He had already dismissed journalism, but sometime around the second or third week of February, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been too hasty, for even if the big-time establishment press was no longer worth thinking about, there were other branches of journalism to consider. The anti-establishment press, otherwise known as the alternative press or the underground press, had been growing stronger in the past year or so, and with the East Village Other, Liberation News Service, and the Rat all in bloom, not to mention several dozen independent weeklies in cities outside New York, rags so wild and unconventional that they made the Village Voice look as stodgy as the old Herald Tribune, perhaps there was something to be said for working at one of those places. At least they were against all the things Ferguson was against and for many of the things he was for, but there were a number of drawbacks to be examined as well, including the problem of low pay (he wanted to support himself with his work and not have to dig too deeply into his grandmother’s fund) and the greater problem of writing exclusively for people on the left (his hope had always been to change people’s thinking, not just confirm what they already thought), which would hardly put him in the Panglossian position of living in the best of all possible worlds, but in a world where best and possible seldom appeared together in the same sentence, a possible job he could live with and not feel tainted by was surely better than no job at all.
A. I. Ferguson, ace reporter for the Weekly Blast, the Amerikan bible of malcontents and vitiated Faustians, the paper of record for the chosen few.
If nothing else, it was a subject that demanded some careful thought.
So Ferguson went on thinking for the next fifteen or twenty days, and then came the Night of the Daggers, which fell just past midnight on March 10, 1969, one week after his twenty-second birthday and four days after he had gone to Jim Freeman’s apartment on West 108th Street and handed him the finished manuscript of The Pretty Redhead and Other Poems from France, a too-large selection he had told Jim to cut down in any way he saw fit, and as Ferguson paced the rooms of his own apartment on the night of the tenth, composing a long, introspective letter to Nora Kovacs in his head, he felt a sharp twinge in the lower part of his abdomen, one of many that had plagued him in recent months, but rather than subside after ten or twelve seconds as most twinges did, this one was followed by a second, more powerful twinge, which hurt so much that it no longer qualified as a twinge but as genuine pain, and a moment after that second stab the assault had begun, the daggers in his gut, the twenty-seven spears that left him writhing on the bed for close to two hours, and the longer the pain went on, the more likely it seemed that his appendix or some other organ was rupturing inside his body, which so frightened him that he willed himself to stand up, put on his coat, and stagger off to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital seven and a half blocks away, Ferguson clutching his stomach and grunting loudly as he wobbled forward in the night, stopping every so often to cling to a lamppost when he felt in danger of falling to the ground, but for all that no one on Amsterdam Avenue seemed to notice he was there, no one bothered to come up to him and ask if he needed help, not one person among the eight million in New York was the least bit interested in whether he lived or died, and then he waited for an hour and a half until he was called into a room where a young doctor spent fifteen minutes asking him questions and probing his belly, after which Ferguson was told to go back to the waiting room, where he went on sitting for another two hours, and when it became clear that his appendix was not going to explode that night, the doctor saw him again and prescribed pills, telling him to stay away from spicy foods, to avoid whiskey and other hard drinks, to shun grapefruits, to stick to the blandest diet possible for the next two or three weeks, and if another attack should occur during that time, he would do well to have another person accompany him to the hospital, and as Ferguson nodded at the doctor’s sound and helpful instructions, he asked himself: But what person, and who in the world would be there for him the next time he thought he was going to die?
HE STAYED IN bed for four days drinking weak tea and nibbling on crackers and slices of dry toast, and seven days after he was well enough to go out again, a man named Carl McManus came down from upstate New York to talk to the departing members of the Spectator staff. The editorial board of Friedman, Branch, Mullhouse, and the others had already finished its March-to-March one-year term and had handed the paper over to the new board, and Ferguson, the occasional freelance critic, had already written the last article he would ever publish in the Spectator, a somber, admiring review of George Oppen’s latest collection of poems, Of Being Numerous, which had come out on March seventh, three days before the Night of the Daggers. The irony was that he was the only one of the seniors who was still toying with the idea of going into journalism. The overworked, mind-blasted Friedman was planning to hibernate in one of the public school teaching jobs that had scared off Ferguson, Branch was going to med school at Harvard, Mullhouse was staying at Columbia to do graduate work in history, but they all came to the meeting because McManus had written a letter to Friedman back in the spring praising the work of the Spectator staff during the “Troubles,” and praise from Carl McManus meant something to them. The executive editor of the Rochester Times-Union had been editor in chief of the Spectator in 1934, and in the thirty-plus years since then he had gone to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, had gone to Asia to cover the Pacific front in World War II, and had stayed at home to cover the Red Scare in the late forties and the civil rights movement in the fifties and early sixties. A long stint of editorial work with the Washington Post after that, and now, as of a year and a half ago, the head man at the Times-Union, where he had found his first job after graduating from Columbia in the thirties. Not quite a legend (he had never published a book and rarely appeared on radio or TV) but a known personage, a man with a large enough reputation to have lifted the spirits of the exhausted Spectator crew when his letter arrived in early May.
A Brooklyn accent, a broad Irish face with protruding ears, a body that could have belonged to an ex-linebacker or longshoreman, alert blue eyes and a mop of graying reddish hair, long enough to suggest an interest in keeping pace with the times or else the hair of a man who had forgotten to go to the barbershop for his next haircut. Informal. More at ease with himself than most men, and a good resonant laugh when Mullhouse proposed they all go down to the Lion’s Den on the first floor, the student snack bar that served, in Mullhouse’s riff on the familiar New York phrase, the worst cup of coffee in the world.
Seven people sitting around a brown Formica table, six students in their early twenties and the fifty-six-year-old man from Rochester, who got straight to the point and told them he had come back to Columbia in search of recruits. Several positions were about to open up at his paper, and he wanted to fill them with what he called fresh blood, hungry kids who would bust their asses for him and turn a decent operation into a good one, a better one, and because he was already familiar with their work and knew what they were capable of, he was willing to hire three of them on the spot. That is, he added, if anyone was crazy enough to want to move to Rochester, New York, where the winds that gusted off Lake Ontario in winter could freeze the snot in your nose and turn your legs into popsicle sticks.