Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  We’ve taken a few pictures together since, but there are many more spaces in the album to fill, including that one in the front. With so much of my childhood framed by pictures with fraudulent captions and fake relatives, I’m impatient for a photograph with my real sisters. I want more conversation, more in-person visits, more family time watching movies and dumb TV shows, more laughter and hugs and tears. Underneath our stacks of to-do lists and errands are the courage to connect and the patience to let us discover who we can be to one another when we’re ready.

  I’m learning that surviving a family is different from living with one. During a trip to Los Angeles over Christmas in 2010, Kereny, Adriana, and I were in a car driving home from the supermarket. Kereny told me she’d read something online I said about Candido.

  “You said that my father abandoned you. That isn’t true. He was driven away.”

  She was hurt and disappointed. I was angry too. Was this about to devolve into the kind of endless, vicious fighting I knew so well? How could anyone—especially a blood relative—deny that I was abandoned? My mother repelled Candido as surely as she drew him into her magnetic field, but he could have kept in touch with my grandmother. He could have made gestures that didn’t require great risk on his part. He could have sent money anonymously. Or he could have taken the risk—I was his only son, after all—and tried to be in my life regardless of what my mother threatened. So much of what my mother told Candy he knew to be untrustworthy; why would her threats be any different?

  Adriana strived for a middle ground in our conversation. “We don’t know everything that happened,” she said. What I thought was, We do know what happened: I was left behind, and someone else got my father and my dream of a stable family life. Would I have to prepare myself for having to learn how to defend myself in a family all over again?

  “You know what you sound like?” a friend said to me. “Someone who has siblings.”

  Turns out, our “conflict” was an “after-school special” disagreement resolved gently with a simple conversation, not apoplectic rage. Kereny and I text often, while Adriana dashes off exhausted emails when the boys will let her. It’s a happy life beyond what I dreamed possible. I just want more of it.

  Becoming part of a new family means that as one layer of secrets is unpeeled, the feelings underneath them are exposed to the light. Kereny mentioned that Candido’s mother was never close to them. Once, on a trip to Mexico, they saw a picture of me with other grandkids but no pictures of her, Adriana, or Natalie. Candido had seen that picture too. Every time he visited his mother Felicitas’s house in Yahualica, he saw the pictures I’d sent her in junior high framed on her wall. She told Candido that his legitimate child was studying to be a lawyer.

  Here’s his picture, she said.

  Candido saw my glasses and chubby cheeks and thought, He’s fatter than I imagined. He said nothing, though, just stared in wonder at his almost unknown son.

  Kereny had no idea who I was or why I was hanging on the grandkids wall, but she realizes that in her grandmother’s conservative Catholic mind, my mother was Candido’s first and only wife, since there’d never been an official divorce. She considered Candido’s daughters “not good enough,” or illegitimate offspring. So sad for Kereny, I thought, but so ironic for my mother. An illegitimate wife who married illegally so many times that her aliases were the length of a forearm, my mother was, in a Mexican’s home, a legitimate wife at last.

  • • •

  I have a good relationship with my father Frank. We talk on the phone three or four times a year, and after nearly thirty-seven years, we’re almost comfortable with calling each other Father and Son, though I slip up sometimes and call him Frank. He slips up too and sometimes calls me Tiger, which he’s never stopped using since I was four. He’s retired now from the “temporary” job he applied for in 1977 and spends his days going to book readings, gallery openings, and curating his own personal museum of signed memorabilia that takes up two storage sheds. Frank shows up to every Los Angeles book event I do, camera in hand, and still covers lunch or dinner when we meet up. Among his most valuable items, if you ask him, are out-of-print hardcover editions of my first book, which he was able to buy in bulk for pennies a copy.

  “I don’t want to make you feel bad by telling you how little I paid for them,” he says, “but I know these are going to be worth something someday.”

  We reminisce about our old days together. My mother and grandmother come to life so vividly when we talk it’s like they’re there in the room with us—well, just the parts we loved about them. We chat more over Facebook, where he’s friends with my sister Kereny; two big-hearted family members intersecting in a way I’d never imagined. My sister, and my father, and me, friends.

  I’ve retired all air quotes around my family members, reserving them for things they’ve said or written. This past June, I texted Frank a single message that was for him and him alone: “Happy Father’s Day.”

  Frank, my father, said, “Thank you so much, Son.”

  • • •

  I lived with my birth father, Candido, for the first three years of my life. I’ve been in contact with him for the past three years of my life. Since we’ve gotten back in touch, we speak about once a year on my birthday. He knows I am busy, he says, which absolves us both, since I’ve called him just three or four times in return. I’m grateful he stays in touch and have no right to expect more, because he is giving me everything he has left. I am disappointed because I am thirty-five years late, and there is nothing more for us to offer each other. On the days I am cruel, I tell myself my father has failed me twice. On the days I am honest, I tell myself that had he stayed, we could have failed each other every day.

  Whenever conversation drifts to Candido’s disappearance, as it does sometimes, not one of his family members used the word abandon. Was there an inability to reconcile the kindly, present father they knew with the absentee one I didn’t? Both Adriana and Kereny are fiercely antiwelfare, ignoring how welfare stepped in to do the job our father didn’t, compensating for thousands of dollars in missing child support. Had I been looking at this in too one-sided a way? Was I in part the prodigal son? Over drinks and cigars, Adriana’s husband, John, expressed his initial concerns about my intentions.

  “We didn’t know who you were at first. I’m protective of this family,” he said. “Candido is like a father to me.”

  It was strange to hear him say that. How many men had I chased to be “like a father” to me? Was I doing the same with my own father?

  During the one Christmas I’ve spent with Candido’s family, I was welcomed and embraced in the midst of a large togetherness I hadn’t felt when I did have a family to share it with. Yet the part of me that remembered Christmases with my mother and grandmother felt alone, alien, an outsider capable of understanding intimate gestures only by using a stolen dictionary. Then I saw Candido playing with Adriana’s son Dillan—my nephew—and heard him call Dillan “Pappas.”

  “Pappas,” my grandmother said, “means ‘potatoes’ in Spanish.”

  Do you remember, Father, when you called me Pappas?

  Sometimes the gap between Candido and me feels too great, like an aside to the family I want with my sisters. It’s as if my mother ripped out the pages of my story with Candido as she read them, let them fall to her feet like plucked feathers, and then left Candido and me to reassemble our book without the benefit of page numbers. Maybe there wasn’t enough time to bond when we were father and son, and we’ve forgotten too much. Or maybe, if he’d stayed, we would have reached the same place in each other’s lives we are today: two men leery of our past bound to stay connected by something more than obligation but not quite yet love.

  A few months ago in May 2013, my father showed up one auburn afternoon at my sister Adriana’s house where I was staying for a few days and invited me out to dinner. He drove me to a
Mexican restaurant in a nondescript strip mall where we shared carnitas and a beer. He explained in his slow, proud English that, through his job, at sixty-three years old, he’d opened his first email account and was asked to pick a password.

  You’ll have to check it every day, he was told. Choose something you won’t forget.

  Candido, my father, says, “I chose Brando.”

  Thank You

  For changing my life, twice, and your unwavering support—Kitt Allan

  For the gift of a real father—Frank Zamora

  For doing the best you could—Paul Skyhorse Johnson, Robert, Pat, and Rudy

  To the brothers I wish I’d met—Dustin Paul SkyHorse Johnson and Josh Palmer (222)

  For writing and manhood lessons—Geoffrey Wolff and George Feifer

  To the freshest Life Saver in the roll—Susan “Big Red” Golomb

  For embracing Madonnas—Amber Qureshi, Kelly Marcel, Julia Cho, Julie Goler (juliesbookgroups.com), booksellers indie and major, friends old and new

  For the golden opportunity—Jonathan Karp, Martha Levin, Peter Matthiessen, Joy Williams, Philip Levine, Edward P. Jones, Will Schwalbe, Bob Shacochis, Allegra Goodman, Jayne Anne Phillips, The Hemingway Foundation, PEN/New England, American Academy of Arts and Letters

  To the best road crew in the business—Millicent Bennett, Chloe Perkins, Ed Winstead and everyone at Simon & Schuster

  For the time and space to find my way in—Can Serrat, El Bruc, Spain (canserrat.org/canserratart.com) with special thanks to Elizabeth Sher

  For light through a dark period—Brendon Small’s Home Movies

  For help closing the door—Dawn Trook, Chris Hokanson, Jeff Lytle, Sophoat Lim, Daniel Maurer, Jason Wishnow, John Reed, Amy Hundley, The Ucross Foundation (ucrossfoundation.org), Sharon Dynak, Ruthie Salvatore

  To my Wonder Girl, who amazes me anew every day: you’re my Neon Pegasus—Erin Kelley

  For the chance to be a family—John Madrid, Pedro Gonzalez, and Aurora, Adriana, Kereny, Natalie, Dillan, Marco, and Candido Ulloa

  “Another element of my memoir—the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity—has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated.”

  —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  Reading Group Guide

  Take This Man

  A Memoir

  Brando Skyhorse

  Introduction

  In this riveting, heartfelt memoir, Brando Skyhorse shares the story of his turbulent childhood in Echo Park, Los Angeles, with a rotating cast of surrogate fathers and a Mexican mother who refashioned herself and her son as Native Americans. With poignant honesty, he recalls his struggle to reconcile his dual cultural identities, reconnecting with his biological father after more than three decades, and how he finally untangled the truth of his past.

  Topics and Questions for Discussion

  1.Share your thoughts about Maria as a person and as a mother. Were you sympathetic toward her at all? Why or why not? What were her maternal strengths and weaknesses?

  2.What motivated Maria to fabricate a Native American identity for herself and Brando? How did the phrase she repeated (“At least it’s never boring”) shed light on her extreme, often outrageous behavior? Why was Maria able to get away with the lies and stories she told?

  3.Discuss the cultural identity issues that Maria’s charade caused Brando. Why did he defy his mother and “come out” as a Mexican when he was in his teens? Was Sofie right or wrong to accuse Brando of lying to her?

  4.Grandma June was supportive of Brando—encouraging his love of reading, for example—and at other times was cruel to him. How would you describe their relationship? Was she more of a positive or a negative influence in her grandson’s life?

  5.Discuss the atmosphere inside the Echo Park house. How did June and Maria’s relationship impact Brando? What conclusions are there to be drawn from the fact that being on the road, away from the house, “stripped away [Maria’s] characteristic fear and disappointment”?

  6.How did Brando’s view of his mother, and his relationship with her, change as he got older? How about after he went away to Stanford? Why does he wish he could go back and warn his younger self after arriving on campus? What advice would he give him?

  7.Discuss Brando’s relationships with each of his stepfathers—Robert, Paul, Pat, and Rudy—and the impact they had on him. What did he most want from a father figure? How did this shift over time?

  8.Discuss the role Frank has played in Brando’s life. What has kept the two of them connected for decades? Why was it Frank, never married to Maria, who became most like a father to Brando?

  9.Brando admits that by the time he contacted Candido he’d “had so many fathers that even the idea of a father—the very word father—seemed absurd”. Why then did he finally decide to reach out to him? Did he get what he had hoped to from Candido?

  10.Candido cited the circumstances of his tempestuous parting with Maria and her threats to have him deported as the reasons why he never contacted Brando. Did he give up too easily on trying to be involved in his son’s life? Were his actions justifiable in any way? Why or why not?

  11.In what ways are Candido’s daughters “so unlike” the women Brando grew up with, and why is this glaringly apparent to him? Why is he able to connect more with his sisters than with Candido?

  12.Why didn’t Brando return home for Maria’s funeral? Is his decision understandable? When he was finally able to cry after his mother’s death, what was he really mourning?

  13.The book’s title, Take This Man, draws attention to the men in Brando’s life. Why do you suppose this title was selected? Do you think it’s an accurate reflection of the book? Overall, how are men presented in the memoir?

  14.What lasting effects has Brando’s upbringing had on him as an adult? In what ways has it impacted his romantic relationships, his emotional well-being, and other aspects of his life?

  15.What is your overall opinion of Take This Man, including your thoughts on Brando as a narrator? Which aspects of the book particularly resonated with you? How does it compare to other memoirs your group has read?

  A Conversation with Brando Skyhorse

  Q: “Every storyteller needs more than good stories. He needs to understand why he’s telling the stories he tells,” you state in Take This Man. Why did you decide to write this memoir?

  A: It started in 1996. My writing professor Geoffrey Wolff knew a partial sketch of my life story—being raised by five different stepfathers—and thought it could make a good book. In the eighteen years since his first suggestion, my mother and grandmother died, I went through years of therapy, and reconnected with my biological father and his new family, which includes his three daughters. So as these various life events accumulated, my reasons for writing this book evolved from a simple accounting of crazy experiences—and then I had another dad!—into something deeper and more complex. It went from trying to understand my circumstances to trying to understand me.

  Q: You describe your mother as “a siren whose songs were her stories.” Did writing Take This Man help you better understand, or perhaps even come to terms with, your mother and her “mythmaking”? How so?

  A: There’s a part near the end of the memoir where I write, “narrative is breath . . . stories sustain us.” My mother’s stories sustained her version of the life she wanted to live, something she thought was impossible to do otherwise. She was so desperate to “be” an American Indian that she wanted to convince enough people and make her lie a reality. I know now that my mother wasn’t trying to be malicious or cruel. She thought she was
paying homage to a people and a culture she loved. My use of the word “siren” was intentional, though. Sirens can draw people to places filled with pain, and my mother’s songs often came attached with difficult consequences. What’s more, a siren lives only until the moment someone who hears their songs passes them by. My mother died a month after I left Los Angeles for good. There’s still a small part of me that feels I was responsible because I wasn’t there to listen to her stories anymore.

  Q: You come across as incredibly honest in Take This Man. Were you ever tempted to gloss over certain details that were painful to revisit, or leave them out altogether?

  A: I spent years unknowingly—then knowingly—lying about who I was because the truth felt more complicated and dangerous. I thought people would reject me if they knew about both my mother’s lies and my own. Being able to write this memoir was an extraordinary gift, and a privilege, because at last I could put the whole story down somewhere. My mother led a sad and unhappy life in part because she tried to omit all the things in her past that had hurt her. For me to tell anything less than the whole story as I understood it would have been pointless and wrong. I would have been guilty of selling out my own creation and cheating every reader who picks up this book.

  Q: Tell us about the experience of writing Take This Man. How was the memoir-writing process different from crafting your novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park?

  A: Everything about this book was difficult. How long it took to write it, sell it, title it, even start it, though I’m grateful now for that particular challenge. This story seemed so massive and challenging that I had no idea where to begin. Kitt, who’s mentioned in the book, suggested that I try to find my birth father Candido. She thought that detailing my attempts to find him would be a good place to begin. I never thought the search would be successful nor did I think it would take just ten minutes on whitepages.com.