Take This Man

by Brando Skyhorse

  This was how the mayor did business.

  • • •

  My grandmother loved the movies. She’d switch on cable in the morning like she was checking with a good friend on the day’s gossip. If nothing good was playing, she’d take the bus downtown to dilapidated one-dollar-a-ticket movie palaces that’d become makeshift homeless hotels, staving off bums with her house keys in the bathrooms. Her favorite memories were of watching movies in those same theaters with her mother, Lucille. She died in 1941, but my grandmother spoke of her daily, as if she’d just gotten off the phone with her. Lucille often needed “time away” from being a mother, and she’d send June, whom she nicknamed Eek for her inability to speak in a clear voice, to a series of convents and reform schools, including the Ventura School for Girls. They’d celebrate June’s releases by going to the movies. When she was eleven, Lucille took June to the premiere of City Lights, standing outside the Los Angeles theater downtown as part of a teeming mass of twenty-five thousand fans lining Broadway, tiptoeing and flamingo-necking for a glimpse of Charlie Chaplin. When the churning crowd almost crushed June, her mother beat her with a belt for being clumsy. Once, June was released to the custody of a family friend who accompanied her to Long Beach, where her mother was living. She arrived on the day of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that killed over one hundred people. Lucille said, “You brought the damn earthquake with you, Eek!”

  Gone With the Wind was the last film she and her mother saw together. When Clark Gable said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” there was a collective audience gasp.

  Lucille stood up and shouted, “You tell her, Rhett!”

  My grandmother valued the dead. On her always-on TV, June catalogued the opening credits of black-and-whites with a Hollywood Babylon encyclopedic knowledge of every deceased actor’s sordid backstory: “Gable, he’s dead. Womanizer. Monroe, she OD’d; beautiful but no talent. Montgomery Clift, he died a drunk. My God, they’re all dead! Clift was such a gorgeous man but liked to swing both ways.” (Confused look from a six-year-old me.) “You know, he liked women and men!”

  Like many of the women in my family, my grandmother rooted for the bad girls in movies. Every month, cable played the same twelve movies multiple times a week; an endless loop of my grandmother’s favorite roles. Shirley MacLaine tearing up her “ungrateful” daughter Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, my grandmother shouting in unison with Joan from her oversized recliner, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas!” Susan Hayward played Barbara Graham in one of my grandmother’s favorites, the “based on a true story” potboiler I Want to Live! My grandmother told me again and again that Graham lived behind our property for a few months before she was arrested in 1953 for pistol whipping an elderly woman to death in a botched robbery and sent to die in San Quentin State Prison’s gas chamber.

  “What a woman!” my grandmother said.

  I’d walk up to the thicket of trees and bushes that separated our backyard from Graham’s former house to see what ghosts this pretty murderess had left behind. What I found were swarms of cats the house’s current owner hosted, fed, and watered. When he died, the cats mewed for days as they succumbed to malnutrition. By the time the stragglers crawled through the chain-link fence to our yard looking for food and water, most of the cats had died. Solemn, I rattled kibble in pie tins for the survivors but my grandmother said it was hopeless.

  “It’s the Graham curse,” she said. (John Waters would have loved my grandmother.)

  Floating above them all in my grandmother’s canon was Saint Bette Davis. When Davis’s daughter wrote My Mother’s Keeper in 1985, a Mommie Dearest–style memoir, my grandmother was as indignant as if the book had been written about her.

  “What a disgraceful, ungrateful child, telling all her family’s secrets for money,” she said (writing this sentence, I nod uncomfortably) and was moved enough to write Davis a fan letter pledging her support through this difficult time.

  You could also find my grandmother burrowing into a stack of murder mysteries from her Book-of-the-Month Club along with True Crime or Official Detective magazines she purchased at the local news stand. The magazines, printed on a ground stock paper with a buxom woman falling out of her tube top on the cover, were anthologies of murders or burglaries committed across the country, most of which involved rapes or bludgeonings from jealous lovers. When the Night Stalker serial killer crimes gripped Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, my grandmother ordered a small pistol that shot mini tear gas cartridges from one of the companies that advertised in the magazine. She kept it under her pillow next to a crucifix.

  Years later, when it came time to sort through my grandmother’s possessions, in her “valuables” drawer was the gun (never fired), a tub of talcum dusting powder calcified into a brittle chalk, and a crisp thank-you note with the letters BD in a royal blue art deco font, a handwritten expression of gratitude from Bette Davis for my grandmother’s fan letter. To me now, these things are my grandmother.

  • • •

  If my Grandma June was a factory steam whistle calling me to work and my grandfather Emilio a whisper to be ignored, my mother was a siren whose songs were her stories.

  “You almost weren’t born,” my mother says. I’m watching her, wide-eyed, expectant, an eight-year-old perched on her bed mouthing words I know by heart.

  “You were on a date?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And then you got in a fight with the guy who brought you to a park in his car?”

  “It was a lovers’ lane,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where men take women to talk them into something. I didn’t want to talk that night.”

  “And then you left the car and another guy showed up?”

  “He was very handsome,” my mother says. “He pulled alongside me and asked if I was okay. ‘Let me drive you home,’ he said. He seemed like a gentleman.”

  “You got in?” I ask.

  “He was a real fox,” my mother says. “Really hot for a white guy.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He drove further into the woods. Deeper and deeper, like he was looking for something. All he told me was his name. ‘I’m Ted,’ he said.”

  “And then?” I ask.

  “Ted found some kind of clearing, stopped the car, turned off the headlights, got out, and opened the trunk. I looked behind me and saw he was holding something. Silver, like a pipe. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “These bikers—Hells Angels—roared up and shouted, ‘What’s going on?’ He ran off into the woods, and one of the bikers gave me a ride back home. They saved my life.”

  “And then?” I ask, edging up on my mother’s bed like a puppy. She smiles, cocking her eyebrows as if she’d forgotten we were talking at all.

  “And then?” I ask, about to explode.

  “Then I saw his face on TV. His name was Ted Bundy.”

  “Wow!” I’d say. “Ted Bundy!”

  “They won’t execute him until he loses his looks,” she says. ­“Bundy’s adaptable; he’s a Sagittarius. Not a strong Aries, like me. Or Hitler. But if Ted Bundy had killed me that night,” my mother says, “I’d have never been able to meet your father and have you.”

  What a story! Delusion requires charity, which I, like many people who loved her, was more than happy to offer. There was something about my mother that made you not only want to follow her off a cliff but also to cushion her blow when you both hit the ground. She didn’t perform chores or cook any meals; when my mother made ­dinner—and I loved her dishes—it was a tub of cottage cheese sprinkled with Lawry’s seasoned salt, or a pound of ground beef mashed into tiny pebbles and either fried to crispy burnt scabs or snacked on raw. My mother nourished me with words.

 
She started me off young, teaching me to read at two, when, she said, I plopped a book in her lap.

  “Teach me,” I said. (The book, in her later retellings, morphed into a dictionary.) My mother enrolled me briefly at a Montessori preschool. I spoke out of turn and was punished with an hour of sitting on a green felt mat in the center of the classroom.

  “If that’s how you punish talking, my son’s already smarter than you,” she told my teacher. I didn’t finish out the week. Later there was a Christian school with a no-hair-below-the-collar policy. My “Indian” hair was to my shoulders.

  “Jesus had long hair,” I said, and was gone the same day.

  My mother bought me phonics workbooks by the stack and checked my answers each night after work. If I did well, as a reward she’d let me brush her long, cherished hair, guiding my hands with a heavy brush across her scalp and down to her waist in a slow, ­languorous rhythm that was like sipping hot tea.

  I graduated to learning, and participating in, my mother’s narratives. I couldn’t hear the lies in her stories. Their frequency was too low for my young ears. Much the way certain singers perform a song a different way each time they sing it, my mother told her stories a different way every time she spoke them. Every one of her stories had at their core one seedling of truth that allowed her, like a jazz musician, to improvise its telling depending on her audience. I loved being her “rhythm section”—sharing our secret language of winks, nods, smiles, and interjections that corroborated her stories as they evolved on the spot in their multiple retellings. In some versions, her embellishments ran over her cup’s edges like hot foam; in others, she’d carve out the bottoms of her multiple truths to fit whatever awkward conversational moment she’d stumbled into, like when she met someone eager to hear more about her Indian knowledge and ways. Her history and her experiences were mercury in a barometer, fluctuating based on what she felt you wanted to believe. My mother didn’t enjoy movies like my grandmother; those were other people’s stories. She wanted to be the story and live her life through these stories. In her stories, though, death, like angry smoke, always found a way in.

  “I won’t see you grow old,” my mother said. “I’m going to die young.”

  “No!” I said. “You can’t die!” Every day, she told me I was wrong.

  “I won’t live past forty,” she said.

  Forty came and went. Then: “I won’t see you graduate from high school.” That passed, too. Finally, bored with years of death scares, I said, “You’re not going to die, Mom.”

  “You’re wrong, Brando,” she said. “When I was little, I lied to Death. Death doesn’t forget.”

  When my mother was four, my grandmother moved to Lompoc, California, for a brief time to get away from Los Angeles and Emilio. June and Emilio had dated off and on for several years before June had my mother. “Learn how to take money from men you don’t want to marry,” June’s mother, Lucille, told her. “He’s a chango, a monkey man with a tail between his legs, like all Filipinos.” June took Emilio’s gifts and rejected his marriage proposals. Then June met my biological grandfather, Tomás, at a bar in the Grand Central Market downtown. He taught her how to drink beer the right way, cerveza mexicana, he said, with a lemon wedge she sucked on and a dash of salt she licked off the rim of his glass. She shared many cervezas mexicanas with Tomás until he learned she was pregnant.

  “I can’t be tied down to a woman,” Tomás said, and left. My grandmother wasn’t surprised. Her own biological father, Steven Scolari, had long since vanished, sending her every couple years from Europe treasured penny postcards with sailboats on them. The women that raised me were themselves raised by stepfathers. They believed men left simply because that’s what men did. To expect more from a man meant you’d better find yourself a woman.

  While in Lompoc, little Maria stepped on a splinter that infected her foot and led to blood poisoning that almost ended her life. Death appeared at the foot of her bed and beckoned her to a tree outside her window. She agreed to go but changed her mind and hid under the covers. My mother didn’t follow Death that long night and survived. The scare brought June and Maria back to Los Angeles. Only then did June agree to be Emilio’s wife, bearing him his own son, Oscar, who moved away as a young man and was never close to his mother or half sister.

  A pudgy, well-behaved child with pigtails, Maria won good citizenship awards in school seven years running. She was a good girl at home, too, and couldn’t understand why her mother would sometimes, while combing Maria’s long, tangled hair, lose her patience and strike her back with a wooden brush. Maria turned to her collection of ceramic statues of Catholic saints for answers, but they kept quiet. When June threatened to kick my teenage mother out of the house, Maria smashed her saints to pieces and tossed them into a garbage bag. It would not be the last time my mother cleaned up her past this way and erased any trace of something to which she’d been so devoted.

  Maria stopped being a good girl at Belmont High School. She had either on a dare or through intimidation joined a street gang and became a chola.

  “They’re a teenybopper gang,” June scoffed. “They don’t even use knives!”

  The experience was scary enough, though, to get June and Emilio to transfer my mother to Hollywood Professional, an all-grades private school on Hollywood Boulevard that, in 1963, cost three hundred dollars a semester. A half-hour bus ride from Echo Park, the school was for kids who needed classes arranged around a budding musician’s or actor’s schedule. At Hollywood Professional, Maria was free to wear her long, dyed, blood red hair beehive high. She showed off her dark skin in tight black dresses and spoke what little Spanish June had taught her to attract the white boys. She wanted to be new, dangerous, and sexy, everything she had never been and could never be in Echo Park. Here my mother would come to understand the power of being exotic; the power of being “the other.”

  She refused a small role in Spartacus offered by a casting agent who hung out at the school. She met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, high on coke and drunk all the time, doing his best to transform his drug-addled palsy into charm as he played with her hair during study period, called her “Baby,” and said he’d ask his brother Brian to write a song for her. She hung out with James Mason’s daughter, Portland, and earned a bevy of female admirers and friends by throwing a young, bratty Charlene Tilton (future jezebel of TV’s prime-time soap opera Dallas) down a flight of stairs. She was voted Duchess of the Harvest Ball, 1963, and made rich friends who encouraged her to live with the kind of reckless, self-destructive abandon only money and privilege can afford. Her best friend was a spoiled Bel Air Jewish princess named Betty. They drank, drugged, and partied together until the early nineteen seventies, when Betty married an Asian man, moved to Florida, had a child, and in a fit of depression and rage bashed her baby girl’s head in with a hammer and was sent to death row.

  After Hollywood Professional, my mother had fallen in love with a sandy-haired blond named Mike and gave birth to two children before me, both of whom had befallen their own separate inconceivable tragedies. A son named Shane, who in his black-and-white photograph looked like a porcelain doll with onyx marbles for eyes, had a congenital heart defect. A hole in his heart, which my mother instinctively knew was there but that an unsympathetic hospital staff ignored, claimed his life at three. My mother’s snow-white, blue-eyed, blonde daughter, Janaine Deborah Patterson, had been kidnapped, also at three, by a jealous babysitter and disappeared. The police scoffed at my mother’s claims to the Caucasian baby, letting crucial time lapse after Janaine’s abduction. In a grainy color photograph taken in our house’s backyard in the 1970s, my mother holds Janaine, dressed in a pink jumper, high in her arms—the one piece of evidence that my mother had given birth to a beautiful girl that nobody believed was hers.

  What else didn’t people believe? I mean, how much of this was true?

  Spartacus had been in theaters for t
hree years when my mother transferred to Hollywood Professional. Dennis Wilson never went there, though his younger, shyer brother, Carl Wilson did, to escape ravenous fans at Hawthorne High. Portland Mason and Charlene Tilton, who went to Hollywood High School several years later, aren’t noted among Hollywood Professional’s illustrious alumni. There were no women on Florida’s death row at the time my mother claimed that Betty was there.

  Shane and Janaine both exist in photographs, Shane’s in my memory, Janaine’s in my possession. While I maybe saw a trace of my mother in Shane’s face, I realize now there’s no possible way a woman with my mother’s features and skin color gave birth to a blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned girl. Years later, I noticed a tiny time stamp on the trim of Janaine’s photo that says August 1977, which meant that Janaine would have been my younger, and not older, fake sister. Yet for years these children were resurrected whenever I misbehaved, a make-believe sister and brother to go with my make-believe father and ethnicity, who met horrible make-believe ends. My mother had so much pain to share that she had to invent people to hurt.

  Yet in every lie she told, she always made sure to give something back to you. It could be a Weight Watchers meeting where she claimed a ribbon for losing fifty pounds after submitting a falsified weight loss card. Then she’d hit another meeting at another Weight Watchers branch later in the week, claiming the same weight loss ribbon twice.

  “She lost all that weight in six weeks?” someone whispered. “She looks great!”

  “If I can do it,” she told a rapt group of hopeful women, “you can do it too.”

  It could be the Overeaters Anonymous group where she ran into John DeLorean, the disgraced auto executive who had beaten government drug trafficking charges and was at OA because he’d “started eating lots of junk food during his trial” and needed to find “a self-­empowering Christian way to lose weight.” He told his fellow OA’ers not to lose faith and gave my mother his business card.