By the end of Thanksgiving week, Ferguson had built up a pile of half a dozen translations that seemed more or less finished to him, and when they passed the all-important Amy Test, he finally gathered them together, put them in a manila envelope, and submitted them to the Review. Contrary to what he had been expecting to be told, the editors were not averse to the principle of including translations in the magazine—as long as they weren’t too long, as one of them said — and so it was that Ferguson’s English rendering of the Desnos poem about the deserter and the sentinels, At the Edge of the World, was accepted for publication in the spring issue. Even if he was no longer a full-fledged poet, he could still participate in the act of writing poetry by translating poems that were far superior to anything he could have written himself, and the young poets connected to the Review, whose ambitions for themselves were much greater than his were for himself, who risked everything when they sat down to write while he risked almost nothing when he sat down to translate, recognized his value to the group as someone who could judge the merits of some works over other works, who brought a wider, more inclusive perspective to their conversations about poetry, but they never embraced him as a member of the inner circle, which was entirely fair and just, Ferguson thought, since in the end he wasn’t truly one of them, and yet as far as hanging out at the West End was concerned, they were all good friends, and Ferguson loved talking to them, especially David Zimmer, who impressed him as the most brilliant and precocious of the bunch, along with Zimmer’s non-writer pal from Chicago, Marco Fogg, an eccentric, wild-haired boy who walked around in an Irish tweed suit and was so deeply informed about literature that he could crack jokes in Latin and make you laugh, even if you didn’t understand Latin.
The journalists and the poets were the ones Ferguson gravitated to because he found them to be the ones who were most alive, the ones who had already begun to figure out who and what they were in relation to the world, but there were others in the class of ’69 who had no clue about themselves or anything else, the floundering teenage boys who had amassed good grades in school and could score knockout numbers on standardized tests but who still had the minds of children, the horde of inexperienced ephebes and virgin wankers who had grown up in small provincial cities and suburban tract houses and who clung to the campus and their dorm rooms because New York was too big, too rough, too fast, and the place threatened and confused them. One such innocent was Ferguson’s roommate, a genial fellow from Dayton, Ohio, named Tim McCarthy, who had entered college thoroughly unprepared to take on the freedom of living away from home for the first time, but unlike many of the others in that position, he didn’t withdraw into himself and hide from the city, he rushed straight into it, bent on losing himself in the twin pleasures of monumental beer consumption and a steady intake of marijuana, with a couple of acid trips thrown in for good measure. Ferguson didn’t know what to do. He spent most nights with Amy at the apartment on 111th Street, and his room in Carman Hall served as little more than an office for him, the place where he kept his books, typewriter, and clothes, and whenever he was in that room he tended to be sitting at his desk with the typewriter in front of him, working on his news articles for the Spectator, composing the various short and long papers he was required to hand in for his courses, or else fiddling with yet another draft of one of his translations. He didn’t see Tim often enough to have formed a connection with him, their relations were friendly but deeply superficial, as he had once heard a woman say to another woman on the 104 bus, and while Ferguson sensed that the boy was headed for what could have been serious trouble, he was reluctant to pry into Tim’s personal business. He had already seen enough to know that he himself had no interest in experimenting with the silliness that was pot or the craziness that was LSD, but what right did he have to tell Tim McCarthy to refrain from ingesting those things? One afternoon in mid-December, however, when Tim stumbled into the room squealing and giggling after his latest pot session with the gang down the hall, Ferguson finally spoke up and said: It might seem funny to you, Tim, but it’s not funny to anyone else.
The Dayton boy flopped down on his bed and smiled: Don’t be such a grump, Archie. You’re beginning to sound like my father.
I don’t care how many drugs you take, but it wouldn’t be so nice for you if you flunked out of here, would it?
You’re talking through your nose, Mr. New Jersey. I’m all A’s and B’s this semester, with more A’s than B’s, and if I do what I should on the finals next month, I’ll probably make the dean’s list. Won’t Daddy be proud.
Good for you. But if you go on getting stoned every day, how much longer can you keep it up?
Keep it up? It’s always up, man, always up and raring to go, and the higher I am, the more up it is. You should try it sometime, Archie. The hardest hard-ons this side of the Rock of Gibraltar.