That same evening, Ferguson locked himself in his room and cried for the first time since he had moved out of the old-old house. Dana Rosenbloom had left for Israel earlier that day, and because her parents were moving back to London for yet another fresh start, it was more than likely he would never see her again. He had pleaded with her not to go, explaining that he had been wrong about many things and wanted another chance to prove himself to her, and after she told him her mind was made up and nothing could stop her, he had impulsively asked her to marry him, and because Dana understood that it wasn’t a joke, that Ferguson meant every word he was saying, she told him he was the love of her life, the one man she would ever care about with her whole heart, and then she kissed him for the last time and walked away.
The next morning, he started working for Arnie Frazier again. Mr. College was back in the moving business, and as he sat in the van listening to Richard Brinkerstaff talk about his childhood in Texas and the whorehouse in his little town where the madam was so cheap she recycled used condoms by dousing them in warm water and then unrolling them onto the ends of broomsticks to dry out in the sun, Ferguson understood that the world was made of stories, so many different stories that if they were all gathered together and put into a book, the book would be nine hundred million pages long. The summer of Watts and the American invasion of Vietnam had begun, and neither Ferguson’s grandmother nor Amy’s grandfather would live to see it to the end.
5.1
He had been assigned a room on the tenth floor of Carman Hall, the newest dormitory on campus, but once Ferguson unpacked his bags and put away his things, he walked over to an adjacent dormitory a few yards to the north, Furnald Hall, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor, where he stood in front of Room 617 for a few moments, and then he went downstairs, walked east along the brick pathway that ran alongside Butler Library and headed for a third dormitory building, John Jay Hall, where he rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor and stood in front of Room 1231 for a few moments. Federico García Lorca had lived in those two rooms during the months he spent at Columbia in 1929 and 1930. Six-seventeen Furnald and 1231 John Jay were the work sites where he had written “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University,” “Return to the City,” “Ode to Walt Whitman” (New York of filth / New York of wires and death), and most of the other poems collected in Poet in New York, a book that was ultimately published in 1940, four years after Lorca was beaten, murdered, and thrown into a mass grave by Franco’s men. Holy ground.
Two hours later, Ferguson walked over to Broadway and West 116th Street and met up with Amy at Chock Full o’Nuts, home of the heavenly coffee that was reputed to be so good that not even Rockefeller’s money could buy a better brand (according to the TV commercial). Chock Full o’Nuts was the same company that employed Governor Rockefeller’s friend Jackie Robinson as vice president and director of personnel, and after Amy and Ferguson had mused on those weird, entangled facts for a couple of minutes — ubiquitous Nelson Rockefeller, whose family owned coffee plantations in South America, and post-baseball Jackie Robinson, whose hair had turned white even though he was still relatively young, and a chain of eighty New York coffee shops with mostly black people working in them — Amy put her arm around Ferguson’s shoulder, drew him toward her, and asked him how it felt to be in college now, a free man at last. Jolly good, my love, positively ripping, he said, as he kissed Amy on her neck, ear, and eyebrow — except for one small detail, which had nearly caused him to be punched in the face one hour after he arrived on campus. He was referring to the Columbia tradition of forcing incoming freshmen to wear powder-blue beanies during Orientation Week (with the class year stitched onto the front, in this case the laughable ’69), which in Ferguson’s opinion was a revolting custom that should have been abolished decades ago, a throwback to the humiliating initiations of rich-boy undergraduate life in the nineteenth century, and there he was, Ferguson said, minding his own business as he trundled through the quad on his way from here to there, with the name tag identifying him as a freshman pinned to his chest, when he was confronted by two upperclassmen, so-called monitors whose job was to help first-year underlings find their way around campus, but those short-haired hulks in the tweed jackets and ties, who must have been linemen on the varsity football team, were not interested in helping Ferguson find his way but in stopping him to ask why he wasn’t wearing his beanie, sounding more like unfriendly cops than friendly students, and Ferguson bluntly told them it was upstairs in his room and he had no intention of wearing it anytime that day or any other day that week, at which point one of the cops called him a puke and ordered him to go back to his room and fetch it. Sorry, Ferguson said, if you want it so much, you’ll have to fetch it yourself, a response that so irked the monitor that for a moment Ferguson thought he was about to haul off and flatten him, but the other cop told his friend to calm down, and rather than prolong the confrontation, Ferguson simply walked away.
Your first lesson in the anthropology of male-college kinship groups, Amy said. The world you belong to now is split into three tribes. The frat boys and the jocks, who make up about a third of the population, the grinds, who make up another third, and the pukes, who make up the last third. You, dear Archie, I’m glad to say, are a puke. Even though you used to be a jock.
Maybe so, Ferguson said. But a jock with the heart of a puke. And also, perhaps — I’m just guessing here—the mind of a grind.
The heavenly coffee was set down before them on the counter, and just as Ferguson was about to take his first sip, a young man walked in and smiled at Amy, a medium-sized young man with long rumpled hair who was unquestionably one of the pukes, a fellow member of the tribe Ferguson now seemed to belong to, since length of hair (according to Amy) was one of the factors that distinguished pukes from jocks and grinds, the least important factor in a list that included leftward political inclinations (anti-war, pro — civil rights), belief in art and literature, and suspicion of all forms of institutional authority.
Good, Amy said. There’s Les. I knew he would come.
Les was a junior named Les Gottesman, a casual friend of Amy’s, no more than a dim acquaintance, in fact, but everyone on both sides of Broadway knew who Amy Schneiderman was, and Les had agreed to show up at Chock Full o’Nuts that afternoon as Amy’s welcoming gift to Ferguson on his first day of college because he, Les Gottesman, was the author of the line that had so amused and exhilarated Ferguson on his visit to the campus six months earlier: A steady fuck is good for you.
Oh that, Les said, as Ferguson hopped off his stool and shook the poet’s hand. I guess it seemed funny at the time.
It’s still funny, Ferguson said. And vulgar and offensive, too, at least to some people, probably to most people, but also an undeniable statement of fact.
Les smiled modestly, looked back and forth between Amy and Ferguson a couple of times and then said: Amy tells me you write poems. You might want to show some of them to the Columbia Review. Come around and knock one day. Ferris Booth Hall, third floor. It’s the office with all the people shouting in it.