Free Brando by Marlon Brando Page A

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 evaluatethe 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 my neck out. If you try to be good and thoughtful and kind and truthful, people call you a liar and suspect you and resent you and hate you. I try my damnedest to understand and forgive, but if I were to put into words and actions what I sometimes feel, it would cost me my life almost. Society won’t let you be decent because they’re so God-damned afraid all the time. I’ve tried to be smart and stay on the line but it makes me feel as though I weren’t livingup to my own ideas and principles.… I’m going to miss the fall at home and the apples and leaves and smells and stuff. I’ve got a lump in my throat now just thinking about it.…
    Love, Bud.
    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