It was his last year of high school, the last year he would spend in the town of Montclair, New Jersey, the last year he would live under the same roof with his parents, the last year of the first part of his life, and now that he was alone again, Ferguson looked out at his old, familiar world with renewed concentration and intensity, for even as he kept his gaze fixed on the people and places he had known for the past fourteen years, he felt they were already beginning to vanish before his eyes, slowly dissolving like a Polaroid image moving in reverse, undeveloping itself as the outlines of buildings blurred and the features of his friends’ faces grew less distinct and the bright colors faded into white rectangles of nothingness. He was among his classmates again as he hadn’t been in over a year, no longer slinking off to New York on the weekends, no longer a person with a secret life, a one-thumbed shadow reinserted into the midst of the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds he had known since the age of three and four and five, and now that they were beginning to disappear, he found himself looking at them with something close to tenderness, the same boring suburban crowd he had turned his back on so abruptly after Amy went upstairs with him on the afternoon of the Labor Day cookout were his sole companions again, and he did what he could to treat them with tolerance and respect, even the most ridiculous and empty-headed among them, for he was no longer in the judgment business, he had given up his compulsion to hunt out the flaws and weaknesses in others because he had learned by now that he was just as weak and flawed as they were, and if he meant to grow up into the kind of person he was expecting himself to be, he would have to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open and never look down on anyone again.
No Amy for now, no Amy for what threatened to be a long and unbearable stretch of time, but Ferguson’s irrational conviction that the two of them were destined to be together again at some point in the future pushed him into making plans for that future when the moment came for him to send off his applications to college. That was one of the curious things about being in the last year of high school, the fact that you spent most of your time thinking about next year, knowing that a part of you was already gone even as you remained where you were, as if you were living in two places at once, the drab present and the uncertain future, boiling down your existence into a set of numbers that included your grade point average and SAT scores, approaching the teachers you liked best and asking them to write letters of recommendation for you, composing the absurd, impossible essay about yourself in which you hoped to impress a panel of anonymous strangers of your worthiness to attend their institution, then putting on a jacket and tie and traveling to that institution to be interviewed by someone whose report would weigh heavily on whether they accepted you or not, and suddenly Ferguson started worrying about his hand again, for the first time in months he felt anxious about his missing fingers when he sat down across from the man who would help to decide his future, asking himself whether the man saw him as a handicapped person or merely as someone who had been in an accident, and then, even as he was replying to the man’s questions, he remembered the last time he and Amy had talked about his hand, back in the summer when for some reason he had looked down at it and said how much it revolted him, which had annoyed her so greatly that she’d shouted at him, saying that if he ever mentioned his hand again she would take out a cleaver and chop off her own left thumb and give it to him as a present, and the ferocity of her anger was so magnificent that he promised never to bring up the subject again, and as he went on talking to the man who was interviewing him, he realized that not only must he not talk about it again but he must not think about it either, and bit by bit he forced himself to push it out of his mind and settled into his conversation with the man, who was a music professor at Columbia, which needless to say was his first choice, the only college he had any interest in attending, and when the genial, humorous, thoroughly sympathetic composer of twelve-tone comic operas found out that Ferguson was interested in poetry and hoped to become a writer one day, he walked over to the bookshelf in his office and pulled out four recent issues of the Columbia Review, the undergraduate literary magazine, and handed them to the nervous, self-conscious applicant from the other side of the Hudson. You might want to have a look at these, the professor said, and then they were shaking hands and saying good-bye to each other, and as Ferguson left the building and walked out onto the campus, which was already familiar to him because of his half dozen weekend trysts with Lady Schneiderman back in the fall, he wondered if he might not run into her that afternoon (he didn’t) or if he shouldn’t go down to her apartment on West 111th Street and ring the bell (he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t), and so rather than torment himself with thoughts about his absent, inaccessible love, he opened one of the issues of the Columbia Review and stumbled across a poem with a most amusing and vulgar refrain, a line so shocking in its directness that Ferguson laughed out loud when he read it: A steady fuck is good for you. It might not have been much of a poem, but Ferguson couldn’t help agreeing with the sentiment, which contained a truth that no other poem had ever expressed so bluntly, or at least no other poem he had read, and on top of that he found it encouraging to know that Columbia was a place that allowed its students to publish such thoughts without fear of being censored, which meant that one could be free as a student there, for if any student had written that line for the Montclair High School literary magazine, he would have been expelled at once and likely thrown in jail.
His parents were indifferent. Neither one of them had gone to college, neither one of them knew anything about the distinctions between one college and another, and therefore they would be happy for their boy wherever he went, whether to the state university in New Brunswick (Rutgers) or to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since they were too ignorant to have developed into snobs about the prestige of one school over another and were simply proud of Ferguson for having been such a good student all his life. Aunt Mildred, however, who had recently been promoted to full professor at Berkeley, had other ideas about the academic destination of her one and only, and in a long coast-to-coast phone call in early December she tried to steer her nephew around to her way of thinking. Columbia was an excellent first choice, she said, no problem with that, the undergraduate program was one of the strongest in the country, but she also wanted him to consider other options, Amherst and Oberlin, for example, small, isolated schools where the atmosphere would be calmer and less distracting than in New York, more conducive to the rigors of focused study, but if he had his heart set on a big university, why not give some thought to Stanford and Berkeley, how dearly she would love to have him out in California with her for the next four years, and either one of those places was every bit as good as Columbia if not better, but Ferguson told her that his mind was made up, it was New York or nothing, and if Columbia turned him down, he would go to NYU, which accepted nearly everyone who applied, and if something went wrong there, his high school diploma would allow him to enroll in courses at the New School, which turned down no one, and that was the plan, he said, just three possibilities, all of them in New York, and when his aunt asked him why it had to be New York when there were so many more attractive places to choose from, Ferguson reached back into his memory and pulled out the words Amy had spoken to him on the first day they met—because, he said, New York is it.
* * *
A STATE OF limbo, perhaps, but in the narrow slit between the not-here and not-there of the drab present, something happened to Ferguson that altered his thinking about what would happen next. In early December, he landed a job at the Montclair Times, which more accurately could be said to have been a job that landed on him, since it came his way unexpectedly, with no serious effort on his part, a gift of blind happenstance, but once he started doing it, he discovered that he wanted to keep on doing it, for not only did he enjoy the work but the effect of that enjoyment was to narrow the infinite spaces of a future anywhere into a precise somewhere, and with that narrowing a multitude of anythi
ngs was suddenly turned into a single something. In other words, three months short of his eighteenth birthday, Ferguson accidentally stumbled upon a calling in life, something to do over the long haul, and the perplexing thing was that it never would have occurred to him to do it if he hadn’t been thrust into doing it in the first place.
The Montclair Times was a weekly newspaper that had been covering local events since 1877, and since Montclair was larger than most of the towns in the area (population: 44,000), the paper was more substantial, more thorough, and carried more advertising than other Essex County weeklies, even if most of the stories it published were more or less the same as those found in the smaller rags: Board of Education meetings, gatherings of the Ladies Garden Club, Boy Scout banquets, automobile accidents, engagements and marriages, break-ins, muggings, and acts of teenage vandalism as reported in the Police Blotter, reviews of exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, lectures at Montclair State Teachers College, and sports in all of their indigenous manifestations: Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, and extensive coverage of the games played by the high school varsity teams, the redoubtable Montclair Mounties, whose football squad had just finished the most successful season in its history—a perfect 9–0 record, a state championship, and a number three ranking in the country, which meant that of all of the thousands of high school football teams spread across the United States, only two were considered to be better than Montclair. Ferguson had missed every one of those Saturday games, but now, just ten days after his glum, post-Thanksgiving conversation with Amy, his mother told him about a possible opening at the Times—assuming he was interested. It seemed that Rick Vogel, the young man who reported on high school sports for the paper, had done such an impressive job chronicling the football team’s glorious season that he had been hired away by the Newark Evening News, a daily paper with twenty times the circulation of the Montclair weekly and a large enough budget to pay twenty times the salary, and the editor in chief of the Times found himself in what Ferguson’s mother called a hell of a fix: the varsity basketball season was scheduled to begin next Tuesday, and he had no one to write about the games.
Until then, the thought of working for a newspaper had never crossed Ferguson’s mind. He saw himself as a literary man, a man whose future would be dedicated to the writing of books, and whether he wound up becoming a novelist or a playwright or the heir to New Jersey’s Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, he was headed in the direction of art, and whatever the importance of newspapers, it was certain that writing for them had nothing to do with art. On the other hand, an opportunity had presented itself to him, he was at loose ends, restless and dissatisfied with just about everything, and perhaps a stint at the Times would inject some color into the drab present and lure him away from dwelling on his own miserable circumstances. More than that, there was some money involved—a nominal ten-dollar fee per article—but even more than the money there was the fact that the Times was a legitimate newspaper, not a joke publication like the Mountaineer at Montclair High, and if Ferguson managed to wrangle himself a job there, he would be entering the ranks of the grown-up world—no longer an almost-eighteen-year-old high school boy but a young adult, or, just as good if not more satisfying to his ears, a boy wonder, meaning a boy who was doing the work of a man.
Not to be forgotten was that Whitman had started out as a journalist for the Brooklyn Eagle and that Hemingway had written for the Kansas City Star and that Newark-born Stephen Crane had been a reporter for the New York Herald, and so when Ferguson’s mother asked him if he had any interest in taking over for the precipitously departed Vogel, Ferguson needed no more than half a minute to say yes. It wasn’t going to be easy, his mother added, but Edward Imhoff, the fat sourpuss who edited the Times, might be desperate enough to chance going with an untested kid, at least for one game, which would buy him a little time if Ferguson didn’t pan out, but as they both knew, his mother said, he was going to pan out, and because she had been publishing photographs in Imhoff’s paper for more than a dozen years and had included his portrait in her book of Garden State notables (an act of uncalled-for generosity if there ever was one), the windbag owed her, she said, and without wasting another second she picked up the phone and called him. Such was the way Ferguson’s mother handled herself when something needed to be done—she seized the moment and did it, unafraid and unstoppable, and how Ferguson relished her gutsy bravura as he listened to her half of the conversation with Imhoff. Not once in the seven minutes they talked did she sound like a mother begging a favor for her son. She was a clever talent scout who had just solved a problem for an old friend, and Imhoff should get down on his knees and thank her for saving his ass.
On the strength of that call, Ferguson was granted an audience with the moody, dyspeptic editor in chief, and although he came armed with two samples of his writing in order to prove that he was not an illiterate numskull (an English paper on King Lear and a short, jocular poem that ended with the lines If life is a dream, / What happens when I wake up?), the bulbous, balding Imhoff barely glanced at them. I assume you know something about basketball, he said, and I assume you can write a coherent sentence, but what about newspapers—do you even bother to read them? Of course he read them, Ferguson replied, three papers every day. The Star-Ledger for local news, the New York Times for world and national news, and the Herald Tribune because it had the best writers.
The best? Imhoff said. And who in your opinion are the best?
Jimmy Breslin on politics for one. Red Smith on sports for another. And the music critic Gilbert Schneiderman, who happens to be the uncle of a close friend of mine.
Bully for you. And how many newspaper articles have you written, Mr. Hotshot?
I think you already know the answer to that question.
Ferguson didn’t care. Not about what Imhoff thought of him, and not even if Imhoff turned him down for the job. His mother’s boldness had emboldened him into a position of absolute indifference, and indifference had power, Ferguson realized, and no matter what the outcome of the interview, he wasn’t going to let himself be pushed around by that bilious sack of haughtiness and bad manners.
Give me one good reason why I should hire you, Imhoff said.
Because you need someone to cover the game on Tuesday night, and I’m willing to do it. If you didn’t want me to do it, why would you be wasting your precious time talking to me now?
Six hundred words, Imhoff said, as he slapped his palms against the desk. You fuck up, and you’re out. You cut the mustard, and you get to live another day.
Writing a newspaper article was going to be different from any other kind of writing Ferguson had done in the past. Not just the writing of poems and short stories, which were so different from journalism they didn’t even belong in the discussion, but also the other forms of nonfiction writing he had been engaged in for most of his life: personal letters (which sometimes reported on real events but were predominantly filled with opinions about himself and others: I love you, I hate you, I’m sad, I’m happy, our old friend turns out to be a despicable liar) and papers for school, such as his recent essay on King Lear, which was essentially a group of words responding to another group of words, as was the case with nearly all scholarly endeavors: words responding to words. By contrast, a newspaper article was a group of words responding to the world, an attempt to put the unwritten world into words, and in order to tell the story of an event that had occurred in the real world you paradoxically had to begin with the last thing that had happened rather than the first, the effect rather than the cause, not George Bliffle woke up yesterday morning with a stomach ache but George Bliffle died last night at age seventy-seven, with something about the stomach ache two or three paragraphs down. The facts above all else, and the most important fact before all other facts, but just because you had to stick to the facts didn’t mean you were supposed to stop thinking or weren’t allowed to use your imagination, as Red Smith had done earlier that year when
reporting on the defeat of Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title: “Cassius Marcellus Clay fought his way out of the horde that swarmed and leaped and shouted in the ring, climbed like a squirrel onto the red velvet ropes and brandished his still-gloved hand aloft. ‘Eat your words,’ he howled to the working press rows. ‘Eat your words.’” Just because you were confined to the real world didn’t make you any less of a writer if you had it in you to write well.
Ferguson knew that sports were of no consequence in the long run, but they lent themselves to the written word more readily than most other subjects because each game had a built-in narrative structure, the agon of competition necessarily resulted in a victory for one team and a defeat for the other, and Ferguson’s job was to tell the story of how the winner won and the loser lost, whether by one point or by twenty points, and when he showed up for the first game of the season on that Tuesday night in mid-December, he had already figured out how he was going to shape his story, since the central drama of the Montclair basketball team that year was the youth and inexperience of its players, not one member of the starting five had been a starter last season, eight seniors had graduated in June and with one exception the current squad was composed entirely of sophomores and juniors. That would be the thread that ran through his coverage of the team from game to game, Ferguson decided, charting whether a collection of raw beginners would evolve into a solid unit as the season unfolded or simply stagger along from one defeat to the next, and even though Imhoff had promised to boot him out if the first article failed to deliver the goods, Ferguson wasn’t planning to fail, he most emphatically was not going to fail, and therefore he looked upon that first article as the opening chapter of a saga he would go on writing until the season ended after the eighteenth game in mid-February.