For the first five months, the rhythm of his daytime routine was as follows: work on his book every morning from nine to twelve, lunch from noon to one, reading the books on Gil’s list from one to four, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he read from one to two-thirty and spent the next hour and a half in Vivian’s study talking with her about the books, an hour-long walk through various Left Bank neighborhoods (mostly Saint-Germain, the Latin Quarter, and Montparnasse), and then on to the Boulevard Raspail for his Monday-through-Friday classes at the Alliance Française. Until he finished his book (which happened a few days after his nineteenth birthday in March), and until he felt his French was solid enough to forgo the classes (also in March), he rigidly adhered to those three fundamental activities of writing, reading, and studying to the exclusion of all others, which meant that for the time being there was no time for watching movies except on Saturdays and Sundays and the occasional weekday night, no time for basketball, and no time to begin tutoring French children in English. Never before had Ferguson shown such dedication and singleness of purpose, such a fervent commitment to the tasks he had set for himself, but never before had he felt so calm and steady when the light came through his window in the morning, so glad to be where he was, even on those mornings when he was hungover or not feeling at his best.
The book was everything to him. The book was the difference between being alive and not being alive, and although Ferguson was still young, no doubt extremely young to have embarked on such a project, the advantage of starting the book at eighteen was that he was still close to the time of his boyhood and remembered it well, and because of Mr. Dunbar and the Riverside Rebel he had been writing for some years now and was no longer strictly a novice. He had published twenty-seven articles of varying lengths in Mr. Dunbar’s paper (one as short as two and a half typed pages, another one as long as eleven typed pages), and after he started recording his impressions of films in the loose-leaf binder, he had acquired the habit of writing nearly every day, since there were more than a hundred and sixty sheets in the binder now, and the jump from nearly every day to every day come hell or high water was not so much a jump as the natural next step. On top of his own efforts during the past three years, there had been the long conversations with Gil, the lessons learned from Gil about how to achieve concision, grace, and clarity in each sentence he wrote, how to join one sentence to another sentence in order to build a paragraph that had some muscles in it, and how to begin the next paragraph with a sentence that would either prolong or contradict the statements in the preceding paragraph (depending on your argument or your purpose), and Ferguson had listened to his stepfather and absorbed those lessons well, which meant that even though he was barely out of high school when he started working on his book, he had already sworn his allegiance to the flag of the Written Word.
The idea had come to him after the humiliations of his army physical on August second. Not only had he been forced to reveal the black mark on his name denoted by the words criminal record, but the doctor had pressed him to talk about the particulars as well, not just being caught for pinching books on the day George Tyler’s hand had crashed down on his shoulder but how many other times he had stolen books without being caught, and because Ferguson had felt tense and frightened to be sitting in that government building on Whitehall Street talking to a U.S. Army doctor, he had told the man the truth, had said several times in answer to the question, but beyond the humiliation of being forced to delve into the larcenous activities of his senior year, there had been the greater humiliation of having to confess to his unnatural sexual desires, his attraction to boys as well as to girls, and then the man, whose name was Dr. Mark L. Worthington, had asked Ferguson to provide the particulars concerning that matter as well, and while Ferguson had understood that telling the truth would guarantee that he would never have to serve in the army or spend two to five years in a federal prison for refusing to serve in the army, it had been hard to tell the truth because of the disgust he had seen in Dr. Worthington’s eyes, the revulsion expressed by the tightening of his lips and the clenching of his jaw, but the man had wanted to know the details and Ferguson had had no choice but to give them, so one by one he had marched through the erotic acts he had performed during his love affair with the beautiful Brian Mischevski from early spring to the day Brian left New York in early summer, and Yes, sir, Ferguson had said, they had been on the bed together many times with no clothes on, that is, both of them entirely naked, and Yes, sir, Ferguson had said, they had kissed each other with their mouths open and had pushed their tongues into those open mouths, and Yes, sir, they had put their hardened penises into each other’s mouths, and Yes, sir, they had ejaculated into each other’s mouths, and Yes, sir, they had put their hardened penises into each other’s bottoms and had ejaculated into those bottoms or onto the buttocks flanking those bottoms or onto each other’s faces or stomachs, and the more Ferguson had talked, the more disgusted the expression on the doctor’s face had become, and by the time the interview was over, the never-to-be-inducted Ferguson was trembling throughout the length of his four limbs and sickened by the words that had tumbled from his mouth, not because he felt ashamed of what he had done but because the doctor’s eyes had condemned him, had looked on him as a moral degenerate and a menace to the stability of American life, which had felt to Ferguson as if his own life were being spat on by the government of the United States, which was his country, after all, whether he liked it or not, and by way of revenge, he had said to himself as he walked out of that building into the hot summer air of New York, he would write a little book about the dark years after the Newark fire, a book so powerful and so brilliant and so drenched in the truths of what it meant to be alive that no American would ever want to spit on him again.