The Last of the Savages (22 page)

Looking up from my drink, I found myself being studied by a woman with a shock of vivid red hair two stools away.

“Whatsa matter, honey? All alone on New Year’s Eve?” Her drawl was pronounced, her eyes animated with a quick and predatory curiosity that seemed at odds with the torpid voice. I was not good at judging the age of women older than myself, but I guessed her to be about thirty. Her skin was fair and freckled, and her eyes had tiny sun wrinkles; she seemed far too pretty to be talking to me, except that this was the South, whose natives were known to talk to strangers for no particular reason.

“Actually, I’m waiting for someone,” I explained, as she slid across to the stool beside me.

“Aren’t we all, honey? Aren’t we all?” Her name was Janie Thompson, and she was from a town called Indianola in the Delta. “I come up here with a friend for a little New Year’s festivity but he got a little too festive right off the bat, and here I am—all dressed up an’ no place to glow.” She shrugged her shoulder and grinned at me impishly. “So allow me to buy you a drink.” Waving to the bartender, she pointed at our glasses.

When she leaned forward to squeeze my hand I was treated to a glimpse of the freckled valley of her cleavage and the lacy scalloped edge of her brassiere. “Did you see that sign out in the lobby—now appearing in the something or other room, Lash LaRue?” she said. “I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes—Lash LaRue, that old lariat thrower. I used to watch him on the TV when I was about this tall.” She lowered her hand to the vicinity of my knee. “I always had a little crush on ole Lash. Well, I’m on my way to the bar but then I see this sign and so off I go to see the great man. And there he was signing autographs, in the flesh, more
or less, looking like they pickled him and put him up. So when it’s my turn I say, ‘How’s it going Lash, what you been up to?’ And he says—get this—he says, ‘Well, ever since they shot President Kennedy I been spending a lot of time on Mars. The streets are cleaner up there.’ At first I think he’s pulling my leg but then I look in his eyes and see he’s serious. Crazy as a betsy bug. Lash LaRue.” With that she drained half the drink the bartender set before her. “Where you-all from,” she asked.

“I go to school in New Haven,” I said.

“I like college boys,” she said. As a Yale man I found her enthusiasm for male academia rather too broad based, but so pronounced was Janie Thompson’s affability that I suspected she was also in favor of many other categories of male. “I guess your little friend isn’t going to show, is she?”

“It’s not a she,” I said.

“Oh. Well, different strokes for different buckaroos.”

“No, it’s not … That’s not it,” I stammered. “I’m waiting for an old friend from prep school.”

“Well, hell,” she said, “what’s this old buddy of yours called. We all know everybody down here.”

“Will Savage,” I said, supposing that he and Janie traveled in very different circles.

“Will?” she exclaimed. “He’s practically a legend in these parts. My daddy used to raise hell with his daddy. They used to fly their little planes up and down the Delta and over to Nashville, just going to parties. They were
wild.
” She pronounced the adjective with an emphasis that suggested she was something of an authority on rash behavior. “You’ve heard the story about how he shot his own daddy.”

Stunned, I shook my head. “You mean Cordell?”

“Well, they ruled it accidental, but Cordell’s daddy was a mean drunk, and some say he took a hand to Cordell’s mama one too many times.”

I questioned her further about this alleged patricide, but she’d told what she knew and seemed to feel that it was an old story, and not particularly an unusual one in her experience.

“So how is old Will? I haven’t seen him in aeons. He sure did cause a
hell of a fuss marrying that colored girl. What’s she like, anyway? Is he really in love with her?”

We drank and talked about Will, four scotch-and-waters’ worth. Finally the bartender turned up the volume on the television set as Guy Lombardo counted down the minutes to the not-a-moment-too-soon New Year of 1970, and not long after the stroke of twelve my companion was kissing me, probing remote crannies of my mouth with her tongue.

Only moments later, it seemed, we were kissing in the elevator on the way up to her room. She held her finger to her lips as she turned the key in the door, then dragged me over to the bed.

With a drunken fluency and much help from my new friend, I squirmed out of my clothes and assisted her out of hers while managing to keep my tongue in her mouth—as if I believed that the whole process would surely grind to a halt the moment contact was broken. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening, though my excitement was adulterated by a nagging fear about my performance. When she broke free of our lip lock and kissed her way down my chest and belly, I lay back, rigid with astonishment and anxiety. In a sense, it was, indeed, too good to be true. It’s hard to say who was more surprised when I came a moment later.

“Hey,” she said, raising her head from between my legs. “That was supposed to be the warm-up, not the main event.”

I mumbled some kind of apology.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be a virgin, would you?” she said brightly, sliding up to face me, a new and—to me—embarrassing tang on her breath.

“Sort of,” I said.

She laughed. “Seems like either you are or you aren’t. That’s okay. I don’t mind. We can try again.”

Like a schoolboy, I asked if I could go to the bathroom, desperate for a moment alone to compose myself.

“Sure,” she said. “If you gotta go you gotta go.”

I was just inside the door when I heard her whisper something cautionary, though I couldn’t make out the words.

The bathroom light revealed a young man in a tuxedo sprawled in the bathtub. Pausing just long enough to verify this seeming hallucination, and
recover the use of my limbs, I turned off the light and retreated.

“Don’t go, that’s just Lance,” Janie said, as I searched in the dark for my clothes. Frankly, I couldn’t see how these two clauses fit in the same sentence.

“I’ve got to meet Will,” I said.

She tugged at my arm in the dark. “You still owe me one,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. At that moment, I felt that my sexual career had ended about the same time it had begun.

Remembering my manners, I thanked her as I was leaving.

Out in the lobby I dialed Will’s suite again, and then, as a last-ditch measure, his office. Just as I was about to hang up someone answered. I asked for Will, but the din on the other end was so great that I doubt he heard me. I listened to the music and the competing voices of a party for some minutes before giving up. Replacing the receiver, I felt stunningly sober.

Will’s office and studio was a short walk from the hotel, in a derelict part of town, an old limestone hulk just off the river. Gargoyles grinned down from the portico and from the elaborately incised rooftop cornice. The mullioned windows were pulsing with music from within. Two white men of menacing demeanor stood on the sidewalk, passing a joint. “I’m looking for Will,” I explained. Nobody said anything, but there was just enough room to slide through the door without violating anyone’s space. Downstairs, a logo stenciled on the glass identified the offices of Savage Management & Cement Mixer Music.

Behind the first door I opened I surprised a couple making love on a desk, or rather they surprised me; the woman turned and grinned at me through the cascading ropy strands of her partner’s greasy hair while he went on about his business. It seemed a night designed to put me off sex forever.

A door opened behind me, unleashing a blast of sound. Stubblefield stuck his head into the lobby, reconnoitering. “Keane,” he said, as if he had seen me the day before. Even as a hippie he looked preppie; his utterly limp, straw-colored hair was reminiscent of much-washed chinos,
and his self-contained, slightly smug expression suggested that anything that you might think of doing had already been achieved by his ancestors. I followed him down a hallway into an open studio, where five or six musicians were jamming and dozens of bodies churned in a choppy sea of strobed light.

Finding nothing to moor myself to, I was grateful when a skinny white girl with a blond Afro suddenly held out a joint. I took a quick hit and attached myself gratefully to her group.

“When my pop died Will said I’d see him on the other side,” the girl said. “He’s so spiritual. It’s incredible. He died himself on the operating table that time after he got stabbed—you know that scar on his face, from when what’s his name, the blues guy, cut him?”

She looked vaguely around the room as if the alleged perpetrator might still be among us, knife dripping. “What was I saying? Oh, right, Will said he was lifted up out of his body and looked down on the earth and saw that it was just, like, a phase, you know, our physical existence on this planet.” She sucked in on the joint which I had returned to her.

“That’s cool,” said a fat guy with a long matted beard. “He was telling me this story about the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67,” he said, taking the roach from the girl.

“Who was?”

“Who was what?”

“Telling you what you just said about Monterey.”

“It was Will, like I said. It’s like, Hendrix got in from playing with King Curtis at four in the morning and he walked into his bedroom, and he saw this cat in bed with his old lady. He went and got his pistol, stood over the bed, cocked it and turned on the light. He’s just about to shoot but then he says to himself, ‘Damn, that’s Otis. Shit, I can’t kill Otis, man.’ ”

“That is so outrageous. Was Will there?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe.”

“But what does that have to do with reincarnation?”

“I don’t know. I thought we were talking about Will.”

“Where is Will,” I asked.

No one seemed to know, though they assured me he was around. I left this group to free-associate amongst themselves and strolled around, trying to assume a casual, funky gait, feeling conspicuous in my crewneck sweater as a topless woman with small, asymmetrical breasts danced past me.

Spotting Lester Holmes conferring with two white girls, I sidled over and reminded him that we’d met. He regarded me for a moment with mild irritation, then sloped off without saying a word.

“Will says Lester could be the biggest thing since Ray Charles,” said one of the girls, to no one in particular, “except he’s lazy and won’t travel more than a few hours from Memphis.”

People kept saying that Elvis was going to come by; if he did, I missed him. But in fact I was surrounded by people who were much cooler than Elvis, though few of their names were familiar to me at the time. Some years later in New York, when we were both sitting up late over a bottle of cognac, I asked Taleesha to run down the guest list that night.

Among those she recalled being present were Duck Dunn and Don Nix, along with another founding member of the Mar-Keys, Steve Cropper, who became famous as a producer and studio guitar wizard for Otis Redding and others at Stax. Also Jim Dickinson and Jimmy Crosthswait. Alex Chilton, who at the age of sixteen was the lead singer of the Box Tops and later played with Big Star and Panther Burns. Bowlegs Miller. And Bukka White—who supposedly stabbed Will—whose 1940 Vocalion sessions helped define the Delta blues. The great Sleepy John Estes even brought his guitar; Will paid for his funeral when he died in poverty some years later. Hound Dog Taylor, from Chicago. Chips Moman, the producer and songwriter, and fellow Alabaman Dan Penn, with whom he wrote “Do Right Woman.” Issac Hayes, of imminent “Shaft” fame. The guitarist John Fahey, who found Skip James, long presumed dead, on a plantation in the midsixties. Jerry Phillips, son of Sam, of Sun Studios.

Fresh from his appearance at the Peabody, Lash LaRue made a big splash with the Memphis hipsters—the cowboy from outer space. William Eggleston, the photographer, arrived in a hearse equipped with an oxygen tank, accompanied by the writer Stanley Booth. I remember
seeing Eggleston, an anomalous, razor-thin figure in an elegant black suit, dripping anomie and looking askance at the hippies.

Wading blindly through these legends-in-the-making, I spotted Stubblefield leaning against a wall watching the proceedings with stoned intensity.

“Will around,” I asked.

“Somewhere. How’s Yale,” he asked, drawing forth a long earnest answer from me before I realized that he couldn’t care less, that he was stoned out of his mind. “My old man went there and so did his old man,” he said, as if to drive home the point that I needn’t have bothered to yammer away about it.

“So what do you do for Will,” I asked, with what I hoped was a discernible measure of contempt for all mere functionaries, subordinates and flunkies.

I thought he hadn’t heard me, but finally he turned to me and said, “I ball all the chicks is what I do.”

Finding no niche for myself in this bacchanal, I explored the edges until I found Taleesha in an office, curled up in a beanbag chair, improbably reading Samuelson’s
Economics.

“Hey, Patrick,” she said, looking up and grinning, scrambling to free herself from the grip of the chair. “Oh, shit! We were supposed to meet you, weren’t we? God, I’m sorry. Living with Will I start to get on his schedule, which is no schedule at all. Anyway, it’s good to see you”—she shook her head—“in this zoo.”

I hadn’t seen her since the fire, and I was happy to discover that my residual guilt—about not having been there to prevent it—seemed to dissolve in her presence. I gave her a hug. “Happy New Year.”

“Have you seen Will yet,” she asked.

“I haven’t been so blessed.”

“He’s doing his Buddhist Rasputin thing tonight. Come on, let’s find him.”

We took the stairs to the basement, where a red sign glowed above a door:
RECORDING! DO NOT ENTER WHEN LIGHT IS ON
. Taleesha pushed
on through. Dressed entirely in black, Will was sitting astride a stool in front of the console of a mixing board, one hand on the board, a huge joint in the other. Jessie Petit sat in the corner reading a newspaper.

“Play that last track again,” Will said to the middle-aged man sitting beside him.