The Last of the Savages Read Free Page A

I was most worried that my new roommate would arrive before they left. And a taxi did pull up just as my parents were climbing into our Impala, my mother weeping, supported by my father, who was holding the passenger door open for her. A tall boy hopped out of the cab whistling, wearing aviator sunglasses, a transistor radio pressed to his ear. My father, who despite my partial scholarship was straining his resources to send me here, honked the horn as he slowly pulled away. Brimming with impatience and shame, I raised my hand in farewell but didn’t look back. If this show of indifference was performed for the sake of the new arrival, I don’t think he noticed, bopping up the flagstone walk ahead of me.
    A head taller than me, with shaggy dark hair, he wore ripped khakis and a much worn button-down shirt, the tail of which flapped behind him; he suffered his clothing the way you might inhabit an old summercottage, cheerfully indifferent to the sagging porch and peeling paint. This was in fact the last gasp of his sartorial conformity; within the year my new roommate would shed the inherited uniform of the preppie and start dressing in rainbow hues and, later, after that psychedelic decade of our youth, in black.
    I dawdled up the stairs in his wake. When I reached our room, he was deeply occupied in the task of setting up a stereo. After I introduced myself, he stood up and held out his hand. When he focused on me the effect was quite startling; beneath his dark eyebrows his eyes were bright blue verging to violet, like an acetylene flame.
    “Will Savage,” he drawled, shaking my hand firmly, almost violently, before turning back to electronics. “Gonna wire us up for some sound here,” he said. “You like the blues?”
    “Sure,” I said, not entirely certain who or what the blues might be. I was relieved to find my new roommate friendly, if somewhat distracted. Within minutes we were listening to an eerie, piercing lament. He sat on the bed cross-legged, nodding behind his sunglasses, explaining with evangelical zeal that the singer—the greatest ever American musical genius—had died at the age of twenty, poisoned by a jealous woman.
    “This is the purest art this damn country has produced, man. Listen up. It’s like the distilled essence of suffering and the yearning to be free. That’s why it could only have been produced by the descendants of slaves.”
    Will’s enthusiasm was initially more convincing to me than the music itself. He listened with rapturous concentration, closing his eyes and tilting his head back, his face contorting in a kind of map of the song’s emotional arc. “We’re all slaves,” he announced suddenly, “but we don’t know it.” He pointed to the record player. “Him,
he
knows it.”
    When, after the song ended, I ventured that I liked the Beatles, he sneered. “This is the real thing,” he said. “At least the Stones acknowledge their sources.”
    The music unsettled me, as did the fierce, restless blue beam of his attention when he asked me about myself and absorbed my answers. He seemed intensely interested in my story in spite of my own vague sense of shame at its cheap, Sheetrock and Formica stage sets and lack of highdramatic interest. I simultaneously inflated and disparaged the details of my background. I told him my father worked for General Electric—marginally true: he sold their washers and dryers. I said grandiloquently that my life had been largely lived through books to date, that I liked the novels of Ayn Rand, Salinger and Sir Walter Scott—though I had read only
Waverly
—and the poetry of e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas.
    “He’s cool,” said Will of the latter. “Old Bobby Dylan copped his name.”
    I nodded sagely, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about. But I could tell he was impressed with the breadth of my reading, and for the first time it occurred to me that all those lunch hours spent in the library in order to avoid getting