Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [18]
A small Jewish man named Hasso befriended me. He was an itinerant scissor sharpener who went door-to-door selling needles and offering to fix things in exchange for a meal, and he taught me a lot: who to trust and who to avoid, how to get supper for a little sweat, how to avoid the railroad dicks who prowled the railroad yards with oak clubs that they smashed on your head if they caught you on a freight. Hasso told me to jump off the train a mile or so before the train arrived at a freight yard, walk a mile or so past it, then hop aboard another train after it had left the yard. He taught me to avoid empty boxcars whenever I could because they bounced up and down at least eight inches, and rattled so much that you couldn’t sleep. Find a loaded boxcar, he said, and make your bed on a stack of cardboard boxes if you can. If you can’t, ride the rods—the steel bars stretching beneath the boxcars a foot or two above the tracks. The safest way to do it, he said, was to place a piece of wood across the rods and stretch out on it. It was safe enough to ride that way, he said, but you had to be wary of gravel bouncing up from the track bed when the train moved at high speed. When it got cold, Hasso taught me, wood was a poor insulator, but newspapers could keep you warm. Three or four sheets of newsprint on damp ground, he said, kept you dry and, stuffed under your shirt, they kept you warm in a high wind. I remembered this trick later when I started riding motorcycles.
If I didn’t spend the night in a hobo camp, I’d stay with a stranger or friend I had met along the way. There was usually a note on each freight car instructing the switching crews where to direct it. At one point I traveled across Wisconsin with the intention of going to harvest time in Minnesota. I got sick and didn’t make it and wound up at Jimmy Ferguson’s—my dear friend—in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.
In those days people were generous, and if they had it to spare, they’d give you a meal in exchange for a little work. There wasn’t much crime, and my only real worry was the yard dicks. At one farmer’s house, I knocked on the door and offered, as usual, to work for my supper.
“Well, what can you do to earn it?” the man asked.
“Anything.”
When he asked me if I knew anything about farming, I said that I lived on a farm, so he took me out to his barn and I milked the cows and fed the pigs. Then I went into the kitchen and sat down with his family for supper. After dinner he sent me upstairs to sleep in his daughter’s bedroom. It was the old traveling salesman’s dream come true. She was very pretty, and after the lights went out, I had a few urges to get into her bed, but then I thought to myself, After they’ve been so nice to me, how could I do it?
I’ve never repeated that stupidity.
When I returned to Shattuck that fall, the freedom I’d enjoyed all summer quickly evaporated. It was uniforms, formations, close-order drills, inspections and rigidly enforced conformity again, and I resumed my old tricks.
I didn’t like studying or attending classes at Shattuck any more than I had at other schools. Whether it had something to do with my dyslexia or for other reasons, I’ll never know, but I never did well in school and was constantly searching for ways to avoid it. Like the other cadets, I began each semester with five classes, but it wasn’t long before I’d fail one and drop it, then another and another, so that by the end of the semester I usually had only one or two classes left.
Sometimes I faked an illness to get out of going to class. One nurse at Shattuck named Mahalia (we called her Mahoola) was a kind woman, although years of looking after rowdy adolescents had left her looking exhausted. When I told her I was sick, she always felt my forehead and said, “Well, you don’t feel hot. Let’s take your temperature.” Then she would stick a thermometer in my mouth and leave to go look after someone else; then I would take it out, vigorously rub it on my pants and put it back. When she returned to check, the thermometer