Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 3

  I also discovered at Lathrop that I wasn’t bad at sports; I won the school decathlon championship and set a record by doing a thousand push-ups without stopping. I was still going when the coach stopped me. He said I had to stop because if I didn’t, I might damage my heart.

  Even now, I still get a thrill savoring these small successes so long ago.

  After almost two years, my mother decided to reconcile with my father, and we moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a small town north of Chicago near Lake Michigan. Once again, we all looked forward to a fresh start.

  Almost sixty years later, I can still feel the rhythm of the train that returned us to Illinois. While it rocked and swayed, I walked to a vestibule between two cars and felt the energy of the wheels rattling across the steel joints in the tracks. Spontaneously, I started banging on the doors and walls with my hands, grooving to the beat of the train as if it were a jazz quartet. After that, I was a changed boy: I wanted to be a drummer. Never again did I ride a train without getting the urge to pound my hands and fingers against something in accompaniment to the melody of the rails, and whenever I heard a train whistle in the middle of the night, I’d rise up on my elbows in bed and listen for the clack of wheels against rails and look out the window for a trail of steam. Long before I knew anything about the Doppler effect, I tried to figure out where a train was headed and how fast it was traveling by listening to the fading sound of its whistle and the steely song of its wheels. I really miss those old trains.

  4

  WES MICKLER WAS BALANCED in his chair, leaning against the barn by the tack-room door when I rode up. I was riding Peavine Frenzy. She was lathered a bit and flaring her nostrils.

  “Was you runnin’ that horse, Bud?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “If you do that again I swear I’ll knock a fart outta ya.”

  My face jerked while I tried to suppress my laughter.

  “Can’t you see that old horse is goin’ lame?” Wes asked.

  “I didn’t notice it, Wes.”

  “Wut the hell’s amatter wichu?”

  The way Wes said almost anything made me laugh.

  He was part owner of a farm on Bradley Road, where my family rented a house five miles outside Libertyville, It wasn’t a full-time farm anymore; it was more a horse ranch where people could keep their horses or rent them for a day. Wes’s partner, Bill Booth, was the horse trader, always making deals and trucking horses to one place or another.

  Wes loved horses, and even though my family owned Peavine, he made me feel she was his.

  I pretended to adjust the stirrup on Peavine’s far side so Wes couldn’t see my face wrestling with a smile. He almost always broke me up. He said things he didn’t intend to be funny, and the more serious he got, the more my throat tightened, fighting to suppress a laugh. I realize now it probably didn’t mean a damn to him whether I laughed or not, but at the time I thought it might make him angry, so I coughed and spit a lot trying to mask my laughter.

  When I was cleaning the stall of a new boarding pony one day, Wes stood outside looking through the bars as the pony watched me. The pony didn’t move, but he was flexing his nostrils and his ears were bent back. I reached out slowly to touch his nose and Wes said, “You better grab your nuts, kid. That damn dink can kick you frontways just as good as back.”

  I lost air like a ripped gas bag and sank gently to the warm manure. Wes didn’t say anything, just stared at me, and the more he did and the more he remained silent, the more I had to thrash around trying to gulp some air into my body as I laughed.

  Wes finally walked away, but when the pony looked at me with its big eyes that seemed to be saying, “What in the world is the matter with you?” I went into a life-threatening seizure. Finally I was able to manage a few hoots and crawled around the stable looking for my hat.

  Wes was in the terminal stages of tuberculosis. Pretty soon his back was a hump and he was carrying his elbows a little higher, so that when he walked they pointed back like arrows. He was always coughing, hacking and spitting out thick wads of mucus that sometimes was so lumpy it caught on his front teeth when he tried to spit. He almost never smiled, but when he did his mouth looked like a golden cemetery. You could see his skull showing through his face, and his smoky blue eyes seemed to be falling out of his head whenever he bent over to spit.

  But when Wes was on a horse, he had a smile, golden cemetery or not, that made you feel that he knew something you didn’t. He always glittered when he was up there, looking like he grew out of the horse’s back. And he always talked softly to any horse under him—like it was a woman. He was sure of himself on a horse; he was home. But after a while, he couldn’t mount up anymore. Mostly he just sat in the chair outside the tack room and waited for death. I thought he would spit away his whole body, and one day he did.

  Wes Mickler, born someplace, died on Bradley Road. He never said what happened in between.

  Sometimes when my mother got bent out of shape, an acquaintance from a bar or a stranger brought her home; other times we’d have to go looking for her or the phone would ring and I’d hear a police sergeant say: “We have a Dorothy Pennebaker Brando here. Could you come down to the station and get her?”

  Jocelyn usually ran the show at home. Even though she was only a few years older than Frannie and me, she had to assume the responsibility for bringing us up, for which I owe her a debt of gratitude that is unpayable. Although I may have argued more with Frannie than I did with Jocelyn, we were close, too. After all, we shared the same bunk in purgatory. But it was Tiddy who kept the family together. When my mother was missing, I always looked to her for instructions about what to do. She made sure I had something to eat and clean clothes to wear. She was as magnificent, as strong a person as I’ve ever known, but everybody reaches their breaking point sooner or later, and in time both she and Frannie did.

  The three of us, and sometimes my father, spent a lot of time looking for my mother. I’d tramp door-to-door through Chicago’s skid row on a sunny afternoon, push open the door of each bar in succession, peer into a dark cavern and try to spot her on one of the stools.

  When I was about fourteen, my father brought her home once and took her upstairs. I was downstairs in the living room. I heard her fall, then the sounds of slapping and hitting, and I ran upstairs. She was lying on the bed crying and he was standing over her. I became insane with rage and set my teeth in an attack mode; filled with Goliath strength, through a clenched mouth nine inches away from his nose, I said in a low, clear voice, “If you ever hit her again, I’ll kill you.”

  He looked in my eyes and froze. He knew he was staring at more adrenaline than he had ever seen in his life. My father was afraid of nothing and we probably would have fought to the death had it not been for the fact that perhaps he felt guilty. It was probably the only time in his life that he backed off from a physical challenge. He just walked out of the bedroom, leaving my mother on the bed.

  The country road we lived on was named for Old Man Bradley, who presided over a pretty forty-acre farm about a mile down the road. He had two sons, Dutch and Indian. He had blackheads on his nose so big that you could have scooped them out with a soupspoon. I could never remember anything he said because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the wondrousness of those blackheads. He was missing most of his front teeth, and he must have been eighty years old, but almost every day he walked down that gravel road past our farm, paused and, if she was around, said hello to my cow, Violet. Our family always had animals, but they became more important to me as the years passed because they helped me deal with the absence of love. I used to come home from school and nobody would be home. There would be dirty dishes in the sink and piles of cat turds under the piano. The beds weren’t made, and the whole house would be unkempt and empty. My sisters were either still at school or with friends, my mother was out drinking and my father was out whoring. As a result, I sought—as I still do—affection, loyalty and friendship from animals.
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  One was a huge, black Great Dane named Dutchy. Every spring the meadow in front of the house became an ocean of canary-colored mustard blossoms, and when a wind came up, it was like watching a sea of rippling golden waves rising and falling with the breeze like breakers just before they pound into a reef. There was a trail through the field that led to the other side of town, and we often rode our horses along the trail three miles to the Des Plaines River. Dutchy liked to chase rabbits through the mustard field, which was nearly five feet high by late spring. She’d lose one and suddenly stop. A moment or two would pass, and then she’d leap about six feet in the air, a big, pitch-black dog silhouetted against the yellow mustard, looking to see if the mustard was vibrating in any direction. Like Nureyev, she seemed to be able to stay elevated for an extraordinary length of time. Then the chase would be on again. The sight of Dutchy seemingly frozen in midair is one of those memories imprinted on my brain that will last forever and a day. I don’t think she ever caught a rabbit, but she never stopped trying.

  Besides Dutchy, I was attached to Violet, our Jersey cow. It was my job to milk her twice a day, and on some winter mornings, it was so cold she would be steaming. I’d get out of bed, put on my coveralls and galoshes and walk to the barn, where I could barely see her shrouded behind the mists of her own body heat. Usually there was a bantam rooster and a couple of hens roosting between her horns, which, when she turned her head and looked at me, made Violet look as if she were wearing an elegant flowered hat from Paris. She’d look up at me, twist her head, watch me as I came through the door and utter a friendly good morning moo.

  I’ve always found animals easy to love because their love is unconditional. They are trusting, loyal and undemanding except in wanting love in return. In the summer I’d open the gate, climb on Violet and ride into the pasture. She never complained. I’d put my arms around her, kiss her and feel her return my affection. Cows have very sweet breath because of the hay that they eat, and I felt the warmth from it. In the summer there were usually a dozen or two barn cats around the farm, welcome if uninvited squatters, and they knew exactly when I milked Violet. Every morning when I went to the barn, they were waiting for me, lined up fifteen or twenty feet away. As soon as I started milking her, they got on their haunches, in a queue, and stuck their front paws out, waiting for me to squirt some milk into their faces, which I did. I don’t remember a time when they didn’t make me laugh. Sometimes when I was milking her, Violet would suddenly lift her leg and stick it in my bucket, fouling it with bits of manure, hay and dirt from the floor of the stable. Since I didn’t want to waste the milk or the time I’d spent getting it, I kept a piece of cheesecloth handy, and every time she did this, I poured the milk through the cheesecloth to remove the hay and manure before taking the milk inside. Everybody drank it, and I never told anyone about using my makeshift sieve or that manure had been in their milk.

  Every time I milked Violet, fed the chickens and cleaned the stable, manure affixed itself to my galoshes, which caused me a lot of embarrassment. I washed and scrubbed the galoshes as hard as I could, but never truly got rid of the smell. It was especially discomfiting because it branded me as a farm kid. There was a kind of snobbery at Libertyville Township High that ranked kids who lived in town as superior to those who lived on farms or—even worse—in a place called Roundout, a railroad switching center where a lot of poor kids lived. Our farm wasn’t far from Roundout, so as a result a kind of double stigma rubbed off on my sisters and me, and we didn’t rank high in Libertyville’s adolescent pecking order. Every morning before school, I scrubbed my shoes and galoshes trying to clean off the manure, and when I got to school I waited until everybody else was in the classroom before walking in at the last moment, hoping no one would smell it. If I took a girl to a basketball game, I always sniffed the air while trying not to let her know I was doing so, embarrassed that she might smell the cow manure in the car.

  I have many pleasant memories of my childhood, however. The school was in town, so I either hitched a ride with a neighbor or took a trolley on the branch line connecting Libertyville with Chicago via Lake Forest and Waukegan. If the weather was good, I sometimes walked the five miles home and threw rocks at the glass insulators on telephone poles along the way; it was a triumph to break one, or better yet, to knock one of the wires off the crossbar. And sometimes friends and I took a detour to Roundout and chatted with the gandy dancers who walked the tracks searching for loose spikes. Or we’d hijack a handcar from a siding and ride several miles, watching for trains in both directions. In winter the rails became slippery and caked with ice, and we’d go to Roundout and watch the steam locomotives labor to get going, with their wheels sliding and slipping; in summer we sat beside the rails, stuck a penny on the tracks with a wad of gum and waited for a train to flatten it, then made necklaces and belts out of the flattened coins.

  When we heard a train approaching, everybody started yelling, “Come on, come on, come on … the train is coming!” We stood as close to the tracks as we dared and as soon as the train was a few yards away, we all turned our backs to avoid being splattered in the face by the hail of pebbles and rocks that were whipped up by the train and stung like hornets.

  At fourteen or fifteen, I decided to earn my living when I grew up playing drums made from wooden beer kegs and leading a group called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. We organized a little band, but it didn’t last long and didn’t make any money. Instead I became an usher at a local movie theater to earn some spending money. On Saturdays most of the farmers brought their families into town to see a movie, no matter what was playing. I enjoyed directing customers to a row of seats that was already filled. To see a line of a dozen people file down a row of seats in the dark, sitting on other people, stepping on feet and causing a general ruckus, then coming out the other side, was a hoot. I had to wear a stiff, formal uniform I never liked, especially during hot weather. To cool off, I started taking off my shirt, but I sewed a pair of cuffs to my jacket to make it look like I was wearing one. I figured no one would know about it because I was wearing a dickey under the jacket. After one of the other ushers squealed on me and I was fired for being out of uniform, I chopped up some rotting broccoli—few things smell worse than broccoli that’s been out in the sun two or three weeks—mixed it with Limburger cheese I had ripened until it was pure bacteria, and stuffed it into the intake pipe of the air-conditioning system, flooding the theater with an odor that sent the audience out to the street. It was a great act of revenge. The guy who fired me never figured out who did it.

  At Libertyville High, I was a bad student, chronic truant and all-round incorrigible. I was forever being sent to the principal’s office to be disciplined. Mr. Underbrink didn’t like me much, and seated behind his big wooden desk, with a stern, worn look on his face, he gave me one lecture after another. My homeroom teacher, Mr. Russell, was just as enraged by my contempt for authority, and his response was to belittle me; once he lost his temper and shook me as hard as he could, and announced to the class that I had an IQ of ninety and that I had better pay attention if I wanted to keep up with the rest of the class. I didn’t try hard because I was bored and irritated.

  The situation didn’t improve during my second year. I failed or dropped out of so many classes that by the end of the term I was informed that I had to repeat my sophomore year.

  I was one of the bad boys of the school. I always had friends, boys as well as girls, but I was anathema to many of my teachers and the parents of many of my friends, some of whom treated me as if I were poison. Though I didn’t realize it then, I was beginning to discover one of the realities of life: members of almost every group in human society try hard to convince themselves that they are superior to the other groups, whether they are religions, nations, neighboring tribes in the rain forest or members of rival suburban country clubs who claim that membership in their club proves they have a higher social standing than those in others. The caste system may be more highly de
veloped in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it. In Libertyville I was in the caste right near the bottom.

  My father’s solution to my difficulties at Libertyville High was to send me to the same school he had once attended, Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. He thought the discipline would benefit me greatly.

  My tenure at Shattuck was probably fated from the beginning to be short. By then I was rebelling against any authority and against conformity in general with every ounce of energy in my body.

  5

  THE CAMPUS OF Shattuck Military Academy was attractive in the way of a sedate English country boarding school. From a distance it almost looked like one, with symmetrical rows of Gothic limestone buildings and a tall, square bell tower cloaked in ivy. The tower overlooked the parade grounds, where I was soon marching two or three times a day. Beyond the buildings were a football field and hiking trails for extended-order drills. Reveille was at six-thirty, when we shined our shoes and put on our uniforms for the first inspection of the day; after calisthenics there was a formation, morning drill and breakfast. Following five or six hours in a classroom, afternoons were devoted to sports.

  I was sixteen when I arrived at Shattuck. Since I had to repeat my sophomore year, I was a year behind other cadets my age. Shattuck had been producing soldiers for the United States Army since shortly after the Civil War. From the first day, we were indoctrinated with its traditions and the exploits of alumni who had demonstrated the values that our teachers said they were going to teach us: discipline, order, honor, obedience, courage, loyalty, patriotism.