The Last of the Savages (3 page)

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 wanted 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 who’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.

These changes in each of us were probably more gradual and subtle than they seem now, for we became even closer friends over the course of that academic year and the next. I helped him with the subjects he was too bored to follow in class. And there was one major subject which we never tired of discussing. After lights-out we whispered into the night about whom we would and wouldn’t screw, and what we would give to do so. I was deeply, achingly in love with Elizabeth Montgomery, the good suburban witch of
Bewitched
, while Will had a special boner for the duskier Natalie Wood. Besides these public stars, the wives of
teachers and housemasters came under intense scrutiny, since there were no other live victims for our fantasies. One night he whispered across the chilly room, “Would you take an F in history to pork Carsdale’s wife?”

“God, are you kidding? Absolutely.” But in this case I was lying. As much as I might have liked to pork almost anybody, I knew I needed to succeed in school in order to realize my ultimate desires. I would’ve traded away any number of girls to get into Princeton or Yale,

One evening Will said that the thing that he liked about soul music and the blues, as opposed to, say, “fucking
folk
music,” was that it was all basically about sex, not just the words but the actual music itself, and from that moment I started to listen to his records with keener interest. So it wasn’t only about freedom, but about sex, this music he was so passionate about. He also told me about his older brother’s dirty books—
The Story of O
and
My Secret Life
, part of the same private library where Will had also discovered
On the Road
and
Black Like Me.

Another night we argued about whether black or white lingerie was sexier. I said black, since I was pretty sure no one I knew wore a black bra or panties; the secret garb of hookers and starlets, they seemed, like sex itself, incredibly strange and kinky. Will argued for white, though I think he took the position just for the sake of debate. It must have been one of the only times in his life he picked white. As I recall he extolled the virginal properties and the thrill of metaphoric soiling and defloration. It certainly didn’t occur to me at the time to ask what color of hypothetical female flesh we were trading in. Neither one of us, as it turned out, had conventional tastes, although we weren’t about to fess up to it back then.

As in most worldly matters, our relationship was lopsided, since Will’s experience far surpassed my own, and even far surpassed the experience I claimed. He’d gone to third base twice and gotten two hand jobs by the time I met him. Or so he said. One of the triples was with a Negro girl who lived on their place in Mississippi. Perhaps most incredible of all—he had also been the fleeting recipient of an actual blow job until his partner, whom he’d gotten drunk specifically for the occasion, threw up in his lap. Brimming with wild surmise, I stayed awake long
after he told me this story; I could hardly imagine ever asking anyone to put her mouth on my thing, any more than I could imagine a girl who would do so without being asked. It seemed extraordinary—indicative of a hidden, waiting world that was far more mysterious and splendid than I had ever thought possible. I listened to the rhythm of Will’s raspy breathing as I masturbated beneath the starched tattletale sheets, as earnestly and devoutly as I had once upon a time said my prayers.