Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [15]
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