The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney

standing up and tugging on my arm. Suddenly I realized that everyone in the room was watching, and it would have taken a substantial application of physical resistance to refuse the offer, dearly as I wished to. My apprehension only increased when the couples who’d been dancing seemed to disperse at a signal, as if they didn’t want to be seen with us, or else wanted to watch from a safe distance. I was hoping for a slow song. We were alone out there when the band kicked into a fast, upbeat number.
    Trying to mimic the gestures of my companion, I briefly felt I was doing all right. I recalled my dancing triumphs with Belinda a few weeks before, at Lester’s house. For a moment I nearly lost myself in the rhythm. But as my partner’s movements became increasingly complicated, my own tenuous confidence faltered, until finally I began to suspect she was deliberately making a spectacle of me. I persisted gamely, no longer following her lead, increasingly aware of the laughter from the tables around us. When at long last the song finally ended, my partner collapsed into the arms of a friend, incapacitated with mirth, while I was accosted with a chorus of hoots and jeers. As I slunk toward thetable, my face burning, Lester announced over his mike, “Damn, that
hurt
to look at. I’m talking
ugly
here now.”
    In the car heading back to Bear Track, Will thrust his hand at me from the driver’s seat. “Hey, man. Smell my finger.”
    “Watch where you’re going,” I said. When he continued to stab his finger at me I slapped his hand away, causing him to swerve off the road onto the shoulder before he regained control.
    “What’s your fucking problem?” he shouted.
    “My problem? I don’t have a fucking problem.”
    “You’re just jealous.”
    “Yeah?” I yelled. “I wouldn’t have touched that girl with a stick.”
    “That’s cause you’re a fag.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “Fuck
you
.”
    Ah, yes—those were the days when this seemed like a crushing and eloquent rejoinder.
    We drove home in silence and went to bed without speaking. I was mad at Will for so many reasons I could hardly begin to sort them out, not least because I blamed him for my humiliation, but I wasn’t about to tell him that, since I didn’t want him to know about what had happened in his absence. When he had finally returned to the table I was sitting with two friendly young bloods who had hit me up for three beers apiece and a pint of gin.
    My anger dissipated in the night; I awoke at dawn in a state of frantic anxiety, fearing that I had permanently damaged our friendship. When Will finally emerged from his room three hours later I apologized for my outburst.
    “That’s okay,” he said, with a shrug. “We were drunk.”
    I’m not sure this explanation exactly covered the case, but I was happy enough to pretend that it did. In the middle of the night I had realized that Will had become my best, and practically my only, friend.

    Will announced over breakfast that he was driving back toward Clarksdale to attend church. Was this a matter of penance for the previous night’s activities? I’d been subject to compulsory Sunday Mass up until the moment I left home for prep school, where I shunned the stigma of the special van that took Catholics into town. I couldn’t imagine voluntarily driving half an hour to sit inside a church, which, by Will’s standards, could only be regarded as deeply uncool.
    “There’s this choir I want to check out,” he said bashfully, or so it seemed to me. “You ever heard any gospel music?” Sensing my doubt, he said, “Man, you think rock and rollers have groupies—gospel singers get more pussy than anybody on the planet.”
    This was a side of the religious vocation I’d never considered. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “Kid you not,” he said.
    He told me I was welcome to stay at Bear Track, and I think he would have preferred me to, but I was eager to repair any damage that had been done