Well, maybe it wasn’t a year with Brando, but it sure seemed like it. And maybe the warthog didn’t exactly explode – but it was close. Anyway, I’ll get to all that.

In every human being, there’s a constant battle between following your heart or your brain. Maybe we all live in the middle somewhere, chasing rainbows and paying taxes. Looking over my life, I can see very clearly those times when I should have exerted more brainpower, but all of those demons inside of me – who still hunker and scream in the dark caves of mind - demanded something else. They still do. I wish I could find the ‘Off’ switch.

So there I was in the summer of 1980, two o’clock in the afternoon, sitting in the dark bar at La Guardia airport, sipping a JD, considering my next move. (If you’re ever at loose ends, a good place to hang out is an airport bar – because nobody ever belongs there, not even the pilots). I had lots of cash and could go anywhere, do anything. I thought of going back to Tennessee, maybe hanging with some old pals like Chet Atkins. But that seemed like a dead end. I didn’t want to get back into New York’s punk scene because I could sense the whole thing was over and the smart money had moved on (and I was right).

At around that moment I heard the boarding call for Los Angeles, and thought ‘what the hell’. I could get to LA, get a car, roam the coast and maybe end up in Vegas. So off I went. No big whup.

That night I was cruising my old haunts down Sunset Boulevard. LA really isn’t a city, like Miami, it’s an attitude. I took a turn and sped around Laurel Canyon. I remembered going to an amazing party there once, around 1968, over at John Phillip’s house. Lots of Mamas and Poppas around. They gave you a LSD sugar cube when you walked through the door. But those drugs were never for me – just too mild. Plus, I’m not big on introspection. Anyway, I recall that Sharon Tate was there that night, so was Roman Polanski and Peter Sellers. Most of those people are dead now: nobody made it to old age. It doesn’t matter. They all burned a bright flame. Anyway, too many people hang on for too long – hooked up to bottles and pills and tubes. Dear reader, make it your motto: always leave the party at its peak and never, ever carry baggage on to the plane.

I had a convertible and the wind was cool and refreshing and I took hits off some kind of Portuguese wine that a woman on the airplane had given me, telling me that it was great, which it wasn’t, but as I said, it was a gift, therefore special.

I thought vaguely that I might call on Jack Nicholson, whom I knew through Terry Southern, the writer of ‘Easy Rider’ and other stuff. So I gunned up Mulhullond Drive. I knew where Jack lived.

But Jack wasn’t home. I didn’t care; he was a good guy but a prickly bugger. I was about to get back in the car when somebody walked up behind me. Shit, I thought, I’m about to get mugged – and I had about $10,000 cash on me. But the guy didn’t do anything except sniff the air – just like a dog, sniffing around.

Finally, I took a few steps away, turned around, and told him to piss off. He just started to laugh, this kind of high-pitched, wispy laugh. A genuine psycho. Unfortunately, he stood between me and my car.

“Consider this,” he began, as if I was an old friend that had just sat down with him on a park bench. “Consider how nature has given us the magical sense of smell. Because it is magical my friend. I mean, what is smell? Can you describe a smell without referring to another smell? Never. Fuckin’ impossible. Therefore, smell is unlike anything else.”

By that time I had figured out the guy was Marlon Brando, who I knew lived next door to Nicholson. I had met Brando a few times, way back in the early 60s.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

Brando shuffled a few steps closer. “Turn toward that streetlight,” he said. So I did. And he began to walk around me as if he was sizing me up for a sculpting.

“Yeah, I know you,” he finally said. Suddenly, he sniffed the air again. “Tonight, you bring with you a certain danger. I can’t… I dunno…your sweat has a steely aftertaste, so to speak. That kind of sweat results from nerves, from anticipation, but not exertion. You read me Mr. Carr?”

“Sure Mister B, I read you. How you been fat man?”

He held a hand in front of his face, inspecting his palm. “I don’t understand the question,” he said. “Is this me? Really? Look me in the fuckin’ eyes. Do not look at my stomach! You know the poet W.B. Yeats? He said, ‘I am shackled to a dying beast’. That’s how he felt about this… this shit-filled machine that we all need.”

“Marlon,” I said, “I think you’re shackled to a fatted cow.” This made him laugh more. “Jack ain’t home,” he told me. “I saw you looking for him through that,” and he pointed up to a security camera that was hanging off a gate. “He’s doing some piss-poor movie somewhere.” He hugged himself, clenched his face and yelled “Shit! It just never fucking stops!” Then he went kind of limp. “Silence is a kind of noise, my friend…Dusty Carr, my nightclub man. You want a drink at the house?”

I never held any strong opinions about Brando. He had made a few good flicks – ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘Last Tango in Paris’, ‘The Godfather’ – but I never had time for movie stars – movies yes, but not the stars because generally they’re just meat, just stooges: their business is mostly to reflect light. I knew some people, who had been close to Brando, and they said he was truly crazy; it wasn’t just an act like a lot of people do to make themselves appear eccentric and wise. Besides, I had nowhere to go that night.

We sat in his living room on a huge couch surrounded by shitty bamboo furniture that he’d dragged up from his place in Tahiti. He took a long haul on a glass of vodka and said, “Do you realize, right now, that you have no way to prove you are alive? It’s fuckin’ nuts! There’s just no way. How would you prove it? It’s impossible.” Then he kind of put his chin up in the air and scratched his neck with the back of a hand. “Yet we continue to believe in this misty little dream called life.”

“Hey Marlon,” I said, “You got any ice in that frig that’s not chipped? I prefer cubes in hard liquor.”

He looked at me, as if trying to figure something out. “I made a film with Charles Chaplin once,” he said. “It stunk worse than a piece of shit inside a dead skunk. Ah Christ… He was a real bastard. He had this habit of picking his earwax and wiping it on whoever was walking by… Jesus, a real piece of work. The little tramp! Christ, it’s all so just…. Sometimes, when I see my old movies, I want to reach through that screen and grab my young self. But then I realize that I would have nothing to say to me. What could an old fat man tell me?… Jesus… Hey, you want another drink – with cubes this time?”

A lot of rich, idle guys like Brando have, what they call, ‘house guests’. And that’s what I became for about two weeks. We entertained each other.

I tried to teach him to sing, but it was as if he couldn’t remember a melody. He always got about a quarter way through a song, then started to scratch himself and look out the window. He tried to teach me about acting. I remember him saying, “Two things. When you play a character, you must fall in love with the character, even if he is goddam Hitler. The other thing, when there’s a close-up, concentrate very hard on projecting that character through your eyes. That’s it Dusty. Total story. A million dollars worth of advice.”

The other thing Brando did a lot of was eat. He must have been three hundred pounds. This little Tahitian maid he had would set great steaming bowls of crap before him, and Brando would burrow in like a starved hound dog. And then he’d usually walk around the house, wrapped in a towel, smacking his belly, yelling up at the rafters, stuff like, “You can watch me, but you cannot participate. No you can’t. That is not possible because you are dead!”

People would come over to the house, some I knew, some were clearly punks that really thought they were meeting the Godfather. Jack Nicholson arrived one night, and we talked about the film ‘Easy Rider’, a film that I had appeared in but my performance never made it to the screen because wildman director Dennis Hopper exposed rolls of undeveloped film during a wolfman-style acid binge.

I stayed about ten days. On the last evening, Brando got drunk on wine – which nobody should ever do as it makes you soft – and he started telling me about James Dean, how Dean would follow him all over New York City, how he had caught Dean burning himself all the time with cigarettes – “His goddam chest looked like Mars, all these red bumps from being burned,” how Dean used to cry all the time. “And all that’s left of him,” opined Brando, “is just some freakin’ chemical emulsion on a strip of plastic, and that’s not even him, it’s just what came off a thousand watt bulb. It’s pitiful. It makes me… ah sweet Jesus, it makes me want to rip out my hair!”

Brando had this big, fenced box in his backyard. He had told me that it was his intention to raise animals in that box. “If they ever drop the bomb, I’m still going to have lots of fresh meat.” The only thing in that box was this old warthog that, I was told, suffered from chronic constipation because Brando insisted on feeding him Babe Ruth and Mallo bars. “It’s to fatten the fucker up,” he explained.

Anyway, during the last evening we started to talk about this poor warthog. Brando said that even though the hog was old, he was still powerful – just like Brando. I told him that was ridiculous, the warthog would keel over if you so much as sneezed near it. Brando said he would prove his point.

So he stripped off all his clothes and climbed naked into the box. Then he started to hiss at this old warthog. The goddam hog just backed against a wall; it was terrified of Brando. I began to guzzle Southern Comfort because the sight of naked Brando and the warthog was really disturbing. Finally Brando got the hog in a chokehold and the thing collapsed on Brando, gasping for breath and screeching.

I was trying to light a Dunhill when I heard Brando yell, “Get this fucker offa me!” So I butted out and went into the box. The hog got one look at me and went berserk. It leapt off the ground and started to stamp on Brando – who howled with pain. I slid off my belt, which featured a half-pound horseshoe buckle embedded with rhinestones, and whipped the shit of the hog.

Finally the hog made his escape through the open door, and went tearing down Mulhullond Drive. Brando stood up and made a gurgling sound for a while, then acted like nothing had happened and went down into the basement to play bongo drums.

After about an hour I ventured down to see him. “Marlon, you okay?”

“Someday,” he kind of mumbled, “the hogs shall overcome us because our brains have lied to us, they have lied and have made our instincts weak and lazy. I can see them now, the hog masters, bending my face into their hot dung. The mighty warthogs are like the insects that shall eventually devour all flesh. The worms rest right now in our bowels, ah yes they do, at exactly this moment, waiting, just waiting for the blood to cease before they begin the feast.”

Enough was enough, you only take some much of that crap, so the next day I bade my pal goodbye and headed out to Vegas. Dressed in a flowing sarong, he waved to me from the front door, holding a huge umbrella above his head and kind of dancing beautifully in the warm California sun.
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Dear reader, I know that this is not a very satisfactory place to end my autobiography, but I know what I’m doing. There’s so much more to tell you, but I haven’t put it all in perspective yet. I mean, it takes at least twenty years to make sense of something, so I should wait a while before I consider anything past 1985.

They tell me that in an autobiography you’re supposed to inform the reader that you’ve learned something during this terrible, wonderful trip called life, that you’ve gained some kind of wisdom. This is what people want to read. But I’ve never lied to you, so it’s late to start now: I can’t say that I’ve ever been aware of learning anything. I mean, I was just stuck in different situations and I reacted. It was all as natural as my singing.

Wisdom? What wisdom do I have? Last night, for instance, I was thinking about Sonny Liston – whom I knew because we had a few mutual friends – I suppose you could call them friends.

Anyway, I was there that night that in 1964 when Sonny took the dive for Cassius Clay. Sonny just sat in corner and wouldn’t come out for the seventh round. He just sat and wouldn’t stand up. He lost the heavyweight championship of the world, just like that. He told me later, not long before he died in Vegas, that ‘they’ had told him to take a fall, that it was Clay’s turn to be champion. Sonny told me that that was the way things worked. He sang me some words from an old blues song, “When the Lord gets ready, you gotta move.” No use crying about it. Was Sonny on to something? In the end, did Sonny Liston have wisdom? Listen pal, I don’t have the wisdom to figure that one out. Do you?

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