11. Gary Gnu III


The author in his favorite (and only) shirt pens the masterpiece “Bionic Friends” on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The chair is from Hungary, the couch from Manhattan.

JUST BEFORE PUBERTY BEGINS in earnest, I come down with Dissociative Identity Disorder, evidenced by “The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states, [with] at least two of these identities or personality states recurrently [taking] control of the person’s behavior” (DSM-5).

At least two? I’ve got four! To my parents and Grandma Polya I am Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart, disobedient son and beloved grandson, respectfully. Very respectfully. To the American teachers at SSSQ, I am Gary Shteyngart, strange salami-smelling boy with some aptitude at math. To the Hebrew teachers at SSSQ I am Yitzhak Ben Shimon or some shit like that. And to the children, to my fellow pupils in their Macy’s regalia, I am Gary Gnu the Third.

If a psychiatrist had been present (and why the hell wasn’t she present?) to ask me who I was, undoubtedly I would have answered with my slightly manicured but still thick Russian accent, Doctor, I am Gary Gnu the Third, ruler of the Holy Gnuish Empire, author of the Holy Gnorah and commander of the Mighty Gnuish Imperial Army.

How do things come to such a pass?

In 1982, I decide that I can no longer be me. The name “Gary” is a fig leaf, and what I really am is a fucking Red Gerbil, a Commie. A year later the Soviets will shoot down Korean Air Lines flight 007, and the topical New York pop-radio station 95.5 WPLJ will play a parody of the hit song “Eye of the Tiger” by the important American rock band Survivor, only instead of “Eye of the Tiger” the song will be renamed “The Russians Are Liars.” (“As those Communist killers / try to sleep late at night …”)

And as awful as those lyrics are, I can’t stop singing them. In the shower beneath our amazing frosted window opening out on the Deepdale Gardens parking garage, in my father’s car on the way to SSSQ, both of us morning-moody and unfriendly, even beneath the slurs and swipes of my classmates. The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars.

The Soviet leadership are liars; that much I now understand. Latin Lenin in Moscow Square was not always on the up and up. Fine. But am I a liar? No, I am truthful most of the time. Except when one day after one Commie comment too many, I tell my fellow pupils that I wasn’t born in Russia at all. Yes, I just remembered it! It had all been a big misunderstanding! I was actually born in Berlin, right next to Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld, surely you’ve heard of it.

So here I am, trying to convince Jewish children in a Hebrew school that I am actually a German.

And can’t these little bastards see that I love America more than anyone loves America? I am a ten-year-old Republican. I believe that taxes should only be levied on the poor, and the rest of Americans should be left alone. But how do I bridge that gap between being a Russian and being loved?

I start to write.

Papa’s space opera, The Planet of the Yids, is high on my mind when I open up a Square Deal Composition Notebook, 120 pages, Wide Ruled with Margin, and begin my first unpublished novel in English. It is called The Chalenge [sic]. On the first page “I give aknowlegments [sic] to the book Manseed [probably sic] in this issue of Isac [sic] Isimov [sic] Siance [sic] Fiction magazine. I also give thanks to the makers of Start [sic] Treck [sic].”

The book, much like this one, is dedicated “To Mom and Dad.”

The novel — well, at fifty-nine pages let’s call it a novella — concerns a “mistirious* race” which “began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta.”

Yes, Atlanta. We have recently heard from some fellow immigrants that the cost of living in Georgia’s largest city is much lower than New York’s, and one can even own a house and a swimming pool in the suburbs of that fast-growing metropolis for about the price of our garden apartment in Queens.

Opposite the celestial body that is Atlanta with its conservative politics and strong retail base shimmers an alien planet named Lopes, sometimes more correctly spelled as Lopez. “Lopes was a hot world. It was a wonder it didn’t explode … It also contained many parrots.” Somehow I have restrained myself from giving the steamy proto-Latinos of Planet Lopez a set of transistor radios to play at full blast, but I did endow them with three legs each.

There is also an evil, wisecracking scientist named, of course, Dr. Omar. “Hello,” Omar says, “I’m Dr. Omar it’s no pleasure meeting you, now if you mind zipping up that big whole in the middle of your face I can show you my discovery.”

Dr. Omar’s discovery is the “Chalenge Machine” that “perhaps will prove which race is the right one”: the Atlantans with their corporate tax breaks or the Lopezians with their parrots and weak academic records?

As I reread The Chalenge, I want to cry out to its ten-year-old author, Jesus Christ, why can’t you just doodle in the corner of your notebook, dream of Star Wars action figures, and play pick-up sticks with your friends? (Therein, I suppose, lies the answer: what friends?) Why at this young age does it have to already be a race war in outer space and one without the self-deprecating humor of Papa’s Planet of the Yids? What the hell are you talking about, you who have never met a Lopez or an Omar on the wild streets of Little Neck?

The hero of The Chalenge is a space fighter pilot named Flyboy, modeled after a kid who has just transferred into SSSQ, a kid so blond and handsome and retroussé-nosed it’s hard for some of us to believe he’s fully Jewish. Flyboy’s best friend is fellow pilot Saturn, and the love of his life is a fly girl named Iarda. Even at this early stage of my writing career, I realize the importance of a love triangle: “Flyboy smiled his best smile which the other two were jelous off. It of course was clear [Iarda] liked him best.”

“Oh no,” Iarda says. “Fourteen more ships from the other side.”

“Look,” says Saturn. “Twenty more ships in Atlanta battle formachions. Our kind.”

“It hit the electronic scanner shaft and all the scanners and other equipment apart.”

“Well how stupit can people get?” Flyboy wonders.

And then, once the space battle is complete, and our kind has won: “The fourth ship was bound to come. On Atlanta things were going wild.”

I write dutifully, excitedly, asthmatically. I get up every weekend morning even if the Lightman has kept me awake all night, the little pinpricks of light that form his hand spilling out of the cracks between closet door and jamb, reaching out for me, scared breathless on my foldout couch. Five years earlier I had written the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose for my grandmother Galya, who is now six years away from a horrible death back in Leningrad. But now I know to avoid anything even remotely Russian. My Flyboy is as Atlantan as apple pie. And his Iarda, while vaguely Israeli sounding (a reference to the Yordan, the River Jordan?), is also a hot, principled taxpayer who can blow a Lopez or a Rodriguez out of the sky as surely as Ronald Reagan will soon joke, “We begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes.” Bombing Grandma Galya back in Leningrad, he means, and the rest of us Russian liars.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal. Lenin didn’t work out; joining the Komsomol youth league didn’t work out; my family — Papa hits me; my religion — children hit me; but America/Atlanta is still full of power and force and rage, a power and force and rage I can fuel myself with until I feel myself zooming for the stars with Flyboy and Saturn and Iarda and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

There is a teacher at school, a Ms. S, who has just transferred in to substitute for some Mrs. A — Z, and who herself won’t last long within the unique educational environment of SSSQ. Ms. S is as nice to me as the liberals’ son. She has, like almost all the women at the school, an enormous weight of spectacular Jewish hair and a small pretty mouth. On one of her first days on the job, Ms. S asks us all to bring in our favorite items in the world and to explain why they make us who we are. I bring in my latest toy, a dysfunctional Apollo rocket whose capsule pops off with the press of a lever (but only under certain atmospheric conditions, humidity must be below 54 percent), and explain that who I am is a combination of my father’s Planet of the Yids tales and the complicated stories in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dr. Asimov himself, and that I have even written my own novel. This passes largely unremarked as the latest batch of Star Wars X-Wing fighters and My Little Ponies are paraded around.

Finally, Ms. S holds up a sneaker and explains that her favorite activity is jogging.

“Pee-yooh!” a boy cries out, pointing at the sneaker and holding his nose, and everyone except me laughs a wicked child laugh. Jerry Himmelstein agoofs.

I am shocked. Here is a young, kind, pretty teacher, and the children are intimating that her feet smell. Only me and my two-hundred-pound Leningrad fur are allowed to smell around here! I look to Ms. S, so worried that she will cry, but instead she laughs and then goes on about how running makes her feel good.

She has laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!

After we have all finished explaining who we are, Ms. S calls me over to her desk. “You really wrote a novel?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “It is called The Chalenge.”

“May I read it?”

“You may read it. I will brink it.”

And brink it I do, with the worried admonition “Please don’t lose, Meez S.”

And then it happens.

At the end of the English period, when a book about a mouse who has learned to fly in an airplane has been thoroughly dissected, Ms. S announces, “And now Gary will read from his novel.”

His what? Oh, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m standing there holding my composition notebook straight from the Square Deal Notebook people of Dayton, OH, Zip Code 45463, and looking out at me are the boys beneath their little flying-saucer yarmulkes, and the girls with their sweet aromatic bangs, their blouses studded with stars. And there’s Ms. S, whom I’m already terribly in love with but who I’ve recently learned has a fiancé (not sure what that means, can’t be good), but whose bright American face is not just encouraging me but priding me on.

Am I scared? No. I am eager. Eager to begin my life. “Introduction,” I say. “The Mistirious Race. Before the age of dinousaurs There was Human life on Earth. They looked just like the man of today. But they were a lot more inteligent than the men of today.”

“Slowly,” Ms. S says. “Read slowly, Gary. Let us enjoy the words.”

I breathe that in. Ms. S wants to enjoy the words. And then slower: “They built all kinds of spaceships and other wonders. But at that time the Earth circuled the moon because the moon was bigger than the Earth. One day a gigantic comet came and blew up the moon to the size it is today. The pieces of the moon began to Fall on Earth. The race of people got on their spaceships and took off. They began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta. But there was another planet named Lopez with a race of three legged Humanoids. War started soon.” Big breath. “Book One: Before the First Chalenge.”

As I’m reading it, I am hearing a different language come out of my mouth. I do full justice to the many misspellings (“the Earth cir-culed the moon”), and the Russian accent is still thick, but I am speaking in what is more or less comprehensible English. And as I am speaking, along with my strange new English voice, I am also hearing something entirely foreign to the squealing and shouting and sheket bevakasha! that constitute the background noise of SSSQ: silence. The children are silent. They are listening to my every word, following the battles of the Atlantans and Lopezians as far as the ten minutes of allotted time will go. And they will listen to the story for the next five weeks as well, because Ms. S will designate the end of every English period as Chalenge Time, and they will shout out throughout the English period, “When will Gary read already?” and I will sit there in my chair, oblivious to all but Ms. S’s smile, excused from following the discussion of the mouse who learned how to fly, so that I may go over the words I will soon read to my adoring audience.

And God bless these kids for giving me a chance. May their G-d bless them, every one.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a hated freak. But here’s what I’m doing: I am redefining the terms under which I am a hated freak. I am moving the children away from my Russianness and toward storytelling. And toward the ideology of strength and Republicanism, which is life around the Shteyngart dinner table. “Did you write anything new?” shouts a kid in the morning, a merchant’s son, renowned for his lack of basic literacy. “Will the Lopezians attack? What’s Dr. Omar gonna do next?”

What indeed? I am now so far beyond Jerry Himmelstein that I don’t even bother studying him and trying to avoid his social miscues. With my newfound lesser brand of hate comes the responsibility that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The responsibility of writing something every day, lest I fall out of favor again and be restored to Red Gerbil status.

What I need is to expand my repertoire. And that means more access to popular culture. When I’ve run out of The Chalenge to read I follow up with another fifty-pager called Invasion from Outer Space, featuring the evildoings of the Academy of Moors (Yasser Arafat has been back in the news), and that one goes over reasonably well. But what I really need is access to a television set.

Enter Grandmother Polya.

Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who acts as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent. You can see her in action in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens, running after her thick-limbed grandson with a dish of buckwheat, fruit, or farmer’s cheese—“Sasha, come back, my treasure! I have plums for you!”—or flipping through rows of slacks at the Alexander’s (now Marshalls) on Queens Boulevard, getting Sasha ready for the new school year.

Rego Park, Queens. This is where I go after school while my parents work. Close enough to Little Neck for my father to strike with his Chevy Malibu Classic, but far enough away that I may develop my own personality. The homey, low-rise redbrick neighborhood is overshadowed by the three modernist Birchwood Towers, each nearly thirty stories in height and featuring the tackiest themed lobbies on the Eastern Seaboard — the Bel Air, the Toledo, and the Kyoto, with its marble Japanese statuette and hanging scrolls. I spot my first limousine parked in the Bel Air’s circular driveway and promise to myself that one day I will own one. Other less gargantuan co-op buildings have pretty gardens and names like the Lexington and New Hampshire House. In one of these, my grandmother, over sixty but still full of country strength, cleans toilets for an American woman.

Grandma lives at 102–17 Sixty-Fourth Avenue, a cheap six-story redbrick facing a public school that contains black children and that we circle with care. She holds court on a wooden bench outside, presenting me to fellow Russian retirees, demanding that attention be paid as she explains how I am the best, most successful grandson that ever walked the streets of Queens.

My grandmother loves me more than the Madonna del Granduca loved her Son, and when I come to stay at her house after school this love is expressed through a three-hour gorging process.

Back at my parents’ house, we feast on Russian or, I should say, Soviet cuisine. Breakfast is a plate of roasted buckwheat groats with a puddle of butter soaking up the middle. Supper is a plate of thick, salty farmer’s cheese with a can of frozen peaches dumped on it. (“Just like they serve in the restaurants!” my mother cries, as if she’s ever been to a restaurant.) Around 3:00 P.M. a piece of boiled meat and some kind of wan vegetable are beaten into submission. “Please,” I beg my mother. “If you let me eat only half a plate of buckwheat groats, I’ll vacuum the whole apartment tomorrow. If we skip the farmer’s cheese, I’ll give you back part of my allowance. Please, Mama, don’t feed me.” When my mother isn’t looking, I run to the bathroom and spit out the inedible bricks of farmer’s cheese, watching the toilet water turn cloudy white with my misery.

At Grandmother’s life is different. Whilst I recline on a divan like a pasha, three hamburgers topped with coleslaw and mustard and a fart of ketchup are quickly brought to me. I eat them up with trembling hands as my grandmother peers turtle-like from behind the kitchen door, eyes wide with anxiety. “Are you still hungry, my favorite one?” she whispers. “Do you want more? I’ll run to Queens Boulevard. I’ll run to 108th Street. I’ll run anywhere!”

“Run, Grandma, run!” And Grandma raises dust through central Queens, her arms straining under the weight of pepperoni pizza pies, greenish pickle slices, cervelat smoked sausages from Misha and Monya’s Russian gastronom, ridged potato chips covered in some kind of orange crud, mayonnaise-heavy tuna-fish salad from the kosher store, thick pretzels that I pretend to smoke like cigars, ranch dips that bring to mind a hint of the garlic that’s all but absent in our Little Neck garden apartment, packets of creamy chocolaty Ding Dongs, cartons of Sara Lee layer cake. I eat and eat, trans fats clogging my little body, pockets of fat popping up in unlikely places. Sometimes I find Grandma in the kitchen sucking on a chicken bone amid an orange landscape of government cheese while she leafs through a fresh packet of food stamps, each graced with a beautiful drawing of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. Grandma survived the wartime evacuation of Leningrad with her three-year-old son, my father, to suck poultry marrow in a Queens kitchen. But she looks happy with her meager meal, philosophical. Anything to keep Little Igor (or Gary, as the Americans are now calling him) in Ding Dongs.

Grandma’s one-bedroom apartment is a thing of wonder. Besides the hamburger-producing kitchen there is my mean step-grandfather Ilya glowering at the dining table, who will die soon anyway, partly of cancer and partly because he’s never really found anyone in Rego Park with whom to hoist 150 grams of the good stuff (alcoholic heartbreak should be a classifiable Russian disease). Then there are the bright medals Ilya won “for bravery” while serving with the Soviet navy in the Arctic Circle, which I love to pin across my chest, because, yes, the Russians are liars, but we still fought and won the Great Patriotic War against the Germans, so … And most important, there is the television set.

Grandma has a television set.

The television came with the apartment, along with the crumbling divan and the scary children’s clown drawings, probably because moving it would require all the men of the Twenty-Third Soviet Arctic Division. The screen is not big, but it is encased within a kind of gigantic wooden armoire (not too different from the three-ton Hungarian specimen Grandma has brought with her from Leningrad), and the whole contraption stands on two sturdy legs splayed at a decisive angle. The Zenith is probably from the latter portion of the 1950s or the very early 1960s, and the problem with it is that, like a dog too old to run after the ball, it’s no longer interested in catching the electromagnetic signals that transmit picture and sound. Or rather it catches either picture or sound.

The only way to get the sound is if I hold on to the tip of the antenna and then point one of my arms outside the window. Then it is possible to follow the plot but not to see the action. In reverse, if I don’t become a part of the antenna, if I lie opposite the Zenith on Grandma’s divan, it is possible to see the action but not to hear anything but cold static. Soon I catch on to the fact that episodes of the most popular series are frequently rebroadcast on American television. I turn myself into the antenna to hear the storyline and, upon commercial break, jot down as much of the dialogue as I can. When the show is reaired a few months later, I watch it with my notes, so that I am able to put the dialogue and action together.

Given this method, it is still hard to understand why Buck Rogers is trapped in the twenty-fifth century or why the Incredible Hulk is sometimes green and sometimes not. Buck Rogers, a favorite of the schoolchildren — all the boys have a crush on Colonel Wilma Deering, played by shapely model Erin Gray in a sexy one-piece jumpsuit, but none’s crush is greater than my own — requires special adjustment because it comes on at 4:00 P.M. on WWOR, channel 9. The thing about channel 9 is that to receive transmission between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M. necessitates more than just my leaning out the window while holding the antenna. Exactly every seven seconds I have to make a “come over here” motion with my hand, as if inviting the electromagnetic signals into Grandma’s living room, so that I may hear Colonel Wilma Deering cry, “Buck Rogers, I’m ordering you back to the base! This is against all principles of modern aerial combat!” as her blue eyes open up in hot, simulated panic and, if I may extrapolate, desire.

Later I have Grandma petition my parents to buy her a Hitachi nineteen-inch television with limited remote-control capacity. They don’t realize that the three hours I spend at Grandma’s before Papa rolls in on his car-boat are spent exclusively on being fed like some pre-foie-gras goose and watching her Zenith. I lie and tell them that I am doing my homework for those three hours, and Grandma keeps mum; she’s just happy to see me eating Doritos while the Germans are not advancing past the border set down by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Homework at SSSQ takes about three minutes of my time. You add up how many hot-air balloons there are floating in a photograph of New Mexico, and then you identify some prophet and miserably scratch into the machberet, the blue Israeli notebook. (My father has already called the Hebrew school and demanded that they give me more difficult math problems. They have categorically refused.) And then when you’re done with the Prophet Ezekiel you’re free to watch Diff’rent Strokes. The problem is that even with my growing English vocabulary and the excellent visibility on Grandma’s new Hitachi, Diff’rent Strokes, ostensibly the story of a rich white man who adopts many black children, makes no sense on cultural grounds. In fact, none of it does.

The more I watch, the more the questions keep mounting. Just what exactly is going on in this country of mine? And why won’t President Reagan do something about it? For instance:

The Brady Bunch: Why are Mr. and Mrs. Brady always so happy even though Mrs. Brady has clearly already had a razvod with her previous husband and now they are both raising children who are not theirs? Also, what is the origin of their white slave Alice?

Three’s Company: What does it mean, “gay”? Why does everyone think the blond girl is so pretty, when it is clearly the brunette who is beautiful?

Gilligan’s Island: Is it really possible that a country as powerful as the United States would not be able to locate two of its best citizens lost at sea, to wit, the millionaire and his wife? Also, Gilligan is comical and bumbling like an immigrant, but people seem to like him. Make notes for further study? Emulate?

Planet of the Apes: If Charlton Heston is a Republican, are the monkeys Soviet?

After three hours of watching television and eating government cheese on Grandma’s food-stamp-bought Ritz crackers I am ostensibly as American as anyone else. In the kitchen Grandma is preparing still more food for the next day’s feedings, and I now wonder how it is possible to love someone so much just because she gave me what I wanted when no one else would.

Although I am afraid of heights I climb out on the fire escape some six floors above the patchy grass of central Queens and watch the TWA jets descend sharply into LaGuardia Airport. Soon Papa will come and take me home to Little Neck, to my real home, where my parents will fight about the wolfish relatives until 10:30 P.M., until it is time for all of us to get enough sleep to face another difficult day in America.

Outside Grandma’s apartment, the car honks stretch way out to the Grand Central Parkway, and people in the apartment house next door are playing English and Spanish radios and just being alive and free, and the air is city-scented with gasoline and grilled meat, which is in its own way delicious. When I shut my eyes I hear the addictively cloying Three’s Company theme song (“Come and knock on our door / We’ve been waiting for you”) and the commercial for Juicy Fruit gum sung with such intense abandon it makes me scared (“Jew-seh froooot is gonna moooove ya / it gotta taaaaste that cut raaaaght throoo ya-ugh”).

Even a few years back I was angrier than I am now, and when I’d watch the TWA jets descend I wanted some of them to fall out of the sky and explode against the little houses beyond the jumble of redbrick apartment buildings. But now I just think, Vow, how lucky are people that they can take a flight somewhere. And will that be me someday up in the air again? Where will I land this time? Will it be at Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld? At Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, so I can fight Omar and the other Arabs? Will someone other than Grandma ever love me?

“You’re Gary Gnu.” It’s some kid on a public, non-Jewish playground.

Me: “Vat?”

“Your name’s Gary. So you’re Gary Gnu. From the Great Space Coaster.”

“Vat coaster?”

“Don’t be a dick. You’re Gary Gnu.”

“I am Gnu?”

But before I am Gnu, let me discourse on one more television show I have caught on Grandma’s Zenith. It is called The Six Million Dollar Man. First, let’s be honest here: This man is expensive. Not ten-million-dollar expensive per the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes we almost won, but nearly two-thirds as expensive. Steve Austin is his name, and he was an astronaut until a terrible accident deprived him of many body parts and he was resurrected at taxpayers’ expense to have all kinds of adventures. (Famous opening sequence: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … We have the technology.”) As in love as I am with Colonel Wilma Deering of Buck Rogers, I am even more fascinated with bionic Steve Austin. Because when I think about it, the man is a cripple. He is missing one arm, two legs, and one eye. Imagine if I showed up at SSSQ without those things, and with my toy Monkey missing an arm as well. The Israeli kids would mop the floor with me, or the parts of the floor Jimmy and George, the two black custodians, have missed. And yet, Steve Austin is not deficient. Although parts of him aren’t real, Steve takes advantage of his new powers. He is, in the words of the show, “Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don’t work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

In my “novel” Invasion from Outer Space, I include a chapter called “Bionic Friends,” about, well, two bionic friends. The pretty Ms. S, now sadly a Mrs., likes that chapter in particular, and I remember the incident with her sneaker at the Show and Tell, when one of the kids pointed at her sneaker and said “Pee-yooh”:

She laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!

Me, back on the playground: “Who is Gary Gnu?”

“It’s you, dick. Your name is Gary, right? So you’re Gary Gnu, asshole.”

It is hard to argue with this Christian boy’s logic.

Gary Gnu is a comical furry green muppet in a mauve turtleneck on the children’s television show The Great Space Coaster. All the other kids at SSSQ are familiar with him, but I do not watch The Great Space Coaster because it comes on in the morning when I am without Grandma’s Zenith. A gnu is one of the “stocky, oxlike antelopes of the genus Connochaetes,” resident of Africa. Gnu is pronounced nu. Gary Gnu clearly has a problem with the silent g in his name because he adds it to every word that starts with the letter n in annoying fashion: “Absolutely gnot. You’re a gnuisance who’s sure to bring gnothing but bad gnews.” His motto on The Great Space Coaster is “No gnews is good gnews with Gary Gnu.” I do not know any of this, but as the goy-boy on the playground pointed out, the antelope’s name is Gary just like mine. So I try it out on the kids. “I’m Gary Gnu!”

“Gary Gnu! Gary Gnu! No gnews is good gnews!”

Well, that went over pretty well. No “Commie” or “Red” there. And then I am reminded of Thurston Howell III, the millionaire on Gilligan’s Island who is so inspiring to a young Republican immigrant. “I’m Gary Gnu the Third.”

“Gary Gnu the Third! Gary Gnu the Third! No gnews,” etc.

And then it hits me. I’m not a Russian. Never was. I’m an antelope. I’ve always been an antelope. It is time to commit this discovery to paper.

I write my own Torah. It’s called the Gnorah, an allusion to my new Gnu-ness. The Gnorah is written on an actual scroll of paper to give it the feel of a Torah. I type it on a new kind of device that my father has brought over from work, which is a computer keyboard that receives signals via a telephone line and translates such signals into dot-matrixlike characters that it then spits out on paper. To make the whole thing even more Torah-like I have my father carve two sticks to simulate the rollers used for scrolling the Torah.

The Gnorah is a hatchet job directed at the entirety of the SSSQ religious experience, the rote memorization of ancient texts, the aggressive shouting of blessings and counterblessings before and after lunch, the ornery rabbi who claims the Jews brought on the Holocaust by their overconsumption of delicious pork products. In Hebrew, the words of the Old Testament are pure gibberish to our ears. Bereishit bara Elohim … (In the beginning God created …). In English, the words are not much better, the start of a long lesson in overzealous genealogy meant, I suppose, to convey to us youngsters the permanence and uniqueness of our race. Only take one look at the redheaded merchant’s son unable to form two coherent sentences in English, incurious about any and all aspects of life save the ongoing excavation of his own nose, and bereishit, indeed. The Gnorah merely, humbly, takes the Old Testament to its own logical conclusion circa 1984.

1. First There was nothing, just a piece of Hubba Bubba. 2. And then it popped and the earth formed. 3. And the sugar of it turned into dust. 4. Just one piece of Nutra Sweet turned into a man.

God creates Adam (or, rather, Madman) and gives him a garden called Cleaveland, referring, I’m guessing, both to the unsuccessful city in Ohio and Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife”).

In subsequent chapters there are references to Wendy’s famous Where’s the Beef? campaign, Mister Rogers, Howard Cosell, Playboy magazine, and the Waldbaum’s supermarket chain. Every pop reference I have learned from the Zenith and elsewhere is crammed into use, alongside poor Jerry Himmelstein. The Twelve Gnuish Tribes multiply—“Princess Leia gave him Shlomo, Shlemazel, Shmuck, Nudnik, Dino, Gloria, Dror, Virginia, Jolly and Jim”—and somehow end up in Australia instead of Egypt.

Exodus becomes Sexodus. Henry Miller would have been proud. Moses is renamed Mishugana, and instead of a Burning Bush there is the Burning Television. God sends the Australians twelve plagues, the last one of which is Rabbi Sofer, SSSQ’s potbellied Hebrew principal and strongman, “and the Australians couldn’t take it anymore and they said go, go and take Rabbi Sofer with you.” The Gnuish tribes make their way from Australia to Hawaii, “the land of silk and money.” The fifth commandment handed down by the Gnuish God is simple: “Abuse your teachers.”

And G-d spoke: Don’t worry about ethics, this does not however mean you can act like John Macaenroe. Do not pray to statues of Michael Jackson or Tom Sellek: I am your G-d. If you see a blind man do not cheat him: for example do not sell him cocaine when it is really angel dust. Don’t swear in the name of Brook Shields, by doing so you are insulting my name.

And G-d continued: Whatever form of government you have tax the people highly and unfairly. You are not to become emotionally involved with Boy George or his mother. Allow abortion because what if someone like Jerry Himmelstein is born in such cases it is wise to say the two parents agoofed. And what if a natural disaster like Eedo Kaplan [an Israeli boy who harasses the two Russian girls in school] is born? Think about it. Here are things you should not crossbreed …

A long list that includes “Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Ferraro” and ends, sadly, with “Gary Gnu and any Female Gnu” and then the same words with which my father would end all of his Planet of the Yids tales: “To be continued.”

Once it is finished I read it over and over again. I cannot sleep. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. The next day in school I wait impatiently until recess, and then unfurl my Gnorah for a few kids, mindful of Rabbi Sofer’s thick presence. More children gather around me. With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric. By the final period, the Gnorah has been passed around the entire school. By the next day, it is being quoted in the boys’ bathroom, the center of power. Even Jerry Himmelstein seems pleased by my disgustingly cruel remarks about him. Not that I care. And as, in class, we recite mindlessly about the prophets and the women who loved them, as we chant things that mean nothing to us, as Rabbi Sofer waddles around with his bullhorn telling us what bad children we are, me and my small band of — wait, are they really my friends? — we laugh and rejoice in the Gnuish tribes and their hard, horny Sexodus from Australia and their worship of the much-loved Brooke Shields, who, rumor has it, really might be Jewish, or Gnuish, or whatever.

The Gnorah marks the end of Russian as my primary tongue and the beginning of my true assimilation into American English. Back in my stuffy bedroom in Little Neck, I eagerly jot down the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire (the HGE), which is built on solidly Republican principles. The love of two countries, America and Israel, the love of the smooth, always laughing, unconcerned-seeming Reagan, the love of unfettered capitalism (even though my father works for the government and my mother for a nonprofit), the love of the mighty Republican Party is a way for me to share something with my father. To my well-thumbed Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine I have added a subscription to the National Review. William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative magazine ostensibly has fewer space monsters between its covers than Isaac Asimov’s, but even though I can understand maybe 50 percent of the words Buckley and his friends use, I can already discern the angry, unhappy rhetoric about certain kinds of people that so neatly mirrors our own. On the cover of the Holy Gnuish Constitution I draw a set of scales marked “Welfare” and “Military Spending,” tipping resolutely toward the latter. Take that, you welfare queens with your Cadillacs. And then another unbidden delight. Having established my Republican bona fides by subscribing to the National Review, I am sent a thick card featuring an American eagle sitting upon two rifles. Even though I am too young to own a gun and to be able to shoot a black person on the subway who might rob me (I’ve actually taken the subway maybe thrice thus far), I am being welcomed, with great Second Amendment fanfare, into the National Rifle Association.

At SSSQ, another overly imaginative boy named David creates the Imperial Lands of David (the ILD), mirroring the Democratic politics to which most Queens Jewish kids’ parents subscribe. He calls himself the Mighty Khan Caesar. As a matter of course, the Holy Gnuish Empire and the Imperial Lands of David go to war. David and I talk peace treaties and how we will divide the known universe between us in the same way Spain and Portugal once split the globe according to the Treaty of Zaragoza. As we settle our foreign affairs, our followers run around the SSSQ gym stacked with prayer books, where in the morning we sing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and, with a feeling that almost brings us to tears, the “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. But today the kids are not crying out about Nefesh Yehudi (“the Jewish soul”). They are chanting my anthem (“Nefesh Gnushi …”) and hoisting my flag, the drawing of a gnu standing resplendent in the African veldt, photocopied from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

Until high school, I will never be called Gary again. I am Gary Gnu or just Gnu. Even the teachers refer to me as such. One of them, in a bid to forgo teaching for a day, decides to devote the class periods to the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire. This development makes me so excited I have an asthma attack that lasts an entire week. The children, my Gnuish representatives, carry on while in his sickbed the Gnuish leader, mesmerized by the Lightman reconstituting himself in his closet, wheezes his way into some future world, some future personality.

Three years from now we will graduate, and a yearbook will be issued. There will be humorous quotes about each of the students — for example, the song titles that best personify us. The three other Russian children will get quotes solely about their Russianness (e.g., favorite song: “Back in the U.S.S.R.”), but mine will be about my Republicanism or my strangeness (“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”).

Better, stronger, faster.

But not really, of course. As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn’t particularly give a damn. And as the hoopla around my Gnuish Empire dies down, a beefy kid whose last name means both “Oak” and “Dullard” in Russian waddles over to me and says, “Hey, Gnu. What do you listen to? The classical music station?” And I begin to protest, because I’ve learned never to talk about high culture in public nor mention the fact that both my parents have musical training. “I don’t know about classical music!” I say, loudly, too loudly. “I have the Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger cassette tape and the Cyndi Lauper!”

But the “Oak” and a small, pretty Mesopotamian-eyed girl in the seat next to him are already laughing at my terrible affliction. If only they knew what a wide berth I have given to my father’s Tchaikovsky and my mother’s Chopin. How in my father’s car, on the way home from my grandmother’s, I turn on the Duran Duran tape as loudly as he will let me, and, with my face turned to my window, as if I’m watching the fascinating cement scenery of Grand Central Parkway go by, I mouth the British words I cannot even begin to comprehend (“The re-flex, flex-flex”) under my tuna-fish breath. I mouth them with every last little bit of hope inside me.



* From this point the “sic” will be omitted for the sake of brevity.

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