“Why are you turning into an asshole?” she asked me.
“He’s okay. He just misses his teacher.” Pat patted me on the back and yawned, clinging to the kitchen sink. His bus commute was exhausting, but he was stuck, since my grandmother refused to have “another man in my house with a car.”
Surprisingly, my mother, a long ways from her passionate defense of Robert, stood up for Pat. “Maybe it’s time for us to go, then. Pat wants to get us a place of our own. I really don’t want to die in this house,” she said, convinced that her tumor was acting up again like a pulled tendon.
“A new broom sweeps clean,” my grandmother retorted. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
Sharing a house with my mother and grandmother had always been like shuttling between two divorced parents. They drifted apart when a husband arrived but came back together when he left, two land masses forever separating and colliding. No one had ever seriously threatened—or encouraged—us to move out before now. Pat’s work ethic meant that he might be a man my grandmother had to take seriously.
“Let Pat support us if he wants,” my mother said. “If he can’t buy himself a car with his own damn money, it’s time for us to move out on our own.” My grandmother backed down. That was the easy part.
“You see this here?” a salesman told Pat. “This is a ‘red flag.’ You have three of them on your credit report.”
When the salesman left, I asked Pat, “What’s a red flag?”
“Oh, it doesn’t mean anything. My report should have been cleaned up by now. It’s an old college loan thing. I took care of everything in Tahoe,” he said. His reply was itself a red flag, but before I could respond, he patted my shoulder and said, “We’ll get there, Brando.”
Pat at last found a “new” used Subaru with power windows, power locks, power antenna, power sunroof. It was the most extravagant four wheels our family had ever, or would ever, own.
“Would you drive this car?” Pat asked me with a wry grin. I was exhilarated to ride in a not-piece-of-shit car. Could our family afford this?
“My parents will wire transfer me the three-thousand-dollar down payment,” Pat said. “We can take it home today.”
We drove off the used-car lot under a bright sun, a clear spring Los Angeles sky with the power windows and power sunroof open. I tuned into my favorite radio station just as it played my favorite band Depeche Mode’s new single—and thus my new favorite song—and Pat high-fived me. Being sixteen, I thought that life’s happiness came from lining up as many of your favorites in a row as you could. Here they all were, together, with my new favorite father.
The next day, a Saturday, Pat gave me my first driving lesson in the rambling paved valleys of Dodger Stadium’s acres-wide parking lots. The car was a feather-touch automatic, and Pat, a patient, encouraging teacher, but I was still the slow learner I’d been when Oscar had tried to teach me how to ride a bike.
“We’ll go out again next week,” he promised.
Three days later, I ditched school with permission from my mother—who warned me to “be safe and take care of myself” if anything bad happened, and whose habitual premonition for catastrophe I shrugged off—and got into a line with a group of four friends and over three hundred other kids at eight in the morning to earn Depeche Mode autographs at a record-release in-store signing. In that pre–cell phone era, we passed the next thirteen hours listening to the new album on state-of-the-art CD boom boxes and dispatches from the radio station organizing the event. We made cardboard Honk If You Like Depeche Mode signs that we waved at confused motorists and had awkward, parrying conversations about who we liked in school. I wandered through the bright, clean aisles of the Beverly Center mall across the street with Cristina, a new crush, not talking, and imagined us sitting at a food court, sharing deep secrets while her black tights and Doc Martens brushed against my ultra-cool Zodiac shoes.
Nightfall swelled the waiting crowd to an estimated fifteen thousand people. The line became a surging, bottle-throwing sea that carried me several feet off the ground and dropped me hard against a concrete shore. The signing, unbeknownst to us, was canceled. We’d waited hours for nothing and were stuck in an angry mob. My friends didn’t want to leave, but my mother’s survival instincts kicked in. I fought through the crowd and called Pat from a pay phone a block away. Where that instinct to call him for help came from, I don’t know. It might have been desperation or a sincere belief that here at last was a father figure I could turn to when I was in need.
“Stay safe,” he said. “I’ll come and get you as soon as I can.” It took him almost two hours, but Pat found us, materializing from around a corner.
“There were police barricades on the street, so I had to park a few blocks away,” he said.
“How did you get past them?” I asked.
“Oh, I have my ways,” he said and smiled. He drove me and my friends to the restaurant he managed. It was past closing time, but he opened up the kitchen, sat us at a booth, and took our orders like a waiter. Starved and dehydrated from waiting all day in line, we wolfed down sizzling hamburgers coated with shaved onion rings and swallowed oversized glasses of delicious, ice-cold sodas.
“You have, like, the coolest dad ever,” Cristina said.
“She’s right, Brando!” Pat shouted from the kitchen.
Pat crammed us into the car—there wasn’t enough space for us, so Cristina sat on my lap—and drove each of my friends home. We pulled up to our house around three in the morning.
My mother let me sleep in late and miss school the next day, too. Pat was home early, the car cutting almost an hour and a half off his commute. When I joined everyone for dinner that night, there was this eerie peace; a sense of joyous calm that settled over the table.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” my mother said. “It must have been like the sixties for you out there!”
“I should’ve listened to you to be careful,” I said.
“Pat was there when you needed him,” my mother said and stroked his arm.
That dinner, there was joking without cruelty, laughter without maliciousness. Some kind of spirit was there in that dining room binding us together, protecting us all from unexpected misfortune that had nipped our every step for years. Good things could at last happen to us. We were going to make it.
Two days later, Pat called from the restaurant.
“I’m coming home late tonight on the bus. Somebody stole the car.”
• • •
“Let’s see you steal this one,” Pat said as he attached a theft protection club to the steering wheel of a crippled 1970s yellow Honda hatchback that with his seat pushed way back put Pat’s knees right under the steering wheel. The car lost power at odd times and filled with engine smoke when put in reverse.
“This is only for a while,” Pat said. “I’m expecting another wire transfer.”
When the new round of transfers cleared, the Honda was traded in for a large Pat-friendly Ford Bronco SUV. He found new work at a family-style restaurant chain that let him take home “overstock” food destined for the trash and crammed our freezer with steaks, burgers, and chicken breasts. An “asshole manager” from his old job who had accused Pat of a nebulous financial impropriety found his car damaged.
“Instant karma,” Pat said.
The red flags were thick as wildflowers, and yet I can’t remember a time when we, as a family, were less alert or more content. I’d never see my mother happier or watch her anger dissolve faster. She cared less about the plight of American Indians and more about new patio furniture and aromatherapy. My mother let Pat string Christmas lights around the security bars on our front windows as he tortured us with a high-pitched rendition of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”
“Invite your friends for Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “I want to cook for them.”
When my friends a
rrived, Pat set out a spectacular multicourse “overstock” feast catered with large restaurant-sized cartons of steak and lobster, along with five different whole pies for dessert. Sitting himself with my mother and grandmother at what he called the “kids’ ” table on the back indoor patio, he served me and my friends in the dining room wearing his chef’s whites.
I’d invited over my newest crush, Sofie, a Vietnamese girl who’d been a friend for almost six months. My mother and grandmother were completely oblivious to my feelings for Sofie; Pat wasn’t, and courted her with extra servings.
“Make sure she’s comfortable,” he told me. “She’s not just here for the food.”
After dinner, my friends played board games while I sat next to Sofie and counted the times we accidentally brushed against each other. On the patio, the adults sipped wine, cussed without malice in a tryptophan afterglow, and listened politely as my mother spent the entire Thanksgiving dinner talking about a concert she and Pat were going to in a couple weeks. The tickets were for Fleetwood Mac, but they actually were a passport for my mother to meet her “Goddess”: Stevie Nicks.
I’d saved up enough from my summer job at a stock brokerage house to buy her and Pat twelfth-row floor tickets. The concert would be my mother’s first “night out” in a year. She idolized Stevie Nicks, whose smoky voice was like a drug to help Mom escape from her life. My mother deputized herself a high priestess in Stevie’s faux Wiccan army; if Stevie had formed a country, I’m sure my mother would have found a way to make us citizens.
Mom went to a beauty salon for her hair and nails, and then spent the afternoon in front of her closet interviewing potential outfits. Pat bought a gold box of long-stemmed roses that my mother was to use to get to the stage. During a darkened encore break, a security guard let my mother approach the barricade. There, for about thirty seconds, my mother became the rock star she had wanted to be her whole life.
She could hear a lumbering roar float up from the front of the stage, rise like a wave to the back of the arena, cresting up in the cheap seats, and then snapping back down to her. Why all this cheering? Were they cheering, she wondered, because she’d made it up to the barricades? Were they cheering for her? (Oh, Mom.) She didn’t see the band’s silhouettes slide across the stage. Leaning over the metal barricade, my mother shoved the box of roses onstage just as the stage lights came on. My mother was ten feet from Stevie Nicks.
“I love you, Bella Donna!” my mother screamed. Stevie flip-twisted her hair and smiled, and then cradled the gold box of roses and handed them off to a roadie. She mouthed the words “Thank you.”
My mother had looked into the eyes of her Goddess. And it was good. She recounted that story for a week and a half—and, uncharacteristically, told it the exact same way—wanting to stretch that moment out to experience it every day.
“I’ll never forget what you did for me, Brando,” she said. “You really do love me.”
She’d forget, of course. But she remembered that night.
• • •
On New Year’s Day, 1991, Pat and my mother invited Sofie and me to Disneyland. Sofie and I had already been on several platonic dates, and this was the day I’d hoped we’d consummate our relationship with a kiss. Having breakfast together on Main Street, U.S.A, in the Carnation Café inhaling piped-in candy-cane-scented air, we could have been a bad barroom joke: a large Irish man, his Mexican wife and stepson masquerading as American Indians, and a young Vietnamese girl walk into the Happiest Place on Earth and order breakfast. But this time there wasn’t a cruel punch line. No stuffed Mickeys were abducted, no messy entanglements with undercover Disney police officers. My mother had a content, tranquilized glow about her. She was feeling safe and secure with Pat, and also taking new diet pills. My mother was genuinely happy, but years of seeing her miserable had made it difficult for me to tell. It was easy to mistake what happiness looked like at Disneyland.
Pat and my mother split off halfway through the day so that Sofie and I could spend time alone together. We rode the Skyway from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. Sofie was facing me, looking back at Fantasyland and what we were leaving behind, while I looked ahead to Tomorrowland and what was yet to come. It’s a perfect metaphor, sure, but it’s hard to see us in that moment here, knowing what was about to come: for us, for my family, for me. If I could take that ride again, I’d sit next to Sofie with her hand in mine and my back to the future too.
Sofie sat on my lap in the backseat on the night ride home.
“I think we should be together,” I said.
“I do, too,” she said, and we kissed. Over her shoulder, I saw Pat eyeing us in the rearview mirror, grinning. When he dropped her off, he said, “I knew she liked you. Now all you have to do is keep her happy so you don’t lose her. That’s the hard part. There’s a lot of little things and tricks to keeping a woman happy.”
I waited for my mother to chip in some brutal, acerbic comment. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. Pat looked at me in the rearview and mouthed “See?”
• • •
“You didn’t get either of us anything for Valentine’s Day?” my grandmother asked. It didn’t take my mother and grandmother long to figure out they wouldn’t be getting their customary sweetheart cards.
“You have a girlfriend?” my mother asked. “You sure you aren’t gay? You’d be so much more interesting if you were.”
My parents soon realized how valuable a new person to talk to would be. Drawn to Sofie’s sweetness and naïveté, my mother tried being my girlfriend’s girlfriend. When Sofie came over, my mother took off her sweaty phone headset, roped Sofie into her bedroom, and stunned the poor girl with her ribald, adolescent vigor. Sofie had never heard the words skinny and bitches used as a compound phrase before.
“This is what speaks louder to a real woman than any fucking thing,” my mother said, and pulled a rolled-up ball of cash from her cleavage, fanning it. “You must get your ‘men’ to pay to be around you.”
My grandmother had noticed how much time Sofie spent with my mother and wanted to see if she, too, could connect with her.
“Did I tell you about my worthless son?” my grandmother asked. “I’ve left him one dollar in my will. He’s never getting this house!”
Or: “Don’t you think Pat makes too much food?”
Then: “Why is Brando such a horrible grandson to me?” Like Pat, Sofie found it odd that I’d just now graduated to my own bed, and the wet kisses my grandmother gave her when she walked in the front door made her uncomfortable.
Pat was Sofie’s safe zone. He told G-rated versions of Andrew Dice Clay routines and sang goofy songs like “Stray Cat Strut” while he led Sofie and me into the kitchen to watch him make restaurant-sized omelets with fat chunks of fresh “overstock” lobster and blueberry pancakes smeared with peanut butter.
“Sometimes it seems like Pat’s the only normal one here,” Sofie said.
• • •
Pat had lived with us for close to two years when he revealed that he was in the running for a senior management position at his chain restaurant’s corporate headquarters in Northern California.
“Starting salary is ninety thousand a year,” he said, a staggering amount to our family. His mantra repetition of that sum just made it seem more unreal.
“Think, Brando,” he said, “you could have a real bedroom. Big enough for an actual bed. With only three of us, you could have two rooms, one when you come home from college you could use for your studies, like an office. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Was it safe to imagine a middle-class life outside of Echo Park provided by a man who disappeared from his own apartment? Or whose new erratic work schedule led him to stash white burlap money sacks with rolls of coins under my mother’s bed? (“It was too late to visit the bank,” he said. “I’ll deposit them tomorrow.”)
I never stopped to ask bec
ause I was dreaming of an escape to college. I’d been identified a gifted student in second grade and took advanced courses throughout junior high and high school but didn’t know how realistic my dreams were. I carried my college catalogues—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—everywhere, as if they’d disappear like my fathers if I let them out of my sight. I woke myself early on test days, hitching rides to test centers with friends, and stayed up late playing MTV with no sound, teeth chattering while I wrote bad college application essays and struggled to fill in tiny, precise spaces with a moody electric typewriter. I pictured me and a multiethnic group of friends smiling outdoors on a sunny patch of grass, just like in the glossy pictures! I saw Pat lugging a heavy steamer trunk—something I didn’t even own—up a narrow flight of dormitory stairs on a hectic orientation day, winking at me when a cute girl said hello. It was like the playacting I did with my mother, except the stuffed animals were gone, and I didn’t need my mother as a partner to pretend anymore.
I didn’t discuss what schools I was applying to, campus tours, or how I’d pay for it all, because no one I knew had ever gone to college; my mother had some community college and beauty school. It was just assumed I’d go somewhere.
“That’s what smart kids do,” my mother said. “You don’t need my bullshit to interfere.”
“We’ll mortgage the house if we have to,” my grandmother said.
Later my mother said, “Don’t expect her to do that. Figure the money out on your own. If you can’t afford it, remember you don’t have to go to school. You don’t have to go anywhere,” my mother said. “But I know you will.”
I kept the college process away from my mother. I was just ready to get out. The problem, of course, was Sofie. She’d become far too important a part of my life, and I couldn’t imagine what would happen when—if—I went away to school. Pat was the only one who seemed to understand our relationship. Maybe I could talk to him about Sofie. I joined Pat on a rare afternoon spent on the living room couch watching my grandmother’s television. It was just the two of us.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 16