This is Brando after he'd gone "bad." He was a fun guy before his aunt died. He was a huge figure, nearly more gesture than human in some ways. "Larger than life." He was an architect who "studied at Taliesin," Frank Lloyd Wrights home in Arizona. Lloyd was long dead, of course, but Brando spoke much of his widow.
Who knows how much of it was true?
What I do know is that--and this he told me to keep secret but since he fucked me over--he never graduated, never received a degree in architecture. He had a checkered academic career, having gone to the University of Florida where he had what he claimed to be a "nervous breakdown" and had to leave school and return home to Coral Gables. He took a job with a surveying company for a year. There is some confusion here. He said his mother taught painting at the University of Miami, but I don't think she had a degree and I always suspected that she taught painting in a community program, but I could be wrong. He had several of her paintings and I liked them a lot. They reminded me of Cezanne's landscapes.
After that year of surveying, he took some courses at U of M, but he never matriculated.
Rather. . . he decided to take the AIA exam. He passed.
This was in the era when you could do such things as take the Bar exam, pass, and practice law. Degrees weren't part of the requirement as they are now. For better or ill.
Brando worked in an architectural firm for some time after that, but eventually he opened his own. He had the idea that his company would spend half the year in Florida and the other half in Santa Fe and he managed to do this for several years before the firm dissolved.
You had to admire his extreme romanticism.
After that, Brando worked out of his house on his own. That is when he decided to become a travel guide. It was just on the front side of travel companies becoming big business. He was by and large a pioneer.
It was at this point that he won some unlikely honors, one of which is astounding. Truly. The City Beautiful awarded him "The Key to the City," and there was an official "Brando Day" celebrated downtown. This is the same guy who went to his ex-girlfriend's house, walked up the stairs, pulled her naked from her bed, and put her in his car right in front of her cardiologist father.
"It's alright," Brando reportedly told him, "I'll bring her home."
He couldn't drive for shit, but he bought a little red MG convertible sports car. One afternoon, drunk and showing off for his girlfriend passenger, he drove through a tent the Ralph Lauren store had erected for a street party on the Boulevard that night. Fortunately, nobody was in it.
"Christ," he said. . . "I could have killed somebody."
So yea. . . larger than life and luckier than a two dollar bill.
At this point, he was not concerned with money in any serious way. He made enough to rent small studios and apartments and keep himself fed without cooking. You see. . . he was his aunt's only living relative. She owned, according to Brando, "all the land surrounding Atlanta," and she was, he said, worth a fortune. She was very old and needed care, so she hired a live-in nurse to look after her. Brando, in his magnificence, would drive up to see her for a day or two once or twice a year. Sometimes he would pen her a letter.
When she died, he went up for the funeral and the reading of the will. He came back an utterly changed and bitter man. She had left him the same things she left his children--ten thousand dollars and conjoined property outside Atlanta in the foothills, three houses surrounding a small lake. The rest of her property and fortune went to her longtime caretaker.
At this point, Brando was living in the house his parents had owned when they died. He did not take good care of it, and when it needed a new furnace, some repair of the wooden floors, and a new roof, he sold it. He also sold his land in Georgia. Both of these things devastated his daughter, but maybe more on that later. He moved into a duplex he had designed, a Frank Lloyd Wrong design, and rented from a wealthy woman about town he referred to as "Baby." I don't know how he did it, but he pissed through the money until there was no more. He was dating a woman at the time who had been a big time banker in Las Vegas handling gangster money. She "retired" at an early age. Just fled.
I was with Brando at one of our favorite restaurants sitting at the bar on a New Year's Eve when he met her. She just came right up and introduced herself. When we left, she handed Brando her number.
"Call me," she said.
We had left before midnight, of course, not wanting to look like two losers when the party hats came out. Back at my house, we drank, smoked some pot. . . and then my phone rang. It was Skylar. She was in town.
"Happy New Year. . . ." She called me by her pet name for me.
"Come over," I pleaded.
"I can't. I've got to go."
Oh, fuck. . . .
The photo above is one of the early 2000s photos that I have just discovered that have never been scanned. Until now. There are other photos of Brando and his girlfriend, the woman who approacehed him at the bar. I have a lovely photo of her with her arm in a sling. I can't remember if he had broken her arm or merely dislocated it one night when he was drunk. Brando was becoming more and more of a louse until he turned into a downright scoundrel.
This photo was taken shortly before he cheated a group of us out of a safari trip to Africa. Travis and I were two of the three he never paid back. He had one more trip after that. Egypt. In order to make that trip go, he used his girlfriend's credit cards to charge up what was rumored to be $50,000. That was the end of it. I am pretty sure he paid her back in order to stay out of prison.
And that was the end, too, of my twenty-plus year friendship with Brando. His girlfriend, then in her 60s, decided to join the Peace Corps. Brando took a room in a friend's house in another part of town and kept a group of travel friends who he had not yet cheated. For them, who had lost nothing, those last few fuck ups were nothing more than part of Brando's colorful legacy.
Some of the cheated hounded him, however, and eventually he moved to Greece. He was given a room in a hotel in Santorini owned by someone he knew. Later I found out that people were pooling their money and sending it to Brando to live on.
He was a scammer in the end.
There were other images on that roll of film that made up the story I sent to friends that I couldn't tell here. Skylar and I had only intermittent contact, but I was still deeply head over heels in love.
If Brando became a scoundrel, I was scandalous myself. I was divorced, living alone in the house I had to buy from my ex. Skylar was becoming what she would eventually be, a rock star in the fashion world. It was a Saturday night. I was on my couch watching t.v. alone when there was a knock at the door. It was a pretty dark haired Italian girl who worked for my then tenant, an interior designer who was out of town just then on a job.
"Hill said she needed something from the apartment and that I should get a key from you."
I eyed her for a moment, then got the key.
"I'm moping and watching tv. I'll leave the door open, so just come in when you are done."
When she came back, I asked her if she wanted a beer. She did, she said.
"What kind?"
She thought for a moment. "I'll have a Blue Moon."
I NEVER had Blue Moon beer in my fridge except for this particular night. Fate. She was impressed.
We chatted. She was a music major at Country Club College. She had her violin in the car and brought it in and played for me. The night had gotten interesting. We chatted for awhile, but it was Saturday night and I'm sure she had things to do.
"I'd better go," she said, and I walked her to the door. She took out a piece of paper and a pen from her purse, wrote something and handed it to me.
"I'm busy tomorrow night, but after that call me," she said.
I did.
Skip ahead. Spring break. I was going to the little beach motel on Singer Island, just north of Palm Beach, as I often did to decompress. The Italian girl was going to see her family in Naples. She wanted me to come and meet her parents. I said I would come on the weekend.
I was meeting another girl, however, who went to a small private college just south of Palm Beach. She would be arriving before me, so I gave the hotel her name so she could get the room key. Now here's the problem. I can't tell this story without reservation as I don't want to piss off Skylar. I still love her and need her to be. . . what? Around? Yea. It's complicated.
In a few days, I went to Naples and met my new girl's parents for lunch at their country club. Her father was a successful architect in Philly but had moved to Naples to develop a lot of the homes there. She came from money. As it turned out, her parents were just a bit younger than I. I was fairly used to that. The girl had a fraternal twin sister who wasn't real hip on the whole thing, but her parents were alright and they invited me to come to their home. For most of the weekend, the girl and I hung out on the beach and had fun.
She was from family money, and I was a good influence. Scoff if you will. After we broke up, she was dating an attorney, but she came to me once and said she wanted to get back together.
"We always had fun. Everything was an adventure. You told me once never to compare what you were doing with some other time when you were having fun. You enjoyed everything, every moment. You never compared the day to any other."
Now I have to admit, this was something I got from hanging with Brando. He would cut you out if you were to say, "this croissant isn't nearly as good as the one I had in Paris." Nope. It didn't matter if it was better or worse. . . just enjoy the moment.
That was before his aunt died, though.
"We were always going somewhere, eating, dancing, drinking."
I used to take her to a dive bar that had a group of usual drunks, pool tables, and the best juke box in town. We'd drink cheap beer, play pool, and I'd dance her around the bar floor to Frank Sinatra. The regulars loved her.
"On the weekend, my boyfriend just wants to sit around and watch golf and eat sandwiches. I'm tired of lawyer dick!"
But I was already gone by then.
That weekend in Naples, though, we went somewhere in my car. She picked up a piece of paper. It was a receipt from the hotel.
"Who in the hell is Maribel?!?!?"
"What? Oh. . . hell. . . I have no idea."
Yea. I mean, it was ok. I was still head over heels for Skylar. But more on that later.
The music major ended up marrying an attorney. I don't know if it was the same one. Funny enough, she started her own interior design company, I'm sure with help from her architect father. I've looked her up. She has done very well.
But here's the thing. I've forgotten Skylar's birthday two years in a row, I think. It is terrible. She doesn't forget mine. But I hate birthdays, my own more than others, and I'm sure I don't want her to get older.
Joke.
Kind of.
I have never been good with birthdays. Today is Ili's. When we were together, she almost left me because I thought her birthday was on the third rather than the second. Fuck. My relationship with Ili was much more complicated than I will ever be able to explain, but as we know, she came to me in the hospital when my life should have been over. I blame her for that.
I thought about her recently because a friend of mine has gotten praised for staying with her boyfriend in the hospital for three days before she collapsed with fatigue and went home, "finally," to get some rest. Ili slept in my hospital room for over two weeks. "Slept," hardly. She must have been exhausted beyond comprehension. Whenever I woke in the night, she got up from the portable bed to see what I needed. I was heavily narcotized with morphine. I remember little of what occurred in those two weeks. All I really remember is her.
So. . . I was tempted to send her a Happy Birthday note. Really tempted. I thought and was afraid that I would do so while drinking whiskey last night. It would have been a really bad idea. As far as I remember, I didn't.
But I did listen to music. Lots. Whiskey opens some doors and music some others. I watched a video by a band I'd never heard of before. "Men I Trust." I liked the music and I thought Skylar would like it, too. Ili would have hated it and we would have fought because of the beautiful woman singer. She got angry many times at such inane things, even dead actresses that I said were pretty.
They are of the same age, Ii and Skylar. My aquarian sign is not very compatible with either of them. Maybe there is some veracity to such things if my experience is any indication. And yet. . . .
They are both married now, so I leave them alone. But not in my head. There, sometimes, it is just a dance party of music and joy. I can't dance worth a shit, but I love to move a girl around a dance floor.
This song is kind of 80's Sade/Tears for Fears era sounding. I love live recordings like this. They fascinate me. And of course. . . the girl. What can I say?
After that, a live version of "New Slang" by The Shins popped up. Ili and I used to play it in her car whenever we were taking a long drive. Happy Birthday, Ili. My heart was melting. . . but then again, you know. . . the girl.
I'm a mess, but I'll be alright. Don't worry about me. I'm fine. Things just overwhelm me sometimes. But the day has broken. There's a bright shining there.
All photos are from the same time period, just as the digital photo world was breaking. As you can see, film has its own charm.
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