Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  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 le
ngth; 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.

  No caption needed.

  MY FIRST YEAR AT STUYVESANT I discover something new about me, something my family never suspected.

  I am a terrible student.

  In grade school, my father taught me from advanced Soviet textbooks. I would try to solve the math problems in the back of the composition books in which I wrote The Chalenge, Invasion from Outer Space, and my other sci-fi novellas. The algebraic scrawl looks impressive enough for a third grader, but above the math problems I have written for my father to see: YA NICHEVO [sic] NEZNAYU, I don’t know anything. On another page, in English, “All wrong.”

  Schoolwork has always come easy for me. In Hebrew school, my competition was Best Friend Jonathan, David the Mighty Khan Caesar, and maybe three girls. At Stuyvesant there are two thousand and eight hundred children far more gifted than I am, half of them hailing from points east of Leningrad. In class they are bent over their desks like so many human architect lamps, humming softly, insanely, to themselves the way Glenn Gould would hum over his piano, little pockets of drool shining on their chins, the corners of their eyes covered with the only sleep they’ll ever know, their pencils assuredly making magic against their notebooks as equations are swiftly put to bed. What accounts for their commitment? Who is tending their home fires? What awaits them if they fail? I always thought Papa beat me too much, but what if he didn’t beat me enough?

  I am scared. At Hebrew school, I thought I would outgrow my subhumanity by sheer force of will, by clawing my way into the Ivy League and then into the graces of the upper class. I would out-Jaguar my classmates with my sechel, my thick Jewish brain. That was my way out. By the end of the first two weeks of Stuyvesant I conclude that this path will be closed to me forever. At Stuyvesant, that’s how quickly you know whether or not you will succeed in life.

  The teacher—an African American woman in a bright designer blouse, an impeccably coiffed bun at the back of her neck—questioningly clicks her brilliant chalk against the board as the immigrant students call out the right and proper answers. She calls, they respond. Except for one student in his Ocean Pacific T-shirt covered with waves of flop sweat under the armpits who is staring blankly at the board as the new language of Sine, Cosine, Tangent is called out around him, as students who got the answer only partially right smack themselves violently across the forehead. “Nice going,” one of them keeps saying to himself, sarcastically. “Nice going.”

  Won’t someone please take me back to Hebrew school? I’ll do anything, I’ll believe anything! I’ll memorize the Passover Haggadah. I’ll chant all the gibberish at the top of my lungs. Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha parabola. Just get me out of here. Just let me be a good student again, so at least my parents will have that.

  In biology class, I am paired with a Vietnamese girl of some ninety pounds, most of them brain matter, who swiftly dismembers a frog and labels all of its organs in English and Latin. “Aren’t you going to do anything?” she says as I stand there with my scalpel as impotent as it is erect. “Are you, like, retarded?”

  I was once the Red Gerbil; I was once Gary Gnu. You could spit at me or bean me with your spit-covered Carvel ice-cream stick or not invite me to your Great Neck roller rink Bat Mitzvah. But you could never say I was stupid. And now I am. Stupid enough to almost fail out of Spanish class. Stupid enough to stare at a page of geometry for half a day and come away with nothing but the conclusion that triangles have three sides. And if I could understand what a negative feedback loop is in biology class, I could maybe understand that the more I feel stupid, the stupider I become. The anxiety grows and reinforces itself. The tests—and they are daily—grow more difficult, not less. And with each week, with each test, I am getting closer to it.

  It is the report card. It tells you what your station in life will be. Because the immigrant children of Stuyvesant do not have backup plans. We will not be filling in at our daddy’s firm or taking a gap year in Laos. Some of us are from Laos.

  The report card, printed on flimsy dot-matrix toilet paper, is handed out in morning homeroom, our eyes instantly skirting past the individual grades to the bottom number, the average.

  I am crying even before I see the four digits.

  82.33.

  Essentially, a B.

  Harvard, Yale, Princeton?

  Lehigh, Lafayette, maybe Bucknell.

  What does it mean for an immigrant child of the top rank to go to Bucknell University?

  It means I have failed my parents. I have failed myself. I have failed my future. We may as well have never come here.

  Stuvyesant in 1987 resembles a Lower East Side tenement at the turn of the last century: The school’s snot-colored passages are filled to bursting; central hallways form their own crowded Broadways; smaller hallways are the equivalent of major crosstown streets. The first-year students latch on to others who look like them; they travel in packs. Here is Tiny Taiwan, Mini Macao, Petite Port-au-Prince, and Lesser Leningrad. Despite my first-day success playing Ultimate Frisbee with some future jocks, I am still much too shy and unsure of myself to fully make friends, and I spend half my lunch breaks hiding out in the bathroom, where a triad of Chinese “toughs” smoke at one another.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, a Filipino-or-maybe-Mexican kid accompanies me to a sandwich shop called Blimpie, where I buy a breaded chicken sandwich that is too big, but that I eat anyway because it costs 499 cents. My parents give me six dollars a day for food, which makes me comparatively rich, but the guilt of eating an expensive breaded chicken while getting a Lehigh average is too much to bear.

  “Yo.”

  “ ’Sup.”

  “What’s your average?”

  “82.33.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Lehigh.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Maybe Bucknell.”

  “You might as well go to SUNY-Albany, save some money, do really well, and then transfer someplace better.”

  “Haverford accepted an Albany transfer with just a 3.78 in 1984.”

  “Dude, that was 1983. Their selectivity ranking’s gone up since then.”

  “I thought they dropped to ninth place on U.S. News & World Report.”

  “Medicine or law after?”

  “Law.”

  “Hastings in California. They’re a sleeper school, but they take a lot of SUNY kids.”

  “I just got the latest Essays That Worked for Law School.”

  “My mother just left one under my pillow with Duke, like, highlighted three times.”

  Just two fifteen-year-old kids with ghastly new mustaches talking, one a relatively spoiled son of a Russian engineer, the other trying to work his way out of his parents’ grocery store.

  Just two boys shooting the shit.

  The weather has turned cold. My first Manhattan winter. Snowdrifts form around Beth Israel’s psychiatric ward, where, soon enough, two of my classmates will find a home, one after retiring to Central Park to build his own igloo in the middle of the frozen night. On the 1.5-floor landing of our new Little Neck colonial, I stare out the window as the snow makes pretty the future site of my father’s productive raspberry patch. (Between my father’s weekly fishing and his growing fruits and vegetables, we will soon be entirely self-sustaining!) The next house over is already in Great Neck. Little Neck is middle class; Great Neck is rich. That next house over had been the plan for me. Until now.

  “Son of a bitch!” my father cries from the first floor. “He promised to vacuum the stairs! Look at that debil. He’s just going to stand there with his mouth open.”

  “I’m thinking about homework,” I lie. And then with some of the attitude I’ve been work
ing on in high school, “Otstan’ ot menya.” Leave me alone.

  “I’ll give you otstan’ ot menya!” my father shouts. “I’ll beat your ass!”

  But he doesn’t.

  I flop down on my bed with my biology text. How Does the Structure of a Paramecium Enable It to Function in Its Environment? How Is the Heart Adapted for Its Function? I’ve covered one of my walls with a poster of the troop uniforms of the different NATO nations, which I ordered out of an anti-Communist survivalist magazine. Above my new color TV I’ve hung a CIA recruiting poster. On a third wall: an ivy-covered quadrangle of the University of Michigan, my new reach school. My parents have started subscribing to Playboy, and once they’re through with the issues in their bedroom I stack them openly next to my bed. Essays That Worked for Law School will soon lie beneath a Playboy issue featuring topless La Toya Jackson, sister of Michael, wearing a snake around her glistening neck. Meanwhile, old friend Chekhov is yellowing away on a bookshelf across the landing.

  My Ocean Pacific T-shirts have given way to a black-and-beige Union Bay sweater that, unbeknownst to me, marks me as the ultimate in Bridge and Tunnel. In warmer weather, the children of Stuyvesant High School used to cluster around the front and back entrances of the school, waiting for their next pop quiz the way astronauts wait for the mission countdown clock. Now they seek refuge inside the school’s vast auditorium. Some of them, depleted by study, are asleep on their backpacks as if they had just survived a terrible natural calamity and are now huddled in a FEMA shelter. Some of the Asian kids, with touching familiarity, are asleep on each other’s laps. Nearly all of us have headphones on, gigantic fuzzy headphones plugged into a tiny reward for all our hard work, a late-model Aiwa Cassette Boy with the new equalizer function that makes one feel just a little bit like a DJ.

  Back home in our sweaty bedrooms, our outsiders’ angst finds itself in the “Eurotrash” new-wave tunes of a Long Island radio station called WLIR (later renamed WDRE), broadcasting from deep in the suburban interior of Garden City. We—and by “we” I mean young, pimply Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Indians—are lost between two worlds. We go to school in Manhattan, but our immigrant enclaves of Flushing, Jackson Heights, Midwood, Bayside, and Little Neck are too close to Long Island for us to resist WLIR, that clarion call of squeaky synthesizer music, narcoleptic goth outfits, and spiky, inclined hair. The usual British suspects rule the airwaves: Depeche Mode, Erasure (their ecstatic hit “Oh l’Amour” is an inspiration to the loveless), and, of course, the princes of the gelled-hair set, the Smiths.