Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [23]
Once I stayed up all night at a party in Brooklyn and looked out the window at a gray dawn at about six A.M. and watched the streets glow with the headlights of buses, cars and taxis. Then the sidewalks began to fill up with people carrying briefcases and scurrying to their offices. I thought, God, wouldn’t it be awful if I had to get up and go to work like that every day?
Frannie, who lived in an apartment near Patchin Place in the Village, invited me to move in with her. I got a job as an elevator operator at Best & Company department store, then worked as a waiter, a short-order cook, a sandwich man, and at other jobs that I don’t remember now.
One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from.
“New York,” he said.
“How did you get that Texas accent?” I asked.
“I was in the army.”
“But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?” I’m sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face.
“It was protective coloration,” he said, “because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan.” He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn’t broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer and the other man said he was Jimmy Baldwin.
Although Mailer, who was as yet unpublished, and I never became good friends, Jimmy Baldwin and I became close after that meeting in Hector’s Cafeteria. It was a special relationship, and one of its hallmarks was an absence of any sense of racial differences between us, something I have seldom experienced with other black friends. Neither of us ever felt we had to speak about race. Our relationship was simply that of two human beings with no barriers between us, and we could tell each other anything about ourselves with frankness. I was working at a dull job and so was he; he hadn’t written much yet and I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.
Unfortunately, Jimmy became one of the many friends I’ve loved since I left Libertyville who had much to offer but died senselessly and tragically long before they should have. He never told me he was dying, and I didn’t learn about his cancer until after he was dead.
In the apartment next to my sister’s lived a woman named Estrelita Rosa Maria Consuelo Cruz. I called her Luke. She was Colombian and ten or fifteen years older than me; she was olive-skinned, fetching, extremely artistic and a great cook. Her husband was overseas with the marines, and one night she invited me for dinner; there was a fireplace, candlelight and wine, and I lost my virginity.
Luke was extremely passionate and sexually unconventional. She never wore underpants, and we’d often walk down a street in New York, duck in an alley and have at it. At the ballet one night, she put her hand on my prick and I put my hand up her dress. We both came, and she yipped and tittered so loudly that others in the audience must have wondered about her. After her husband came back from overseas, he learned about our affair and divorced her. Our friendship lasted for many years. She was very important to me then, but after her there were many other women in my life.
10
THE BEST BANDS in the world were constantly coming in and out of Manhattan and making wonderful music in Harlem and behind the neon lights and red awnings of jazz clubs along West Fifty-second Street. I thrived on this feast. In Libertyville my idols in the jazz world had been Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, but one night I went to the Palladium, a ballroom on Broadway, to dance and almost lost my mind with excitement when I discovered Afro-Cuban music. Every Wednesday night there was a mambo contest, and it seemed as if every Puerto Rican in New York got out on the dance floor and released a week of frustration after working as a waiter or pushing a cart in the garment district. People moved