Take This Man. A Memoir by Skyhorse Brando

Author:Skyhorse, Brando [Skyhorse, Brando]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Adult
ISBN: 9781439170908
Goodreads: 20736518
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Published: 2014-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

8

“You have to sleep with the man you’re living with. It isn’t right,” my grandmother said. Ignoring how she’d exiled Emilio from her bedroom for years, my grandmother and my mother were arguing about what to do with Rudy. When Rudy moved in two months after I left for school, he got a temporary job as a security guard and surrendered his pittance of a bimonthly paycheck in exchange for a spot on the couch or my empty bedroom. Now that I was back from school, where would he sleep?

“Why can’t he stay in Brando’s room? He doesn’t live here anymore,” my mother said.

“I’m here right now,” I said, “and I don’t want a stranger in my room.”

“You’re the only stranger here,” my mother said.

“Stop it, you two,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you love Rudy?” she asked my mother.

“Of course I don’t!”

“Then what the hell is he doing here in my house?” my grandmother asked.

“I can’t find anyone else,” my mother said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Then take your future husband into your room.”

“I don’t want to sleep with a dead lay!” my mother said.

Rudy had ended up in a homeless shelter by following a woman to Los Angeles. One morning he awoke in their motel room to find the woman and his money gone, with a scrawled message in lipstick on the mirror: “Limp Dick.” Later my mother’s version of the story had Rudy as an obsessive phone sex client who had migrated west to woo her.

“I don’t want any more men in my house,” my grandmother said.

“He wants to be my husband,” my mother said. “He wants to be a dad to Brando.”

“I don’t want anything from Rudy,” I said.

“I don’t see your father helping you out,” my mother said. It was hardly worth wondering anymore which father she was talking about.

• • •

My grandmother and I nurtured an escalating defiance to each consecutive stepfather’s introduction into the house, a familial hazing that unified us until the man asserted himself and I eventually “adopted” him as a real potential father. Whenever my mother pushed one of her men—often, literally—there was a certain amount of pushback that she both rebelled against and craved. Even Pat’s chattiness and constant stream of positive energy was in itself a kind of challenge to my mother’s relentless anger and negativity. He refused to let her get him down.

Rudy, however, offered no resistance. He was an absolute blank slate. With a cherubic face, jagged smile, stout body, tufted crown of clown’s hair, and a hiccup of a laugh, Rudy resembled a giant Robin Williams balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, guided by my mother’s tethers, drifting whichever way she pulled. He laughed at every joke at his expense, posed no challenge whenever his opinion was invalidated, and made no defense of himself when my mother and grandmother gored him with some weeping dissatisfaction of theirs or confronted him with his own pathetic backstory.

My first night home at the end of freshman year,

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