Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  “What do you do, Brando?” Tony asked.

  “He’s a college graduate,” Frank said quickly.

  “Ah,” Tony said, “nothing beats a great education.”

  We drove under a bridge. “Let me turn off the air conditioner,” Tony said. “So you can hear the engine.”

  “Sounds like a good engine,” Frank said.

  “So how were you planning to pay for this?” Tony asked me.

  “Well, I was gonna cosign for him,” Frank said before I could answer.

  “You know, Frank, it would really be better for the both of you if you bought him the car. I’m sure your credit is better than his,” Tony said.

  “I have excellent credit,” Frank said. “But I’m just here to cosign for him.”

  We drove back to the lot. “Okay,” Tony said, “Let’s see how excellent that credit is.”

  Tony led us through a series of offices with no doors and floor to ceiling windows. He set down a stack of carbon-copy forms at his desk and then turned his back to me.

  “So, Frank, are you gonna buy this car for Brando?”

  “You know, Tony,” Frank said, “I really just came here to cosign. He really wants to buy the car on his own.”

  “Yes, I know, but this is the reality,” Tony said. “You have the job, you have the credit. If you buy this car for Brando, you’ll have smaller monthly payments. He can pay those to you. Nobody cares as long as the monthly payment gets made. Also, when you buy insurance for Brando”—Frank flinched when he heard this—“the payments will be a lot smaller.”

  Tony looked at us and said, “I’m just trying to help you guys out.”

  “Sure, Tony,” Frank said.

  “Now, remember, if you do buy this car, it has nothing to do with him,” Tony said, and brushed his hands at me. “This will be your car, and you’ll be giving it to him.”

  Frank glanced at me, rubbed his double chin. “Yeah, let’s go ahead and do it like that.”

  “You wanna do it like that?” Tony asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Frank said, and pulled out his wallet. Tony pushed over a long form. “Okay, I need you to fill this out, here, here, and here,” he said, making large blue Xs on the sheet. “Frank, I’m gonna pull your TRW report.” Tony pushed back his chair, clicking a ball-point pen. “Are you Brando’s father?” he asked Frank.

  Frank and I blinked at each other. Then we blurted out together:

  “Yes,” Frank said. “No,” I said. Then we flipped our answers.

  “Hey, yes, no, it doesn’t matter,” Tony said, taking it in used-car-salesman stride. “You two will figure it out.”

  I was twenty-two years old. I’d known Frank as some kind of father for eighteen years. We still froze whenever anyone asked if we were father and son. We were still trying to figure things out.

  • • •

  The average shelf life for a stepfather was two to three years. Yet Rudy was heading into his sixth year without any signs that he was leaving. My mother was enjoying the delusional tranquility of her fifth and longest-lasting marriage.

  “Rudy’s loyal,” she told me. “You could learn something about loyalty from him. Every day you become less and less my son.”

  For her forty-ninth birthday in April 1996, I treated her to an expensive restaurant she’d read about in a magazine. It was a reconciliation dinner. I was living an hour’s drive away in Irvine, California, attending a creative writing graduate program I started right after college. She was furious that I hadn’t moved back into the house and commuted, and we’d had a series of increasingly bitter phone arguments that led me to cut off communication with her and screen all incoming calls. First, there were angry voice mail messages, followed by ten to fifteen hang-up calls a week over the next two months. Then one morning I found a manila envelope stuffed under my car’s windshield wipers. In it was a collection of short stories I’d written in college. My name was written in my mother’s hand on the envelope. She had Rudy drive her forty miles to tuck the package on my car and then had him drive her back home. I couldn’t tell whether the gesture was an attempt at reconciliation or a threat.

  There in the restaurant, out of the house, out of her bedroom, away from my grandmother and Rudy, I found a woman who was funny but not crude, vivacious but not loud, smart but not caustic. She flirted with our waiter, drank good white wine, and ate Cajun pizza. She listened as often as she spoke.

  “Rate me,” my mother said. “On a scale of one to ten, how good a mother was I?” She asked me this now each time we talked.

  “A seven?” I answered, unsure. I saw her as a ten when I was a child. Now in my twenties, she was a two or three, tops. Truth is, she was a seven that night.

  “I would have gotten mad before if you didn’t say I was a ten,” she said. “But I think you’re being generous. Why couldn’t it have always been like this, the way it is right now?” my mother asked. “This is nice.”

  That night, she wrote to herself in her long-gestating memoir: “For a while, I felt normal. Even though I know I can never be normal. Never. As you know by now, I’m dying, and for the first time in a long time, I cried for my position. I’ve always read about people dying in books, and now I’m writing my own. I have blood poisoning that’s made a tumor that’s exploded in my brain . . . I know nobody believes me, but it’s true.”

  Her book, called The Beginning, had been in process since Robert lived with us. She’d been typing up her fears on a Sears manual typewriter with a sleek plastic lid that let her carry it from room to room like a suitcase, filling up pages margin to margin without paragraph breaks or spelling corrections. The writing had brought her happiness in a way that few other things did, but her journal entries, prose poems, and chapter fragments had now degenerated into amorphous paragraph blobs intended to “say good-bye” and “make amends” to the people in her life because she believed she was dying. She wrote Sofie a letter apologizing for her behavior and telling her how much she loved her. The rest of what she didn’t tell Sofie, she wrote in her book: “I miss her and love her. I hope she forgives me because I was a fucking cunt, acting like I had some kind of power over her I didn’t have.”

  She spoke to my grandmother and Rudy daily about how she’d “die young” like Kurt Cobain and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora from MTV’s The Real World and urgently shared the deaths of famous celebrities as if updating me on the family business. Her life was confined to a single room with a telephone and a TV—this information was the family business.

  My grandmother told my mother, “You know what happened to the boy who cried wolf, don’t you?”

  For some reason, probably simply because she said so, Rudy was convinced that Maria, in her late forties, was pregnant. He “felt movement” in her. She wasn’t, but she now carried over 230 pounds on her five-foot-two frame. She’d stopped exercising and refused to take walks with my grandmother down the hill, complaining of excruciating migraines, severe exhaustion, foot trauma, and failing eyesight. When I took my mother out for Mother’s Day, she was walking alongside Rudy arm in arm on their way to his car when she stumbled on a flat sidewalk and crumpled to her knees. She walked off the fall with a laugh and a jittery sluggishness.

  At my grandmother’s birthday dinner a few weeks later, my mother, belligerent and disoriented in public—something I’d never seen—challenged June to shut up for being too boisterous. In the round-robin slotting of alliances, I took my grandmother’s side.

  “Maybe you should have taken her out for Mother’s Day instead of me,” my mother said.

  “Are you kidding?” my grandmother said. “You would have killed me if Brando had taken me along, even though I’ve been as much a mother to Brando as you.”

  “Do you see what you started, Brando?” my mother said. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known. I wish—”

  “You wish w
hat?” I asked. “Are you going to storm off and leave me here?”

  “I wish I had left you like your father,” my mother said.

  “I wish you had, too,” I said. “I might have had a chance at a normal childhood.”

  “Fuck you,” my mother said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t know who the bigger baby is, you or Brando,” my grandmother said. She hailed a waiter. “Give me a grasshopper fast, so I can get my fucking birthday party started.”

  Round and round it went—it would always go—and then: apologies and laughter.

  More than once I’d succumbed to fantasies where my family disappeared—gone in some Disneyfied plunge into a dark chasm where the ground wasn’t visible—but I assumed this was simply what parents did when they aged, finding new ways to embarrass and mortify you by revealing, but not acknowledging, their limitations.

  • • •

  “You have to keep this between us,” Frank said. “The news would devastate your mother.”

  Frank was getting married, and I was invited. It felt sudden, though the last time we spoke, he’d alluded to a having long-term girlfriend. He didn’t share too much out of fear I’d report back to my mother. Being out of the house made it easier to keep things from her, like my having moved in with a girlfriend named Kitt. We met in my writing program, which she’d joined after leaving her job in New York City.

  I brought Kitt to my house for dinner just once. It was so . . . quiet. Our family didn’t do quiet. Intimidated by Kitt’s education and age, nine years older than me, my mother said nothing. In our house, my mother’s silence could blow out your eardrums.

  My grandmother served Shake ’N Bake chicken on reused paper plates to save water. “I don’t ordinarily cook ‘white’ food,” she told Kitt by way of half-hearted apology.

  “I had Shake ’N Bake growing up, too,” Kitt replied and smiled.

  I promised Frank I’d keep his marriage a secret. “Any woman in my life has to accept you too,” he said. “That’s the deal. Nothing’s going to change between us.”

  He meant well, but the fact that things hadn’t changed was the problem. Who would I be to Frank now that he’d have a wife? How would we introduce me to Stephanie? In front of others, we scrambled to define what our connection was, but our answers were never consistent. Sometimes Frank called me a “close friend”; other times, after a couple beers, I was “the son I never had.” Frank was, to me, “an old buddy,” “my stepfather,” or, on a rare night, “my father.” We switched up what we called each other depending on the social situation: the more august the ceremony, the “higher” we elevated the other in rank.

  At the wedding reception, Frank worked up a great beer buzz fast. He walked out to the street in his tuxedo with a Heineken and sat on the hood of an unoccupied LAPD car. When he came back inside, Stephanie brought him over to my table.

  “I’m so happy to finally meet you,” she said and hugged me. “It was really important to me that you came.”

  “I’m glad to be here,” I said, and then looked at Frank, hovering over Stephanie’s shoulder. What do I say?

  “I know exactly who you are,” she said. “And you’re always welcome in our house.”

  Frank and I said nothing, both of us relieved. She knew who I was even if, after close to twenty years, Frank and I didn’t.

  • • •

  “You’re moving to New York City?” my mother asked. “I don’t know how you’re going to make it. You’ve always relied on me for everything.”

  “I’m done with my writing program. Kitt got a job offer there,” I said. “A long- distance relationship won’t work.”

  “A long-distance family won’t work either,” she said.

  My mother couldn’t see that we’d already become a long-distance family. In the two years since I’d moved an hour’s drive away, I visited her and my grandmother maybe four or five times, while ignoring about two or three dozen of my mother’s “emergencies.” Every visit ended with the two of us in a fight. I’d race down the stairs and drive off in the car Frank and I bought together, running away from my mother the same way that Frank did when I was a child. One Christmas I mailed my family their presents instead of driving an hour and spending the day with them. That’s what my family had become: a “them.”

  When the time came to move to New York, I signed over my car to Rudy for a dollar so he could get rid of the deathtrap he drove my mother around in. I didn’t feel comfortable with Rudy possessing the title, but he had lived with her now for six years, longer than any of my stepfathers or even my actual father. How could he possibly pull a Pat after all this time? Or a Paul? Or a Robert? Where was he going to go?

  “You really don’t have any plans to come home again at all, do you?” my mother said. She was right, but I couldn’t tell her that.

  “We’ll see,” I said. Please disappear, I thought.

  • • •

  On the December night I left Portia Street, my grandmother clutched me by the porch railing she had leaned on a thousand mornings watching me walk to school. When she had seen me off for college, my grandmother christened me a man and encouraged my mother to release me. Then she showed my mother how it was done. My grandmother shouted my name and clasped her hands together over her head like a prizefighter. How she let me go was a gift.

  I walked down the stairs that night with Rudy and my mother. With Pat’s Christmas lights turned off, my grandmother’s silhouette blended into the web of jacaranda tree branches she’d spent years trying to amputate. I was around the age my biological father, Candido, had been when he left me. Had he known he wouldn’t see me again? Was this the last time I’d see my grandmother, or my home? Did he look back the way I was looking at the house now, his guilt tempered by a sense of liberation and joy? Did he sprint down the stairs with the same lightness in his feet I had in mine?

  “Take good care of my mother,” I told Rudy, because it sounded like the kind of thing a protective son would say instead of good-bye. It was a feeble attempt to be menacing; I knew there was nothing I could do from across the country.

  Rudy and I embraced in an awkward pat-down. Then I hugged my mother.

  If our good-bye had a hint of dramatic tension or anger, or a portentous exchange that foreshadowed the future, I’d have done a better job of remembering it. It was a simple “See you soon” and a hug. It was a hug, in memory, that seemed to go on forever, one that clung around my neck like a weighted anchor.

  Driving off, they—my family—blended into nothing but darkness. I exhaled a comic-book bubble sigh of relief, confident it’d be a long time before I had to see them again.

  • • •

  I was out of contact for a month while my girlfriend and I lived at her brother’s place in Hoboken waiting to move into a high-rise waterfront apartment in Jersey City. Within minutes of getting a live phone connection, my mother called, and we talked for an hour.

  “Here’s what I want from New York,” she said, and rattled off a list of souvenirs I pretended to write down. When I ended our call, she said, “All right, Brando! C’mon, New York City!” She sounded upbeat, animated, as if she’d saved up all her energy from the past few weeks for this one phone call with her son.

  Sometime that evening, a Saturday, she came down with the symptoms of a mild cold.

  On Sunday the symptoms of her cold worsened, and she stayed in bed. At some point, she used the phone and pressed “record” on a machine she’d purchased to tape calls. She recorded one side of an unintelligible conversation that I’m convinced was with herself. When I listened to this recording later, her voice was muffled, drugged, almost deranged, like sleep talk. The tape ends with the only word I understood: “Good-bye.”

  Late Sunday night and then on Monday, her condition worsened. She sprayed Lysol in her crotch instead of changing her days-old underwear and
staggered out of bed several times, complaining to my grandmother about the temperature in the house.

  “I’m cold, Momma,” she said. “Why am I so cold?”

  My grandmother gave her a stack of musty Southwestern pastel bedspreads and a jar of Vicks VapoRub, and then made her some soup. On her stereo, my mother played not her beloved Stevie Nicks but Julia Fordham. (Her CD player would spit Fordham’s East West out the next time it was plugged back in. The first track is called “Killing Me Slowly.” The album sits unlistened to in my record collection.)

  “I’m coming to the end of my life,” my mother had written several months ago. “I don’t even care or give a fuck about the pain that will be inflicted. Sure, I will be screaming at the top of my lungs, but I feel, or fear, that pain is normal.”

  My mother was quiet the next day, Tuesday. She hadn’t left her bed. My grandmother checked on her in the afternoon and asked if she wanted some soup for dinner.

  My mother said, “Yes, Momma. I’d like some.” My grandmother closed my mother’s bedroom door behind her, out of habit.

  “There has to be something more than my closed door and my room,” she wrote. “I wonder what AIDS patients think of. What is everybody’s last moments like?”

  • • •

  On Tuesday, January 6, the same date my great-grandmother Lucille had died at the age of thirty-eight, Rudy left a message on my machine: “Brando, I need you to call me back right away. Okay? Call me as soon as you get this message.”

  My mother had left hundreds of similar emergencies on my machine, so I avoided this one at first. I didn’t want her to feel I could be paged three thousand miles away. There was a crackling fear in Rudy’s voice, though; an insistency that sounded like backbone. The previous year, a college buddy had called to tell me a mutual friend had died in a Yosemite hiking accident. He had that same edge and crackle in his voice, as if the words were stuck in his throat and he had to use all the strength in his stomach muscles to dislodge them, like a bit of food blocking your windpipe. He had to force the words out before they choked him.