Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [22]
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?”
9
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