Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse Page A

happened that fast. Paul’s holding me one week, and Frank’s back to holding me the next, loading me into his van’s prized shotgun seat for a ride to the drive-in.
    â€œBabe, he’s five,” Frank said. “I don’t think a child his age should watch a horror movie.”
    â€œBrando’s not like children his age,” my mother insisted “He’ll be the first to tell you that. And don’t talk about him like he’s not here. I hate when people do that. Brando, do you want to see Halloween ?”
    â€œHalloween! Halloween!” I said. I didn’t know what the movie was about. I just wanted to go everywhere my mother went. (My unintentional love of horror films and the macabre comes from her.)
    â€œHe won’t remember a thing,” my mother said.
    My mother and Frank “watched the movie” from the van’s rear couch bench seat while I sat stupefied as a forty-foot Michael Myers stabbed his way through, and then disappeared into, an ethereal fog that steamed up the inside of the windshield.
    We drove to a supermarket to get chips for the ride home. Frank said I could keep my seat up front so that I wouldn’t have to sit in the back of his darkened van. I hadn’t moved, spoken, or (it felt like) breathed since the credits. My mother dozed off in the rear while we idled in the blackness of an empty parking lot. Off in the distance, I thought I saw a shadowy figure. There was the boogeyman by that light pole! Or pushing that row of shopping carts!
    Suddenly a huge pumpkin shot up from the passenger window inches from my face as the tall figure holding it screamed, “Boo!”
    I shot out of my seat, knocked my head against the roof of the van, and started screaming, loud gasping whoops of terror. I couldn’t breathe. My mother rushed me to the van’s couch bench and cradled my head in her lap.
    â€œWhat the fuck is the matter with you, Frank?” she shouted. Being a pal instead of a parent had its limits.
    Frank understood my mother’s temper protecting me, but her explosiveness defending herself made him afraid. He stumbled into it face-first when, in a silly fight over whether Warren Beatty was “Mr. Hollywood” or a hack womanizer, my mother, a foot shorter than Frank, leapt up at him with her nails out and tried to dig into his cheeks. Frank had his hand out to protect himself.
    She screamed to June, “Call the pigs, momma, this motherfucker tried to hit me!”
    At first Frank laughed it off, thinking this was a weird, twisted play on my mother’s unusual sense of humor. Then he realized she was serious. Figuring the best way to defuse her anger was to leave fast, Frank got into his van, revved the gas, and sped off.
    Their relationship disintegrated over the next year, with a series of breakups and hasty reconciliations. The sound of Frank’s loud, gunned engine would sometimes be my only good-bye. I chose the front bedroom window when it was my turn to “father fish” the same way Frank had as a boy, exhaling disappointment on its glass, tracing endless circles in my breath with my finger. I sometimes knelt there looking for Frank’s van even on days I knew he wouldn’t come. Even when he did, he could stay the night or leave in an hour. His shortest visit was six minutes—enough time to plop on my mother’s bed, exchange words with her, threaten to leave if they continued to argue, and then take off.
    In early 1979 Paul sent us train tickets to come visit him. My mother knew already about Frances, but Paul made no mention of her in an accompanying letter. With Frank around less, my heart ping-ponged back to the man I believed was my “real” father. Our train was waylaid in Kansas City because of a massive blizzard that piled snow as tall as the engine. When we arrived in Saint Louis, Paul had a pregnant Frances drop him off at the station and asked that she not