Yes, they were ever so droll and inventive, and yes, Ferguson’s stomach sometimes ached from laughing so hard at their buffoonery, but why he found them laughable, and why his love for them began to flower beyond all reason, had less to do with their clownish antics than their persistence, with the fact that they reminded Ferguson of himself. Strip away the comic exaggerations and slapstick violence, and Laurel and Hardy’s struggles were no different from his own. They, too, blundered from one ill-conceived plan to the next, they, too, suffered through countless setbacks and frustrations, and whenever misfortune brought them to the snapping point, Hardy’s angers would become his angers, Laurel’s befuddlements would mirror his befuddlements, and the best thing about the botches they made for themselves was that Stan and Ollie were even more incompetent than he was, more stupid, more asinine, more helpless, and that was funny, so funny that he couldn’t stop laughing at them, even as he pitied them and embraced them as brothers, kindred spirits forever smacked down by the world and forever standing up to try again — by hatching another one of their harebrained plans, which, inevitably, would knock them to the ground once more.
Most of the time, he watched the films alone, sitting on the floor in the living room about a yard from the television set, which his mother and grandmother both considered to be too close, since the rays emitted by the cathode tube would ruin his eyes, and whenever one of them caught him in that position, he would have to remove himself to the more distant sofa. On the days when his mother was still out working when he returned home from school, his grandmother would stay with him in the apartment until his mother came back from her daily duties (as the nursemaid put it in The Music Box, complaining to a policeman after Stan had planted his shoe in her rear end: He kicked me right in the middle of my daily duties), but Ferguson’s grandmother had no interest in Laurel and Hardy, her passion was for cleanliness and domestic order, and once she had given her grandson his post-school snack, generally two chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk, but sometimes a plum or an orange or a stack of saltines that Ferguson would coat with dabs of grape jelly, he would go off to the living room to turn on his program and she would busy herself with scrubbing down kitchen counters or scouring off crud from the stove burners or cleaning the sinks and toilets in the two bathrooms, a dedicated destroyer of filth and germs who never grumbled about her daughter’s shortcomings as a housekeeper but nevertheless sighed often as she went about these tasks, no doubt chagrined that her own flesh and blood did not adhere to her rigorous standards of sanitary living. On the days when Ferguson’s mother was already at home when he returned from school, his grandmother would simply drop him off and leave, exchanging a kiss and a few words with her daughter but rarely pausing long enough to go to the trouble of taking off her coat, and when his mother wasn’t developing pictures in her darkroom or preparing dinner in the kitchen, she would occasionally join her son on the sofa and watch Laurel and Hardy with him, now and then laughing as hard as he did (at the daily duties line in The Music Box, for example, which became a private joke between them, a term that eventually replaced the old words they had used to refer to the human posterior, a long list that had included such dependable idioms as backside, tuchas, keister, heinie, rear end, fanny, and rump, as with the question his mother would sometimes ask when they were in different rooms, calling out, What are you up to, Archie?, and if he wasn’t standing or walking or lying down somewhere in the apartment, he would respond, I’m sitting on my daily duties, Ma), but most often she would merely chuckle at Stan and Ollie’s pranks and pratfalls, or give a little smile, and when things started to get out of hand, with whacks and thwacks and painful blows, she would wince or else shake her head and say, Oh, Archie, that’s just awful, not meaning that the film was awful but that the roughhousing was too excessive for her. Ferguson didn’t agree, of course, but he was old enough to understand that it was possible for someone not to like Laurel and Hardy as much as he did, and he felt she was a good sport for sitting there with him, since he knew that Stan and Ollie were too dumb and childish for her and that even if she watched them every day for a year, she would never become a fan.
Only one person in the family shared his enthusiasm, just one grown-up had the acuity to recognize the genius of his beloved imbeciles, and that was his grandfather, the elusive Benjy Adler, who had always been something of a mystery to Ferguson, a man who seemed to possess two or three different personalities, effusive and generous on some days, shut down and distracted on other days, at times nervous, even jittery and short-tempered, at times calm and expansive, by turns warmly attentive to his grandson and almost indifferent to him, but on his good days, the days when he was in one of his spirited moods and the jokes were flying out of his mouth, he was a sterling companion, a co-conspirator in what Ferguson thought of as the Bore War (his scrambled incarnation of the misheard and misunderstood Boer War), which he took to be a militant assault against the dullness of life. In late November, Uncle Paul sent Ferguson’s mother on another trip, this time all the way out to New Mexico to photograph Millicent Cunningham, an eighty-year-old poet who was about to publish her Collected Essays with Random House, and during her absence Ferguson holed up at his grandparents’ apartment near Columbus Circle. He had been living in Laurel-and-Hardy Land for more than a month by then, entirely dug in with his new infatuation and nearly bereft when weekends rolled around now, since the program was off the air on Saturday and Sunday, but the first night he spent at West Fifty-eighth Street happened to be a Monday, which gave him five straight afternoons of Mr. Fat and Mr. Thin, and when his grandfather came home early from work on the first afternoon, explaining that it had been a slow day at the office, he plunked himself down on the sofa next to Ferguson to watch the program, which seemed to affect his sixty-two-year-old mind in the same way it affected Ferguson’s eight-year-old mind, and before long he was shuddering with laughter, at one point so excessively that he began to wheeze and cough and turn red in the face, and so thorough was his delight that he came home early from the office every day that week to catch the show with his grandson.
Then came the surprise, the Sunday visit in early December when Ferguson’s grandparents walked into the apartment on Central Park West loaded down with packages, some of them so heavy that Arthur, the superintendent of the building, had to wheel them in on a hand truck, which earned him a five-dollar tip from Ferguson’s grandfather (five dollars!), and another one in an exceedingly long cardboard box that his grandparents carried in together, each one grasping an end with two hands, and so long was the box that it nearly didn’t make it into the apartment, and when he saw his grandmother smile (how rarely she smiled) and heard his grandfather laugh and felt his mother’s hand settle onto his right shoulder, he knew that something exceptional was about to happen, but he had no idea what that thing could be until the packages were unwrapped and he discovered that he now owned a sixteen-millimeter movie projector, a roll-up movie screen with a collapsible tripod base, and copies of ten Laurel-and-Hardy shorts: The Finishing Touch, Two Tars, Wrong Again, Big Business, Perfect Day, Blotto, Below Zero, Another Fine Mess, Helpmates, and Towed in a Hole.