The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged.
6.4
Wily, irresponsible Noah Marx, who had given his word not to show the manuscript of Mulligan’s Travels to anyone but his father and stepmother, broke that word by lending his copy to twenty-four-year-old Billy Best, a prose writer and Columbia dropout who earned his living as the superintendent of a four-story walk-up building on East Eighty-ninth Street between First and Second Avenues, a working-class subsection of Yorkville known as the Rhinelander District. Two years earlier, Billy had founded a small publishing house of mimeographed books called Gizmo Press, a noncommercial, anti-commercial operation that had released about a dozen works so far, among them volumes of poetry by Ann Wexler, Lewis Tarkowski, and Tulsa-born Ron Pearson, who had given the author of Mulligan’s Travels a copy of John Cage’s Silence back in October. In those days before the advent of cheap offset printing, mimeo was the only form of book and magazine production available to the young, penniless writers of New York, and far from being a sign of obscurity or a one-way path to terminal neglect, having your work published in mimeo by a house such as Gizmo Press was considered a badge of honor. The print runs averaged around two hundred copies. The titles and illustrations on the cardboard covers were drawn in black and white by Billy’s downtown artist friends (most often by Serge Grieman or Bo Jainard, fluid and inventive draftsmen whose cover work helped set the tone of mid-sixties graphic design, the look of the moment, which was bold and unadorned and tried not to take itself too seriously), and even if there was something ragged and improvisational about books printed on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch typing paper, the contents were unsmudged and readable, as clear as any offset or letterpress book. Billy’s wife, Joanna, prepared the stencils on her large office-sized Remington in single-spaced pica characters with unjustified right-hand margins when the work was in prose, and then the stencils were fed into the mimeograph machine in Billy’s workroom and run off on both the recto and verso of each page, collated by a group of friends and volunteers, and put together with saddle-stitch binding (staples). Most of the copies were given away for free, that is, sent off or handed to fellow writers and artists, and the remaining fifty or so were distributed to the handful of Manhattan booksellers who believed in the next generation of American newness, and for a young person to walk into the Gotham Book Mart or the Eighth Street Bookshop and see his mimeo book among the recent offerings of poetry and fiction was to understand that he was beginning to exist as a writer.
Ferguson should have been furious with his cousin for having gone behind his back and shown the book to someone without permission, but he wasn’t. Noah had run into Billy Best at a Lower East Side gathering in mid-May, one month after Ferguson had finished the manuscript and one week after his third and final visit to Dr. Breuler. Noah had started talking to Billy about his cousin’s work, Billy had expressed an interest in seeing it, and by the last week in May Noah was on the telephone with Ferguson letting the cat out of the bag. Sorry, sorry, he said, he knew he wasn’t supposed to have shown the manuscript around, but he had gone ahead and done it anyway, and now that Billy had been floored by Mulligan’s Travels and wanted to publish it, Ferguson wasn’t going to be dumb enough to try to prevent that from happening, was he? No, Ferguson said, he was all for it, and then he thanked Noah for his help, which launched them into a conversation that lasted for about half an hour, and after they hung up Ferguson understood that it made no difference if he thought the book should be burned and forgotten, he needed the book now because his life was over, and publishing it would perhaps be a way to trick himself into thinking he still had a future, even if no more Fergusons would ever be a part of that future, and how fitting it was that he had chosen to publish his work under the name of a murdered man, his paternal grandfather Isaac, felled by two bullets in a Chicago leather-goods warehouse in 1923, the man who was supposed to have been Rockefeller but wound up being Ferguson, father of a father who had vanished from his son’s life and grandfather of a grandson who would never live to become a father himself.
Billy Best became a good friend and a devoted publisher of Ferguson’s early books, but Noah Marx was the best man there was, and whenever Ferguson tried to imagine who he would have been without him, his mind would shut down and refuse to give an answer.
Nimble Joanna managed to convert the one hundred and thirty-one double-spaced pages of the manuscript into fifty-nine single-spaced pages by eliminating the blanks that preceded each chapter head of Mulligan’s twenty-four journeys and starting the new journeys on the same pages as the old, which reduced the better part of a year’s work to thirty sheets of paper — thin enough to be stapled together without difficulty. Instead of using Bo Jainard or Serge Grieman to design the cover, Ferguson asked Billy if Howard Small could take a shot at it, and because Howard produced such a good drawing (Mulligan sitting at a desk and writing one of his reports in a room crammed with artifacts and souvenirs from his adventures), he too became a part of the Gizmo family and went on contributing covers and illustrations until the press folded in 1970. Fifty-nine pages on thirty sheets of paper — which meant that the last page of the book was empty. Billy asked Ferguson if he would like to write a biographical note about himself to fill that emptiness, and after thinking about it for close to a week, Ferguson submitted the following two sentences:
Nineteen-year-old Isaac Ferguson can often be found wandering the streets of New York. He lives elsewhere.
NO MORE EVIE. No more visits to the half-house in East Orange after the last visit to Dr. Breuler’s office in Princeton. Ferguson could no longer bring himself to face her. He had let her down and destroyed her hopes, and he didn’t have the courage to look her in the eyes and tell her he would never be the phantom father of the illusory baby she had invented to hold them together in some future world when circumstances would at last have driven them apart. What a tangled business it was. How badly they had both deceived themselves, and now that the words of a doctor had put an end to their deluded aspirations, Ferguson picked up the phone and announced that end as any other coward would have done it, not even daring to sit down in her presence and talk it out and perhaps come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the worst tragedy in the world and that they could go on in spite of it. Evie was shocked by his callousness. Too bad and all that, she said, and I really do feel sorry for you, Archie, but what does it have to do with us?