Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [25]
He interrupted me and very slowly said, “My name is Leroy, L-E-R-O-Y.” Those letters are burned into my brain to this day.
“Well, actually, Mr. Leroy,” I said, “I was just looking for a good time and trying to dig the music …”
I didn’t know much black jargon, but I had heard the word “dig,” so I used it as often as I could. “My name’s Bud. I’m from out of town,” I said. “I just came in from Chicago. I don’t mean to be stepping on anybody’s toes or anything like that.”
“That’s cool,” Leroy said. “That’s cool.”
It took him about five seconds to draw out the one syllable of “cool”; in fact, he may have turned it into four syllables. “That’s cool, my man,” he repeated.
I said, “Thank you very much. Are you sure it’s all right?”
He looked at me and said “Mmmm, hmmmm.” It was a long “Mmmmm hmmmmm.” He never once looked at me.
I went back to my seat mentally reciting my catechism, sat down and started talking to the girl again while trying to do something about the tortured smile on my face. “Is that your boyfriend?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, moving her head slightly and smiling again, “kind of.”
“Listen,” I said, “why don’t we go downtown? I know some nice places there where we could have some fun and dance. Would you like to go downtown?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not, baby? Let’s make it.”
I put some money down to pay the bill and went to the checkroom, which was near the bar in the front, to get my coat. As I was putting it on, I turned around and looked back toward the doorway and saw a body flying horizontally past me directly into a pile of chairs and tables that had been piled on top of each other. It was Ruby/Sugar. Without stopping to evaluate the situation, I pivoted on my right foot, opened the door and ran like a nine-year-old girl who had just seen her first snake. Behind me, I heard feet scuffling out of the jazz club, so I ran faster, passing several guys in a doorway who said, “Where you goin’, white boy?” I had so much adrenaline in my bloodstream that I could have outrun Jesse Owens on his best day. At an intersection two blocks away, a car was stopped at a red light; I vaulted over its hood like a high hurdler, then ran toward the subway at 110th Street and down the stairs to the platform four steps at a time. At the end of the platform, I peeked from behind a post searching for my pursuers. After several eternities, a train arrived, and as it did, several guys piled down the stairs. Well, that’s it, I thought, I’m going to die in a pool of blood on a subway train underneath Central Park, and I’m only nineteen. I knew that the train wouldn’t stop at another station until Fifty-ninth Street, and the trip seemed to last a thousand years. I waited for those guys to come polish me off, sweating from the back of my knees to between my toes, everywhere I had a sweat gland. At Fifty-ninth Street, I rushed off the train and looked around, but nobody else got off. Then I realized that nobody had been chasing me; it was all in my head.
11
FOR ALL THE FREEDOM I savored in New York, a letter I wrote home that fall suggests that I was a confused young man:
School starts tomorrow and I’m very glad because I’ve been plenty antsy for a long time, what with bitter busdrivers, pacifists, philosophers, kooks, funny people, New York and myself.
Oh, God! Round and round I go looking for an answer of some kind. No answer. No nothing. I’ve tried relaxing, but it’s still the same. I’ve gone nuts thinking about truth and its aspects. I don’t get anything. Nothing adds up. There is so damn much bitterness and fear and hate and untruths all around me. I want to do something about it. It makes me mad when I get scared of sticking