Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 6

  My mother was moved to tears by this, and I was proud. I was unconcerned about how my father reacted and I don’t recall his response.

  After thinking it over a day or so, I responded with the adolescent reply that I would always remember what the cadets had done and would forever be grateful to them for supporting me, but that I had decided not to return to Shattuck; I had reached a fork in the road and was going to take a different path.

  I got a job paying $35 a week with a small construction company digging trenches, laying pipe, setting tile and helping to build houses. For the first time in my life, I had money in my jeans that I had earned myself. I can still taste that first beer I bought with my own paycheck.

  There were only three of us at home now because both my sisters had moved to New York. Tiddy, who had done some acting in high school, was taking classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and Frannie was studying painting at the Art Students League and starting a career as an artist in Greenwich Village.

  Despite the bravado of my letter to the cadets, I didn’t know what that path I was going to take was or where I wanted it to lead me, but I suspected it wouldn’t be long before I was in uniform again. Most of the boys my age in Libertyville were being drafted, and others were volunteering. The army was snapping up students with military-school backgrounds and commissioning them as officers, so I decided to sign up.

  At the induction center, a doctor asked me if I had any physical problems.

  “Sometimes my knee bothers me a little,” I said.

  I’d injured it in a football scrimmage at Shattuck when someone tackled me from behind and snapped the semilunar cartilage, which had been removed. The doctor grabbed my leg and pulled it sideways, causing my knee to spin a little like a ball in a socket.

  “Sorry, son, you’ve got a trick knee,” he said. “You’re 4-F.”

  My parents bravely sat me down and asked me what I was going to do now. “I don’t know,” I said, but I had a few ideas. The previous Christmas I’d visited my sisters in New York, and afterward I wrote Frannie: “I like N.Y. and I am going to live there when I start living.… God, I wish I were there. It is the most fascinating town in the world.…”

  My mother said it was important for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and my father offered to pay for my education to learn a trade. Since the only thing I had ever done except sports that anyone had praised me for was acting, I told them, “Why don’t I go to New York and try to be an actor?”

  9

  AS I GOT OUT OF the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to my sister’s apartment in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1943, I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everybody dead.

  I cherish my memories of those first few days of freedom in New York, especially my sense of liberation from not having to submit to any authority, and knowing that I could go anyplace and do anything at any time. No more uniforms, no more formations, no more bugles, no more extended-order drills, no more parades, curfews or masters. I had hated school, and now I was free.

  One night I went to Washington Square and got drunk for the first time. I fell asleep on the sidewalk and nobody bothered me. When I had to piss, I got up and relieved myself behind a bush. No one said I couldn’t. It was ecstasy sleeping on the sidewalk of Washington Square, realizing I had no commitments to anything or anyone. If I didn’t feel like going to bed, I didn’t. In those first weeks I formed the sleeping patterns of a lifetime: stay up till past midnight, sleep till ten or eleven the next morning.

  Once I stayed up all night at a party in Brooklyn and looked out the window at a gray dawn at about six A.M. and watched the streets glow with the headlights of buses, cars and taxis. Then the sidewalks began to fill up with people carrying briefcases and scurrying to their offices. I thought, God, wouldn’t it be awful if I had to get up and go to work like that every day?

  Frannie, who lived in an apartment near Patchin Place in the Village, invited me to move in with her. I got a job as an elevator operator at Best & Company department store, then worked as a waiter, a short-order cook, a sandwich man, and at other jobs that I don’t remember now.

  One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from.

  “New York,” he said.

  “How did you get that Texas accent?” I asked.

  “I was in the army.”

  “But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?” I’m sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face.

  “It was protective coloration,” he said, “because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan.” He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn’t broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer and the other man said he was Jimmy Baldwin.

  Although Mailer, who was as yet unpublished, and I never became good friends, Jimmy Baldwin and I became close after that meeting in Hector’s Cafeteria. It was a special relationship, and one of its hallmarks was an absence of any sense of racial differences between us, something I have seldom experienced with other black friends. Neither of us ever felt we had to speak about race. Our relationship was simply that of two human beings with no barriers between us, and we could tell each other anything about ourselves with frankness. I was working at a dull job and so was he; he hadn’t written much yet and I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.

  Unfortunately, Jimmy became one of the many friends I’ve loved since I left Libertyville who had much to offer but died senselessly and tragically long before they should have. He never told me he was dying, and I didn’t learn about his cancer until after he was dead.

  In the apartment next to my sister’s lived a woman named Estrelita Rosa Maria Consuelo Cruz. I called her Luke. She was Colombian and ten or fifteen years older than me; she was olive-skinned, fetching, extremely artistic and a great cook. Her husband was overseas with the marines, and one night she invited me for dinner; there was a fireplace, candlelight and wine, and I lost my virginity.

  Luke was extremely passionate and sexually unconventional. She never wore underpants, and we’d often walk down a street in New York, duck in an alley and have at it. At the ballet one night, she put her hand on my prick and I put my hand up her dress. We both came, and she yipped and tittered so loudly that others in the audience must have wondered about her. After her husband came back from overseas, he learned about our affair and divorced her. Our friendship lasted for many years. She was very important to me then, but after her there were many other women in my life.

  10

  THE BEST BANDS in the world were constantly coming in and out of Manhattan and making wonderful music in Harlem and behind the neon lights and red awnings of jazz clubs along West Fifty-second Street. I thrived on this feast. In Libertyville my idols in the jazz world had been Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, but one night I went to the Palladium, a ballroom on Broadway, to dance and almost lost my mind with excitement when I discovered Afro-Cuban music. Every Wednesday night there was a mambo contest, and it seemed as if every Puerto Rican in New York got out on the dance floor and released a week of frustration after working as a waiter or pushing a cart in the garment district. People moved their bodies in ways that were unimaginable; it was the most beautiful dancing I’d ever seen and I was mesmerized by it. Every Wednesday night was a festival, and I looked forward to it each week. The place exploded with joy, excitement and enthusiasm. Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, the very best of the Afro-Cuban bands, played there, and when one finished a set, another took over. I had always been stimulated by rhythm, even by the ticking of a clock, and the rhythms they played were irresistible. Each band usually had two or three conga drummers, and I couldn’t sit still because of their extraordinary, complicated syncopations.
I had been a pretty good stick drummer—I’d taken lessons—but had never played the congas. After going to the Palladium, I gave up stick drumming, bought my own conga drums and signed up for a class with Katherine Dunham, a wonderful black dancer, and for a while thought of trying to make my living as a modern dancer. She had been all over the world learning what was then called “primitive dancing,” and I was hypnotized by it, although in class whenever I was given the choice of either playing the drums or dancing, I much preferred to play.

  There were only two white people in my class at Dunham’s; the rest were black, including a nurse from Jamaica named Floretta who had a very distinctive look in her eyes. Her eyelids fell deep over her eyes, which make them look almost closed. For some reason, I found this very sensual. After we made love, I realized that she had never been with a white man and that I had never slept with a black woman before, so we shared the kind of curiosity that people of different races have for each other. I don’t know why it surprised me, but I found it interesting that there was no difference in making love to a woman of color than to a woman who was white. The only difference was her color, a symphony in sepia. When I pressed my thumb on her skin, it became luminous around the edges; it was like skin I had never touched before. We had great times together, but eventually we went our separate ways. She left school for some reason, and I never heard from her again.

  One night, after someone told me about a good band in Harlem, I took the subway to a small, dark club on 132nd Street with a bar out front and a small dance floor in the back where the band was playing. I had a pleasant buzz on, and after listening awhile I walked up to the bandstand and asked the musician who was playing conga drums if I could play a set. I pulled a $5 bill out of my pocket and offered it to him, but he wouldn’t look at me. A guy next to him with a big scowl on his face wouldn’t look at me either. Then a huge guy with eyes like ball bearings came out of nowhere and said, “I’ll take your money, boy. Do you want to play the drums? Gimme your money. I’ll see that you play the drums.”

  “Well, I think I’ll just listen now,” I said, “and play later.”

  Suddenly the place was silent. That’s strange, I thought. Then it registered on me that the big man was the only person in the club who had made eye contact with me, and I realized that I was the only white person in the room.

  As I sat down again, I noticed that several women were sitting at a table behind mine. The band started up again, and I sat back and listened, still happy to be there. Then I heard a voice: “You want to dance?”

  I looked up and saw a very pretty woman. “Dance? Yeah, sure.”

  We started dancing and I asked what her name was.

  “Ruby.”

  “My name’s Buddy.”

  “Buddy. Buddy?”

  “That’s right,” I said, and suddenly a slanted smile stole across her face, a charming smile illuminated by a bright gold tooth. We danced, and when the music stopped, we sat down and started to chat. While I was talking, I noticed her look behind me, and suddenly she said, “My name’s still Sugar.”

  I turned around and looked into the faces of five or six women, then saw a man sitting directly behind me, a black icebox with eyes like two .45s. I realized I’d looked into the wrong face; I had crossed an infuriated cement tank. I got out of my chair, swallowed hard, looked down at the floor, then at my feet, while trying to think of something to say. Finally I turned and walked over to him, my stomach fluttering like the hands of a jazz pianist. I stood beside him with all the girls staring dead-eyed at me, but he didn’t look back, just kept staring straight ahead. Trying to appear nonchalant, I said, “Hey, man, I’m just in from out of town.”

  He interrupted me and very slowly said, “My name is Leroy, L-E-R-O-Y.” Those letters are burned into my brain to this day.

  “Well, actually, Mr. Leroy,” I said, “I was just looking for a good time and trying to dig the music …”

  I didn’t know much black jargon, but I had heard the word “dig,” so I used it as often as I could. “My name’s Bud. I’m from out of town,” I said. “I just came in from Chicago. I don’t mean to be stepping on anybody’s toes or anything like that.”

  “That’s cool,” Leroy said. “That’s cool.”

  It took him about five seconds to draw out the one syllable of “cool”; in fact, he may have turned it into four syllables. “That’s cool, my man,” he repeated.

  I said, “Thank you very much. Are you sure it’s all right?”

  He looked at me and said “Mmmm, hmmmm.” It was a long “Mmmmm hmmmmm.” He never once looked at me.

  I went back to my seat mentally reciting my catechism, sat down and started talking to the girl again while trying to do something about the tortured smile on my face. “Is that your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, moving her head slightly and smiling again, “kind of.”

  “Listen,” I said, “why don’t we go downtown? I know some nice places there where we could have some fun and dance. Would you like to go downtown?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not, baby? Let’s make it.”

  I put some money down to pay the bill and went to the checkroom, which was near the bar in the front, to get my coat. As I was putting it on, I turned around and looked back toward the doorway and saw a body flying horizontally past me directly into a pile of chairs and tables that had been piled on top of each other. It was Ruby/Sugar. Without stopping to evaluate the situation, I pivoted on my right foot, opened the door and ran like a nine-year-old girl who had just seen her first snake. Behind me, I heard feet scuffling out of the jazz club, so I ran faster, passing several guys in a doorway who said, “Where you goin’, white boy?” I had so much adrenaline in my bloodstream that I could have outrun Jesse Owens on his best day. At an intersection two blocks away, a car was stopped at a red light; I vaulted over its hood like a high hurdler, then ran toward the subway at 110th Street and down the stairs to the platform four steps at a time. At the end of the platform, I peeked from behind a post searching for my pursuers. After several eternities, a train arrived, and as it did, several guys piled down the stairs. Well, that’s it, I thought, I’m going to die in a pool of blood on a subway train underneath Central Park, and I’m only nineteen. I knew that the train wouldn’t stop at another station until Fifty-ninth Street, and the trip seemed to last a thousand years. I waited for those guys to come polish me off, sweating from the back of my knees to between my toes, everywhere I had a sweat gland. At Fifty-ninth Street, I rushed off the train and looked around, but nobody else got off. Then I realized that nobody had been chasing me; it was all in my head.

  11

  FOR ALL THE FREEDOM I savored in New York, a letter I wrote home that fall suggests that I was a confused young man:

  School starts tomorrow and I’m very glad because I’ve been plenty antsy for a long time, what with bitter busdrivers, pacifists, philosophers, kooks, funny people, New York and myself.

  Oh, God! Round and round I go looking for an answer of some kind. No answer. No nothing. I’ve tried relaxing, but it’s still the same. I’ve gone nuts thinking about truth and its aspects. I don’t get anything. Nothing adds up. There is so damn much bitterness and fear and hate and untruths all around me. I want to do something about it. It makes me mad when I get scared of sticking my neck out. If you try to be good and thoughtful and kind and truthful, people call you a liar and suspect you and resent you and hate you. I try my damnedest to understand and forgive, but if I were to put into words and actions what I sometimes feel, it would cost me my life almost. Society won’t let you be decent because they’re so God-damned afraid all the time. I’ve tried to be smart and stay on the line but it makes me feel as though I weren’t living up to my own ideas and principles.… I’m going to miss the fall at home and the apples and leaves and smells and stuff. I’ve got a lump in my throat now just thinking about it.…

  Love, Bud.

  I attended the New School for Social
Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city’s intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time. I was raised largely by these Jews. I lived in a world of Jews. They were my teachers; they were my employers. They were my friends. They introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn’t know existed. I stayed up all night with them—asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew, learning how inarticulate I was and how abysmal my education was. I hadn’t even finished high school, and many of them had advanced degrees from the finest institutes in Europe. I felt dumb and ashamed, but they gave me an appetite to learn everything. They made me hungry for information. I believed that if I had more knowledge I’d be smarter, which I now realize isn’t true. I read Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Locke, Melville, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky and books by dozens of other authors, many of which I never understood.

  The New School was a way station for some of the finest Jewish intellectuals from Europe, a temporary haven before they left to join the faculties at universities like Princeton, Yale and Harvard. They were the cream of Europe’s academicians, and as teachers they were extraordinary.

  One of the great mysteries that has always puzzled me is how Jews, who account for such a tiny fraction of the world’s population, have been able to achieve so much and excel in so many different fields—science, music, medicine, literature, arts, business and more. If you listed the most influential people of the last hundred years, three at the top of the list would be Einstein, Freud and Marx; all were Jews. Many more belong on the list, yet Jews comprise at most less than 3 percent of the United States population. They are an amazing people. Imagine the persecution they endured over the centuries: pogroms, temple burnings, Cossack raids, uprootings of families, their dispersal to the winds and the Holocaust. After the Diaspora, they could not own land or worship in much of the world; they were prohibited from voting and were told where to live. Yet their culture survived and Jews became by far the most accomplished people per capita that the world has ever produced.