The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  “Fucking Dink Stover, the All-American Boy.”

  “All right, Slim, fuck it,” I said. “You want me to do a line, I’ll do a line. Okay?”

  Back then, in ’81, people with regular jobs weren’t au courant with coke etiquette. Will showed me how to stick the rolled-up fifty-dollar bill in one nostril and block off the other. It scared the hell out of me, seeing my face suddenly loom up from the mirror. I braced myself for a violent alteration of consciousness, but I didn’t notice much at first except for the tickling and burning in my nostrils.

  Will separated out another sinuous trail with his knife and snorted it himself. “I hear you’ve got a chick.”

  “Just got engaged,” I said. “Stacey’s a great girl. You’ll have to meet her.”

  He stared at me balefully. “Taleesha wants a divorce.”

  I knew this and had been feeling bad about it for weeks. “You’ve been separated almost eight years,” I pointed out.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better about it?”

  “She needs to get on with her life, Will.”

  “Always the pragmatist.” He held the knife up to his nose and sniffed at it. “Don’t you ever get just a little bit tired of being practical all the time?” He laughed dryly, then frowned again. “Why does Taleesha want a divorce now? Who’s the dude?”

  Taleesha had been seeing Aaron for several months, and I suppose it was my fault. I didn’t know how much Will knew, but this seemed like the time to come clean. “This guy she likes—he was my roommate at Yale.”

  “That’s touching, Patrick. I’m really fucking glad you told me that.”

  “He was the one who got those charges dropped in New York.”

  “Who fucking asked him? I’ll face the motherfucking charges. Give me back my wife.”

  “You know she’s been seeing other people. You both have. God, you and your little groupies. Come on, Will. You don’t expect her to wait forever, do you?”

  “We talk almost every day.”

  “What do you want from her?”

  “I want everything.” He jammed the tip of the knife down into the surface of the desk.

  “You can’t have everything,” I said reasonably. My teeth were starting to feel funny.

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “I refuse to be the parent here,” I said. Under the influence of the drug, wanting everything didn’t necessarily seem quite so crazy as it might have a few minutes before.

  “What does she want from me?” He sounded bewildered, as if he could not begin to imagine why they weren’t together still.

  “What if she wanted you to be normal,” I asked. “Could you manage that for her?”

  “You think I chose who to be, like you choosing Yale?” He stood up and began to pace the room. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I could settle down and become an accountant.”

  I had to laugh.

  Still pacing, he lit up a joint. “What I’m afraid is I’ll ruin her life if I step back into it. What if she can’t save me and I only drag her down with me?” Taking a long pull of cognac, he said, “Remember that asshole I threatened to throw out the window that was hitting on Taleesha?”

  “Yeah, the leisure suit.”

  “Became president of the company last month and shit-canned my contract immediately. Had to put a fucking mortgage on Bear Track. Even before my deal was canceled that bastard had been making sure my records, my acts, didn’t get any airplay. My people. And when they started to leave, what could I say? I couldn’t even take care of my people. For the first time I couldn’t take care of them. All I ever wanted was to be a conduit …” He paused in his pacing as if to focus all his energy on what he was trying to say. “I always believed in what I was doing …”

  He sucked on the joint and held his breath. “But maybe it’s all just commerce,” he said, through the smoke. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m just another huckster. Another big massa.”

  “You’re not that,” I said. “I’ll stake my life on it. You’re the only person I know who really believes in something.”

  “But what the fuck is it? I can’t remember.” Will handed me the bottle.

  “I believe in you,” I said. “Even though I don’t always know what you’re doing.”

  But his mind had skipped to another track. “It’s all fucked up. I can’t make her happy when I’m with her, but I can’t make myself happy without her.”

  “You’ve never been happy,” I said, surprising myself.

  Seeming to masticate this idea, he worked his jaw like a gum chewer. “I’ve had my moments,” he finally said. “The day we got married—hey, that was one. The day Taleesha’s first single hit the charts.” He took a few steps and stooped for one of the jars standing on the floor. He turned away from me, his bizarre modesty still intact in this near delirium, unscrewed the top and unzipped his fly. Finally he screwed the top back on and placed the jar on the floor beside the others.

  “You don’t have a John up here?”

  “It’s somewhere over there,” he said, pointing, “if you want it.”

  Actually I did, suddenly, but I wanted no part of this pissing in jars. Standing up, I felt it had been a long time since I’d been vertical. Briefly, I wondered what Stacey would think if she could see me now. I couldn’t quite believe I was here myself. On my way I hoisted one of the window shades. In the deep twilight, the lights below me outlined the Chickasaw Bluffs. Scattered lights in the distance marked Arkansas, beyond the wide black plain that was the Mississippi. Off to the right, upstream, a suspension bridge spanned the void. My senses seemed incredibly crisp and quick, processing everything more efficiently than usual. My bladder, however, wasn’t working properly. I felt like I had to go, but then I couldn’t.

  Coming out of the bathroom I saw Stubblefield waving his shotgun from the top of the stairs.

  “Just let me shoot him,” he said to Will.

  “Give me the gun,” Will said.

  “We could have barbecue cabrito.” He spotted me then, and leveled the gun at me. “There you are, you little prick.”

  Will advanced on him slowly, his arm outstretched for the gun.

  I was too curious to be afraid. Was he really serious, I wondered. Had they gotten that far out there?

  “Give it to me,” Will said, stopping a few feet away.

  “Please,” whined Stubblefield, like a child pleading for a toy.

  “Now,” said Will softly.

  He lowered the gun, and handed it butt first to Will.

  “Go get some rest,” he said.

  “You don’t need me?”

  “Go on home, Jack.”

  Will waited until he was gone, then leaned the gun against the door-jamb.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered about your compulsive need for disciples? Look what happened to Jesus, Will.” I must be high, I thought. This didn’t sound like me.

  Will was staring at the shotgun. “I’d trade them all in to get A.J. back,” he said. “And I’d gladly give my own sorry hide for Elbridge. He was the man. Smartest motherfucker I ever knew. He could do anything. And I killed him.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “I might as well have. I killed them both.”

  “Come on, Will. Give it a rest.” I was definitely emboldened by the drug; certainly I’d never spoken so bluntly to Will, or taken his sorrows at any but his own valuation. “How long are you going to wallow in that? I know you loved him. But it’s history.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” he said. “Your major, wasn’t it? Well, here’s what you should have learned: it’s always with us. Right alongside us, like a ghost train. It’s all still happening—everything that’s ever happened.” He had his nose in the mirror.

  “Maybe I’ll try another one,” I said.

  The night slipped away incredibly quickly. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the daylight leaking around the edges of the shades. We were sitting in the front seat of Elvis’s Cadillac. Th
roughout much of the night, Will had been clutching the steering wheel as though he were, at the expense of great effort, keeping us from spinning out of control and crashing. Periodically he called pit stops; he would go off, modestly turning away, to fill another jar. I explained at great length my interpretation of the so-called slave rebellion at Bear Track, which seemed to validate Will’s long-cherished notion of the family curse.

  “It’s not just us,” Will said. “It’s the whole goddamned Republic. The curse came over to the New World with the first black slave and it’s been here ever since.”

  “My ancestors were starving in Ireland,” I pointed out.

  “And when they got here they were thrilled to have somebody to look down on and shine their boots.”

  When I tried to tell him about historical indeterminacy, he informed me I was talking to somebody who dropped a thousand tabs of acid and that he’d forgotten more about indeterminacy than I ever knew.

  Later we talked about love and about the difficulty of understanding women—how much simpler the love between men, like ourselves. “The only problem,” Will said, “is I don’t want to sleep with men.”

  Toward midday Will’s mood turned dangerous. He jumped out of the car and began pacing back and forth demanding Aaron’s phone number. “He’s a friend of yours, you bastard!” He heaved a stereo speaker into the windshield, then took the shotgun by the barrel and swung the butt like a club at every standing object in the room, starting with lamps and finishing with the jars of urine.

  After he dropped the gun I tackled him, pinning him to the floor. Because he was uncharacteristically thin, or because he’d expended most of his rage, I was able to hold him down as he thrashed and tried to throw me off, until gradually he yielded and began to sob.

  Finally, I persuaded him to sleep. We took some kind of pills and climbed into the sleeping loft over the bathroom. As I drifted off I half dreamed that Will and I were floating down the river on a mattress, drifting past the high bluffs and the broad levees, two boys without past or future, leaving behind the lights of the river town where the families and fathers and fair young ladies were still sleeping.

  XXI

  I had forgotten that it was Halloween. On my way to meet Stacey at the very bistro where I had proposed, I decided to get out and walk, after stagnating in a cab near Washington Square for ten minutes. More than a little out of place in my lawyer’s mufti, I struggled through the boisterous throng of the annual Village parade. It was difficult to determine the border between spectators and participants. Outnumbering the wolfmen, vampires, ghosts and witches were dozens of Ronald Reagan masks, the president reigning supreme in the local demonology. One man—at least I supposed it was a man—walked around inside a papier-mâché toilet. The females tended toward short hair, drab olive and denim clothes; a distinct minority among the men were brilliantly tricked out as women. Despite the chill there were a great many shirtless, muscle-bound torsos. At one point I was thrust up against a young man with the rear end cut out of his jeans; another, much appreciated by the crowd, wore nothing but a codpiece; yet another was in diapers.

  After ten minutes I found myself trapped behind the blue police barricades along the main parade route on Sixth Avenue. A fleet of leather-jacketed women pedaled uptown under the banner DYKES ON BYKES, followed by THE HOUSE OF SCARLET—a troupe of black men in hoop-skirted gowns and brandishing parasols. I was just about to bolt through the lines of these mock southern belles when, to my horror, a man wearing feathered mask and a toga pointed and waved at me. He was holding a sign that said PEDAGOGICAL PEDERASTS.

  “Patrick, my boy. Come aboard.” The accent was unmistakable—it was Doug Matson, my old housemaster. Before I could react he’d taken my hand and pulled me through the opening between two barricades. “One of my protégés,” he announced to his fellow Greeks.

  “Let go,” I shouted, and when he failed to, I pushed him, inadvertently knocking him over so that he in turn bowled over one of his fellow pedagogues. I ducked under the barricade and bored frantically through the wall of onlookers on the other side of the street, drawing scattered boos and jeers.

  Matson was the last person in the world I wanted to see at this moment—as I was anticipating my wedding. I did not wish to be reminded of the night he had come to visit me at Yale, when, after many hours of talk, I found I was so drunk that I had trouble navigating to my bed. Matson, supposedly quartered in Aaron’s empty room, had suddenly slipped into mine, sitting on the corner of my bed as I watched the room spin around me.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Please, Patrick.” He began to stroke my leg. I asked him to stop and he said he didn’t believe I wanted him to stop. I remember debating him. I tried to convince him that I wasn’t that way. He told me that I was hiding from my true self. At first I think I was vehement in denying this claim, but in my ductile state, I allowed myself to be swayed, or rather, I allowed myself to attribute to drunkenness my eventual acquiescence. Finally exploring that side of my nature which I had tried so desperately to deny, I found it was easier to pretend that I was not fully conscious, that I had not so much acted as yielded. And Matson made it easy. “You don’t have to do anything,” he repeated. “Just lie there.” And he was as good as his word. Which is not to say that I did not recoil from the sight of him the next morning, full of remorse and self-loathing.

  When I finally arrived at the restaurant disheveled and wild-eyed, Stacey regarded me with dismay. “I nearly got trampled in the parade,” I explained.

  “These people are out of control,” she said, straightening my tie. “I mean, really.”

  With Stacey brushing my hair back into place I began to feel better almost immediately. It was an extraordinary gift, having a woman who cared for and took care of me. And for her part, traditional girl that she was, she’d been delighted to find someone so respectful not only of her, but also of her parents.

  Nine years younger than me, Stacey seemed to hail from an era before mine; she had missed the great wars and bacchanals which had shaped my generation—the revolt of youth against age, of Dionysus against Apollo, Lux et Veritas versus rock and roll. With Stacey and her friends it was as if those years had been erased, as if the Beatles had never landed on these shores, as if the birth-control pill had never been invented, as if Vietnam were nothing more than an answer in a geography quiz. Insofar as they existed, Stacey’s political convictions were more or less aligned with her father’s. She worshiped her parents, and now I would inherit a portion of this fealty and devotion.

  After guzzling a gin and tonic I felt better. Yes, this was what it was like to be engaged, this happy concourse. It was reassuring to hear Stacey discuss the wedding plans: invitations, flowers, music, catering, guest list, gift registry. I envisioned the stately spectacle of our wedding under a green-and-white tent stretched tight between the Colchesters’ big white house and the ocean. It was reassuring to catalog Stacey’s august clan, to hear that the governor of Massachusetts and several congressmen would almost certainly be in attendance. Sitting there, I knew that if I just concentrated on the nuptial details I could block out the image of Matson sprawled on Sixth Avenue and erase the memory of the weekend at Yale. It was certainly not the kind of thing I wanted to discuss over cigars and brandy with my future father-in-law.

  As a judge, Carson Colchester had a reputation for toughness, a patrician manner and a scathing wit. I dreaded the moment when he would interrogate me about my motives in marrying his daughter—not that I necessarily believed they were dishonorable. Father of six, he was a handsome, weathered man who relished the role of patriarch, who expected obedience and respect, whose claim on authority was only emphasized by the fact that at fifty-seven he remained taller than his grown sons, as if by design. In conversation he tended to assume an impatient, knowing smile that stopped just short of a sneer, as if he had heard it all before and could, in any case, look right into your soul—but if you kept it short and lively he
might hear you out. It was as if I’d found a more liberal, Yankee version of Cordell Savage for a father-in-law. Stacey was his youngest child, and if he largely spared me his withering skepticism, it might well have been because he didn’t perceive me as a threat or because Stacey did not merit as much of his attention as her older siblings.

  I had waited until we were engaged to take Stacey home to my parents, somehow fearing they might blow the deal, though in fact my father’s fortunes had taken a dramatic upturn. He had opened three new appliance stores and was just then beginning to sell computers. My parents had moved to a large new house on a lake outside of Taunton. My grandmother Keane had passed away, rejoining all those souls who had been so very fond of her, who had thought the world of her before they left it. Her place had been taken by Aunt Colleen, whose son, Jimmy, had died of a heroin overdose, his body discovered in Tompkins Square Park, a victim either of maternal repression or of rock and roll, depending on your vantage point. Colleen lived in the so-called mother-in-law suite over the garage of the new lakefront split-level. My father was fiendishly proud of his pool, the game room in the basement and the golf cart in which he cruised down to the lake and back, and if anyone had told him that there was anything to aspire to beyond his present state he would have been politely and understandably skeptical. The first night home with my fiancée, I stayed up with him after the women had gone to bed. A sense of father-son business was hovering in the air.

  “She’s a great girl,” he said, lighting a fresh cigarette. And then, “You know, I’ve always been faithful to your mother.” I took this to be a piece of fatherly advice. “I’m not saying we haven’t had our problems. With work and money worries, I haven’t always come through for her when she needed me. But we’ve always loved each other. And we both love you.” He paused. “Luckily she stood by me. If she hadn’t, all this”—he waved his smoking hand to encompass the house and the lake—“it wouldn’t be worth a damn. If the money was all gone again tomorrow, we’d still have each other.”