There were messages from Pat on my mother’s answering machine when we got home. What Hail Mary explanation had Pat offered to explain his disappearance and continue the relationship?
“I’d wiped out on my bike and didn’t know how to reach you.”
“He couldn’t call his own apartment?” I asked my mother. “That doesn’t make sense.”
My mother said, “It’s none of your business.” Once meant to dissuade me from my past, “none of your business” was how my mother handled my increasing curiosity about our shared futures.
Three months after Pat had disappeared in Tahoe, he reappeared, like magic, at the bottom of our front stairs by the old jacaranda tree. In the spot from which my biological father and two of my three stepfathers took their first steps into flight, I shook Pat’s hand in tentative friendship. Two weeks later, I shook his hand again, celebrating his first marriage while I “gave away” my mother at her fourth—that is, her fourth marriage ceremony. (Official paperwork was sent in with a false name or not at all.) It was her third marriage without a divorce in less than ten years.
Pat’s mother, Jane, lectured my mother on her wedding day about the importance of dieting—“A moment of temptation in your face, a lifetime on your waist!”—and gave Pat a wedding card that he opened at the outdoor altar. There was a fifty-dollar bill inside. My mother gasped. When the yelling started their honeymoon night, at the same Lake Arrowhead hotel where Frank had taken my mother and me less than a year earlier, I realized her gasp had been stunned disappointment.
Pat was kept oblivious about us being Mexicans so that we could benefit from what my mother called “white man’s guilt.” That made no sense, I told my mother. Wouldn’t whites feel guilty about how Mexicans are treated too?
“Are you fucking serious?” my mother asked.
Pat found a job as an assistant restaurant manager in the San Fernando Valley, but then the car he drove down from Lake Tahoe collapsed in an asthmatic attack on the highway. There wasn’t enough money for a replacement.
“I see that I can take the bus to work,” he said. “What’s that like, Brando, taking the bus in Los Angeles?”
Public transportation was a lot like my house on wheels, really: ridden by the poor, the minority, the working class, and the sometimes crazy.
“I think you’ll get used to it,” I said to Pat.
To a white man who’d never known the indignities of squeezing into a Spam-can-tight seat bench surrounded by “loud and angry blacks,” as Pat described it, the daily commute was four hours of sheer punishment. He’d come home and try to quietly unlock the front door security gate. “Sounds like I’m opening a prison cell,” Pat said. “Can’t we get rid of this door? You don’t need it anymore to be safe. I’m here.”
Those metal clangs summoned my grandmother and mother to the living room, where they pounced on him:
“What took you so long to get home?”
“Where is your paycheck?”
“What do you mean there’s nothing left after taxes?”
“What kind of dumb fuck works so long for so little?”
Despite all this, Pat maintained a never-dimming attitude that was positive, cheerful, easygoing, compassionate, and, most important, sober. I’m not sure how he did it. His was a linoleum personality that wiped clean after each spill. I wasn’t as strong. In the face of a similar battery of questions when I came home from school, I hid behind my room’s semifunctional lock, like my mother, and gorged myself on one large platter of food at a single sitting. Pat took over cooking duties and cooked navy-style portions that I’d eat and eat until the food was gone.
“You like beef Stroganoff?” my grandmother asked in disbelief. “He makes too much goddamn white food.”
It was a sick pattern of dinner binging without the purging meant to limit how much time I spent with my family and to fit into my own high school uniform: rayon print shirts that resembled Moroccan wall tapestries and Z. Cavaricci slacks—tapered at the ankle, wide at the hip—with an identifying white brand label down the fly.
“Dude,” my male friends asked in earnest, “do you have an eating disorder?”
A shift change at Pat’s restaurant a couple months later meant that he came home around midnight, after my grandmother had turned off her television and my mother had gone to bed. I was still sleeping in my grandmother’s bed, and my burning bedroom light frequently led him to rap on my door and strike up conversations, but I’d shut him down with teenage detachment and distance. I had decided that, at fifteen, I was now too old for a father-son relationship, the same way one reaches a certain age where it’s too late to start playing a sport with an eye toward reaching a professional level. I’d welcomed Pat to the house with two basic rules: do whatever my mother says, and leave me alone because I don’t want a father anymore. The first part Pat had down cold; during arguments with my mother, who came up just to his shoulders, he bent his head down so she could jump up a half foot and slap his face.
“I had to want to be hit for her to reach me without a stool,” he said with a smile. The other half, leaving me alone, was harder for him to accept. One night Pat came with a gift.
“I asked at the record store who the lead singer of that band you like was,” he said. “He said I should buy this.” Pat handed me a long-boxed copy of Morrissey’s first solo album “Viva Hate.”
“I don’t know Spanish, but that title means ‘Long live hate,’” Pat said. “He looks like James Dean. What could he have to hate about life?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess I like him because he sings what I’m feeling.”
“We both have growing pains here, don’t we?” he said.
Before I could answer, he said good night and closed my door with a respectful click.
How safe was it to get close to a man who’d shown a capacity to materialize from nowhere or, worse, Northern California? (All that fog-shrouded “losing myself to find myself” scenery up there.) Yet here was a sincere attempt at alliance that, unlike my other stepfathers, didn’t involve pitting my mother against me. It was flattering, and, as often happens when you’re being flattered, your longing to be embraced overrules your sense of caution. Pat saw us as POWs in the same prison camp, and it made sense for us to pool our resources, to trade each other’s trivialities, the things that we held dear to us when no one was looking—things that he said would bond us together to survive “in a house filled with men-hating women.”
Given the time Paul spent drinking, the days Robert vanished, and the gaps between Frank’s check-ins, Pat’s day-to-day presence gave him a familiarity and a legitimacy my previous fathers never earned. I saw for the first time the punishing treadmill of life of a man who wasn’t my grandfather Emilio, who had to leave the house every morning and come home at the same time each night. On weekends, Pat was exhausted but took over cooking duties. He lobbied for a new sectional sofa and loveseat with a pullout mattress that folded out onto the floor, so that at sixteen I finally had my own bed to go with the room that had been mine since my grandfather’s death. I’d shared a bed with my grandmother for fourteen years, longer than she’d slept in one with her husband.
“An older boy needs his own room and his own bed,” he said. “Besides, Grandma,” he told her, “this way he won’t wake you up when he climbs into bed after staying up late doing his homework.”
A television Pat had brought in the U-Haul, an old Nintendo game system, and a VCR completed my hermetically sealed setup.
“Don’t stay up too late watching cable. Sometimes they have naughty movies on,” he said, winking.
We rented movies together, and he watched me play video games. He applauded when I vanquished Zelda II, where, upon rescuing the princess, the hero receives an embrace behind a curtain.
“All that work for a hug?” Pat asked. “Just like real life,” he said, high-fiving me with a c
onspiratorial man-to-man grin.
Pat and I helped each other find a safe place in our own harsh and confusing worlds. I told him where to sit on the bus on his ride home from work so that he wouldn’t get hassled for being white: closest to the exits, nearest the driver, never in the back. He showed me how to knot a necktie.
“You can’t wear a clip-on to your office job,” he said. “Put the skinny end near the fold of your inside elbow. Like this,” he said, and leaned down to help. Pat’s meaty hands tied a gentle knot around my neck. One of his fish stick–sized fingers brushed my throat, and I jerked back a bit—a dog on a leash wincing at the sting of my mother’s strangling me in Nakome’s trailer.
“It’s okay,” he said, and I knew in this one small moment that it would be.
“Thanks, Pat,” I said. The word Dad cowered on my tongue’s tip, a groundhog too spooked by shadows of fathers past to emerge.
Pat earned his promotion to “father” with consistency and time, the two things a stepparent can’t force. Riding in on a wave of pubescent testosterone was severe disfiguring cystic acne that distended my back, chest, face, and earlobes with boils as heavy as gram weights.
“I’m not taking you to a doctor,” my grandmother said. “The neighborhood’s filled with quacks. I had acne, and I turned out fine. You don’t need any medicine.”
Time grated my cheeks down to miles of bad road. My back crinkled into skin mistaken for second-degree-burn tissue. I’d wear undershirts that at school day’s end had shoulder-to-shoulder bloodstains resembling birdshot. Pat brought home clean Hanes T-shirts and medical pads to tape across my back.
When I’d caught a persistent cough, my mother drowned me in NyQuil and music.
“This will help you sleep,” she said, and played the Doors’ self-titled debut album on repeat. I liked her effort to be maternal, but the Doors and NyQuil were a horrifying mix. I’d drift in and out of consciousness, waking up sweat drenched during Jim Morrison’s oedipal howl in “The End” and seeing large black dogs at the foot of my bed.
My grandmother’s approach was different.
“You want me to eat the Vicks VapoRub?” I asked. “It says ‘external use only’ on the jar.”
“I’ve eaten it all the time, and nothing bad’s ever happened to me.”
“External means you don’t eat it,” I said.
“God, I loved it more when you weren’t able to read,” she said.
When the weeklong cough developed into walking pneumonia, Pat stepped in. “You can’t solve this with NyQuil. Either I take Brando to the doctor’s today or I’m not coming home tonight.”
In the pharmacy parking lot, Pat said, “Wait here in the car.” There was the comforting sound of the car door locking behind him, his confident “taking care of business” stride while he got my medicine. Gripped in a delirious sickness where you surrender to wherever help comes from, I put my fingertips on the cool windshield to touch him and said, “Okay, Dad. Okay.”
Just when my mother stopped pressuring me to accept a man as a father did it at last feel right. I trusted Pat. It was impossible to untrust him now.
To my other dads, even my real one, I’d been forgettable, easily abandoned, a distraction, an acceptable sidekick, a transparent sponge to soak up their tastes and desires, and not able to express my own. Now, with my fourth and sure to be last stepfather, perhaps some alchemy could turn us into men, together.
Presto, change-o, alakazam! A visible son, at last.
• • •
A work truck filled with tree trimmers wielding poles and chainsaws arrived to trim the jacaranda tree out front, bringing to an end my grandmother’s decade long letter-writing crusade to have her tree trimmed. She’d written numerous letters to every California public official for help: LA mayor Tom Bradley, Governor George Deukmejian, Senator Alan Cranston. She’d even enlisted officials who weren’t from our same state.
“Ted Kennedy represents Massachusetts, Grandma,” I told her.
“I voted for the bastard when he ran for president!” she said. “He’s supposed to help old women like me.”
The tree trimmers stripped the branches above my favorite place, a nook at the bottom of our staircase that couldn’t be seen by anyone in my house, down to stumps. My grandmother had robbed me of my clubhouse. By high school, her charms seemed vulgar and grotesque; my high school friends, of course, thought she was a total badass. My mother, too, was “awesome.” When she wasn’t locked in her bedroom working as a phone sex operator, she befriended my teenage buddies, our high school’s only multiethnic alterna-music-loving collective. She peppered profanity into conversations. At first they encouraged her to curse; then struggled to keep up. (“What’s a ‘reverse butt plug’?”) She learned their likes—which became my likes, of course—and soon had copies of the Cure’s Disintegration and Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses sitting next to her Buffy Sainte-Marie cassettes.
She was the “cool” parent you could talk music or sex with. Asking questions, though, meant that you had to shut up and listen to her, too.
“Did you know I’m dying?” she’d say, and tell stories about her numerous health maladies: the temporary blindness, the blood poisoning, the ingrown toenails, and the “inoperable brain tumor”: that pernicious beast that shadowed her for years, routinely bursting into her head DEA-drug-bust style and then vanishing like an ice-cream headache. My friends trusted my mother’s stories; one friend’s sincere greeting whenever I saw him was, “So how’s your mom’s tumor?”
No topic was off-limits. Nothing, that is, except her job.
“Doesn’t your mom ever come out of her room?” one friend asked me.
“When she’s not working.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night.”
“She’s a telemarketer.”
“What does a ‘telemarketer’ do, anyway?”
“She’s in sales.”
“What does she sell?”
“Office supplies,” I said.
“Who buys office supplies at ten o’clock at night?”
“Someone who . . . really needs paper.” (I wasn’t as swift on my storytelling toes as my mother was.)
My friends were old enough to poke holes in this and my other gaseous tales, but one thing that had to remain secret was our identities as Mexicans. I sure was inventing some tall tales of my own to keep that part of my life hidden, though:
“My father was an Indian chief. Yes, that means I’ll take over the tribe one day.”
“My name Skyhorse means ‘great warrior.’ Yes, just like a Jedi from Star Wars.”
“Yes, these blond highlights my mother got for me at the Edward Boye' Salon in West Hollywood are consistent with my Indian upbringing. Indians put sand in their hair as part of their ascent into manhood.”
Not that any of it mattered to my Mexican high school friends, who were more interested in seeing the Cure at Dodger Stadium or hearing the latest Morrissey single than speaking Spanish and discussing our mutual “cultura.” We talked of getting Depeche Mode tattoos and lusted after what we called KROQ (pronounced K-Rock) chicks: white and Asian girls named for the local alternative music radio station who wore wispy black dresses on ninety-four-degree days or jean shorts with black tights and combat boots. Our shared culture was English pop music, not la raza.
My mother, who was still playing her deck of bad fake ID cards with interchangeable versions of Running Deer Skyhorse, acknowledged being a Mexican only when playacting on the phone with her clients. When my mother’s best friend in the phone sex business (her only friend that I knew of) was out of town, the friend’s boyfriend wanted some action. Instead of calling his girlfriend’s service, which would have let him talk to someone for free, he dialed my mother’s service and spoke to her for eight hundred dollars’ worth of charges. When my mother’s friend got the bill a month later, sh
e asked her boyfriend why he did it.
“I wanted to speak to somebody Latina,” he explained
His girlfriend told him, “The joke’s on you, dummy. You were talking to an American Indian.”
• • •
“Who are the roses for?” Pat asked. I’d stashed them in the fridge and told my mother and grandmother that they were a gift to a teacher leaving staff. They believed me.
“Roses for a teacher,” Pat said. “Uh-huh. She must be very . . . pretty.”
I’d crushed for over a year on a casual friend who worked at the student store, but I had no idea what to do next. Buy her something nice, express my feelings in the most over-the-top way possible, and pray that my feelings are reciprocated, right? At her best friend’s suggestion, for Christmas I bought her college sweatshirts: soft-hued Nordstrom knockoffs to soften how weird and masculine these gifts were. I wrapped them in shiny foil boxes that I stuffed in my backpack and paired them with a dozen roses I carried to school upside down in a plastic bag like a bouquet of inverted balloons. On the last day before winter break, I assembled everything on her homeroom desk then asked her for a date. Out of sheer embarrassment, she said “yes.”
She found a way to say “no” a couple days later on the phone.
“So what did the flowers you gave me mean?” she asked after an hour-long conversation.
“They mean, I guess, that . . . I love you.” She didn’t hear the question mark I ended the sentence with in my head.
“I think we should just be friends,” she said. I was devastated, but by now it was a familiar feeling. This heartache played in a minor key compared to what I felt when a father left. Pat spotted that my sullenness was not, as my mother feared, a defiant act of rebellion.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 15