“He’s a payaso,” she said. “A clown. Everybody laughs at clowns.”
• • •
On my sixth-grade graduation day, I plucked out pins from a cellophane-wrapped stabby-collared shirt, tugged at an asphyxiating clip-on tie, squeezed into pinching-sharp dress shoes, and assembled, with a small multiethnic chorus, at the front of our graduating class to sing the refrain from “We Are the World.” I was chosen for volume, not ability. When I auditioned in front of our music teacher, Mr. Farina, he said, “That’s not singing, that’s shouting.”
Paul stood and nodded his head when I received my diploma, his face inscrutable. At the edge of the auditorium was a cluster of parents unable to find seats. Who was that man in the corner, holding his fingers up to his lips and going “Shhh”? Was it Frank? Had he figured out when my graduation was and, as if in a Disney movie, appeared when I needed him most?
No. He wasn’t there. He either didn’t know the date or stayed away because of Paul, but that didn’t matter. Like the child of a divorced parent, I started to realize that his being in my life depended just as much on his relationship with my mother as it did with me. I kept expecting him to think like a father. Instead, he acted the way my grandmother said men acted.
“They never do what you want them to do,” she said. “Only boys follow orders.”
In a warm, shady courtyard, my classmates and I shuffled autograph books among us, signing assorted colored pages with pens that didn’t work, scrawling phone numbers and promises to K.I.T. in crooked lettering.
“You can’t just sign your name in an autograph book!” a friend told me. “That’s just for famous people. You have to write something.”
Somebody handed me Nina’s autograph book. Nina was Vietnamese, with large, inky black eyes and an unflattering Prince Valiant done at home bowl cut that hadn’t changed since second grade. She wore a white and saffron dress, socks with a doily fringe around her ankles, and shined patent leather shoes.
I retuned her autograph book with a signature that overflowed the entire folded paper triangle. “You’re not supposed to write a whole book, Brando!” she said.
Nina, along with most of my friends, applied to a gifted and talented program at a junior high in the San Fernando Valley, so I did the same, ignorant of the forty-minute bus trip to Granada Hills. Out of habit, I forged my mother’s signature on the school application in the same way I’d signed my own report cards since second grade.
“You don’t need to prove to me how smart you are,” she had always said, dismissing my grades with a wave and a laugh.
Junior high, I’d learn, was a collection of kids who didn’t know who the fuck they were, all of a sudden desperately trying to believe or convince others they knew exactly who they were. Those warm months before seventh grade were ripe for summertime Cinderellas. Ugly-duckling sixth graders shed baby fat and stupid clothes, maturing into gawky young adults with too much confidence and makeup. I gained thirty pounds, transforming from cute sixth grader with an Indian name to an overweight four-eyed seventh-grade blob with a mullet. My father’s “legal” last name, Johnson, was now my last name too. At my almost-all-white suburban San Fernando Valley school, my records transfer caused Skyhorse to slide to my middle name.
A new “fat” wardrobe had to be purchased, grudgingly. “We already got you glasses,” said my grandmother, who’d stopped taking me to the dentist when he told her I needed braces.
Choices for husky kids in Echo Park were hand-me-down Dodgers T-shirts, oversized sweaters, and Dickies dress slacks with pleats, because, a salesman told my grandmother, “Pleats give you extra room in case he keeps growing.”
“All the weight I’ve lost has gone onto you,” my mother said and, having graduated from Dexatrim, handed me water pills in a disposable napkin. I knew what water pills were. From the age of seven, I was the only one in the house who could manage the childproof caps.
On water pills, I vibrated around the house like a mosquito, pissed violent jets of colorless urine, and woke up at two in the morning in a sweat glaze, my heartbeat cinched around my throat.
“You can have these back,” I told my mother. They scared me.
I did keep “growing” and, to my utter astonishment, was unpopular. Suddenly Nina and my other elementary school friends didn’t speak to me anymore. What attention I drew came from misfit bullies: a stocky aggressive dork who copied me video games on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and then “claimed” my assigned homeroom seat by punching me in the stomach; or the tall Asian boy with the uncool-even-for-the-era Flock of Seagulls haircut who shoved me into my main locker as kids passed by and grinded his crotch into my large ass in some weird show of sexual dominance. I tried being still and silent in class, so much so that I pissed my pants in seventh-grade math because I was afraid to ask permission to go to the bathroom. In gym, I didn’t understand the basic rules of football or volleyball and smiled reflexively when classmates with names like Josh and Alex screamed at me, turning their baby fat cheeks red. I’m pretty sure kids thought I was retarded. Sympathetic, cute, gum-chewing Valley girls with black eyeliner and nude lipstick that I had crushes on whispered to boys they had crushes on, “Why do they treat him that way?” How a boy treated me, the class reject, was seen by fawning young girls as a barometer for his empathy, compassion, and coolness.
Nina’s dimpled smile, her new, poofy Mary Tyler Moore hairdo, and her exotic appearance and background (this was the mid-1980s in the San Fernando Valley, after all) helped her achieve a popularity that far outstripped what she’d known in predominantly Latino Echo Park. She crushed on a white boy from my homeroom named Jay, a killer Sonny Crockett of Miami Vice look-alike—slip-on Vans, turquoise tank top, and a white blazer on Fridays—who volunteered me for all-you-can-eat competitions in the cafeteria.
Despite this, though, Nina and I were secret friends on the bus ride back home, almost as if we transformed there to being what we really were: nerds from a poor neighborhood who’d gotten a chance to go to a better school. Nina and I sometimes walked the same path home, talking about classes and how her parents were going to move away from Echo Park soon because it was a bad neighborhood in which to be Asian.
“When do I get your school picture?” she asked.
The next day, I tried giving it to her in homeroom, our one mutual class. “Later, okay?” she said. On the bus home, she asked for my picture again. I handed over a glossy wallet-sized seventh-grade class photo of me in a Le Tigre striped shirt, my sharp canines chewing on my bottom lip like a pork rind.
She flipped the picture over. “You always write so much!” she said and laughed. She was right. I’d spent maybe an hour trying to cram whatever awkward feelings I had for her on the back of two by three inches of glossy paper that didn’t take to ballpoint pen. My words were smudged and smeared, like race cars all over a wet track.
“Let me fix the photo,” I said.
“You’re going to scratch out what you wrote or do something to it,” she said.
She handed back the picture, and I ripped it into small chunks that couldn’t be shredded further.
“I knew it,” she said, even though I hadn’t known it myself. It had been an impulsive move spurred, I thought, by her suggestion, but I was furious with myself. I’d acted like my mother and felt exactly the way I did when my mother scolded me. Did my mother feel this way every time she yelled at me? Why would she keep doing it if she did?
Nina ignored me the rest of the ride home. Walking on Sunset Boulevard, Nina’s girlfriends from the bus clustered around her in a protective circle. They moved fast, and I struggled to match their steps, trying to find the right moment where I could pull her aside and apologize. I swelled with guilt as each step brought me closer to our paths splitting and the opportunity lost. I challenged myself to stop her outside the market, then the drugstore, then the shoe store. Hurry, I thought. Hurry
now, hurry before it’s too late . . .
“Son,” Paul said. He was standing outside the Sunset, drunk. It was four in the afternoon.
When I saw Paul, I stopped cold and lost a half dozen steps on her pack. Nina’s bubble was floating away.
“Son, where you going?” he asked. Down the street, Nina’s group hadn’t looked back. It was a stark choice: acknowledge and stand by my father or pursue my enraged, uninterested crush, racing home.
“Stay with me awhile,” Paul said and I did. We walked in the opposite direction to the supermarket to buy Pall Malls and, as a special treat, whatever I wanted. I chose a bottle of Flintstone Chewable Vitamins.
I didn’t see Nina again. She disappeared, but I was starting to understand that’s simply what people you cared about did. Her parents made good on their promise to move out of Echo Park, turning her from an actual person to my forever idealized first crush, an always smiling, always fourteen-year-old girl with now-forgiving eyes and a spring day’s playground laugh.
She says, “You always write so much!”
• • •
The seventh-grade Young Author’s Project was a citywide competition among English classes for which students created their own book, from writing the story, to designing the cover, to binding the book together, culminating in a contest honoring the best entries. It was one of those “long-term” projects with a deadline that always seemed comfortably a few months off on the horizon. Then the horizon was a weekend away. In full panic with no ideas for a book, I asked Paul for help.
“Write about Indians,” he said. “I know plenty.”
We sat at the dining room table with a fresh pack of Pall Malls, a smokeless ashtray my grandmother had bought him, and my mother’s typewriter. There was no story. The hope was that Paul would have enough interesting things to say that would fill out a thirty-two-page book.
“I’m Kiowa White Mountain Apache. Only tribe that never signed a peace treaty with the federal government. You could look that up in a book if the books weren’t all written by white people,” he said.
“When did you meet my mother?” I asked.
“You’re lucky you have a mother,” he said, and smoked his cigarette. “I was twelve when my mother died. Her name was Penny Cook. She was gunned down on Mother’s Day. Did you get that down? They killed my mother on Mother’s Day. Police were serving a warrant, and they murdered her.” While I typed, I pictured an epic Bonnie and Clyde shoot-out at a simple house on a lonely prairie, surrounded by an overwhelming force of armed so-called “good guys,” the house riddled with bullet holes as big as pie plates.
“What can people do to help Indians?” I asked.
“Go back to where you came from and leave us alone. ‘First come, last served.’ We’re like the Jews during World War II. Genocide and ID numbers. You know every Indian has to get a number from the Bureau of Indian Affairs? I don’t have one because our tribe—your tribe, Brando—didn’t sign a treaty with the white man. You could get college money if I were registered, but I’m not gonna give you a number.”
His answers unfurled in length, complexity, and anger. I couldn’t follow what was supposed to be true and what he simply believed; he told stories the same way my mother did.
“Why don’t you just let me type what I’m saying?” he asked. “Writing fast is easy for a jailbird,” Paul said.
My mother checked on us several times throughout the afternoon, watching Paul type up my months-long homework assignment with furious energy.
“I’m glad you’re spending time with your father,” she said.
The manuscript was finished in less than a day. What was complicated was manufacturing the book itself. I had step-by-step instructions on how to assemble it, but since I didn’t buy any of the materials listed ahead of time, Paul suggested we improvise. He stitched together the pages between two cardboard flaps wrapped in wood-grain contact shelf paper with a pair of dirtied-up shoelaces that were braided along the book’s spine. It looked like a frontier journal but was impossible to open.
The title was Paul’s idea. Amid a row of books written by twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, with festive cover illustrations of mice wearing superhero capes and happy spacemen, was The Shame of America, the title spelled out in vinyl mailbox lettering.
My English teacher, Mrs. Davis, a ghoulish rule lord who wore plum berets and had the formatting instructions for each day’s assignments written out in bullet points on the chalkboard before we entered the classroom, read the book and then left a single comment in the margins.
“Brando, whose writing is this?” she wrote in red ink.
Before our books were handed back, she explained how she graded us and what categories each book belonged to, including “one so-called ‘analytical nonfiction’ entry,” which I knew meant me. The first book I’d “written” earned a B-minus. Our class’s winning entry was about a frog with superpowers.
“A B-minus, huh? Your teacher’s white, isn’t she?” Paul asked. “White people don’t want to hear the truth.”
• • •
“I’m getting rid of you!” my mother screamed. She was sending me . . . well, somewhere.
My mother kicked me out of the house at least several times a month, but I rarely got beyond the front door. It was just something she said once in a while, like “Get the fuck out of my face!” or “What good are you if you can’t fix my goddamn VCR?” This time, though, she made me pack a bag. I packed a cheap giveaway Dodgers backpack with some underwear and socks, soap and toothpaste (no toothbrush), oranges, and some Capri Sun juice packs. A stuffed animal might make a good pillow, I thought, so I left my Transformers on the shelf and made a Sophie’s Choice decision to pack Fudgie. He was my first teddy bear, a gift brought to the hospital by my grandfather Emilio when I was several hours old.
Today my mother was kicking me out because Paul had caught me cheating: that is, “conning.” I’d shoved a set of vocabulary tests between Paul’s face and his smokes, desperate for any of his “before-the-bar” attention. The plan backfired when he saw that I’d rearranged the test papers to make it look as if my grades had steadily improved, when, in fact, they had taken a dip before recovering.
“You didn’t think I’d notice the dates on each test, did you?” he asked and showed my mother. “Look at what your son tried to do. He tried to con a con.”
“I want him fucking out of here!” my mother screamed. I couldn’t figure out why my mother was so upset. She hadn’t asked for a report card or looked at my homework since second grade. I didn’t understand then that she’d upped her intake of weight-loss pills and was experimenting with speed.
“Why don’t you walk around the block for a while,” Paul suggested.
I had no neighbors’ houses to run to, no friends that didn’t live long car drives away, so I carried my bag down to the nook at the bottom of our stairs that was invisible from my mother’s bedroom window, next to the old jacaranda tree. This tiny, uneven concrete square was my version of a clubhouse, though it adjoined the sidewalk and the street. I’d sit here after the bus ride home from school, and if the breeze hit the branches just right, bask in a shower of jacaranda flowers before I’d rush into the hot broth of a house dripping with misery. From here, my home looked the size of a castle, enough room for everybody. How could one immense space, so calm and tranquil outside, breed so much anger and rage?
Clutching my Dodgers bag, I didn’t picture escape (not yet), but peace, as if I could will it to happen just by imagining it. I was terrified that this time I was being kicked out for real and would be permanently separated from my mother and grandmother. What would I do? These women were my only family. They had created my world, sustained and nourished it; without them, there was not only no world, there was no me.
I leaned my head back, felt the blossoms fall on my face like fat raindrops—plop, plop, plop—and
could imagine the roar of an ocean, feel sandy grit under my palms. I was used to waiting on curbs and had learned some of the magic that came with the practice of patience. Passing cars and the lulls left in their wake became the crashing of waves. The street was an ever-spreading body of water, one not a long bus ride away in Santa Monica but right at the foot of my stairs.
A couple hours later, I crept back up the hill. Nobody had invited me back inside. My mother was locked in her bedroom, her TV turned up. My grandmother, who’d been reading behind her locked door and never let a fight get between her and a book, was in hers. Things were “normal” again. Paul was in his own waiting place, perched against the washing machine, back door open behind a locked security gate, blowing smoke outdoors. He ashed into his noisy smokeless ashtray, the glowing end of his cigarette butt a steady buoy light.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “I talked some sense into her. I was never going to let you be sent away. I would have stepped in and made things right before it ever got that far.”
Had a father—my father—finally protected me? I tiptoed to my room, afraid that peace in our house was a delicate glass I’d drop and shatter if I made any sound above a whisper, and started to unpack. Then, in the midst of my gratitude, I wondered, why had Paul told my mother about my tests at all? Why not lecture me separately? It took awhile before I fully understood what the lesson was. My father wasn’t mad that I’d cheated. He was mad I got caught.
• • •
Paul had been living with us for about a year and a half when he earned enough money hustling to buy a two-door brown Ford Maverick with black plumber’s tape trim. It was a car that needed fixing up to become a lemon.
My grandmother hated it. “I don’t need cars. I take Brando everywhere on the bus,” she said. She knew she couldn’t compete with four wheels and a man.
“It’s time you got out of the hens’ nest,” Paul said to me. “Just you and your ‘dear old dad.’”
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 12