Brando (9 page)

   One night, after someone told me about a good band in Harlem, I took the subway to a small, dark club on 132nd Street with a bar out front and a small dance floor in the back where the band was playing. I had a pleasant buzz on, and after listening awhile I walked up to the bandstand and asked the musician who was playing conga drums if I could play a set. I
pulled a $5 bill out of my pocket and offered it to him, but he wouldn’t look at me. A guy next to him with a big scowl on his face wouldn’t look at me either. Then a huge guy with eyes like ball bearings came out of nowhere and said, “I’ll take your money, boy. Do you want to play the drums? Gimme your money. I’ll see that you play the drums.”

“Well, I think I’ll just listen now,” I said, “and play later.”

Suddenly the place was silent. That’s strange, I thought. Then it registered on me that the big man was the only person in the club who had made eye contact with me, and I realized that I was the only white person in the room.

As I sat down again, I noticed that several women were sitting at a table behind mine. The band started up again, and I sat back and listened, still happy to be there. Then I heard a voice: “You want to dance?”

I looked up and saw a very pretty woman. “Dance? Yeah, sure.”

We started dancing and I asked what her name was.

“Ruby.”

“My name’s Buddy.”

“Buddy.
Buddy?”

“That’s right,” I said, and suddenly a slanted smile stole across her face, a charming smile illuminated by a bright gold tooth. We danced, and when the music stopped, we sat down and started to chat. While I was talking, I noticed her look behind me, and suddenly she said, “My name’s still Sugar.”

I turned around and looked into the faces of five or six women, then saw a man sitting directly behind me, a black icebox with eyes like two .45s. I realized I’d looked into the wrong face; I had crossed an infuriated cement tank. I got out of my chair, swallowed hard, looked down at the floor, then at my feet, while trying to think of something to say. Finally I turned and walked over to him, my stomach fluttering like the hands of a jazz pianist. I stood beside him with all the girls staring
dead-eyed at me, but he didn’t look back, just kept staring straight ahead. Trying to appear nonchalant, I said, “Hey, man, I’m just in from out of town.”

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.

FOR ALL THE FREEDOM
I savored in New York, a letter I wrote home that fall suggests that I was a confused young man:

I attended the New School for Social Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city’s intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time. I was raised largely by these Jews. I lived in a world of Jews. They were my teachers; they were my employers. They were my friends. They introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn’t know existed. I stayed up all night with them—asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew, learning how inarticulate I was and how abysmal my education was. I hadn’t even finished high school, and many of them had advanced degrees from the finest institutes in Europe. I felt dumb and ashamed, but they gave me an appetite to learn everything. They made me hungry for information. I believed that if I had more knowledge I’d be smarter, which I now realize isn’t true. I read Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Locke, Melville, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky and books by dozens of other authors, many of which I never understood.

The New School was a way station for some of the finest Jewish intellectuals from Europe, a temporary haven before they left to join the faculties at universities like Princeton, Yale and Harvard. They were the cream of Europe’s academicians, and as teachers they were extraordinary.

One of the great mysteries that has always puzzled me is how Jews, who account for such a tiny fraction of the world’s population,
have been able to achieve so much and excel in so many different fields—science, music, medicine, literature, arts, business and more. If you listed the most influential people of the last hundred years, three at the top of the list would be Einstein, Freud and Marx; all were Jews. Many more belong on the list, yet Jews comprise at most less than 3 percent of the United States population. They are an amazing people. Imagine the persecution they endured over the centuries: pogroms, temple burnings, Cossack raids, uprootings of families, their dispersal to the winds and the Holocaust. After the Diaspora, they could not own land or worship in much of the world; they were prohibited from voting and were told where to live. Yet their culture survived and Jews became by far the most accomplished people per capita that the world has ever produced.

For a while I thought that the brilliance and success of Jews was the cumulative yield of an extraordinarily rich pool of genes in the Middle East produced over eons by evolution. But then I realized that my theory didn’t hold up because following the Diaspora, Ashkenazic Jews evolved into a group physically much different from Sephardic Jews. Spanish Jews had nothing in common with Russian Jews; in fact they could not even speak to them. Russian Jews were isolated from German Jews, who thought of themselves as separate and superior, and Eastern European Jews had nothing to do with the Sephardic Jews. Besides, there had been so much intermarriage over the centuries that genetics alone couldn’t explain the phenomenon.

After talking to many Jews and reading about Jewish history and culture, I finally came to the conclusion that in the end being Jewish was a cultural phenomenon rather than a genetic one. It is a state of mind. There’s a Yiddish word,
seychel
, that provides a key to explaining the most profound aspects of Jewish culture. It means to pursue knowledge and to leave the world a better place than when you entered it. Jews revere education and hard work, and they pass these values on from one
generation to the next. As far as I am aware, this dynamic and emphasis on excellence is paralleled only in certain Asian cultures. It must be this cultural tradition that accounts for their amazing success, along with Judaism, the one constant that survived while the Jews were dispersed around the world.

Traditions passed on via the Torah and Talmud have somehow helped Jews to fulfill the destiny they have claimed, a kind of “chosen people,” if spectacular success in so many, many fields is proof of that. Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them. They introduced me to a sense of culture that has lasted me a lifetime.

As well as academics and scholars from Eastern Europe, Jewish girls, most of whom were more educated, sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world than I was, were my teachers during those early days in New York. It was common in those days for girls from wealthy New York Jewish families to rent an apartment in the city and have a little fling before striking out on a career or marriage after they had graduated from college. With my inept, simple ways, I must have seemed to them like an alien from a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. I was a gentile in a Jewish world who had hardly been to school; I rode a motorcycle; I was young, reasonably attractive, full of vim, vigor and sexuality, an exotic specimen if for no other reason than I was different from the boys these girls had grown up with. I didn’t follow any of their rules and they didn’t follow any of mine. They were fascinated by me and I by them. Many were more experienced sexually than I was, and I was a willing and happy pupil. I remember especially Caroline Burke, a beautiful woman who was about ten years older than I was, in whom I always regretted not making a more permanent investment. She was not only physically attractive and well educated, but bursting with elegance, charm, taste and appreciation for beautiful things. She lived in an apartment filled with antiques
and always wore delicious perfume. To her, I suppose I was a kind of bumpkin—a nineteen-year-old farm boy who still worried secretly that he had manure on his shoes, but she taught me a great deal.

I was walking down Fifty-seventh Street with Caroline one day and innocently asked, “Isn’t it funny how you see so many women with blond hair and a mink coat?” There was a woman in front of us with blond hair wearing a mink coat and we were talking about her, when Caroline said, “She’s Jewish.” I asked, “How do you know?” She answered, “Well, it’s because … I don’t know, she’s just Jewish.” I said, “You mean to say, just because she has blond hair and a mink—” She interrupted, “Look, I’m a Jew, and I know what Jews are like from the front, back, side or top.” “Well, how can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew?” She replied, “Well, you have to be Jewish to know that.” I was stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable powers of perception.

   After several months in New York, I was still interested in becoming a modern dancer, but then I took an acting class at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop and everything changed. During that fall of 1943, I kept my parents informed of my progress in letters that seem to have been written by a person I barely recognize, a naïve kid trying hard to understand the galaxy he had stumbled into and looking for a place in it as well as a purpose in life: