The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  He suddenly looked up at me, nodded and said, “How you doing?”

  All I could manage was to blush and mutter some pleasantry—suddenly ashamed of the educational deferment which would keep me out of Vietnam while boys like him went in my place. According to Nana Keane, a Boston banker had bought an exemption from service in 1861 and sent my great-great uncle as a substitute to be killed here in Franklin. For all I knew the descendants of that banker were known to me from school. And I couldn’t help wondering if this boy would be so friendly if he knew he was my substitute.

  If this were another kind of story, the protagonist’s life would be forever changed by this political epiphany—Saint Paul dashed from his horse. But for most of us these moments of clarity fade as quickly as the flash of a camera, recollected, if at all, as a faded picture in the album of memory. The young soldier dutifully paid the attendant and drove away to his fate as I proceeded toward mine.

  Dusk was falling on New Year’s Eve as I arrived in Memphis. I succeeded without much difficulty in finding the Peabody Hotel, one of the more prominent features of the Memphis skyline, but there was no answer to my calls in the Savage suite.

  I think it was Faulkner—usually a safe bet in these matters—who said the Mississippi Delta originated in the lobby of the Peabody. Certainly no one would have mistaken this for the Boston Ritz-Carlton, or for the Plaza in New York. That curious and beguiling southern blend of ease and formality were in the air—that rhythm oscillating between languor and hysteria. The lobby was thronged with revelers in evening dress. Sitting in a leather chair, I watched an elderly couple step from the elevator. In a tuxedo which looked as if it had been handed down through half-a-dozen generations and might dissolve into dust at any moment, the man bowed gallantly from the waist to a pair of women getting into the elevator. When the women had passed, his silver-haired spouse assisted him in regaining his upright posture. Young women in ball gowns wafted about the two-story lobby, while their male counterparts lurked in corners, conspiring and breaking out into sudden fits of suppressed hilarity. These young swains applauded as a tiny man in livery marched the ducks from the fountain in the center of the lobby across the floor and into the elevator en route to a pen on the hotel roof. The ducks were the descendants of a batch of live decoys—or so Cordell Savage once told me—which had been dumped into the fountain one afternoon by a band of liquored-up hunters fresh from the duck blind who wanted to continue drinking at the hotel bar.

  After I grew tired of sitting, I orbited the lobby, looking in the shop windows and seeing only myself in the glass, a ridiculous figure pretending to be occupied while the festive couples swirled past, too busy to notice. Finally I took to the streets, which seemed desolate. Beale Street, the scene of Will’s initiation into the blues, was being sanitized and demolished. Only after lingering over a dinner of ribs in a tacky restaurant catering to tourists did I return to my vigil at the Peabody.

  I tried the house phone every fifteen minutes, and finally claimed a stool in the bar, sorely tempted to press on with my trip and say to hell with Will. I was tired of living on Will Savage time, being always the one left waiting and wondering whether he would show. And I was tired of being alone again on New Year’s Eve, that most melancholy of holidays. I had a terrible premonition of a solitary life, of dinners on TV trays and odd-smelling, transient rooms. Something was wrong with me; I was afflicted with a terrible self-consciousness which seemed to set me apart, doomed forever to be a spectator at the ball, watching the dancers from the sidelines. I tried not to inquire too closely into the sources of my alienation, but sometimes, as on this particular evening, it was impossible to resist the pressure of self-knowledge. I tried to divert myself rereading Binnie Pilcher’s diary:

  May 10 Outside my window the scraping sound of the hands hoeing. Already the mosquitoes are a plague. Human beings were not meant to live here. Law, take me back to Charleston! Whatever the issue of the current strife, this country will always be ruled by insects. And I shall die a maiden. And Mama shall become invisible under the influence of her drops. Clarence was hanged to day also Abraham, and two other of our field hands, plus the Yancys’ Thomas, who ran away last year and was recaptured. Plus two of the Johnsons’ slaves and the Platts’ carriage man. And old Red who died of heart attack under examination makes nine. The other negroes, our own and the Yancys’, reprieved. The size and scope of the conspiracy still in doubt, but after a week of hearings the desire to preserve property i.e. able-bodied male negroes has somewhat overtaken the zeal for lurid revelation and retribution.

  Father refused to let the committee depose John, saying he was too young, and in the end it all came down to Ben the Yancys’ driver who said he heard Thomas say that the federals are coming and the negroes should kill Mr. Yancy and ravage Mrs. Yancy and the girls. I wonder if I was to be ravaged or rather ravished as I think is the proper expression? To the end, Clarence refused to testify, even under the lash. The gentlemen of the committee urged him to acknowledge and meet his Maker with unburdened heart to no avail. Sissy the kitchen maid says that his heart was turned to stone when Father sold off his woman and that he didn’t care what happened after that. This morning John tried to lock himself in his room but Father forced him to go to the courthouse to witness the hanging, he said John had started this and that he must see the consequences through to conclusion. We ladies staying home sewing haversacks. John returned at midday ashen and silent, blazing eyes banked low for once and dim. Took to his room. I could almost feel sorry for him then. Clarence was once his constant companion, taught him to ride and fish and conjure while Father was off in Memphis or Vicksburg or New Orleans. John spent so much time in the slave quarters and so often cited the authority of his friend Clarence that Mother and Father began to fear for his morals though for a negro he possessed a high degree of intelligence and dignity.

  Looking up from my drink, I found myself being studied by a woman with a shock of vivid red hair two stools away.

  “Whatsa matter, honey? All alone on New Year’s Eve?” Her drawl was pronounced, her eyes animated with a quick and predatory curiosity that seemed at odds with the torpid voice. I was not good at judging the age of women older than myself, but I guessed her to be about thirty. Her skin was fair and freckled, and her eyes had tiny sun wrinkles; she seemed far too pretty to be talking to me, except that this was the South, whose natives were known to talk to strangers for no particular reason.

  “Actually, I’m waiting for someone,” I explained, as she slid across to the stool beside me.

  “Aren’t we all, honey? Aren’t we all?” Her name was Janie Thompson, and she was from a town called Indianola in the Delta. “I come up here with a friend for a little New Year’s festivity but he got a little too festive right off the bat, and here I am—all dressed up an’ no place to glow.” She shrugged her shoulder and grinned at me impishly. “So allow me to buy you a drink.” Waving to the bartender, she pointed at our glasses.

  When she leaned forward to squeeze my hand I was treated to a glimpse of the freckled valley of her cleavage and the lacy scalloped edge of her brassiere. “Did you see that sign out in the lobby—now appearing in the something or other room, Lash LaRue?” she said. “I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes—Lash LaRue, that old lariat thrower. I used to watch him on the TV when I was about this tall.” She lowered her hand to the vicinity of my knee. “I always had a little crush on ole Lash. Well, I’m on my way to the bar but then I see this sign and so off I go to see the great man. And there he was signing autographs, in the flesh, more or less, looking like they pickled him and put him up. So when it’s my turn I say, ‘How’s it going Lash, what you been up to?’ And he says—get this—he says, ‘Well, ever since they shot President Kennedy I been spending a lot of time on Mars. The streets are cleaner up there.’ At first I think he’s pulling my leg but then I look in his eyes and see he’s serious. Crazy as a betsy bug. Lash LaRue.” With that she drained half the drink the bartender set
before her. “Where you-all from,” she asked.

  “I go to school in New Haven,” I said.

  “I like college boys,” she said. As a Yale man I found her enthusiasm for male academia rather too broad based, but so pronounced was Janie Thompson’s affability that I suspected she was also in favor of many other categories of male. “I guess your little friend isn’t going to show, is she?”

  “It’s not a she,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, different strokes for different buckaroos.”

  “No, it’s not … That’s not it,” I stammered. “I’m waiting for an old friend from prep school.”

  “Well, hell,” she said, “what’s this old buddy of yours called. We all know everybody down here.”

  “Will Savage,” I said, supposing that he and Janie traveled in very different circles.

  “Will?” she exclaimed. “He’s practically a legend in these parts. My daddy used to raise hell with his daddy. They used to fly their little planes up and down the Delta and over to Nashville, just going to parties. They were wild.” She pronounced the adjective with an emphasis that suggested she was something of an authority on rash behavior. “You’ve heard the story about how he shot his own daddy.”

  Stunned, I shook my head. “You mean Cordell?”

  “Well, they ruled it accidental, but Cordell’s daddy was a mean drunk, and some say he took a hand to Cordell’s mama one too many times.”

  I questioned her further about this alleged patricide, but she’d told what she knew and seemed to feel that it was an old story, and not particularly an unusual one in her experience.

  “So how is old Will? I haven’t seen him in aeons. He sure did cause a hell of a fuss marrying that colored girl. What’s she like, anyway? Is he really in love with her?”

  We drank and talked about Will, four scotch-and-waters’ worth. Finally the bartender turned up the volume on the television set as Guy Lombardo counted down the minutes to the not-a-moment-too-soon New Year of 1970, and not long after the stroke of twelve my companion was kissing me, probing remote crannies of my mouth with her tongue.

  Only moments later, it seemed, we were kissing in the elevator on the way up to her room. She held her finger to her lips as she turned the key in the door, then dragged me over to the bed.

  With a drunken fluency and much help from my new friend, I squirmed out of my clothes and assisted her out of hers while managing to keep my tongue in her mouth—as if I believed that the whole process would surely grind to a halt the moment contact was broken. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening, though my excitement was adulterated by a nagging fear about my performance. When she broke free of our lip lock and kissed her way down my chest and belly, I lay back, rigid with astonishment and anxiety. In a sense, it was, indeed, too good to be true. It’s hard to say who was more surprised when I came a moment later.

  “Hey,” she said, raising her head from between my legs. “That was supposed to be the warm-up, not the main event.”

  I mumbled some kind of apology.

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be a virgin, would you?” she said brightly, sliding up to face me, a new and—to me—embarrassing tang on her breath.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  She laughed. “Seems like either you are or you aren’t. That’s okay. I don’t mind. We can try again.”

  Like a schoolboy, I asked if I could go to the bathroom, desperate for a moment alone to compose myself.

  “Sure,” she said. “If you gotta go you gotta go.”

  I was just inside the door when I heard her whisper something cautionary, though I couldn’t make out the words.

  The bathroom light revealed a young man in a tuxedo sprawled in the bathtub. Pausing just long enough to verify this seeming hallucination, and recover the use of my limbs, I turned off the light and retreated.

  “Don’t go, that’s just Lance,” Janie said, as I searched in the dark for my clothes. Frankly, I couldn’t see how these two clauses fit in the same sentence.

  “I’ve got to meet Will,” I said.

  She tugged at my arm in the dark. “You still owe me one,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. At that moment, I felt that my sexual career had ended about the same time it had begun.

  Remembering my manners, I thanked her as I was leaving.

  Out in the lobby I dialed Will’s suite again, and then, as a last-ditch measure, his office. Just as I was about to hang up someone answered. I asked for Will, but the din on the other end was so great that I doubt he heard me. I listened to the music and the competing voices of a party for some minutes before giving up. Replacing the receiver, I felt stunningly sober.

  Will’s office and studio was a short walk from the hotel, in a derelict part of town, an old limestone hulk just off the river. Gargoyles grinned down from the portico and from the elaborately incised rooftop cornice. The mullioned windows were pulsing with music from within. Two white men of menacing demeanor stood on the sidewalk, passing a joint. “I’m looking for Will,” I explained. Nobody said anything, but there was just enough room to slide through the door without violating anyone’s space. Downstairs, a logo stenciled on the glass identified the offices of Savage Management & Cement Mixer Music.

  Behind the first door I opened I surprised a couple making love on a desk, or rather they surprised me; the woman turned and grinned at me through the cascading ropy strands of her partner’s greasy hair while he went on about his business. It seemed a night designed to put me off sex forever.

  A door opened behind me, unleashing a blast of sound. Stubblefield stuck his head into the lobby, reconnoitering. “Keane,” he said, as if he had seen me the day before. Even as a hippie he looked preppie; his utterly limp, straw-colored hair was reminiscent of much-washed chinos, and his self-contained, slightly smug expression suggested that anything that you might think of doing had already been achieved by his ancestors. I followed him down a hallway into an open studio, where five or six musicians were jamming and dozens of bodies churned in a choppy sea of strobed light.

  Finding nothing to moor myself to, I was grateful when a skinny white girl with a blond Afro suddenly held out a joint. I took a quick hit and attached myself gratefully to her group.

  “When my pop died Will said I’d see him on the other side,” the girl said. “He’s so spiritual. It’s incredible. He died himself on the operating table that time after he got stabbed—you know that scar on his face, from when what’s his name, the blues guy, cut him?”

  She looked vaguely around the room as if the alleged perpetrator might still be among us, knife dripping. “What was I saying? Oh, right, Will said he was lifted up out of his body and looked down on the earth and saw that it was just, like, a phase, you know, our physical existence on this planet.” She sucked in on the joint which I had returned to her.

  “That’s cool,” said a fat guy with a long matted beard. “He was telling me this story about the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67,” he said, taking the roach from the girl.

  “Who was?”

  “Who was what?”

  “Telling you what you just said about Monterey.”

  “It was Will, like I said. It’s like, Hendrix got in from playing with King Curtis at four in the morning and he walked into his bedroom, and he saw this cat in bed with his old lady. He went and got his pistol, stood over the bed, cocked it and turned on the light. He’s just about to shoot but then he says to himself, ‘Damn, that’s Otis. Shit, I can’t kill Otis, man.’ ”

  “That is so outrageous. Was Will there?”

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe.”

  “But what does that have to do with reincarnation?”

  “I don’t know. I thought we were talking about Will.”

  “Where is Will,” I asked.

  No one seemed to know, though they assured me he was around. I left this group to free-associate amongst themselves and strolled around, trying to assume a casual, funky gait, feeling conspicuous in my
crewneck sweater as a topless woman with small, asymmetrical breasts danced past me.

  Spotting Lester Holmes conferring with two white girls, I sidled over and reminded him that we’d met. He regarded me for a moment with mild irritation, then sloped off without saying a word.

  “Will says Lester could be the biggest thing since Ray Charles,” said one of the girls, to no one in particular, “except he’s lazy and won’t travel more than a few hours from Memphis.”

  People kept saying that Elvis was going to come by; if he did, I missed him. But in fact I was surrounded by people who were much cooler than Elvis, though few of their names were familiar to me at the time. Some years later in New York, when we were both sitting up late over a bottle of cognac, I asked Taleesha to run down the guest list that night.

  Among those she recalled being present were Duck Dunn and Don Nix, along with another founding member of the Mar-Keys, Steve Cropper, who became famous as a producer and studio guitar wizard for Otis Redding and others at Stax. Also Jim Dickinson and Jimmy Crosthswait. Alex Chilton, who at the age of sixteen was the lead singer of the Box Tops and later played with Big Star and Panther Burns. Bowlegs Miller. And Bukka White—who supposedly stabbed Will—whose 1940 Vocalion sessions helped define the Delta blues. The great Sleepy John Estes even brought his guitar; Will paid for his funeral when he died in poverty some years later. Hound Dog Taylor, from Chicago. Chips Moman, the producer and songwriter, and fellow Alabaman Dan Penn, with whom he wrote “Do Right Woman.” Issac Hayes, of imminent “Shaft” fame. The guitarist John Fahey, who found Skip James, long presumed dead, on a plantation in the midsixties. Jerry Phillips, son of Sam, of Sun Studios.