Returning to school after my interlude at Bear Track, I was astonished to learn Will got a grade of A on the previous term’s American-history paper, although his other grades were unimpressive. For his part, Will would have been no less surprised had he known that I’d exchanged several letters with his father that spring, sending cheerful news of our academic idyll, mythologizing our prep school days in the Booth Tarkington manner and receiving in return wry and philosophical missives from Memphis.
One night Will slipped soundlessly into the room and caught me reading Stover at Yale. “Dink fucking Stover,” he repeated again and again, after lights-out, emphasizing a different syllable each time and inventively giving each of these three words an ugly new inflection with each repetition. “Dink Stover. Dink Stover. Man, I am so disappointed in you.”
Finally Matson opened the door and told us to be quiet.
“Tell him,” I said.
“Tell him,” Will mocked, as soon as the door closed. I stayed awake for what seemed like hours, furious with Will and with myself.
“Dink Stover and Doug Matson,” Will whispered, long after I thought he was asleep. “Cute couple.”
A few days later I came back from class to find Will smoking a joint. “Are you crazy,” I hissed, grabbing the joint and throwing it out the window. Then I tried to fan the smoke from the room. “You want to get us kicked out of here?”
He looked slowly up at me with amused detachment. “Gosh, that would be terrible.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Obviously I’m crazy,” he said.
“Well I’m not.”
“Don’t worry, Patrick,” Will said. “Nobody’s ever going to accuse you of that.”
He was right; I couldn’t afford to be crazy; that was a luxury my children might have.
And so we went our separate ways that summer, me to work at my uncle’s Chevy dealership. By day I washed cars, changed oil and swept the service bay clean. Every night at six I scrubbed the grease from under my fingernails, then at six-thirty I ate dinner at the kitchen table with my parents and my grandmother, whose meat I would dutifully cut. Afterward I would retreat to my basement room.
“What the hell is it you do down there,” my father demanded one night, his tone and my mother’s sudden blush implying that it could only be solitary sexual vice that kept me so busy and sequestered. In fact I would have rather admitted to the masturbation which occupied a portion of every evening than to have been caught in the performance of my other chief activities, which were reading poetry and writing to Will.
Satirizing my life in Taunton seemed the best way to distance myself from it. I wrote grotesque descriptions of the troglodyte clientele of my uncle’s car dealership, suggesting unctuously that when the revolution came it should ban madras shorts on fat people, although my best and fiercest letter was inspired by a visit from my cousin Jimmy and his accordion. I neglected to tell Will, however, that I spent weekends playing lacrosse with some kids from the local Jesuit school; I had learned the previous year that the lacrosse team was essentially a fraternity composed of exactly the kind of careless blue bloods I wanted to count among my friends.
Will reported that he was cruising around Memphis and the Delta, scouting for musical talent. Once liberated from school, he informed me, he intended to start a management company and maybe even his own record label. The next letter came from the family’s camp in Ontario, a long tirade against his parents and their lakeside compound, which, to me, in my subterranean particle-board-paneled redoubt, sounded like paradise. He enclosed the lyrics to “All Along the Watchtower,”—not yet released, and evidently obtained by some Woodstock samizdat—and underlined the phrase “Businessmen they drink my wine.” This seemed to be an oblique reference to his father, whom Will described elsewhere in the letter as an “authoritarian reactionary pig. Speaking of pigs,” he continued, “former creep veep Richard Nixon came for a few miserable days along with some other hideous Republican Nazi types. Nixon and my old man are undoubtedly planning a right wing coup.” By Will’s account the former vice president was a lousy fisherman with a great store of dirty jokes. He closed on a more inspiring note. “Cheryl ‘baton’ Dobbs arrives tomorrow for a week. Now, if I can just arrange to drown L.B.”
In July the Savages returned briefly to Tennessee, then hied themselves to the mountains of North Carolina; our correspondence accelerated until we were writing every other day. And so, after a week of silence on Will’s part, I wrote: “Fall down the stairs and break both wrists? Post office burn down? Hit by a car and suffering from amnesia? Well, just to refresh your memory, my name is Patrick Keane and I’m still waiting for a response to my last missive.” Ten days later I was unable to disguise my sense of grievance: “If our correspondence has become wearisome you might at least have the decency to tell me so.”
Finally, as I was packing to return to school I received a note from Cordell Savage.
Dear Patrick:
You will understand and forgive me for not writing earlier; Will was involved in an automobile accident and for more than a week we were not at all confident that he would survive. Happily he has regained consciousness and appears to be out of danger. He will certainly be late going up to school but I trust you will help him catch up upon his return. I know he would want me to send you his warmest regards, as do I.
I waited a week before calling Memphis. As from a vast distance, Will’s mother told me he was doing well but was unable to come to the phone; she wished me luck at school and would tell him I had called. Repentant about my earlier peevishness, I wrote lighthearted epistles intended to distract and divert the convalescent.
It was strange returning to school without Will. The bed on the other side of the room lay empty. In Will’s absence I decided to take advantage of other social opportunities. For example, I made the lacrosse team. I spent most of the season on the bench, but after I proved that I was willing to put up with a certain amount of gratuitous physical abuse in practice and that I was willing to share my class notes, I was allowed to take meals with my teammates. I aped their shambling posture, cultivated the almost imperceptible sneer of the loutish patrician. When I set up James “Trey” Bowman III for the winning goal against Hotch-kiss he actually congratulated me. Trey was team captain, and in this, his senior year, he was the king of the campus. His father, James II, managed the Wall Street empire founded by his grandfather, James I; James III had grown up in a huge apartment on Park Avenue and gone to Buckley before following his forebears to our school. That he was also tall and athletic hardly seemed fair, but most of us were willing to overlook these flaws in exchange for a smidgen of his attention and approval.
“Whatever happened to your friend Savage,” he asked one evening in the dining hall. “Get his hair caught in somebody’s zipper?” Everyone at the table laughed, myself included, although I didn’t get the joke—to my deep shame—until later that night.
“We were beginning to wonder about you and Savage,” Trey said. “The way you guys homoed around together.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “Will gets plenty of pussy.”
“Right. In his dreams.”
“Oh, man,” moaned Collins, “I had a wet one the other night”—and the conversation propitiously drifted away to safer subjects.
In Will’s absence I also spent time with Matson, who’d started a new club called the Auden Society to advance the appreciation of poetry on campus and to expose philistines everywhere. Through the club I met Isaac Mendel, who would eventually beat me out as valedictorian of our class. I had history and English wrapped up, but he was a math and science whiz. There was something impressive about the way Mendel didn’t even try to conform to the sumptuary laws and Waspy etiquette of the school. He was a Jew from Brooklyn, and he didn’t care who knew it. He seemed almost to pity the rest of us slow-witted conformists; I was amazed when he brushed off my initial overtures, imagining myself to be condescending from a
more advantageous social station. “Sure,” he said, “you talk to me now when your jock friends aren’t around.”
Fuck him, I thought. But a few weeks later when the lacrosse table began to lob taunts at him, sitting alone at the next table, I surprised myself by saying, “Hey, leave him alone, he’s a friend of mine.”
I held my breath; not quite believing I’d said it. But Bowman sized me up, then said: “Okay, amnesty for Mendel.”
Matson fell in beside me one afternoon as I was walking to the library. Tapping the ground with the tip of his umbrella, he said, “I talked to Dick last night. I told him about you, and he’s looking forward to meeting you.”
After a puzzled moment, I realized he was referring to the poet Richard Wilbur, whose reading the Auden Society was attending the following night in Amherst. Only later did it occur to me to wonder what he might possibly have “told” the poet about me—what was there to tell, really?—but I was briefly flushed with a warm sense of self-approbation, though if the majestically urbane Richard Wilbur had ever heard about me he gave no particular indication when he shook my tremulous hand after his reading. For my part I was struck dumb; it seemed incredible that high scholarship and fastidious craftsmanship could be combined with such grace and fluency and sheer charm.
“Look at this guy,” groused Mendel, standing beside me. “It’s like they asked Cary Grant to play a poet.” Wilbur embodied a sort of neoclassical idea of the poet which was then being called into question by the new hairy romanticism. Standing in his lustrous presence, sipping from a plastic glass of rosé and nibbling cheese which was neither presliced nor orange like the cheese of my youth—cheese which might just possibly be foreign—it seemed hard to believe anyone would want to be authentic if they could be so cultured. In Matson you could see the aspiring version of this ideal. The poet was clearly acquainted with our leader, if not quite on such terms of intimacy as we’d been led to expect. As they conversed, I was astonished to see that, although Matson held his arms folded tightly across his chest, his hands were shaking.
Driving us back to school in his Volkswagen van, Matson regained his composure and regaled us with tales from the lives of the modern poets, emphasizing their minor eccentricities—Roethke’s love of plants, Auden’s shuffling up St. Mark’s Place in bedroom slippers. No career seemed so worthy that night as the vocation of poetry. Halsted kept saying over and over again that he was damn well going to be a poet, that was the job for him all right. But Mendel, who hadn’t had any of the wine, asked—If being a poet was so wonderful how come they all ended up drunk and crazy?
Muddy and bruised, I returned from lacrosse one day to find Will sitting on his bed looking as if he’d just materialized there briefly and might disappear at any moment, so pale and gaunt that he seemed like an apparition, although his eyes were if anything more startlingly blue than ever. A fresh pink scar zigzagged across his cheek. He smiled up at me serenely and all I could think of to say was “You’re back.”
“Either that or I’m astral projecting.”
“You sound like yourself,” I observed happily. “Who else would even know what that means?”
“What’s with the webbed stick, white man?”
I felt the heat rise to my face. “I’m, uh, on the team.”
“I have been gone a long time. What year is it?”
I changed the subject. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”
“I don’t remember. They say I hit a truck.” He fixed his eyes on me and smiled puckishly. “Actually, it was a cement mixer.”
“A cement mixer?”
He laughed, evidently delighted that his peculiar obsession had been somehow validated by the accident. All he knew for certain was that he’d been at a juke joint in Memphis and that he’d started back for his family’s house in the early morning hours. When he regained consciousness a week later five of his ribs were crushed and one of his lungs was collapsed from the impact of the steering wheel.
“Jesus,” I said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Actually I was dead,” Will said. “I came back.” He seemed perfectly serious.
“You mean you were almost dead.”
“No, I mean I was dead.”
I decided not to pursue this. The look in his eyes scared me. Not that it was frightening per se; he looked like he did when he was stoned, somehow widely diffused and narrowly focused at the same time, like a cat in repose.
We resumed our routine. But Will seemed different—older and otherworldly, as if he’d actually begun to inhabit one of the regions of higher consciousness to which he was always alluding. I struggled to return our friendship to its familiar footing, and to this end, one night after lights-out I asked him if he’d gotten any nooky over the summer.
After a long pause, he whispered across the darkness, “I finally lost my cherry.”
“Bullshit you did.” I sat up eagerly in my bed. I was thinking—It’s true then. It does change you. “With who?”
“You mean ‘whom.’ ”
“Come on, Will. With whom?”
“Would you give your left nut to sleep with Cheryl Dobbs?”
“You didn’t.”
“No, actually it was Lollie Baker.”
I was glad he couldn’t see me. I could’ve killed him in his bed.
“Her family came up to Ontario,” he whispered. “Everybody was out fishing and I stayed behind at the camp. I had some Panama Red I’d brought up from Memphis out to the woodshed. Lollie walked in on me, right after I lit up. So I offered her a hit …”
“What happened?” I said finally, trying to control my voice.
“Hey, I’m a gentleman.”
If a moment ago I hated him for what he had revealed, I was now furious at his sudden reticence. “Tell me,” I demanded.
“Hey, calm down. It was nice. It was great.”
I couldn’t believe this was all he had to say about the momentous event, but within minutes I could hear him breathing in sleep. It was not fair; for the first time I resented Will’s good fortune in this as in everything. Lollie was mine. If Cheryl was the remote dream of carnality, Lollie was the practical embodiment of my nocturnal yearning. With Lollie I had a concrete foundation on which to construct my fantasies—the memory of her flesh and a sense of possibility—which Will had suddenly taken away from me.
Or so I told myself. In fact my jealousy was far knottier than I was willing to admit, even to myself, at the time. Lying awake, listening to the last sad crickets of the Indian summer, I was in no way prepared to entertain the possibility that it wasn’t Will Savage I was jealous of, but Lollie Baker.
VIII
The leaves turned ruby and gold, then gathered themselves in fragrant heaps while I was filling out applications for college. Walking to the dining hall the morning of the first frost, with Will limping elegantly alongside me, I could see my breath and hear my steps on the crunchy turf. The chapel bells were ringing eight o’clock, the sound crisp and bright in the lucid air. I felt a flash of clairvoyant nostalgia, imagining my aging self hunched over a desk in some stuffy office.
“We’ll be gone from here before you know it,” I said to Will.
“Not soon enough,” he answered.
Booking hard for grades that fall, the last semester that would count toward college, I felt myself drifting away from Will. I wasn’t at all happy when our room became headquarters for a band of disciples who gathered to listen to Will’s records and talk about black music and Indian religion and Beat literature. This was the first incarnation of the entourage which became a feature of Will’s adult life. His very aloofness seemed to attract those who were less self-contained, and he did nothing to discourage these satellites. Incredibly, the chief disciple was Jack Stubblefield, who, under the influence of my roommate and the Zeitgeist, had quit football and grown out his hair.
“It’s dangerous to introduce new ideas to a guy like Stubblefield,” I complained one evening when we found ourselv
es, briefly, alone. “It’s like sending a balloon up into space—it’ll expand and explode in the void.”
“Stubblefield’s cool,” Will said, staring out the window over the snowy lawns. “It’s like starting with a blank slate.” And indeed he did have a certain vacancy that made him the perfect athlete as well as an exemplary follower.
Shortly before Thanksgiving Will proposed to lead an expedition to hear Buddy Guy and Junior Wells play at a coffeehouse in Boston. To nearly everyone’s surprise, permission was granted after Will secured Bubble Head Wilson, the music teacher, as chaperon. I was annoyed that I’d first heard about this adventure from Stubblefield, who asked me if I was going. And I was deep in the middle of two term papers. Toward the end of the week I had made enough progress on my papers to consider going. If Will had asked me to join him I might have, but when I mentioned I might not be able to go he said, “Whatever you feel like, man.”
I didn’t want our friendship to wither away. But neither did I want to become just another one of Will’s hangers-on. Let Stubblefield kiss Will’s ring and carry his water. And so I stayed.
Will and his disheveled band trooped into lunch on the Saturday after their concert, an air of jaded conspiracy emanating from their table. Back in our room, pride prevented me from asking any questions, but the campus was soon humming with wild rumors: Will had given everyone LSD … Will had gone backstage after the show to smoke dope with the performers … They’d all gone to the Combat Zone and gotten drunk … He’d picked up a girl at the coffeehouse and taken her back to their hotel … Will had incriminating photographs of Wilson in a strip joint that he threatened to release if the teacher didn’t keep quiet …
Wilson himself assured the headmaster that the outing was uneventful, but for weeks thereafter he seemed chagrined and dazed, and the trip became legend. Will’s own renegade luster was further burnished, if not his standing with school authorities. His influence on campus was considered subversive. It was almost inevitable that the rumor of drug dealing would attach to him. Not long after the Boston outing Matson, in his role as housemaster, conducted a search of our room, and though, remarkably, no drugs were found, he did discover Will’s large stash of small bills. We’d just returned from dinner when our triumphant housemaster confronted us in the entry hall.
The Last of the Savages Page 9
