Every Step You Take (6 page)

“My dad hated my guts. I'd go anywhere not to be there,” Pop says. At age fifteen my father lied and said he was seventeen so that he could join the air force for a three-year stint that kept him moving all over the United States in a nice agitated pattern. When his stint with the air force was over he wandered back to Puerto Rico for a while, where he took up with a woman named Lucy who was fifteen years his senior and the bartender at a local bar.

“We got sexually involved,” no-nonsense Pop explains to me in his very faint Puerto Rican accent. I can almost hear him shrugging. “She gave me food and drink. I didn't have any money. It was very convenient.” Lucy had two children from a previous marriage, and when she got pregnant they got married and moved with their baby—my half brother Mac Joe—from Puerto Rico to Philadelphia. That was in 1961. My father was twenty-two, and my mother, who was seventeen and just starting her nursing career, was also living in Philadelphia.

When Pop tells the story of how he and my mother started dating, despite the fact that he was married and had a young son, I hear him shrug again. “Puerto Rican men go out on their wives all the time. Same as the Cubans, same as the Mexicans,” he explains. “They always have another woman. You know I cheated on your mother. A lot.” Pop has taken to blurting out this last confession frequently ever since Mom has died—I don't know why—and hearing it always gives me a queasy feeling. As I get to know him better I am learning that my father has a roomy soul that can accommodate some very strange contradictions. Moments after declaring his numerous infidelities, he returns to the saga of how he and my mother met at a Puerto Rican salsa club in Philadelphia that he used to visit every Saturday when he took the night “off” from his wife, Lucy. Pop gets all sentimental and teary.

Mom was sitting in the corner with another girl from the nursing school when my father spotted her. “She was sitting there, her glasses were like Coke-bottle bottoms, they were so thick,” Pop says. “I went over and asked her to dance, and she got up and danced with me. And I went away, but then I came back and we danced again and again, until she had to go home. I knew right away this was supposed to happen.”

My mother was allowed to leave the nursing school only on Saturdays, provided her grades were good, so every Saturday for the next four weeks my father picked her up in his '49 Ford to take her out for the night. “She used to sit right next to the door,” Pop says. “I told her, ‘You know what? If I had a seat on the outside, you'd be out there.' Little by little I says, ‘Come over here, sit next to me.' And little by little she did. Her grades were excellent—because she wanted to go out.”

On the fourth Saturday my father announced to my mother that he was feeling restless, that he was going to leave Philadelphia and head out to California. “Do you want to come?” he asked her. Mom asked him for a week to think about it, and when he called the following Saturday she agreed to go. She had never had sex—in fact she didn't even know what sex was—and she headed off across the country with an older, married man she'd met only weeks before. “She quit school for me,” Pop says, with a tremble in his voice. “She had a scholarship and everything. You know, love is funny—she quit school, and I just picked up and left my wife and baby.”

My father may have had some trouble remembering he was married from time to time, but he has always had a beartrap memory when it comes to anything about cars—which is why he can tell me that a friend who had a 1957 Pontiac four-door drove him and Mom across the country. They had a ham in a can and some bread and crackers—and not much else. Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon. When they got to Sacramento, they hung out in the park and ate at soup kitchens and stayed in flop joints where the rate was fifty cents per night per person. Pop would go up to the clerk to rent a room for one, and Mom would G.I. Joe–crawl past the desk so the clerk wouldn't see her. They had sex for the first time there in California, Pop tells me in one of his “overshare” moments. “Poor thing,” my father says, shaking his head. “She was very, very naive.” Not long after this they got the idea to stuff a pillow under Mom's shirt to make her look pregnant—as if this brilliant ruse was possible only now that they were having sex—and convinced a sympathetic banker to loan them three hundred dollars. “We ate for three days,” remembers Pop.

When they had run through the last of their money, Mom called home and the two of them made their way to my grandparents' farm on the reservation. “I was not accepted,” my father says bluntly. “I was not Navajo. They didn't like me. And I didn't want to stay.” My father left the reservation and returned to Philadelphia by himself, but only two weeks later he came back to get my mother. This time the two of them left the reservation together, and by the time they returned, Mom was pregnant with my older brother, Kiko. When they got to my grandparents' home my grandpa Bud was waiting for them at the gate with a loaded shotgun in his hand. And it was not long after that my father got divorced from Lucy and he and my mother married. They settled into my grandparents' hogan on the reservation and on August 24, 1963, Kiko—whose full name is McKee Duane Soto—was born. A year and a half later, on April 16, 1965, I arrived.

Clearly my parents' first encounters and subsequent romance do not qualify as classic fairytale—or even Hollywood “meet-cute” material. In fact, I have never really let myself focus on several troubling details before—such as my mother's extreme innocence when she met my father and the fact that she scrapped her education to run off with a married man, and the existence of my half brother Mac Joe, who would have been just a baby when my father walked out on him and his mother. My father's casual attitude toward the marriage contract is another touchy issue that triggers painful memories that I have been reluctant to address over the years.

But despite all these less than perfect wrinkles, there is much about my humble family's humble beginnings that impresses me. Both of my parents went through some pretty rough times in their early years—much rougher, in fact, than anything I have had to endure. Both of them not only survived but in the process evolved into kind, decent, generous people. My father was brutally beaten as a child, but he grew beyond the awful example he was given. Pop never raised a hand against Kiko or me when we were young, and he always did his best to provide us with everything he could. My mother was practically a child herself when she started her family, and yet she was the most embracing, wise, and self-sacrificing mother anyone could ever want. She held us to high standards, but she was always there to help us meet them.

I was sitting at home alone, contemplating these stories about my family, one night when my father called and gave the family narrative a new twist. He was in Puerto Rico, visiting my grandparents, and he had had a very exciting day, he announced. After all these years he had finally extracted the truth from his mother, my grandma Margo. She had confirmed that Don Lolo was not his real father.

As soon as his mother admitted this to him, Pop and his brother Chico (who actually is Don Lolo's son, and has the short stature and big ears to prove it) had set off on a trip into the mountains to find the man who used to live next door to them. And they succeeded. Pop said it was amazing—the guy was six foot two, with my dad's same hair, same face, same green eyes. “Chico couldn't believe it—he looks exactly like me!” Pop crowed. “He's ninety-six now, but he's all put together. He looks real good.” The man's name was Luis Cortez, and when Pop explained who he was and asked Mr. Cortez if perhaps he was his real father, the old man smiled and nodded.

It was touching how excited and happy my father sounded about all of this—almost proud. When I pointed out to him that this meant that technically he was a Cortez, not a Soto, he started laughing. Of course, this also means that we should all be named Cortez, not Soto—including my mother. As if I wasn't already confused enough about my identity…

F
OR YEARS
I have struggled with a feeling of anxiety about falling between the cracks when it comes to the big traditional categories in life. On the reservation as a child I was a half Puerto Rican among pure Navajos; and on the reservation as a grown man I am an outsider from New York. As a teenager in New York I was a half Navajo, half Latino in the predominantly white world of Balanchine's ballets, and a neophyte in a high society of worldly sophisticates. But my confusion about my mix of cultures and heritages and life experiences, and the loneliness and feelings of displacement that have sometimes weighed me down over the years, seems to be growing less oppressive the more I learn. I suppose in an age when our forty-fourth president, Barack Hussein Obama, can casually refer to himself as a “mutt,” we may even begin to find reasons to celebrate blended blood.

There have been moments in my dance career when people have pointed to my humble beginnings and saluted me as someone who has accomplished a great deal against great odds. This seems ludicrous to me now as I consider my mother and father and the unusual arc of their lives. It seems to me they accomplished much more against much greater odds. I have a new admiration for them, and I am beginning to understand how much I owe them. They may not have started with much, but they sure did their very best, and they sure gave me everything they could—which turns out to have been quite a lot.

A few months after he had discovered the truth about his own father, I invited my father to join me in Santa Fe for a weeklong stint I was doing as a guest teacher and choreographer for a modern dance troupe called Moving People Dance. It was the first time we had seen each other since Mom's death, and my goal was to take some of the sadness out of Pop's face. We stayed together at the apartment where my hosts were putting me up, in a community for retired gay people called Rainbow Vision. (Was there a hidden message here?) I cooked his favorite foods for him all week, and he drove me back and forth to my dance classes, the way he always used to when I was a kid. It almost felt like old times—although I did notice Pop had developed a new habit while driving, of reading signs out loud as he passed them. Once when he wasn't thinking, he automatically started driving us to the A-1 Storage facility where he and Mom used to live and work, instead of to our Rainbow Vision apartment. When I called him a homing pigeon, he said he was more like a faithful old dog that had been left downtown and was trying to find his way home.

Overall it was a quiet and healing week for both of us, and when my teaching duties were over we drove to Eagle Nest to see the house I had started building for Mom before she died. To distract us both from the sadness of Mom's absence I cooked a huge dinner featuring what I dubbed Enchiladas à la Cortez and told Pop the meal was in honor of his newfound biological father. He seemed pleased.

A little later he turned to me and asked me if I liked the way he had styled his hair. It was sort of curly looking, greased up with some new gel he had discovered. The question made me feel odd, as if I were somehow becoming a replacement for my mother. But I just nodded yes, and served him another helping of Enchiladas à la Cortez.

Later, as he was driving me to the airport, Pop turned to me again and said he was really proud of me and happy we'd spent this time together. I told him I felt the same way. It seems sad that it has taken until Pop is in his seventies and I am in my midforties for us to begin to trust in our love for each other—but then, I tell myself, when it comes to finding fathers, better late than never.

O
NE OF MY
father's favorite meals, one I often make when I am visiting him out west, is an enchilada dish my mother taught me. After Pop made his fateful trip to Puerto Rico and went digging for his “roots,” I renamed the dish Enchiladas à la Cortez—in honor of my father's finding his real father. Originally this recipe involved frying the tortillas first and then rolling them into enchiladas. I always love a shortcut, so I decided to save time (and calories) by skipping the frying and rolling steps, and instead layering the tortillas with the meat sauce to make a casserole. I love this easier version of the traditional recipe—and so does my father, José Anthony Soto à la Cortez.

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SERVES 8

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 pounds ground sirloin

1 large onion, chopped

2 jalapeño peppers, diced

4 10-ounce cans enchilada sauce

1 10¾-ounce can condensed cream of mushroom soup

Salt and pepper

6 cups grated cheddar cheese

24 6-inch corn tortillas

Get a large skillet nice and hot. Add the vegetable oil and then add the ground sirloin. Brown the meat for 5 minutes. Add the onion and jalapeños, and cook for about 5 minutes over high heat. Add the enchilada sauce and the cream of mushroom soup, and add salt and pepper to taste; simmer gently for about 20 minutes, covered.

During this time you can shred your cheese—or to make life easier you could just buy shredded cheese—and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

When your meat sauce is ready, turn off the heat and prepare your assembly line. Ladle a cup of sauce onto the bottom of a large casserole dish. Layer tortillas to cover the sauce and add a layer of cheese. Repeat the sauce-tortilla-cheese layering, ending with sauce and cheese.