Take This Man: A Memoir
Brando Skyhorse
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1439170894
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
One of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014
“A West Coast version of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors...A funny, shocking, generous-hearted book” (Entertainment Weekly) about a boy, his five stepfathers, and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth.
When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his immigrant father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live as a Mexican American just because he was born one. With the help of Maria’s ruthless imagination and a hastily penned jailhouse correspondence, the life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the Native American son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California, where Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth, when a surprise discovery leads him to his biological father at last.
From this PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novelist comes an extraordinary literary memoir capturing a mother-son story unlike any other and a boy’s single-minded search for a father, wherever he can find one.
is easy for a jailbird,” Paul said. My mother checked on us several times throughout the afternoon, watching Paul type up my months-long homework assignment with furious energy. “I’m glad you’re spending time with your father,” she said. The manuscript was finished in less than a day. What was complicated was manufacturing the book itself. I had step-by-step instructions on how to assemble it, but since I didn’t buy any of the materials listed ahead of time, Paul suggested we improvise. He
sustained and nourished it; without them, there was not only no world, there was no me. I leaned my head back, felt the blossoms fall on my face like fat raindrops—plop, plop, plop—and could imagine the roar of an ocean, feel sandy grit under my palms. I was used to waiting on curbs and had learned some of the magic that came with the practice of patience. Passing cars and the lulls left in their wake became the crashing of waves. The street was an ever-spreading body of water, one not a long
Pat didn’t return the next day, didn’t call, nor did anyone stop by to check on us. He didn’t return the day after that. For the first time in our years of traveling, we were marooned. “I’m not going to worry about a man I’m not even married to,” my mother said. I can’t remember whether she said “yet.” We concocted various getaway fantasies that, because neither of us could drive a car, ended at his front door. We ordered pizza because neither of us knew how to cook. My mother ransacked his
that his own father had spent Dustin’s childhood with an imaginary son instead of him. I never met Dustin, but I’d like to think we could have been friends, maybe even brothers. After all, we shared the same father. I lost that chance when Dustin passed away at thirty-one from a pulmonary embolism in November 2010. • • • I was in high school when Robert made an unannounced visit to Echo Park. He got as far as the front porch. My grandmother made him a can of corned beef hash—“And that’s all
from Law & Order or Michael Nouri from the movie Flashdance. In that order. These men were never simply my mother’s “boyfriends” or “partners.” They weren’t “surrogate dads” or “stepfathers.” I couldn’t call them by their first names, nor was I allowed to speak about any past father in the presence of a new one. My mother made it clear that these men, trying to be men, were my fathers, absorbed instantly into our tiny clan of mother, grandmother, and me, so we could be, or pose as, a family.