Daniel worked as a commercial artist and sometime illustrator of children’s books, a self-employed odd-jobber who spent eight to ten hours a day in a small room at the back of the family apartment that had been converted into a studio, a cluttered, dimly lit micro-atelier where he churned out drawings and paintings for greeting cards, advertisements, calendars, corporate brochures, and Tommy the Bear watercolors for his collaborations with writer Phil Costanza, bringing in enough money to feed, clothe, and house a family of four but with nothing left over for extravagances like long summer vacations or private schools for the kids. His work was skilled and professional, bearing the marks of a deft hand and a capricious imagination, and although there was nothing terribly original about what he did, it was never less than charming, a word that was often used to describe Daniel Schneiderman himself, who turned out to be one of the most unpretentious and jovial people Ferguson had ever met, a person who liked to laugh and consequently laughed a lot, an altogether different kind of being from his older brother, the little one who never had to struggle with a German accent, the handsome one, the unserious one, the one who liked sports, as did stepcousin Jim, long, lean, basketball-playing Jim, who had just started his junior year at the Bronx High School of Science when Gil and Ferguson’s mother were married, and once the male contingent of the other Schneidermans learned that their new nephew/cousin was as big on basketball as they were, the duo became a trio, and every time Dan and Jim went to see a game at the Garden, Ferguson was invited to go along with them. That was the old Garden, the now demolished Madison Square Garden that had once stood on Eighth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, and so it was that Ferguson was taken to see his first live basketball games during that 1959–60 season, Saturday afternoon college triple-headers, Harlem Globetrotter exhibitions, and the shoddy, mediocre Knicks of Richie Guerin, Willie Naulls, and Jumping Johnny Green, but there were only eight teams in the NBA back then, which meant that the Boston Celtics played at the Garden at least half a dozen times per season, and those were the games the trio made a point of attending, since no one played the game better than that team of Cousy, Heinsohn, Russell, and the Jones boys, they were a single, five-part brain in constant motion, a single consciousness, utterly selfless players who thought only of the team and not of themselves, basketball as it was meant to be played, as Uncle Dan kept repeating as he watched them, and yes, it was astonishing to observe how much better they were than the Knicks, who seemed sluggish and awkward beside them, but much as Ferguson admired the team as a whole, there was one player who stood out for him and captured the bulk of his attention, sinewy, wire-thin Bill Russell, who always seemed to be at the heart of what the Celtics did, the one whose brain seemed to hold the four other brains inside his head, or a man who had somehow dispersed his brain into the heads of his teammates, for Russell moved strangely and didn’t look like an athlete, he was a limited player who rarely took shots or scored, who rarely even dribbled the ball, and yet there he was snagging another crucial rebound, making another impossible bounce pass, blocking another shot, and because of him the Celtics kept winning game after game season after season, champions or competing for the championship every year, and when Ferguson asked Jim what made Russell so great when in many ways he wasn’t even good, Jim paused for a moment to think, shook his head, and replied, I don’t know, Archie. Maybe he’s just smarter than everyone else, or maybe it’s because he sees more than other people do and always knows what’s going to happen next.
Beanpole Jim was the answer to Ferguson’s age-old prayers, the wish for an older brother, or at least an older cousin-friend he could look up to and draw strength from, and Ferguson exulted in their connection, in the way the sixteen-year-old Jim seemed to have no qualms about embracing his younger stepcousin as a comrade, little understanding that Jim, with a sister and two girl cousins, had no doubt been longing for a brother just as much as he had. In the two years before Jim graduated from high school and went off to study at MIT, he turned out to be an essential figure for the often confused and rebellious Ferguson, who was doing well in his classes at the Riverside Academy but continued to have an attitude problem (talking back to his teachers, quick to flare up when provoked by thugs like Billy Nathanson), and there was Jim, all curiosity and high spirits, a bighearted math-and-science boy who loved to talk about irrational numbers, black holes, artificial intelligence, and Pythagorean dilemmas, with no anger in him, never a rude word or a pugnacious gesture toward anyone, and surely his example helped tamp down the excessiveness of Ferguson’s behavior somewhat, and there too was Jim giving Ferguson the lowdown on female anatomy and what to do about the ever more persistent problem of sex on the brain (cold showers, ice cubes on your dick, three-mile runs around the track), and best of all there was Jim on the basketball court with him, the five-foot-eleven-inch high school junior, the six-foot-one-inch senior who would meet Ferguson on Saturday mornings at the midway point between their two apartments and walk down to Riverside Park with him, where they would find an empty court and practice together for three hours, seven sharp every Saturday as long as the weather gods were with them, drizzles being acceptable but not downpours, flurries but not sleet or heavy snow, and nothing doing if the temperature dropped below twenty-five degrees (frozen fingers) or rose above ninety-five (heat prostration), which meant they were out there on most Saturdays until Jim packed his bags and left for college. No more trotting along beside his mother on weekend photo outings for young Mr. Ferguson, those days were finished forever, and from now on it was basketball, which he had discovered at twelve when the ball stopped being too large and heavy for him to control, and by the time he was twelve and a half it had become the new passion of his life, the next best thing to movies and kissing girls, and how fortunate it was that Jim had arrived on the scene just then and was willing to give up three hours every week instructing him on how to play, what a miraculous turn that was, the right person at the right time — how often did that happen? — and because Jim was a good and conscientious player, more than good enough to have made his high school team if he had chosen to go out for it, he was a good teacher of fundamentals, and one by one he led Ferguson through the basic drills of how to execute a proper layup, how to move his feet on defense, how to box out for rebounds, how to throw a bounce pass, how to shoot free throws, how to bank the ball off the backboard, how to release the ball at maximum altitude when taking a jump shot, so many things to learn, dribbling with his left hand, setting picks, keeping his arms up on defense, and then the games of O-U-T and H-O-R-S-E at the end of each session, which turned into games of one-on-one in the second year, as Ferguson sprouted up to five-four, five-six, and five-seven, always losing to the taller, more experienced Jim but beginning to hold his own after his fourteenth birthday, at times respectable enough to pour in five or six straight jumpers through the netless rims of Riverside Park, the same denuded rims to be found in every public park across the city, and because they played by the New York rule of winners-out, whenever Ferguson went on one of his shooting sprees, he would come dangerously close to not losing. As Jim put it after one of the last games they played together: Give it another year, Archie, grow another two or three inches, and you’ll be wiping my ass off the court. He spoke those words with the proud satisfaction of a teacher who had taught his pupil well. And then it was Boston and good-bye, and a new hole was dug in Ferguson’s heart.