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: