Don’t even think about that, Ferguson said. I’ve made special arrangements with the boys upstairs, and they’ve promised me you’re going to live forever.
Good classes, good teachers, good classmates, but not all aspects of the Columbia experience were joyful ones, and among the things Ferguson liked least about the place were its stodgy, Ivy League pretensions, its backward-looking rules and rigid protocols, its lack of interest in the welfare of its students. All power was in the hands of the administration, and with no due process or impartial investigative board to oversee matters of discipline, they could kick you out at any moment without having to explain themselves. It wasn’t that Ferguson was planning to get into trouble, but time would prove that others were, and when large numbers of them decided to make trouble in the spring of 1968, the entire institution went berserk.
More about that later.
Ferguson was pleased to be in New York, pleased to be with Amy in Amy’s New York, at last a full-time resident of the capital of the twentieth century, but even though he was already familiar with the Columbia neighborhood, or somewhat familiar with it, now that he was living there he finally began to see Morningside Heights for what it was: a wounded, disintegrating zone of poverty and desperation, block after block of worn-out buildings with most of the apartments in those buildings housing mice, rats, and cockroaches along with the people who lived in them. The dirty streets were often strewn with uncollected garbage, and half of the pedestrians walking down the streets were out of their minds, or about to lose their minds, or recovering from mental breakdowns. The neighborhood was kilometer zero for the lost souls of New York, and every day Ferguson passed a dozen men and women locked in deep, incomprehensible dialogues with invisible others, people who did not exist. The one-armed vagrant with the overstuffed shopping bag, his hunched body doubled over itself as he stared down at the sidewalk and muttered his paternosters in a small, rasping voice. The bearded midget ensconced in various doorways on the side streets off Amsterdam Avenue, reading month-old copies of the Daily Forward with the jagged shard of a broken magnifying glass. The fat woman who floated around in her pajamas. On the traffic islands in the middle of Broadway, the drunk, the elderly, and the mad crowded together on benches above the subway gratings, sitting shoulder to shoulder as each one stared off silently into the distance. New York of filth. New York of wires and death. Then there was the person everyone referred to as the Yumkee Man, the aging crackpot who stood on the corner in front of Chock Full o’Nuts every day intoning the words yawveh yumpkee, a haranguer of the old school variously known as Dr. Yumkee and Emsh, self-proclaimed son of Napoleon, self-proclaimed messiah, and true-blue American patriot who never went anywhere without carrying his American flag, which on cold days he would wrap around his shoulders and use as a shawl. And the bald, bullet-headed boy-man Bobby, who spent his days carrying out errands for the owners of Ralph’s Typewriter Shop on Broadway and 113th Street, sprinting down the sidewalk with outstretched arms pretending to be an airplane, weaving in and out of the human traffic as he made the engine noises of a B-52 in full-throttle flight. And hairless Sam Steinberg, the ever-present Sam S., who rode three different subway trains from the Bronx every morning to sell candy bars on Broadway or in front of Hamilton Hall, but also to sell his crude, Magic Marker pictures of imaginary animals for one dollar, little works done on the laundry cardboards that came with pressed shirts, calling out to anyone who would listen to him, Hey, mistah, new paintings here, beauteeful new paintings here, the most beauteeful paintings in the woild. And the great enigma of the Hotel Harmony, the crumbling hotel for down-and-out men that stood on the corner of Broadway and 110th Street, the tallest building for blocks around, and written on the brick wall in letters large enough to be read from a quarter of a mile away was the hotel’s motto, which surely qualified as the most dumbfounding oxymoron on earth: THE HOTEL HARMONY — WHERE LIVING IS A PLEASURE.
It was a cracked-up world up there on the upper Upper West Side, and it took some getting used to before he could harden himself to the squalor and misery of his new stomping grounds, but not all was bleakness on the Heights, young people were wandering around the streets as well, pretty girls from Barnard and Juilliard often figured in the landscape, fluttering past him like optical illusions or spirits from dreams, there were bookstores to browse in on Broadway between 114th and 116th Streets, even a basement store for foreign books around the corner and down the stairs on 115th Street, where Ferguson could spend the odd half hour rummaging through the French poetry section, the Thalia and the New Yorker showed the best old and new movies just twenty and twenty-five blocks to the south, Edith Piaf was on the jukebox of a greasy-spoon diner called the College Inn, where he could stuff himself with cheap breakfasts and talk to the blowsy, bleached-blond waitress who called him honey, Chock Full o’Nuts for ten-minute coffee breaks, life-sustaining hamburgers at Prexy’s (The Hamburger with a College Education), ropa vieja and espresso at the Ideal (Ee-day-al), the Cuban-Chinese place on Broadway between 108th and 109th Streets, and goulash and dumplings at Yum City, the restaurant he and Amy went to so often for dinner that the plump husband-and-wife owners began offering them free desserts, but the central point of refuge in that cracked-up neighborhood was the West End Bar and Grill, situated on Broadway between 113th and 114th Streets, with its immense oval bar of smoothly polished oak, the booths for four or six along the northern and eastern walls, and the large, movable chairs and tables in the back room. Amy had already introduced him to the West End the previous year, but now that Ferguson was a year-round resident himself, that ancient, dimly lit watering hole soon became his principal hangout, his study hall by day and meeting place by night, his second home.
It wasn’t the beer or the bourbon that interested him, it was the talk, the chance to talk to his friends from the Spectator and the Columbia Review, to talk to Amy’s political friends and various West End regulars, drinks were merely liquid props to be nursed along in order to go on sitting in the booth, for this was the first time in Ferguson’s life that he had been surrounded by people he wanted to talk to, not just Amy anymore, who for the past two years had been his sole interlocutor, the one person in his life worth talking to, now there were several, now there were many, and the conversations he took part in at the West End were just as valuable to him as anything that was said in his classes at Hamilton Hall.
The Spectator boys were a serious, hard-working lot, more grinds than pukes when it came to how they dressed and cut their hair, but grinds with the hearts of pukes, and Ferguson’s fellow beginners from the class of ’69 were already dedicated newspapermen, just out of high school but dug in and committed to their jobs as if they had been working at them for years. The older members of the Spectator staff tended to frequent another bar a couple of blocks down Broadway, the Gold Rail, which was the saloon of preference for the frat boys and jocks, but Ferguson’s cronies preferred the dingier, less raucous atmosphere of the West End, and of the three who sometimes joined him for drinks and talk in one of the side booths, there was the calm and thoughtful Robert Friedman, a kid from Long Island who covered Academic Affairs and at the absurd age of eighteen could write as skillfully and professionally as any reporter from the Times or the Herald Tribune, the fast-talking Greg Mullhouse from Chicago (Sports), and the dogged, probing, wryly sarcastic Allen Branch from San Francisco (Community Affairs), and they all agreed that the managing board of the paper was too conservative, too timid in its treatment of the university’s bad policies concerning the war (allowing military recruiters on campus, failing to cut ties with the ROTC — pronounced Rotsy—the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program) as well as its slumlord tactics in evicting poor tenants from university-owned apartment buildings to further Columbia’s expansion through the surrounding neighborhood, and when their turn came to take control of the Spectator in the spring of their junior year, they would elect Friedman editor in chief and quickly get to work at changing everything. The plans for this eventual coup only confirmed what Ferguson had already figured out about the freshman class that year. They were different from the classes above them — more aggressive, more impatient, more willing to stand up and fight against stupidity, complacency, and unfairness. The postwar children born in 1947 had little in common with the wartime children born just two and three years earlier, a generational rift had opened up in that short span of time, and whereas most of the upperclassmen still bought into the lessons they had learned in the 1950s, Ferguson and his friends understood that they were living in an irrational world, a country that murdered its presidents and legislated against its citizens and sent its young men off to die in senseless wars, which meant that they were more fully attuned to the realities of the present than their elders were. A small example, a trivial example, but nevertheless a pertinent example: the beanie battles of Freshman Orientation Week. Ferguson had instinctively refused to wear his, but so had the Columbia Review and Spectator boys, so had scores of others, and in a class of six hundred and ninety-three students, more than a third of them stared down and bumped shoulders with the football monitors in the days before the start of classes. Nothing had been organized. Each anti-beanie boy had acted on his own, appalled by the idea of having to march around campus as a conscript in the Tweedledee and Tweedledum brigade, and the contagion of resistance had spread until it was turned into a de facto mass movement, a general boycott, a struggle between tradition and common sense. The result? The administration announced that beanies would henceforth be dispensed with for all incoming freshmen in the future. A microscopic victory, yes, but perhaps a sign of things to come. Beanies today — who knew what tomorrow?