The Last of the Savages Read online

  “They’re running a fucking protection racket,” Jack said.

  Will lit one of his corona-sized joints and inhaled. “We can all use a little extra protection.” It sounded like a line from a song.

  The G-men didn’t believe for a minute that anyone would casually give six thousand dollars to an unknown bunch of black radicals.

  “You’re saying they held him up at gunpoint?”

  “No, not exactly. He felt like giving it to them.”

  The special agent whose head looked like an aircraft carrier shook his head in disgust. “What the hell’s a clean-cut kid like you doing with a dangerous radical like Will Savage?”

  This would not be the first or the last time I heard some version of that question.

  II

  Will Savage and I were thrown together as juniors at prep school, late arrivals to the class of ’67, strangers to a cold New England campus which glows warmly in the memories of a half-dozen generations of American plutocrats. Although our new school was only forty miles from my home and a thousand miles from his, I’d traveled much farther than Will. He was the fifth Savage to matriculate, and the observatory bore the name of his maternal grandfather; I was a scholarship student from a New England mill town down the road, a dying redbrick museum of the Industrial Revolution ringed by fast food and auto dealerships. Will was from Memphis, Tennessee, the first real southerner I’d ever known.

  His luggage preceded him. When the housemaster showed me and my parents to the cell that would be my home for the next academic year, two large trunks layered with faded steamer stickers were stacked in the middle of the room, taking up most of the space between the two beds. I unpacked my plaid suitcase while my father made nervous conversation and my mother tried not to cry.

  “Your room at home is much nicer,” she said, as if trying to assure herself that this snotty school wasn’t too good for her son even as she was mourning the perceived necessity of my leaving the nest.

  “It’s not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” my father agreed. Scared as I was, I wanted to be here, and I wanted to be alone in my new room. I resented this mild criticism. Already, I realize now, I was disowning them in my heart.

  My mother is, shall we say, a noticeable woman: nearly six feet tall, she has a bust like the prow of a ship. The fact that she had always been a doting and devoted mother did not prevent me from feeling, somewhere around the dawn of puberty, acutely embarrassed by her sheer physical volume, bright clothing and clarion voice, its broad adenoidal vowels redolent of the tenements of South Boston. She compounded the crime of being the parent of an adolescent by being so damnably conspicuous. My father, as if to compensate, tended to recede; he is, in fact, two inches shorter than my mother, and this, too, was a source of chagrin. Fathers were supposed to be taller and, when visiting their sons’ prep schools, were not supposed to wear checked sports jackets worn shiny at the elbows, nor polyester ties. This much, even I knew. I was, in short, an ungrateful little shit.

  As we’d walked across the lawn to the house, I felt the casual reconnaissance of three young men with lacrosse sticks languidly flicking a ball back and forth, and felt myself wanting. My clothes, my hair, my very walk, did not pass muster. For this I blamed my parents. Now, on the verge of leaving home for the first time in my life, and actually forever, I was most worried that my new roommate would arrive before they left. And a taxi did pull up just as my parents were climbing into our Impala, my mother weeping, supported by my father, who was holding the passenger door open for her. A tall boy hopped out of the cab whistling, wearing aviator sunglasses, a transistor radio pressed to his ear. My father, who despite my partial scholarship was straining his resources to send me here, honked the horn as he slowly pulled away. Brimming with impatience and shame, I raised my hand in farewell but didn’t look back. If this show of indifference was performed for the sake of the new arrival, I don’t think he noticed, bopping up the flagstone walk ahead of me.

  A head taller than me, with shaggy dark hair, he wore ripped khakis and a much worn button-down shirt, the tail of which flapped behind him; he suffered his clothing the way you might inhabit an old summer cottage, cheerfully indifferent to the sagging porch and peeling paint. This was in fact the last gasp of his sartorial conformity; within the year my new roommate would shed the inherited uniform of the preppie and start dressing in rainbow hues and, later, after that psychedelic decade of our youth, in black.

  I dawdled up the stairs in his wake. When I reached our room, he was deeply occupied in the task of setting up a stereo. After I introduced myself, he stood up and held out his hand. When he focused on me the effect was quite startling; beneath his dark eyebrows his eyes were bright blue verging to violet, like an acetylene flame.

  “Will Savage,” he drawled, shaking my hand firmly, almost violently, before turning back to electronics. “Gonna wire us up for some sound here,” he said. “You like the blues?”

  “Sure,” I said, not entirely certain who or what the blues might be. I was relieved to find my new roommate friendly, if somewhat distracted. Within minutes we were listening to an eerie, piercing lament. He sat on the bed cross-legged, nodding behind his sunglasses, explaining with evangelical zeal that the singer—the greatest ever American musical genius—had died at the age of twenty, poisoned by a jealous woman.

  “This is the purest art this damn country has produced, man. Listen up. It’s like the distilled essence of suffering and the yearning to be free. That’s why it could only have been produced by the descendants of slaves.”

  Will’s enthusiasm was initially more convincing to me than the music itself. He listened with rapturous concentration, closing his eyes and tilting his head back, his face contorting in a kind of map of the song’s emotional arc. “We’re all slaves,” he announced suddenly, “but we don’t know it.” He pointed to the record player. “Him, he knows it.”

  When, after the song ended, I ventured that I liked the Beatles, he sneered. “This is the real thing,” he said. “At least the Stones acknowledge their sources.”

  The music unsettled me, as did the fierce, restless blue beam of his attention when he asked me about myself and absorbed my answers. He seemed intensely interested in my story in spite of my own vague sense of shame at its cheap, Sheetrock and Formica stage sets and lack of high dramatic interest. I simultaneously inflated and disparaged the details of my background. I told him my father worked for General Electric—marginally true: he sold their washers and dryers. I said grandiloquently that my life had been largely lived through books to date, that I liked the novels of Ayn Rand, Salinger and Sir Walter Scott—though I had read only Waverly—and the poetry of e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas.

  “He’s cool,” said Will of the latter. “Old Bobby Dylan copped his name.”

  I nodded sagely, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about. But I could tell he was impressed with the breadth of my reading, and for the first time it occurred to me that all those lunch hours spent in the library in order to avoid getting beaten up on the playground might yield social as well as academic dividends.

  Will’s chosen field of erudition was harder to define and—for me—to understand: it revolved around the music scene in his hometown of Memphis, although the music, in his analysis, was part of a larger movement of personal and social liberation. I knew about Elvis, of course—the whole planet knew about Elvis.

  “Even before civil rights,” he told me, “the musicians were breaking down the barriers, secretly integrating the city. I’d hide under the covers in my parents’ house in East Memphis and listen to Rufus Thomas on WDIA in Memphis and WLAC out of Nashville and when I was older I’d sneak down to Beale Street with Jessie Petit—our yardman till my old man fired him—we’d split a pint and listen to the rhythm and blues and I’d say to myself, Shit, the segregationists are right—if white folks find out what they’re missing they ain’t never going to work for the man anymore. That’s why the old man sent me here, they w
anted to get me away from that Memphis scene. But the shit’s out of the box now and it’s spread way beyond Memphis.” As if throwing me a sop, he added, “The Beatles are part of it, they’re messengers.”

  He stood up to change the record. “My parents gave me this fucking stationery, has our family crest on it. Like I’m going to be writing lots of letters home about the glories of the old school.” He paused and looked off. “Tell you what—I’m gonna design me my own crest with the motto, Free the Slaves. And let me tell you, Pat—the slaves are you and me.”

  I began to worry at this point that my new roommate was crazy.

  “You Catholic,” Will asked suddenly.

  The question threw me. “Is the pope?” I finally responded. This was one of the characteristics of my upbringing I was sort of planning on leaving behind. Growing up Irish Catholic in the fifties and sixties, it was impossible not to feel slightly déclassé among the Protestants, who seemed to be the real natives of the Republic, and who were still being regaled in their own churches with stories of papist idol worship and voodoo.

  “Wish I was,” said Will. “Next best thing to being Jewish, which is the next best thing to being a Negro. At least you’ve got a real identity.”

  I had never considered this aspect of the matter. Will wanted to know all about confession, and in the light of his intense curiosity—caught in the disconcerting focus of those raptorish blue eyes—I suddenly saw one of the more tedious rituals of my life as faintly exotic and interesting. This was one of Will’s gifts, within the limits of his choppy attention span: to make you seem interesting to yourself by virtue of his inquisitiveness. Within minutes he’d forced me to reassess two of my manifest handicaps—my bookishness and my Catholicism.

  “Do you confess everything? Like even your thoughts?”

  “You’re supposed to.” Flexing my new independence, I added, “I don’t.” This was true; ever since the virus of sex had invaded my body I had been unable to make a really honest confession.

  As if reading my mind he said, “So if you think about laying a chick, that’s a sin?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  Men of the world, we both stretched out on our beds and contemplated this absurdity. All the tormented hours I’d spent trying to reconcile my unbidden sexual fevers with the supposed dictates of my faith suddenly seemed like so much moral persnicketiness.

  Will said, “No wonder Catholic girls are so screwed up about sex.”

  Were they? I wondered. And how did he know?

  “What are you,” I asked.

  “Episcopalian, Methodist, what’s the diff?” He gave the impression that he considered himself cursed at birth. “I come from one crazy-assed family. From the Mississippi Delta by way of Charleston. You know about the Delta?”

  “More or less,” I muttered. I knew only that it was a geological feature associated with the river. And at that time the delta you heard most about was the Mekong.

  “Some say it’s the flatness of the land and the isolation and the heat. I say it’s karma.” He paused and looked out through the wall; this, I would soon discover, was a habit of his—to fall into a reverie in mid-speech. He seemed to count on the fact that you would wait for him to continue, or rather, he didn’t really care. “I fully expect to be dead before I’m thirty,” he said suddenly. “Drinking and firearm violence run in the family.”

  He frowned, pushed the hair out of his eyes. Then he announced: “My little brother’s dead.” Clearly it was something he’d been saving, a fact he considered vital to his own story.

  Not knowing what to make of any of this, I said I was sorry. Then, amazing myself, I said that I had a sister who died.

  “How did it happen,” Will asked.

  “We were playing kick-the-can and she ran across the street and got hit by a car.” I couldn’t quite believe I was lying so fluently. I’d never had a sister—my mother had been unable to conceive after my birth—and I was borrowing her from my friend Jeff Toomey. “She was seven,” I added.

  “A.J. was fourteen,” Will said after a respectful pause. “I was supposed to come east last year but he got killed in a hunting accident and I had to stay home with my mother. It was my fault,” he added, tantalizingly, and then we were called down for our first house meeting.

  That night we were walking to the dining hall together when Will stopped to stare at a cement mixer on the site of the future science building. There was nothing to see but a hole in the ground and a big yellow cement mixer. “What is it,” I asked.

  He didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know, I’ve always had a thing about them.”

  “Cement mixers?”

  He nodded.

  I looked around, worried that somebody might see us here staring at a big yellow truck. “Well, so did I when I was a kid.” This was the first chance I’d had to act superior to Will, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I dream about them sometimes.”

  Again I worried that there was something wrong with my roommate. He certainly seemed a little crazy. It would be a terrible curse, starting out my new life with a cracked roommate. Finally we resumed walking.

  “Someday I’m going to buy one and make a little room in the back cylinder,” he said, “and cut a window to look out while somebody drives me around.”

  My faith in Will’s social value was restored when an older boy with a southern accent greeted him warmly in the food line, inquiring about mutual acquaintances.

  Everything was so new to me that I no longer clearly remember the sequence of events, but a day or two after we arrived we passed a group of five or six boys lounging in the shade of the big chestnut tree observing us with intense indifference. A small, acne-speckled kid I would later know as Henson said, “Johnny Reb and the Townie,” and the others laughed. At that moment I longed to be transported back to my second-rate hometown high school, where at least I could look down on the boys who tormented me. It had been crazy, hubristic, to think I could fit in here.

  Will walked up to the group and stood looking down at Henson, who cocked and bobbed his head nervously. Then he turned to the largest boy, whom I already recognized as Jack Stubblefield, a linebacker on the football team, and punched him in the face. Stubblefield fell like a tree, wobbling and bowing slowly to the ground, and Will started calmly back to the house.

  “Are you crazy,” I asked, exhilarated, after I caught up. “Why’d you hit the big guy? He didn’t say anything.”

  “Ever heard of Lester Holmes,” Will asked. “Guitar player, played with Elmore James and Muddy Waters, I met him a couple of years ago on Beale Street. He told me he’d been thrown in the pen, he was in a cell with about ten other mean, hungry-looking specimens. Right away he could see he was in for some shit. So he said to me, ‘You know what I did?’”

  By now we had reached the room. Will sat down on the bed, swiping the hair away from his face. A sixteen-year-old suburban kid, I didn’t have any idea of the things that might happen to a caged man.

  “He said, ‘I go up to the biggest, baddest nigger in that cell, boy about ten foot tall, face like King Kong. And I punch him hard as I can right square in the face and knocks him cold. And none of them boys in that cell bothered me the rest of the night including old King Kong.’ ”

  “But, Jack Stubblefield …”

  “Biggest gorilla in the cage.”

  “What if he reports you?”

  “That’s not how it works, Patrick.”

  In fact the incident seemed to have precisely the effect that Will anticipated. He was treated with cautious respect and, as his friend, I was spared some of the ritual indignities of the new boy. Stubblefield glowered and sulked for a few days, as the bruise on his dumb handsome face ripened purple, and finally he and his gang confronted us one night when we were returning from the dining hall. Striding up to Will, he demanded an apology. Will said he was perfectly willing, if Henson first apologized to us. Henson, the spotty, jumpy little court jester wh
o’d precipitated hostilities, whined in protest, but finally bowed to his leader’s command, staring at the ground and gouging the turf with the toe of his Weejuns as he did so. Then Will said, “Sorry I hit you, Stubblefield,” and honor was satisfied.

  That autumn I took on new colors, seeking to transform myself and to erase the green trail of my blood and upbringing. I talked my mother into sending me part of the housekeeping money for clothes, which I slowly acquired from the prep shop in town. Playing soccer, I earned a certain minor jock status. In these attempts to pander to the elitist tone of the campus I was out of step with the approaching egalitarian drumbeat of the times, despite the fact that I heard the beat every day from the little shelf speakers of Will’s stereo.

  Will, who already was almost everything I wanted to be, was also transforming himself, sloughing off the dry shell of familial expectation. His disrespect for authority seemed almost pathological, and he seized on small points of discipline against which to rebel—as when he wore a jacket and tie but no shirt to chapel one day, observing the letter if not the spirit of the dress code, for which act of sedition he received a week’s detention. If he had been thrown out for drinking or fighting or bad grades—this would have been understood at home. His grandfather had been tossed out of four schools, including this one. But Will was reading Siddhartha and D. T. Suzuki and Kerouac, listening to James Brown as well as his beloved Delta blues, imagining a world which the Savages did not own—although he also had the Wall Street Journal delivered to our dorm, presumably to check on the progress of stocks in his trust fund.

  Will’s hair grew longer and shaggier; the administration threatened to expel him unless it was cut. One Saturday afternoon he arranged for a barber to come out to the campus and had Stubblefield and Henson escort him, in handcuffs—for I refused to participate—to a chair in the middle of the quad, where he had an inch cut off his locks in front of the hundred or so students who had heard about the event. It was the first act of political theater I ever witnessed. That Will was able to enlist Stubblefield and Henson was no more amazing than the fact that he managed to escape punishment for this antic.