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A Memoir
by Brando Skyhorse
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"I can't be tied down to a woman," Tomás said, and left. My grandmother wasn't surprised. Her own biological father, Steven Scolari, had long since vanished, sending her every couple years from Europe treasured penny postcards with sailboats on them. The women that raised me were themselves raised by stepfathers. They believed men left simply because that's what men did. To expect more from a man meant you'd better find yourself a woman.
While in Lompoc, little Maria stepped on a splinter that infected her foot and led to blood poisoning that almost ended her life. Death appeared at the foot of her bed and beckoned her to a tree outside her window. She agreed to go but changed her mind and hid under the covers. My mother didn't follow Death that long night and survived. The scare brought June and Maria back to Los Angeles. Only then did June agree to be Emilio's wife, bearing him his own son, Oscar, who moved away as a young man and was never close to his mother or half sister.
A pudgy, well-behaved child with pigtails, Maria won good citizenship awards in school seven years running. She was a good girl at home, too, and couldn't understand why her mother would sometimes, while combing Maria's long, tangled hair, lose her patience and strike her back with a wooden brush. Maria turned to her collection of ceramic statues of Catholic saints for answers, but they kept quiet. When June threatened to kick my teenage mother out of the house, Maria smashed her saints to pieces and tossed them into a garbage bag. It would not be the last time my mother cleaned up her past this way and erased any trace of something to which she'd been so devoted.
Maria stopped being a good girl at Belmont High School. She had either on a dare or through intimidation joined a street gang and became a chola.
"They're a teenybopper gang," June scoffed. "They don't even use knives!"
The experience was scary enough, though, to get June and Emilio to transfer my mother to Hollywood Professional, an all-grades private school on Hollywood Boulevard that, in 1963, cost three hundred dollars a semester. A half-hour bus ride from Echo Park, the school was for kids who needed classes arranged around a budding musician's or actor's schedule. At Hollywood Professional, Maria was free to wear her long, dyed, blood red hair beehive high. She showed off her dark skin in tight black dresses and spoke what little Spanish June had taught her to attract the white boys. She wanted to be new, dangerous, and sexy, everything she had never been and could never be in Echo Park. Here my mother would come to understand the power of being exotic; the power of being "the other."
She refused a small role in Spartacus offered by a casting agent who hung out at the school. She met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, high on coke and drunk all the time, doing his best to transform his drug-addled palsy into charm as he played with her hair during study period, called her "Baby," and said he'd ask his brother Brian to write a song for her. She hung out with James Mason's daughter, Portland, and earned a bevy of female admirers and friends by throwing a young, bratty Charlene Tilton (future jezebel of TV's prime-time soap opera Dallas) down a flight of stairs. She was voted Duchess of the Harvest Ball, 1963, and made rich friends who encouraged her to live with the kind of reckless, self-destructive abandon only money and privilege can afford. Her best friend was a spoiled Bel Air Jewish princess named Betty. They drank, drugged, and partied together until the early nineteen seventies, when Betty married an Asian man, moved to Florida, had a child, and in a fit of depression and rage bashed her baby girl's head in with a hammer and was sent to death row.
After Hollywood Professional, my mother had fallen in love with a sandy-haired blond named Mike and gave birth to two children before me, both of whom had befallen their own separate inconceivable tragedies. A son named Shane, who in his black-and-white photograph looked like a porcelain doll with onyx marbles for eyes, had a congenital heart defect. A hole in his heart, which my mother instinctively knew was there but that an unsympathetic hospital staff ignored, claimed his life at three. My mother's snow-white, blue-eyed, blonde daughter, Janaine Deborah Patterson, had been kidnapped, also at three, by a jealous babysitter and disappeared. The police scoffed at my mother's claims to the Caucasian baby, letting crucial time lapse after Janaine's abduction. In a grainy color photograph taken in our house's backyard in the 1970s, my mother holds Janaine, dressed in a pink jumper, high in her arms—the one piece of evidence that my mother had given birth to a beautiful girl that nobody believed was hers.
Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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