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  It was all so complicated. They were twelve years old now, or on the cusp of turning twelve, and some of the boys and girls were beginning to pair off, the old divide between the sexes had narrowed to a point where male and female stood on almost common ground, suddenly there was talk about boyfriends and girlfriends, about going steady, nearly every weekend there were parties with dancing and spin-the-bottle games, and the same boys who just a year ago had tormented girls by pulling their hair and pinching their arms were now in favor of kissing them. Still the number one boy, Timmerman had forged a romantic alliance with the number one girl, Susie Krauss, and the two of them reigned over the class as a kind of royal couple, Mr. and Miss Popularity 1959. It helped Ferguson that he and Susie had been friends since kindergarten and that she was the leader of the anti-bully forces. When she and Timmerman became an item at the end of March, the atmosphere began to change somewhat, and before long Ferguson noticed that he was being attacked less often and that fewer boys were attacking him. Nothing was ever said. Ferguson suspected that Susie had given her new beau an ultimatum—stop torturing Archie or I’m gone—and because Timmerman was more interested in courting Susie than in hating Ferguson, he had backed off. He still treated Ferguson with contempt, but he stopped using his fists on him and no longer vandalized his belongings, and once Timmerman withdrew from the Gang of Nine, several other boys dropped out as well, since Timmerman was their leader and they followed him in all things, so that for the last two and a half months of school there were only four tormentors left, Krolik and his band of imbeciles, and while it was hardly pleasant to be given the treatment by those four, it was far better than being worked over by nine. Susie wouldn’t tell him whether she had spoken to Timmerman or not (protocol demanded that she remain silent on the subject out of loyalty to her love), but Ferguson was almost certain she had, and so grateful was he to Susie Krauss and her noble fighter’s heart that he began to long for the day when she would eventually dump Timmerman and the field would open for him to try his luck with her. He thought about it continually throughout the early weeks of spring, deciding that it would probably be best to begin by asking her to spend a Saturday afternoon with him at his father’s tennis center, where he could show her around and demonstrate how knowledgeable he was about the inner workings of the place, which would no doubt impress her and put her in the right mood for a kiss, or perhaps several kisses, and if not a kiss, then at least holding hands. Given the volatility of preteen romances in that corner of the New Jersey suburbs, where the average alliance lasted just two or three weeks and two months of couplehood was the equivalent of a ten-year marriage, it was not unreasonable for Ferguson to hope that his opportunity would come before school let out for the summer.

  In the meantime, he had his eye on Gloria Dolan, who was prettier than Susie Krauss but not as exciting to be with, a gentle, plodding soul when compared to the sprinting, spitfire Susie, and yet Ferguson had his eye on her because he had discovered that Gloria had her eye on him, quite literally she was looking at him when she thought he wasn’t looking at her, and how many times in the past month had he caught her staring at him in class, sitting at her desk as Mr. Blasi turned his back to the students and worked out another math problem on the blackboard, no longer paying attention to the white chalk numerals but studying Ferguson instead, as if Ferguson had become a subject of intense interest to her, and now that Ferguson had become aware of that interest, he too began turning his head away from the blackboard to look at her, and more and more often now their eyes would meet, and every time that happened they would smile at each other. At that point in his journey through life, Ferguson was still waiting for his first kiss, his first kiss from a girl, a true kiss as opposed to the fraudulent kisses from mothers, grandmothers, and female first cousins, an ardent kiss, an erotic kiss, a kiss that would go beyond the mere pressing of lips upon lips and send him flying into hitherto unexplored territory. He was ready for that kiss, he had been thinking about it since before his birthday, in the past few months he and Howard Small had discussed the matter repeatedly and at length, and now that he and Gloria Dolan were exchanging secret smiles in class, Ferguson decided that Gloria should be the first one, for every signal pointed to the inevitability of her being the first one, and so it was, on a Friday night at the end of April, during the course of a gathering at Peggy Goldstein’s house on Merrywood Drive, that Ferguson took Gloria into the backyard and kissed her, and because she kissed him back, they went on kissing for a good long while, far longer than he had imagined they would, perhaps ten or twelve minutes, and when Gloria slipped her tongue into his mouth after the fourth or fifth minute, everything suddenly changed, and Ferguson understood that he was living in a new world and would never set foot in the old one again.

  * * *

  BEYOND THOSE LIFE-ALTERING kisses with Gloria Dolan, the other good thing about that dismal year was his deepening friendship with the new boy, Howard Small. It helped that Howard had come from somewhere else, that he had entered the scene on the first fateful morning of the new school year without prejudices or preconceptions about who was who or who was supposed to be what, that he had bought the third issue of the Cobble Road Crusader within minutes of reaching the playground and was happily scanning its contents when he saw the boy who had just sold it to him being attacked by Timmerman and the others, and because he was a person who knew right from wrong, he immediately took Ferguson’s side and then stuck with Ferguson from that day forward, and because he too occasionally came under attack for the crime of being Ferguson’s friend, the two boys grew close, since each would have been entirely alone if not for the existence of the other. Sixth-grade pariahs—and therefore friends, within a month the best of friends.

  Howard, not Howie, emphatically not Howie. Small by name but not in size, just a fraction of an inch shorter than Ferguson and already beginning to fill out, no longer a scrawny child but an ever more robust preteen, solid and strong, physically unafraid, a kamikaze sportsman who compensated for his mediocre abilities with relentless enthusiasm and effort. Wit and kindness, a fast learner with a talent for performing well under pressure, surpassing even Timmerman in one hundred percent test scores, a reader of books, as Ferguson was, a developing student of politics, as Ferguson was, and a boy with a wondrous gift for drawing. The pencil he carried around in his pocket churned out landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of near-photographic precision, but also cartoons and comics, which largely derived their humor from unlikely puns, words yanked out of their familiar roles because their sounds were congruent with the sounds of other, unrelated words, such as the drawing entitled He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease, which showed a boy propelling himself across the sky with a large capital E in his outstretched hands, while other boys in the background struggled along with diminutive lowercase e’s, or else Ferguson’s favorite, the one in which Howard turned the word toiletries into a new form of vegetation, a drawing that bore the title Pinsky’s Fruit Farm, with a row of cherry trees on top, neatly labeled Cherry Trees, and a row of orange trees in the middle, neatly labeled Orange Trees, and a row of toilet trees on the bottom, neatly labeled Toilet Trees. What a fine and funny idea, Ferguson thought, and what a good ear to have broken apart the original word and changed it into two words, but even more than the ear it was the eye that counted, the eye in conjunction with the hand, since the result wouldn’t have been half as effective if the toilets hanging from the branches hadn’t been drawn so well, for Howard’s toilets were nothing less than sublime, the most faithful and accurately rendered toilets Ferguson had ever seen.

  Howard’s father was a math professor who had moved the Smalls to New Jersey because he had been offered a new post as dean of students at Montclair State Teachers College. Howard’s mother worked as an editor for a women’s magazine called Hearth & Home, which meant that she commuted to New York five days a week and seldom returned to West Orange before nightfall, and because Howard had a twenty-year-old bro
ther and an eighteen-year-old sister (who were both off at college), his circumstances were remarkably similar to Ferguson’s—a de facto only child who mostly came home to an empty house after school. Few suburban women had jobs in 1959, but Ferguson and his friend both had mothers who were more than just housewives, and consequently they had been forced to become more independent and self-reliant than the bulk of their classmates, and now that they were twelve and careening toward the gate of adolescence, the fact that they had large swaths of unsupervised time to themselves was proving to be an advantage, since at that stage of life parents were surely the least interesting people in the world, and the less one had to do with them the better. They could therefore go to Ferguson’s house after school and turn on the television to watch American Bandstand or Million Dollar Movie without fear of being reprimanded for squandering the last precious hours of daylight by sitting indoors on such a beautiful afternoon. Twice that spring they even managed to talk Gloria Dolan and Peggy Goldstein into going back to the house with them for four-person dance parties in the living room, and because Ferguson and Gloria were old hands at kissing by then, their example inspired Howard and Peggy to attempt their own initiation into the complex art of tongue-bussing. On other afternoons, they would go to the Smalls’ place instead, secure in the knowledge that they would not be interrupted or spied upon as they opened the bottom drawer of Howard’s brother’s desk and pulled out the pile of girlie magazines he kept stashed in there under the innocuous decoy of a high school chemistry book. Long conversations would follow about which naked woman had the prettiest face or the most attractive body, comparisons would be made between the models in Playboy and the ones in Gent and Swank, the slick, well-lit color photos of the quasi-unreal-looking Playboy women as opposed to the cruder, grainier images in the cheaper magazines, the glossified all-American young beauties and the older, more lascivious tramps with their harsh faces and bleached-blond hair, the point of the discussion always being which one was the most arousing to you and which woman would you most like to make love to when your body was ready to engage in real sex, something that for the moment was still not possible for either one of them, but it wouldn’t be long now, maybe another six months, maybe a year, and finally they would go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to discover they were men.

  Ferguson had been tracking the changes in his body since the first sign of impending manhood appeared in the form of a single hair sprouting from his left armpit when he was ten and a half. He knew what it meant and was surprised, since it seemed to have come too early, and at that point he was not prepared to say good-bye to the boy-self that had belonged to him since birth. He found the hair ugly and ridiculous, an intruder sent by some alien force to mar his previously unblemished person, and therefore he plucked it out. Within days it had returned, however, along with an identical twin that arrived the following week, and then the right armpit swung into action as well, and before long the isolate strands were no longer distinguishable, the hairs were turning into nests of hair, and by the time he was twelve they had become a permanent fact of life. Ferguson watched with horror and fascination as other zones of his body were transformed as well, the almost invisible blondish down on his legs and forearms turning darker, thicker, and more abundant, the emergence of pubic hair on his once smooth lower belly, and then, just after he turned thirteen, the odious black fuzz that began germinating between his nose and upper lip, so disgusting and disfiguring that he shaved it off one morning with his father’s electric razor, and when it grew back a couple of weeks later, he shaved it off again. The horror was not being in control of what was happening to him, of feeling that his body had been turned into the site of an experiment conducted by some mad, prankster scientist, and as new hair continued to proliferate over greater and greater areas of his skin, he couldn’t help thinking about the Wolfman, the hero of that gruesome film he had seen with Howard on television one night back in the fall, the metamorphosis of a normal man into a woolly-faced monster, which Ferguson now understood was a parable about the helplessness one experiences during puberty, for you are doomed to become whatever your genes have decided you will be, and until the process is finished, you have no idea what the next day will bring. That was the horror of it. But along with the horror there was fascination, the knowledge that however long and difficult the journey might be, it would eventually lead to the kingdom of erotic bliss.

  The problem was that Ferguson still knew nothing about the nature of that bliss, and struggle as he did to imagine what his body would feel in the throes of an orgasm, Ferguson’s imagination continually failed him. His early double-digit years were filled with rumors and hearsay but no hard facts, mysterious, unconfirmed stories from boys with older, adolescent brothers that alluded to the unlikely spasms involved in the attainment of erotic bliss, the pulsing streams of milky white fluid that spurted out of your penis, for example, which sometimes traveled several feet or even yards through the air, the so-called ejaculation, which was always accompanied by that much sought after blissful feeling, which Howard’s brother Tom described as the best feeling in the world, but when Ferguson pressed him to be more specific and describe what that feeling was, Tom said he wouldn’t know where to begin, it was too hard to put into words and Ferguson would simply have to wait until the time came for him to feel it himself, a frustrating answer that did nothing to alleviate Ferguson’s ignorance, and while some of the technical terms were now familiar to him, such as the word semen, which was the sticky stuff that shot out of you and carried the sperm that were essential for creating babies, Ferguson invariably thought of a shipful of sailors whenever someone used that word in his presence, merchant seamen dressed in milky white uniforms coming ashore and heading for honky-tonk bars along the docks to flirt with half-naked women and join the old salts in drunken sea chanteys as a one-legged man in a striped shirt blasted out the tune on his ancient concertina. Poor Ferguson. His mind was in a muddle, and because he still couldn’t imagine what any of the words really meant, his thoughts tended to dart out in several directions at once. Sea-man would soon become see-man, and an instant later he would imagine he was blind, tapping his way into the noisy bar with a white cane in his hand.

  It was clear that the central actor in this drama was his groin. Or, to hark back to the terminology of the ancient Hebrews, his loins. That is to say, his privates, which in the medical literature were commonly referred to as genitalia. For as long as he could remember being himself, it had always felt good to touch himself down there, to fiddle with his penis when no one was looking, in bed at night or early in the morning, for example, manipulating that fleshy extrusion until it rose up stiffly in the air, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling in size, and with that startling mutation an inchoate sort of pleasure would begin to spread through his body, particularly the lower half of his body, a formless rush of feeling that was not yet bliss but suggested that bliss would one day be achieved by a similar kind of friction. He was growing steadily now, every morning his body seemed to be a little larger than it had been the day before, and the growth of his penis was keeping pace with the rest of him, no longer the nubby dickey bird of pre-hair childhood but an ever more substantial appendage, which now seemed to possess a mind of its own, lengthening and hardening at the least provocation, especially on those afternoons when he and Howard studied Tom’s nudie magazines. They were in junior high school now, and one day Howard repeated a joke he had been told by his brother:

  A science teacher asks his students: What part of the body can expand to six times its normal size? He points his finger at Miss McGillacuddy, but instead of answering the question, the girl begins to blush and covers her face with her hands. The teacher then points at Mr. MacDonald, who quickly responds: The pupils of the eyes. Correct, says the teacher, and then he turns back to the blushing Miss McGillacuddy and addresses her with an irritation bordering on contempt. I have three things to tell you, young lady, he says. One: You haven’t bee
n doing your homework. Two: You have a dirty, filthy mind. And three: You’re in for a life of bitter disappointment.

  Not six times, then, not even after he was fully grown. There were limits to what he could expect from the future, but whatever the exact measurements were, whatever the proportions between soft repose and hard readiness, the increase would be sufficient unto the day, and the night of that day, and all the nights and days that followed.

  Junior high was unquestionably superior to the grammar school that had held him prisoner for the past seven years, and with more than a thousand students charging through the halls at the end of each fifty-minute period, he no longer had to endure the suffocating intimacy of being trapped in a room with the same twenty-three or twenty-four people every Monday through Friday from the beginning of September to the end of June. The Gang of Nine was a thing of the past, and even Krolik and his three toadies had essentially disappeared from view, since Ferguson rarely crossed paths with them anymore. Timmerman was still present, a fellow class member in four of Ferguson’s academic subjects, but the two boys coexisted by going out of their way to ignore each other, a less than happy standoff but not an unbearable one. Better yet, Timmerman and Susie Krauss had parted ways, just as Ferguson had hoped they would, and because Ferguson himself had lost contact with Gloria Dolan over the summer, his first kissing mate had now cast her eyes on handsome Mark Connelly, which disappointed Ferguson but didn’t entirely crush him, since a path had been opened for him to go after Susie Krauss, the girl of his sixth-grade dreams, and he jumped at his chance by calling her one evening during the first week of school, which led to a Saturday afternoon visit to his father’s tennis center, which in turn led to their first kiss the following Saturday and many other kisses on subsequent Fridays and Saturdays over the next few months, and then they too parted ways, with Susie falling into the arms of the aforementioned Mark Connelly, who had lost Gloria Dolan to a boy named Rick Bassini, and Ferguson pining for an ever more attractive Peggy Goldstein, who had broken off with Howard sometime ago, but Ferguson’s best friend had recovered with his heart intact and was now offering that same heart to the bright and bubbly Edie Cantor.