Brando (8 page)

We were ordered into the woods on extended-order drill with rifles and other paraphernalia. I was the officer in charge of the blue team, which was supposed to outmaneuver the red team. The colonel came up to me and said, “Soldier, your battalion leader has been killed. What do you do?”

“Sir,” I said, “I’d ask the company commander.”

“He’s been killed, too. What would you do then?”

“Well, I’d ask the squad leader,” I said.

“He’s been killed, too,” the colonel answered. “What would you do then?”

“Sir,” I answered, “I guess I’d run like hell.”

It was not the answer he expected, and it was viewed as
insubordination. I was put on probation and confined to my room, which delighted me because it meant I wouldn’t have to take part in the extended close-order drill scheduled later in the day. But after an hour or so of being alone in my room, I got bored and decided to go into town. Unfortunately, my unauthorized absence was quickly discovered, and since I was on probation I was expelled.

“Marlon, this school is not meant for a person like you,” Nuba the Tuba told me when he broke the news. “We can’t put up with you anymore.”

Sadly I went from room to room saying good-bye to all my friends. When I got to Duke, he surprised me by saying, “Don’t worry, Marlon, everything will be all right. I know the world is going to hear from you.”

I’ll never forget his words.

My eyes suddenly filled with tears as he embraced me. I put my head on his shoulder and couldn’t stop sobbing. I hadn’t realized that I had been holding back a desire to be loved and reaffirmed. I guess I didn’t even realize it then. It was the only time anyone had ever been so loving and so directly encouraging and concerned about me. I looked into Duke’s eyes and saw that he really meant it. Even now, as I recall that moment, I am moved and touched by how much he meant to me.

   When I got home, I looked at the faces of my mother and my father and sensed their hopelessness and disappointment. But I was used to it by then.

About two weeks later a letter arrived from Shattuck: “Dear Cadet Brando,” it said. “The Student Body and all the officers in the entire battalion have been on strike because we feel you were unfairly treated. We declared we will not go back to class until and unless you are reinstated.…” After describing the strike, the letter concluded: “We are happy to inform you that we have succeeded in winning your reinstatement. The administration
have agreed to let you return to Shattuck and make up the time you lost in summer school.” The letter was signed by every cadet in the battalion.

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?”

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.

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.