The Last of the Savages (26 page)

“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.

While many of the new heroes of show business and rock and roll had utter faith in the efficacy of Will’s benediction, old-style tycoons and entrepreneurs were also grudgingly respectful of what they took to be Will’s canny discovery of a new vein of wealth.
Fortune
devoted two pages to his empire. He remained more interesting than anyone I’d ever met, and he was still two steps ahead of his demons in the midseventies—no small feat in itself.

Will and I never discussed his father. I didn’t tell him, for instance, that Cordell had sent me an alligator wallet from Asprey’s when I graduated from Yale. By all reports he had prospered in his new home. Having left all of his fortune but for a hundred-thousand-dollar grubstake to his ex-wife, he had proceeded to accumulate another by somehow managing to make himself the synapse between large bodies of international capital and commerce. Will, who still refused to see or speak to his father, insisted that arms dealing was at the center of his activities and sometimes attributed his success to the Bohemian Grove Club, a semi-secret society of movers and shakers who periodically met at their retreat north of San Francisco to dance naked and perform pagan rites amidst the redwoods. Certainly Will had his sources. Cordell’s name came up in connection with a case I handled involving the transfer of funds to overthrow Allende in Chile; later, I would hear him linked with the Rothschilds and Niarchos in perfectly legitimate capacities. Throughout these years we exchanged Christmas cards, and once, while taking a break from Torts or Contracts in the law library, I came across a picture in
Town and Country
of a beaming Cordell and an anxious Cheryl with Prince Philip at Ascot.

The summer of my graduation from law school I took my first trip to Europe, previous breaks having been devoted to earning my tuition. I was almost relieved when I failed to land one of the prestigious but poorly paid federal clerkships. I was tired of eating TV dinners in a tiny cell without TV. All along, the law for me had been a kind of airship—a shiny vehicle of upward social mobility. In August I would begin working for a white-shoe firm in downtown New York. In the meantime, I finally assayed the pilgrimage to the Old World that most of my peers had been making for years.

Though I stayed in a damp, fusty-smelling hotel staffed by furtive subcontinentals, though the city that summer was plagued with brownouts and intermittent phone service, I felt at home in London. I bought a stout umbrella and sauntered Matson-like through the Georgian streets of Mayfair. In my tweed driving cap I walked the gaudy length of the King’s Road, half expecting to see Will among those I thought of as his tribesmen, and trudged dutifully through the British Museum. The day before I was to leave for Paris, I called Cordell Savage, having thought about it all week.