Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  “About time I got to do something in this house outside of your mother’s room,” he said. He didn’t seem himself. There was a war movie on cable.

  “Those ‘gooks’ are really dug in,” he said.

  “Hey, Sofie’s Vietnamese,” I said. “That’s a really racist word to use.”

  “I know about your girlfriend,” he said. “I wasn’t talking about her.”

  “You should apologize.”

  “What’s got into you? You know that’s not what I meant,” Pat said. “You’re making something out of nothing, just like your mother.”

  There was that slap to my face again: “just like your mother.” Was I just like her? What did that mean, exactly? How many of my fathers had said that to me?

  I stormed off to my room. Just like my mother would have, I thought. Maybe he was right. I knew he didn’t mean to insult Sofie. Why hold an Andrew Dice Clay fan to a higher standard than my mother or grandmother, who spouted racist, sexist, and ethnic stereotypes every time they opened their mouths? What I didn’t understand was why he wasn’t backing down this time, the way he’d done in every disagreement. His standing his ground was as much a betrayal as was my singling him out as a racist. We never cleared the air, just sort of dropped the discussion. He had other things on his mind.

  The next week, I was called out of my fifth-period economics class to take a phone call in the guidance counselor’s office. There were rumors among my college-bound friends that you were pulled out of class when you were accepted to a really big school. Was this how my new future would begin?

  At the office, someone said, “Your father’s on the phone.”

  “I got the job,” Pat said.

  “You did? That was fast. Wow,” I said, unwowed. Maybe this wasn’t certain yet. Maybe the job would fall through.

  “Ninety thousand a year,” he said. I already knew that. Why keep repeating what I knew?

  “I have to go to Northern California to their corporate offices to begin the paperwork. I wanted to call you before I left.” I hadn’t talked to him about Sofie. How had I run out of time with Pat already?

  “You’re going right now?” I asked.

  “I want to get a jump on the traffic.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Do you want to stop by here so you can say good-bye on your way out of town?”

  I heard what sounded like the receiver shuffled around. “There really isn’t time, but I’ll call you when I get up there. I’ll be sending for you and your mother in a week.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Ninety thousand a year,” he said. “I’ll see you soon!”

  That afternoon, I left school in a daze. I didn’t want to leave the house I’d known my whole life. There were so many good memories here—weren’t there?

  At home, I tried calling Sofie but couldn’t get a dial tone. The phone wasn’t dead; someone had unplugged it.

  • • •

  Pat fled Los Angeles with some of the restaurant’s money and the Bronco—my mother claimed it was ten thousand dollars. The restaurant gave him the option of returning the money—and then getting fired—instead of facing prosecution. There would be no bedroom of my own or an office to do my college studies, just as there was no ninety-thousand-dollar-a-year job in Northern California. It seemed that our Thanksgiving dinner and the many pies and boxes of lobster and steak that filled the freezer weren’t all “overstock.” At least some of the bags under my mother’s bed were restaurant deposits Pat never made. The Subaru he bought the year before had been repossessed when his check bounced. There wasn’t a single emergency wire transfer from his parents, who, when informed of Pat’s deceptions, responded with a brusque, officious air of incredulity that we’d been suckered in the first place. (Removing physical traces of Pat was easy; there was nothing to throw away because by then my mother had stopped posing for pictures.)

  I was seventeen with four past “fathers”—Candy, Robert, Paul, and Pat—not to mention Frank and the chain of temporary boyfriends. They were all “count ’em off” scratches on a wall now. It had seemed possible for a while that one steady man could steer us to a “normal” family life of barbeques, father-and-son road trips, and a nice house in boring middle-class suburbia where your dad rose and slept under the same roof. Pat’s lies cracked that dream apart. It was time to rid my house of every lie. I had to “come out” as a Mexican.

  It had been three or four years since I discovered I was Mexican, yet I was still acting out the same Indian charade for strangers, for my friends in school, for Sofie. We’d been dating only a couple months, but my teenage black-and-white thinking made me certain I’d marry only once and that Sofie was the one. She’d been absorbed into my family drama so fast, and had become such a necessary brace and validation for how I survived in my world, I decided that Sofie deserved the truth.

  My mother drilled me never to tell anyone “outside the family” about our real backgrounds. “It’s none of their business,” she’d say, warning me I’d be disappointed with how people would react.

  “Nobody gives a shit about another ordinary Mexican from Echo Park,” she said. “Nobody will care who you are.”

  More lies to protect a lie, I thought. By telling Sofie, I hadn’t planned on “embracing my Mexican roots” or learning Spanish. I wouldn’t change my name to Ulloa, because why swap the name of a father who had abandoned me for another father who had abandoned me? I’d thought Paul was my father for years and lived with him as his son. I’d earned the right to be called Skyhorse. What I didn’t have a right to was telling people I was Indian. It seemed simple to me. This wasn’t about losing one set of cultural roots and replacing them with another or swapping one set of politics of the oppressed for the other. I wasn’t interested in being just an Indian or a Mexican at seventeen. I wanted to be me—someone who wasn’t an Indian or a Mexican first. My mother was telling me that if I didn’t want to lose people I loved, I had to be her version of me. I knew she was wrong.

  “What do you mean you’re not American Indian?” Sofie asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m Mexican,” I said. “My father was Mexican, but I was raised as an Indian.”

  “You’ve been lying to me? What about your mother and your grandmother? You’re all Mexicans too?” It hadn’t occurred to Sofie once that my family was Mexican. Sofie saw my mother silence my grandmother whenever she spoke Spanish so often it had briefly occurred to her that my grandmother could be Mexican, but of no biological relation to my mother.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, it’s no big deal. I’m the same person. Is this a problem?”

  “Yeah, it’s a big problem. I feel so sick.” She was in tears. “I’m sorry, I can’t be with you, Brando. I can’t see you anymore.”

  When Sofie told her family what happened, one of her sisters asked, “Why are you upset? Date a nice white guy.”

  • • •

  I was devastated. My friends were confused. “What happened? Who dumped who?” By way of explanation, I “came out” one at a time to a rainbow coalition group of friends: white, Indian, Asian, and Mexican. (How much easier it’d have been to announce a “race change” as a status update on Facebook—Hey guys, I’m Mexican now. Olé!) I prepared an elaborate array of explanations and defenses for why I’d hidden the truth for so long. I thought my white friends would ask me endless rounds of questions I couldn’t or didn’t want to answer. My Mexican friends would call me a traitor.

  “Oh, you’re Mexican?” each of my friends said. “Weird. But whatever.”

  Sofie and I were broken up for two days; a month in high school time. She was contrite when we reconciled.

  “It’s my family,” she said. “I’m not supposed to like Mexicans. They threw rocks at my house when I first moved to America. The girls teased me about my flat chest and my hairless forearms. In elementary school, they threaten
ed to jump me in the bathroom. A Mexican mugged my brother and stole the one BMX bike we all had to share. Every Mexican I’ve met is the same. That’s why I couldn’t understand how you could be one too. You’re not like any Mexican I’ve met,” she said, and then added, “I’m sorry you had to tell everyone your secret.”

  I believed secret was the right word. This was information I’d have to protect when I went to college. How could I risk that anyone new in my life would offer the same kind of understanding and acceptance as my friends? Being a couple again, I saw things that confirmed Sofie’s view of the world. In Chinatown, we received long, hostile glares when we held hands, and weren’t seated in restaurants. On a bus, a light-skinned Hispanic woman said as she stepped off, “You two are disgusting!”

  My own mother’s and grandmother’s reactions were just as hostile, but they were mad for a different reason.

  “She dumped you?” my grandmother asked. “What the hell did you think would happen when you told an Oriental girl you were Mexican?”

  “Why the hell did you snitch to anyone outside the family?” my mother asked. “Didn’t you learn anything from being my son?”

  I’d broken my mother’s omertà. I repaid her with my senior class yearbook quote: “Thanks to my friends for EVERYTHING! Thanks to everyone else for NOTHING!”

  “What the fuck did your friends ever do for you?” my mother asked.

  It was a good point. With Pat and his paycheck gone, I didn’t need friends. I needed cash. What I’d saved from my summer job wasn’t close to covering senior year expenses. It was money I had to fight my mother to keep.

  “How come you aren’t like black kids that give all their money to their mothers and the house? Why are you so fucking greedy? You live here rent free and don’t contribute shit!”

  “This is money for college,” I said. “And I pay as much rent as you do. Zero.”

  “Fuck you! Get the fuck out of my house!” Thunderous steps, a slammed door, an earthquake under my feet.

  My acceptance to Stanford University, arriving a couple weeks after Pat abandoned us, was a parenthetical aside that didn’t merit enough interest in the house for a closing bracket.

  “Of course you got in, you’re smart!” my mother said. “But are you smart enough to fix my VCR?”

  Pat left at the worst time imaginable. Who would pick up where he left off? Who would help me with expenses for the prom? Who would help pay my enrollment deposit for college? I hated the fact that, for the moment, I thought more about Pat’s wallet than his fatherhood, but my mother had taught me a simple thing throughout my life so far: money equals love.

  • • •

  “Take this,” said Frank, pressing a roll of hundred-dollar bills into my hand. He’d do this twice that year—once at prom and again when he dropped me off at college. Unlike money that had come to me this way in the past—in warm, moist clumps—I knew how long Frank had worked for it, knew he hadn’t stolen it, and knew he’d never ask for or steal it back.

  I’d summoned Frank like a genie, but granting wishes came with new tests of understanding for both of us. He seemed confused about the man I was becoming: a man modeled on him in so many ways that we both didn’t yet realize or understand. He drove Sofie and me to a concert and took us to dinner before the show. When Sofie went to the bathroom, Frank asked, “So who likes this band, you or her?”

  “We both do,” I said.

  “Pet Shop Boys,” he said. “I only know that one song of theirs. ‘The East End boys and the West End girls.’ What does ‘Pet Shop Boys’ mean? Are they a ‘gay’ band?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they’re gay.”

  “If they’re ‘gay,’ they’re a ‘gay’ band. Do they have any songs about being gay?”

  “No, not really. They’re not like Bronski Beat, which has this song about coming out and being gay.”

  “That sounds sick,” he said. “How do you know about this music? Do they play that song on the radio station you listen to?”

  “Frank, I’m here with my girlfriend.”

  I was angry with Frank for not being Pat, the same way that I had been angry with my other dads for not being Frank. Being a kid had helped me forget that anger and forget Frank fast, but I was too old to forget resentments anymore. I hated Frank’s filthy Birkenstocks, his boring seventies rock music, his preconcert ritual of weed and drinking a six-pack of Heineken. When Frank took my mother, Sofie, and me to see Stevie Nicks, I sneered at the “Bella Donna” wannabes in the parking lot holding their arms aloft with chiffon shawl wings while they swirled in circles to music coming from cars.

  We sat in the picnic area, Frank with a six-pack of Heinekens.

  “How many beers is that?” I asked.

  “This is my fourth and last one,” he said.

  “I think it’s irresponsible for you to drink while you’re driving us.” I was the coming-of-age “son” standing up to my “father.” Strip away the quotation marks, though, that connected us as father and son, and I was being a spoiled shit to my mother’s old boyfriend, since I had no way of lashing out at any of my other dads or my actual biological father.

  “We’ll be here for a few hours. I can drink four beers, and it doesn’t affect me. I’m a big boy.”

  “You’re being selfish,” I said. “And you’re embarrassing me.”

  “Do you think I’d jeopardize your safety?” he asked. “Or Sofie’s? Or your mother’s?”

  My mother sat quiet. It was a public space. “This is between you two,” she said.

  The four of us had two pairs of tickets on opposite sides of the outdoor amphitheater. From the other side of the theater, Frank waved and then stood and gave a clenched-fist salute. After the show, Frank asked, “Did you see how I held my hand up? Just like Jackson does?” He called singer Jackson Browne by his first name, as if Jackson were a casual friend.

  I nodded and said, “Yeah, I saw it.” There was a genuine, hopeful look on his face that said, “Let’s move past this fight.”

  “Who’s Jackson?” Sofie asked.

  “You know, Jackson Browne,” I said. “ ‘The Pretender.’” I said those words like I was singing a song Frank taught me, using the same tone of voice and intonation he’d used for years. Neither Frank nor I caught it then, but if both of us had listened close, we’d have heard Frank’s imprint upon my speech so clearly and distinctly, you wouldn’t have been able to tell our voices apart.

  • • •

  I was in the living room around midnight, leaving with Frank for an all-night drive to Stanford. I’d had dinner and a slow dance with Sofie in my tiny bedroom earlier that night, where we promised to stay together no matter what. We’d been having sex with each other since the spring, but that night we just huddled close on my small couch, as if coiling ourselves together would keep the future from striking us too hard.

  “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. “I want for us to get married one day. And for your parents to not be there.”

  My mother gripped me in a fierce hug. My grandmother said, “C’mon, the men gotta get going! Let your son go and be happy for him.” But my mother didn’t let go. When she released me at last, she said, “You don’t get a vote on what happens here now. You don’t live here anymore.”

  “I know,” I said, and exhaled an eighteen-year-old sigh of relief.

  “You’re seventeen, and we’re running up one-oh-one!” Frank sang as he drove north on Highway 101 throughout the night, blasting Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” to stay awake. We hit campus before sunrise and found an empty parking lot, where Frank pissed on a tree. Then he moved my things in—a CD boom box, some clothes, an electric typewriter with a floppy drive and a four-line preview screen—and passed out on my roommate’s bed. I watched his belly rise and fall, his snores blending with the crushing wail of orientat
ion freshmen screaming outside. It wasn’t the first day of college I’d pictured with Pat, but I was away from home at last.

  I looked out the window. Outside was a morning auburn fog, the eerie kind of light found in display cases of sacred texts. Now what?

  I would spend the next four years wandering through that fog, desperate to connect—it took an entire week to find a student who knew exactly where the financial aid office was—and distinguish myself, resigned to becoming a nervous, introverted, black-clad stereotype that I knew wasn’t me any more than the other sons or ethnicity I’d been playing my whole life were.

  I got a phone call to join the Stanford American Indian Organization. “We heard you were kind of a radical,” the caller said. I blew them off out of shame and then spun the invitation into a macho story about asserting my individuality.

  “I didn’t leave the ghetto to stick myself in another one!” I’d say, and maybe score a couple cheap laughs. Then I’d throw in a fabricated story about witnessing a drive-by gang shooting or the time I saw someone shot point-blank in the head on the mean streets near my house. I made few friends but excelled at hating everyone and everything for every reason.

  I would have major arguments with Sofie, who stuck it out with me but hated our long-distance relationship. She’d gone to a commuter college and continued living at home. Without Facebook, Skype, unlimited cell phone minutes, or even regular email access, we blamed each other for our lack of companionship and our enormous phone bills. On my vacations home to Los Angeles, I would fly into panicked searches for temporarily missing college documents or have severe car-key-throwing anxiety attacks over what the parking situation would be at a movie theater or restaurant. I didn’t know how to fully become any one of my fathers but had learned how to be my mother’s son.

  I would legally change my name to Brando Skyhorse and steer clear of El Centro Chicano, Stanford’s Latino student center. The name change was a faux stab at independence from my biological father’s name based solely on embracing the persona my mother had invented for me. I was as much in her thrall now as I was when we shared a house, since my college life revolved around avoiding her and keeping her howling anxiety at bay.