Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [11]
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