He had to choose. That was a problem because he had no idea which one of the six would be the best love-maker for an unpracticed boy-girl virgin whose sexual history so far had been confined to one male partner, and he had to choose quickly because it made him feel uncomfortable to be sizing up those women as if they were packages of fuck-meat without brains or souls, and therefore Ferguson eliminated the four partially dressed ones and narrowed it down to a choice between the two all-naked ones, figuring there would be no surprises that way when the action began, and suddenly it wasn’t difficult at all, since one of the two was a chubby, large-breasted Puerto Rican woman well past thirty and the other was a good-looking black girl who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Ferguson — a slender, small-breasted sprite with short hair and a long neck and what looked to be remarkably smooth skin, skin that promised to feel better than any skin his hands had ever touched.
Her name was Julie.
He had already paid his twenty-five dollars to the rotund, chain-smoking Mrs. M. (no discounts for youthful beginners), and because Terry had loudly and crudely announced that Ferguson’s dick had never seen the inside of a pussy, there was no point in pretending he had been down this road before, the road in this case being a narrow hallway that led to a cramped, windowless room with a bed, a sink, and a chair in it, and as Ferguson walked down that corridor behind the young Julie’s sweet, swaying behind, the bulge in his pants was steadily growing, so much so that when they entered the room and Julie instructed him to take off his clothes, she looked down at his cock and said, You sure get hard fast, don’t you, kid? which pleased Ferguson immensely, knowing that he was virile enough to produce more rapid hard-ons than most of her adult customers, and suddenly he felt happy, not at all nervous or afraid, even if he didn’t fully understand the ground rules of the encounter, as when he tried to kiss her on the lips and she jerked her head away, saying, We don’t do that, honey — gotta save that stuff for your girlfriend, but she didn’t mind it when he put his hands on her little breasts or kissed her on the shoulder, and how good it felt when she washed his dick with soap and warm water at the sink, and how much better it felt when he agreed to something called half-and-half without knowing what it was (fellatio + copulation) and they lay down on the bed together and the first half of half-and-half proved to be so pleasurable that he was afraid he wouldn’t make it to the second half, but somehow he did, and that was the best part of the whole adventure, the long-hoped-for, long-dreamed-of, long-delayed entrance into another person’s body, the act of coupling, and so powerful were the sensations of being inside her that Ferguson couldn’t hold back anymore and came almost immediately — so fast that he regretted his lack of control, regretted that he hadn’t been able to put off the climax by even a few seconds.
Can we do it again? he asked.
Julie burst out laughing — a great gut yawp of hilarity that bounced around the walls of the tiny room. Then she said: You come, you’re done, funny man — unless you have another twenty-five dollars.
I barely have twenty-five cents, Ferguson said.
Julie laughed again. I like you, Archie, she said. You’re a good-looking boy with a pretty pecker.
And I think you’re the most beautiful girl in New York.
The skinniest, you mean.
No, the most beautiful.
Julie sat up and kissed Ferguson on the forehead. Come back and see me sometime, she said. You know the address, and that loudmouthed friend of yours has the telephone number. Call first to make an appointment. You wouldn’t want to show up when I’m not here, would you?
No, ma’am. Not on your life.
Sat. Making the varsity team as a sophomore was a reflection of how much Ferguson’s game had improved over the summer. The outdoor leagues had been highly competitive, the rosters crammed with poor black kids from Harlem who took their basketball seriously, who knew that being good at basketball meant starting for a high school team, which could mean playing for a college team and a chance to get out of Harlem for good, and Ferguson had worked hard to improve his outside shooting and ball handling, had put in long hours of extra practice with one of the eager kids from Lenox Avenue named Delbert Straughan, a fellow forward on the tougher of the two teams he had played for, and now that he had grown another two inches and stood at a sturdy five-nine and a half, he had advanced from mere proficiency to something close to excellence, with such potent spring in his legs that even at his height he could dunk the ball once in every two or three tries. The problem with making the varsity as a sophomore, however, was that you were automatically relegated to the second team, which doomed you to spend the season picking up splinters as a lowly benchwarmer. Ferguson understood the importance of hierarchies and would have been content with his subordinate role if he hadn’t felt that he was a better player than the first-string small forward, a senior by the name of Duncan Nyles, sometimes referred to as No-Dunk Nyles — for, as it happened, he wasn’t only just a little better than Nyles, he was a lot better. If Ferguson had been the only one who felt that way, it wouldn’t have rankled so much, but nearly all the players shared his opinion, none more vociferously than the other proletarian scrubs, among them his old friends from last year’s freshman team, Alex Nordstrom and Brian Mischevski, who were positively disgusted by the coach’s decision to put Ferguson on the bench and kept reminding him of how unfairly he was being treated, since the evidence was there for everyone to see: Whenever the first team and the second team squared off in practice scrimmages, Ferguson consistently outshot, outhustled, and out-rebounded No-Dunk Nyles.
The coach was a perplexing person — half genius and half idiot — and Ferguson never quite managed to figure out where he stood with him. A former backcourt star for St. Francis College in Brooklyn, one of the smallest schools on the metro region’s Catholic circuit, Horace “Happy” Finnegan knew the game thoroughly and taught it well, but in all other respects his brain seemed to have atrophied into a gummy mass of melted thought wires and burned out language tubes. Pair up in threes, he would say to the boys at practice, or Make a circle, men, three hundred and sixty-five degrees, and beyond the incessant malapropisms there were the questions the boys would ask just for the pleasure of seeing him scratch his head, such as, Hey, Coach, do you walk to school or carry your lunch? or Is it hotter in the city or the summer?, nonsensical beauties that never failed to elicit the desired scratch, the desired shrug, the desired You got me, kid. On the other hand, Happy Finnegan was a perfectionist when it came to the finer points of basketball, and Ferguson marveled at how he seethed with indignation whenever a player missed a free throw (the one gimme in the whole damn game) or saw a player drop a neatly fired pass (Keep your eyes open, fucker, or I’ll yank you off the court). He demanded efficient and intelligent play, and even though everyone laughed at him behind his back, the team won most of its games, consistently performing above and beyond its meager talents. Still, Nordstrom and Mischevski kept urging their friend to go in for a private meeting with the coach, not that it would necessarily change anything, they said, but they wanted to know why he insisted on starting the wrong man at small forward. Yes, the team was winning most of its games, but didn’t Finnegan want to win every game?