Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  Most of my childhood memories of my father are of being ignored. I was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested him. He enjoyed telling me I couldn’t do anything right. He had a habit of telling me I would never amount to anything. He was far more emotionally destructive than he realized. I was never rewarded by him with a comment, a look or a hug. He was a card-carrying prick whose mother deserted him when he was four years old—just disappeared, ran off someplace—and he was shunted from one spinster aunt to another. I think he deeply resented women because of that experience. I loved him and hated him at the same time. He was a frightening, silent, brooding, angry, hard-drinking, rude man, a bully who loved to give orders and issue ultimatums—and he was just as tough as he talked. Perhaps that’s why I’ve had a lifelong aversion to authority. He had reddish, sandy hair, was tall and handsome and had an overwhelming masculine presence. His blood consisted of compounds of alcohol, testosterone, adrenaline and anger. On the other hand, he could make any room fill with laughter. Women found him fetching, strong and handsome. And surprisingly, he had an extraordinary sense of the absurd.

  But my father could also slip quickly into the role of a bar fighter. I imagine him as the fellow at the bar who, when you look over at him, says, “Who the fuck do you think you’re looking at?” I remember a story—I don’t remember who told it to me—that once he got drunk in San Francisco in a bar, and Sunday-punched his fighting partner out of the door and onto the trolley tracks, where they continued to exchange knuckle sandwiches until a streetcar nearly ran them over. I never actually saw him fight, but I remember him coming home with a shiner. He was a man whose emotional disorders took the form of pathological stinginess: he wouldn’t spend a nickel if he didn’t have to, and he socked away his cash like a miser. He insisted on controlling people, which—who knows?—may have something to do with why I’ve spent much of my life trying to control other people. Once I remember his putting his arm around my shoulder and playing with my earlobes at a movie, and there was always a perfunctory kiss when he returned from one of his trips, but such moments were exceptional. Perhaps he didn’t know how, or was too proud or too frightened to do it. I don’t remember him being affectionate with anybody except maybe our dogs.

  After his mother disappeared, my father was brought up by his aunts, who were very Victorian in their outlook, and by my equally Victorian grandfather, whom we called Pa, an imposing man in celluloid collars who was stiff, frugal and cautious.

  My father fell in love with my mother when they were in high school, I think because she was vivacious, funny and unconventional and enjoyed a good laugh like he did. He was a man who had known great pain and had never forgiven his mother for her desertion, and the residue of that anger had to be absorbed by my mother, by us three children and by whoever tried to stare him down at a bar.

  Recently, Frannie sent me a letter in which she said that growing up in our family was “in a way like having four parents, or six, or eight. When Poppa wasn’t beset by his inner irrational fears, he could be sweet and loving and considerate, amusing and amused, charming and sensitive, and then all this could be blotted out by black moods, thunderous silences, and anger that could burst out furiously over what seemed to us to be minor infractions. It was a lonely, friendless household. I don’t think Poppa wanted to be such an abusive person, but he had no means to escape the consequences of the abuse and abandonment that he had suffered.”

  What was absent most conspicuously in our family was forgiveness. “I don’t remember forgiveness,” Frannie wrote. “No forgiveness! In our home, there was blame, shame, and punishment that very often had no relationship to the ‘crime,’ and I think the sense of burning injustice it left with all of us marked us deeply.”

  My mother was a delicate, funny woman who loved music and learning, but was not much more affectionate than my father. To this day, I don’t understand the psychodynamics and pathology of her disorder or the forces that made her an alcoholic. Perhaps it was genetic, or perhaps alcohol was the anesthesia she required to numb the disappointments in her life. I always wondered about the reasons, but never learned the answer. She was seldom home when I was growing up, although I have a few good memories of lying in bed with her, with her light brown curls strewn over the pillows, while she read a book to me and we shared a bowl of crackers and milk. And occasionally we all stood around the piano and sang while she played, one of the few times I remember any sort of family activity.

  My mother knew every song that was ever written, and for reasons that are unclear to me—perhaps because I wanted to please her—I memorized as many as I could. To this day, I remember the music and lyrics to thousands of songs my mother taught me. I have never been able to remember the number of my driver’s license, and there have been times when I couldn’t even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric. I am forever humming tunes in my head. I know African songs, Chinese songs, Tahitian songs, French songs, German songs and, of course, the songs my mother taught me. There is hardly a culture whose music I am not familiar with. Surprisingly, I can’t remember a single song that was written after the seventies.

  2

  SOME OF MY EARLIEST and best memories of childhood are of Ermi and of moonlight cascading through the window of my bedroom late at night. I was three or four when Ermi came to live with us in Omaha as my governess, and I see her as vividly now as I did then; she was eighteen years old, slightly crosseyed and had fine, silky dark hair. She was Danish, but a touch of Indonesian blood gave her skin a slightly dusky, smoky patina. Her laugh I will always remember. When she entered a room, I knew it without seeing or hearing her because she had a fragrant breath that was extraordinary. I don’t know its chemical composition but her breath was sweet, like crushed and slightly fermented fruit. During the day, we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I, and it was a lovely experience. She was a deep sleeper, and I can visualize her now lying in our bed while the moonlight burst through my window and illuminated her skin with a soft, magical amber glow. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her. She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married on the pinnacle of Magellan’s cloud and then, bejeweled in our love, I would have taken her in my chariot made of flawless diamonds beyond the stars, beyond time, and farther than light to eternity.

  Ermi had a boyfriend named Wally. When I was seven, I was playing by myself near a stream when I saw them kissing in a car. I was mystified, but had no idea of the disaster that this event foreshadowed. When Ermi left me not long after that to get married—not to Wally, but to a boy named Eric—I was devastated. She never told me she was going to leave or to be married. She merely said one day that she was leaving on a trip and would return soon. (In fact, she did return—twenty years later.)

  The night I realized Ermi was gone forever, I looked up and saw a buttermilk sky. There was a full moon behind the clouds and as it seemed to skip overhead across the saffron universe, I felt my dreams die. It had been weeks since she had gone. I’d waited and waited for her. But I finally knew that she wasn’t coming back. I felt abandoned. My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too. That’s why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me; I had to repeat the process. From that day forward, I became estranged from this world.

  When I was six years old, we moved from Omaha to Evanston, Illinois, near Chicago, where my father established his own company, the Calcium Carbonate Corporation. I think I was probably ready for a change.

  At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I’d been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don’t remember why. Perhaps it was because I was starting to resist authority. All I remember about kindergarten was that I was the bad boy of the class and had to sit under the teacher’s desk, where my p
rimary activity was staring up her dress. I must have had dyslexia, although there wasn’t a name for it then. Even now I often have to work carefully with words and numbers, one at a time, one sentence at a time, especially if I feel under stress, and I still can’t dial a telephone correctly if I look at the numbers; I have to dial without looking at the keyboard as if I were touch-typing.

  My mother’s drinking got worse in Evanston. Sometimes alcohol sent her into a crying jag, but initially it usually made her happy, giddy and full of mirth, and she might sit down at the piano and sing to herself, and we often joined in. But she was seldom home. With Ermi gone, I was alone a lot, and it was shortly after this that I found myself behaving in odd ways. I was failing in school, I was truant, I became a vandal and trashed houses that were being renovated; I shot birds, burned insects, slashed tires and stole money. At the same time I began finding myself not wanting to go home, and spent most of my time at the house of Jimmy Ferguson, a classmate and longtime friend, or at the house of a Greek family who lived up the block and across the alley.

  I also began to stammer, so noticeably that I was taken to Northwestern University for speech therapy, where I was treated unsuccessfully. With my BB gun, I accidentally shot a chauffeur, and I also shot the big bay window in our house and cracked it, which brought a ferocious reaction from my father. In one of the lighter moments that I remember, we had a woman helping us who was from Martinique, and in an effort to please my father, she emptied a carafe of water and filled it with gin. The next morning he sat down to breakfast, took several large gulps of it and went to the office half snockered.

  Like all recollections, my memories of those times are colored by later events and distorted by the blurred prism through which my mind now chooses to examine my life. I have learned that it is easy to convince yourself that an event occurred a certain way when it did not—to think you know exactly what happened until someone tells you, “No, that never happened. You weren’t even there.” We all invent things in our minds and can be astounded to learn they really didn’t happen the way that they are recalled. So as I reflect on my life in these pages, I advise the reader of my limitations and the fallibility of my brain.

  I’ve often thought I would have been much better off if I had grown up in an orphanage. My parents seldom fought in front of us, but there was a constant, grinding, unseen miasma of anger. After we moved to Evanston, the tension and unspoken hostility became more acute. Why, I don’t know, but I suspect my mother was growing more disillusioned and angry with my father’s philandering, and he was growing more unhappy with her drinking.

  3

  CAROL HICKOCK HAD A curious malady that made her fall asleep suddenly. One moment she was awake, the next she was sound asleep even if she was standing up; then a minute or two later, her eyes blinked open slowly, she woke up and didn’t realize she’d been asleep. When one of our teachers at Lincoln School told the class about her problem and asked us to look out for her, I relished the assignment. I wanted to care for her. Then I decided I was going to marry her. I occasionally walked her home from school, and soon I asked her for a date. I felt very sporty inviting her to Coolie’s Restaurant for lunch, and then we went to see Boris Karloff in The Mummy. When the scary part of the movie came on, I told her that I had to go to the bathroom and left. The truth was, I was scared stiff. Instead of going to the bathroom, I went to the lobby and waited until the scary part was over, then returned to my seat. When the next scary scene came on, I disappeared again, then a third time. I don’t know what Carol thought of my bathroom habits.

  One afternoon I was visiting Carol and we were sitting on the sofa when she suddenly lost consciousness. I leaned over and kissed her—my first kiss. After she came to a minute later, I said, “How are you?” But I never mentioned my thievery. Maybe she was the girl I should have married. I don’t know whatever happened to her.

  There were only two black kids in Lincoln School, and they were both my friends, especially Asa Lee. I was at his house one day when he and his cousin and I decided to form a club. When it was time to elect the president, vice president and secretary, we had difficulty in deciding who was going to be president, and I said, “Well, that’s simple: ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go—eeny, meeny, miney, moe …’ ” At that moment I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Asa’s mother. She bent down and said, “Dahlin’, we don’t use that word in this house.” I looked up with some surprise and I said, “What word?” She answered, “Nigger.” I said, “Oh.” I had no idea what the word meant, but I could tell from Asa’s expression that it was significant. Then she put a sweet gum ball in my mouth, patted my head affectionately and said, “You’re a sweet thing.” That was my first experience with a sense of race.

  During my four years at Lincoln School, a few teachers liked me, but because I would not conform and was often rebellious, most had no hope for me. Among them was Miss Miles, whose name was appropriate because she was about six feet three inches tall and had the personality of a large granite obelisk.

  After noticing that Asa and I spent a lot of time together, Miss Miles called us out of class into the hallway one day and said, “All right, you two, tell me what’s going on here.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I said, “Nothing is going on.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” she said. “How come you two are hanging around together?”

  When I said we were in the same club, she asked, “What kind of club is it?”

  When neither of us said anything, she grabbed me by one arm and shook me violently. I began crying and maybe Asa did, too.

  “Now, you tell me the truth,” she said. “What kind of club do you have?”

  “It’s our club,” I said. “He’s the president, and I’m the vice president.”

  I didn’t mention that we had only one other member in the club, Asa’s cousin.

  Miss Miles said, “You better watch yourselves.”

  When I returned to the class, I slumped to my desk, still crying. I felt humiliated and didn’t know what was going on. I remember crying, then becoming aware that mucus was hanging from my nose when it landed on my desk. I pretended it was funny, causing the other kids to howl, but I felt humiliated and hid it as best I could.

  In our family picture album, there is a photograph of me with a few words scrawled on the back by one of my sisters: “Bud—and is he a grand boy! Sweet and funny, idealistic and oh, so young.” Once Tiddy told me, “By the time you were seven or eight you were constantly bringing home starving animals, sick birds, people you thought were in some kind of distress, and if you had a choice, you’d pick the girl who was cross-eyed or the fattest one because nobody paid attention to her and you wanted her to feel good.”

  I suppose it was true. I fashioned myself into the protector of weaker beings. I stopped shooting birds and became their guardians. I scolded friends who stepped on ants, telling them the ants had as much right to live as they did. While I was riding my bike near the beach in Evanston one day, I passed a woman who was lying on the ground; it turned out she was falling-down drunk, but I thought she was just sick. I rode her home on my bicycle and told my parents, who were outside on the porch, that we should help her because she was sick. They were embarrassed and uncomfortable, but they knew I was sincere and so they helped her. The memory of this incident suggests, I realized later, that early on I felt an obligation to help people who were less fortunate than me, or didn’t have friends. But it wasn’t only people to whom I felt an obligation. Curiously, after I moved to New York, whenever I saw a piece of paper on a sidewalk, I thought, If I don’t pick it up, who will? So, I would bend over and put it in a trash basket.

  When I was eleven, my parents separated, and my mother, my sisters and I went to live with my grandmother—the matriarch of the family, whom we called Bess or Nana—in California.

  She was buxom and sharp-featured, with white hair, an aristocratic bearing and the lo
ok of a Gibson girl. Like my mother, she was also very much an individual and a renegade who refused to accept unblinkingly Victorian standards of behavior. Being Irish, she was witty and amusing. Humor, I suppose, is probably the hallmark of my family; if anything kept us sane, it was humor. We never knew what would come out of my grandmother’s mouth. She had an enormous laugh and a sense of absurdity about human behavior, but there was also a serious side to her. She was a Christian Scientist practitioner, and a good one, I was told.

  I attended the seventh and eighth grades at Julius C. Lathrop Junior High School in Santa Ana, a farming community in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. It was a period when my mother drank more than ever; she’d promise to stop, then disappear on another bender for four or five days—trying to love us, I suppose, when she was home, but rarely paying much attention to us. I probably didn’t realize yet what an alcoholic was, but, like my sisters, I had to live with the effects of her disorder. My mother would get drunk on the sly, then try to hide it in classic alcoholic fashion. For a time in Santa Ana, I had a fantasy that the important people in my life were all dead and were only pretending to be alive. I lay in bed for hours, sweating and looking up at the ceiling, convinced I was the only one in the world who was still alive. For a twelve-year-old—for anyone—it was frightening.

  At home I was always on skinny rations when it came to praise. I never received accolades or adulation, not even encouragement. Nobody ever thought I was good for anything except a few kindly teachers. One was my shop teacher at Julius C. Lathrop Junior High, a man whose name I’ve forgotten but whose words of encouragement affect me to this day. Once he gave me a piece of metal with the assignment to make something with it. I pounded it on a forge into the shape of a screwdriver, put it in a box of wet sand to make a mold, melted some aluminum and poured it into the mold. I had made a screwdriver, and he praised me for it. For the first time in my life, I had done something of which I was proud.