A good question, the coach said, when Ferguson finally knocked on his door in early January. A very good question, and I’m glad you asked it. Yes, any idiot can see you’re better than Nyles. You go up against each other one-on-one, and there’d be nothing left of him but an empty jockstrap and a puddle of sweat on the gym floor. Nyles is a lump. You’re a Mexican, Ferguson, a goddamn human jumping bean, and you play as hard as anyone I’ve got, but I need the lump out there on the court. Chemistry, that’s what it is. Five-on-five, not one-on-one — you follow? With those four other guys sprinting around like jazzed-up dots and dashes, the fifth has to be a sack of potatoes, a lump of flesh with sneakers on his feet, a big nobody to fill up space and think about digesting his food. You see what I mean, Ferguson? You’re too good. Everything would change if I put you in there. The pace would get too fast, too revvy-revvy. You’d all have heart attacks and epileptic fits, and we’d start to lose. We’d be a better team, but we’d be worse. Your day will come, kid. I’ve got plans for you — but not until next year. The chemistry will be different after the dots and dashes fly the coop, and then I’ll need you. Be patient, Ferguson. Bust your ass at practice, say your prayers at night, keep your hands off your willy, and everything will work out just so.
He was tempted to quit the team right then and there, for what Finnegan seemed to be offering him was no chance to play no matter what happened for the rest of the season — unless the so-called chemistry began to go wrong and the team stopped winning, but how in good conscience could he root for the team to lose and go on calling himself a loyal member of the team? Still, Finnegan had all but promised him a starting spot for next year, and on the strength of that promise Ferguson reluctantly swallowed his medicine and held on, working hard to impress Finnegan by busting his ass every day at practice, although he didn’t say his prayers at night and couldn’t keep his hands off his willy.
When the next season began, however, he found himself on the bench again, and the awful thing about it was that there was no one to blame — not even Finnegan, especially not Finnegan. The new boy had turned up out of nowhere, a six-foot-two-inch sophomore whose family had moved to Manhattan from Terre Haute, Indiana, and Hoosier phenom Marty Wilkinson was so damned good, so much better than Ferguson and everyone else on the team, that the coach had no choice but to start him at forward, and with the other starting forward back from last year, the solid and dependable Tom Lerner, who had been voted captain of the team, there was no room for Ferguson to crack the first-string lineup. Finnegan made some efforts to increase his playing time, but five or six minutes a game wasn’t enough, and Ferguson felt himself withering on the bench. He had been turned into an afterthought, a combination hatchetman-noncombatant whose skills quietly seemed to be eroding, and the mounting frustration, as he confessed to his mother and stepfather at dinner one night, was killing his spirit, and so it was that four games into the season, which happened to fall four weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, one month minus two days after that grotesque Friday when even the skeptical, unduped Ferguson had shed tears along with everyone else, allowing himself to succumb to the general mood of the country without understanding that the murder of the president had been a reenactment of his own father’s murder nine years ago, the full horror of his private grief now played out on a grand public scale, and on December 20, 1963, a few minutes after the end of Riverside’s fourth game, Ferguson went into the coach’s office and announced that he was quitting the team. No hard feelings, he said, but he just couldn’t take it anymore. Finnegan said he understood, which was probably true, and then the two of them shook hands, and that was that.
He wound up playing in a league sponsored by the West Side Y instead. It was still basketball, and he still enjoyed it, but even though he was recognized as the strongest player on his team, it wasn’t the same, it couldn’t be the same, and it would never be the same again. No more red-and-yellow uniforms. No more bus rides. No more Rebel fanatics cheering from the stands. And no more Chuckie Showalter pounding on his bass drum.
BY THE BEGINNING of 1964, the almost-seventeen-year-old Ferguson had published a dozen more film articles under the stewardship of Mr. Dunbar, often with help from Gil on matters of prose style, diction, and the always daunting problem of figuring out exactly what he meant to say and then saying it as clearly as possible. His pieces tended to alternate between American and foreign subjects, an examination of the language in W. C. Fields comedies, for instance, followed by something on The Seven Samurai or Pather Panchali, A Walk in the Sun followed by L’Atalante, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang followed by La Dolce Vita—an elemental sort of criticism that was less interested in making judgments about the films than in trying to capture the experience of watching them. Bit by bit, his work was improving, bit by bit his friendship with his stepfather had deepened, and the more he went to the movies, the more he wanted to go to the movies, for moviegoing wasn’t a hunger so much as an addiction, and the more movies he consumed, the more his appetite for them increased. Among the theaters he went to most often were the New Yorker on Broadway (just two blocks from his apartment), the Symphony, the Olympia, and the Beacon on the Upper West Side, the Elgin in Chelsea, the Bleecker Street and Cinema Village downtown, the Paris next door to the Plaza Hotel, the Carnegie next door to Carnegie Hall, the Baronet, the Coronet, and Cinemas I and II in the East Sixties, and, following a pause of several months, the Thalia again, where he had yet to run into Andy Cohen after twelve visits. In addition to the commercial theaters, there was the Museum of Modern Art, an indispensable resource for classic films, and now that Ferguson was a member (a present from Gil and his mother when he turned sixteen), he could go to any and all of those films merely by flashing his card at the door. How many films had he seen in that span between October 1962 and January 1964? An average of two every Saturday and Sunday and one other on Friday, which came to a total of more than three hundred — a good six hundred hours of sitting in the dark, or the number of clock ticks repeated in the course of twenty-five consecutive days and nights, and when you subtracted the minutes lost to sleep and various drunken swoons, over a month of his waking life during the fifteen months that had ticked by.
He had also smoked a thousand more cigarettes (both with and without Amy) and had pursued his love affair with strong spirits by drinking three hundred glasses of Scotland’s finest product at weekend parties thrown by Terry Mills and his equally dissolute successors the following year, no longer upchucking on rugs when he overindulged but passing out quietly and contentedly in a corner of the room, single-mindedly pursuing these alcoholic oblivions in order to purge the dead and the damned from his thoughts, having come to the conclusion that unmediated life was too horrible to bear and that swallowing liquids designed to dull the senses could bring comfort to the troubled heart, but it was important to exercise caution and not go too far, which was why binges were reserved for the weekends, not every weekend but roughly every other one, and he found it curious that he never craved the stuff unless it happened to be right in front of him, and even then he found it altogether resistible, but once he took the first drink, he couldn’t stop until he had drunk too much.