The author’s grandmother never passed judgment on the amazing shirt he is sporting here. He saved his best smiles for her.
FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS of my life in Queens, America, I have no idea where Manhattan is. There are two or three skyscrapers of maybe twenty stories apiece rearing up where Union Turnpike smashes into Queens Boulevard. I am under the impression that that is Manhattan.
Eventually, I am taken to the bargain emporiums of Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, where I spend most of the day rooting around the clothing bins like a curious piglet, pulling out underwear and belts, socks and slacks, a winter jacket with a hood designed to cover the head of an urban Goliath, not a little milksop like myself. There’s something visually unclean about this whole place; in contrast to the park-like spreads of eastern Queens, Manhattan’s colors are reminiscent of a Soviet newscast — tractor browns, beet reds, cabbage greens. Mama and I turn off Orchard Street onto Delancey, where the steel cauldron of the Williamsburg Bridge overwhelms the cityscape, leaving me worried for the cars disappearing between its vast girders. And then — a loud pop. Gunfire! I grab my mother’s hand and pull myself into her coat. The violent, unhappy Manhattanites are shooting at us! We hear a few yelps from passersby, but soon the halfhearted terror gives way to laughter and Spanish. What happened? A car backfired, that’s what.
As a Hebrew school boy, I dream of someday moving to the most suburban of suburbs, where I will never have to look into another unfamiliar face, or indeed any faces at all. I see myself as a prosperous Republican left to his own devices in a backyard that stretches over a hill, swallows up a formerly public lake, and ends in a fierce bramble of barbed wire festooned with a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. It’s an appropriate way to spend the 1980s. Young immigrant to city: Drop dead.
And then I am accepted to the Stuyvesant High School for the maths and the sciences on Fifteenth Street, between First and Second Avenues and between the dangerous districts of East Village, Greenwich Village, Union Square, Times Square, and the Ladies’ Mile.
September 1987. Manhattan Island. The car of visiting relatives makes its way down Second Avenue, with me and my knapsack in tow. The relatives, from some second-tier American or Canadian city, glance out apprehensively at the busy, dirty city. “Leave him here,” my mother says. “Igoryochek”—Little Igor—“can you walk across the street by yourself?”
“Yes, Mama.” We are worried that just like at Hebrew school the nonmagnificent car of our relatives will create problems for me with the student body. We don’t seem to understand that more than half the students at Stuyvesant are lower- to middle-class immigrant strivers much like ourselves, that China’s Fujian Province, the Indian state of Kerala, and Russia’s Leningrad Oblast lie at different corners of the same body of land. (The notoriously hard-to-get-into school requires top marks on a math test that students from the dweebiest countries can easily achieve.)
I also do not understand that I am about to walk into the rest of my life.
In the weeks before the start of Stuyvesant, I sit down with my mother and I tell her that I need to wear better clothes than I did at Solomon Schechter. I don’t tell my mother about the eight years of being subhuman at Hebrew school, because that would be tantamount to saying something bad about the Jews, which is treason, a capital offense. My parents sacrificed everything to bring me here to be free and Jewish, and I have taken that lesson to heart. I may have written my blasphemous Gnorah, yes, but only a year ago I led my parents on an insane hunt against crumbs of chametz, the leavened bread that is forbidden during the Passover holiday, castigating them for their lack of vigilance, nearly tearing off the shag carpet in search of month-old chunks of Lithuanian rye. When I pee I know that I am not allowed to think of any of the names of G-d or He will punish me, will lop off whatever’s left, although these days I mostly can’t help letting loose a stream of YahwehYahwehYahweh, followed by hours of deep existential grief.
“Mama, I have to dress better.”
In my quest for sartorial funding, I may have also mentioned to my mother that dressing better is a prerequisite for acceptance to an Ivy League college. This (sort of) lie may have loosened the clasp of her wallet, because getting into a top college has been the first, second, third, and last concern of all Stuyvesant students and their mamas from the day the high school was founded in 1904 and will be until the day its new waterfront campus finally sinks beneath the climate-stoked waves in 2104.
And so my first Stuyvesant memory actually takes place at Macy’s. My mother and I are roaming that midtown maze for the new hot brands, Generra, Union Bay, Aéropostale. I want to dress like the rich girls in Hebrew school did, so I am trying on loose, baggy shirts and sweaters, which will also hide my tits and settle softly over the pink keloid scar taking up the real estate of my right shoulder. No one shops like my mother. A small budget is stretched out into a shirt for every day of the week and pants and sweaters for every other day. I come out of the dressing room, and Mama presses the shirts against my body, holds them tight, to make sure I don’t bulge out upstairs, and, if I’m trying on jeans, to certify there is at least the suggestion of an ass. Until I make the acquaintance of a series of girlfriends in my thirties who will accompany me to dressing rooms all over Manhattan and Williamsburg, this is the closest I come to the ministrations of a woman.
When we walk out of Macy’s with two tightly packed bags under each arm, I feel my mother’s sacrifice far more than when she talks about what she’s left behind in Russia. I love my mother truly, but I am a teenager. The fact that my mother has just visited my dying grandma Galya in Leningrad and found her unable to speak or even recognize her, while the rest of her family, cold and hungry, waited in line for hours to score a desiccated, inedible eggplant, means much too little to me.
All I can hear are the electronic zaps—tttrick—of the $39.99 Generra shirts being scanned at the counter, the green dollar figures adding up on the register, the final indignity, the New York sales tax, soaring the numbers into an unexpected new realm. I am so sorry, Mama, to spend our money like this.
At Solomon Schechter boys had to wear shirts with collars because that’s how Yahweh wanted it, but secular Stuyvesant has no dress code, and so we invest in a colorful collection of OP T-shirts. “OP” stands for “Ocean Pacific,” and it is a California surfers’ brand. I am, of course, the world’s most consummate Californian surfer. (“Dude, that breaker was boss! I am like so amped!”) Still, despite my lack of surfer credentials, these T-shirts are wonderful: They stretch out over the uncertainty of my teenage frame, and their bright visages of wave-riding surfers distract a little from the bobbing Adam’s apple above the neckline. One of the shirts features three grannies in polka-dot dresses next to a long-haired surfer carrying his boogie board, and I’m guessing this is some kind of easygoing California humor, but it is also a reminder that in the center of Queens, so far from the scary world of Manhattan, there still lives my grandmother, who is proud of me for getting into the prestigious math and science academy.
Wearing my OP grandmother shirt, I walk through parklike Stuyvesant Square, sweaty-palmed and scared. I know I cannot be Gary Gnu any longer, but then what will I be? A serious, hardworking Republican boy bound for Harvard, Yale, or, in the worst scenario, Princeton. That’s me. I’ll be funny only when it’s called for. No more clowning around. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I have just seen Oliver Stone’s Wall Street with my family, and the lessons were clear. Don’t trust outsiders. Don’t get caught. Focus only on wealth creation. Greed is good. I also think I have a trump card: the $280,000 colonial my family has just bought in Little Neck. Packed in my school bag, just in case, I carry an engineer’s report testifying to our new house’s value, including a photograph of the house in the morning sun, its southern exposure swaddled by a row of hyacinths. Every step of the process, from picking out the actual house among a casting call of colonial look-alikes to calculating the mortgage payments, was done with my obsessive participation. I even created a Commodore 64 computer program called Family Real Estate Transaction Calculator to help us make sense of our descent into institutional debt. I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.
And the other thing I want to do is to make a friend. Jonathan has gone off to the Ramaz School, a Hebrew school on the Upper East Side, many of whose children enjoy the kind of prosperity that would make my old Solomon Schechter comrades blanch. The difference between Stuy and Ramaz is too severe, the memory of our common suffering still too recent, and our friendship quickly fades away. Now there is no one to play Zork or eat juicy kosher kebabs with, no daily phone calls, no car rides with a kind native-born father, and I realize, after having a real American friend, that friendship is almost as important to me as the acquisition of prime outer-borough real estate. Since I can’t use humor to advance myself at Stuyvesant, I must learn a different way to make people like me and spend time with me.
And so here I am standing in front of Stuyvesant High School in my Ocean Pacific granny T-shirt. The building is a muscular Beaux-Arts monster, five stories of brick academic excellence that scare the boy from Little Neck to no end. But my fellow first-year students look no better than I do. Most of the boys are my height, or maybe a little taller, thin, and pallid, smelling of something stale and ethnic, the world around them reflected in spectacles so thick they could generate solar energy. Our natural enemies are the truly urban kids from low-performing Washington Irving High School, a few blocks away, who will supposedly beat the shit out of us at will (in four years at Stuyvesant, I encounter exactly zero of them). A special “Safe Train” is arranged by the board of education at the First Avenue L stop. This subway train departs under full police protection to make sure our Einsteins are not attacked by ruffians as they connect to, say, the number 7 train to Flushing, Queens. Apparently, I’ve gone from a Judaic Benetton showroom to a holding pen for multinational nerds.
Which brings me to the next thing I notice.
About half of these kids are “Chinese.” I’ve been told to expect this interesting twist and to develop all kinds of formal strategies for relating to children of the Far East, because one day they might employ me. While it is an accepted fact that the black and Hispanic kids will be violent, the Chinese kids are supposed to be smart and polite, if maybe a little otherworldly, because their culture is just so different from normal culture. An important tidbit I pick up somewhere on the streets of Queens: You must never refer to these Chinese kids as “Chinese,” because some of them are actually Korean.
Inside, bedlam. The halls of the old Stuyvesant — the school presently occupies a deluxe mini-skyscraper in Battery Park City — were meant for a handful of boys at the turn of the previous century. By 1987, the school somehow crams in nearly three thousand geeks of both genders. Freshman orientation involves reams of printouts, sequences of precalculus and full-on calculus and postcalculus and meta-calculus, along with lethal doses of biology, physics, and chemistry. A thick white-and-blue handbook gives us the first taste of what we’re to expect in the next four years: the College Highest Average Rejected, Lowest Average Accepted Chart (CHARLAAC),* which we will soon know by heart. The numbers are numbing. Without at least a 91 percent average, even the lowliest Ivy League school is out of bounds.
At the end of the day, my mother and I have worked out a plan. Because Manhattan is so dangerous, Mama will hide behind a tree outside of the main entrance of Stuyvesant, and when I come out she will shadow me to the subway and, from there on, back to the safety of Little Neck. When I ran away from the Sauerkraut Arms on Cape Cod, I had managed this long subway journey by myself. But back then I had the two garbage bags full of books and clothes that made me look so destitute even potential muggers averted their eyes out of sympathy.
And so it is resolved: I need a subway companion. But our plan goes awry in the most awful way for Mama. Because by the end of the first day of Stuy with its great scholarly disquisitions on the different schools of Cornell (the School of Industrial and Labor Relations is a good option if you can’t get into Arts and Sciences and if you can convince the admissions people that you like labor), I have made something of a friend, and he is … black. With just a tiny dribble of finely cut hair on his head and an urban uniform of no-brand sweatpants and no-brand sweatshirt, black. And this new friend has asked me to go to the Central Park and play something called Ultimate Frisbee with him and some other Stuyvesant kids, black.
A terrible choice is upon me. Do I betray Mama, who is hiding behind a tree, anxiously scanning the horizon for me as waves of Chinese kids run past her to the Safe Train? Or do I go with this black to the Central Park? I choose friend making. And it hurts me so much, because my mother has just bought all these nice clothes for me and our shopping has made us close. Mama is a friend, my best confidante now that Jonathan has gone to Ramaz, and she is waiting for me under the tree. Just three years ago at Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony I had taken her aside and informed her of the most important development of my life to date: “Mama, we played Spin the Bottle and Natasha had to kiss me.”
What to do?
The young man and I leave by the back exit as I try on different excuses for my mother: We’ve already discussed peer pressure and come to the conclusion that sometimes one must strategically succumb to it. And my new companion isn’t black, he’s Chinese. We went to the park to do some athletics and to discuss the College Highest Average Rejected, Lowest Average Accepted Chart. This boy, Wong, will steadfastly see me through Wharton, and with luck we will crunch numbers at the same brokerage house in time for Dan Quayle’s first presidential term in 1996.
My new friend is walking through the subway cars, and I mean through them. The signs on the car doors caution you not to do so, to stay safely inside, but this city boy just slides right through from one end of the train to the other, with me in tow, and him dancing ahead. Just one misstep and you will fall into the void between the half-moon platforms — but the boy doesn’t care! He actually whistles as he goes through the cars and holds the doors open for me with a smile and a nod. (Me, scared, through my teeth: “Thank you, dude.”) Our train is an ancient silvery beast belonging to a subway line I’ve never heard of, not the relatively clean and modern F, which hoofs it to somewhere near Jonathan’s house and the Hapisgah kosher kebab restaurant, but the B or T or P train, which shoots arrow-like up skinny Manhattan Island and doesn’t go to Queens at all.
Am I being bad? Am I setting myself up for a mugging? I forgot to pack a “mugger’s wallet,” which should have only one five-dollar bill for the mugger, with the rest of the money secreted away in one of my socks or in my tighty whities (even my underwear has a statement to make about race).
But whatever this is, it doesn’t feel wrong.
We climb out of the underground at Seventy-Second Street and breathe in the sunshine. I wonder what my new chum sees in me, why he asked me to come to the park with him. It must be my Ocean Pacific T-shirt and friendly surfer manner. The boy confidently walks through the Central Park and toward a green space laid out, carpetlike, amid the skyscrapers. Two hundred days later, by next spring, I will know it quite well as the Sheep Meadow. Right now, I look at it askance. How did this happen, this clean bit of beauty smack in the middle of the world’s second most dangerous city after Beirut? All this greenery, all these got-off-from-work-early, quietly content people lying on their stomachs, the late summer wind billowing the backs of their cotton tees.
“Shit,” my new amigo says, appreciatively.
My father is no stranger to cursing in English. Every encounter with a household appliance or a motor vehicle will bring on a torrent of “Sheeets” and “Faaaks” sometimes leading to an operatic “Faaak Sheeet Faaak, Faaak Faaak Sheeet,” which, before he stopped hitting me, would put my upper torso on high alert. But at Hebrew school the curses were mostly in that language and the province of the Israeli boys. Which brings me to my next question: How does one talk to a gentile?
“Shit,” I say. All casual and loose.
My new colleague puts a brown hand to his brow as a visor and scans the horizon. “Fuck,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Fuck.” And it feels good, it feels right and strong, and I’m not entirely familiar with the word yet, but I’ve caught on to something of the concept: It feels cool. My buddy spots the kids we’re to play Frisbee with and wow — they’re goys big-time. Goys from China and India and Haiti and the Bronx and the Brooklyn and the Staten Island, too. But even though they’re not Jews, it’s pretty clear from the get-go that they’re not going to mug me or heroin me. They just want to toss around a fucking Frisbee.
And while I’m not good at the urbane sport of Ultimate, which combines disk throwing with American football (but without the occasional paraplegia), I do well enough that no one laughs at me. And as I run through the Sheep Meadow with my hands in the air trying to capture the disk and speed it to the “end zone,” I long for the moment when we will stop running, just so I can take this in.
Where am I? I am in Manhattan, the chief borough of New York City, the biggest city in America. Where am I not? I’m not in Little Neck; I’m not with my mother and father.
The park is a respite from the urban grid. Beyond it I am surrounded by buildings of heroic proportions, buildings that dwarf me, buildings that tell me I’m not all that special, but I am not scared of them. What if … It occurs to me right away. What if one day I were to live in one of them?
I am surrounded by women who are beautiful. Not the way I was taught was beautiful, the idyllic proportions of sword-and-sorcery maidens, the chesty reproductive heights of yeshiva, but beautiful with their slender bodies lying on blankets, just a little bit of chest staring out over their bras, a strip of white, a strip of brown, don’t look too hard, look away.
In Henry Roth’s novel of turn-of-the-last-century immigration Call It Sleep, the young Jewish protagonist, David Schearl, leaves the familiar contours of his Brownsville ghetto with a Polish boy, and he thinks of his new friend, Not afraid! Leo wasn’t afraid! And here I am, just a few hours out of my mother’s loving grasp in the big terrible city, not afraid.
“Time out, time out,” I say, and manage to do the American perpendicular thing with my hands that signals to my playmates that I need to take a breather. I sit down on the grass, my blue Guess? jeans collecting the grass stains I know I should protect them from because, even on sale at Macy’s, they cost Mama forty-five dollars. I breathe in with great lust. Late-summer grass. Tanning lotion off the backs of females. Seventy-five-cent hot dogs boiling in dirty water.
I take stock.
Ultimately speaking, the disk throwers around me will not be my friends. Stuyvesant does not have a cool elite, because everyone’s a nerd at heart, but these kids I see on the Sheep Meadow today will be our most athletic and most “popular,” if that word even applies. Some of them will even wear ski jackets with the lift tickets still attached. As I watch them race around the park in pursuit of their prized disk, I do not begrudge what I already know will happen, that they will not be close to me.
There will be so many awful tests to come, in mathematics and the sciences, of course, but I passed the most important one of them on my very first day. I blended in. I ran around. I yelled and was yelled at. I caught a disk. I let the disk tumble out of my hand at the last minute and screamed “FUCK!” I fell on a boy, and then another boy fell on me, and I smelled the sweat that coated all of us and found none of special distinction. I was not Russian today. I was just a boy of fifteen for a late afternoon, an early evening; I was just a boy of fifteen until some of the Asian kids had to knock off for Flushing and we called “Game!” And then I went back into the subway, back into the belly of the B or P or T train, and I walked its length; I walked in letting the doors slam behind me, as the people, the New Yorkers, watched me pass, and they watched me without love, without hatred, without criticism. This is my new happiness. Their complete indifference.
* Acronym mine.