TWO WEEKS LATER, Amy wrote to tell him she had fallen for someone else, a certain senior classman named Rick, and that she wouldn’t be coming home to New York for the Christmas holidays because Rick had invited her to spend that time with him at his family’s place in Milwaukee. She said she was sorry to have to break such bad news to him, but something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, and how good it had been during those beautiful weeks in the spring, and how much she still loved him, and how glad she was that they would always be the best cousin-friends on earth.
She added in a postscript that she was relieved to know he wouldn’t be going to jail. Such a stupid business, she said. Everybody steals books, but you had to be the one who got caught.
FERGUSON WAS DISINTEGRATING.
He knew he had to pull himself together — or else his arms and legs would start to fall off and he would spend the rest of the year writhing on the ground like a worm.
On the Saturday after he tore up Amy’s letter and burned it in the kitchen sink, he sat through four movies in three different theaters between the hours of noon and ten — a double bill at the Thalia and one movie each at the New Yorker and the Elgin. On Sunday, he sat through four others. The eight films were so scrambled in his head that he couldn’t remember which was which anymore by the time he fell asleep on Sunday night. He decided that from then on he would jot down a one-page description of every film he saw and keep those pages in a special three-ring binder on his desk. That would be one way of holding on to his life instead of losing it. Plunging into the dark, yes, but always with a candle in his hand and a box of matches in his pocket.
In December, he published two more articles for Mr. Dunbar’s newspaper, a long one on three non-Westerns by John Ford (Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath) and a short one on Some Like It Hot, which mostly ignored the story and concentrated on the men disguised in drag and Marilyn Monroe’s half-naked body spilling out of her diaphanous dress.
The irony was that his suspension from school had not turned him into an outcast. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have elevated his standing among his male friends, who now looked upon him as a daring rebel, a tough hombre, and even the girls seemed to find him more attractive now that he had been officially transformed into a dangerous person. His interest in those girls had ended when he was fifteen, but he asked a few of them out just to see if they could stop him from thinking about Amy. They couldn’t. Not even when he took Isabel Kraft in his arms and kissed her — which suggested that it was going to take time, a long time before he was ready to start breathing again.
NO COLLEGE. THAT was his final decision, and when he told his mother and Gil that he wouldn’t be registering to take the SATs in early January, that he wouldn’t be sending out applications to Amherst or Cornell or Princeton or any of the other colleges they had been discussing for the past year, his parents looked at him as if he had just announced that he was planning to commit suicide.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Gil said. You can’t stop your education now.
I won’t be stopping it, Ferguson said. I’ll just be educating myself in a different way.
But where, Archie? his mother asked. You’re not planning to sit around this apartment for the rest of your life, are you?
Ferguson laughed. What a thought, he said. No, I wouldn’t stay here. Of course I wouldn’t stay here. I’d like to go to Paris — assuming I manage to graduate from high school, and assuming you’d be willing to give me a graduation present that would cover the price of a cheap, one-way charter ticket.
You’re forgetting the war, Gil said. The moment you’re out of high school, they’ll draft you into the army and ship you off to Vietnam.
No, they won’t, Ferguson said. They wouldn’t dare.
FOR ONCE, FERGUSON was right. Six weeks after he stumbled his way to the end of high school, having made his peace with Amy, having blessed Jim on his engagement to Nancy Hammerstein, having lived through an unexpectedly warm and comforting springtime affair with his good friend Brian Mischevski, which had convinced the now eighteen-year-old Ferguson that he was indeed someone who had been built to love both men and women and that his life would be more complicated than most other lives because of that doubleness but also perhaps richer and more invigorating as well, having written a new article for Mr. Dunbar’s paper every other week until the end of the final semester, having added close to a hundred pages to his loose-leaf three-ring binder, having worked with Gil to prepare a comprehensive reading list for his first year as a student attached to no college or university, having gone back to the Gristedes on Columbus Avenue to shake hands with his former co-workers, having gone back to Book World to apologize to the owner, George Tyler, for having stolen the books, having understood how lucky he was to have been caught and not severely punished, having vowed never to steal anything from anyone ever again, Ferguson received his Greetings letter from the United States government and was told to report to the draft board on Whitehall Street for his army physical, which needless to say he passed because he was a fit young man with no physical problems or abnormalities, but because he had a criminal record, and because he openly confessed to the staff psychiatrist that he was attracted to men as well as to women, a new draft card was issued to him later that summer with his new classification typed onto the front: 4-F.
Feckless — frazzled — fucked-up — and free.
4.4
In his three years as a high school student in the New Jersey suburbs, the sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old Ferguson started twenty-seven short stories, finished nineteen of them, and spent no less than one hour every day with what he called his work notebooks, which he filled with various writing exercises he invented for himself in order to stay sharp, dig down, and try to get better (as he once put it to Amy): descriptions of physical objects, landscapes, morning skies, human faces, animals, the effect of light on snow, the sound of rain on glass, the smell of burning wood, the sensation of walking through fog or listening to wind blow through the branches of trees; monologues in the voices of other people in order to become those other people or at least try to understand them better (his father, his mother, his stepfather, Amy, Noah, his teachers, his friends at school, Mr. and Mrs. Federman), but also unknown and more distant others such as J. S. Bach, Franz Kafka, the checkout girl at the local supermarket, the ticket collector on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, and the bearded panhandler who cadged a dollar from him in Grand Central Station; imitations of admired, demanding, inimitable writers from the past (take a paragraph from Hawthorne, for example, and compose something based on his syntactical model, using a verb wherever he used a verb, a noun wherever he used a noun, an adjective wherever he used an adjective — in order to feel the rhythms in your bones, to feel how the music was made); a curious sequence of vignettes generated by puns, homonyms, and one-letter displacements of words: ail/ale, lust/lost, soul/soil, birth/berth; and impetuous jags of automatic writing to clear his brain whenever he was feeling stuck, as with a four-page scribble-gush inspired by the word nomad that began: No, I am not mad. Nor am I even angry, but give me a chance to discombobulate you, and I’ll pick your pockets clean. He also wrote one one-act play, which he burned in disgust one week after finishing it, and twenty-three of the foulest stinker poems ever hatched by a citizen of the New World, which he tore up after promising himself never to write another poem again. He mostly hated what he did. He mostly thought he was stupid and talentless and would never amount to anything, but still he persisted, driving himself to keep at it every day in spite of the often disappointing results, understanding there would be no hope for him unless he kept at it, that becoming the writer he wanted to be would necessarily take years, more years than it would take for his body to finish growing, and every time he wrote something that seemed slightly less bad than the piece that had come before it, he sensed he was making progress, even if the next piece turned out to be an abomination, for the truth was that he didn’t have a choice, he was destined to do this or die, because notwithstanding his struggles and dissatisfaction with the dead things that often came out of him, the act of doing it made him feel more alive than anything else he had ever done, and when the words began to sing in his ears and he sat down at his desk and picked up his pen or put his fingers on the keys of his typewriter, he felt naked, naked and exposed to the big world rushing in on him, and nothing felt better than that, nothing could equal the sensation of disappearing from himself and entering the big world humming inside the words that were humming inside his head.