Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse Read Free Book Online Page A

Pictures of a young man, madly in love and maybe in a little over his head, becoming an actual father a piece at a time. There he is, driving us down I-5 to suburban Buena Park on Halloween, where the houses had glowing orange jewel doorbells, there were no security gates on the windows and doors, and the candies handed out weren’t loose single pieces but packed in actual bags .
    There he is again, dropping me off at an overnight summer camp in the afternoon and then driving back that night to take me home when I wouldn’t stop crying in my cabin.
    He’s got an ice pack on my head in the next one. A spunky tomboy named Carrie invited me to her birthday party, and, when I laughed and told her I didn’t want to go to a “girl party,” she creamed me on the head with her metal Land of the Lost lunch pail. Later Frank drove me to her house bearing apology Hostess Ding Dongs.
    I’m at a Paul Williams concert with him and my mother. She’s brought pajamas and a bathrobe for me to change into in his van if I get sleepy on the ride home. Williams is hours late, so my mother changes me in the concert hall’s ladies’ room. Frank’s holding my hand while we return to our seats amid chuckles and applause, when somebody shouts out, “Enjoy the show, Hef!” Frank thinks he’s making fun of me and snaps back, “Hey, thanks , pal!”
    Then he’s running, panicked, carrying me to hard asphalt. I had dived into a backyard pool, unaware I needed swimming lessons first.
    Each day with Frank was our own parade where I marched in his footsteps, shooing my mother’s hands from his belt loops. I idolized his manner of being a man. He called my mother—and tall, skinny blondes—“Babe” and ordered Heinekens, “No glass,” in restaurants, which for years afterward I considered the classy, sophisticated way to order beer. There were warm, milky baths in his ancient oversized tub after hard days of sweaty horseplay, sleepovers on the couch in Frank’s drafty childhood home, and backyard barbecues of frugal cuts of steak on a grocery-store-bought hibachi.
    â€œHe loves you two,” my grandmother said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “Too bad he’s so cheap.”
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    They’d been dating for a year when my mother told Frank she was taking me on a trip to meet my father: Paul Skyhorse.
    Frank felt like he’d grown into some kind of father to me, but he didn’t want to come between me and my “real” dad. Paul Skyhorse, my mother said, had moved to Chicago after his acquittal in Los Angeles, and while things were over between her and Paul, she wanted her son to know his father. (This, of course, was Skyhorse Johnson. Skyhorse Durant stayed on the West Coast, first in Seattle and then San Francisco.) How could Frank refuse that?
    There’s a white-bordered photo taken at Los Angeles’s Union Station that has, written in my grandmother’s hand, the date, September 8, 1978, and three names: Frank Zamora, Maria Banaga Johnson, and Brando Skyhorse. We’re packed for a trip on the Southwest Limited, headed east. My mother still enjoyed posing for photos then.
    She sits in a throne-like leather armchair while I’m astride her lap. By her feet are two large suitcases, one of which has bulging sides, packed in what would become my mother’s characteristic “rush and stuff” style when visits to my father became manhunts to find a father.
    I had just turned five. I’m dressed in white overalls, a checkerboard shirt, and am holding a kids’ Amtrak travel pack, a cross between a doctor’s bag and a purse. I keep trying to brush the itchy long hair that I hate off my shoulders.
    â€œAll American Indians wear their hair long,” my mother explained.
    Perched on the armrest behind us is Frank. He couldn’t stop ­thinking about how I was going to see my