What he hadn’t expected was how inordinately alive he would feel when he walked into the school gym and took his seat beside the official scorer at the table that straddled the midcourt line. Everything was suddenly different. No matter how many games he had seen in that gym over the years, no matter how many physical education classes he had attended there since entering high school, no matter how many indoor practice sessions he had taken part in there as a varsity baseball player, the gym was no longer the same gym that evening. It had been transformed into a site of potential words, the words he would write about the game that had just begun, and because it was his job to write those words, he had to look at what was happening more closely than he had ever looked at anything, and the sheer attentiveness and singularity of purpose that sort of looking required seemed to lift him up and fill his veins with massive jolts of electric current. The hair on his head was sizzling, his eyes were wide open, and he felt more alive than he had in weeks, alive and alert, all lit up and awake in the moment. He had a pocket-sized notebook with him, and all through the game he jotted down what he was seeing on the hardwood court, for long stretches he found himself seeing and writing simultaneously, the pressure to translate the unwritten world into written words was pulling out the words with surprising quickness, it was utterly unlike the slow, brooding agonies that went into writing a poem, all was speed now, all was haste, and almost without thinking about it he was writing down words such as a short, redheaded ball handler with the quickness of a hamster and a skinny rebounding machine with elbows as deadly as sharpened pencils and a foul shot that fluttered in and out of the rim like an indecisive hummingbird, and then, after Montclair fell to Bloomfield in a closely fought 54–51 defeat, Ferguson concluded the story with: The Mountie faithful, unaccustomed to losing after an autumn of football perfection, shuffled out of the gym in silence.
The article was due the following morning, so Ferguson rushed back home in the white Impala and went up to his room, where he spent the next three hours writing and rewriting the piece, whittling down the eight-hundred-word first draft to six hundred and fifty words and then down to five hundred ninety-seven, just under Imhoff’s limit, which he typed up in a final typo-free version on his Olympia portable, the indomitable, German-made machine his parents had given him on his fifteenth birthday. Assuming Imhoff accepted the article, it would be the first bit of writing Ferguson had ever published outside of school magazines, and as he faced the imminent loss of his authorial virginity, he dithered back and forth about what name he should use to sign his work. Archie and Archibald had always posed a problem for him, Archie because of that damnable idiot in the comic books, Archie Andrews, the friend of Jughead and Moose, the birdbrained teenager who could never decide whether he loved the blond-haired Betty more than the dark-haired Veronica or vice versa, and Archibald because it was a fusty, oldfangled embarrassment that was all but defunct now, and the only literary man known as Archibald anywhere in the world was Ferguson’s least favorite American poet, Archibald MacLeish, who won every prize and was considered to be a national treasure but was in fact a boring, no-talent dud. Except for his long-dead great-uncle, whom Ferguson had never met, the sole Archie-Archibald he felt any kinship with was Cary Grant, who had been born in England as Archibald Leach, but no sooner had the showman-acrobat come to America than he’d changed his name and turned himself into a Hollywood film star, which never would have happened if he had stuck with the name of Archibald. Ferguson liked being Archie to his friends and family, there was nothing wrong with Archie when he heard it in the intimate discourses of affection and love, but there was something juvenile and even laughable about Archie in a public context, especially for a writer, and because Archibald Ferguson was not to be considered under any circumstances, the almost eighteen-year-old budding newspaperman decided to suppress his name altogether and go with his initials, in the same way T. S. Eliot and H. L. Mencken had gone with theirs, and thus the career of A. I. Ferguson began. A.I.—known to some as a field of study called Artificial Intelligence—but there were other references buried in those letters as well, among them Anonymous Insider, which was the one Ferguson chose to think about whenever he saw his new name in print.
Because he had to go to school the next morning, his mother agreed to stop in at Imhoff’s office and give him the article herself, since her studio was only two blocks from the Times building in downtown Montclair. A day of anxious breathing followed—would Ferguson be let in the door or shut out, would he be asked to cover Friday night’s game or was his job as a basketball reporter finished after one game?—for now that he had taken the plunge, he was no longer indifferent, and pretending that he didn’t care would have been a lie. Six and a half hours of school, and then the drive to Roseland Photo for the verdict, which his mother delivered with a certain dose of bemused irony:
It’s all okay, Archie, she said, getting down to the most important fact first, he’s running your story in tomorrow’s paper, and you’re hired for the rest of the basketball season, and the baseball season, too, if that’s what you want, but good God, what a piece of work that man is, humphing and grumphing as I stood there watching him read your article, pouncing on your new pen name first of all—which I like a lot, by the way—but he couldn’t get over what he called the pretentiousness of it, A.I., A.I., A.I., he kept saying it over and over, and then he would add, Asshole Intellectual, Arrogant Imbecile, Absolute Ignoramus, he couldn’t stop himself from insulting you because he realized what you’d written was good, Archie, unexpectedly good, and a man like that doesn’t want to encourage young people, he wants to crush them, so he picked on a couple of things just to show how superior he is to everyone else, the remark about the indecisive hummingbird, he just hated that one and crossed it out with his blue pencil, and a couple of other things made him snort or curse under his breath, but the upshot is that you’re a working member of the local press now, or, in Ed Imhoff’s words, when I asked him whether he wanted you or not, The boy will do. The boy will do! I burst out laughing when I heard that, and then I asked him, Is that all you have to say, Ed?, to which he answered, Isn’t that enough? Well, maybe you’d like to thank me for finding you a new reporter, I said. Thank you? he said. No, my dear Rose, it’s you who should be thanking me.
One way or another, Ferguson was in the door, and the good thing about the arrangement was that he rarely had to see or talk to Imhoff, since he was required to be at school on Wednesday and Monday mornings, the respective deadlines for the articles about the Tuesday and Friday night games, which were published together when the paper came out on Thursday afternoon. Ferguson’s mother therefore continued to hand in the pieces to Imhoff, and although Ferguson went in twice for Saturday meetings with the Big Fish (in a small pond) to be dressed down for the sin of overwriting (if phrases such as existential despair and a balletic move that challenged the principles of Newtonian physics could be considered overwriting), most of his conversations with Imhoff took place on the telephone, as when the boss asked him to do a feature-length profile of the basketball coach, Jack McNulty, after the team won six in a row to lift its record to 9 and 7, or when he instructed Ferguson to start wearing a jacket and tie to the games because he was a representative of the Montclair Times and needed to comport himself as a gentleman while carrying out his duties, as if wearing a jacket and tie had anything to do with writing about basketball games, but those were the days when questions of clothing and hair had begun to divide the old and the young, and like many of the boys in his school Ferguson had let his hair grow longer that year, the old 1950s crew cuts were passé now, and changes were happening among the girls as well, more and more of them had stopped teasing their hair into the cotton-candy bouffants and beehives of yore and were simply brushing it out and letting it hang loosely around their shoulders, which Ferguson found far more attractive and sexy, and as he studied the human landscape in those early weeks of 1965, he felt that everyone was starting to look better, and there
was something in the air that pleased him.
* * *
ON FEBRUARY SEVENTH, eight American soldiers were killed and 126 wounded in a Vietcong attack against a military base in Pleiku—and the bombing of North Vietnam began. Two weeks later, on February twenty-first, just days after the end of the high school basketball season, Malcolm X was gunned down by Nation of Islam assassins while delivering a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. Those were the only two subjects that seemed to exist anymore, Ferguson wrote in a letter to his aunt and uncle in California, the expanding bloodshed in Vietnam and the civil rights movement at home, white America at war with the yellow people of Southeast Asia, white America in conflict with its own black citizens, who were more and more in conflict with themselves, for the movement that had already split into factions was splitting further into factions of factions and perhaps even factions of factions of factions, everyone in conflict with everyone else, the lines drawn so sharply that few dared step over them anymore, and so divided had the world become that when Ferguson innocently asked Rhonda Williams out on a date sometime in January, he discovered that those lines were now sheathed in barbed wire. This was the same Rhonda Williams he had known for the past ten years, the slender, talkative girl who was in most of his academic classes and who happened not to be a white person but a black person, as were many other students at Montclair High, which was the most racially integrated school in the area, a segment of northern New Jersey in which every one of the surrounding schools was nearly all white or nearly all black, and Rhonda Williams, whose family was wealthier than Ferguson’s and who happened to have black skin, which in truth was pale brown skin, just one or two shades darker than Ferguson’s skin, vivacious Rhonda Williams, who was the daughter of the chief of internal medicine at the V.A. hospital in nearby Orange and whose younger brother was a substitute guard on the Montclair basketball team, bright, college-bound Rhonda Williams, who had always been Ferguson’s friend and shared his love of music, was consequently the first person who sprang to mind when he read that Sviatoslav Richter would be performing an all-Schubert program at the Mosque Theatre in Newark the Saturday after next, and so he asked Rhonda if she would like to go with him, not just because he thought she would enjoy the concert but because it had been two months since he had last seen Amy and he was aching for female companionship, longing to be with someone who was not a basketball player or Bobby George or odious Edward Imhoff, and of all the girls in his school, Rhonda was the one he liked best. The prospect of an early Saturday night meal at the Claremont Diner and then Schubert played by one of the world’s finest pianists struck Ferguson as something no music lover would want to turn down, but incredibly enough she did turn him down, and when Ferguson asked her why, Rhonda said:
I just can’t, Archie.
Does that mean you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?
No, there’s no boyfriend. I just can’t.
But why? If you’re not busy that night, what’s the problem?
I’d rather not say.
Come on, Rhonda, that’s not fair. This is me, remember? Your old friend Archie.
You’re smart enough to figure it out for yourself.
No, I’m not. I can’t even begin to guess what you’re talking about.
Because you’re white, that’s why. Because you’re white, and I’m black.
Is that a reason?
I think it is.
I’m not asking you to marry me. I just want to go to a concert with you.
I know, and I appreciate your asking me, but I can’t.
Please tell me it’s because you don’t like me. That I can accept.
But I do like you, Archie. You know that. I’ve always liked you.
Do you realize what you’re saying?
Of course I do.
It’s the end of the world, Rhonda.
No, it’s not. It’s the beginning—the beginning of a new world—and you just have to accept it.
Whether it was the end of the world or the beginning of the world, Ferguson would never bring himself to accept it, and he walked away from that conversation feeling both sucker-punched and angry, appalled that such a conversation could still have been possible one hundred years after the end of the Civil War. He wanted to talk to someone about it, to pour out the thousand reasons why he was so upset by what had happened, but the only person he had ever been able to open up to about such things was Amy, and Amy was the one person he couldn’t talk to now, and as for his friends at school, there was no one he trusted deeply enough to confide in anymore, and even Bobby, who still rode to school with him every morning and continued to regard himself as Ferguson’s staunchest pal, wouldn’t have had much to contribute to a discussion of that sort, and besides, Bobby was having problems of his own just then, love problems of the most devastating adolescent variety, an unrequited crush on Margaret O’Mara, who herself had had a crush on Ferguson for the past six years, which was now causing no end of trouble and consternation for Ferguson, since immediately after his post-Thanksgiving talk with Amy he had toyed with the idea of asking Margaret out on a date, not that he had any burning desire to become entangled with Margaret, who was a dull, friendly girl with an uncommonly attractive face, but after Amy had declared her interest in kissing other boys Ferguson had wondered, not without some bitterness, whether he shouldn’t respond by going out to look for other girls to kiss, and Margaret O’Mara was a prime candidate because he felt almost certain she would want to be kissed by him, but then, just as he was preparing himself to call her, Bobby had confessed how enamored he was of the same Margaret O’Mara, who was the first monumental love of his life, but she seemed to have no interest in him, she barely even listened when he talked to her, and would Ferguson kindly intercede on his behalf and explain to Margaret what a good and worthy fellow he was (shades of Cyrano de Bergerac, a film that Ferguson and Margaret had seen together in their tenth-grade French class), and so when Ferguson went to Margaret and tried to put in a word for Bobby (instead of asking her out himself), she laughed at him and called him Cyrano. The laugh was the end of it—resulting in a double washout, failure on both fronts. Bobby was still pining for her, and even though Margaret would have leapt at the chance to go out with Ferguson, Ferguson had resolved not to ask her out because he couldn’t do that to his friend. Which led to no dates with anyone for the next two months, and then, when he did ask someone out, it was Rhonda Williams, who politely kicked him in the face and taught him that the America he wanted to live in didn’t exist—and probably never would.
Under different circumstances, he might have gone to his mother and talked out his frustrations with her, but he was feeling too old for that now, and he didn’t want to depress her with a long emotional rant about the bleak future he envisioned for the Republic. His parents’ future was already bleak enough, and with income dwindling from both Roseland Photo and Stanley’s TV & Radio, and with the supplemental fifteen thousand all but exhausted now, drastic changes were imminent, it was only a matter of time before the family would have to rethink how it lived and worked and perhaps even where it lived and where it worked. Ferguson felt especially sorry for his father, whose small retail business could no longer compete with the large discount stores that were popping up in towns such as Livingston, West Orange, and Short Hills, and why would anyone want to buy a television from Ferguson’s father when the same set could be found for forty percent less at E. J. Korvette’s just a few miles away? When Mike Antonelli was let go in the second week of January, Ferguson understood that the store was on its last legs, but still his father persisted in maintaining the old routine, arriving at nine sharp every morning to install himself at his workbench in the back room, where he continued to repair broken toasters and badly functioning vacuum cleaners, more and more reminding Ferguson of old Dr. Manette from A Tale of Two Cities, the half-deranged prisoner of the Bastille who sat at the bench in his cell cobbling shoes, year after year cobbling shoes, year after ye
ar fixing damaged household appliances, and more and more Ferguson came to acknowledge the incontestable fact that his father had never fully recovered from Arnold’s betrayal, that his faith in the family had been destroyed, and then, in the ruins of his crumbled certainties, the one person in the family he still loved had crashed her car into a tree and maimed his son for life, and even though he never talked about the accident, both Ferguson and his mother knew that he rarely stopped thinking about it.
The fortunes of Roseland Photo were also sinking, not as quickly as those of Stanley’s TV & Radio, perhaps, but Ferguson’s mother knew the days of studio photography were nearly done, and for some time she had been reducing the number of hours she kept the studio open, from five ten-hour days in 1953 to five eight-hour days in 1956 to four eight-hour days in 1959 to four six-hour days in 1961 to three six-hour days in 1962 to three four-hour days in 1963, devoting more and more of her energies to photo work for Imhoff at the Montclair Times, where she had been put on salary as the paper’s chief photographer, but then her book of Garden State notables was published in February 1965, and within two months the book had landed in the waiting rooms of most doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, lawyers’ offices, and municipal offices around the state, and Rose Ferguson was no longer an invisible no one but a recognizable someone, and on the strength of her success with the book, she decided to go to the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger (whose picture was in the book) and ask for a job as a staff photographer, for even though Ferguson’s mother was forty-three by then (too old, perhaps?), to most people she looked six or eight years younger than that, and as the editor scanned the contents of her voluminous portfolio and remembered the flattering portrait she had taken of him, which was hanging on a wall in his den at home, he suddenly reached out and shook her hand, for the fact was that they did have an opening, and Rose Ferguson was just as qualified to fill that slot as anyone else. The salary wasn’t much, more or less the same amount she had managed to cobble together with studio portraits and her work with Imhoff in an average year, which would neither hurt nor help the family’s overall financial situation, but then Ferguson’s father came up with the bright idea of shutting down Stanley’s TV & Radio, which had been running in the red for the past three years, and a negative was turned into a positive, which became slightly more positive when Sam Brownstein talked him into accepting a job at his sporting goods store in Newark (or, as Ferguson’s father put it, in one of his rare moments of levity, trading in air conditioners for catcher’s gloves), and thus, in the spring of 1965, both Roseland Photo and Stanley’s TV & Radio closed their doors for good, and with Ferguson about to go off to college in the fall, his parents said it was time to start thinking about selling the house and renting a smaller place closer to their new jobs, which would free up more than enough money to cover Ferguson’s college expenses, since for some reason Ferguson’s father was opposed to the idea of asking for a scholarship (stupid pride or proud stupidity?) or reducing the burden by taking part in a work-study program, because, as his father explained, he didn’t want his boy to work while he studied but to work at his studies, and when Ferguson protested that his father was being absurd, his mother walked over to his father, kissed him on the cheek, and said: No, Archie, you’re the one who’s absurd.