The Last of the Savages
Read The Last of the Savages Online
Authors: Jay McInerney
J
AY
M
C
I
NERNEY
The Last of the Savages
Jay McInerney lives with his wife and their two children in New York City and Franklin, Tennessee.
J
AY
M
C
I
NERNEY
Brightness Falls
Story of My Life
Ransom
Bright Lights, Big City
F
OR
H
ELEN
Whom I would have invented myself
if my imagination were that rich
… 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.
T
he 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.