Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

I called Paul “dear old Dad” after hearing the cartoon dog Augie Doggie use that phrase. Paul was the first man I lived with that felt comfortable calling himself my dad all the time. I knew Candido was my biological father, but that revelation didn’t change my life at all. The word father was something I attached to a relationship, not to any one particular person, and I decided I’d keep using that word on someone until it stuck. Finding out about my real dad that was nowhere in my life didn’t mean nearly as much as a fake dad that could be present every day.

  Manhood lessons began that summer. We spent late afternoons drifting in the slow lane, eating McDonald’s supersized Value Packs for an early dinner, listening to 1950s oldies that Paul remembered from his childhood (the tinkling piano opening of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” moved him to tears), and installing car parts outside the local Thrifty while I fended off the fire ants that swarmed the parking lot. There was rust in the sky as Paul stared off at a concrete wall opposite the lot and reminisced about fun things he did growing up: street fighting, popping off fly balls in the park, shooting his BB gun.

  “A boy needs a gun,” Paul said. “You ever been in a fight?” he asked, and held up his palms.

  “Show me how you’d hit someone,” he said. I jabbed with a balled fist.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, motioning to how my thumb was stuck inside my enclosed fist. “You’ll break your thumbs doing that. Next time you get in an argument, don’t say anything. Take a swing first.”

  I had shelves of books, games, and stuffed animals, but since Nina moved away, I’d made just one best friend in junior high. Daniel rode the same school bus to the valley but lived in a grittier area wedged between Echo Park, Westlake, and downtown near the shadows cast by soaring freeway overpasses. Dandruff dusted the shoulders of his fake Members Only jacket, and a Milky Way constellation of whiteheads inflamed his face. He named his backpack “Anthony” and gave me “thigh crushers” when we sat next to each other on the school bus.

  “That’s the best friend you could find?” Paul asked.

  Paul was driving us home when he stopped at a strip mall auto parts store. Daniel squeezed my thigh. He smiled, waiting for me to squirm away in laughter. I threw a punch that glanced off the side of his head. I met Paul’s eyes in the rearview and punched Daniel again, this time in the shoulder. Again, I didn’t connect. Daniel cowered with his arms over his head, stunned, and waited for me to finish sliding my punches off his back and onto the seat cushion.

  We dropped off Daniel a half hour later. He cheerfully waved good-bye without a bruise on him.

  “Did you see our fight?” I asked Paul, expecting to check “Get in fight” off my manhood list.

  “You were getting some good shots on him,” he said. “He wasn’t fighting back. You were in control. I would have stepped in if it’d gotten too bad. Maybe we should get you some boxing gloves and go to a gym?”

  Gloves? A gym? I hadn’t expected to “fight” again, let alone every time I had an argument. I’d sucker pummeled my best friend, done a poor job of it, and was scrounging around for any sliver of the pride Paul felt.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, and stared out the window. We didn’t talk about it, but, of course, I’d never fight again. Next time Paul took me out, he bought me a Crossman BB air rifle.

  He set up a cardboard box target mount in the backyard and brought out a folding stool to sit by my side.

  “Don’t jerk it when you fire. Lean in a little more,” he said, his hands gentle as they made tiny corrections. Shooting was boring; practice time with an instrument I hated. Maybe Paul could sense this. He too lost interest after our second lesson. I left the gun leaning in the closet like an old mop.

  My grandmother moved the gun to her room, and on nights when couples made out in parked cars under our jacaranda tree, she waved the rifle around on the front porch to scare them away. Then she took the gun on daytime patrols to shoo away people who ate sandwiches at the bottom of our stairs during lunch hour and left their garbage behind.

  “You could get shot doing something that dumb,” Paul told her.

  “Nobody’s gonna shoot an old woman,” she said. “I’m too old to be afraid.”

  She was also too old, I decided, to play catch, though she was in better shape than Paul. I had him drive us up to the end of our street and then down a hill to Elysian Park with some gloves and a bat.

  “Don’t be afraid to pull one,” he said. I popped flies that he hobbled after. Later, on a drive to McDonald’s, he cut across traffic to park on the side of a busy road.

  “Got one coming,” he said, and stretched himself out on the backseat as if it were a couch. Paul was about to have a seizure. He’d been having them since he moved in with us. His body gave him a good minute or two warning before one hit. Beatings from sadistic guards, he insisted, had exacerbated his condition. When we picked up his prescription bottles at the pharmacy, I’d read aloud, “Not to be taken with alcohol.”

  In Paul’s front jeans pocket was a tongue depressor made from a pink toothbrush handle with hospital tape wrapped around the brush head. I kept one hand on the stick in his mouth while his seizure rode in like a stampede, trampling his legs, my other hand dabbing rancid yellow foam off his cheeks. When his shaking ebbed, I wiped off the depressor while Paul got a postseizure Budweiser and whisky from the trunk. He drove home tipsy with alcohol on his breath.

  We were now spending too much time with each other, my mother decided.

  “Are you sure you don’t see him drinking?” she asked. I hadn’t—just saw the empties—but wouldn’t have turned him in if I had. I saw him now as a fellow soldier trapped in the same trench. Both my mother and grandmother considered this a betrayal. Their problem wasn’t my problem, though. I was becoming a man, I thought, and it was time to take my side by one.

  • • •

  Besides Paul, I stockpiled other men as prominent father surrogates. Just in case. Paul drank like a thirsty river. His belly was distended and, like Frank before him, he punctuated the ends of arguments by revving his car’s engine and speeding away. So I kept an eye out for other eligible fathers. One was Jose, a thirtysomething Mexican who had a weird maternal crush on my sixtysomething grandmother.

  “Jose’s too old to be a gigolo,” she said, “and I’m too poor to give him any money. Maybe he can do something for you.” He failed the father test when he took me to a drive-in theater, but I had to pay for our tickets and pizza.

  There was Allan, a kind, elderly Dartmouth College graduate I met while he was canvassing our neighborhood for the 1984 Democratic presidential ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. My grandmother told him he should talk to her in-house political expert. He looked at her oddly when she returned with an eleven-year-old.

  “I didn’t realize you followed politics,” he said.

  “Mondale won’t win,” I said. “Because of the ‘wimp’ factor.”

  After a long discussion about the presidential election, he befriended and hired me as a part-time employee at his West Los Angeles company, which manufactured enclosures for electronic equipment. He drove me out to his offices and back, paying me $4.50 an hour for filing and roaming around the grounds unsupervised. Each visit ended with a paycheck in my own name and, for my birthday, a Commodore 64 home computer.

  My grandmother said, “I thought he’d do more for you.” There was no gesture she couldn’t compound into disappointment.

  Then there was Uncle Oscar, my mother’s half brother. He’d stop by unannounced a few times a year. My mother would stay in her room with the door closed until he left.

  One Christmas, Oscar brought over a BMX bike. “Here’s how you ride it,” he said, and then hopped on it and pedaled up and down the street. “Now you try.”

  I wobbled around unsteadily for ten minutes. When I was unable
to learn on the spot, he got bored. “You don’t seem like you’re really trying,” he said, and ended the lesson. The bike went into the basement.

  “Let me teach you kung fu,” Oscar said, and demonstrated some moves. I thrust out my fists at a crooked angle. He was unimpressed.

  “If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m not going to waste my time teaching you,” he said.

  My mother said he used drugs and took money out of her and her mother’s purses growing up. For a while, he was a member of the Reverend Jim Jones’s People’s Temple branch in Los Angeles but dropped out when he realized he would have to hand over all his money and possessions. He lived in a small, junk-cluttered Silver Lake bungalow and sometimes brought over tall, leggy, beautiful white girlfriends with strange, exotic names like Renee who stroked his hands while he and my grandmother argued on the couch about everything. When he was alone, they argued about his father, Emilio.

  “You never treated Papa right,” Oscar said at the dining room table. My grandmother sat on the opposite end. I sat in the middle, spectator to a Ping-Pong match between a father figure angry about his dad and a mother figure angry with her son. “You cheated on Papa and lied to him. You hated him,” Oscar said.

  “Papa hated you too,” she said. “You didn’t visit him once in the hospital before he died. You only showed up at the will reading. You were always an ungrateful child.”

  “How about all those women you used to bring over here into your bedroom?” Oscar said, his voice trembling. “Me and Maria had to sit here as little kids and see a parade of women come through the house when Papa was working.”

  “Okay, so I was a bad mother that gave you a rotten childhood and you turned into a rotten human being. We’re not going to get anywhere talking like this all night.”

  “I concur,” Oscar said.

  “What does ‘concur’ mean?” I asked.

  “It’s a fancy white man’s way of saying, ‘You’re right,’” my grandmother said.

  One afternoon Oscar showed up in a gray hoodie and sweatpants. His face was gaunt, his eyes sleepless. His sweats drooped off him like curtains. He was itchy, bouncing from room to room, confused by Paul’s presence. It was the first time Oscar had visited since Paul moved in.

  Oscar asked my mother if he could borrow fifty dollars. “I’m not giving that asshole shit,” she told me. “He’s using again.”

  When he got into an argument with my grandmother, Paul asked Oscar to leave.

  “Who are you?” Oscar shouted. “This is my mother I’m talking to! I don’t know who you are.”

  Paul stepped in front of my grandmother in the living room and tried to push Oscar toward the front door. Oscar pushed back, and Paul went into a defensive fighting stance. Oscar assumed a kung fu pose. Paul’s bum leg sent him stumbling backward while Oscar punched air. What should have been an old-school rumble became a slap fight, their heavy fists punching the empty space between them.

  It seems comical now, but it was terrifying then. I was sobbing when I grabbed my baseball bat and, clutching it to my chest, screamed, “Get out!” Here I was, thirteen years old, with a chance to defend my house and my mother. My grandmother could handle herself, but I’d once been my mother’s “little big man.” We both knew that I’d since become a fat, wimpy, smart-mouthed nerd. I hadn’t grown into Al Pacino from Scarface—my mother’s favorite movie character—meaning she still couldn’t find, or create, a man interested in or capable of protecting her. That broke off the first part of her heart. I knew I wanted to guard the parts that were left. I just didn’t know how.

  Paul knocked Oscar off balance toward the front door. Oscar looked at me and said, “See what they’re doing to me, Brando? They’ll do this to you! This is what these women are going to do to you!”

  My grandmother grabbed the bat and leveraged Oscar out on the porch, but he yanked the bat from her as we slammed the door closed behind him. He swung the bat hard at the door’s glass-and-wood middle section, splintering it into large chunks. A large flapping shade kept the glass from spraying on us.

  Then it was quiet in our house. The sound was so unfamiliar it was deafening.

  Oscar drove away. My grandmother and I collected the largest glass shards. This was the second time, along with Robert’s smashing through the sliding glass door, a window shade had “protected” us. The next week, my grandmother would install shades on every available window and leave them drawn day or night. We debated whether the police should be called, but the one thing my grandmother wanted her son charged with—theft—was moot when the bat was found tossed at the base of the hillside’s retaining wall.

  My grandmother turned on Paul. “You didn’t land a single punch on my son,” she said. “Didn’t you fight in jail?”

  Paul said nothing. My mother shifted her fury to me. “Do you know how much that fucking front door is going to cost?” she asked. “Do you think Oscar’s going to come back and pay us for it?”

  “Brando doesn’t think anything through,” my grandmother said.

  “Could you have gotten away with shit like this when you were a child?” my mother asked my grandmother. “Acting like a pussy and costing your mother money?”

  “Are you kidding?” my grandmother replied “My mother would have beat me from here to Hollywood if I hadn’t protected her!”

  My mother said to me, “You’re turning into a worthless man, just like the rest of them.”

  I stood silent, ashamed, incapable of acting. I hoped my mother would exhaust herself lashing out at me. Or that Paul would step in and do something. Anything.

  He went to the laundry room to smoke.

  Later I thought about what Oscar had said before he’d grabbed the baseball bat. “These women.” It was the same thing Paul had said to me, too. Oscar had just bashed in our front door, but the danger, he said, was inside the house. Were Oscar and Paul right? What would these women do to me?

  • • •

  Though I’d had enough experience and should have seen the warning signs by then, whenever a “father” left, it always came like the jab of a needle: a white-hot flash of intense pain and the dull, alcohol-rubbed ache left behind. My mother was surprised, too, though by now she had come to expect abandonment over security. With the strength of a thousand arms, she held on to these men she hated from the first moment they walked through our front door, but when they were ready to leave, it made no difference. Men always traveled toward unseen constellations, pulled by the force of their own gravity.

  And they always remembered to take the car with them.

  Paul’s last night was in early 1988. On a rare “family night out,” we drove to La Pizza Loca, a sub-Domino’s chain, just to bring the food back to the house. When Paul went inside to order, some young cholos swaggered from across the parking lot, sat on the hood of our car, and started rocking it. They cursed and chugged from forty-ounce bottles.

  My mother, from her customary spot in the backseat, yelled, “Can you stop bouncing our car up and down?” Her voice was a nervous crackle.

  “Fuck you, puta!” one boy said. “Come out here and make us, you fucking bitch!”

  My mother told me, “Don’t just fucking sit here. Do something!”

  Cholos and I didn’t see each other in Echo Park. I pretended I couldn’t see them while they tagged walls with indecipherable characters or drank forties on street corners at three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon. One time I stood several feet from a fat one as he snatched a woman’s purse on the corner where I waved to my grandmother every morning and did nothing as he huffed off in escape. Cholos were better than the white bullies in junior high, though, because cholos left you alone if you knew how to do the same. They ambled down the street at a crooked angle to lean into you, spoiling for a fight. So I gave them plenty of space on the sidewalk, crossing the street to avoid posse clots down the block.
I was great at avoiding confrontations and fights outside my house. But these cholos I couldn’t avoid. My mother wouldn’t let me.

  I crept out of the car. The plan was to hide with Paul. Head bent over, I sulked past the gangbangers. None of them was old enough for facial hair. One of them said, “Hey, he’s gonna snitch on us.”

  I told Paul what was happening. He glanced out the window and said, “Let’s wait for our food.”

  We emerged arms laden with “feed a family for eight dollars” pizza and two-liter soda bottles to see the group shambling off, their cursing and bottle slinging an echo that now made them seem like harmless teenagers.

  “They were just kids,” Paul told my mother.

  “You two hid inside like pussies!” she screamed, but she could have been talking about herself too. Her days of being a badass exotic fake chola were long gone. She couldn’t talk to cholos the way my grandmother could have and was as out of touch with gangs as she was with the rest of the neighborhood, having lived the past several years of her life inside a phone sex bunker.

  Paul and my mother argued until they got home. He said, “I’m not listening to this anymore. I’m going for a drive.”

  My mother followed Paul down the stairs, screaming. She had never fought in public, feeling that violence against loved ones was a private matter. From my bedroom window, I saw in the dank yellow front porch light my mother and Paul fight at the bottom of the stairs next to the jacaranda tree, the same place I prayed every day for some kind of peace in this house.

  Paul sped off. My mother burst through the front door.

  “He pulled a knife on me! He cut me!”

  “Where did he cut you?” my grandmother asked, skeptical. “I wanna see these stab wounds for myself.” Paul carried a buck knife, but I couldn’t tell from my bedroom whether he’d pulled it on my mother. She gathered us around and showed us a faint nail scratch on her wrist.

  “That’s not a cut,” my grandmother said. “I’m going to bed.”

  By the next morning, Paul hadn’t come back. He’d never stayed away overnight before. My mother ransacked the house, totaling up subtle clues that only a con, or someone who had been conned enough by cons, should have caught but didn’t: Paul’s bare clothes hangers shoved to the back of the closet. His bathroom cabinets emptied. The telephone unplugged. Paul had planned to leave that night. He just needed an excuse.