Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  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 monkey
s 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.”