the tour and scratched off the appropriate locations on their game card. The tram ride was long, and I got bored. I saw that by scratching a thin line down the middle of each scratch spot, you could find out where the characters were without having to wait to the end of the tour.

  Frank was gamely playing along, pointing out a mannequin, when he saw I wasn’t hunched over my game card scratching along with the other kids.

  “What did you do to yours?” he asked.

  He held it up to the sun. My thin scratch marks looked fatter and more conspicuous in the light.

  “You cheated, Brando! Why did you cheat?”

  “I didn’t cheat,” I said. “I just didn’t have to wait like everyone else.”

  “No, this is cheating,” he said. “You cheated yourself out of a good time. Your impatience ruined the day. God, Brando, sometimes you’re just like your mother.”

  The comeback—“And you’re nothing like a father!”—got lodged in my throat and stayed there. I hated Frank, so I punished him with silence on the rest of the tour and the drive home. I’d already demoted him from father, but to what? What was the right word for Frank, someone less than a father but more than a friend? Frank stared ahead, shoulders hunched, muttering about traffic when he dropped me off. He drove away before I’d unlocked the front door.

  In my room, I wished that he’d disappear. I got my wish. It would last for three years.

  • • •

  A few months later, my mother’s footfalls thundered across the house to my room. She had news. Big footsteps. Big news.

  “Paul’s coming.”

  “Here? When?”

  “Two weeks,” she said.

  It was early 1985, seven years since I’d last seen Paul Skyhorse Johnson. What would he expect of us? Did he know we weren’t Indian? How “Indian” would we have to act? Would Paul confront my mother for raising an “apple”: red on the outside, white on the inside?

  Since turning to phone sex, my mom’s Indian-ness had lost its blush, and any sense of cultural identity I had went with it. She’d stopped leaving the house, so she didn’t meet new people to introduce her Indian self to. She maintained her Running Deer identity for her coworkers but had so many faux lives to embody for her calls, her clients gave her the performative space she needed for her own cascading personal narratives. Becoming someone else wasn’t questioned or challenged on the phone, it was encouraged and rewarded. My mother could be Cara Lee on one call or an Indian squaw getting raped by a cowboy on the next. She could be anyone on call. Off the phone, she still couldn’t be my birth mother Maria Teresa.

  I didn’t think about being an Indian anymore until someone reminded me of it: well-intentioned white teachers, African-Americans who wanted me to know they were “one-eighth Cherokee,” total strangers in search of a good story from their ride on the city bus. For me, being “Indian” wasn’t different from what any other kind of ghetto raconteur in Echo Park did: talk fast and hide the truth. Or tell my mother’s version of the truth that I had memorized:

  “My father is Paul Skyhorse. My mother is Running Deer Skyhorse. They are both full- blooded American Indians. My father was falsely arrested for killing two FBI agents. My mother was a lawyer helping with his defense. I’m the son of a Indian chief and will become a chief one day myself. Any questions?”

  Then I went back to my ordinary, homogenized American favorites: McDonald’s French fries, video games, Transformer cartoons, and lying. I knew my mother’s story about me was total fabrication, but I kept telling it anyway. My mother told me to. My grandmother told me to. Eventually, in his own way, Paul would tell me to as well. Truth is, I’d have kept telling that story even if my family had given me a choice. People smiled when I told them my name. They paid attention to me when I told them my story. The more I told my mother’s lies, the less I felt like I was just an extension of her. The truth about Candido seemed like another way for my mother to control me and define who I was. In the shade of absolute falsehoods, I realized I could grow up.

  • • •

  Thirty-nine-year-old Paul Skyhorse Johnson resurfaced in a seniors’ convalescent home in Torrance, a town two buses away. Fresh off parole for another undetermined crime and needing to recover from an injury without insurance, he’d been placed in a state-subsidized home to recuperate.

  The Paul I’d remembered meeting in jail and in Saint Louis had been a “Thunder Warrior” Indian comic-book superhero hulk with billowing, untamed locks. In Torrance, I found an aged man creaking into his forties with a broken leg and short, thinning hair. His muscular upper body had atrophied into a firm, compact potbelly scarred with slash marks, looking like the tread of an old tire. One of his legs was in a cast up to his hip, and he maneuvered through the bleached flourescent yellow halls in a wheelchair. What I wanted most from a father was a buffer between me and my mother. How would this man stop my mother’s hysterical slides off her emotional cliff, when he couldn’t stand on his own without a cane?

  Had Paul really changed so much in the past few years? Or had I confused him with my brief courtroom memories of Paul Skyhorse Durant, with whom my mother was still in contact? After Durant’s celebrated acquittal, he’d been rearrested for armed bank robbery, pled guilty, and was sent in 1984 to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he underwent a psychiatric evaluation. While there, he filled out a visitors list that authorized only five people: his attorney of record, his brother, his mother, an investigator, and my mother, “Maria Banaga.”

  Presumably, she had used her real name because, in case of a visit, she’d have to present official ID. My mother was listed as Paul’s “friend” and next to her name was a Q, indicating a questionnaire had been sent to her that required her signature before she could receive formal approval. The prison’s annotation points to her name with the word money atop it, which certainly means she’d been sending Durant cash. Her mailing address has been redacted from the visitors’ sheet, but my mother kept a PO box in Glendale for many years where she’d collect her phone sex checks and singles ad responses.
My mother stayed in contact with Durant because she wanted a backup man, but there was bigger game with him, too. Durant could give her something she never felt she had before: legitimacy. As his potential wife, she could be, unquestionably, at last, an American Indian.

  When I met Paul Skyhorse Johnson again as a twelve-year-old, I’d mixed up his CV with what my mother had told me over the years about Durant. He sensed my distance but not my confusion. Our first conversation was about prison fights; he’d been in many of them with both guards and convicts.

  “I always get the best of ’em,” he said. His laugh burned slow like his Pall Malls, and he made clear, penetrating eye contact over his hump of a bulbous nose.

  “Your old dad’s a lump head,” he said. “Feel.”

  He ran my little fingers through a mist of blackish hair, across a phrenologist’s dream of bumps and ridges. “I was mistaken for dead a lot of times. But here I am, a dead man talking to you.”

  On his dresser was an arm’s-length stack of vintage Playboy magazines. “When you get old enough, these magazines will be yours, and you can sell them.” My mother and I were silent, each waiting for the other to lead the conversation. Paul was unsettled. “I know both of you can talk more than this. I had plenty of quiet inside jail. Brando, I want to hear how you’re doing in school.”

  “I’m doing good,” I said. Pause. “Dad.” I knew he wasn’t, but whether I was Candido’s son or not, it was time to play along. I sat by his side and tried to make conversation with a man who’d abandoned his own son but who was clearly trying to become some kind of father to me.

  • • •

  Paul stayed several weeks at the convalescent home and introduced me to several of his ward friends, including another wheelchair-bound patient, a man in his seventies whose head resembled a large snowball with a ring of tufted clouds for hair and chin scruff. When we left for lunch, Paul’s friend asked me to sneak him back a small order of onion rings, which he paid for with a gentle appreciation and shoulder hugs. After the fourth batch of rings and hugging, Paul asked me not to bring him food unless he paid money for it.

  “He’s a child molester,” Paul said. “Did time for touching small boys. He won’t touch you because he knows I’d ‘take care of him,’ but I don’t want you going near him.”

  I wondered if he was just lying, the way my mother did. But if he wasn’t, why would he have introduced me to a pedophile to begin with?

  When Paul was discharged, he moved into my grandmother’s house with us. He emerged from his cast with a gimp leg and a permanent limp that made my mother wince when he hobbled too far in one direction.

  “He takes longer to get up the hill than I do!” my grandmother said.

  My mother said to her, “This motherfucker lied to me. He’s much older than I am.” They were just a year apart. “If I wasn’t going to get a week’s honeymoon in Vegas after we get married, I’d kick his ass out.”

  The wedding, her third, was at the Circus Circus’s Chapel of the Fountain on my mother’s thirty-eighth birthday, April 7, 1985. My mother, who never divorced any man, applied for a license with an assumed name and a fake ID.

  I was the wedding’s sole guest when I stood again to give my mother “away” as I had in the Baha’i ceremony with Robert. “No more weddings for me!” my grandmother had said.

  In our group picture, I’m wearing a metallic silver suit with a clip-on necktie and white sneakers. My mother looks dazed, dressed in pink, a color she hated, marrying a man she doesn’t love. We’re posed on a midnight blue shag mat in front of the altar, in front of a cardboard church backdrop, with Paul holding on to both my mother’s and my shoulders for support. My hair is long enough to brush Paul’s hand. It’s easiest here in this picture to see how people would mistake Paul for my actual father—matching long, dark hair, the same bittersweet orange skin tone, and a similar facial structure around the eyes. His, though, were often pinched, narrowed, squinting, as if focused on some faraway mountain peak.

  We had another family picture taken in Las Vegas in the fall of 1986 at a showroom in the Frontier Hotel. It was a double bill of oldies acts Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Righteous Brothers. In those eighteen months, both my mother and I have swelled, saturated with a fat that has rounded out our faces and plumped up my mother’s arms. (She hated seeing herself overweight; this is the last photo I have of her.) My mother’s hair flows to her bust and has been styled with a crimping iron bought from an infomercial, her primary shopping outlet since she grew afraid of “being fat in public.” I’m wearing plastic eyeglasses, and my genuine smile from the wedding has dissolved into a saccharine smirk. Paul, originally seated on my left, has since been excised from the photo through a clean vertical rip. What remains is his saddle-tan hand on my shoulder, as if he’s offering his condolences or steadying me for a hard, coming blow.

  • • •

  It was ten o’clock on a school night when my mother gave a quick knock on my bedroom door and then barged in. I was twelve years old, hunched over a TV tray loaded with books, reading.

  “It’s past your bedtime,” she said. “Go to the bar and get your father.”

  My mother wasn’t a drinker and underestimated what being an alcoholic meant. She had two glasses of champagne on New Year’s Eve and then went to bed until late morning. Paul rotated daily among the half dozen bars within walking distance of our house. Little Joy Jr. on the corner was good for pool hustling and a gay cruising spot. A block away, the Short Stop was popular with off-duty police officers, who, as it turned out, were the easiest marks for Paul to hustle. Stadium Bars #1 & #2 were for Dodgers fans brave enough to park on curbs lined with broken passenger car door glass, as if frozen pools of water had been dropped and shattered.

  My mother also didn’t realize how much Paul hated living with us.

  “I’m in a jail worse than the one I was locked up in,” he said to me a month after the wedding. He hadn’t once confronted my mother about her phone sex job or me about my “American” upbringing. “This place is run by two hens who want to cut the balls off this rooster. Looks like they already got to you,” he told me. My father was right, I thought. My father was also a total stranger who wasn’t even my father. How quickly should I trust him?

  Paul’s local was The Sunset. With its grenadine neon sun signage and marbled brown stucco exterior, it’s the first bar seen in the opening credits for Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, a 1987 movie written by Charles Bukowski. (When your father’s local is the first bar seen in Barfly, you know how this story’s gonna turn out.) Sandwiched like a hunk of bad roast beef between Roy’s Market (more carnicería—butcher shop—than market) and the Echo Park Trading Post (more pawnshop than trading post), The Sunset was a mix of white and Mexican toughs who’d been softened up by age, disillusionment, and cirrhosis, and out-of-area slummers looking for a dive bar with gums but no teeth. It was here that Paul found his greatest success as a pool hustler, or, as he called himself, a “professional gambler,” who earned money through hours-long pool games and tricking people in the hoariest of bar bets. Paul tried teaching me a few of them, most involving cigarettes, playing cards, and number memorization, but I was never as impressed as he wanted me to be.

  “Too bad we don’t have a pool table at the house,” he said. “You could finally realize I’m good at something.”

  I sat on the curb outside the bar for an hour, blackening my palms and the ass of my jeans, praying that Paul would come out on his own. He didn’t. I was more terrified of going back to my mother empty-handed than of whatever was in the bar, so I sucked in air like I was about to dive underwater and then rushed the front door. Thick, pilled velvet curtains with cigarette smoke and BO trapped in their folds parted to reveal murky blue and red lights undulating over my head. Noise and smoke everywhere, it was impossible to breathe. Then someone shouted, “Get that fucking kid out of here!” and I was pushed
back out the door and onto the street.

  Paul limped after me aided by his cane with a duck bill’s head.

  “Tell your mom to stop treating you like a dog,” he said. “She already treats me like one. Go home. I’m making money for her to spend.” If Paul had a good night’s winnings, he’d stumble back before midnight. If he lost, he’d drink until close. He was simultaneously an irresponsible drunk and a practical manager of his money.

  “What do you mean you left him there?” my mother said. “You can’t take on one crippled old man? What the hell good are you? Go back there and wait for him.”

  I sat on the curb outside the bar past midnight, yawning, trying to stay awake. When he came out, tipsy, I drifted alongside, unacknowledged, a phantom son.

  The crooked stairs to our house, perched atop a slanted hill, gave Paul trouble sober, so tonight he decided to scale the sliding right angle of our front lawn. He staggered to his feet on the grass, but then he twisted his bum leg, tumbling him through dry, ashy weeds down to a retaining wall like a broken top. His cane flew like a javelin. Finally, Paul let me help him crawl up the hill on his hands and knees. Our neighbors across the street watched and laughed from darkened porches.

  A stench of sweat, dead grass, dirt, cigarette smoke, and alcohol floated with us like a noxious fog. “You smell like a drunk,” my grandmother said to me and then steered Paul onto my mother’s empty bed, where he slurri-naded my grandmother with Ray Charles’s and Willie Nelson’s duet “Seven Spanish Angels” before passing out. My mother had lost interest in Paul the moment he hit the front lawn and was asleep on the couch. She didn’t really want Paul. She just wanted him home.

  When my grandmother closed his bedroom door, I asked her why people were laughing at Paul.