The Last of the Savages Read Online Free Page B

we would and wouldn’t screw, and what we would give to do so. I was deeply, achingly in love with Elizabeth Montgomery, the good suburban witch of
Bewitched
, while Will had a special boner for the duskier Natalie Wood. Besides these public stars, the wives ofteachers and housemasters came under intense scrutiny, since there were no other live victims for our fantasies. One night he whispered across the chilly room, “Would you take an F in history to pork Carsdale’s wife?”
    “God, are you kidding? Absolutely.” But in this case I was lying. As much as I might have liked to pork almost anybody, I knew I needed to succeed in school in order to realize my ultimate desires. I would’ve traded away any number of girls to get into Princeton or Yale,
    One evening Will said that the thing that he liked about soul music and the blues, as opposed to, say, “fucking
folk
music,” was that it was all basically about sex, not just the words but the actual music itself, and from that moment I started to listen to his records with keener interest. So it wasn’t only about freedom, but about sex, this music he was so passionate about. He also told me about his older brother’s dirty books—
The Story of O
and
My Secret Life
, part of the same private library where Will had also discovered
On the Road
and
Black Like Me.
    Another night we argued about whether black or white lingerie was sexier. I said black, since I was pretty sure no one I knew wore a black bra or panties; the secret garb of hookers and starlets, they seemed, like sex itself, incredibly strange and kinky. Will argued for white, though I think he took the position just for the sake of debate. It must have been one of the only times in his life he picked white. As I recall he extolled the virginal properties and the thrill of metaphoric soiling and defloration. It certainly didn’t occur to me at the time to ask what color of hypothetical female flesh we were trading in. Neither one of us, as it turned out, had conventional tastes, although we weren’t about to fess up to it back then.
    As in most worldly matters, our relationship was lopsided, since Will’s experience far surpassed my own, and even far surpassed the experience I claimed. He’d gone to third base twice and gotten two hand jobs by the time I met him. Or so he said. One of the triples was with a Negro girl who lived on their place in Mississippi. Perhaps most incredible of all—he had also been the fleeting recipient of an actual blow job until his partner, whom he’d gotten drunk specifically for the occasion, threw up in his lap. Brimming with wild surmise, I stayed awake longafter he told me this story; I could hardly imagine ever asking anyone to put her mouth on my thing, any more than I could imagine a girl who would do so without being asked. It seemed extraordinary—indicative of a hidden, waiting world that was far more mysterious and splendid than I had ever thought possible. I listened to the rhythm of Will’s raspy breathing as I masturbated beneath the starched tattletale sheets, as earnestly and devoutly as I had once upon a time said my prayers.

III
    M emphis possesses a jagged vitality that seems more western than southern, as if its inhabitants have never been told that the frontier has moved on and, finally, disappeared. Although physically situated in Tennessee it is the spiritual capital of Mississippi, the metropolis to which planters sent their wives for finery and their sons for dissipation; and to which the sons and daughters of their slaves migrated to escape the brutal drudgery of the cotton fields. The city was once abandoned to fever, and a riverine funk still hangs over the housing projects of the South Side as well as the mansions to the east. At least that’s one theory, that it is the big river that makes people there a little crazy—the car-crashing debutantes, the love-triangle murderers, the dipsomaniacal aunts, the suicide uncles, Elvis.
    “Why