Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"At least it's never boring."

1

My grandmother's breath. Racing across my baby shoulders like western clouds. I'm propped against the sofa between my grandmother's thick varicose calves dressed just in toddler shorts, like an oversized stuffed bear. A phalanx of whirring plastic fans don't cool the soupy air as much as shuffle it in a circle around us.

"Shhh," Grandma says, and blows on my hot neck, rustling the pouty tips of my shoulder-length hair off my back. Some days my grandmother's breath blots out the violent heat. Some days it blows the storms ashore.

My mother's voice forms over our mountain range of a couch. It could shower a loving rain, tickle me with a sing-along for the summer ants crawling up my legs, or change the air above into a "run home to Mama" sky like a russet storm.

"Where's my Pappas?" Mom asks, shoveling me into her arms and blowing a raspberry on my tummy. Pappas means "potatoes" in Spanish.

"Shhh, be quiet," my grandmother says. "And hold him like a mother."

My grandmother's breath. My mother's voice. My whole world. My every happiness.

• • •

I was born and raised in Echo Park, California, with my mother, grandmother June, and my Filipino step-grandfather Emilio. I can see my old neighborhood like an iris-in movie shot, a pinprick of Southern California light so bright it'd crease your corneas, opening up into a fragile tapestry of shaggy green lawns and sunbaked terra-­cotta roof tiles. White flight transformed Echo Park by the 1970s into a Latino oasis with sizable Vietnamese and Filipino enclaves, but its history was awash in silver nitrate. Mack Sennett built Keystone Pictures Studios here in 1912, and many of its early Keystone Cops comedy shorts were shot in Echo Park's loping emerald green hills and valleys. Its silent era stars migrated west (wealth always moves west in California, to the ocean), but the land stayed behind, its colors bleeding into a grainy seventies movie patina of tall, open fields of weeds bleached to a white wine finish and palm trees, their fronds beckoning with a campfire sizzle in the strong Santa Ana winds. In a documentary about the legendary Sunset Boulevard, the beginnings of which run through the neighborhood, Echo Park was pronounced "the most beautiful ghetto in America."

We lived midway up Portia Street, mispronounced to rhyme with tortilla by neighbors and impatient bus drivers. Like its Shakespearian counterpart, our Portia offered a choice of three distinct directions, connecting at one end with Sunset Boulevard, which snaked into Hollywood and Beverly Hills and ended at the coast in Pacific Palisades, a town as wealthy as it sounds; Scott Avenue at the other end, a short cut-slash-escape route from Dodger Stadium to the freeways that led to the season ticket holders' suburban homes in the San Fernando Valley; and Galveston, a slug of a street that jutted up at a 30-degree angle toward the hills and oozed its way through gang territory, where each street seemed to be its own treacherous canyon. Two or three times a week, shots rang out and police helicopters rumbled overhead, slicing the night open with powerful search beams, scouring the area my grandmother called "the Steps," an outdoor staircase by Laveta Terrace that, when the cops came, cholos used as a getaway slide down to Sunset.

I'd be tempted to call this God's country except that my grandmother didn't rent out to God. We lived in her house. It squatted atop a steep, exhausting hill accessible by a crooked winding staircase: slabs of uneven concrete blocks spiraling down to the street like a row of dominoes. Emilio bought June the single-family house in 1952 for twelve thousand dollars. Built in 1921, it was a one-story, 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath Mediterranean-style home. When my grandparents moved in, a neighbor asked June to sign a petition to remove a black mailman from their route. My grandmother, a lightish mix of Mexican, Spanish, and Swiss, refused. In retaliation, the neighbor set a crank-style Victrola record player in a side window abutting our shared fence and put on at a high volume, "The Band Played On," a waltz she played again and again, on, and on, and on.

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.