Ferguson had been tracking the changes in his body since the first sign of impending manhood appeared in the form of a single hair sprouting from his left armpit when he was ten and a half. He knew what it meant and was surprised, since it seemed to have come too early, and at that point he was not prepared to say good-bye to the boy-self that had belonged to him since birth. He found the hair ugly and ridiculous, an intruder sent by some alien force to mar his previously unblemished person, and therefore he plucked it out. Within days it had returned, however, along with an identical twin that arrived the following week, and then the right armpit swung into action as well, and before long the isolate strands were no longer distinguishable, the hairs were turning into nests of hair, and by the time he was twelve they had become a permanent fact of life. Ferguson watched with horror and fascination as other zones of his body were transformed as well, the almost invisible blondish down on his legs and forearms turning darker, thicker, and more abundant, the emergence of pubic hair on his once smooth lower belly, and then, just after he turned thirteen, the odious black fuzz that began germinating between his nose and upper lip, so disgusting and disfiguring that he shaved it off one morning with his father’s electric razor, and when it grew back a couple of weeks later, he shaved it off again. The horror was not being in control of what was happening to him, of feeling that his body had been turned into the site of an experiment conducted by some mad, prankster scientist, and as new hair continued to proliferate over greater and greater areas of his skin, he couldn’t help thinking about the Wolfman, the hero of that gruesome film he had seen with Howard on television one night back in the fall, the metamorphosis of a normal man into a woolly-faced monster, which Ferguson now understood was a parable about the helplessness one experiences during puberty, for you are doomed to become whatever your genes have decided you will be, and until the process is finished, you have no idea what the next day will bring. That was the horror of it. But along with the horror there was fascination, the knowledge that however long and difficult the journey might be, it would eventually lead to the kingdom of erotic bliss.
The problem was that Ferguson still knew nothing about the nature of that bliss, and struggle as he did to imagine what his body would feel in the throes of an orgasm, Ferguson’s imagination continually failed him. His early double-digit years were filled with rumors and hearsay but no hard facts, mysterious, unconfirmed stories from boys with older, adolescent brothers that alluded to the unlikely spasms involved in the attainment of erotic bliss, the pulsing streams of milky white fluid that spurted out of your penis, for example, which sometimes traveled several feet or even yards through the air, the so-called ejaculation, which was always accompanied by that much sought after blissful feeling, which Howard’s brother Tom described as the best feeling in the world, but when Ferguson pressed him to be more specific and describe what that feeling was, Tom said he wouldn’t know where to begin, it was too hard to put into words and Ferguson would simply have to wait until the time came for him to feel it himself, a frustrating answer that did nothing to alleviate Ferguson’s ignorance, and while some of the technical terms were now familiar to him, such as the word semen, which was the sticky stuff that shot out of you and carried the sperm that were essential for creating babies, Ferguson invariably thought of a shipful of sailors whenever someone used that word in his presence, merchant seamen dressed in milky white uniforms coming ashore and heading for honky-tonk bars along the docks to flirt with half-naked women and join the old salts in drunken sea chanteys as a one-legged man in a striped shirt blasted out the tune on his ancient concertina. Poor Ferguson. His mind was in a muddle, and because he still couldn’t imagine what any of the words really meant, his thoughts tended to dart out in several directions at once. Sea-man would soon become see-man, and an instant later he would imagine he was blind, tapping his way into the noisy bar with a white cane in his hand.
It was clear that the central actor in this drama was his groin. Or, to hark back to the terminology of the ancient Hebrews, his loins. That is to say, his privates, which in the medical literature were commonly referred to as genitalia. For as long as he could remember being himself, it had always felt good to touch himself down there, to fiddle with his penis when no one was looking, in bed at night or early in the morning, for example, manipulating that fleshy extrusion until it rose up stiffly in the air, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling in size, and with that startling mutation an inchoate sort of pleasure would begin to spread through his body, particularly the lower half of his body, a formless rush of feeling that was not yet bliss but suggested that bliss would one day be achieved by a similar kind of friction. He was growing steadily now, every morning his body seemed to be a little larger than it had been the day before, and the growth of his penis was keeping pace with the rest of him, no longer the nubby dickey bird of pre-hair childhood but an ever more substantial appendage, which now seemed to possess a mind of its own, lengthening and hardening at the least provocation, especially on those afternoons when he and Howard studied Tom’s nudie magazines. They were in junior high school now, and one day Howard repeated a joke he had been told by his brother:
A science teacher asks his students: What part of the body can expand to six times its normal size? He points his finger at Miss McGillacuddy, but instead of answering the question, the girl begins to blush and covers her face with her hands. The teacher then points at Mr. MacDonald, who quickly responds: The pupils of the eyes. Correct, says the teacher, and then he turns back to the blushing Miss McGillacuddy and addresses her with an irritation bordering on contempt. I have three things to tell you, young lady, he says. One: You haven’t been doing your homework. Two: You have a dirty, filthy mind. And three: You’re in for a life of bitter disappointment.
Not six times, then, not even after he was fully grown. There were limits to what he could expect from the future, but whatever the exact measurements were, whatever the proportions between soft repose and hard readiness, the increase would be sufficient unto the day, and the night of that day, and all the nights and days that followed.
Junior high was unquestionably superior to the grammar school that had held him prisoner for the past seven years, and with more than a thousand students charging through the halls at the end of each fifty-minute period, he no longer had to endure the suffocating intimacy of being trapped in a room with the same twenty-three or twenty-four people every Monday through Friday from the beginning of September to the end of June. The Gang of Nine was a thing of the past, and even Krolik and his three toadies had essentially disappeared from view, since Ferguson rarely crossed paths with them anymore. Timmerman was still present, a fellow class member in four of Ferguson’s academic subjects, but the two boys coexisted by going out of their way to ignore each other, a less than happy standoff but not an unbearable one. Better yet, Timmerman and Susie Krauss had parted ways, just as Ferguson had hoped they would, and because Ferguson himself had lost contact with Gloria Dolan over the summer, his first kissing mate had now cast her eyes on handsome Mark Connelly, which disappointed Ferguson but didn’t entirely crush him, since a path had been opened for him to go after Susie Krauss, the girl of his sixth-grade dreams, and he jumped at his chance by calling her one evening during the first week of school, which led to a Saturday afternoon visit to his father’s tennis center, which in turn led to their first kiss the following Saturday and many other kisses on subsequent Fridays and Saturdays over the next few months, and then they too parted ways, with Susie falling into the arms of the aforementioned Mark Connelly, who had lost Gloria Dolan to a boy named Rick Bassini, and Ferguson pining for an ever more attractive Peggy Goldstein, who had broken off with Howard sometime ago, but Ferguson’s best friend had recovered with his heart intact and was now offering that same heart to the bright and bubbly Edie Cantor.