Little Failure

18. The Long Road to Oberlin

The author has been rightfully crowned the King of Medieval Times. To the left is his blushing queen.

BACK IN QUEENS, my parents sense that I’m going off the rails, but they’re actually quite nonviolent about it. My father patiently tries to diagram the workings of a combustion engine so that I may survive physics. My mother begs forgiveness from teachers on my behalf. Everything is being done to make sure I can recover grade-wise in time for law school. And while my mother is unhappy that I show up at three in the morning drunk—“Why, why didn’t you call us if you were going to be nine hours late?” “I ran out of quarters, Mama!”—my parents did both grow up in Russia and understand how young adult life works. On the few occasions when I return from a virginal night out with a girl, my father will take time out from slicing up one of his prized heirloom tomatoes at the kitchen table to query, “Nu, are you a man yet?” He’ll lean in and smell the air around me. And I will sigh and say, “Otstan’ ot menya,” Leave me alone, and stomp, stomp, stomp upstairs to my Playboys and my Essays That Worked for Law School.

The elite among us, on the other hand, are waist-deep in it. There are parties all the time now. I am introduced to the best of Manhattan real estate. Lofts on Mercer Street, classic sixes along Amsterdam, a penthouse on West Tenth Street with wraparound views of that still-living, still-breathing animal Greenwich Village. A Battery Park City apartment so close to the towers of the World Trade Center that after a few joints I think I can spot my reflection within their steel-and-glass sheaths (not possible). There’s teenage canoodling everywhere. And why not? The apartments all seem to be abandoned by their adult owners. The parents are gone. Building rocketry in distant lands, advising the Croatian constitutional court, growing coffee in the highlands of Kigali. All these brilliant progenitors of all these beautiful people are time zones away. It never occurs to me that having goofy immigrant parents in uncool Little Neck is somehow preferable to the wild state of affairs so many of my coevals now find themselves debauched in.

And so, in a dozen empty apartments, among several dozen hairy people, there is the happy exchange of sex to which I am not privy. Pleasantly stoned, headed to the bathroom, I hear light moans and giggles from one direction, bedsprings from another. I stand in front of the door, aroused, confused, trying to summon my Dr. Ruth knowledge. That sounded like a vaginal orgasm. That one, clitoral for sure. Out on the terrace, the sun is setting over the flaming fire-lookout tower of Jefferson Market and Fellow-Sufferer John is dismantling a turkey deli sandwich over a thing of beer. “Jew, wakka-wakka,” he says. “Hermeneutics.” And so on and so forth, for a good long while, until we take the Long Island Rail Road home.

Whom am I in love with? Let me count the girls. Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? I love indiscriminately and openly. A tall, classically pretty girl with circles under her eyes. I take her to the Central Park Zoo, my idea of romantic. She brings a friend. Then one of her long, alternative fingernails accidentally scratches my hand something terrible, a scar I still bear. There’s a fluffy buxom blonde with clear blue eyes who lives in a Village townhouse with her divorced mother. Mama opens the door, appraises my harmlessness, and allows Fluffy out for a date to the Bronx Zoo, where I buy her an elephant we name Gandhi. I take her to a French restaurant in midtown. “Let’s just be friends.” There’s Sara whom I have tantric sex with in metaphysics class. There’s a tall Korean girl, Jen, who lets me massage her feet. “You have to be greedy, selfish, and immoral to survive in this lifetime” is Jen’s yearbook quote. Mine: “ ‘Virtue has never been as respectable as money’—Mark Twain.” Soul mates. There’s curly-haired, skinny Alana (not her real name), whose Fifth Avenue apartment and permissive parents I will soon appropriate for my first novel. I spend many nights, head spinning, on her spare couch, next to a bathroom smelling of kitty litter and two actual cats, Midnight and Cinnamon. Past midnight, lovesick, Alana comfortable in her big bed elsewhere, I once again stare out of the kitchen window next to my couch at the spire of a brown Gothic church. A mutual friend of ours has told me that Alana thinks my nose is too big, so that’s not going to happen. Interesting about the nose: My father had always called me Yid-face, but he had said my lips were the problem. Now the nose, too. Anyway, I am in an apartment full of brilliant Manhattanites, next to a box of kitty litter, and outside a moon hovers over the church and the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue at the juncture where it leads up to the dramatically European flourish of the Washington Square Arch. The famous street is empty save for one beat-up old taxi. It is going to snow soon.

But someone does love me. His name is Paulie.^* He’s in his forties. I have an after-school job working for his ____^† company in the meatpacking part of town, although it’s hard to tell what exactly I’m supposed to be doing there. To bait me into his middle-aged clutches, Paulie puts up an advertisement on the Stuyvesant work board asking for a smart teenager and promising six dollars an hour. He first hires me and a Russian girl, but the Russian girl smells of meat and sweat, so she lasts only a few days. At my behest Paulie hires Alana, too, but it’s not her he wants! It’s me! Half of our days are spent tearing down city streets in his car as he leans out the window and shouts in his ____ accent^‡ to passing women, “Hey, beau-tee-ful! Jew got a nice ass! Don’t deny it!” Over the course of several years, we get lucky, let’s say, never. “I’m no fag,” Paulie says, brushing aside the curly remains of his dyed hair, but he does talk about how he would like to bend me over the desk and do ____ and ____ to my ass.

I am incredibly flattered by Paulie’s attentions. Although he’s much older, he also wants to become a writer someday, maybe chronicle his escape from ____^§ on a raft with the help of the CIA. At work, I’m in charge of getting lunch for the whole crew, mainly burgers from Hector’s Cafe or arroz con pollo from the Dominican place. He yells at me when I get it wrong, but when I get it right he calls me Prince Pineapple, along with some snatches of Spanish. “Nice going, Prince Pineapple, puta maricón.” I can smile for an hour after he says that. One day Paulie takes me down to Florida for a little vacation, a jaunt that will inspire a long, scary chapter of my first novel. On the morning before I leave, my father sits next to me on the couch while my mother rifles through the bag I’ve packed for Florida to make sure I have my asthma inhaler and sunscreen. “Your boss …,” my father says. He sighs. I flex my white winter toes. Does Papa suspect that my boss wants to pork me? “Sometimes,” my father says, “I’m jealous of Paulie because he seems like more of a father to you than I am.”

“Oh, no,” I say, “please. You’re my father.”

Several days later Paulie and I are sitting in a rented Buick in front of a deluxe Sarasota condo, his hand on my knee. Paulie points at the condo. He looks exhausted from pursuing me, as exhausted as I would be pursuing all those girls back at Stuy if I were his age. “Look,” he says. “That condo up there can be yours. Your family can use it anytime. Think of how happy you’ll make your parents. I just want …” And his hand creeps up my thigh.

I laugh the way girls laugh when I try to put the moves on them, and then I take his hand off my thigh, feeling its heat and heft. I’m a little scared and a little happy that my second father takes such an interest in me. If only I were at all turned on by him. This is just like one of those Tolstoy novels where X loves Y, but Y loves Z.

There’s a picture from that trip with someone’s arm over my shoulder. Not Paulie’s, but the Queen’s. I am standing there, curly haired, wearing some kind of Mexican blanket pullover along with the paper crown of Medieval Times, a dinner-and-jousting-tournament place near Orlando. The Queen looks like an advanced teenager in full medieval regalia. Off to the side, Paulie is laughing at me, making motions with his hand to show what I should do to Her Highness. My shoulders are slightly hunched, arms dangling beneath them, because it’s unusual for a woman to touch me, but my off-white, Soviet-toothed smile tells me that I am loved. It is one of the happiest moments of my life to date.

Time is speeding up. College is almost upon us. Almost one-fucking-third of our graduating class has submitted research papers in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I, on the other hand, still haven’t been on top, beneath, or behind a woman. One of the few nights that I’m not out drinking and drugging with Ben, Brian, and John, or trying to get with Sara, Jen, Fluffy, et al., I’m lying in my bedroom with colorful American college brochures spread out around me. Downstairs, the razvod is looming. Aunt Tanya and her children have come to America. My lithe, pretty cousin Victoria, the ballerina, has been sharing a bed with my mother for more than a year, refugee style, while my father broods in his attic. Both her parents have died, including my mother’s older sister Lyusya, and the twenty-year-old Victoria is stuck with us until she can find her own apartment. My father offers her valuable advice: With her looks, she should work in a strip club. I pass Victoria shyly on the stairs or look at her across the dinner table, scared and confused by her presence, wanting to talk to her but worried about taking sides between my mother and father. It’s a little bit like when we were young and I stared at her across the glass of our French door in Leningrad, unable to touch her because of my mother’s fear of mikrobi (microbes). But there’s something else — for the past decade I’ve been working ridiculously hard at becoming an American, and now there’s this Russian girl in our midst, a reminder of who I used to be. In the room she shares with my mother, Victoria listens to country radio because the words spill out slow and easy, and she can pick up some English. “Country music sucks,” I tell her, rolling my eyes, ever the urbane, helpful cousin. Ever my father’s emissary.

Because now it is total war. Now my father and his wolfish relatives are suddenly outmatched by the new arrivals. It is time for my parents to engage in a frank exchange of viewpoints. “Zatkni svoi rot, suka!”Shut your mouth, bitch.

But in my mind I’m already gone. I read about Cornell’s “old boy, old girl network,” and consider the marvels of a world in which I can be an Old Boy sitting around a fireplace at a university club with other Old Boys and maybe a sexy Old Girl, networking hard. Cornell, of course, is a difficult college to get into, but I have a chance at its School of Hotel Administration, because Paulie has gotten a bullshit note from one of his friends testifying to the fact that I am one of the finest bellhops at a prestigious Manhattan hotel. The brochure for kindly, progressive Grinnell College in Iowa literally makes me cry. All those morally strong boys and girls, all those international flags hanging amid the Gothic architecture. I curl up in my old Soviet comforter as Mama and Papa launch new fusillades downstairs. What kind of a person would I be if I went to a place like Grinnell? What if I jettisoned all of it, foreigner, Gnu, Gordon Gekko wannabe? What if I started from nothing? Am I crying because of the razvod downstairs? Am I crying because I can’t wait to be loved for the little nub inside me, whatever it may contain? Or am I crying because, in a sense, I know I’m about to commit an act of suicide, an act that will take me fully through my twenties and thirties, fully through a decade of psychoanalysis, to complete?

I get into Michigan first. A red Jeep belonging to some rich friends of Ben’s and Brian’s is flying up the West Side Highway with me in the back screaming “Mee-shee-gun!” at the transvestites of the Meatpacking District. Then, my head filled with the lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on endless loop, I am puking into a Penn Station wastebasket. Then, having drunkenly taken the Long Island Rail Road’s Port Jefferson line some two hours into Long Island (Little Neck, where my family lives, lies along the Port Washington, not Port Jefferson, line), I find myself stumbling down an unknown train platform, until I fall down with my legs dangling over the rails. A bored conductor pulls me out of harm’s way and tells me to get some coffee in me. “Michigan,” I say to him. “I’m-a college gone.”

“Go Blue,” the conductor says.

But I will not be going to the university in Ann Arbor. Nor will I be attending Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, to which I am shockingly admitted. Over senior year, I have fallen in love yet again.

She is a tiny, book-addicted Jewish girl, red hair out of myth, thin lips, and negligible chin like my own. She is from alternative Queens, the part over which the radio station WLIR runs roughshod with its Depeche Mode and its Cure. Her name is Nadine (it’s not). She is smart and worldly and not a part of our stoner clique. Somewhere I pick up that one of her parents or grandparents is a Holocaust survivor, knowledge I have no idea what to do with. In any case, Nadine is tough and strong and owns that strange combination of boyishness and femininity I so loved in Natasha, my first crush. When she says “Gary” over the phone in her sexy, cigarette-ruined voice, I think how wonderful that my American name isn’t Greg.

Are we going out together? Not really. But we like to hold hands. And we like to sing “I Touch Myself,” the surprise hit song of 1991 by an Australian band called the Divinyls. So here we are walking up and down the lengths of Stuyvesant High School, holding hands, singing “I don’t want anybody else / When I think about you / I touch myself.” And this is what I’ve always wanted: someone to hold hands with while we sing about female masturbation, while others watch. Now I’m a real person, aren’t I?

Over at her house we lie next to each other, and I try to kiss her briefly, or I almost accidentally skirt her small breasts through her thick sweatshirt, trying to discern nipple. Or we go see Terminator 2: Judgment Day, our hands tensely locked together for 139 minutes (we stay through the credits), and then we walk out into the city heat, still together. Or we go to a bookstore by Penn Station that like so many of them no longer exists, where I shyly pick out something pretentious.

On bad days, Nadine says, “You know you’re depressed when you can’t even make yourself come.”

Nadine is going to an academy for shy people in Ohio named Oberlin, which I recall as once ranking number 3 on the U.S. News & World Report list of America’s top liberal arts colleges but lately has been plummeting down that list. It also has a good creative writing program, and I can double major in political science for law school. Oberlin’s Lowest Average Accepted is about 5 points below my current 88.69, so getting in will be easy, and hopefully there will be enough financial aid not to bankrupt my parents. And if I go to the little school in Ohio, I will have someone to hold hands with when I get there, my sweet nongirlfriend with the sultry voice. I will have a head start.

“I honestly believe that you and Nadine will end up getting married,” a Stuy friend of mine, a handsome swarthy Greek whom I have recently introduced to marijuana (pay it forward), writes in my Stuyvesant yearbook. And then his final assessment of my life chances: “Good luck, Gary. You’ll need it.”

^* Oh no it’s not.

^† Let’s just say it’s a company that runs off the sweat of many brawny men with commercial driver’s licenses.

^‡ Let’s just say it’s a certain island nation.

^§ Again, a certain island nation.