The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  Once John Savage had transmogrified his Oedipal struggle into the collective myth of his people, events moved rapidly. We can only imagine his surprise at how thoroughly he was believed, his torment at the inexorable chain of consequences—the long dark nights of the rest of his days stalked by the ghosts of nine innocent black men …

  I went on at numbing length, but that is the gist of my thesis, which was very well received by Professor Kaufman, my thesis adviser, who was impressed enough to submit it to the Yale Review. And that’s where the trouble began. On the editorial board of the Review was a history professor, whom I will call Jenkins. One of the more radical members of the faculty, Jenkins had played an inflammatory role in the Panther proceedings, and he now turned his flamethrower on me.

  Professor Kaufman called me into his office a few weeks before graduation to inform me that not only would the Review not be publishing my thesis but also that his recommendation that I graduate with honors in history had been challenged. Jenkins had written a letter to the chairman of the department in which he attacked me for marginalizing the role of the slaves. A bearded gentleman of the Samuel Eliot Morison school, Kaufman was deeply embarrassed as he fussed behind the paper towers on his desk.

  “Let me just say, Patrick, I am surprised and appalled by this unfortunate development, and I of course intend to defend you and your scholarship all the way to Brewster’s office.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, then opened the folded linen as if to read the contents. “But I’m afraid that for the moment the question of your graduating with honors is being put before the next full meeting of the department.”

  Jenkins’s central complaint, as contained in the letter Kaufman read to me, was this: Once again, a white scholar has placed white men at the center of the narrative. (I should mention in passing that Jenkins was no less white than myself.) An actual conspiracy involving Clarence and his fellows, Jenkins argued, was a far more plausible—and, of course, heroic—conclusion, based on the evidence.

  Kaufman cleared his throat. “I am concerned that at the very least, the matter won’t be resolved in time for graduation.”

  And he was right. I graduated summa cum laude, and I still have my Phi Beta Kappa key in my cuff link box, but the controversy over my thesis dragged on well into my first year at Harvard, when I finally received an apologetic letter from Kaufman. As a budding lawyer I thought about pressing my case. But illegal immigrants tend not to resort to courts of law to redress their grievances, and I still felt like an alien in the world I wished to occupy.

  Like his polar opposite Cordell Savage, Jenkins was a man of righteous conviction, but I am a man of the middle, which is why I suppose I failed to follow up on this. While I am proud of my alma mater, my own small rebellion dating from that time consists of dropping each annual fund-raising solicitation into the wastebasket, a practice I have followed to this day. Maybe it was an early grounding in the concept of original sin which makes me susceptible to doubt as to my own convictions. Or maybe it is a sense of my own fraudulence that prevents me from asserting myself even when I believe I may be right. In fact, I had interpreted the evidence of the diaries according to my extratextual knowledge of Will’s family, just as surely as Jenkins had decoded the same data on the basis of his political convictions. I take comfort in the belief that, in the end, history may be better served by those of us who are able to see through our own convictions than by the passionate believers.

  Somehow the whole incident filled me with shame. What I’d expected to be the jewel in my undergraduate crown had, in effect, served only to tarnish it. On the other hand, I had done in three years in New Haven what usually required four; I had, along with my Yale diploma, acquired a first-class ticket to the world I so fervently desired. And I had, or so I imagined, polished the veneer which concealed from that world the base materials of my nature, and the darkest enigma of my being.

  XVII

  A midst the bleached tribe at the Harvard Club with their larval winter faces, Taleesha cut a striking figure as she strode in to meet me, her height exaggerated by a dark halo of hair and tight pink hip huggers that flared out to meet a pair of red platform shoes. A few months short of receiving my degree, I was in New York interviewing with law firms. She was assistant to a vice president at one of the big record companies. Still a recent immigrant to the North, Taleesha found it amusing—or perhaps she defensively pretended to be amused—to integrate such a WASPs’ nest. I hadn’t seen her in three years.

  “The job’s great,” she said, after we’d observed the pleasantries and ordered iced tea from a uniformed black waiter. He and Taleesha exchanged a fleeting look that seemed to me like a secret signal, and then suddenly she was back with me. “I’ve had a promotion and two raises in less than a year and I’m learning the business. Everybody at the company’s fascinated that I quit singing. But I never really had that hunger. I’d rather be backstage, thanks.”

  “Like Will,” I said, experimentally, dropping the taboo name. Though they were living apart—Will was still in Memphis—the terms of their separation were still not clear to me, and Will had been characteristically obscure on this subject.

  She laughed mirthlessly. “No, not like Will. I don’t need to pull everybody’s strings. Will wants to set the world free, but strictly on his own terms. He can’t make up his mind whether he wants to be a preacher or a politician or a rock star.” Eyes bright with vexation, she seemed on the verge of an angry outburst. I watched as she paused to let the emotion subside. “Anyway, nobody’s like Will,” she said, in a subdued tone. “Even here I can’t …” She let me complete the thought. “Everybody at my company worships him, thinks he’s some kind of outlaw genius.”

  I waited, glancing up at the stuffed head of a wildebeest.

  She sucked in a deep breath, preparing for a sprint. “It just got to be too much. All of it—Will’s family, my family, the entourage, the South. His father leaving—that was the beginning of the end. Will started spending all his time trying to take care of his mother, but maybe that’s my fault. I don’t have much of a pattern for being a good wife. Then my brother getting killed in Vietnam. At first they told us he was missing and finally they sent him home in a box.” Her face grew taut. “The goddamned box was stinking by the time it got to us. There we were crying and sweating in the church on an August day and trying to hold our breath with my brother stinking in his coffin.”

  She paused and smiled at the busboy as he filled our water glasses. “I don’t know,” she said once he’d gone. “Maybe we’re still stuck somewhere back there in history, somewhere between here and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

  “I thought Will lived in the moment,” I said, playing dumb.

  “He tries. That boy sure does wear it out. God, it was exhausting. Wake up in the afternoon and step over the bodies. Specially after we bought that old house outside town—it was like a transient hotel for musicians and dope fiends. I mean I could almost handle the drugs and the craziness, the groupies and the hangers-on, even the disappearances. But honey, Memphis was wearing us down. You don’t even know. Down there, white folks are still pissed off about sharing their precious lunch counters, let alone their blue-eyed sons. There’d be these remarks, you know, just loud enough so you could hear them, people spitting on the ground. Will would get in fights, if somebody says something he’ll be right in their face, but it just plain wore me out.” She glanced around the room. “Not that it’s a fucking bed of roses up here in Yankeeland.”

  Indeed, it was difficult to make a case for great racial tolerance in the North; my Irish-Catholic brethren in South Boston would soon be setting fire to school buses and beating up Negroes with an ardor that would surely thrill and inspire the rednecks of Mississippi.

  “So,” she said impatiently, “have you seen the great man?”

  “The mighty mogul?”

  “Big guy, about like this.” She held out her hands to indicate a paunch. “Smokes a big fat
spliff. Best friend of Mick and B.B. and Elvis.”

  “You mean the guy who invented rock and roll?”

  “With a little help from his friends.”

  “But not much.”

  “No. Mainly him.”

  Our sudden laughter dispelled the tension; both Taleesha and I realized, I think, that we were and likely always would be caught up in his powerful gravitational field.

  When I was in law school, he always invited me to the shows when he came through Boston with Sam and Dave or Bobby Blue Bland. Once he took me backstage when the Rolling Stones came to Boston. I tried not to let myself mind the fact that he was sometimes barely there with me, his mind already racing ahead to the next concert, the next act he would sign, the record he was about to produce.

  I think he appreciated me as a foil; he tried to shock me once by saying that Lester Holmes had shot someone in New Orleans and that he paid off Jim Garrison, the notorious district attorney, to quash the indictment. Relating this, he grinned across the table of a club in Cambridge, eager for my reaction. Whether it was true or not, he wanted to challenge my Ivy League law student worldview. He told me about having bags of cash delivered to disc jockeys, record company executives and indie promoters. “But hell,” he said, “I come by it honestly. One of my earliest memories is being in the car with Cordell when he drove to an abandoned construction site with a suitcase stuffed with small bills.”

  Invariably there was a girl, some pale, longhaired waif or more often an African queen, whose name he could scarcely remember. He was constantly gobbling handfuls of pills—“feeding the beast,” he called it. One night he arrived at my apartment with a musician named Stevie Ray Vaughn and another guy, who pointed a pistol at me and then threatened to jump out the window. On another occasion I bailed him out of jail after he had punched a security guard and busted up assorted furniture at the Ritz-Carlton; he’d been asked to leave because of his flamboyant disregard of their dress code, and as I drove him back to my place he raved on about the great unfinished, unwashed revolution, about buying the damned hotel and showing the bastards. A few months before my lunch with Taleesha he was back at the Ritz-Carlton, his previous visit apparently forgiven.

  I arrived that night to find a party in progress, a half-dozen figures lurking within the smoky gloom. Will was on the phone in the living room, a stunningly pale and lanky blonde creature draped on his shoulder. How he could hear anything above the music I can’t imagine. The power source of the gathering was a pile of white powder on the glass coffee table; one by one the revelers knelt down at this altar and partook, as Stubblefield obligingly held their long locks back behind their heads. Will finally lifted himself from the couch and, still attached to the girl, lumbered over to embrace me. Though he was clearly pleased to see me, I also sensed that, given his state of mind, we might as well have been in two different cities. Not bothering to introduce his companion, he offered me a hit on his joint and then pointed out several of the males in the room, members of a then-popular band. I took the joint, but declined the offer to kneel down at the table.

  He frowned. “Are you judging me?”

  “I’m not judging you.”

  “Here I invite you to my party and you won’t accept my hospitality.”

  “I’d just rather not,” I said. “That’s all.”

  The benevolent glaze in his eyes had suddenly given way to a menacing intensity.

  “You’ve got to learn to trust me,” he said ominously. “You think I’m the devil, trying to tempt you in the desert, or something?”

  One of the guys in the band came over and held out a rolled hundred-dollar bill, tinged with blood, which he had just extracted from his nostril.

  “Patrick doesn’t do drugs,” Will said, by way of introduction. Rubbing his nose and sniffling ostentatiously, his guest regarded me with amazement, as though Will had just identified me as a hermaphrodite.

  Fortunately, at that moment Stubblefield called Will to the phone.

  Compensating for my squeamishness about the cocaine, I smoked the rest of Will’s joint while Annalina, his companion, quizzed me about our friendship.

  The bass player, hearing that I was a law student, came over to ask my advice about certain fine points of legal practice. “Let’s say you throw something out of your car window,” he proposed. “I mean, how can they say whether it’s yours or not?”

  Soon I was engaged in a monologue touching on search and seizure and probable cause. This musician, I decided, was actually an excellent fellow. Will reappeared at intervals. I waved from the couch, eager to show him what a grand time I was having.

  Later I found myself standing in front of a bathroom mirror, staring at my own face, which seemed unfamiliar, trying to reclaim it. Stumbling out, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a bedroom. I thought it would behoove me to rest for a few minutes to regain my edge. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when I suddenly realized Annalina was sitting on the bed beside me, stroking my forehead.

  “That better,” she asked. Standing up, she stepped out of her jeans and shucked her T-shirt.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, as she straddled me and began to unzip my jeans. “Aren’t you Will’s girlfriend?”

  She shrugged. “He told me to take care of you.”

  “Are you sure?” I said, reaching down to stop her hands. “I mean, are you sure this is what he meant?”

  “He said I should ball you,” she replied matter-of-factly. “He said you needed it.”

  I pondered this as she unpeeled my jeans. “Do you ball Will?”

  “When he’s in the mood,” she said, lying down beside me. “Actually I’ve only known him since Thursday.”

  At the start, I was too amazed to assist or resist. But I was removed enough from my own body to simply observe as it seemed to respond and, then, to perform with a will of its own. Under the mounting influence of undeniable physical pleasure I lost my self-consciousness and rejoined my body as it merged with Annalina’s, surrendering to the moment and then actively participating until I dimly heard her say, “Whoa, Mr. Stallion,” even as she bucked harder beneath me.

  Afterward, she retrieved a joint from her jeans and rejoined me on the bed. “Will said you were probably a virgin. But, hey, I never would’ve guessed it.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What else did he say?”

  She shrugged. “What’s with you guys anyway?”

  “What do you mean,” I asked, after taking a hit off the joint.

  “I don’t know. It just seems a little weird. I mean, maybe you guys should sit down and talk.”

  A glazed look of recognition crossed Will’s face as I rejoined the party with an air of cocky modesty, but I left soon afterward to try to salvage some portion of the coming academic day, and we never did talk about Annalina, or that night.

  Will was off in Memphis, or Muscle Shoals or Managua, when I attended our fifth reunion, though of course technically he was not a member of the class. Matson was still teaching English, still a housemaster, a less romantic figure than I remembered—slightly ludicrous now in the same bow ties and English country tweeds that had once seemed so sportif, speaking in the same convoluted locutions that had once been so charming. I was nervous about seeing him—our last meeting had not been a thoroughly happy encounter, but to my surprise he was effusive in his greetings. “We expect you to be nothing less than the next Oliver Wendell Holmes,” he declaimed. “Still finding time for your poetry, I hope.”

  I mumbled something about keeping my hand in. As I had drifted away from Yale’s English department to history I stopped sending him poems and essays, partly because of the strangeness of his visit to New Haven, and partly because I felt I was betraying youthful ideals of which he was the executor. I felt that embarrassment still, simultaneous with a feeling of condescension. Having finished my second year at Harvard Law, I imagined myself to be part of the wider world from which Matson had sought shelter. I was more than a little smug.


  Had I attended my twenty-fifth reunion a few years ago, I might have looked at myself from the perspective of youth and found I was not quite the giant I might have hoped to become, back when everything seemed possible. But as a scholarship boy five years out of prep school I was by no means displeased with myself, which was one reason I had gone to the reunion in the first place—to demonstrate that I was making good on my promise.

  At the cocktail reception, I felt obliged to come clean with Matson about the incident with Lollie Baker. “I was in the closet that night when you came in,” I confessed. “The girl, the, uh, young lady was with me, not Will.”

  I wanted to shock him. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t the person he took me to be.

  He touched his glass to mine and winked. “I know,” he said, his pink face beaming. “I knew it then, my boy.”

  If I’d been a man at that moment, instead of a lawyer manqué, I would have decked him.

  Will grew larger in every sense—fatter, richer, more successful. He founded his own label, and eventually branched out to the white artists who were influenced by his black artists—this despite his oft-quoted remark that white boys just couldn’t sing the blues. He bought his first private jet, helped bankroll and organize the abortive presidential campaign of George McGovern and later threw benefit concerts for Jimmy Carter. And, to the despair of his accountant, he became a devotee of the Dalai Lama, whom he followed around the globe. In Will’s mind this was all part of the same plan.

  His fame was not broad, and he took pains to stay out of the spotlight, but those who were truly famous often prided themselves on their acquaintance with Will Savage and spoke knowingly of his fortune, his excesses, his influence and his genius. Once he took me to a party given by an English lord in a townhouse on the Upper West Side. Everyone wanted to meet the rock stars; all the rock stars wanted to meet Will. While supplicants and well-wishers surged in and out, Will sat in the lotus position in the middle of the Persian carpet in an unfurnished parlor. Finally Mick Jagger arrived, slouching in a corner and pouting through that mouth which looked like a reptile sewed on his face, lethally bored until someone told him Will was in the next room.