Take This Man

by Brando Skyhorse

  Together we saw a live performance of Zoot Suit, a landmark fictionalized play about the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, in which a group of twenty-one Latino males received one of the most lopsided racist show trials in Los Angeles’s history, and the subsequent zoot suit riots, the flashpoint of which centered around a group of thuggish sailors attacking and stripping random Mexican zoot suiters.

  For the show, she bought and dressed me in a sailor’s outfit, complete with a Dixie cup hat and a whistle. The path to our seats was a sea of hostile looks and double takes. Seeing Zoot Suit dressed as a sailor is like wearing a Nazi uniform to Schindler’s List. The sailors are the bad guys.

  “I was a pachuca,” my grandmother said when we sat down. She had joined a loose street gang that preyed on white girls leaving war factories, jumping women coming from jobs that pachucas couldn’t get. On her bicep was a gang tattoo she got in her early twenties of two intertwined hearts with a banner wrapped around them. I mistook her hearts for two train engines colliding in an explosion of barbed wire.

  The lights dimmed in the theater. “This is my history,” she said. “Pay attention.”

  The sailor suit helped me remember the moment but not concentrate on what I was watching. I think that was my grandmother’s plan. I was just too young to know it then. Frightened, confused, I quietly puffed on my whistle and scratched at the shaggy Prince Valiant haircut that always got me mistaken for a girl and not the stoic little Hiawatha my mother was trying to make me into instead.

  • • •

  I was an unconvincing Indian brave from the start. In first grade, when my teacher asked me to rise with my Mexican and Vietnamese classmates for the Pledge of Allegiance, I stood and recited from memory the words my mother had drilled into me the night before:

  “Because of this country’s treatment of my race and my people, I cannot pledge allegiance to this flag or this country.” Then I sat down.

  Unsure what to do, Mrs. O picked a child to lead the pledge. He fumbled with the words as the rest of the children craned their heads back at me, staring and mumbling through their recitation, unsure of whose lead to follow. Sensing she was losing control of the room, Mrs. O ran to my desk, yanked me out of my chair, and grabbed my hand, placing it over my heart in time for the pledge’s final words: “with liberty and justice for all.” (My mother savored this detail.) Mrs. O had me stand outside our squat bungalow classroom until recess, where I listened through a closed door to my classmates sing counting songs we were learning in English, Spanish, and Chinese.

  I’d never been reprimanded, let alone touched, by a teacher before. What had my mother made me say? I started to cry. What kind of Indian brave was I?

  “Did she really put her hands on you?” my mother asked that night, incredulous that I’d been punished, as well as overjoyed with possessing, at last, her own personal story of nonviolent resistance and accompanying Indian persecution. She asked me many times to replay what had happened, as if I were a favorite song. I loved it. No matter how old I got, I’d cherish the extra attention I earned for telling stories that weren’t boring.

  “It’s time,” my mother said, “to call your father and tell him what happened.”

  “Paul?” I asked. “I don’t want to get my teacher in trouble.”

  My mother rustled a few papers in her filing cabinet and, like a magician, conjured Paul’s voice on the phone. She knew how to get in touch with him whenever she wanted but kept her distance because of Frances. His voice was just as I remembered it: robust, deep, and slow, like a coffee drip; his words had the tautness of crisp linen.

  “You did nothing wrong,” he reassured me. “Your teacher is to blame. This too will pass,” he said.

  My mother arrived after class the next day with a tall Indian man wearing denim jeans, a black cowboy hat, and long hair that unfurled to his waist like a ball of sable yarn. Was it Paul? Could she make him appear at her will, too?

  Like most of my mother’s men during this time, he came and left without a name. I was ushered to stand outside the bungalow classroom again, but this time I knew I wasn’t the one in trouble.

  Raised voices soon flowed like a river into a warm ocean of laughter, that calming sound that always overtook my mother’s public conversations. Outside the house, my mother’s anger never crested the dam of appearances. She never lost her temper in public; she’d just misplace it and find it at home later. What had been conceived as a lunch counter act of civil disobedience became, in my mother’s hands, a simple cultural misunderstanding. She’d charmed my teacher into the belief that an American Indian radical’s son was a student in her classroom. Now here was her chance to teach the teacher, a well-­intentioned white liberal woman teaching in an ethnic neighborhood, what it meant to be a “skin.”

  The next morning before class, Mrs. O said I could read, color, or rest my head during the pledge—whatever I wanted, as long as I was quiet.

  Flush from her victory, my mother prepped me with fantastic tales of Indian rituals I’d eventually participate in as the son of a chief, such as periodic fasting and a chief-making ceremony in which I’d be tied to a pole by my hair and swung around like a tetherball. (I’d learn much later, when I saw the ceremony in person from a safe distance, that my mother’s misappropriation of reality was tamer than real life. The “hair-swinging” ritual was her interpretation of a sacred sun dance ceremony in which men’s chests are pierced with wooden pegs attached to ropes that are pulled over a high tree branch, hoisting the man into the air until the skin breaks.)

  She took me when I was nine to a sweat lodge in the San Bernardino Mountains. The site was guarded by an “AIM Checkpoint”—a wooden sign and a log stretched across two sawhorses—which, when we arrived, was moved out of the way by two young ponytailed whites in their twenties in T-shirts and jeans. After stripping down to towels because “nothing white,” my mother said, could come into the sweat lodge (the actual rule was nothing metallic, to prevent burns), participants were divided by gender into two wooden structures shaped like inverted bowls. Young children, like me, went with their mothers. Hot coals were pitchforked into a hole in the center of the lodge. Then water was splashed onto the rocks, and the lodge’s entrance flap flipped shut. In the darkness, a librarians’ army of shhhhing ­exhalations rose from the smoldering hole.

  My eyes started burning, and I gulped the remaining air as if wringing it from a sponge. The other kids, all girls under ten, watched silent while I cried and screamed to get out. The lodge leader tried to soothe our circle (me) with a calming prayer, but nobody could hear her over my shouting. My mother restrained me from leaving, so I poked a small breathing hole in the lodge’s deerskin wall. How clever I was! Then we crawled out into the sun, where none of the baby squaws with long, dark knotted braids would look at a coward like me.

  • • •

  Just as I was learning how to be an Indian, my kidnapped, white-as-snow sister reappeared, another of my mother’s magician tricks. I was nine when my mother and I flew across the country to meet Helen, a woman my mother said was my long-lost abducted sister, Janaine.

  “She’s family,” my mother said. “You’ll be ‘Uncle’ Brando to her kids.”

  “Why does she have a different name?” I asked.

  “That’s what the kidnappers named her,” my mother said.

  I mailed off a signed school photo, “Love, from your little brother” as if brother were a new pen name. I thought family members were like trading cards. You collected names, and maybe you’d stumble onto one you cherished, but otherwise they’d just sit there crammed away somewhere, to be brought out simply as something to make other people envious. I was a full-blooded Indian boy in a Mexican neighborhood who now had a white older sister that lived on another coast. It made perfect sense to me. There was no bar for admittance into our circle. Those who wanted to be a part of our family could just attach themselves t
o us as if they were Lego bricks.

  When Helen picked us up from the airport, she was ten years older than Janaine would have been and had two young children. We stayed at a large two-story house down a long dirt road deep in the woods. I slept in a room with my very own bed, opened the window at night to air out that strange “new house” smell, and soaked in the roar of grasshoppers and silence. I grew homesick for noise and my grandmother.

  It was fun at first. I played backyard games and drank apple juice with Helen’s daughter and son, my “niece” and “nephew,” played a family round of Clue in the heat of a summer afternoon, visited a lawyer’s office with lots of books to distract me, oblivious to the “giving Brando a better home” discussion shuttlecocking over my head, and won a stuffed dog in a German lederhosen costume at an amusement park for the trip home.

  Then I noticed Helen acting more like a mother than my big sister. She assigned me chores, giving me specific instructions on how to set the table, fold my bath towel, and take out the trash. Why was she telling me what to do? Was I going to collect mothers now the way I’d been collecting fathers? I already had a mother, and she didn’t act like a mother at all. She was my best friend. Why did I need a new mother when I already had my grandmother? Were all mothers so distant and formal? Helen was like some kind of . . . authority figure.

  Our stay ended with a fight over an innocent comment Helen made about American Indian history. My mother locked herself in a bedroom and told me to pack while Helen crouched on the floor by a closed door and pleaded apologies for “offending your people.”

  I’d get occasional letters and Christmas cards from Helen throughout the years but didn’t learn until my twenties that she’d answered an ad my mother placed in a magazine dangling me out for adoption—the same venue my mother frequently used in her efforts to find me a father and an identity. Perhaps my mother thought her life would be easier without me—“No one else feels any obligation to stay!” my mother would scream—but when she looked into the abyss of letting her child go, unlike Candido, she flinched. When as an adult I confronted my mother with Helen’s truth, she dug into her Janaine story, not deviating one detail from the narrative she’d been living with for years.

  “She told me she was my daughter,” my mother said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.” She paused. “At least it’s never boring.”

  • • •

  But my mother was bored. She’d been single for almost a year after Frank left her, so we hit the road, with prepaid Amtrak, Greyhound, and airline tickets, looking for dads for me, and men for her, but not really in that order. When you’re a child, you go where you’re pulled and trust whoever’s doing the pulling. What started as a couple trips to visit Paul was now a full-scale cross-country manhunt.

  “We’ll always stay safe as long as we’re together,” she said. “Nobody’s fucked up enough to hurt a mother and her child.”

  My mother dated three-dimensionally, keeping track of the men she met through her evolving singles ads like a chess master in the park playing five games at once. She chose prospective suitors based on what parts of the country she wanted to visit. New men meant new adventures on buses, trains, and planes, with phonics workbooks and “early readers” to cover my short “vacations” from school. Staring out the large airport windows, my mother, always a nervous flyer, would watch a plane take off and whisper, “Come on, Big Bird. You’re gonna make it.”

  Our visits were measured in days or hours, accommodated sometimes—but not always—with our own beds, and garnished with healthy dollops of charity and good luck. We traveled to Oakland, where Larry, a kind, wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, introduced me to Pong. There was an Amtrak trip on the Coast Starlight to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Karl, a man in his early sixties, loaded us into his pickup truck and drove to a literal shack with a tin roof and newspaper insulation where he and his three children slept in one common bed. In Oxnard, California, we stayed with Stan, an obese man whose bratty tween daughters hissed at me through their retainers and kept their sunglasses on indoors. A man in Albuquerque, New Mexico, tried to teach me the harmonica. A scary redneck named Rick, who lived in a San Antonio trailer park, served me milk in glasses with topless Playboy models on them. I named a stuffed rabbit bought at a Greyhound bus station Redding, in honor of the California town we fled at four in the morning. By my tenth birthday, my stuffed animal collection—one toy per man—had grown into a Versailles menagerie of felt ears, cotton bellies, and button eyes.

  A disabled man in Atlanta never got us home from the airport. My mother spotted him from the Jetway and, thanks to her habit of never sending photographs of herself, walked right by him, made a U-turn, and headed to a ticket gate saying that we needed to return to Los Angeles because she’d forgotten my insulin.

  “Look sick,” my mother said. I frowned and sucked in my cheeks.

  We had our pick of seats on a boomerang flight back to LA, during which a crew of concerned flight attendants checked up on us throughout, complimenting my mother on how “calm and strong” I seemed.

  Whenever a prospective man didn’t work out, I nurtured a small, flickering hope that my mother would abandon her cause and choose to remain single; that she would remain mine alone but that we could continue our fantastic journeys together. I loved them. I had ­elaborate fantasies of a life spent with my mother rail tripping to far-flung American destinations. In my dreams, instead of searching for men, we were stars of our own television show: a mother-and-son detective duo out for adventure, new people to meet, and new stories to collect. Each “manhunt” included a cast of warm ancillary characters: relatives, shopkeepers, waiters and waitresses, bus and cab ­drivers, Amtrak dining car companions—all of them with intoxicating accents and strange-sounding American hometowns and ­festive backstories so unique and memorable in our moments together. Then, after a flurry of information exchanged on loose napkins and floating sheets of scrap paper, they were lost and forgotten, like names scrubbed clean from a headstone.

  Impermanence was both my mother’s ally—“Don’t make friends with anyone,” she said—and my own fiercest foe. For me, if any man was nice for more than a day, he was a potential father. If a woman smiled and rubbed my head, she could be my mother’s new best friend. I couldn’t help it. Sometimes neither could my mother. Her compassion and tenderness toward total strangers were a constant surprise. Something about the road, being away from the claustrophobic house and a codependent June, revealed her deeper generosity and stripped away her characteristic fear and disappointment. I’d love to tell you all these strangers’ names and stories here, how each one of them was crucial in helping us make a connecting flight or a just-about-to-depart train, or covering a meal in a diner when we were short of cash, or buying me a chocolate bar “for the road,” but they’re all a jumble of receding faces and closing doors to me now. (Whoever you were, and wherever you all are, I thank you.)

  The children were, for me, harder to forget. We met men who’d been set adrift by their younger wives and who were simply too old to keep up with their kids. I saw the loneliness in these children’s eyes and imagined them kindred brothers and sisters, siblings that could come home with me and replace my stuffed animal forest. We’d hide away together from my mother when she was angry, and laugh, play, and clutch one another tight in my closet when her thunderous footsteps got too close. These kids, forced to be adults before they were ready, weren’t authority figures like Helen. They were just like me, searching in their own fathers for the same thing I had traveled halfway across the country to find. Little kids also ask brave questions: Why was my hair long like a girl’s? Did I live in a teepee? How come I didn’t wear feathers? My mother ignored these questions or sometimes invented her own answers, but she always left town with the same encouraging words: “We’ll be back.” Sometimes the men followed up with notes from their kids, who told us in large capital ­letters that floated like balloons
across three-hole-punched paper how much they missed us, asking when they’d see us again. My mother never answered them. She was writing her own letters, too busy singing to me the virtues of a new and coming father to listen to the dreams of children.

  4

  “You wanna play catch, Son?” Robert asked.

  My first live-in stepfather, Robert, took me into the backyard with a baseball and a pair of gloves one smog-crusted afternoon when I was ten years old. Bored with the repetitive play, he roughhoused me atop his shoulders and then hoisted me over the neighbor’s fence, dangling me by my ankles above a gully filled with broken glass.

  “Say ‘Catch’!” he said.

  “Catch!” I said.

  “I can’t hear you!” he said and dropped me down a couple inches. I swayed aloft in midair like a pendulum, the tips of my hair grazing shards of cracked windows, and howled with equal doses of giddy joy and shrieking terror.

  “My arm’s feeling tired, Son! Say ‘Catch’!”

  “Catch!” I screamed. “Catch! Catch! Catch!”

  I was lifted back over the wall. He handed me my baseball. “Boring game,” he said and ran in the house. Robert was a lightning flash: hot, blinding, and gone before the thunder came.

  • • •

  Robert was serving his fifth year of a five-year sentence at Arizona State Prison at Florence when he met my mother through one of her personal ads. He was born on St. George Island, Alaska—his Aleutian name was “Tall Fox”—and sent to the Chilocco Indian School in northern Oklahoma, a boarding school created by an act of Congress aimed at “educating” Indians with a useful trade. When he was sixteen, Robert was expelled from Chilocco for driving over a cop’s foot. He graduated to a series of youth authority camps and second-string county jails before arriving at “Arizona State,” which is what he called the prison in conversation, as if he were discussing his alma mater.