So there was Ferguson after Amy flew off to Madison, Wisconsin, a senior in high school with his whole life in front of him, as he was informed by his teachers, his relatives, and every adult he crossed paths with, but he had just lost the love of his life, and the word future had been erased from every dictionary in the world. Almost inevitably, his thoughts turned to Julie again. It wasn’t love, of course, but at least it was sex, and sex without love was better than no sex at all, particularly when no books would have to be stolen in order to pay for it. Most of his birthday money was gone by then. He had spent it on lingerie and perfume and linguine dinners with Amy in the spring, but he still had thirty-eight dollars left over, which was more than enough for another tumble in the apartment on West Eighty-second Street. Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart.
He called Mrs. M., hoping to schedule a Friday afternoon appointment with Julie, and though Mrs. M. had some trouble remembering who he was (it had been months since his last visit), he reminded her that he was the kid who had been sitting around in the living room talking to the girls when that cop walked in to collect his weekly envelope and shooed him out of the place. Yeah, yeah, Mrs. M. said. I remember you now. Charlie Schoolboy. That’s what we used to call you.
And what about Julie? Ferguson asked. Can I see her on Friday?
Julie ain’t here, Mrs. M. said.
Where is she?
Don’t know. Word is she’s on smack, honey. I doubt we’ll be seeing her again.
That’s terrible.
Yeah, it’s terrible, but what can we do about it? There’s another black girl here now. Much prettier than Julie. More flesh on her bones, more personality. Cynthia, that’s her name. Want me to pencil you in?
Black girl—what’s that got to do with it?
I thought you went for black girls.
I go for all girls. I just happened to like Julie.
Well, if you go for all girls, there’s no problem, is there? The stable’s full these days.
Let me think about it, Ferguson said. I’ll call you back.
He hung up the phone, and for the next thirty or forty seconds he repeated the word terrible to himself thirty or forty times, struggling not to imagine Julie’s limp body as she nodded out somewhere in a drugged-up haze, hoping Mrs. M.’s information was wrong and that Julie wasn’t working there anymore because she had graduated from City College with honors in philosophy and was studying for her doctorate at Harvard, and then his eyes teared up for a moment as an image formed in his mind: Julie lying dead on a bare mattress, naked and stiff in a dingy room at the Auberge Saint Hell.
A week later, he was ready to give it a shot with Cynthia or anyone else at Mrs. M.’s establishment who had two arms, two legs, and something that resembled a woman’s body. Unfortunately, he had spent the last of his birthday money on a record-buying spree at Sam Goody’s and had to resort to less than savory means of acquiring the money, so on a warm Friday afternoon in early October, one day before his rescheduled appointment to take the SATs, he donned his thief’s gear of woolen overcoat and multipocketed winter jacket and entered a bookstore across from the Columbia campus called Book World, which sounded so much like the burned-down business that had once been Home World that at first he hesitated to go in, but in he went despite his qualms, and as he stood by the paperback fiction section along the southern wall of the store, slipping novels by Dickens and Dostoyevsky into his pockets, he felt a hand come crashing down on his shoulder from behind, and then a voice was roaring in his ear, I’ve got you, fucker—don’t move!, and just like that Ferguson’s book-stealing operation came to a sorry, idiotic end, for what person in his right mind would wear a woolen overcoat on a day when the temperature was sixty-two degrees outside?
They slammed down hard on him and gave him the works. The book-stealing epidemic that had spread across the city was driving many booksellers to the verge of ruin, and the law needed to make an example of someone, and since the owner of Book World was fed up and enraged by what had been happening to his business, he called the cops and told them he wanted to press charges. Never mind that there were only two slender books in Ferguson’s pockets—Oliver Twist and Notes from Underground—the boy was a thief and had to be punished. The stunned and mortified Ferguson was therefore handcuffed, arrested, and driven in a squad car to the local precinct house, where he was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed from three angles as he held up a little board with his name on it. Then they put him in a holding cell with a pimp, a drug dealer, and a man who had stabbed his wife, and for the next three hours Ferguson sat there waiting for one of the cops to come back and fetch him so he could be arraigned before a judge. That judge, Samuel J. Wasserman, had the authority to dismiss the charges and send Ferguson home, but he didn’t do that because he too felt that someone needed to be made an example of, and what better candidate than Ferguson, a snot-nosed rich boy from a so-called progressive private school who had broken the law for no reason other than the pure sport of it? The gavel came down. The trial was scheduled for the second week in November, and Ferguson was released without bail—on condition that he remain in the custody of his parents.
His parents. They had been called, and they were both standing in the courtroom when Wasserman set the date for the trial. His mother cried, emitting no sounds as she slowly shook her head back and forth, as if not yet able to absorb what he had done. Gil didn’t cry, but he too was shaking his head back and forth, and from the expression in his eyes, Ferguson gathered that he wanted to smack him.
Books, Gil said, as the three of them stood at the curb waiting for a taxi, what in the world were you thinking? I give you books, don’t I? I give you all the books you could possibly want. Why the hell did you have to steal them?
Ferguson couldn’t tell him about Mrs. M. and the apartment on West Eighty-second Street, couldn’t tell him about the money he was hoping to raise because he wanted to fuck a whore, couldn’t tell him about the seven times he had fucked a vanished junkie whore named Julie or about the other books he had stolen in the past, so he lied and said: It’s about this thing that’s going on with some of my friends—stealing books as a test of courage. It’s a kind of competition.
Some friends, Gil said. Some competition.
They all climbed into the backseat of the cab, and suddenly Ferguson felt everything go limp inside him, as if there were no bones left under his skin. He leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder and started to cry.
I need you to love me, Ma, he said. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t love me.
I love you, Archie, his mother said. I’ll always love you. I just don’t understand you anymore.
* * *
IN ALL THE confusion, he had forgotten about the SATs he was supposed to take in the morning—and so had his mother and Gil. Not that it mattered much, he said to himself as the days wore on, for the truth was that the idea of college had lost its attraction to him, and given how much he had always disliked school, the prospect of not going to school beyond this year was something to be taken into careful consideration.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, when word got out about Ferguson’s run-in with the authorities, the Riverside Academy took it upon itself to suspend him for a month, an action permitted under the by-laws of the code governing student conduct. He would have to keep up with his homework during that time or else risk being expelled when he returned, the headmaster said, and he would also have to find a job. What job? Ferguson asked. Bagging groceries at the Gristedes on Columbus Avenue, the headmaster said. Why there? Ferguson asked. Because one of our parents owns it, the headmaster said, and he’s willing to let you work there during your suspension. Will they pay me? Ferguson asked. Yes, they’ll pay you, the headmaster said, but you can’t keep the money. It all has to go to charity. We were thinking the American Booksellers Association might be a worthy
recipient. How does that strike you?
I’m all for it, Mr. Briggs. I think it’s an excellent idea.
* * *
THE PRESIDING JUDGE at the November trial, Rufus P. Nolan, found Ferguson guilty as charged and sentenced him to six months in a juvenile detention facility. The harshness of the verdict hung in the air for three or four seconds (seconds as long as hours, as years) and then the judge added: Sentence suspended.
Ferguson’s legal representative, a young criminal lawyer named Desmond Katz, asked that the stain of the verdict be expunged from his client’s record, but Nolan refused. He had shown remarkable leniency in suspending the sentence, he said, and the good counselor should refrain from pushing his luck. The crime revolted him. As a son of privilege, Ferguson seemed to think he was above the law and that stealing books was nothing more than a lark, whereas his wanton disrespect of private property and cruel indifference to the rights of others showed a callousness of spirit that needed to be dealt with harshly in order to ensure that his criminal tendencies would be nipped in the bud. As a first offender, he deserved another chance. But he also deserved to have this mark on his record—to make him think twice before he ever considered pulling another stunt like this one again.
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER, Amy wrote to tell him she had fallen for someone else, a certain senior classman named Rick, and that she wouldn’t be coming home to New York for the Christmas holidays because Rick had invited her to spend that time with him at his family’s place in Milwaukee. She said she was sorry to have to break such bad news to him, but something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, and how good it had been during those beautiful weeks in the spring, and how much she still loved him, and how glad she was that they would always be the best cousin-friends on earth.
She added in a postscript that she was relieved to know he wouldn’t be going to jail. Such a stupid business, she said. Everybody steals books, but you had to be the one who got caught.
* * *
FERGUSON WAS DISINTEGRATING.
He knew he had to pull himself together—or else his arms and legs would start to fall off and he would spend the rest of the year writhing on the ground like a worm.
On the Saturday after he tore up Amy’s letter and burned it in the kitchen sink, he sat through four movies in three different theaters between the hours of noon and ten—a double bill at the Thalia and one movie each at the New Yorker and the Elgin. On Sunday, he sat through four others. The eight films were so scrambled in his head that he couldn’t remember which was which anymore by the time he fell asleep on Sunday night. He decided that from then on he would jot down a one-page description of every film he saw and keep those pages in a special three-ring binder on his desk. That would be one way of holding on to his life instead of losing it. Plunging into the dark, yes, but always with a candle in his hand and a box of matches in his pocket.
In December, he published two more articles for Mr. Dunbar’s newspaper, a long one on three non-Westerns by John Ford (Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath) and a short one on Some Like It Hot, which mostly ignored the story and concentrated on the men disguised in drag and Marilyn Monroe’s half-naked body spilling out of her diaphanous dress.
The irony was that his suspension from school had not turned him into an outcast. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have elevated his standing among his male friends, who now looked upon him as a daring rebel, a tough hombre, and even the girls seemed to find him more attractive now that he had been officially transformed into a dangerous person. His interest in those girls had ended when he was fifteen, but he asked a few of them out just to see if they could stop him from thinking about Amy. They couldn’t. Not even when he took Isabel Kraft in his arms and kissed her—which suggested that it was going to take time, a long time before he was ready to start breathing again.
* * *
NO COLLEGE. THAT was his final decision, and when he told his mother and Gil that he wouldn’t be registering to take the SATs in early January, that he wouldn’t be sending out applications to Amherst or Cornell or Princeton or any of the other colleges they had been discussing for the past year, his parents looked at him as if he had just announced that he was planning to commit suicide.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Gil said. You can’t stop your education now.
I won’t be stopping it, Ferguson said. I’ll just be educating myself in a different way.
But where, Archie? his mother asked. You’re not planning to sit around this apartment for the rest of your life, are you?
Ferguson laughed. What a thought, he said. No, I wouldn’t stay here. Of course I wouldn’t stay here. I’d like to go to Paris—assuming I manage to graduate from high school, and assuming you’d be willing to give me a graduation present that would cover the price of a cheap, one-way charter ticket.
You’re forgetting the war, Gil said. The moment you’re out of high school, they’ll draft you into the army and ship you off to Vietnam.
No, they won’t, Ferguson said. They wouldn’t dare.
* * *
FOR ONCE, FERGUSON was right. Six weeks after he stumbled his way to the end of high school, having made his peace with Amy, having blessed Jim on his engagement to Nancy Hammerstein, having lived through an unexpectedly warm and comforting springtime affair with his good friend Brian Mischevski, which had convinced the now eighteen-year-old Ferguson that he was indeed someone who had been built to love both men and women and that his life would be more complicated than most other lives because of that doubleness but also perhaps richer and more invigorating as well, having written a new article for Mr. Dunbar’s paper every other week until the end of the final semester, having added close to a hundred pages to his loose-leaf three-ring binder, having worked with Gil to prepare a comprehensive reading list for his first year as a student attached to no college or university, having gone back to the Gristedes on Columbus Avenue to shake hands with his former co-workers, having gone back to Book World to apologize to the owner, George Tyler, for having stolen the books, having understood how lucky he was to have been caught and not severely punished, having vowed never to steal anything from anyone ever again, Ferguson received his Greetings letter from the United States government and was told to report to the draft board on Whitehall Street for his army physical, which needless to say he passed because he was a fit young man with no physical problems or abnormalities, but because he had a criminal record, and because he openly confessed to the staff psychiatrist that he was attracted to men as well as to women, a new draft card was issued to him later that summer with his new classification typed onto the front: 4-F.
Feckless—frazzled—fucked-up—and free.
4.4
In his three years as a high school student in the New Jersey suburbs, the sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old Ferguson started twenty-seven short stories, finished nineteen of them, and spent no less than one hour every day with what he called his work notebooks, which he filled with various writing exercises he invented for himself in order to stay sharp, dig down, and try to get better (as he once put it to Amy): descriptions of physical objects, landscapes, morning skies, human faces, animals, the effect of light on snow, the sound of rain on glass, the smell of burning wood, the sensation of walking through fog or listening to wind blow through the branches of trees; monologues in the voices of other people in order to become those other people or at least try to understand them better (his father, his mother, his stepfather, Amy, Noah, his teachers, his friends at school, Mr. and Mrs. Federman), but also unknown and more distant others such as J. S. Bach, Franz Kafka, the checkout girl at the local supermarket, the ticket collector on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, and the bearded panhandler who cadged a dollar from him in Grand Central Station; imitations of admired, demanding, inimitable writers from the past (take a paragraph from Hawthorne, for example, and compose something based on his syntactical model, using a verb whereve
r he used a verb, a noun wherever he used a noun, an adjective wherever he used an adjective—in order to feel the rhythms in your bones, to feel how the music was made); a curious sequence of vignettes generated by puns, homonyms, and one-letter displacements of words: ail/ale, lust/lost, soul/soil, birth/berth; and impetuous jags of automatic writing to clear his brain whenever he was feeling stuck, as with a four-page scribble-gush inspired by the word nomad that began: No, I am not mad. Nor am I even angry, but give me a chance to discombobulate you, and I’ll pick your pockets clean. He also wrote one one-act play, which he burned in disgust one week after finishing it, and twenty-three of the foulest stinker poems ever hatched by a citizen of the New World, which he tore up after promising himself never to write another poem again. He mostly hated what he did. He mostly thought he was stupid and talentless and would never amount to anything, but still he persisted, driving himself to keep at it every day in spite of the often disappointing results, understanding there would be no hope for him unless he kept at it, that becoming the writer he wanted to be would necessarily take years, more years than it would take for his body to finish growing, and every time he wrote something that seemed slightly less bad than the piece that had come before it, he sensed he was making progress, even if the next piece turned out to be an abomination, for the truth was that he didn’t have a choice, he was destined to do this or die, because notwithstanding his struggles and dissatisfaction with the dead things that often came out of him, the act of doing it made him feel more alive than anything else he had ever done, and when the words began to sing in his ears and he sat down at his desk and picked up his pen or put his fingers on the keys of his typewriter, he felt naked, naked and exposed to the big world rushing in on him, and nothing felt better than that, nothing could equal the sensation of disappearing from himself and entering the big world humming inside the words that were humming inside his head.