The Last of the Savages Read Online Free Page A

could see he was in for some shit. So he said to me, ‘You know what I did?’”
    By now we had reached the room. Will sat down on the bed, swiping the hair away from his face. A sixteen-year-old suburban kid, I didn’t have any idea of the things that might happen to a caged man.
    “He said, ‘I go up to the biggest, baddest nigger in that cell, boy about ten foot tall, face like King Kong. And I punch him hard as I can right square in the face and knocks him cold. And none of them boys in that cell bothered me the rest of the night including old King Kong.’ ”
    “But, Jack Stubblefield …”
    “Biggest gorilla in the cage.”
    “What if he reports you?”
    “That’s not how it works, Patrick.”
    In fact the incident seemed to have precisely the effect that Will anticipated. He was treated with cautious respect and, as his friend, I was spared some of the ritual indignities of the new boy. Stubblefield glowered and sulked for a few days, as the bruise on his dumb handsome face ripened purple, and finally he and his gang confronted us one night when we were returning from the dining hall. Striding up to Will, he demanded an apology. Will said he was perfectly willing, if Henson first apologized to us. Henson, the spotty, jumpy little court jester who’d precipitated hostilities, whined in protest, but finally bowed to his leader’s command, staring at the ground and gouging the turf with the toe of his Weejuns as he did so. Then Will said, “Sorry I hit you, Stubblefield,” and honor was satisfied.
    That autumn I took on new colors, seeking to transform myself and to erase the green trail of my blood and upbringing. I talked my mother into sending me part of the housekeeping money for clothes, which I slowly acquired from the prep shop in town. Playing soccer, I earned a certain minor jock status. In these attempts to pander to the elitist toneof the campus I was out of step with the approaching egalitarian drumbeat of the times, despite the fact that I heard the beat every day from the little shelf speakers of Will’s stereo.
    Will, who already was almost everything I wanted to be, was also transforming himself, sloughing off the dry shell of familial expectation. His disrespect for authority seemed almost pathological, and he seized on small points of discipline against which to rebel—as when he wore a jacket and tie but no shirt to chapel one day, observing the letter if not the spirit of the dress code, for which act of sedition he received a week’s detention. If he had been thrown out for drinking or fighting or bad grades—this would have been understood at home. His grandfather had been tossed out of four schools, including this one. But Will was reading
Siddhartha
and D. T. Suzuki and Kerouac, listening to James Brown as well as his beloved Delta blues, imagining a world which the Savages did not own—although he also had the
Wall Street Journal
delivered to our dorm, presumably to check on the progress of stocks in his trust fund.
    Will’s hair grew longer and shaggier; the administration threatened to expel him unless it was cut. One Saturday afternoon he arranged for a barber to come out to the campus and had Stubblefield and Henson escort him, in handcuffs—for I refused to participate—to a chair in the middle of the quad, where he had an inch cut off his locks in front of the hundred or so students who had heard about the event. It was the first act of political theater I ever witnessed. That Will was able to enlist Stubblefield and Henson was no more amazing than the fact that he managed to escape punishment for this antic.
    These changes in each of us were probably more gradual and subtle than they seem now, for we became even closer friends over the course of that academic year and the next. I helped him with the subjects he was too bored to follow in class. And there was one major subject which we never tired of discussing. After lights-out we whispered into the night about whom