Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [126]
I knew I needed help, so I crawled up the stairs on all fours to Sylvia’s bedroom; it was a narrow spiral staircase that was almost vertical, and I can still see the fuzzy carpeting looking up at me a few millimeters from my nose. All the while I kept thinking, If I die here, her husband’s going to know what she’s been doing. Then the same voice in my head said, Finally, Marlon, somebody’s going to make you pay for your sins.
I struggled up the spiral staircase one step at a time, then crawled down the hall to the side of Sylvia’s bed and said, “You’ve got to get me to a doctor, I’m sick.”
We both understood the situation: if I passed out there, she’d have to call the paramedics and her husband would discover I had been in the house at three A.M. If she took me to the hospital, people would see her with me. If I died, it would be even worse. Sylvia did something rather brave that I’ll always be grateful for; without a beat, she said she was taking me to the hospital. Maybe she didn’t have much choice, but she saved my life and it was courageous of her. She drove me to the UCLA Hospital, where emergency-room nurses sat me on a gurney and started asking me questions. A doctor came in, asked more questions, shook his head and said he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong with me.
“Doctor,” I said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding internally. Stick a tube down my throat into my stomach, and you’ll see that there’s blood in there.”
“Well, we’re not certain of that.”
“You’ll never know until you try it,” I answered.
They did what I suggested and pulled out a lot of black fluid from my stomach. I suspected I had split my esophagus doing my imitation of a bulimic, so by then I must have been bleeding internally for at least four hours.
“What happens if you can’t stop the bleeding?” I asked.
“We’ll take you upstairs and operate on you.”
“How can you operate on me if I’m already going into shock?”
“Well, we don’t know how much blood you’ve lost, so we’re going to pump your stomach.” They pumped the blood out, then pumped ice water down my esophagus, which stopped the bleeding. The next day they ran a tube with a camera lens down my throat and confirmed what I had thought: there was a tear in my esophagus. They put me on soft foods for ten days, and I was fine, but the experience left me with a herniated esophagus, which in later years I’ve tried to control with biofeedback and meditation.
I’ve gone on and off diets for years, usually before starting a new movie. When I have to lose weight, I can do it. It wasn’t unusual to drop thirty-five or forty pounds before a picture. I ate less, exercised more and it came off. The hard part was putting myself in the right psychological mode, so that eating stopped serving as an avenue of pleasure. I’m not fat by nature. I got fat mostly because I loved brownies, ice cream and everything else that makes you fat. One reason for this, I suspect, is that when I was a kid, I’d come home from school to find my mother gone and the dishes in the sink. I’d feel low and open the icebox, and there would be an apple pie, along with some cheese, and the pie would say: “C’mon, Marlon, take me out. I’m freezing in here. Be a pal and take me out, and bring out Charlie Cheese, too.” Then I’d feel less lonely.
Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox. Most of my life, I weighed about 170 pounds, though when I had my nervous breakdown in New York, I dropped to 157. After forty, my metabolism shifted gears, but I kept eating as much as ever while spending more and more time in a sedentary relationship with a good book.
There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried. During the seventies, one of them limited me to a quart of lemon juice and a few ounces of feta cheese daily. After spending the night at a woman’s house in Santa Monica while on this diet, I woke