The Last of the Savages Read online

  JAY MCINERNEY

  The Last of the Savages

  Jay McInerney lives with his wife and their two children in New York City and Franklin, Tennessee.

  ALSO BY JAY MCINERNEY

  Brightness Falls

  Story of My Life

  Ransom

  Bright Lights, Big City

  FOR HELEN

  Whom I would have invented myself

  if my imagination were that rich

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Copyright

  … one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

  —Norman Mailer

  The author wishes to thank Lucius Birch, Mildred and Robert Bell, William Eggleston, Sam Henderson, Matthew Johnson, Warner F. Moore II, Charlie Newman, Pallas Pidgeon, Julia Reed, Steve Skelton, Dorothy Stevenson (aka Bug), Maxine Smith, and Donna Tartt. Special thanks to Morgan for office space. And of course—Fritz.

  I

  The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families. At least that’s one way of explaining my unlikely fellowship with Will Savage.

  Though we hadn’t spoken in weeks, maybe months, I thought of him the moment two New York City police detectives showed up at my office. I was taken aback, naturally, when my secretary announced them. The kind of law we practice here doesn’t bring us in contact with the police. But their visit had nothing to do with Will Savage—they wanted to ask me about Felson. Ah, yes, officers. Please, sit down.

  Saul Felson was in the tax department at my firm. Family man, active member of his temple, a doggedly brilliant lawyer who, even by the conservative standards of our white-shoe firm, was so colorless as to seem virtually transparent. Kind of a geek. We occasionally worked together, but I didn’t know him well—I don’t think anyone did—and nothing I could tell the detectives might explain how he’d ended up dead of multiple stab wounds in a seedy motel in the Bronx. Everyone’s quite shaken, of course, and the partners will all be attending the funeral. I have to admit the whole affair has given me an acute intimation of mortality. At forty-seven, he was just a year older than me.

  Lately I’ve been wondering if Felson had a best friend. The visit from the detectives reminded me of the day the FBI came to interview me about mine.

  By now, I’m used to answering questions about Will; it seems to be part of my life’s work. The first person ever to formally interrogate me was the rock critic for the Boston Phoenix, looking for colorful anecdotes with which to embroider the nascent Savage legend.

  Camouflaged by a heavy beard and outfitted in the olive army jacket which was then the uniform of strident antimilitarists, anticonformists and all the other bushy antinomians, he sampled many of the world’s beers that afternoon at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square. I think I was wearing a Levi’s jacket and fashionably flared and faded jeans, but as far as he was concerned I might as well have been in chinos and a blazer. In any case he was disappointed to discover that Will Savage had such a straight, musically obtuse friend.

  For all the time I spent with Will and all his efforts to educate me, I’m still apt to confuse Johnny Jenkins with Pinetop Perkins. So shoot me. I appreciate a good hook and a big backbeat, I can hum along with half the songs in the Stax and Chess catalogs, but I can’t necessarily deliver a lecture on the difference between R and B and soul—a fact that irritates and amazes those who worship Will, who think he is a great man because of the careers he helped to create, the empire he constructed, the millions he accumulated and, in true rock-and-roll fashion, the millions he pissed away. I can only say that I believe in the achievement because I believed first in Will, and because I think I understand what it meant to him. The music was not an end in itself but the expression of a deeper program. Will was always trying to free the slaves.

  Halfway through his pilsner, the rock critic asked if it was true that Will had picked up the scar on his cheek in a knife fight with Bukka White, the great Delta bluesman. It was the first time I’d heard this story, which became one of the cornerstones of the Will Savage myth—along with the one about his contest with Jimi Hendrix to see who could swallow more reds without passing out, in which Will was said to prevail.

  “No,” I said. “He got it in a car accident.” Then, realizing how bland that sounded, I added, “He crashed into a cement mixer one night when he was drunk.”

  This fact didn’t make it into the article; certainly the rumor must have seemed more interesting than the truth. I actually met Bukka once, with Will, in Memphis. Big, powerful-looking man, even at seventy, hands like sledgehammers. He wouldn’t have needed a knife.

  Just to fuck with the guy—and with Will, who had sicced him on me—I claimed that Will was known to his closest friends and associates as Memphis Slim, until that moment a private moniker which I had bestowed on him at school. This faux fact was duly reported in the article, without attribution, and subsequently attached itself to Will.

  “I guess,” opined the rock critic, closing his notebook, his dark mustache frosted with the foam of his Czech pilsner, “you didn’t pick up much from your time with Will.” This was after I blanked on something he asked me about Lee Dorsey—or was it Tommy Dorsey?

  Choosing to ignore the implication that Will now belonged to the true believers, I said: “Will taught me about history.”

  Looking stunned, he ordered up a Belgian beer to assuage his incredulity. “History?”

  At the time—this was the early seventies—history was a discredited subject. Not that it has ever quite recovered from that devaluation—but at that precise historical moment it was deemed irrelevant to the accelerating millennial blitz, or, at best, just kind of a drag. And Will, of all people, seemed like an avatar of the orgy of the eternal present.

  “He’s a southerner,” I explained.

  I wasn’t just being perverse. Almost from the moment he could speak, Will knew the names of the battles his ancestors had engaged in—Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chicamauga—and where their lead-pocked bones were interred. Not that he was a history buff particularly; Will had just about no use for orthodox scholarship. But he came from a haunted family, a vanquished land, and even as he stormed the crenellated walls of convention, he inadvertently taught me about the past’s implacable claims on the present—that it is if anything more tangible than the vibrant, breathing moment. I tried to explain some of this to the rock critic, but either I wasn’t clear or he was fuddled from his malty geography lesson.

  In spite of his atrocious hygiene, craven hagiolatry, caustic French cigarettes and High Germanic critical vocabulary, I preferred the rock critic to the FBI agents who showed up at my door a few weeks later. I was in my first year of law school; they were waiting outside my door when I returned to my room from Torts one
afternoon.

  “Patrick Keane?”

  They introduced themselves. Ominously, one of them was named Lynch. Fellow Hibernians both, they seemed to count on this for some sort of rapport. The old sod and all. But this was the era of civil war both in Vietnam and at home. As conventional and politically bland as I might have seemed to my peers, I recognized the enemy by their gray suits and ties, black brogues and crewcuts. Back when hair length was such a foolproof signifier it was easy to tell who was who. Though my own hair was only moderately moppy—halfway down the ears, volume and wave just barely suggestive of an Afro—friends of mine had been clubbed and teargassed in the streets, and a college classmate was in prison in Texas because state troopers had found a joint in his car. When I extended my hand it was shaking. A real child of the times, of course, wouldn’t have offered his hand at all, but in politics I’m a follower of Henry Clay.

  “How ’bout we take a walk,” suggested Special Agent Lynch. Not seeing any choice, I nodded pragmatically. I imagined myself whisked into a car, slowly roasted under fluorescent light in a smoky, windowless room. I felt his paternal arm on my shoulder, urging me forward. The other agent walked behind us, the better to club or chloroform me. I forget what the most popular song was that year, but paranoia was definitely the number-one hit word, the dark mantra of the drug culture. Under the circumstances I seemed to have difficulty remembering how to walk—I couldn’t quite get the traditional rhythm down—and breathing seemed likewise a new and intricate activity. Could this be about the peace rally I had attended the previous fall?

  “So, how you like it here at Ha’vad?”

  “The law school’s excellent,” I said, trying to muster some hauteur.

  “Not bad for an Irish kid from Taunton.”

  I was silent, disliking his implication that I had more in common with him and his sidekick than with the scruffy princelings around us.

  “Tell me about Will Savage.”

  All in a moment I felt relieved, and in the next instant disloyal for feeling relieved, and worried that Will was really in trouble this time. “Did something happen to him?”

  “Not yet, so far as we know. But maybe you can help us help him out of some serious trouble.”

  I had a hard time looking at the special agent because my gaze was alternately drawn to a purple, pea-sized growth on his cheek and to the perfect mesa on the top of his head—a flattop haircut being nearly as rare by then as a powdered periwig. Even as I equivocated, trying to divulge as little information about Will as possible, I was plagued with the notion of picking that rotten pea from his face, and strafed with images of tiny airplanes taking off and landing on the special agent’s head.

  “How would you describe Mr. Savage’s politics?”

  “I think they’re, uh, pretty … standard,” I equivocated, “for someone of his age and … educational background.” A year of law school had not been wasted on me.

  “Would you say that advocating the violent overthrow of the American government is pretty standard, Mr. Keane? Is that what they teach you here at Ha’vad?”

  I am pleased to recall that I dropped my mask and looked at him with open disdain, citizen to citizen. Maybe I had been dodgy about Will’s politics, but I thought this was laying it on a bit thick. “Will doesn’t believe in violence,” I insisted. Of course, he’d been known to carry a gun when traveling the chitlin circuit with his soul and blues acts; but it was strictly a capitalist tool, reserved for those occasions when the local promoters were reluctant to share the take.

  “We have proof,” said Flattop, “that he’s affiliated with groups that do.”

  “Will doesn’t affiliate with groups,” I said, even more confident in this than in my previous assertion.

  “Have you ever heard of the Black Power Solidarity Committee?”

  At first this sounded merely ludicrous, something the director of the FBI dreamed up in an apocalyptic fever. On reflection, however, I realized I’d met the entire politburo of the committee in question, in a hotel suite in Miami a few years before. It was ludicrous, but that didn’t prevent it from being frightening—like many things that happened then.

  I had just finished my freshman year at Yale and was enjoying a brief vacation courtesy of Will, who was attending a convention of radio announcers. He’d taken over a vast suite in a hotel in Miami Beach, at the edge of the then-crumbling deco district. I spent my days on the beach with the codgers and the Cuban muscle boys while Will confined himself to his rooms, receiving visitors, conferring with his entourage, smoking dope and stroking the phones. Returning to the hotel from a day on the sand, grilled to an unflattering shade of pink, I emerged from the elevator to discover three black men in leather jackets loitering in the turquoise hall.

  “We s’posed to meet Will Savage.”

  I pointed to the door. Trying to be helpful, trying to show that I knew there was nothing out of the ordinary about three black men—even three black men who, under slightly different circumstances, might look menacing—visiting Will, I went over and knocked on the door myself. Hey, man, we’re all cool round here.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Patrick,” I said. As the door yielded, I felt myself pushed from behind, across the threshold into the sentinel bulk of Jack Stubblefield, former football player and Will’s devoted vassal. There was a brief scuffle as I tried to regain my balance and the men behind me surged forward, and finally we were all standing uncomfortably close inside the door, me and Stubblefield facing the intruders—only one of us ready and willing to fight them off.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he said.

  A tall, thin man in a red beret glared at him. “We want to talk to Savage.”

  “Who’s asking?” None of us had noticed Jessie Petit, a wiry, white-haired black man in his fifties, who was standing in front of the bedroom door. A revolver dangled from his right hand as casually as a cigarette. I wanted to be excused from this class immediately.

  When the guy in the beret cut his eyes away from us, I looked over my shoulder and saw Will emerging from the bedroom. Although he was still thin at the time, Will always walked with the stately deliberation of the much bulkier man he would become. He was wearing a black silk robe with Chinese ideograms crawling up the facing like white spiders. Within the nest of dark hair and beard, his face seemed sleepy and slack, but the eyes were a brilliant, supernatural blue, as startling as the sudden flash of the light on top of a police car.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “It’s about your contribution, man,” the spokesman finally said. “We’re here in the name of the Black Power Solidarity Committee.”

  “Let them in, Jack,” Will ordered.

  Stubblefield backed up a few steps, creating a narrow right-of-way.

  “Come in,” Will said, “have a seat.” The invitation seemed more an act of noblesse than a capitulation, and perhaps for this reason the three were reluctant to acknowledge it.

  “We don’t need your fucking hospitality, man. What we want right now is your contribution to the committee, on behalf of all the black artists and—”

  His speech was interrupted by Taleesha Savage, who slammed the bedroom door and stood beside Jessie. Glancing at the tableau, she hastened to her husband’s side, her manner wary and protective as she put her arm around his waist. She was a striking creature, tall and lithe and feline in her grace—though at this moment her expression conveyed a hint of razory, sheathed claws, which she wouldn’t hesitate to deploy in protecting her mate.

  “Gentlemen, my wife.”

  The two junior committee members registered their surprise; only the man in the beret seemed stoic about the fact that Will Savage’s wife was as black as himself.

  Stubblefield, meanwhile, was moving slowly along the wall into the living room. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the shotgun leaning against the couch.

  “On behalf of—”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much cash
,” Will said, interrupting the speech again. He’d probably heard it already; everyone at the convention was talking about the mysterious group of shakedown artists claiming to represent exploited black musicians. The rumor was they’d tried to kidnap Jerry Wexler.

  As Will reached into his pocket, the man on the beret’s right thrust his right hand under his jacket.

  “There’s no need for that,” Will said.

  He pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out. “About a thousand, eleven hundred.”

  “You gotta do better than that.”

  “Don’t you tell him what he’s gotta be doing,” Taleesha snapped.

  “I’ll write you a check,” Will said cheerfully. “Five thousand?”

  “Yeah, and then you call your bank to cancel the motherfucker soon’s we out the door.”

  “If I write you a check,” Will said quietly, “you can be goddamn sure that it’s good and it will stay good.” Will’s voice, formerly that of the relaxed and gracious host, was now icy with disdain. He sounded exactly like his father—perhaps his great-great-great-grandfather, the slave owner, who’d killed a man in a duel over an obscure point of honor. He was a hippie one moment and a Savage the next, though of course he was both all along. The hippie had been happy to make a contribution of his own volition; the Savage was outraged that his sincerity would be called into question.

  This was a strange compound, and one that Stubblefield still didn’t understand. After the committee had sullenly accepted the check and backed out of the room, he expressed his outrage that Will had given them anything. “I could have got to the twelve gauge,” he whined. “And Jessie had the thirty-eight.”

  “They have a legitimate grievance,” Will said, his former serenity restored. “Black artists have been getting ripped off in this business since it started.”

  “Not by you,” said Taleesha.

  “Maybe not.” He shrugged. “By people like me.”