Maybe so, Ferguson said. But a jock with the heart of a puke. And also, perhaps—I’m just guessing here—the mind of a grind.
The heavenly coffee was set down before them on the counter, and just as Ferguson was about to take his first sip, a young man walked in and smiled at Amy, a medium-sized young man with long rumpled hair who was unquestionably one of the pukes, a fellow member of the tribe Ferguson now seemed to belong to, since length of hair (according to Amy) was one of the factors that distinguished pukes from jocks and grinds, the least important factor in a list that included leftward political inclinations (anti-war, pro–civil rights), belief in art and literature, and suspicion of all forms of institutional authority.
Good, Amy said. There’s Les. I knew he would come.
Les was a junior named Les Gottesman, a casual friend of Amy’s, no more than a dim acquaintance, in fact, but everyone on both sides of Broadway knew who Amy Schneiderman was, and Les had agreed to show up at Chock Full o’Nuts that afternoon as Amy’s welcoming gift to Ferguson on his first day of college because he, Les Gottesman, was the author of the line that had so amused and exhilarated Ferguson on his visit to the campus six months earlier: A steady fuck is good for you.
Oh that, Les said, as Ferguson hopped off his stool and shook the poet’s hand. I guess it seemed funny at the time.
It’s still funny, Ferguson said. And vulgar and offensive, too, at least to some people, probably to most people, but also an undeniable statement of fact.
Les smiled modestly, looked back and forth between Amy and Ferguson a couple of times and then said: Amy tells me you write poems. You might want to show some of them to the Columbia Review. Come around and knock one day. Ferris Booth Hall, third floor. It’s the office with all the people shouting in it.
* * *
ON OCTOBER SIXTEENTH, Ferguson and Amy took part in their first anti-war demonstration, a march organized by the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee that attracted tens of thousands of people ranging from Maoist student activists to Orthodox Jewish rabbis, the largest crowd either one of them had ever been in outside of a baseball or football stadium, and on that bright Saturday afternoon in early fall, under the perfect blue skies of a perfect New York day, as the marchers headed down Fifth Avenue and then turned east toward U.N. Plaza, some of them singing, some of them chanting, most of them walking in silence, which was how Ferguson and Amy chose to go about it, holding hands and walking side by side in silence, throngs of non-marchers sat on the low perimeter wall of Central Park applauding or shouting out encouragement, while another faction, the pro-war faction, the ones Ferguson eventually came to think of as the anti-anti-war people, shouted insults and abuse, and in several instances threw eggs at the marchers, or ran into the crowd and punched them, or doused them with red paint.
Two weeks later, the pro and anti-anti forces staged their own march in New York City on what they called Support America’s Vietnam Effort Day as twenty-five thousand people walked past a contingent of elected officials who cheered them on from elevated viewing stands. Few Americans were willing to concede the errors of their government’s war at that point, but with one hundred and eighty thousand U.S. combat troops now posted in Vietnam and the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder in its eighth month, with American units on the offensive and G.I. death counts coming in from battles at Chu Lai and Ia Drang, the swift and inevitable victory that Johnson, McNamara, and Westmoreland had all promised the American public seemed less and less certain. In late August, Congress had passed a law fixing a penalty of five years in prison and up to ten thousand dollars in fines for anyone convicted of destroying Selective Service documents. Nevertheless, young men continued to burn their draft cards in public protests as the Resist the Draft movement expanded across the country. One day before Ferguson and Amy marched down Fifth Avenue, three hundred people had gathered in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall Street to watch twenty-two-year-old David Miller put a match to his draft card in the first open defiance of the new federal law. Four other young men attempted to do the same thing at Foley Square on October twenty-eighth and were engulfed by a mob of hecklers and police. The following week, when five others were about to burn their draft cards during a demonstration at Union Square, a young anti-anti jumped out from the crowd and sprayed them with a fire extinguisher, and once the five drenched boys managed to ignite their sodden cards, hundreds of people standing behind the police barricades shouted, “Give us joy, bomb Hanoi!”
They also shouted, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!,” an ugly reference to the anti-war Quaker pacifist who had burned himself to death four days earlier on the grounds of the Pentagon. After reading an account by a French Catholic priest who had seen his Vietnamese parishioners burned up in napalm, thirty-one-year-old Norman Morrison, the father of three young children, drove from his house in Baltimore to Washington, D.C., sat down not fifty yards from the window of Robert McNamara’s office, poured kerosene over his body, and immolated himself as a silent protest against the war. Witnesses said the flames rose ten feet into the air, an eruption of fire equal in force to that caused by napalm when dropped from a plane.
Burn yourselves, not your cards.
Amy had been right. The small, almost invisible disturbance called “Vietnam” had grown into a conflict bigger than Korea, bigger than anything since World War Two, and day by day it was continuing to grow, every hour more troops were being sent to that remote, impoverished country on the other side of the world to fight the menace of communism by preventing the North from conquering the South, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand young men from Ferguson’s generation shipped off to jungles and villages no one had ever heard of or could locate on a map, and unlike Korea and World War II, which had been fought in places thousands of miles from American ground, this war was being fought both in Vietnam and at home. The arguments against military intervention were so clear to Ferguson, so persuasive in their logic, so self-evident after a thorough scrutiny of the facts that it was difficult for him to understand how anyone could support the war, but millions did, many more millions at that point than the millions who opposed it, and in the eyes of the pro and anti-anti forces, anyone who objected to the policies of his government was an agent of the enemy, an American who had given up the right to call himself an American. Every time they saw another dissenter risk five years in prison by burning his draft card, they yelled out traitor and commie scum, whereas Ferguson looked up to those boys and considered them to be among the bravest, most principled Americans in the country. He was all in behind them and would march against the war until the last soldier came home, but he could never be one of them, never stand next to them because of the missing thumb on his left hand, which had already spared him from the threat his fellow students would be facing once they finished college and were called up for their physicals. Defying the draft was not a job for the maimed or the handicapped but for the fit, the ones who would qualify as good soldier material, and why risk going to prison on the strength of a meaningless gesture? It was a lonely spot to be in, he often felt, as if he were an exile who had been exiled even from the exiles, and consequently there was a sense of shame attached to being who he was, but like it or not the car crash had exempted him from the future battle of whether to resist or abscond, he alone among his acquaintances did not have to live in fear of the next step, and surely that helped him stay on his feet during a time when so many others lost their balance and fell, for the country had already split in two by September and October 1965, and from that point on it was impossible to say the word America without also thinking of the word madness.
We had to destroy the village in order to save it.
Then, on November ninth, one week after Norman Morrison’s suicide on the grounds of the Pentagon, roughly six weeks into Ferguson’s first semester at Columbia, when he was still feeling his way forward and not yet sure whether college was all it had
been cracked up to be, the lights went out in New York. It was 5:27 P.M., and within thirteen minutes an area covering eighty thousand square miles of the northeastern United States had lost electrical power, leaving more than thirty million people in the dark, among them eight hundred thousand New York City subway riders on their way home from work. Unlucky Ferguson, who seemed to have perfected the art of being in the wrong place at the wrong time by then, was alone inside an elevator traveling upward toward the tenth floor of Carman Hall. He had gone back to his dormitory to drop off some books and change into a heavier jacket, but he hadn’t been planning to spend more than one minute in his room, since he and Amy were supposed to begin cooking their spaghetti dinner in her apartment at six o’clock, after which he would be reading a history paper she had finished that afternoon, fifteen pages on the 1866 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, an editorial service he provided each time she wrote a paper because it always made her feel better, she said, if he looked over her work before she handed it in. Then they were going to sit on the sofa in the living room together for a couple of hours catching up on their assignments for tomorrow’s classes (Thucydides for Ferguson, John Stuart Mill for Amy), and after that, if they were in the mood, they would walk up Broadway to the West End Bar for a beer or two, perhaps talk to some of their friends if any of them happened to be there, and once they had had enough of sitting in the bar, they would go back to the apartment for another night in Amy’s small but deliciously comfortable bed.
He was never quite sure which happened first, the sudden halt of the elevator or the extinguishing of the lights, or whether the two events occurred at the same time, the brief sputtering of the fluorescent bulbs overhead and the violent lurch of the elevator car all around him, a hiss followed by a bang, a bang followed by a hiss, or a hiss and a bang together, but however it happened it happened fast, and within two seconds the lights had gone out and the elevator had stopped moving. Ferguson was stuck somewhere between the sixth and seventh floors, and there he would remain for the next thirteen and a half hours, alone in the dark with nothing to do but examine the thoughts in his head and hope the lights would come back on before his bladder failed him.
Right from the start, he understood that it wasn’t just his problem but everyone’s problem. People were shouting throughout the building—Blackout! Blackout!—and as far as Ferguson could tell, there was no panic in their voices, if anything the tone was exuberant and celebratory, an outrush of wild laughter was rising up through the elevator shaft and resounding against the walls of the car, the boring old routines had lost their purpose, something new and unexpected had fallen from the sky, a black comet was streaking across the city, and let’s have a party and whoop it up! That was good, Ferguson thought, and the longer the merriment went on, the more it would help him from panicking himself, for if no one else was afraid, why should he be afraid?—even though he was trapped inside a metal box and could see no more than the blindest blind man on a starless winter night at the North Pole, even though he felt as if he had been locked up in a coffin and might starve to death before he managed to crawl out.
Within two or three minutes, some of the more conscientious students started banging on the elevator doors and asking if anyone was inside. Yes! several voices answered, and Ferguson discovered he wasn’t the only unfortunate who had been stranded in midair, that both elevators were in fact occupied, but the other box had half a dozen people in it whereas Ferguson was alone, not only imprisoned as the others were but cast into solitary confinement, and when he yelled out his name and room number (1014B), a voice called back: Archie! You poor sucker! To which Ferguson replied: Tim! How long is it going to last? Tim’s answer was less than encouraging: Who the hell knows?
There was nothing to be done. He would have to sit there and wait it out, the bumbling Mr. Mishap who had been on his way to his girlfriend’s apartment when he was accidentally turned into Experiment Number 001, now confined to a sensory-deprivation tank suspended six and a half floors above ground, the Harry Houdini of the Ivy League, the Robinson Crusoe of New York City and the greater metropolitan area, and if it hadn’t felt so awful to be sealed up in that pitch-black cell, he would have laughed at himself and taken a bow for being the world’s number one comic dunce, the number one cosmic dunce.
He would have to pee in his pants, he decided. If and when it became necessary to empty his bladder, he would have to revert to the self-sopping practices of early toddlerhood rather than inundate the floor and find himself—for the next however many hours—sitting in a puddle of cold, sloshing urine.
No cigarettes, and no matches either. Smoking would have helped pass the time, and the matches would have allowed him to see something every now and then, not to speak of the glowing tips of the cigarettes each time he inhaled, but he had run out of both cigarettes and matches earlier that afternoon and had been intending to buy a new pack on his way down to dinner at Schneiderman’s Spaghetti House on West 111th Street. Dream on, funny man.
It was impossible to know if the telephones were still working, but on the off chance they were, he called out to Tim again, wanting to ask his roommate to contact Amy and tell her what had happened to him so she wouldn’t worry when he failed to show up at six, but Tim wasn’t there anymore, and when Ferguson called out this time, no one answered. The whoops and laughter had quieted down in the past few minutes, the crowds in the hallways had largely dispersed, and no doubt Tim had gone upstairs to smoke pot with his pothead friends on the tenth floor.
So dark in there, so disconnected from everything, so outside the world or what Ferguson had always imagined to be the world that it was slowly becoming possible to ask himself if he was still inside his own body.
He thought about the wristwatch his parents had given him for his sixth birthday, a small child’s watch with a flexible metallic band and numbers on the face that glowed in the dark. How comforting those green illuminated numbers had been to him as he lay in bed before sleep closed his eyes and pulled him under, little phosphorescent companions who disappeared in the morning when the sun came up, friends by night but mere painted numerals by day, and now that he no longer wore a watch, he wondered what had happened to that long-ago birthday present and where it could have gone to. Nothing to see anymore, and no sense of time anymore either, no way of knowing if he had been in the elevator for twenty or thirty minutes, or forty minutes, or an hour.
Gauloises. Those were the cigarettes he had been planning to buy on his walk down Broadway, the brand that he and Amy had started smoking during their trip to France in the summer, the overstrong, brown-tobacco fat boys in the pale blue packages with no cellophane around them, the cheapest of all French cigarettes, and merely to light up a Gauloise in America now was to return to the days and nights they had spent in that other world, the smells of the rough, cigar-like smoke were so different from the blond-tobacco smells of Camels and Luckys and Chesterfields that one puff, one exhale could send them back to chambre dix-huit in their little hotel across from the market, and suddenly their minds would be traveling through the Paris streets again as they relived the happiness they had felt there together, cigarettes as a sign of that happiness, of the new and bigger love that had taken hold of them during their month abroad and could express itself now by such acts as conjuring up surprise meetings with bawdy undergraduate poets as a gift to the newest member of the Morningside Heights Puke Battalion, blessed Amy and her talent for the unpredictable gesture, her lightning-fast improvisations, her resourceful, generous heart.
Ferguson had been tempted to take Les up on his offer and submit some of his work to the Columbia Review, but a month and a half had gone by since then, and he still hadn’t come around and knocked. Not that he would have given Les any of his recent poems, which had all been disappointments to him and didn’t deserve to be published, but the translations he had started doing in Paris had become a more serious enterprise by now, and after investing in several dictionaries that had helped improve
his less than perfect French (Le Petit Robert, Le Petit Larousse Illustré, and the indispensable French-to-English Harrap’s), he was no longer misreading lines and making idiotic blunders, and bit by bit his versions of Apollinaire and Desnos were beginning to sound like English poems rather than French poems that had been shoved through a linguistic meat grinder and rendered into Fringlish, but they weren’t quite ready yet, there was still work to be done in order to make them right, and he didn’t want to knock on the door until he felt good about every word in every line of those lyric glories, which he admired too deeply not to give them everything he had, again and again everything he had. It wasn’t clear that the magazine would want to publish translations, but it would be worth making the effort to find out, since the Review had attracted some of the most interesting freshmen he had met so far, and by becoming part of it himself Ferguson would be able to join forces with poets and prose writers such as David Zimmer, Daniel Quinn, Jim Freeman, Adam Walker, and Peter Aaron, all of whom were in various classes with him, and he had seen enough of them in the past six weeks to know how intelligent and well-read they were, beginning writers who seemed to have the stuff to go on and become real poets and novelists one day, and not only were they smart, ferociously gifted first-year pukes, but each one of them had made it through Freshman Orientation Week without ever putting on his beanie.
No more poems for Ferguson, not for now in any case, and even if the adventure started up again sometime in the future, for the moment he had no choice but to think of himself as a poet in remission. The illness he had contracted in his mid-teens had led to a two-year-long fever that had produced close to a hundred poems, but then Francie had cracked up the car in Vermont, and suddenly the poems had stopped coming, for reasons he still couldn’t understand he had felt cautious and afraid since then, and the few poems he had managed to write had not been good, or not good enough, by no means ever good enough. The prose of journalism had rescued him from the impasse, but a part of him missed the slowness of poetic labor, the feeling of shoveling down into the earth and tasting the earth in his mouth, and therefore he had followed Pound’s advice to young poets and taken a stab at translation. At first, he had thought of it as nothing more than an exercise to keep his hand in, an activity that would bring him the pleasures of writing poetry with none of the frustrations, but now that he had been at it for a while, he understood there was much more to it than that. If you loved the poem you were translating, then taking apart that poem and putting it back together in your language was an act of devotion, a way of serving the master who had given you the beautiful thing you held in your hands, and the great master Apollinaire and the little master Desnos had written poems that Ferguson found beautiful and daring and astonishingly inventive, each one of them imbued with a spirit of melancholy and buoyancy at the same time, a rare combination that somehow joined the contradictory impulses at war in Ferguson’s eighteen-year-old heart, and so he kept at it in whatever spare time he could create for himself, reworking, rethinking, and refining his translations until they would be solid enough for him to come knocking on the door.