Little Failure

19. Hold My Hand

On the left, one of the first days of the author’s Oberlin career. On the right, one of his last.

OBERLIN COLLEGE WAS ESTABLISHED in 1833 so that people who couldn’t otherwise find love, the emotional invalids and Elephant Men of the world, could do so. The college, to its immense credit, was one of the first in the nation to admit African American students and the first to grant degrees to women. In 1970 it made the cover of Life magazine by ushering in the age of the coed dormitory. By 1991, I have concluded that of all the colleges before me, Oberlin would allow me to lose my virginity to an equally hirsute, stoned, and unhappy person in the least humiliating way possible.

And, of course, my main reason for choosing Oberlin. Here, I will have someone to hold hands with from day one, my not-exactly-girlfriend Nadine. Just as I once marched into Stuyvesant with an engineering report on my family’s $280,000 Little Neck colonial, at Oberlin my secret weapon will be an emaciated Jewish girl with a sexy burst of red hair and a pack-a-day habit.

My father’s Ford Taurus is crammed to the roof with asthma inhalers and Apple IIc paraphernalia. I have already alerted my future roommate to expect a party animal par excellence who will subject him to the Talking Heads album Little Creatures without interruption. The roommate, who will prove to be incredibly square and studious, a double major in economics and German from a quiet suburb of the District of Columbia, will get the true Oberlin experience out of me, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth in 1995 dollars.

The Taurus is winding its way between battle-scarred Little Neck and our appointment at Oberlin’s financial aid office. I talk to my mother or I talk to my father, but they do not talk to each other. There is an unspoken sadness amid the inhalers and the Apple IIc — the sadness of the fact that when they return to New York my parents will definitely get the razvod. And so the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” booming out of the Taurus’s dying speaker system, feels about right. Ever since we arrived in America twelve years ago, I have been trying to keep my parents together, but today my diplomacy has come to an end.

As we pass from Pennsylvania, which contains the Ivy League university of the same name, as well as well-regarded Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, and into the flatlands of Ohio, I can’t help thinking that had I been a better student this razvod would not be happening. If Mama and Papa had been more proud of me, they would stick together if only to say, “Our son goes to Amherst, number two top liberal arts college according to U.S. News & World Report.”

Nadine and I have chosen to live in the same dorm.

I have never properly been off the Eastern Seaboard, and the flatness and waterlessness of the passing fields (wheat? corn?) and scrub make me nervous. I cannot comprehend this new terrain, and I cannot locate my place within it. All I can see is a python’s embrace of American highways and the top hats of bottom-tier fast-food restaurants, such as the one they call Arby’s. And yet, because I am young, I am still hopeful that something good will happen to me, razvod or no.

Oberlin College lies southwest of the depressed city of Cleveland, near the even more depressed towns of Lorain, Elyria, and, cruelly enough, Amherst. The also depressed downtown area, a kind of addendum to the college, “boasts” an art deco theater named the Apollo. The town pipes in “Silent Night” all through the greater Christmas season to annoy the Jewish students and faculty. There is a five-and-dime store to go along with the Christmas music and the general feeling that time has left us all far behind. Young peasants and underemployed workers from the local farms like to tear down North Main Street in their pickup trucks shouting, “Queerberlin! You guys are a bunch of fucking Democrats.”

The college’s architecture is designed for LSD and psychedelic-mushroom experimentation, as it makes sense only when it is melting. Heavy blocks of Ohio sandstone have gone into everything from a turreted Gothic hall to a Mediterranean-style, red-tile-roofed chapel. Amid these iconoclastic structures can be found one of Newark Airport’s lost terminals, here reconfigured into a suicidal dorm named South, and the Conservatory of Music by Minoru Yamasaki, the designer of the original World Trade Center, which uncannily resembles a three-story version of that doomed structure. The two seasons are winter and summer. When the leaves turn color for that twenty-minute Ohio autumn, the whole crazy ensemble looks as beautiful as anything else in the world.

The human element wanders between these sandstone and cement giants, pissy looking and vegan, suffering from either Low Self-Esteem or Way Too Much Self-Esteem. A boy in a checkered shirt and multicolored Vans will walk by wearing a propeller on his red papal beanie, and if you try to take a picture of him and his beanie he will sneer at your presumption and make fun of you to his female companion whose jeans are a size skinnier than she is. And if you stop taking a picture of him, he will sneer at you for no longer paying attention to him. Lermontov covered all of this in A Hero of Our Time.

The first two pages of the Oberlin Review from April 5, 1991, bequeath the following headlines: “Discovery of Marijuana Plants Results in Arrests,” “Pro-Marijuana Activists Rally,” “Porn, Domestic Partnership Head Assembly Agenda.” A fourth article, entitled “CF [College Faculty] Discusses Admission Stats,” concerns the fact that the year I am admitted to Oberlin, 67 percent of all applicants have received a nod from the admissions office. I would like to have met the one-third of the applicant pool that failed this rigorous admissions challenge. To quote a faculty member from the article: “That level of selectivity is so embarrassingly nil.”

I have come to the right place.

The Subarus of parents are nestling in herds. I do not yet know the significance of this left-wing East Coast car. I also do not understand that many of the parents are themselves academics, many buoyed by family trust funds that will also see their children into the future. There are so many things that I do not know, except for the fact that my parents are about to get the razvod. So I kiss them very quickly (Papa, quoting Lenin in part: “You must study, study, and study, Little One”) and send them on their way back to Little Neck by way of the inexpensive Motel 6. There they will lie, in my imagination, at opposite ends of the bed, a strange Jewish-Russian silence between them along with some Oberlin promotional brochures, vistas of colorful hippies necking atop a painted rock. In my dorm room, surrounded by my hardworking, completely sober, thoroughly unbohemian new roommate — for his work ethic, he is immediately nicknamed the Beaver — I unpack the Apple IIc and the dot-matrix printer, feeling alone — and not the good alone I felt when I escaped the Sauerkraut Arms — while longing for Nadine’s hand.

Here’s another thing I don’t understand and won’t know for several weeks. On the way back home, my parents “make up.” In fact, once I depart the family scene the entire trajectory of their marriage changes. They will know as much love and happiness together as people of their geography are allowed. The question I may ask now is why? Why does that which I longed for my entire childhood, peace between Mama and Papa, finally happen only as my parents and I separate? Were their daily and nightly fights an attempt to win my audience and attention? Did they enjoy my shuttle diplomacy? My teary “Papa really loves you, and he promises to be a better husband,” or practical “Mama has lost her mother and older sister, so we must be especially kind to her and allow her to send up to five hundred U.S. dollars per month to Leningrad.” Or, more likely, did the fact that they now had so few people to turn to in this country — so few American or Russian friends and decent, nonwolfish relations — finally leave them no choice but to turn to each other again? Maybe, without me, they finally remembered what they loved about each other in the first place: my father’s intellect, my mother’s beauty and will.

Will they be lonely without Little Igor? I certainly hope so. The other alternative: They were always better off without me. I was never a part of the family romance. I was only an impediment to it.

Only the full-size bed of the Motel 6 will know.

And now it is time to claim my own love. Hand-holding Nadine is here, prettier than ever in her neutral gray sweatshirt and denims, even as I bob around her in ugly khaki pants and a tie-dyed T-shirt that my middle-aged want-to-be lover Paulie and I bought at the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. (“Check out this T-shirt, Prince Pineapple, maricón.”) It features Marilyn Monroe’s smiling face from The Seven Year Itch, and I hope having this retro sexpot across my chest will prove edgy or interesting (it doesn’t). There’s a poster sale going on at the Student Union, and I buy a copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and a number called The Beers of the World. I happily show them off to Nadine, who does not seem at all impressed. She lights a menthol, blows the green smoke out of the corner of her tight little mouth, and we head back to our dorm, a neo-Georgian brute called Burton that envelops the northern quad within its two plantation-like wings. With my usual hunger I grab her hand, humming the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

“You know what?” Nadine says. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold hands.”

Elastic of underwear suddenly flooded with anxiety: “Why not?”

“Just there are a lot of potential rich husbands around here.”

She laughs a little.

I laugh a little, too. “Ha-ha,” I say.

Back in the dorm, alone, the Beaver off adding more difficult classes to his overbooked schedule, I lie down on the hard bed and have a ferocious, unmitigated Oberlin-grade panic attack. Here I am with a beaver for a roommate, with divorcing immigrant parents, and with no one’s hand to hold in the northeastern corner of a state whose unironic tourist slogan is “The Heart of It All.”

Oberlin does not have fraternities or sororities. It is also in a dry county. These and other factors combine to make it difficult for most students to abstain from quantities of beer and marijuana that redefine the term “copious” (for those interested, there is also a decent supply of heroin and cocaine). On my first evening at Oberlin I will smoke a half-dozen joints and drink the Beers of the World, or at least a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the bladder-busting local swill. Half comatose I will hold hands with the prettiest girl in the dorm, even as she makes out filthily with a hot resident adviser, everyone laughing at me, the sad drunk holding on to the beauty as she kisses her aesthetic equal, a man with long hair as soft and flowing as her own. Stoned, I grasp the warmth of that hand, forgetting whose it is — Nadine’s? my divorcing mother’s? — until I wake up in a room not my own, wearing some kind of Peruvian poncho and covered in what must be someone else’s drool. In the next year, I will drink and smoke, smoke and drink, trip and fall, fall and trip, until my endless alcoholic and narcotic exploits earn me my Oberlin moniker: Scary Gary.

As night falls on Oberlin, Scary Gary and the Beaver dim their lights. The Beav, exhausted from thinking and learning, snores up a storm from the get-go, but Scary Gary is scared shitless of a certain college peculiarity. The bathrooms in Burton Hall are coed.

To me, every Oberlin woman is already an angel, a deeply odorous creature with the potential of drunkenly holding my hand — and now I am supposed to make waste around her? Also the food served in the dining hall, a disingenuous attempt at beef au jus, a hairy salad of destroyed lettuces, a postapocalyptic taco, have made the Second Directive imperative. If I am to go on living, this crap must rush out of me now as if I were a re-creation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a poster of which I probably should have bought instead of Munch’s clichéd Scream. I circle the bathroom all night long hoping for an opening, so that I may lay a log. At three in the morning, as someone of the fairer sex is loudly vomiting Milwaukee’s Best, I slip into the stall as far away as possible, shyly undo my pants, and prepare to let loose. Just then the hipster boots of the girl whose hand I had drunkenly held as she kissed another slide into the stall between me and the vomiter. I tighten some rectal screw inside me, cancel the Second Directive, and run back to my dorm room. And that terrible shitlessness, essentially, is my first year at Oberlin.

In the morning, although the toilets are coed, the showers on my floor are for men. There are no partitions in the shower room, and we stand about naked with one another, much like in prison or in the navy.

One man walks in with a toy bucket and shovel like kids have on the beach. He sings happily as he sudses himself down. His penis is enormous; even nonerect it describes full arcs in the dense Ohio steam. I try to will myself to grow a little when he’s around, so that I won’t seem puny, but nothing can hold a candle to his candle. “A mulatto, an albino,” the big-dicked fellow cheerfully sings, as every reference in Oberlin in 1991 is to Nirvana’s Nevermind, every dorm room boasting at least one copy of the iconic album with the underwater baby swimming toward a dollar on a hook.

Men with smaller dicks enter the shower. The complaining begins.

“There’s too much reading for English!”

“Ganzel assigned an entire book to read!”

“I had to write two papers in one week.”

The Stuyvesant graduate in me is amused. During my first semester at Oberlin my longest assignment is watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. Students, townspeople, and other assorted losers are allowed to teach courses at Oberlin as part of the Experimental College. These classes are for actual college credit. The nice sophomore hippie next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles, which consists of us listening to Revolver, getting the munchies real bad, and then ordering in a Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple from Lorenzo’s (oh, the famished thirty minutes until the damn thing arrives). Sometimes we’ll drop acid and try to puzzle out “And Your Bird Can Sing” while walking up to various buildings and leaning on them.

It takes me but a few weeks to realize the frightening new prospect before me. Whereas in Stuyvesant I was at the bottom of my class, at Oberlin I can maintain a nearly perfect average while being drunk and stoned all day long. I get on the phone as soon as the first report card is issued.

“Mama, Papa, I have a 3.70!”

“What does it mean, 3.70?”

“An A average. I can get into Fordham Law easy. Maybe if I graduate summa cum laude, NYU or the University of Pennsylvania.”

“Semyon, did you hear what Little Igor has said?”

“Very good, very good,” my father says across the telephone line. “Tak derzhat’!” Keep it up!

Intense stoner feelings of love wash over me. Tak derzhat’! He hasn’t used that kind of language with me in half a decade. I remember being a nine-year-old child in our Deepdale Gardens apartment, crawling up his hairy stomach, rooting around his chest hair, cooing with happiness, while he nonchalantly reads the émigré intelligentsia journal Kontinent. I call him dyadya som (Uncle Catfish). He is my best buddy as well as my papa. “What did you get on your division test?” he asks me. “Sto, dyadya som!” (“A hundred, Uncle Catfish!”) Prickly kiss on the cheek. “Tak derzhat’!”

Does it really matter that upstairs from me, at this very moment, Nadine is holding hands with a guy who looks to me like a famous actor, the one always in rehab or shooting at the police? Does it really matter that outside the window a bunch of hipsters in propeller beanies are tossing around a Hacky Sack, Oberlin’s primary sport, without inviting me, because somehow they can smell my desperate background, my internship with George H. W. Bush’s election campaign, my years as the head of the Holy Gnuish Empire?

Mother: “And what kind of grades are your colleagues getting?”

“People don’t really talk about grades at Oberlin, Mama.”

“What? What kind of a school is this? This is socialism!”

Socialism, Mama? If only you knew. There’s a student dining coop that doesn’t allow the use of honey because it exploits the labor of bees. But all I say is “It is ridiculous, but good for me. Less competition.”

“I noticed there were not many Asian students.”

“Yes,” I say happily. “Yes!”

“Mama and I went to an opera last night. Puccini.”

My father has said Tak derzhat’, and my parents have gone to see Puccini together. This means there will be no razvod. We will remain a family.

As soon as I hang up, I lustfully fire up my silver pot pipe and blow smoke at the Beaver until he stalks off for the library. Then, free of his redheaded, freckled, studious presence, I take care of my final need to the sound of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” For this, too, I will receive college credit.

I like going to classes because I can learn a lot. About the students, I mean. Here the great arias of self-involvement — far more operatic than Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”—wind their way through the boxy little classrooms as professors eagerly facilitate our growth as social beings and master complainers. I learn how to speak effectively within my new milieu. I master an Oberlin technique called “As a.”

“As a woman, I think …” “As a woman of color, I would speculate …” “As a woman of no color, I would conjecture …” “As a hermaphrodite.” “As a bee liberator.” “As a beagle in a former life.”

Only what will I say? Whom will I speak for? I raise my hand. “As an immigrant …” Pause. All eyes on me. This isn’t Stuyvesant; here immigrants are a rare, succulent breed, even if the ones present usually have parents who own half of Lahore. “As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union …” So far, so good! Where can I take this? “As an immigrant from a developing country crushed by American imperialism …”

As I speak, people, by which I mean girls, are looking at me and nodding. I have shed every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown. The things I say in class are no longer meant to be funny or satiric or ironic; they’re meant to celebrate my own importance, forged in the crucible of our collective importance. There is no room for funny at Oberlin. Everything we do must move the human race forward.

And here’s what’s happening to me. I’m learning. The truth of the matter is that I should be nowhere near an institution like this. Oberlin is something nice you do for your child when you’re rich. Or at least comfortable. If I would ever have an American child I would happily send her to Oberlin. Let her enjoy the fruits of my labor. Let her have both clitoral and vaginal orgasms inside a gluten-free co-op. But me? I’m still a hungry, kielbasa-fueled, fucked-up refugee. I still need to build a home in this country and then to buy an all-wheel-drive car to put next to it.

The problem is I learn too slowly. There’s a very popular upper-classman who wears a janitor’s shirt with the name BOB stenciled over his breast. I have also worked as a janitor before coming to Oberlin. My father got me a job washing floors in a former nuclear reactor in his laboratory. I was paid $10.50 an hour for buffing many hectares of radioactive floors and had to wear a device at all times that looked like a Geiger counter (the present state of my hairline reflects as much). I worked all summer long so that I could have money for pot and beer and Chinese food to buy for a prospective hand-holder, but my parents certainly supplied me with shirts and pants to wear. “Poor Bob,” I say. “He only has one shirt. As an immigrant, I know what that feels like.”

“Who’s Bob?”

“Over there.”

“That’s John.”

“Why does his janitor’s shirt say ‘Bob’?”

My hipster interlocutor looks at me as if I am a complete idiot. Which I suppose I am.

As an immigrant, my job is to fucking learn. And what Oberlin has to teach me is how to become a part of the cultural industries in a handful of American cities. How to move back to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg or San Francisco’s Mission District and be slightly known among a select group of my own duplicates. How to use the advance for the Serbian rights to my memoir to throw a killer party featuring the world’s second-worst banjo player and absolutely worst snake charmer. There’s a knock on the door of a labor seminar with my favorite Marxist professor. A package of cheese has arrived from France. The People’s Cheese we call it. The People’s Volvo. The People’s Audi TT Roadster. There are other ways to be fabulous, ways I could hardly imagine among the forty-by-one-hundred-foot lots of eastern Queens. You just constantly have to be sure of yourself. You can’t announce your ambitions. You have to join a band where you dress like a chicken. You have to complain about the Soviet Union’s recent collapse even as your parents celebrate it. You have to bring a beach bucket and shovel to your morning shower. You have to go out with someone for the duration of junior year and get rid of them when you’ve had enough, and then you have to complain about the fact that a human being actually loved you.

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that’s why they call it an education.

My hair is growing and curling into locks and reaching toward my ass; my shirts are becoming flannelly just like Kurt Cobain’s. A child of Lenin is learning about Marxism in the Rust Belt from faculty whose office doors are festooned with signs reading CARD-CARRYING MEMBER ACLU and LOBOTOMIES FOR REPUBLICANS: IT’S THE LAW.

I am still majoring in politics, still paying respect to my parents’ law school dreams, but I am also doing something that Oberlin can respect as well.

I am writing again.