I welcomed just one next-door neighbor that first day, and nobody else on the days that followed. Her friends had passed on, moved away, or been exiled in petty arguments.
“Your grandma was something else,” this neighbor said. “I remember my kid was out in front of your house playing, and she said, ‘Why don’t you get the fuck away from my house and play in your asshole father’s yard?’ I was just out of sight and said, ‘June, it’s all right.’ She said, ‘Fuck you, too!’ Man, she was something.”
To that, my grandmother would have said, “You’re going to complain about a dead old woman hours after she’s been carried out of her house? I always knew you were an asshole.”
What I said was, “Yeah, she was a handful.”
• • •
Four people—my grandmother June, my mother, Maria, my grandfather Emilio, and my grandmother’s lover Tata—died in the house I grew up in. I didn’t want to be the fifth. Every memory would become some kind of ghost trapped in its walls whose impression would leak back out over time if I’d stayed. Oscar and I agreed to sell the house.
On my last day there, I walked through its hollowed-out rooms in a sleep-deprived daze as if visiting the empty set of a sitcom that had gone on too long. The rooms were dark, the floors warped and creaky. I paused before I closed the front door, waiting for a shout from my mother’s room—“Don’t get kidnapped!”—or my grandmother’s jangling keys signaling she was ready to hand hold me down to the bus stop. There was just quiet.
At last, quiet.
• • •
Every day since I was ten or so, my grandmother had said, “Don’t give me a funeral. And please don’t bury me in the ground. Just cremate me and throw my ashes in the sea.” My uncle disagreed.
“We should bury her,” Oscar said. “Because of the resurrection. So she can have a chance to come back.”
“Do you have money to pay for a burial?” I asked coldly.
“Oh, Brando, man, you know I don’t.”
“Do you have any money to contribute for a service?”
“No.”
“Then we should do what she wanted us to do,” I said.
I charged her cremation to a credit card, picking up her ashes in a gold box that resembled a mantelpiece clock. They handed my grandmother over in a white gift bag with a pleasant air, as if I were picking up a package I’d dropped off to be gift wrapped. I wanted to scatter the ashes before I left Los Angeles, but Oscar said he’d hold on to them for a while because he wasn’t ready to let her go. When I returned to New York, in one of our last conversations, he said he’d buried her ashes in a cemetery plot but didn’t reveal where. He left some voice mails and sent a card asking me to call him sometime, but I never did. We were each other’s last known relative, but I wanted to be free from my family. I wanted the right to choose my own.
Nowadays I get messages from aggressive collection agencies about once a year, like Christmas cards, looking for Oscar.
“I don’t know who he is,” I say.
• • •
I had dinner with Frank and Stephanie the night before I left Los Angeles. She asked me, “So how does it feel to have Frank in your life after all these years?”
I smiled and said, “I really think we can have a better relationship now.” It sounded promising, us no longer having to hide from my mother our being in contact, as if she had been the sole obstacle between us having a father-son relationship all along. Of course, she wasn’t, but I didn’t want to see that what was coming for us looked just like what had gone before. A desert of long absences—punctuated by a birthday phone call or a Father’s Day card—that we’d still had to march through together, and alone, still in search of the perfect name for each other.
• • •
My family was gone. Over the next ten years, I dealt with that loss by searching for mother and father surrogates (in my stepfathers’ case, substitutes for substitutes) in temporary people: Kitt’s mother, whom I lost when Kitt and I broke up; a boss I endowed with a nonexistent paternal streak. I searched for family everywhere in everyone, too, holding on to friendships for years, turning coworkers into friends into brothers and sisters.
I learned, slowly, how to acknowledge and embrace being a Mexican who happened to be raised as my mother’s kind of Indian. This was just as difficult as inventing a new family. My upbringing was cobbled together from so many different parents, I identified with almost no culture except “pop.” Who was I, really? My name itself seemed like a celebrity construct borne from a hallucinogenic orgy in a field: “Were your parents hippies?” I spent a third of my life as an Indian, a third denying I was Mexican, and this current third asking, What kind of Mexican am I? (Don’t put the emphasis on kind. Put it on I.) Yet a truth that once felt too complicated to explain in an easy, pat way isn’t anymore. There’s a fluency that comes with sincerity and repetition.
You could say—and four of my five stepfathers might agree—the same about running a con. A Latino professor from Texas confronted me at a booth at a Modern Language Association conference when he saw my name badge.
“Your mother had to be Latino,” he said. “There’s no way you’re a ‘Skyhorse.’” He badgered me to confess my background. I felt like a fraud, but he was both more right, and wrong, than he knew. While on a book tour for my first novel, I was approached at a reading by a woman related to Paul Skyhorse Durant, who would pass away later that same year. She confronted me as some kind of imposter who had stolen the Skyhorse name. I told her my story. She’d never heard of Paul Skyhorse Johnson but believed that while he might have been an Indian, he certainly had no claim to the Skyhorse name. We continued talking. She didn’t buy a book, but she heard what I had to say.
Just before she left, she said, “We Skyhorses have to stick together.”
• • •
I’m intact, but the scars are there. Some, from a losing battle with acne that gave me pimples on my fortieth birthday, are easy to see. Others aren’t. I’m irresistibly drawn to people from my past in spite of the challenges in reestablishing contact and the inevitable pain when they drift out of my life again. I’m prone to hurting people, and being hurt by people who hurt people. I can disappear from contact with friends for weeks or months at a time. I have severe chronic and undiagnosed stomach problems. There are “intimacy concerns” and “abandonment issues.”
On alcohol, which I avoided for years, I have the personality of a loose tire, driving smooth and reliable for hundreds of miles and then flying off and careening into a group of friends like a cannonball shot with belligerence and self-pity. I’d get blinding drunk at parties or out with friends and then be dry as a bone at home. I could hear my mother say, “You’re not even an interesting alcoholic,” and she was right. I had none of the harrowing tales of an addict I’m convinced my mother would have encouraged me to mine, just assorted acts of jackassery: too much loud mouthiness and puke.
Several years of therapy and Wellbutrin kept depression a restraining order’s distance away but has left me mindful of its existence, somewhere around the corner, in the dark. One time I had a panic attack that I was drinking too much water and checked myself into a New York City emergency room with a self-diagnosis of hyponatremia. When the interns performed their evening rounds, I heard the litany of urban horrors—blocked arteries, septic shock, broken limbs—before they reached my bed, which had been discreetly curtained. “This is a case of someone who believed he had poisoned himself by drinking too much water,” the gentle voice said, “so we’re going to skip this one.”
Sometimes there are night terrors. I’m in a maze where my mother and grandmother are at opposite ends, brandishing weapons and trying to kill me. Some nights I confront my mother. I say, “I’m glad you’re dead.” Here in a place somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, my mother listens and, I think, understands.
• �
�� •
In 2010, right after I mailed my letter to Candido Ulloa, I traveled alone to Istanbul, Turkey. There I followed a great parade of gypsies and revelers through cobblestone alleys to a traditional spring gypsy festival by the shores of the Bosphorus Strait. In its center was a fifty-foot-high maypole with tendrils of many-colored scrap paper that fluttered and rattled, a giant shhhhhhh in the breeze. For a few dollars, you bought scraps of paper and wrote messages to loved ones, living or departed, pinned them to a cord, and then let the wind blow these sheets out to the water.
Under a sunset like flecked gold leaf, I wrote messages to my mother and grandmother. I was seven thousand miles away from Echo Park, California, but I had carried them with me—their voices, their prejudices, their ribald humor, their unpredictable cruelty, their astonishing capacity for kindness, their torrential fears—and I knew this was where I could let them go. If a single sheet of paper found its way to my father after thirty-three years, these scraps could be carried aloft to a place where pain and sorrow have passed away and all spirits are welcomed with love and forgiveness.
On those papers was a simple message: I will give something back to you, every day, wherever you are.
Mother, take the first words you gave me to speak.
Grandma, take my first breath you gave me to breathe.
I want to believe your souls are free.
11
M
y father was calling. My father Candido was calling. It had been a week since I’d sent my letter. His first message, left on my relic of an answering machine, was the sound of a telenovela in the background and a man speaking to someone in another room before the receiver was fumbled and hung up. I knew it was Candido, but I didn’t pick up. I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. He didn’t say anything on the message. Maybe he wasn’t ready either.
The second message, a day or two later, was the same as the first. On his third call, I picked up. He asked for me by name and then spoke in Spanish.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and stopped him. “I don’t understand Spanish as well as you’re speaking it.”
“Oh, your letter was so good in Spanish.”
“I had a friend write it.”
“I am the man you are looking for,” Candido said. He didn’t use the word father. He wouldn’t use it in our conversation. I wanted him to—once. Just once.
“I have been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said.
“Well . . . good!” I said, half laughing. “Um,” I said, and paused. What should I say? I hadn’t prepared a list of questions, rants, insults—nothing. I had a sudden urge to hang up. Did I just need to know he’d call me back and hear his voice?
“You live on the East Coast now?” he asked.
“Yes, near New York City. I left Los Angeles when my grandmother died years ago.”
“Oh, I am very sorry to hear that,” he said. His tone was patient and kind. “She was a beautiful woman. I loved her very much.”
“My mother is dead, too,” I said.
Candido said nothing. I didn’t know silence could sound angry.
“Do you remember my mother?” I asked.
“Yes, but I don’t want you to be mad if I say something bad about someone that is dead.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve said many bad things about my mother.”
“She is why I left,” he said.
How many times had my mother told me I was the reason my father—or any of my fathers—had left? I couldn’t believe what I heard. I had to hear it again.
“You left because of her?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She told me if I ever came back, she’d call immigration and get me deported.” Then he told me his story, about how impossible his and my mother’s marriage was and about the last day he lived in our house. He chose his words the way an old man climbs a flight of stairs. His memory was exact and bitter, reciting events as if they’d happened last week, not over thirty years ago. How much could I trust his version of things, I wondered. Then he said, “The last time I tried to leave, your mother attacked me with a knife.”
“I believe you,” I said. I had no more doubts. I was listening to my story. “She pulled a knife on me too.”
“Oh,” he said. He seemed unfazed, so I volunteered another piece of my past.
“My mother remarried after you left,” I said.
“Oh, did she like him?”
“Well, she married four more times, so . . .”
“Four more?” he said and laughed. “That is a lot!”
“Yeah, it’s a lot,” I said. It was a lot, and, really, what more was there to say about my other fathers to my father? How could I explain to him what at the time I barely understood myself?
“Where did you go when you left?” I asked.
“I lived with some friends in an apartment in East Los Angeles for a while,” he said. “Sometimes when I wasn’t working, I’d go to Dodger Stadium with friends to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch.”
“Would you ever drive by the house?” I asked. Our street intersected with a major thoroughfare to the stadium, a five-minute drive away.
“Mmm, maybe sometimes. I don’t remember.” Had he thought about me when he drove to the baseball game? Did he sit in the stands holding a beer and think, My only son lives just a short ways from here? Or had I not crossed his mind at all? The same impulse that keeps you from jumping off an edge when you look over it kept me from asking these questions.
“Living in East Los Angeles, I met my wife, Aurora,” he said, “and we moved down to Whittier. It’s close to Echo Park, you know? Only thirty minutes away by car, very close.”
Yes, I thought. Very close.
“This whole time, all these years, we have been working, me and Aurora,” he said. “Work, work, work. There is always more work to do.”
There it was. The answer I wanted for thirty-three years. What had happened to my father? He went away, he stayed away, and then his real life began.
“How about you?” he asked. “Are you married? Do you have children?”
Here was the chance to tell my father what happened. This was the opening I’d waited years for, to flood him with all the details of my life. The path it took because he left me. I’d wring out on top of him every drop of pain, anger, dysfunction, and chaos his abandonment caused, introduce him to the secondhand fathers I had to learn to love in his absence, hand him, piece by jagged piece, memories of the broken family I assembled over a lifetime and lost for good when my grandmother died. I wanted the father I knew from pictures, that beautiful young man in his twenties, to open a door for me, so I could rush him. But that man—that father—was gone. In his place was a simple, happy man in his early sixties, weary from the toll of a full, ordinary life spent providing for, caring for, loving, and being loved by others. I’d brought the bullets to destroy him, but the gun dissolved right in my hands.
“I never married,” I said. “And I don’t have kids. Not yet. Someday, I hope.”
“Mmm, I thought I might have more grandchildren. I have one already.”
“What is your grandchild’s name?”
“Your nephew’s name is Dillan. He is your oldest sister’s child.”
“Oldest sister?” I asked.
“Yes. You have three sisters.”
• • •
Candido’s wife read my letter first. Her formal name is Maria Ulloa, the same as my mother’s first married name, but she goes by her middle name, Aurora. After a thirteen-hour workday, it’s her responsibility to start dinner and open the mail.
Aurora knew who I was—had known before she and Candy started a family of their own. She’d ask why he hadn’t reached out to me. “You have a son,” she said. “Why don’t you try to get in touch with him? Send him a letter or a card for his birthday?”
“You don’t understand,” Candido said. “If my old wife knew where I was, she would have me sent back to Mexico. She would make our lives hell.”
When Candido came home from his work as a groundskeeper for an apartment complex, Aurora handed him my letter and said, “Your son is looking for you. Now will you contact him?”
Candido read the Spanish version and was impressed by my (nonexistent) command of the language. My last name explained why a Google search he’d done the year before for Brando Ulloa came up blank. He knew he’d call me, but there was something more important to do first. He gathered his daughters Adriana, then twenty-nine, Kereny, twenty-four, and Natalie, twelve, in the living room of his compact two-bedroom house and, rubbing his sweaty palms together, blurted out, “Our family just got bigger.”
The girls were confused. Adriana thought, Mom’s pregnant again? Isn’t she too old for that?
“You have an older brother,” my father said.
• • •
Candido gave his daughters my email address to contact me if they chose. To Natalie, the youngest, the idea of a much older brother on another coast was an abstraction, something that didn’t mean much amid a teenager’s burgeoning desire for independence, privacy, and her own cell phone. For Kereny, a behavior therapist for autistic children, the situation was perhaps the most complicated. A self-described tomboy who grew up watching soccer with her father, she’d considered herself the son he’d never had.
“God gave you three daughters,” Kereny joked with Candido, “because you always wanted a son.” He doesn’t remember, but I wonder what crossed Candido’s mind when she said this. Did he flinch? Smile weakly? Excuse himself to the kitchen? I’m sure his appearance betrayed nothing, but I’d like to think he sat uncomfortably in his chair and felt just a little sick to his stomach, the way men with secrets in movies squirm and perspire as proof that they have a conscience.
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