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The door was the door of 303 Ferris Booth Hall, the student activities center located flush against his dormitory building at the southwestern edge of the campus, the building he was trapped in now, and assuming he didn’t lose his mind in the blackness first, he would have to write about this experience if he ever managed to get out of it, write some witty and provocative first-person article that the Columbia Daily Spectator would run because he was a member of the staff now, one of the forty undergraduates who worked on the student paper with no interference from the university administration or faculty censors, for even though he still hadn’t found the courage to knock on the door of Room 303, he had walked into the larger office at the other end of the hall on the second day of Freshman Orientation Week, Room 318, and had told the person in charge that he wanted to join up. That was all there was to it. No trial period, no test articles, no need to show them the stories he had written for the Montclair Times—just go out and do it, and if you met your deadlines and proved you were a competent reporter, you were in. Auf wiedersehen, Herr Imhoff!
The possible beats for freshmen were Academic Affairs, Student Activities, Sports, and coverage of the surrounding community, and when Ferguson had said, No sports, please, anything but sports, they had given him Student Activities, which entailed filing two stories per week on average, most of them short, barely half the length of the pieces he had written on high school basketball and baseball games last year. His contributions so far had touched on a number of political issues involving both left-wing and right-wing causes, the May 2 Committee’s plan to organize an anti-draft union on campus to fight against what they called “an unjust war of repression,” but also an article about a band of Republican students who had decided to back William F. Buckley’s candidacy for mayor because the current mayor, John Lindsay, had “drifted away from the principles of the Republican Party.” Other articles, which Ferguson called lightweight stuff and trivial fluff, had involved him in some parochial university matters, such as the thirteen freshmen who were still without dormitory rooms three weeks after the start of the semester, or the contest to name the new “café” in John Jay Hall, which was now offering “vending machine delicacies in a Horn & Hardart–style cafeteria,” a competition sponsored by the University Food Services that would reward the winner with a free meal for two at any restaurant in New York City. Now, in the days just before the blackout, Ferguson had been working on a story about a Barnard freshman who was facing suspension for having a male guest in her room at an unlawful hour, since the current policy allowed visits from men only on Sunday afternoons between two and five o’clock, and the accused’s guest had been with her at one in the morning. The girl, whose name was protected and could not be mentioned in the article, felt the punishment was unfair “because others do it and I was just the one who got caught.” No wonder Amy had lied and cheated to scam her way out of living in one of those dormitory-prisons when she was a freshman. Reporter A. I. Ferguson wrote the story as a straight news article, as he was obliged to do, but fellow first-year student Archie Ferguson wished he could have defended the girl by quoting the refrain from Les Gottesman’s poem in the first sentence of his article.
Let the facts speak for themselves.
Newspaper work was both an engagement with the world and a retreat from the world. If Ferguson meant to do his job well, then he would have to accept both elements of the paradox and learn to live in a state of doubleness: the demand to plunge into the thick of things and yet remain on the sidelines as a neutral observer. The plunge never failed to excite him—whether it was the high-speed plunge of writing about a basketball game or the slower, deeper excavations required to investigate outmoded parietal rules at a women’s college—but the holding back was a potential problem, he felt, or at least something he would have to adjust to over the months and years ahead, for taking the journalist’s vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass monastery—removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to whirl around you on all sides. To be a journalist meant you could never be the person who tossed the brick through the window that started the revolution. You could watch the man toss the brick, you could try to understand why he had tossed the brick, you could explain to others what significance the brick had in starting the revolution, but you yourself could never toss the brick or even stand in the mob that was urging the man to throw it. Temperamentally, Ferguson was not someone inclined to throw bricks. He was, he hoped, a more or less reasonable person, but the agitations of the times were such that the reasons for not throwing bricks were beginning to look less and less reasonable, and when the moment finally came to throw the first one, Ferguson’s sympathies would be with the brick and not the window.
His mind drifted off for a while, bogged down in the netherness of the infinite dark around him, and once he emerged from the mental fugue, he found himself thinking about the last lines of his translation of a short poem by Desnos:
Somewhere in the world
At the foot of a mountain
A deserter is talking to sentinels
Who do not understand his language.
Then, after four hours of captivity in the black box, his bladder finally gave out on him and he wet his pants in the same way he had done as a guiltless, smiling little chap in diapers. What a disgusting thing to do, he said to himself, as the warm liquid coursed through his underpants and corduroy trousers—but also, at the same time, how much better to be empty rather than full.
He remembered peeing with Bobby George one afternoon in the Georges’ backyard when they were five years old and Bobby turning to him and asking: Archie, where does it all go? Millions of people and millions of animals peeing for millions of years, why aren’t the oceans and rivers made of pee instead of water?
It was a question Ferguson had never been able to answer.
His old childhood friend had signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles the day after he graduated from high school, and in the last article Ferguson ever wrote for the Montclair Times he had reported on the forty-thousand-dollar bonus that came with the contract along with Bobby’s imminent departure for Aberdeen, Maryland, where he would be starting at catcher for the Orioles’ short-season A-level team in the New York–Penn League. The kid had managed to put twenty-seven games under his belt that summer (and bat .291) before the draft board called him up for his physical, and with no student deferment to prevent him from serving his country now instead of four years from now, he had been inducted into the United States Army in mid-September and was currently nearing the end of his basic training at Fort Dix. Ferguson prayed that Bobby would be shipped off to a comfortable post in West Germany, where they would put him in a baseball uniform and allow him to play ball for the next two years as a way to discharge his patriotic duty, for the thought of little Bobby George tramping through the jungles of Vietnam with a rifle on his back was so repellent to Ferguson, he found the thought almost unthinkable.
How long was the war going to last?
Lorca, murdered by a fascist death squad at thirty-eight. Apollinaire, killed at the same age by the Spanish flu forty-six hours before the end of World War I. Desnos, killed at forty-four by typhus at Theresienstadt just days after the camp had been liberated.
Ferguson fell asleep and dreamed he was dreaming he was dead.
When power was restored at seven o’clock the next morning, he staggered back to his room on the tenth floor, stripped off his damp clothes, and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes.
The previous day, twenty-two-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte had sprinkled his clothes with gasoline and set himself on fire in front of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the U.N. With second- and third-degree burns over ninety-five percent of his body, he had been taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, still conscious and able to speak. His last words were: I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.
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He died not long after the blackout ended.
* * *
FRESHMAN HUMANITIES (REQUIRED). Fall Semester: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato (Symposium), Aristotle (Aesthetics), Virgil, Ovid. Spring Semester: Assorted books from the Old and New Testaments, Augustine (Confessions), Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Spinoza (Ethics), Molière, Swift, Dostoyevsky.
Freshman CC (Contemporary Civilization—required). Fall Semester: Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Politics), Augustine (City of God), Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke. Spring Semester: Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Fourier, Nietzsche, Freud.
Studies in Literature. Fall Semester (in lieu of required Freshman Composition course because of F.’s good score on A.P. exam): A seminar focused on the study of one book—Tristram Shandy.
The Modern Novel. Spring Semester: A bilingual seminar with books read alternately in English and French—Dickens, Stendhal, George Eliot, Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce.
French Poetry. Fall Semester—Nineteenth Century: Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Nerval, Musset, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Corbière, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Laforgue. Spring Semester—Twentieth Century: Péguy, Claudel, Valéry, Apollinaire, Jacob, Fargue, Larbaud, Cendrars, Perse, Reverdy, Breton, Aragon, Desnos, Ponge, Michaux.
It didn’t take long for him to decide that the best things about Columbia were the courses, the professors, and his fellow students. The reading lists were superb, the classes were small and led by tenured faculty members who took a special interest and pleasure in teaching undergraduates, and the other students were sharp, well prepared, and not afraid to speak up in class. Ferguson said little, but he absorbed everything that was discussed in those one- and two-hour sessions, feeling he had landed in a kind of intellectual paradise, and because he quickly understood that in spite of the many books he had read in the past ten or twelve years he still knew close to nothing, he diligently read all the texts that were assigned, hundreds of pages a week, sometimes more than a thousand, stumbling now and then but at least skimming the books and poems that resisted him (Middlemarch, City of God, and the dreary pomposities of Péguy, Claudel, and Perse) and at times doing more than was asked of him (plowing through all of Don Quixote when selections totaling only half the book had been assigned—but how could one not want to read all of that best and mightiest of all great books?). Two weeks into the fall semester, his parents drove in from Newark and took him out to dinner with Amy at the Green Tree, the inexpensive Hungarian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue Ferguson had grown so fond of that he’d renamed it Yum City, and when he started talking about how much he enjoyed his courses and how astounding it was that his main job in life now was to read and write about books(!), his mother told him the story of her own grand adventure during the months before he was born, confined to bed with nothing to do but read, all the excellent books that Mildred had recommended, dozens of works that Stanley had checked out of the library for her and which she still thought about today, so many of them so well remembered after so many years, and since Ferguson could not recall ever having seen her read anything except for a handful of thrillers and some books about art and photography, he was moved by the image of his young, expectant mother lying alone all day in the first Newark apartment with novels propped up against her ever-growing belly, the bulge under her skin that was none other than his own unborn self, and yes, his mother said, smiling warmly at the thought of those long-ago days, How could you not love books after all the books I read while I was pregnant with you?
Ferguson laughed.
Don’t laugh, Archie, his father said. It’s what biologists call osmosis.
Or metempsychosis, Amy said.
Ferguson’s mother looked confused. Psychosis? she said. What are we talking about?
The transmigration of souls, Ferguson explained.
But of course, his mother said. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. My soul is in your soul, Archie. And it always will be, even after my body is gone.
Don’t even think about that, Ferguson said. I’ve made special arrangements with the boys upstairs, and they’ve promised me you’re going to live forever.
Good classes, good teachers, good classmates, but not all aspects of the Columbia experience were joyful ones, and among the things Ferguson liked least about the place were its stodgy, Ivy League pretensions, its backward-looking rules and rigid protocols, its lack of interest in the welfare of its students. All power was in the hands of the administration, and with no due process or impartial investigative board to oversee matters of discipline, they could kick you out at any moment without having to explain themselves. It wasn’t that Ferguson was planning to get into trouble, but time would prove that others were, and when large numbers of them decided to make trouble in the spring of 1968, the entire institution went berserk.
More about that later.
Ferguson was pleased to be in New York, pleased to be with Amy in Amy’s New York, at last a full-time resident of the capital of the twentieth century, but even though he was already familiar with the Columbia neighborhood, or somewhat familiar with it, now that he was living there he finally began to see Morningside Heights for what it was: a wounded, disintegrating zone of poverty and desperation, block after block of worn-out buildings with most of the apartments in those buildings housing mice, rats, and cockroaches along with the people who lived in them. The dirty streets were often strewn with uncollected garbage, and half of the pedestrians walking down the streets were out of their minds, or about to lose their minds, or recovering from mental breakdowns. The neighborhood was kilometer zero for the lost souls of New York, and every day Ferguson passed a dozen men and women locked in deep, incomprehensible dialogues with invisible others, people who did not exist. The one-armed vagrant with the overstuffed shopping bag, his hunched body doubled over itself as he stared down at the sidewalk and muttered his paternosters in a small, rasping voice. The bearded midget ensconced in various doorways on the side streets off Amsterdam Avenue, reading month-old copies of the Daily Forward with the jagged shard of a broken magnifying glass. The fat woman who floated around in her pajamas. On the traffic islands in the middle of Broadway, the drunk, the elderly, and the mad crowded together on benches above the subway gratings, sitting shoulder to shoulder as each one stared off silently into the distance. New York of filth. New York of wires and death. Then there was the person everyone referred to as the Yumkee Man, the aging crackpot who stood on the corner in front of Chock Full o’Nuts every day intoning the words yawveh yumpkee, a haranguer of the old school variously known as Dr. Yumkee and Emsh, self-proclaimed son of Napoleon, self-proclaimed messiah, and true-blue American patriot who never went anywhere without carrying his American flag, which on cold days he would wrap around his shoulders and use as a shawl. And the bald, bullet-headed boy-man Bobby, who spent his days carrying out errands for the owners of Ralph’s Typewriter Shop on Broadway and 113th Street, sprinting down the sidewalk with outstretched arms pretending to be an airplane, weaving in and out of the human traffic as he made the engine noises of a B-52 in full-throttle flight. And hairless Sam Steinberg, the ever-present Sam S., who rode three different subway trains from the Bronx every morning to sell candy bars on Broadway or in front of Hamilton Hall, but also to sell his crude, Magic Marker pictures of imaginary animals for one dollar, little works done on the laundry cardboards that came with pressed shirts, calling out to anyone who would listen to him, Hey, mistah, new paintings here, beauteeful new paintings here, the most beauteeful paintings in the woild. And the great enigma of the Hotel Harmony, the crumbling hotel for down-and-out men that stood on the corner of Broadway and 110th Street, the tallest building for blocks around, and written on the brick wall in letters large enough to be read from a quarter of a mile away was the hotel’s motto, which surely qualified as the most dumbfounding oxymoron on earth: TH
E HOTEL HARMONY—WHERE LIVING IS A PLEASURE.
It was a cracked-up world up there on the upper Upper West Side, and it took some getting used to before he could harden himself to the squalor and misery of his new stomping grounds, but not all was bleakness on the Heights, young people were wandering around the streets as well, pretty girls from Barnard and Juilliard often figured in the landscape, fluttering past him like optical illusions or spirits from dreams, there were bookstores to browse in on Broadway between 114th and 116th Streets, even a basement store for foreign books around the corner and down the stairs on 115th Street, where Ferguson could spend the odd half hour rummaging through the French poetry section, the Thalia and the New Yorker showed the best old and new movies just twenty and twenty-five blocks to the south, Edith Piaf was on the jukebox of a greasy-spoon diner called the College Inn, where he could stuff himself with cheap breakfasts and talk to the blowsy, bleached-blond waitress who called him honey, Chock Full o’Nuts for ten-minute coffee breaks, life-sustaining hamburgers at Prexy’s (The Hamburger with a College Education), ropa vieja and espresso at the Ideal (Ee-day-al), the Cuban-Chinese place on Broadway between 108th and 109th Streets, and goulash and dumplings at Yum City, the restaurant he and Amy went to so often for dinner that the plump husband-and-wife owners began offering them free desserts, but the central point of refuge in that cracked-up neighborhood was the West End Bar and Grill, situated on Broadway between 113th and 114th Streets, with its immense oval bar of smoothly polished oak, the booths for four or six along the northern and eastern walls, and the large, movable chairs and tables in the back room. Amy had already introduced him to the West End the previous year, but now that Ferguson was a year-round resident himself, that ancient, dimly lit watering hole soon became his principal hangout, his study hall by day and meeting place by night, his second home.