Absurdistan

21 The School of Gentle Persuasion

I met Alyosha-Bob on the last day of our first semester at Accidental. I could hardly believe that I had emerged from one hundred days of American college instruction with remarkably good grades (an average of 3.94 out of a possible 4.0 points) and as the recipient of a furtive (albeit monocultural) hand job given behind a beer truck by a white girl with greasy mitts and a stutter.

It was the middle of December, and the midwestern campus was not so much blanketed by snow as encased in it. Most of the student body had already left for the East Coast or Chicagoland to join their families for the Kwanzaa vacation; the few of us who remained were knocking about the campus drunk and stoned and in search of fellow humanity. Back then my coat pockets were always stuffed with ham sandwiches (heavy on the mayonnaise) and bags of corn chips, while my freezing fingers were clasped around a marijuana roach from which I sucked with tremendous force and greed. That year had been my first encounter with marijuana, and I was seriously addicted.

It was nighttime. Two in the morning. A comfortable American bed awaited me somewhere, but I was not ready to go home. The pride of the campus was a truly magnificent chapel built in a naive Moorish style in front of which I would stand at night, smoking joint after joint and imagining that maybe a better life awaited us after death (the year was 1990, the time of perestroika, and many thoughtful Russians were hopeful that God existed). But on that night the chapel refused to reveal to me its closely held Presbyterian secrets, the proportion of good works and industry that would win me a place in the part of paradise reserved for American passport holders. On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

I started to shake in both anger and fear, wrapping my arms around me in a sorrowful embrace, for I so loved my personality that I would kill everyone in my path to assure its survival. Very well, I thought, if faith will not comfort me, then I will turn to progress. I stalked off to the other side of the campus and found myself in a newly built quadrangle, where the modern festive greens and yellows of the dormitories shivered astride windowpanes encrusted with snow. I sat down in a snowdrift, opened a bag of corn chips, and swallowed them all in one go. Then I lit the remainder of a joint and realized that I should have smoked the marijuana first and eaten the corn chips second. When would I learn already?

Laughter and a flash of light from somewhere above as a square black solid, a burial casket, it would seem, flew through the air and landed softly on a neighboring mound of snow, where it lodged at an angle like a gravestone. Frightened, I backed my ass farther into the snowdrift, peeled the cellophane off a frozen ham sandwich, and nervously started eating. Death was everywhere around me. Cold American death.

A second casket was launched. It somersaulted briefly in the frozen air, then fell squarely before my feet. The laughter increased, and I covered my head with my hands and howled in terror. Who could be doing this to me? Who could be so cruel as to bait a foreign man under the influence? I opened another sandwich and swallowed most of it strictly out of fear.

And then a third object, a piece of serrated cardboard, fell by my feet. I put down my food and took a better look. It was part of a Scrabble game board, a curious American game that rewards a player’s knowledge of English lexicography and orthography. I crawled toward one of the burial caskets, my monstrous Soviet mittens filling with snow, until I made out the word BOSE glittering at the base. Like most Russian children, I had spent my youth lusting after Western technology, so I knew immediately that the object before me was a pricey stereo speaker. Now, why would someone be flinging such a treasure from a dormitory window? I elected to find out.

Inside the dormitory, one got the impression of a hastily assembled submarine with small porthole-shaped windows and exposed piping overhead, along with the steady hum of distant propulsion, as if we were burrowing our way beneath the midwestern tundra, hoping to emerge either in the California sun or on the elevated B line rumbling toward Grand Street. The moodily lit lobby was given over to a long row of vending machines from which I procured a dozen delicious MoonPies, their chocolate crust breaking beneath my tongue, bathing it in soft white artificial marshmallow.

“Ho-kay,” I said to the empty hallways, on which corkboards were lined with notices demanding swift lesbian action against fat men who got hand jobs from oppressed sisters behind beer trucks. “Bery vell,” I said, flexing my stuffed nose. “Such a voman must be prodected.”

Savoring my MoonPies, I crossed the lifeless hallways, my ears pricked for the sound of Rastafarian music, my stuffed nose trying to follow the telltale trail of purple haze sneaking out from beneath some yellow-lit doorjamb. Finally, on the topmost floor, such a place was found, absent the Bob Marley but filled to the brim with loud male voices trying to outdo one another, as if to impress a woman.

I produced one of my big, squishy hands and knocked.

“Fuck you!” yelled a familiar Russian-tinged voice. I put my hand down and felt insulted. Why didn’t anyone like me? But as I backed away from the door, the same voice shouted, “Oh, whatever. Come in.”

Delighted by the change of heart, I opened the door to face that little runt, the Russian émigré Vladimir Girshkin, a sophomore of no great distinction who nonetheless condescended to me because of his nine-year American tenure and his fine American accent. Girshkin was drunk and high, more so than me, and his whole florid, goateed being repulsed me. Next to Girshkin was Jerry Shteynfarb the future novelist, ensconced in some hippie Salvadoran poncho with a GIVE PEACE A CHANCE button pinned to his heart.

A man-sized industrial fan twirled its mighty propeller by the window, creating an unnatural breeze that tempered the suffocating dormitory heat. Pieces of paper and cardboard were being sprayed out of the fan, like the bits of potato salad trying to escape my mouth at a Women’s Studies picnic. Alyosha-Bob, naked save for a pair of cotton boxers, was feeding a hardcover book into the giant fan, its remainders flying out the window and onto the snow-covered quadrangle.

“Die, Pasternak, die!” he was shouting.

“Hey, Bob,” Jerry Shteynfarb casually said, “what do I do with the toaster oven?”

“Toss it!” Alyosha-Bob shouted. “The fuck I gonna use it for? I’m never eating again. Hey, look at this, guys. Fucking Ada. Take that, Nabokov! You sixteen-karat bore!”

“Right on,” said Shteynfarb and, without any compunction, hurled the toaster oven out the window, his weak literary arm straining under the metallic load.

“Hey, guys,” I said. I blew my nose against my coat sleeve. “Hey. Why you throwing everything out the window?”

“Because every sing,” Shteynfarb said, mimicking my accent, “must go. That’s vai.”

“We’ve each taken three tabs of acid,” Vladimir Girshkin explained, his eyes dark and blank beneath his tortoiseshell granny glasses. “And now Bob is getting rid of all his worldly belongings.”

“Oh,” I said. “Maybe he’s a Buddhist.”

“Oh,” said Shteynfarb. “Maybe he’s not. Maybe he just wants to say fuck-all to everything for no reason. Does everything have to be systematized for you, Misha?”

Alyosha-Bob had turned his dilated pupils my way and challenged me with a skinny red index finger. “You’re Snack Daddy,” he said, using the nickname I had managed to acquire through my dining hall exploits. I stood in awe of his near-naked splendor, the way he appeared perfectly sane and competent even as he presided over the demise of all the beautiful things his parents must have bought him. This was a new kind of Jew, a super Jew, one divorced from the material world.

“You’re Queasy Bob,” I said. “I’ve seen you around the Honor Scholars’ Library.”

“I know about you,” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re the son of that refusenik Boris Vainberg. You’re the real deal. You’re like a part of history.”

I smiled at all three designations. “No, I’m not so big a person as you think,” I said. “I am just…” I stopped to pick through my vocabulary. “I am just…I am just…”

“You heard him, he is just,” Vladimir Girshkin said.

“Misha the Just,” Jerry Shteynfarb said.

“Snack Daddy the Magnificent,” Girshkin picked up.

I looked sadly at my compatriots. Three Russians from Leningrad. Striving for the attention of a solitary American Jew. Why couldn’t we do better by each other? Why couldn’t we form a team to assuage our loneliness? One day I had offered Girshkin and Shteynfarb some homemade beet salad and a loaf of authentic rye bread from the local Lithuanian-owned bakery, but they had only laughed at my nostalgia.

“I am just a student of history,” I told Alyosha-Bob.

“Say, Bob, whaddaya want to do with this?” Vladimir Girshkin said as he picked up a framed photograph of a sweet, dimple-faced Alyosha-Bob huddled beneath his impossibly beautiful mother, an Assyrian princess in hoop earrings, her lustrous hair held back by chopsticks, and his father, a Yankee professor adrift in a corduroy suit one size too large. Later, I would spend my summers with the Lipshitzes at their upstate New York farm, watching them administer their stunningly profitable business, Local Color. They catered to wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians who would rent out their spread for weddings. During the ceremony, they would be joined by the local townspeople, the local color, as it were—articulate, poor black and white families who would show up and pretend to be longtime friends of the bride or groom, talking in their catchy, bebop dialects about failed crop cycles and the demise of the rust belt. I learned much about the unhappy state of the American family from my summers with the Lipshitzes, especially about the use of silence as a corrective tool.

“Break the glass,” Alyosha-Bob said of the framed photo, “then shred the picture in the fan and throw the frame out the window.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” said Vladimir Girshkin. He picked up a paperweight of St. Basil’s Cathedral that had been sitting peaceably amid the junkscape of Alyosha-Bob’s desk and started smashing the family portrait, the jarring noises drowned out by the twirl of the industrial fan.

“Should I shred your clothes before throwing them out?” Jerry Shteynfarb asked, rustling through a huge pile of rugged outerwear.

“Give me my coat,” Alyosha-Bob said.

He put on a pair of baggy denims and a hoodie, a prescient evocation of the gangsta-rap phenomenon that was just starting to spill out of South Central, while Shteynfarb fixed him with his snide authorial gaze. I wondered if Shteynfarb had taken the acid at all; possibly he was here only to observe Alyosha-Bob, to gather material for his unfunny short stories chronicling the differences between Russians and Americans. “Your coat?” Shteynfarb said. “What the hell for?”

“I want to go for a walk with Misha.”

“But we’re throwing all your stuff out!” Girshkin shouted. “You promised us.”

“Carry on without us, boys,” Alyosha-Bob said. “We’ll be back before sunup. And then we’ll all go to the Pen and Pencil for breakfast. How ’bout that?”

Before the disappointed Russians could answer, Alyosha-Bob had escorted me out onto the quadrangle, which was now covered with a pile of his shredded books and broken records, forming a collage around the twisted form of his rowing machine and the dark remains of his stereo. Girshkin and Shteynfarb were still following orders, dutifully tossing out the smashed carcass of an Apple Macintosh computer and a lovingly slashed beanbag.

Alyosha-Bob and I trundled rhythmically through the snow, walking in no prescribed direction but stealing occasional happy looks at each other. “Queasy Bob,” I said. “Why, if I may ask, are you dispensing with all of your personal effects? Are you indeed a Buddhist?”

“I’m not anything,” he said, breathing hard against the cold. “But I want to be a Russian. A real Russian. Not like Shteynfarb or Girshkin.”

I sighed with pleasure at the unspoken compliment. “But real Russians love all the things you have thrown out,” I said. “For example, I am now asking my father to send money so that I may buy an Apple Macintosh computer. Also I would like Bose speakers and a Harman Kardon subwoofer.”

“You really want all that shit?” Alyosha-Bob asked. He stopped walking and looked at me. In the wintry light, I could see his chilled face, slightly cratered with the aftereffects of late chicken pox, so that his physiognomy mirrored the moon that hung above us, the rich, industrialized American moon.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’ve been associating Russian life with spirituality.”

“Well, some of us are believers,” I said. “But mostly we just want things.”

“Oh,” he said. “Wow. I think Girshkin and Shteynfarb have really led me astray.”

We walked on, compacting the snow beneath us into tiny abstract monuments to our future friendship, following in the wake of the lamp-lit beacons of our own breath. “Let’s talk in Russian from now on,” he said. “I know only a few words. Shto eto?” He pointed at a contorted insect of a building, its chimney pumping effluent into the night. What is it?

“Waste incineration plant,” I said in Russian.

“Hmm.” I noticed his boots were untied but decided not to say anything, to preserve the sanctity of the moment. The landscape of the empty campus unfolded before us, as ominously still as a desert ruin. On most days I felt that the imposing neo-Gothic collegiate architecture was challenging me to excellence, but that night I felt the deep wooden hollowness of an Accidental College education, as if everything I had needed to know lay in some puddle of blood on a street in Vilnius or Tbilisi. Perhaps the most important part of my college days would consist of instructing Alyosha-Bob, of forging his peculiar Russian-bound destiny. “A shto eto?” Alyosha-Bob asked, pointing at what looked like a broken spaceship.

“Student psychiatric clinic,” I said in Russian.

“A shto eto?”

“Gay and Lesbian Liberation Center.”

“A shto eto?”

“Nicaraguan Sister Co-op.”

“A shto eto?”

“The Amazon Rain Forest Experience.” The words in Russian were becoming progressively harder and inane-sounding, so I was particularly happy when the college campus exhausted itself and we found ourselves deep in the impoverished countryside that ringed Accidental. “Cornfield,” I said. “Cow barn. Mechanized tractor. Grain depository. Poultry shed. Pig corral.”

We wandered through several kilometers of agriculture, onto the highway that led into the nearest big city. The sun was rising over a nearby strip mall when we decided to stop and turn back. A phalanx of local police cars, sirens ablaze, streamed past us on the way to campus. We assumed, correctly, that the officers were heading for Alyosha-Bob’s dormitory to arrest Girshkin and Shtenyfarb for vandalism and defilement of college property. Excited by this knowledge, we laughed and shouted into the subzero morning air until our frozen throats failed us. I hugged Alyosha-Bob’s shivering body, wedging him within my folds to show him what real friendship meant in Russian.

I thought we would never be apart.