I kept a vigil by my window at night for his car and counted off each day that he was “missing.” My mother said I was wasting my time. When a week passed, she filled several garbage bags with his letters and the cutout shapes of Paul’s face and body from mangled photographs.
“Paul’s dead,” my mother said. “That’s what you tell people now. Your father is dead.”
• • •
“It’s a dead man talking to you,” Paul’s voice said when I picked up the phone. It’d been several months since he left. My mother was in her room working, this time on shift-based per-minute-billing 976 and 1-900 sex lines. My grandmother was grocery shopping.
“How’s my son doing?” It hadn’t been that long, but I hated that word son now. Hated the way Paul used it so freely, the way it required no effort to say it, no commitment to weight it with value or meaning. I didn’t feel like his son anymore. I didn’t want to be any man’s son.
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice controlled.
“What have you been up to?”
“Nothing,” I said, and answered his follow-up questions in pleasant, monotone, monosyllabic answers. He shared no details of where he’d gone or what he was doing.
“Don’t you have anything to say to your dear old dad?” Paul asked.
“Nope.”
“Okay. You’ll never hear from me again. Good-bye!” he said, sounding almost upbeat. He hung up.
• • •
I was five when I’d clung to Paul’s legs like a tree and called him “Daddy.” I was fifteen when the father I’d waited ten years for, the one father I’d believed in, or thought I’d had a right to, abandoned me, just like the others. Hadn’t my other fathers—Candido, Frank, Robert—been building up to this one father whose name I shared? Who was supposed to stay for good? Was I no longer a Skyhorse? I was still “Indian,” closing yearbook signatures the way I had in seventh and eighth grades, “May the Great Spirit guide you,” the same signature Paul used in his letters. If I wasn’t a Skyhorse—the only part of my identity I felt was “me”—then who was I? A Mexican who had no idea what being Mexican meant, pretending to be an American Indian in name only? An abandoned son mourning his dead father who wasn’t dead and wasn’t his father?
To my mother, these were stupid questions, really. Paul said he was a “dead man” when we first met in Los Angeles and the last time we spoke, but that didn’t mean who my mother and I had become would die with Paul, too. We were Skyhorses now. To every white person we met who said, “You’re Indian?” my mother said, “Did you think you killed us all off?”
7
“D
on’t ever do this, Brando,” Frank gulped, holding in pot smoke. “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Inside the duplex mountain “cabin” in Lake Arrowhead, California, Frank rolled joints and helped my naked, shivering mother operate the whirlpool tub. The weekend trip was meant to be a vacation from her own bedroom, but instead Frank ferried my mother chips, soda, and takeout all weekend because she didn’t want to leave the room. My mother indulged its middle-class amenities like wearing bathrobes baked on the heated towel racks and climbing up and down an indoor staircase just for fun.
“You’ve got stairs at home, babe,” Frank said.
“I know, but these stairs are cute, and they go to my room!” my mother said.
Watching Frank and my mother together more than ten years after they met was like watching a comedy team whose timing was just a little off, with older and somewhat gentler versions of their young, dream-weighted selves now capable of acknowledging how silly their roundabout arguments were—at least until their fighting flared up like a chronic, asymptomatic rash.
I had grown less forgiving of Frank’s visits with my mother, which included an afternoon tryst at a local motel, and less forgiving of him. It had been three years since we last saw each other, and that time had aged us both. He tired more easily, was grayer, and seemed fatter. I was older, crueler, and less satisfied with his episodic parental routine of swap meets and Sunday live-theater matinees; tired of waiting out in parking lots for concert tickets to bands I didn’t like; and wandering convention trade shows where he tracked down Olympic pins and Beatles memorabilia. His souvenir habit branched out into collecting autographs that would turn his childhood home into a hoarder’s fantasy. In his car trunk: a bag of fresh, white baseballs that he asked celebrities to sign, believing that a signed Tom Cruise baseball—which he has—will be more unique, more valuable, and harder to lose than a cocktail napkin. I despised his generic excuses for his long absences, his hypocritical pot smoking, and his cheapness. For my junior high graduation, he took me to Sizzler for a celebration lunch.
“Cheapest steakhouse in town,” my grandmother complained. She was right, I thought. Why wasn’t I worth more to him? I’d been taught daily that money equaled love. Sizzler wasn’t love. Sizzler wasn’t even friendship!
Over lunch, Frank asked me, “So, is that man that was living with you Paul Skyhorse?”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“One day I stopped by the house while you were at school. I was just in the neighborhood.” I thought, You were in the neighborhood only while I happened to be at school?
“Some man came to the door. I didn’t know Maria was living with someone. It was an older gentleman with a limp and a cane. I told him I was a census taker, then left. Was that Paul from the Skyhorse-Mohawk trial downtown? Was that man your father?”
“I guess,” I said.
I was a sardonic fifteen-year-old tired of humoring my . . . well, what exactly was Frank in my life? We hadn’t used the words father and son since grade school. He was uncomfortable with being called “Dad”—he felt he hadn’t earned the title, since he didn’t marry my mother—and I was disinterested in being his son. I wanted Frank to humor me, take me to do the things I wanted to do. The fact that I had no idea what those were didn’t matter.
When he dropped us back home, Frank said to me, “I’ll see you soon, pal.” Soon, it turned out, would be another two years. I didn’t say good-bye when I got out of the car. By now I knew our routine. The tide goes out, the tide comes in; Frank leaves, another stepfather enters.
• • •
My mother went back to the singles ads. Since I refused to miss school to travel, we were now limited to short hit-and-run excursions during vacation breaks. I knew these trips weren’t to find me a father. They were to land my mother a man. We weren’t partners anymore. I was her companion solely because she wouldn’t travel alone. Through my teenager’s eyes, I revised memories of our buoyant, picaresque, cross-country “father-man” hunting adventures into a playing deck of awkward instant friendships with pathetic men, filthy shower stalls, lumpy couch beds, and eggs in greasy spoons for breakfast—weeks I spent watching my mother playact patience and kindness with other people’s children hungry for affection.
Still, I helped with the singles ads. I sorted through my mother’s responses and handled the enclosed photographs like trading cards, convinced that this time I could limit my involvement to a scouting report.
“Here’s one owns his own home and lives near Vegas,” I said. “But he’s way too old.” Elmer was an enormous pot-bellied man in his fifties with two preteen boys, Phil and Dil. He enclosed a Polaroid of him topless with the words “Dare you to send me one like this” written on its back. She didn’t, but she asked for and received two prepaid round-trip train tickets. I didn’t want to go.
“It’ll be like old times,” she pleaded. It wouldn’t be, but my mother needed me.
It turned out that Elmer lived in Henderson, a good drive away from the Strip, or what my mother considered “real” Las Vegas. On our first day there, we drove out to a fish pond where Elmer’s energetic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed boys and I fed loaves of day-old bread to glistening fat carp that hopped and skimmed for food a
cross the water’s surface. My mother stayed in the car.
“I didn’t come to Las Vegas to feed a bunch of fucking fish!” she said.
Next, the Hoover Dam. My mother stayed in the car.
“I’m not climbing a bunch of fucking stairs to see water,” she said.
The boys dug out an unused chess set at home, and I showed them, in the firm, guiding way I imagined an older brother might, how to move the pieces around the board. We were laughing and having fun until Elmer got home from work.
“Pick that mess up off the floor,” he said.
We never made it to the Strip, gambling instead at a casino in Laughlin, ninety miles south of Vegas, where Elmer said the prime rib and slots were cheaper. We dropped off Phil and Dil at an arcade, while I wandered around by my mother’s side as she played quarter slots for ten minutes.
“I’m done,” she told me. “Get Elmer so we can get the hell out of here.”
I found Elmer shuffling by the roulette tables.
“My mother says she’s ready to go. She’s out of money.”
“Well, I’ve got money!” he said and gave me the car keys so the rest of us could wait in the parking lot.
“What the fuck did he say?” my mother asked. “He’s got money?”
My mother fetched his kids, and we sat in his darkened car while she told them stories about us being Indians. They laughed and asked bright questions, oblivious to the serrated edge in my mother’s voice that offered the one clue as to how furious she was at their father.
“How was it out here?” Elmer asked when he returned an hour later. He turned on the radio. “Had a good time?”
“We learned about Indians!” the kids said.
My mother said, “Can you turn off the radio?”
She was seated behind Elmer. I saw her in silhouette, as if her hands were prepping a garrote to slice through his wattle. She said nothing, though. At his house, I taught the kids the card game Uno while Elmer begged my mother to stop packing her suitcase. She decided we were returning to Los Angeles the next morning, a week ahead of schedule.
On the train platform, his kids gripped each side of my mother as if she were a fresh-baked cookie they could split in two.
“Please write us!” Phil and Dil pleaded
“We’ll be back,” my mother lied.
I saw myself in these boys who wanted a mother—any mother—with the same hunger I’d wanted Paul, who had left his own child fatherless yet had tried to be a piece of a father to me. I wanted to push them aside, warn them not to attach themselves to my ruthless exaggerator and liar of a mother, but those boys didn’t want my protection. They wanted what they thought they could sense spilling from my mother’s pockets, what their father was too old and exhausted to give them, and what I no longer believed any adult—mother, grandmother, or father—could give me. They wanted love. When they wrote my mother, they got silence.
“Do you mind if I write them?” I asked my mother.
“If you want,” she said, “but we won’t be seeing them again.” I sat with a pencil and crumpled pages containing only three words: “How are you?”
There were new letters to read. Bob was a divorced father of two girls from San Luis Obispo whom I cleverly called “San Luis Obispo Bob.” He set up a bedroom for us for a week’s stay in his mother’s converted garage. My mother introduced herself by sending him a decade-old photograph. A rectangle of picture was missing next to her waist where my four-year-old self had been trimmed out.
“Dear Bob,” she wrote on the back, “this was with someone else.”
Bob had the misfortune of being my fourth assigned “father” in as many months, and I’d had enough. He was stunned to learn that my mother had a son but treated me with a warm, steady kindness. I rewarded him by sulking in restaurants if they didn’t serve Coke and French fries.
“Thanks for this seafood burrito,” I said.
Meeting Elmer’s sons had been the best part of that trip, and I wanted that same connection with Bob’s tween daughters. I’d sometimes turned residents of my stuffed animal kingdom into younger sisters whom I protected from the ineffable waves of my mother’s wrath. There were fictional older brothers, too, absorbing most of the anger meant for me, but brothers felt too much like fathers and therefore more difficult to imagine. With Bob’s girls, I saw myself as an older, wiser version of the clingy, father-hungry boy I thought I no longer was. I asked them questions about school and suggested books I thought they’d like, but when they saw my roiling “I’m fatherless” anger lash out at their dad, they kept their distance. Like my mother, I was learning how to want too much too soon.
My mother told Bob, “We’ll be back,” but Bob took her at her word and, a month later, showed up at our front door in a station wagon with his two girls. They were packed for an extended stay.
“I think you misunderstood me!” my mother said and reached into the wagon to play with his girls. They talked for about ten minutes.
“I’m sorry, Maria,” he said, and then gave my mother a good-bye kiss. “I’ll see you both next week, then?” he asked. Then he got in the car to drive three and a half hours right back to San Luis Obispo.
My mother performed a soldier’s wife’s wave good-bye.
“Are we going up there next week?” I asked.
“Yes. We’re going to get married,” she said.
“Really?” I asked, both skeptical and uncertain.
While Bob did a three-point turn, my mother caught my eye. Then, as his car sped away, she elbowed me and laughed. I kept smiling and waving.
Some months later, my mother said that Bob had kidnapped his daughters and gone on the run.
“Really,” I said again, the statement perched atop a question mark’s scythe. I worried about his daughters but wouldn’t take the conversation bait. What little time we spent together now was in front of her television watching movies. On slow work days, she’d leave her door open a crack, and I’d sit on the bed with her. No matter how far along she was in a picture when I arrived, I’d stay with her, laugh when she laughed, egg her on to talk back to the screen, and watch through to the end. She’d speculate on what happened to the characters in a movie after the credits rolled, in particular if it was a love story with an ambiguous ending.
“Do you think they make it?” she’d ask, and in her eyes was an earnestness that pleaded, Tell me you have the answers I need, Brando. She knew I didn’t want the answers my mother had for me anymore.
• • •
My father figures and stepfathers were magicians, able to appear or disappear at will. When I was fifteen, my fourth stepfather, Pat, materialized at our house with a U-Haul trailer towed behind his car. He had driven straight from his one-bedroom apartment in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and just showed up at the front door around midnight—another man like San Luis Obispo Bob, ready to move in, an instant father; just add a fake marriage license.
Pat stood around six feet, with murky Santa Monica Bay green eyes and short blond hair, and was younger than my mother by several years. He rode a motorcycle, and his 265 well-proportioned pounds occupied space like a couch perched upright on one of its arms. He leaned as if he could topple onto you any minute.
When we’d visited him in Tahoe for a week—“It’s like Vegas in the mountains!” my mother said—he showed up two hours late at the airport.
“Go search the airport and find him!” my mother ordered, panicked. I walked outside the tiny one-terminal airport, looked around, and then waited, as far away from my mother as I could.
Pat arrived in a limousine with cheap roses and a bottle of celebratory champagne we never opened. He loved to talk. His voice curved high like a contrail, and he claimed to know everybody in town. A vengeful maître d’ who gave us crappy seats at a Dean Martin show would “get what was coming to him,” and Pat casually tossed out
the fact that he personally knew one or two guys listed in gambling’s infamous “Black Book,” men who were banned from entering any casino. My mother, unhappy with Pat’s stories taking up all the space in the room, explained our Indian heritage as she refused to take the customary boarding photo before a paddleboat cruise because “photos rob Indians of their souls.” (Her weight problem made her avoid photographs altogether.)
Two nights before we left, Pat went out for a motorcycle ride around ten at night. He left behind his car keys and a full fridge. Pat didn’t return the next day, didn’t call, nor did anyone stop by to check on us. He didn’t return the day after that. For the first time in our years of traveling, we were marooned.
“I’m not going to worry about a man I’m not even married to,” my mother said. I can’t remember whether she said “yet.”
We concocted various getaway fantasies that, because neither of us could drive a car, ended at his front door. We ordered pizza because neither of us knew how to cook. My mother ransacked his apartment, first for money and then for clues as to “who this man really is.” She found neither. An honorable discharge certificate confirmed his story about being in the navy but everything else was a mystery. What had happened to him? Had Pat wiped out on his bike? Was he in a hospital somewhere with a memory-sapping concussion? My mother, faced with legitimately mysterious circumstances that could have spelled the trouble she seemed to love chasing, backed off, and we flew home.
The choppy flight back spooked my mother, who’d never fly again. “I haven’t noticed any turbulence,” a stewardess snapped at my mother. She wasn’t used to traveling with a teenager and not an adorable attention-getting child. It was difficult to watch how terrified she was. I thought about what might comfort her: some conversation, a joke, holding her hand. But I was so used to absorbing her fear and anger in silence, it was automatic to say and do nothing. My own terror of a panicked mother had jelled into numbness. Now I spoke when spoken to and made only the tiniest of gestures in her presence, unable, or unwilling, to protect her from her own fears.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 14