Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse Page B

accompany him inside. Instead, he sent her to “go buy my son a coat.”
    She returned with an oversized gray wool overcoat, its sleeve ends covering my hands like gloves. My mother called it my “Mafia coat” because wrapped inside it I looked like a tiny “don,” a perfect little “Brando.” It was much too warm for Los Angeles, but when we got back home, I’d wear it on windy days, let my sleeves flap in the breeze, and imagine my coat filling with enough air to carry me aloft like a kite. Flying in the air, “a real Skyhorse” in my mind.
    Paul’s wife gave birth to a real “Sky Horse”—a son, Dustin—in September 1979. Abusive and alcoholic, Paul left Frances and their son a few months later, headed to Minnesota, maybe, but still not to Echo Park. His letters from parole—invariably thin ones without money—promised some kind of reunion, but between that Saint Louis visit and my early adolescence, I’d see Paul just once, possibly, in a horror film called Wolfen .
    â€œYour father’s in this,” my mother said, playing a tape she had recorded off of cable. In the credits, “Paul Skyhorse” is listed in a group of “Native Americans” that appear, true to stereotypical Hollywood form, in a bar called the Wigwam. Was this, in fact, Paul Skyhorse Johnson? Or was it Paul Skyhorse Durant? Perhaps another Paul Skyhorse entirely? The credits list neither surname, but that didn’t stop me from rewinding and replaying the barroom sequence, squinting close into a nine-inch television set, trying to steal a one-second glimpse of Paul—whichever one it might have been—in a Hollywood movie about murderous superwolves.
    He continued sending me gifts (one year a set of Lincoln Logs) and letters admonishing his “little chief” to do well in school. Paul “Skyhorse” had abandoned his biological son but still found a few minutes here and there to be a father to his fake one.
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    My mother had already left her state job in 1980 when Frank tapered off their relationship He figured that as long as he didn’t move the relationship to the next stage by moving in together or proposing marriage, he could indulge their fights because he could leave whenever he wanted. His greatest fear was being trapped in our house with her and my grandparents and having nowhere to go if my mother tried to attack him again. How would he explain to anyone at work why his face was covered with scratches?
    Frank hid his drifting away to another woman because he felt it would have cost him any opportunity to stay in my life. In this little boy he’d practically adopted, Frank saw both an echo of who he was at my age and a way for him to pass along a part of himself. Here was a chance to mend his brokenheartedness over his beloved nana. The price would be wrestling with my mother’s rabid heart and ignoring the feelings he still had for her in his own.
    They tried an uneasy friendship. On the day that John Lennon was killed, Frank called my mom in tears. She cried on the phone with him. The next time they spoke, an argument flared up like a rash. “What kind of man cries about a man—a musician—he never met?” my mother said. “You have fucked-up priorities.”
    My mother thought these were box steps in a breakup waltz where Frank would lead them right back to reconciliation. It took her a while to realize that Frank’s dance would continue on just with me, not her. She’d plead for them to reconcile, and then, when he rejected her proposals, unleash an indiscriminate wrath that was as cruel as it was boundless. She tried to ignore him, but she never learned how to stop loving him.
    â€œI’ll never stand between you and Brando,” she declared. Over the coming years, this would prove true enough when she was married to someone—there were four husbands