Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  As it did for many military academies then, the federal government subsidized Shattuck by providing rifles and cannons for us to drill with. Every year several graduates went on to West Point. Our teachers were called “masters,” and their task was to educate and mold us into proper citizens, instilling in us the kind of acquiescence to authority that generals have sought to impose on their troops from the beginning of time. The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals. That’s the only way you can run an army. It is only through order, submission to discipline and the exorcising of individuality that you make a good soldier. Many people really enjoy it. I witnessed it at Shattuck, and I’ve seen it in a hundred different ways since then. But I hated it. To regiment people—to make them march in step, all in uniform, marching in a unit—was nauseating to me.

  I missed my parents, who rarely visited or wrote, but I had a lot of fun at Shattuck along with much anguish and sometimes loneliness. I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it. I wanted to destroy the place. I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it. I would do anything to avoid being treated like a cipher, which is what they aim for when they put you in a military uniform and demand conformity and discipline.

  Not long ago, I ran across a pile of letters that I’d sent home from Shattuck and that my sister Frannie saved. In my first letter a few weeks after I got there, I told my parents: “The school work is terribly hard to start with, plus my not knowing how to concentrate and my rotten foundation in English, French and Algebra makes things awfully tough. I’m learning, though, not fast maybe, but learning about everything. I hope I will be able to carry all my subjects. I’m working hard and I think I can … I’m rooming with an awful nice kid from Portland named John Adams (good guy)….” The food served by the Shattuck mess, I observed, was “grand and you can have all you can hold. I have gained ten pounds and now weigh 157 with clothes on and about 150 without. I feel swell except for my back, which I messed up in football. It’s coming along, though, and I’ve found I can get plenty tough if I want to in football. People think you have to be a big bruiser to play football. That’s bunk. All it takes is a little callousing of the constitution.… You don’t have time to blow your nose here. On the run all the time. The seniors are plenty tough on you. Some are swell fellows just having a bit of fun. Others get nasty sometimes. I don’t like that, but I’ve found that it’s best to just let things slide.…” I went to a dance at a local girls’ school, but apparently it was disappointing: “The girls are grand, but all but bored to tears, and all they can offer you is a roaring game of Chinese checkers or sitting in the middle of the front lawn.… Sometimes I get very lonely and wish I could be home, of course. Mother, please write me. I’ve gone away to school, you know. Address to Shattuck School, Faribault, Minn.”

  In other letters saved by my sister, I reported on the ups and downs of my first year:

  September, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  Well, the routine has been unleashed in all its fury. I’m going like hell every second. I would have written sooner but honest to my dear God, I just haven’t had time.

  So you don’t think I can play football? I am now first-team first-string right half. Am I sore! My lord above couldn’t know how sore I am. It’s all I can do to lace my shoes.… We have had two tests and in both I think I have done quite well. I like John very much and think—as a matter of fact I know—we will get along fine.… This work has sapped all my strength. I can’t write another line.

  Your loving son, Bud

  September, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  I am settled materially but not spiritually. The staff is tough and the reward is usually a good, sweet, but firm kick in the ass. I’m playing first-string football but the studies are pretty rigid so I think I’ll have to drop it. All I went out for was to see whether or not I could take it. I’ve found I can get hit hard and like it. There will be plenty of time for fight and glory next year. I want to really accomplish something in the academic aspect. I like geometry and Latin American history, much to my surprise.… I’m kinda homesick and want my mother, but I guess I will get over that. I’ve received exactly one letter since I’ve been here. Fine support for the baby of the family. You guys have no idea how much a few words of cheer and goodwill are appreciated here.

  Wistfully, Bud

  October, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  I am not as good a football player as I thought, but I’m still trying. I’ve learned an awful lot about the game I didn’t know before. I’ve gotten to play a few times, but I was so scared I couldn’t do anything. Regardless of what anyone says, I am trying to better myself in every way. I don’t smoke or swear or do anything my sisters or mother wouldn’t approve of.… I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.…

  John is getting in a lot of trouble. He goes out at night in spite of the fact that it is a serious offense and he has been caught at it once before. He spits on the floor. He has an automatic that he fires at the drop of a hat out the window or any place he feels like it. He got a date at 2 A.M. this morning with some disreputable little number in Faribault. You can’t tell him a thing. He is always nice and pleasant though.… I’ve much to say to you when you come, so hurry up.

  Love ya, Bud

  P.S. Please hurry.

  October, 1941

  Dear Frannie:

  This is just a prelude to a manuscript I shall write you in a little while. I was awfully glad to get your letter of goodwill. A letter is very appreciated nowadays. I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner, but I haven’t had time to go to the “John.” That, sister, is a fact! I was actually constipated for almost four days because I couldn’t get to the “John.”

  School is unbelievably tough and I’m having a lot of trouble making myself study conscientiously, but I’ll manage somehow. I was playing first-string football but I have a back injury and now am able to have no athletics at all. I’m in the drum and bugle corps, the orchestra and dance band. Jesus, I can’t wait to see you and tell you some of the Godawful funny things that happen here.…

  Love, Bud

  November, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  This has been quite an eventful day.… I was asked by all the influential senior officers at a special meeting to pledge their fraternity (which is by far the best in school). It is quite an honor to be a member as only the very best-liked fellas get in, and me “a new boy”! My, my. There are few members but very influential as far as they go. I won’t have very much trouble getting on the Crack Squad next year … we are reading The Three Musketeers and not ever having read it before, I find it very interesting.

  I love you both very much.

  Bud

  November, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  You are the most patient, swellest folks a guy could have. I will be glad to get home and talk and just be home. School is fine but bewildering. Life is so gad dammed bewildering. I am learning a whole lot and am really becoming a man, a young man, perhaps, but a man. Many things I used to think of as important aren’t at all now.…

  Love to all, Bud

  December, 1941

  Dear Folks:

  You’ve probably gotten my grades and they don’t look like much. I don’t care what the masters have written in the comments. I am trying. I am being more systematic and orderly about my work and everything concerned. PLEASE have faith in me. I will get through, I know it. Things should be breaking any minute. They are in so many small ways. I have improved since John left, and with Christmas vacation coming up and everything, I’ll have an excellent chance to review while every other fella will be out on a toot. I certainly look forward t
o coming home. I’ll leave about the twentieth.… These last days are grueling. They are piling on work so fast that it dazes you. I guess they have to because three weeks is a long time in which to forget things. I’ve had an awful cold and I’ve been in the hospital for a couple of days.

  P.S. Please don’t mention my grades to me. I am working and I won’t let you down.

  Bud

  6

  IT WAS ONE of the cadets’ responsibilities to write home once a week, and I did my duty. As I look at these letters from Shattuck that Frannie saved, I am struck by the innocence, naïveté and dishonesty expressed by their author. I see an eager, lonely child who never had much of a childhood, who needed affection and assurance and lied to his parents in the hope that something he might say would make them want to love him. He was a boy with little faith in himself, a child who hungered for their approval and would do anything to get it. He told them constantly how much he loved them, hoping his words would persuade them to tell him that they loved him, and he always wrote that everything was okay when of course it wasn’t. But these were not conscious feelings; at the time I had no idea why I was troubled. Now I realize that by then any hope I’d ever had of receiving love or support from my parents was probably moribund. But I was in denial. I tried not to think about it while sending home letters in which a part of me was still trying to make them think I was worthy of their love. In being a loving son, I suppose I was trying to become a loved son. What my letters failed to say was that in those days I blamed myself for all my insecurities and other problems. I didn’t understand yet about the lethal weapons that parents employ in their words and actions when they deal with their children, or the obligation of parents to give their children self-esteem instead of shame.

  I don’t want to give the wrong impression: my youth was not an unremitting stretch of sadness and unhappiness; it wasn’t like that. I had a lot of fun and a lot of laughs. But my life was largely a series of acts of hostility designed to subvert authority. I had no sense of emotional security. I didn’t know until much later why I felt valueless, or that I was responding to a sense of worthlessness with hostility. In summary, my time at Shattuck was a mixed experience; sometimes I felt lonely and bereft of love and affection, and other times I had a great deal of satisfaction in being able to challenge authority successfully and get away with it by clever wiles and lies.

  When I entered Shattuck, I had a hair-trigger temper. I had—and still have—an intense hatred of loud, sudden noises and of being startled, and these could cause me to explode. At home I once knocked down one of my sisters after she came into my bedroom while I was asleep, shook me and told me dinner was ready. I was so startled that I got up, walked across the room and punched her, and was bewildered and contrite afterward. Even today when I’m startled I instinctively put my hands up and pull back my right fist ready to strike. I don’t hit people anymore, but I still automatically assume the posture. I’ve never understood why. One incident at Shattuck suggests that I’ve been that way a long time. I was always the last person in formation. I couldn’t bear the loud ruckus, and the intensity of the noise in the gym, especially early in the morning when we were summoned to formation and somebody was shouting orders, so I was always tardy. I usually got there just as the bugle blew or someone said, “Battalion, attention.” On one occasion, I shuffled my way reluctantly into the gym in wintertime and a friend of mine came up behind me, slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Good morning, Banjo” (one of my nicknames). I turned around and without a conscious thought decked him. Then I stood over him and said, “If you ever do that to me again, you son of a bitch, I’ll kill you.” I saw his anger rise, but when he saw the intensity he was dealing with, he backed off. Then I immediately apologized.

  About three months after I arrived at Shattuck, the chief administrator at the school—his name was Dr. Nuba Fletcher but we called him “Nuba the Tuba”—convened a formation to announce to the battalion that we were at war with Japan. I was in the front row, and he looked at me and told me I was sitting in the very same seat where my father had been sitting when the battalion was informed of America’s entry into the First World War. Since my father had gone on from Shattuck to become a lieutenant in the artillery, I suspect the Tuba expected and certainly hoped I’d receive a commission. Occasionally he or one of the masters would say something like, “Marlon, if you ever stop being a smart-ass, you might make a good officer.” But I wouldn’t have lasted a nanosecond in a uniform. All my life I have questioned why I should do something. My first response always is, Why should I? Reasonable arguments can change my mind, but I won’t do something if I don’t agree. I have never been able to snap to and salute, and that’s what they ordered you to do at Shattuck.

  Still, I have wonderful, warm memories of breaking the rules—of pranks, high jinks, teasing the masters and assorted silliness that almost made being there worth it.

  Once the war started, many of the younger masters went into the army, and we had to deal with whatever faculty the management of the school could scrape together. As a group they were mostly tired older men who were no match for the cadets. By nature, adolescent boys, especially when they organize as a group, can be a diabolical force, testing adults to the limit and pushing those limits to the extreme, and that’s what we did.

  I had discovered that a hair tonic called Vitalis contained alcohol and that if you touched a match to it, it glowed spectacularly for a few seconds in a stunning electric blue flame.

  After this discovery, in the middle of the night I’d take a bottle of Vitalis down two flights of stairs, squirting it on the floor and walls until I came to the doorway of one of the boys I didn’t like, then return to the safety of my room and set the Vitalis afire. The flame raced down the stairs, leaving behind a glorious fiery ribbon.

  Another time, a bunch of us got together and poured Vitalis over the transom of a master who was terrified by this wild, savage group of boys who would never relent once they saw a grain of weakness in a master. We scared him nearly to death, and we could hear him beating the flames out with his clothes. It didn’t cause any damage, merely an eerie blue flame.

  I was also responsible for one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of Shattuck. Besides being easily startled, I have, again, never been able to stand loud noises, although admittedly it is selective: I can listen for hours to music played so loud that other people have to leave the room. But most loud noises—especially sounds associated with authority—annoy me. The bell in the tower at Shattuck constantly bonged every fifteen minutes—on the hour, quarter hour, half hour, three-quarter hour—ordering us to go to class, eat, sleep, get in formation or report for a drill. It was the voice of authority and I hated it. At some point I decided I simply couldn’t bear it any longer and climbed into the tower late one night—an act that alone made me subject to immediate dismissal—intending to sabotage the mechanism that made the bell ring. But I discovered that the only way I could silence the bell was to steal the clapper; it must have weighed 150 pounds, but I decided to take it. I waited until the bell tolled at the quarter hour, nearly deafening myself, leaned over, unhooked the clapper, hoisted it on my shoulders and made my way down the stairs to the ground. It was spring, the night was flooded with moonlight and I felt glorious. I lugged the clapper a couple of hundred yards and buried it, where it is to this day. Anybody with a metal detector could find it. As I covered the clapper in the grave I’d dug for it, I smirked and chuckled in a way that only an adolescent could smirk and chuckle. The next morning the school was wonderfully quiet. The masters gathered outside the tower, looked up, shook their heads and tried to figure out what had happened. I could hardly contain my laughter at everyone’s bewilderment. It was wartime, and every ounce of metal was needed for tanks, guns and airplanes, which meant they couldn’t replace the clapper—good news for me, but a crisis for the staff, because the masters had always relied on the bell to order cadets to their classes and other events. Per
plexed, they found a cadet who played the trumpet and ordered him to toot his horn every hour. But they couldn’t agree what he should play, so he had to keep trying different songs; he could have played “Annie Laurie” and it would have served the purpose, but they kept telling him to learn another new tune, and he was constantly missing notes, which was comical, and his poor playing almost hospitalized me with laughter. I’ll never forget that poor benighted cadet with his horn at his lips trying new bugle calls and constantly hitting wrong notes.

  When they realized the clapper was gone, the faculty decided that a cadet must have been responsible for its disappearance, so they summoned all the cadets to a formation and ordered the culprit to identify himself. When no one came forward, the battalion was put “on bounds,” which meant we couldn’t go into town, normal privileges were suspended and we were confined to the study hall during our free time. The masters were sure that the offender would have bragged about his larceny, and that by punishing the entire battalion one of the other cadets would rat on him.

  I promptly announced I was forming an ad hoc committee of cadets to conduct its own investigation of the crime, which I called a sacrilegious assault on one of the most hallowed traditions of Shattuck. Of course the staff loved me for this. Then I named all my enemies—cadets I didn’t like—as probable conspirators in the theft. Even today I find myself laughing at this elaborate hoax and the style with which I carried it off.

  No one has ever discovered the truth. Eventually the faculty had to surrender; they restored our privileges and everything returned to normal. Meanwhile, I had looked like a knight, the one cadet at Shattuck who’d had the courage, honor and sense of its venerable traditions to demand that the perpetrator be held accountable for his deed. The secret of being a successful vandal in military school is not taking on a partner. If you are the only one who knows a secret, and you keep it and are deft and careful, you will never be apprehended.