Rudy sat motionless at the dining room table. He said nothing and stared blankly at our Christmas tree. If he didn’t speak or move, he became invisible to my mother. This was the same technique I’d used to survive my house for years.
My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway with a long butcher’s knife in her hand.
“Brando, we should go,” Sofie said. “Right now.”
“No!” I shouted. “I’ve had enough of this bullshit!” I flinched from cussing in front of my grandmother. “No more!” I screamed. “Let her come and kill me so I don’t have to be her son anymore!”
My mother walked halfway through the living room with the knife in her hand before my grandmother rose from her chair and placed herself between me and my mother, just as she had stepped between Candido and my mother’s knife when he abandoned us. It was my grandmother—not a stepfather or any man—who protected me.
“Get out!” my grandmother told me. “Go!”
Sofie and I drove off. I had nowhere to go. I thought about calling Frank, but we hadn’t spoken in so long. Besides, what could he do? What could any father do?
“Don’t take me home yet,” Sofie said.
We went to a movie, ate fast food for dinner, watched the sunset at Santa Monica beach, and drove in long, aimless circles through the Los Angeles night until Sofie fell asleep.
When I dropped her off, she said, “You can sleep on our couch. My dad won’t like it, but I can explain.”
“I have to go home,” I said.
“I hate that place,” she said. “Stop calling it ‘home.’ It’s not.”
I snuck back into the house after midnight. The Christmas lights had been left on. I crept to my room, braced the door with a chair, and stayed up until morning, waiting for my mother to come into my room sometime during the night and slit my throat.
• • •
Routine is uninteresting to recall and often unmemorable to record. My mother’s apology, if there was one, was much like the ones before or the ones that came after. I never confronted her again. Drift and disappearance were my protection now; I was just another man running to get out of my mother’s path, much like Frank driving away when he saw a fight coming. I handled my mother by setting myself in a plaster cast of a personality, rigid and safe. I gave her pieces of a son and in return saw her in fragments: a glimpse of me creeping by her door so she wouldn’t catch me and call me into her room where she watched endless loops of TV. Or a snatch of conversation on the edge of her bed where I sat upright like a bookend, answering her questions with “Yes,” “No,” or “We’ll see,” which to me translated to: I wish you’d disappear.
“We’ve been getting along well, don’t you think?” she asked. “Are you going to move back home when you’re done with your rich white school?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
• • •
My senior year of college had been one long, drawn-out nails-clawing-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff struggle to stay at school and not return home. For the fall quarter, I studied overseas at Oxford University. A kind, gray-haired English administrator named Pat fell in love with my last name.
“The mailman came by and said, ‘You got another letter for Chief Crazy Horse,’ and I told him, ‘There’s nothing crazy about him!’” (Oh, if she only knew . . .)
A common phone line in the house on High Street meant that my mother had no direct access. It was my best quarter academically and personally.
My mother and I spoke just once.
“All I wanted you to do over there,” she said, “was to buy me videotapes of Tod Slaughter in Sweeney Todd and those other movies where he’s killing people, and buy me hats from Laura Ashley. What do you mean they use a different kind of videotape over there? You go to Stanford, don’t you? Aren’t you smart enough to figure out how to get what I want? And what do you mean the hats are the same there as they are in the Laura Ashley stores here? I know they’re different ’cause I saw them on TV! They send the shitty hats here and keep the good hats in England!”
During my four months at Oxford, Frank visited my mother one day while Rudy was at work. In his van, they had a conversation free from blame or guilt. They checked into a nearby hotel, made love, and in the warm skin-on-skin bliss of a perfect day reminisced about when they were young together and how Frank had spent torrid evenings sopping moonlight out of my mother’s waist-length hair.
Later they spoke on the phone, and my mother dredged up cheating accusations from a decade ago.
“You drove me away from you,” she told Frank. “Everything bad that’s happened to me since we broke up is your fault.” She hung up on him. There would be more hang-ups between them. There wouldn’t be any more words.
I sent my mother and grandmother postcards as I traveled through Europe, drinking seltzers at a rowdy Dublin bar with Friday-night drunks who at first mocked my avoidance of alcohol. Then they were touched by it, after I explained that I couldn’t take a drink without picturing my “father”—Paul Skyhorse Johnson—rolling down my front lawn. I was almost mugged in Paris and Florence and ran into a pair of drunken racist skinheads at a doner kebob truck in Oxford, acting like a deaf mute until they stumbled off. In Geneva, I bought my grandmother an authentic wooden Reuge music box in honor of her father’s Swiss roots.
“You bought the cheapest-looking piece of shit music box in Switzerland!” she said.
When I returned to Echo Park in December, I learned that my grandmother and mother had changed just a couple facts about my Stanford-in-Oxford studying-abroad program to their friends in the neighborhood.
“A Rhodes scholar!” a salesman at our local clothes store exclaimed. “When do you meet President Clinton?”
When I got back to campus, I learned—or could no longer ignore the fact—that I wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate in June. Financial aid didn’t cover fifth years in college. I’d dropped so many classes to prolong this miserable college experience of mine that, damn it, I should have savored, I was in danger of not earning a degree.
I’d also broken up with Sofie after almost three years and a hundred “This is the last time” breakups. Remembering my grandmother’s trips to the corner magazine stand, I sent a new girlfriend to buy Asian-only porn I claimed my mother needed as research for her phone sex. I tried to throw myself out of a friend’s truck in (slow) traffic. There was a slapstick plan to commit suicide romantically inspired by Kurt Cobain that got as far as the local Target to price shotguns before realizing the store didn’t sell firearms. I prayed at the altar of my eighties music CD collection for a miraculous intervention of alcohol or drug addiction, to succumb to junkiedom solely for the narrative it would create and the pity it would arouse. But I didn’t know the cool drug kids at Stanford (were there any?) and was too poor to sustain a cocaine habit. Even in the grips of a total breakdown, I had to stay practical about how to destroy myself.
• • •
My mother called one late spring afternoon and said, “I’m back in touch with Pat. He called me, and he’s sorry. He’s living in Northern California and wants to know if he can visit you.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s my last quarter at college, and I don’t want any distractions.”
“I already gave him your number,” she said.
Pat’s voice was as bright and high pitched as I remembered from four years ago. Now, though, his agreeable, pleasant tone made me sick with a nauseating impotence. Here was someone I still loved but was unable to speak to the way I once did, with the easy, blind air of security. I ushered us into setting up a reunion, figuring a quick visit would be the fastest way to get him in and then out of my life. I chose as a meeting place the Oval, Stanford’s official entrance and a public location with lots of people around, because I had a grandiose fantasy that Pat might kidnap me. But how could I be kid
napped if I wanted to leave with my kidnapper?
Terrified of moving back with my family and being a college washout, I’d collapsed into a severe depression. I had panic nightmares, wore sunglasses everywhere day or night, pretending I was some drug-addled character from an eighties teen movie (forgetting I wasn’t rich, white, and, aside from my peyote trip as a five-year-old, had never done drugs), ditched classes, and was afraid to leave my room and collect the dining hall trays a friend left outside when I skipped meals.
I was wearing my sunglasses when Pat pulled up in a large SUV.
“Didn’t think the day was bright enough for shades,” he said. “You look cool, though!”
I picked a restaurant off campus that I knew I could walk back from if Pat excused himself during the meal and drove off before the bill came. I adjusted my sunglasses, which stayed on throughout the meal, did my best “I don’t care about you” slouch, and said in a disaffected The Breakfast Club voice, “So, where have you been all this time?”
“Lived on a houseboat for a while near the Russian River, north of San Francisco,” he said. “I grew a beard. You can tell I’ve gained some weight. How’s Sofie?”
My next girlfriend after Sofie, a brief relationship, had been a light-skinned Mexican girl.
“You’re making a big mistake dating one of them,” my mother had said. “I know. How could you dump Sofie after how much she stood by you? Where did you learn to treat people this way? I thought you weren’t anything like me at all.”
Pat nodded. “Your mom didn’t mean that. And I’m sorry to hear about Sofie. I know she loves you very much. Sometimes love isn’t enough. You know how much I loved you and your mother.”
“Is that why you didn’t say good-bye?” I asked.
“I wasn’t leaving you. I was leaving because I had to. I wanted to say good-bye, I really did. There wasn’t time.”
“Why did you steal the money?”
“It wasn’t as black-and-white as it was made out,” he said. “I wasn’t stealing from you guys. How could I tell you what I was doing? My heart was in the right place,” he said.
I heard my grandmother’s voice: Too bad his hands weren’t.
“Why didn’t you write?”
“I wanted to, but I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me. I was ashamed.” Our dialogue sounded so much like ex-lovers, it was hard to believe this was the language men used when they had too many secrets and not enough courage to come clean.
“You know,” Pat said, “you don’t need your sunglasses on in here.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You wouldn’t wear your glasses at the movies, would you?” he asked. “Want to go see one?”
“The closest movie theater is in Mountain View,” I said. “I don’t know the way back on a bus.”
“You think I’d leave you there?” Pat asked.
“Yes.”
“Brando, I’ve done some bad things, but I wouldn’t do that. You know how I feel about your mother. And you.”
“There’s no reason for you to be here,” I said. “We have nothing connecting us. I can take care of myself.”
“There’s no age limit on having a father,” he said. “Unless you already have one in Rudy?”
I had tried accepting Rudy in the role of a father and a contributing part of our family even when his contributions didn’t add up or sometimes went missing. He was still on the hunt for the elusive gun card that would raise his salary tenfold and magically transform his and my mother’s lives. He was still pocketing my gas money to fill up his car with the malfunctioning gas gauge that magically drifted to E whenever I drove it. (“I swore I filled up the tank.”) Our “dates” together were easy and unmemorable. I invited Rudy to “father and son” steak dinners where the sound of our knives scraping the plates substituted for conversation. He sweltered on summer days wearing Stanford sweatshirts I’d bought him as Christmas gifts.
“He’s proud of you,” my mother said.
“It’s just for your benefit,” I said. “He’s showing off.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” she said. “He’s paying for most of your education, anyway.” (Stanford’s financial aid package was a generous mix of scholarships, grants, and loans. Rudy’s total college contributions equaled maybe five hundred dollars.)
Rudy offered movie dialogue as a stand-in for insight or comment, which seemed appropriate, since I’d just learned how to shave properly from a touching father-son scene in Lethal Weapon 3 instead of asking him for help.
My mother: “Brando would make a great lawyer.”
Rudy: “You can’t handle the truth!”
Rudy wasn’t a father. He was a Big Brother volunteer matched to an angry, unreceptive inner-city young man who had been told one lie too many. Rudy hadn’t reached me because he couldn’t. Pat had closed that door. Only Pat could walk through it now.
“So how about a movie?” Pat asked again. “Anything you’d like to see?”
“I like Pulp Fiction,” I said. I’d seen it five or six times. It was the one piece of entertainment that gave me any joy or happiness during my insidious black depression. I took off my sunglasses and watched Pat watch the movie. He laughed in the right places, scoffed at the medical inaccuracy of the stabbing-the-hypodermic-needle-in-the-heart scene (“That’s not how it’s done; I used to be an EMT”) and shifted uncomfortably in the final diner robbery scene. An older overweight restaurant manager—someone Pat could physically resemble in a few years—was pinned on the counter with a gun to his head. I laughed loud enough that it was obvious I imagined it was Pat.
“I was in a restaurant robbery once,” Pat whispered. I felt a blush of shame before I realized Pat had also robbed a restaurant himself, though without a gun.
On the drive back to campus, Pat said, “I’d like to come to your graduation. Is that something you’d feel comfortable with?”
I had no reason to trust someone who had lied and abandoned me, but I couldn’t help myself. I missed Pat, what he taught me, what we shared, and the life he promised me: one free from the burdens of having to be my mother’s full-grown man when I hadn’t even learned how to be a boy. More than Frank, Paul, or Candido, I saw Pat as a victim whose good intentions had been hijacked through circumstances beyond his control. My mother had pushed him into an impossible corner. Hadn’t she done the same thing to every single man in her life, including me?
“I don’t know if you should come,” I said. “Rudy will probably be there. My mother said Frank might come too, but I haven’t spoken to him in a while, so I don’t know if she’s telling the truth.”
“Your mom can be a little flexible with facts,” Pat said. We both laughed. Then I heard my grandmother’s voice again: So can Pat. Don’t give your trust so easily just because he’s a man. All men lie.
“So what do you say?” he asked. “Can I come?”
“Let me think about it.”
“Brando,” he said again, “you’re never too old to need a father. Don’t miss out on having one because of pride.”
He was right. He had to be right, I thought, because he was still some kind of father to me. He knew just what to say that would hurt the most, a gift that biological and stepparents have in common.
He also knew what to do that would hurt the most, too.
• • •
Pat’s phone was disconnected a week before graduation. Every day, I’d redial at a different time, sometimes as many as three or four calls in an afternoon, hoping he’d pick up and knowing he wouldn’t. How could I let myself be heartbroken and disappointed again and again by men who were just half a father?
The day before graduation, Frank left a message. He sounded distant, stilted. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard his voice.
“I thought about coming up,” he said, “but I don’t want a fight with
your mother to spoil everything.” It was the first graduation he’d miss since sixth grade.
“Remember, I’m proud of you, Tiger,” he said.
This time I felt there wasn’t anything to be proud of at all. I’d “walk” my graduation ceremony and finish up my last college credits in summer school. Instead of three fathers rooting for me when I made my processional entrance into the football stadium and onto an immense green field to collect my empty diploma case, there was Rudy, an unfather, somewhere in a blurry sea of cardinal red. And yet, I couldn’t stop craning my neck deep, looking for all my fathers—Candido, Paul, Robert, Pat, and Frank—imagining a row of ghosts way up in the stands, each man rooting for the son I was to him.
“There he is,” each of them would say proudly. “My son.”
9
“T
urn the wheel,” Frank said. “You gotta turn that wheel, Tony.”
Tony, the used-car salesman, backed up to the car lot’s entrance. I’d asked Frank to come car shopping with me, since he was the one adult I knew with a credit history good enough to be a cosigner. Counting his graduation message and Sofie’s prank call about me becoming a father, we’d “spoken” twice in about three years.
On the drive to the car lot, he asked, “So she was never really pregnant?”
“No.”
“Then why did she call me?”
“Mom asked her to.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d get a woman pregnant like that. You’re not that irresponsible.” He paused. “You know about condoms, right?”
I almost laughed, but then Tony opened the passenger side door of the Toyota Corolla for Frank. He had to squeeze into the backseat.
“You understand, Frank,” Tony said, “that I gotta ride up front with Brando. It’s their rules, not mine.”
“Of course,” Frank said.
While I drove, Tony asked Frank, “What line of work are you in?”
“I work for the state of California,” he said. Frank played with the holes in his sneakers and stroked his graying goatee. He dressed and looked like a man fifteen years younger than he was.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 20