“You can’t keep staying up for me,” Robert said before going out one night. “A boy needs his sleep.”
“You’re the only one here who can do math,” I insisted.
“Know why?” Robert asked. “I’m a jailbird. Counting’s your life in jail. Gimme the book.”
He penciled the solutions in my textbook before he left. I checked my work against his and realized I’d gotten most of the problems wrong. In a delirious late-night panic, I copied Robert’s answers and scrubbed them out of my textbook, their faint shadows popping sweat beads on my forehead when I opened the book in class. What would happen if such a big rise in my grades gave me away?
I got a D on my homework. Robert had completed every fourth or fifth problem correctly and made up random answers for the rest.
Never ask a con to help you con someone else. And always learn your lesson. Next time I “checked” my work with a friend over the phone by asking him what he put down for each problem and wrote down all his answers.
I didn’t get caught. This was easy! Robert taught me well.
When a kid dared me to break my LCD digital watch, which he’d (accurately) sneered was “cheap and plastic,” I smashed it in anger on a tree planter in the school’s concrete playground and pinned it on him. The watch had been an honorable-mention prize from a candy drive, earned for “selling” four cases of hard-as-calcium World’s Finest Almond Chocolate bars. My mother and grandmother, disappointed with “stingy” local shop owners buying just one or two candy bars and afraid of my traveling in the neighborhood alone, bought over one hundred dollars of candy themselves and stored it Armageddon-style in our freezer. Money was tight enough already from both bimonthly welfare checks and colorful coupon booklets of food stamps, but my grandmother had a perverse sense of pride at being able to “game” the system to try to win the drive. What she hadn’t counted on was the mega-choco-capitalists in the upper grades whose parents worked in factories and could sell three hundred chocolate bars in an afternoon.
“Someone just took that watch off your wrist and broke it?” my grandmother asked. “You know how much damn chocolate we still have in the freezer?”
I knew. But I was convinced that, like Robert, I’d get away with it. Then my grandmother burst into my classroom before recess and interrupted my teacher midlecture.
“Why’d you let a kid take my grandson’s watch and not punish him?” she shouted. Kids froze in terror, like someone had set off a discipline bomb. “If you won’t do anything, hand the boy over to me so I can spank him right here out in the hall!” Mrs. Perkins fire-blanketed my grandmother and then spoke with her quietly for a minute. They looked over at me and laughed. Whenever adults laugh together, a kid knows trouble’s coming.
“Can you talk with me and your grandmother a moment?” Mrs. Perkins asked. Then she left me alone with my grandmother.
“Are you a bum like Robert?” she asked. “Don’t ever lie to me again.” Just before she left, she said, “I thought you were a man.”
• • •
“Let’s skip your grandma’s breakfast and get corn dogs at Venice Beach,” Robert said. I’d already learned not to go anywhere with Robert without (a) a bus pass, (b) emergency cash, and (c) spare change to call home. I didn’t have emergency cash that morning—Robert knew every one of my piggy bank hiding places and had cleaned them out—but I didn’t want to stay behind and listen to my mother and grandmother argue. I could be out exploring uncharted worlds with “my” father. Or, at least, a father figure.
“Okay,” I said.
Robert pied-piper strutted up and down the Venice boardwalk in oversized sunglasses that covered his face, scoping out “bikini babes” and disappearing into men’s rooms for minutes at a time.
“When are we getting corn dogs?” I asked.
“I didn’t come here to eat!” he said. “All I got is this,” he said, and showed me a dime.
“I’m starving,” I said, and pocketed the coin.
He picked a clear spot on the boardwalk and approached a stranger. “Can you help me get sha-sha-something to eat for my shun?” he asked. Robert was skilled at conversations when he had time to gauge the gullibility of his mark, but in a cold approach where he needed directness, he was sometimes out of sync. I stood mute by his side like a mangy German shepherd nestled at the feet of a homeless person. In a half hour, he collected four cents. Stuttering panhandlers don’t make much money.
On the ride back, two transit cops pulled our bus over a couple miles from home. They stepped hard into the stairwell like they were boarding a boat with contraband. Robert sat at attention. I heard a cop say “sunglasses.” Robert threw his shades to the floor and kicked them under the seats.
One cop took the lead, patting his hand upon each seat rest back as he walked up the bus, while the other stood by the front exit doors. He walked right to our aisle, and then asked Robert to stand up and walk off the bus. I followed. This was my father now, right? You stick by your father.
“Look, I just wanna go home,” I said in a cracked voice that made the cop laugh.
We got off the bus, and I sat on the grimy curb as Robert was cuffed against the transit police car. The passengers stared at us from behind the scratched tinted windows, and then grew bored and were driven away. The cops ran his name and found an outstanding warrant. An LAPD car arrived. Robert made a futile gesture to ask one of the cops to “give his sha-sha-shun” a ride home, but cops ignore men in handcuffs. Nobody spoke to me, so I walked down the street to find a pay phone. The cops drove Robert off.
With Robert’s dime, I called my house from a pay phone a block away.
“I think I can walk home,” I said. “But it’s really far.” Two miles on Sunset Boulevard was about an hour’s walk, which could have been Mount Everest to a Los Angeles boy, even one raised without a car.
“I’ll come get you,” my grandmother said.
When my grandmother arrived, she found me crouched in a ball near a parking lot dumpster. I was curled up trying to stop myself from going to the bathroom in my pants, but my grandmother thought I was cowering in fear and I didn’t correct her. We got into Mike’s car, the drunk from across the street. He had a beer in a brown bag between his legs and drove us home with a surprisingly steady hand.
“You doing okay?” Mike asked, and took a swig.
“Forget okay,” my grandmother answered for me. “Brando, why in the hell did you get off the goddamn bus?”
• • •
“You won’t believe what they pulled me in for,” Robert said when my mother bailed him out.
“What did they—” I asked.
“Uh-uh-uhn-believable,” he stammered, cutting me off. Robert never talked about what got him in trouble. He’d only talk about what he’d do after he got in trouble.
“Let me make it up to you,” Robert told me. “Disneyland?”
Somehow Robert acquired a car—there’s not enough evidence in my memory to use the word bought—and he, my mother, and I headed to Disneyland. I’d gone over a dozen times with my grandmother, though she hated the place. “I like roller coasters, not baby rides,” she said. My grandmother couldn’t drive and hated cars but could plot out a bus route from Echo Park to anywhere in the Southland. She and I would catch the Disneyland special on skid row, a block away from the Greyhound bus station on Sixth and Los Angeles Streets. We waded through bum fights, ignoring harassers or harassing them back. “What kind of man begs an old woman for spare change?” she’d shout. Later, as the park was closing, she’d get us to the last bus out, parked outside the tall hedge walls, and then ask the bus drivers to inch up the curb until we had a good view of the closing fireworks.
At Disneyland with Robert and my mother, I felt I was part of a real American family, like one of the dozens of grumpy, nagging trios slogging around the park. How happy they must be elsew
here when they’re not at the Happiest Place on Earth! I led Robert to the Tinker Bell Toy Shop underneath Sleeping Beauty Castle so he could “make it up” to me by adding to my stuffed animal collection. The shop was a maze of Eeyores, Tiggers, and Winnie the Poohs that frolicked throughout in soft mounds. Atop an open, dramatically lit platform sat a monstrous five-foot-tall Mickey Mouse. Robert picked up a doll here, a Donald Duck there, weighing them in his hands as if they were loaves of fresh bread. He bought me nothing. I went outside with my mother to sulk.
Imagine that first burst of delight, then, when Robert emerged carrying the enormous Mickey Mouse itself, a stuffed animal that weighed as much as I did. Was this really mine? For a stuffed animal menagerie, here was the Hemingway trophy kill of a lifetime!
Tourists gawked, pointed, smiled. I had a minute of happiness before a knotting fear plunked in my stomach. Where did he get the money to buy this? On the other side of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, a Japanese couple asked if they could take their picture with Mickey. They posed with him on the guardrail next to the castle moat. Robert charged them five dollars and then carried Mickey up to the railing that surrounded the grotty moat surrounding the castle and pushed him in. I was heartbroken as Mickey—snout up, arms spread—drifted under the drawbridge upriver, like a gangland corpse.
“Quit standing around,” he said, and took my hand. “We’re leaving.”
Robert quickened his pace as we pushed our way through the oncoming crowds on Main Street, U.S.A. to the exits. Why were we walking so fast?
We were almost at the railroad bridge where you cross back into “the real world” when three men in ties, business suits, and dark sunglasses—Men in Black ringers—materialized and shoved the three of us down a side pathway to a bungalow office with the words Disneyland Police stenciled on a window. My mother and Robert were brought into the office, and a door was closed in front of me. I was left alone, outside, again.
Where, I wondered, was the kindly Disneyland police officer with a coloring book or a piece of candy? Weren’t we at the Happiest Place on Earth? Of course, I realize now what I didn’t as a child: we were “backstage.” Backstage didn’t have to be happy.
Robert signed statements agreeing that in exchange for never returning to Disneyland, no charges would be pressed. My mother was already crafting how the tale could be less “boring” in its retelling. In her version, someone in a Goofy costume busted us by doing a somersault to entertain a group of children and pushed us into the suits.
Years later, on the night of my high school graduation, I returned to the Tinker Bell Toy Shop. Seated on the same platform was an identical oversized stuffed Mickey Mouse, now ensconced in a Plexiglas cube and tethered by his neck and belly to a post. I rapped on the glass and, filled with a bizarre storyteller’s pride, wanted to tell someone, “One of my dads did this.” But how could anyone with just one father have understood?
• • •
First, the Christmas tree flew through the air. Not much of a tree, more of a long upright branch on a cross of wood, really, with bits of puffed tin for decoration. Then the decorations followed, one at a time: shiny Charlie Brown and Snoopy orbs, plastic Jesus-in-manger scenes, and, on a string from my kindergarten art class, a brittle clay handprint that cracked into large clumps.
“He’s not coming back!” my mother screamed. “Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied?!?”
Of course, my grandmother wasn’t satisfied, because he was coming back. My mother always let him back in the house. In the year and a half he’d been with us as a father and husband, Robert had been arrested six or seven times, for everything from drunk-and-disorderly, to petty fraud, to driving on the highway wearing an oversized pair of radio headphones, and had slept with a handful of women in Echo Park, including the ex-wife of a neighbor. He bought himself a pinky ring and a watch on my mother’s in-store account at a jewelry store, and then hocked them. He shoplifted from the neighborhood supermarket and racked up hundreds of dollars of Levi’s on my grandmother’s script account with a local clothing store, and then sold the jeans on the street.
He stole several thousand dollars in rare gold Krugerrand coins from my grandmother’s bedroom. “Brando’s college education!” she screamed, but didn’t report the crime. In a weird defense, Robert insisted that, by his count, what he stole was worth closer to several hundred dollars, not thousands.
“I wouldn’t rob you out of your school,” he said. “If there had been that much there, you think I’d have come back?”
At one point, two burly muscle men with long hair from the Indian center on skid row came to “talk” with Robert about the van he borrowed to drive his “dead mother” back to the reservation. The stripped and burned-out van was found a few days later abandoned on I-5. Robert was lucky that Indians didn’t talk to cops and luckier still they never returned.
Robert joined Alcoholics Anonymous, winning people over with his mostly true tales of inebriation, sobriety, and redemption. On receiving his white six-months-sober chip, he gave a thrilling keynote “hitting rock bottom” qualification/testimony to a large assembly of San Fernando Valley AA groups. He spoke with compassion and energy, without stuttering, and got a standing ovation. Robert let me bang the gavel that brought people back from the midsession break. Later someone discovered a significant short count in the collection plates. Robert wasn’t arrested because his sponsor Mitch believed in second chances. Robert repaid him by cleaning out his wallet too.
There were at least three active warrants for his arrest. Police detectives brandishing good manners and crisp business cards were regulars on our front porch, asking for Robert and for his aliases too: my absent uncle Oscar, my poor dead grandfather Emilio, Frank.
None of this mattered to my mother. No one ever turned him in.
“I’m not a snitch,” my grandmother said. “I hate Robert. But I hate pigs more.”
• • •
If Robert’s sloppiness with the law meant he was getting restless, I was growing bored with my “father” too. I’d visited him three times so far in his stints at the “Glass House.” Located in the junkyard sheet metal badlands of downtown LA, the local metro jail wasn’t, to my disappointment, a see-through house but had earned its nickname just because it had big windows. Trips to jail were like navigating the school cafeteria, following colored lines on the floor that snaked you here, then there, and then here again, with just as many loud and unruly kids.
“Mind your mother,” Robert said. You’re in jail, I thought.
“Okay, Robert,” I said. I’d dropped the “Dad.” Neither he nor my mother noticed.
Robert always got out, eventually. We celebrated at Chuck E. Cheese’s—Where a kid can be a kid! A costumed “Chuck” asked us to leave when Robert was caught stealing rolls of game tokens from other children to keep me playing arcade games.
“Robert’s always getting busted by rats, isn’t he?” my mother said when we got home. “First, Mickey Mouse, now Chuck E. Cheese!”
“I think both of them are mice,” I said.
“God, you’re no fun. How’d you get to be my son, anyway?”
For my tenth birthday, Robert drove me to a regular hangout of his, the Hollywood Fun Center on Hollywood Boulevard and North Western Avenue, an all but abandoned husk by the early 1980s, like the rest of the neighborhood. The “Fun Center” was a half-block-long series of dim, smoky arcades that the writer Charles Bukowski described in the documentary The Charles Bukowski Tapes as a place where “there used to be cement benches out front and all the insane people would sit there . . . The street people they’d talk to each other all day long.” In the street fronts near the arcades, “they used to have women that’d sit in the windows, [and] you could say, ‘I want you.’” Across the street was the Le Sex Shoppe porn store, and halfway up the block on Western was Pioneer Chicken, which was “open all night [and] lots of hookers [would
] go up there late at night, guys, thieves, murderers, get a late snack at three thirty a.m., get a little bite of something after they’ve rolled somebody.” When Buk talked about these places, you could hear the love in his voice for the “dirty action” and the people like Robert whose sordidness made Bukowski feel alive.
Robert parked next to the transient hotel known as the La Paula Apartments, the first place in Los Angeles where a slumlord was sentenced to house arrest in his own decrepit property. Then Robert dashed into the arcades, giving me quarters that I was swiftly hustled out of by older kids with matted hair and taut skin.
I asked him for more money. “All out,” he said, and gave me a money holder birthday card my grandmother’s TV repairman friend had sent me. The cash was missing.
“I took you to the arcade with that money!” he said. “But let’s stick around awhile.”
I wandered the arcade in hopeful circles, and then sat on a bench outside and watched city buses come and go, imagining they were airplanes I could board for distant lands. When I came back in, I couldn’t find Robert. It felt like a hide-and-seek prank at first. Was he playing video games? No. At the air hockey tables? Not there. Maybe in the adjacent pool hall? Nope. The men’s room was the last place to check. “Don’t use them because of chicken hawks,” Robert had warned me. Chicken hawks? Did he mean that small brown bird that tries to eat Foghorn Leghorn in the old Warner Bros. cartoons? In the bathroom, old men loitered by the stalls, smoking cigarettes. The smoke and eye-stinging piss smell drove me out.
I drifted like scrap paper back to Robert’s car. A habitual thief himself, he nonetheless trusted others and never locked doors. I crouched down in the backseat under beach towel seat covers, counting down from large numbers until his return.
He could have been gone ten minutes or four hours—my kid’s concept of time was little help—but when Robert returned, he started up the car and took it out of park, ready to drive off, before he saw me cowering in back.
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