Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  Succumbing to my mother’s mythmaking made me realize that every storyteller needs more than good stories. He needs to understand why he’s telling the stories he tells. Narrative is breath. My mother lied in her stories for the same reason I’ve told the truth in this one. From the breath my grandmother gave me to the breath it takes for you to read this sentence, stories sustain us. They carry us through the lives we convince ourselves we can’t escape to get to the lives we ought or need to live instead. They create out of endless chaos a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  It took the writing of this book, which I’ve been thinking about for almost twenty years, to understand what made my mother tell such incredible tales. Stories can help you survive. They can transform your life—they can transform you—from where you are into wherever you want to be. My mother turned her cage of a bedroom into a castle. Her prison became a launch pad for escape into a whole new identity. Perhaps that’s why my mother was such a fan of killing herself off in her stories. She’d reveal that her brain tumor had taken one last fatal turn for the worst and, with time so short, revel in the temporary attention I gave her, over and over again. Whenever I hear that someone “dying” of an incurable disease has tricked an always disbelieving public through a fake Facebook profile, I sigh and think, Mom? But I understand.

  Strangely, so do others. I talk about my mother often when I give class talks about my first novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, which is set in the largely Mexican-American neighborhood (pending gentrification) of Echo Park. How is it that someone with the most American Indian of names came to write a story set among Mexicans? It’s impossible to talk about that book without telling my and my mother’s stories.

  In Idaho, I met an American Indian college student named Effie Hernandez. I’d never told my story to an Indian before. Here at last, I thought, was my reckoning. I’d have to pay for all the attention and special treatment my name had given me. It was my turn to stay silent and absorb someone’s rightful anger for appropriating a name, a culture, a people. After a thorough grilling during the class, Effie approached me afterward.

  “I was prepared not to like you,” she said, “but I understand now why you lived the life you did. Of all the things your mother could have wanted to be, she wanted to be an American Indian. That’s pretty amazing.”

  The great American Indian writer Sherman Alexie once joked, “Indians have to be so careful around non-Indians. We just make stuff up.” I’m almost as good a storyteller as my mother is, but I’m a terrible liar. My mother wasn’t an Indian, but by Sherman’s metric, she was the perfect Indian storyteller.

  I’m not an Indian either but feel I’m still somewhere between two names and two cultures. It’s difficult because I can’t even occupy the gray space mixed children try to claim for themselves. I get emails from Stanford’s American Indian alum network that say, “Dear Native Alum,” while I struggle to learn Spanish beyond a second-grade level. In New York, where I live, I’m less Mexican or American Indian and more some kind of ethnic superhero—Passing Man! Capable of passing for whatever any member of another ethnicity wants me to be! In their Indian or Pakistani or Latino eyes, they scan me over and ask, Are you like me? Yes, I nod, but who is that? Who am I? I’ve been mistaken for Turkish, Pakistani, Indian American, Sri Lankan, Persian, Afghani, Egyptian, and a dozen other ethnicities. Each man—for it is usually a man who mistakes me as one of his own—says, “Oh, you’d be right at home in my country!” The feeling of another man claiming me as a member of his own people and his own homeland is irresistible to someone who feels he truly has neither.

  I’m also somewhere between two fathers. The father who left me, and Frank, the father who stayed. He tried to raise me in between all the men my mother married. I’m no longer a boy who needs to wait under a gauzy streetlight on a curb outside a bar or hide in the backseat of a car for a father to take me home. Two fathers are already there waiting for me. One has something I want; the other has something I need. I can’t decide which father is which.

  When I dream of my own children, there’s a fiery rosy-cheeked daughter named Nova. Or a son, who’s still nameless because it took so long for me to find my own name. In my dreams, I sing to my children in a golden lullaby, “I am your father.” I will teach you, every day, what every father I was lucky enough to have taught me. I will put your needs first, above my fear, anxiety, and depression, and you will help me appreciate chaos more than I did when I was a child. I will strive to be perfect and fall far short. I will fail you. I will embarrass you. I will be frustrated with you for petty reasons that will later make me ashamed. I will expose you to—I hope—limited levels of familial insanity. I will be there for you every day of my whole life.

  (I hear my mother saying, like at the end of a movie when the credits begin to roll, “Do you think Brando makes it?”)

  Of all the things the men I call my fathers taught me, the lesson that matters most is spoken together in six different voices: sometimes it is enough to survive. And when I am a father at last, I want to gather the men who fathered me over a large family-style dinner that is a physical impossibility except in my dreams. After a few drinks, our memories would recede like the tide and the day-to-day lives we lead would spill out in all their banal glory, and we’d laugh at how ordinary our days have become, and aren’t we grateful for that type of steadiness in our lives now? A chorus of six men calling me Son might sound ludicrous to you, but to me it’s the sound of survival; voices that have the power, by the very noise they make, to turn madness into song.

  Closure

  You might as well know that I’m not looking at my mistakes, and I’m sorry about that. No one wants to hear anything bad about one’s own family.

  I’ve sinned. Who hasn’t? I did a lot of foolish things to be loved; I’m surprised I wasn’t killed. I used to pick up all kinds of men because I was bored at home. Or maybe I was lonely. I wonder why I never focused on the people close to me. Why did I go looking for people who were so far away?

  I don’t know why I can’t be honest with anybody. For a very long time in life, I wanted to give up. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. If anything, I’m feeling mad. No more rages, though. Well . . . I can’t say that, but I can say love looks a lot different as you grow older.

  Brando, I did a lot of things for you and because of you. I could have left you many times, but I didn’t. You’re all I’ve ever wanted in a child. I know you don’t think I did enough as a mother, but as you can see now, I had no choice but to share you with others and the rest of this fucking world. There’s too much to do, too much to see. Make a lot of noise.

  I haven’t really gone anywhere in such a long time because I wanted to feel safe. If anyone takes anything away from this book, it’s this: don’t waste your life hiding away like I did.

  —Excerpted from my mother’s unpublished memoirs, circa 1997

  C

  losure isn’t happiness, but it’s a certain kind of peace. When I found Candido, I wanted to know where my other fathers—Robert, Paul Skyhorse Johnson, Pat, and Rudy—were. Each was so different as a father in how he taught me manhood, yet every man had vanished in the same way, under a murky cloud of his own making. Would their paths resemble each other’s, too, when they stopped being my father?

  A late night Google search revealed Paul Skyhorse Johnson’s death (brain cancer) in a northeastern city in 2002 and a funeral service paid for by a loving octogenarian female companion. His biological son, Dustin, was the only living relative the coroner’s office could track down and signed the paperwork authorizing Paul’s cremation.

  Dustin had no contact with Paul before high school and, in a weird inverse of how I discovered I wasn’t Indian, didn’t know his own Indian name until he was sixteen. Dustin made peace with Paul in his last years, and though he knew who I was, he harbored no animosity or anger that his own father had spent Dustin’s childhood with an imaginary son ins
tead of him.

  I never met Dustin, but I’d like to think we could have been friends, maybe even brothers. After all, we shared the same father. I lost that chance when Dustin passed away at thirty-one from a pulmonary embolism in November 2010.

  • • •

  I was in high school when Robert made an unannounced visit to Echo Park. He got as far as the front porch. My grandmother made him a can of corned beef hash—“And that’s all I’m gonna do for the bum”—while he tossed me a Playboy as some kind of reconciliation gift. He sat with my mother and asked for a loan, maybe a place to stay for a few nights. His trademark laugh and charm were intact, but time had swollen both his and my mother’s bodies. The dynamic sexual chemistry he shared with my mother was gone. He finished his corned beef on the front stairs and was gone before his dish hit the kitchen sink.

  “It’s been good seeing you, Son,” he said.

  Years later, in spring 2007, Robert sent me a one line email—“hope everything is well with you!”—then in a longer follow-up caught me up on everything that had happened after he left us in the eighties. It was a life that included, he said, a “two-hundred-mile high-speed chase down Interstate 70” that ended with a collision of police cars and his tires shot out. In a One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest plea deal, he was sent to a seven-year stay in a mental facility to avoid prison. He was using a pseudonym: “My name was Timothy O’Dell. Now, do I look Irish?” Upon his parole, he settled in Topeka, Kansas, where he made an unsuccessful bid before the city council to run for mayor on a platform to legalize marijuana.

  “At least I tried, I always try!” he wrote. “It’s nice hearing from you, my son.”

  “My son.” Was I his son? Wasn’t this just another broken man claiming a piece of a son that wasn’t his? I sent several follow-up emails over the next three years, first to establish some kind of guarded relationship and then to try to interview him for this book, but the bounceback said his AOL account had been deactivated. For a while, he had a MySpace page, where I noted with wry satisfaction that he’d subtracted about twenty years from his given age. This was another disappearing act, but by this time I should have known that Robert would reappear, on his own accord, when he was ready.

  Robert’s death, like my mother’s, came by telephone. A friendly woman named Sharon with the Office of Forensic Pathology at the Law Enforcement Center in Topeka said that Robert’s tribe in Alaska needed my permission to proceed with handling my “father’s final needs.” He’d been in the Shawnee County Coroner’s Office a week, and time for his decaying body was short.

  “I’m not really his son,” I said, sounding uncertain. “I mean, he was married to my mother and was my stepfather for a while.”

  “You don’t need to be biologically related to make this decision,” she said. “Perhaps you should contact Robert’s friend and work it out with her.”

  Sharon put me in touch with Eva, whose first details about Robert’s life in Kansas were promising. He’d moved in with Eva’s mother, Lois, paying his share of the rent, helping out with chores, carrying the chainsaw around when wood needed cutting. He took lithium every day to keep his manic episodes in check. He graduated from MySpace to Twitter, where he collected over five hundred followers, and tweeted messages regularly to his favorite celebrity, Kim Kardashian. During the holidays, he was a paragon of paternal virtue to any neighborhood children that stopped by the house. This was important to him, he told Eva, as he had been adopted, mistreated, and possibly a victim of incest.

  There were problems, sure. Using Lois’s bathroom one afternoon, Eva’s sister found small piles of wood shavings on a counter. Bursting into Robert’s bedroom, Eva found him crouched against a series of peepholes drilled into the wall with his pants down, masturbating. Then money and credit cards went missing. Why didn’t you kick him out? my inner voice asked, but having lived with Robert, I already had the answer. He helped out less and spoke in wistful tones, circling around a grand plan to hop in Lois’s car one day and drive out to Los Angeles so he could visit his son, Brando—but not before a brief Vegas stopover to put his formidable gambling skills to use.

  One afternoon in February 2012, Robert told Lois he was going to the local casino and borrowed her car with twenty or thirty dollars in his pocket. He didn’t come home that night. He hated to drive in the dark because of his failing eyesight, so Lois assumed he’d stopped off somewhere so that he wouldn’t crash. Robert didn’t come back the next day, either. Before she could call the police, two detectives came to Robert’s residence to inform Lois that her car had been found and, by the way, was she aware that her .357 Magnum was missing?

  Robert committed suicide in that car, parked in a back casino lot, on the thirteenth of February, 2012. No personal identification of any kind could be found, nor were there any provisions for how to deal with his body.

  “There’s no money to pay to clean the car,” Eva said, annoyed. “His body left it a mess.” It sounded cold, but I understood how much work there is left for the living when someone dies.

  I then got an email from the St. George Tanaq Corporation, a company that administers stewardship over oil rights for Aleutian Indians. Robert was a member and had named me as his son. Its email began “If Robert was your father . . .”

  If. How many other men could that word if apply to? I wrote back with dread—and prurient interest. Had Robert made amends by naming me as the heir or beneficiary to any of his oil shares? No. Had he bequeathed to me some kind of formal tribal membership? Not exactly. He “named me as a son” once, in 1993, when he was trying to obtain for me a college scholarship through its foundation.

  What an incredible gesture of kindness. How moving for him, I thought, to cling to the dream of me as a son in the same way that I clung to the dream of him being some kind of father. Then I thought some more. If this was the one time he’d named me as a son—to collect scholarship money—when did he become aware that I was in college and how had he intended to give me the cash? Was that scholarship for me or was it yet another con to defraud money for him? The answer in Robert’s mind, I’m sure, was probably both.

  At the last moment, someone from Robert’s actual family stepped forward and took his ashes back to Alaska. I imagined them being scattered and carried aloft by his sixteen thunderous “Mighty Grandfathers,” conjured by a heart that, with that gunshot, at last found a way to be sincere. His head may have been torn to pieces in that car, but his soul is intact, sprinting away from that parking lot, dashing shirtless across a cold moonlit prairie, whooping it up as he heads west to see his son, with a quick detour to Vegas to hit his lucky streak. I’m watching him go, for miles and miles, rooting for him to outrun those police sirens and that hard cask of big sky daylight that’s closing in.

  Here, Robert, on this page, I’ll be your son if you’ll be my dad. Keep running. Nobody’s gonna catch you this time.

  • • •

  Pat has, as of this writing, neither been found nor established contact. Most of the time, I’m happy to keep it that way. But if he showed up again, I’d probably let him back in my life. I’m a forty-year-old whose nostalgia for his high school years is arriving right on time. I also know he’d break my heart again. I am sometimes still too much my mother’s son.

  • • •

  It’s been fifteen years since I spoke to Rudy, the last man I was forced to call Dad; the father my mother entrusted to watch over me should anything happen to her.

  I heard nothing about or from him until June 2012, when my ex-girlfriend Kitt received a series of angry phone messages from a regional collection agency saying that Rudy or his lawyer needed to contact it immediately. Kitt’s phone number, unchanged from the days I lived with her, had been attached to Rudy’s Social Security number, meaning that all collection agencies would be sent to my—now her—front door.

  I found Rudy on a social media site in the summer of 2013 b
ut declined to contact him for this book, leery of reestablishing a connection. His ability to stay out of my life, if I am honest, is the only gift of his that has ever satisfied me. I don’t think he needs me, anyway. A quick perusal of his page shows that he has remarried and appears to be raising a young boy. He’s maybe ten or eleven and smiling. Perhaps Rudy can be the father to him that I’d never let him be to me.

  • • •

  As for my sisters, there’s not a middle or an ending to a story that’s just begun. The novelty of discovering a long-lost relative—on both my end and theirs—has in the past three years given way to the realities of day-to-day life, with so many ways to stay in touch but seemingly so few opportunities to do so. Adriana is a schoolteacher with two sons of her own, now five-year-old Dillan and newborn Marco. Kereny works full-time as a behavior therapist and is trying to find her way through her twenties. Natalie, just turned fifteen, wants an iPad and a bedroom door with a lock, not a long-lost brother who didn’t have enough money to fly to Los Angeles and attend her quinceañera. Not only was I too late for most of the important moments in these girls’ lives, I’m missing new ones.

  One year my birthday gift from my sisters was their version of a memoir—a greatest-hits photo album collecting pictures from each of their life’s important moments appended with bouncy captions in pink ink and a dedication from Adriana:

  Here are a few memories for you to look at maybe begin to get to know our history a little bit better. The rest of the album is for you to continue to add more photos of our memories together. The front of the album is reserved for a complete family photo of us including you!