Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  Who will rescue us from ourselves? Who will teach us about the right drugs and the proper music? Who will integrate us into Manhattan? For this we will need the native-born.

  They occupy the far-southern edge of the auditorium, just a few rows hanging over the precipice beneath which the string section is perpetually tuning away. They hail from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. The boys are hippies, stoners, and punks or just kids who have extensive personalities and interests but lack the work ethic to compete with the fierce academic warriors of Stuyvesant. The girls wear long, flowing skirts, tie-dyes with pictures of horses and mandalas on them, slashed jeans, flannels, green army jackets, and peasant kerchiefs and seem to have struck a reasonable balance between self-expression and academic achievement. That is to say, they will one day attend college. The vibe is densely unmaterialistic. When I present evidence of my family’s $280,000 Little Neck colonial, the girls are too kind to tell me that their parents’ classic sixes on the Upper West Side are worth four times as much.

  Unlike Haverford and the UC Hastings College of the Law, these kids have flexible admissions standards.

  Maybe they will be my friends.

  Prom for one?

  ON ELECTION DAY 1988, I come to the Marriott Marquis ballroom thinking, This is the day. The day I will finally get laid.

  I have volunteered for George Bush Sr.’s scorched-earth presidential campaign against the hapless Michael Dukakis, laughing along with Bush’s racist, hysterical Willie Horton commercials and all they imply about the liberal Massachusetts Greek. Compassion, after all, is a virtue only rich Americans can afford, tolerance the purview of slick Manhattanites who already have everything I want.

  I plug away at Bush’s New York headquarters, manning the phone banks with two older women in fur-trimmed coats. Our duties are to call the Republican faithful and solicit their support. My colleagues, who despite their garb never seem to shed a drop of sweat in the lingering summer heat, have a grand old time on the phone, laughing and flirting with old classmates and lost loves while I clutch the receiver with shaking hands, whispering to suburban housewives about the twin evils of taxes and Soviets. “Let me tell you something, Mrs. Sacciatelli, I grew up in the USSR, and you just cannot trust these people.”

  “But what about Gorbachev? What about glasnost?” Mrs. Sacciatelli of Howard Beach wants to know. “Didn’t Ronald Reagan say, ‘Trust but verify’?”

  “I would never second-guess the Gipper, Mrs. Sacciatelli. But when it comes to Russians, believe me, they’re animals. I should know.”

  Come Election Day, I am invited to attend what is sure to be a Republican victory party at the Marriott Marquis, the ugly slab of a building near Times Square, whose revolving restaurant will one day host my mother’s birthdays. The invitation to the party features a scornful cartoon of the big-eared Dukakis sticking his head out of an M1 Abrams tank (the most unfortunate photo op of his campaign), and I expect an evening of arrogant crowing, of being pressed to the bosom of my fellow conservatives while dancing a Protestant hora over the grave of American liberalism.

  Yes, tonight is a special night. It is the night I am to meet a Republican girl from a clean, white home. Her name will be Jane. Jane Coruthers, let’s say. Hi, Jane, I’m Gary Shteyngart from Little Neck. My family owns a colonial worth two hundred eighty thousand dollars. I’m the brains behind the Family Real Estate Transaction Calculator. I go to Stuyvesant High School, where my grades aren’t so great, but I hope to get into the honors college at the University of Michigan. I guess tonight it’s going to be curtains for the governor of Taxachusetts, hee-hee.

  I enter the ballroom, a dark, gap-toothed immigrant wearing sweat socks and brown penny loafers and my special and only suit, a highly flammable polyester number. I navigate the room filled with sparkling Anglos clutching single malts without a word said in my direction, without a pair of happy blue eyes reflecting the gray sheen of the crisp nylon tie I had picked up for two dollars from a Broadway vendor. As George Herbert Walker Bush racks up state after state on the big screen above us, as cheers and laughter circulate around the massively hideous ballroom, I stand alone in a corner biting down on my plastic cup filled with ginger ale and swatting the colorful balloons that seem to have an affinity for my static-inducing polyester, until a pair of teenage blond lovelies, the girls I had been waiting for all my life, finally approach with needy smiles on their faces, one of them beckoning me to come hither with her hand. I’m so excited I somehow fail to see myself for what I am—a short teenage boy, born to a failing country, trapped inside a shiny gunmetal jacket, carrying about a mop of the blackest hair in the room, blacker even than Michael Dukakis’s Hellenic do.

  Which one will be my Jane? Which one will trace the W of my weak chin with her pewter fingers? Which one will take me on her boat and introduce me to the millionaire and his wife? You know something, Daddy? Gary survived Communist Russia just so he could join the GOP. I think that’s very courageous, son. Would you like to throw the old pigskin around with me and Jack Kemp after cocktails? Just leave your Top-Siders in the mudroom.

  “Hey,” one of the lovelies says.

  Me, debonair, unconcerned: “Hey.”

  “So, I’ll have a rum and Coke, just a splash of ice and a lime. Mandy, you said no ice, right? She’ll have a Diet Coke, lime, no ice.”

  I have been mistaken for the waiter.

  The racism inside me is dying. A difficult, smelly death. Looking down at others is one of the few things that has kept me afloat through the years, the comfort in thinking that entire races are lower than my family, lower than me. But New York City is making it hard. Stuyvesant is making it hard. What’s there to say when the smartest boy in school is of Palestinian descent by way of South Africa? His name happens to be Omar, the name of the evil scientist in my adolescent novel The Chalenge. And how can I not notice that the prettiest girl in all of Stuyvesant, a brief glimpse of her strong, miniskirt-clad legs in physics enough to lower my average by 1.54 points for the semester, is Puerto Rican? And that the masses around me, blazing their sleepless paths toward the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, are, simply, not white?

  When the racism goes away, it leaves an empty, lonely place. For so long I have not wanted to be a Russian, but now, without the anger-fueled right-wing fanaticism, I’m really not a Russian. At dining tables across the Eastern Seaboard, among little ryumochki of vodka and slicks of oily sturgeon, I could lean back and join in the hate and be a part of something bigger than myself. Two decades after Bush Senior’s campaign against Dukakis, from the mouth of a relation expressing herself in English for the benefit of the few non-Russians at the Thanksgiving table: “I think Obama should be president. But of African country. This is white country.”

  Only suddenly it’s not a white country. Or, for me, a white city. A white school. The awful words still come out of me, but now they’re just meant to be antagonistic and contrarian, or maybe just funny. Welfare this. Trickle-down that. When the toxic and outré American right-wing pundit Glenn Beck declared himself a “rodeo clown” a few years back, I understood his recipe well: part clown, part bully. How many fingers, Vinston?

  After the debacle at the Bush victory party, I write a fifty-page novella for a social studies class, set in the independent Republic of Palestine in the then-distant year of 1999. The novella, pretentiously titled Shooting Rubberbands [sic] at the Stars, features my horniest line to date, something about “the smooth expanse of thigh, breast and shoulder.” But Rubberbands is also, for me, surprisingly evenhanded. Six years after the intergalactic racial insanity of The Chalenge, the Palestinians are, like my fellow student Omar, human. “Your materialist exterior hides a sensitive aesthetic soul,” my teacher, a white-bearded leftie, has written, along with a grade of A++. I focus on the grade, my average now inching slightly past Michigan on the College Highest Average Rejected, Lowest Average Accepted Chart, and I put away the description of my sensitive, aesthetic soul for college. Speci
fically, for a woman named Jennifer.

  But back to that “smooth expanse of thigh, breast and shoulder.” My dying Republicanism and provincialism aren’t the only things keeping me from getting some. I don’t know how to talk to a girl without either going into pathetic overdrive (Hey, baby, want to listen to my new Aiwa Cassette Boy?) or swallowing my tongue. Sophomore year, somehow the tongue finds its way into the mouth of another, a blond, tie-dye-wearing girl from one grade junior, on a park bench in the western, more manicured half of nearby Stuyvesant Square, or the Park, as we call it. I am too scared to enjoy the moment for its actual value: the fact that someone I just met wants to share a mouth with me. At the time I’m more attuned to the fact that some of my new stoner friends over on a neighboring bench are shouting “Wooo!” and “Go, Shteyngart!”

  If only I could have slowed myself down that night, enjoyed being alive with someone equally young and, I assume, happy to be there with me. Those soft skinny legs, the awkward overhang of her arms around my neck, the seriousness with which we go at it: my first real kiss, maybe hers as well. In any case, when I see the young lady the next day at school, there’s just the exchange of awkward looks, and nothing more happens. Forget it, Jake, it’s Stuyvesant. She goes back to her studies and friends; I go back to tallboys and gold-stamped hash.

  It’s one o’clock at the Park. Do you know where your child is?

  Me, I’m drunk and stoned. I’ve been drunk and stoned for three years now.

  I’ve rigged my senior-year schedule so that I take meteorology, one of the amazing horseshit classes taught by one Mr. Orna, a middle-aged hero for us burnouts who revels in nonsensical, self-invented, quasi-Yiddish phrases such as “Ooooh, macha kacha!” and “Oh, schrotzel!,” conducts cloud-watching field trips to the Park, does not take attendance all through the semester, but then takes your final exam for you, guaranteeing my one perfect grade at Stuy. Between Mr. Orna’s meteorology and his other Jacques Cousteau–like undersea adventure, oceanography, I’ve slotted in two lunch periods. Now I have four periods to get high and crush twenty-four-ounce tallboys or to roam around the city with my friends. Around 2:00 P.M. I will check into the one class I still have an interest in attending, metaphysics. The class is run by Dr. Bindman, a psychoanalyst-guru whom we all adore but whose grading practices are far tougher than Mr. Orna’s, and far more metaphysical—a coin flip determines your grade. I stop into Dr. Bindman’s class because he lets me lead a tantric-sex demonstration, whereupon we lower the shades, light scented candles, and I get to lock my forehead with one of the many girls I’m in love with.

  Her name’s Sara, and she’s a half Filipina with terrifyingly true hazel eyes and lungs that can hold in a bowl of pot smoke for an entire lunch period. The closest I will get to her seagull lips is the rim of a paper cup. We buy diner coffee cups in bulk, the ones with the Greek-styled legend WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU, and fill them with Kahlúa and milk so that the school guards think we’re sipping coffee with a drop of cream. Back in Dr. Bindman’s metaphysics, with the shades drawn, with four cups of Kahlúa and milk inside me, I touch Sara’s warm forehead with mine, concentrating on not sweating all over her, as our classmates om pleasurably around us. Par for the course, Sara’s in love not with me but with Dr. Bindman, his kind American face, his calming voice and luxuriant mustache.

  Back at the Park, I’m still wearing that idiotic Union Bay sweater down to my knees, a kind of homage to the girls of Solomon Schechter, but I’ve accessorized it with a studded leather cuff around my left wrist, and my feet are shod in Reebok Pump sneakers, a new kind of high-tops that inflate when you press a stylized orange basketball hanging off the tongue. One of my inane catchphrases: “Hey, baby, you want to pump me up?”

  Or in reference to some contemporary rap song and the latest news on television: “Peace in the Middle East, Gary out of the ghetto, no sellout!”

  Or brandishing my new Discover card, the one that has found a snug place in my wallet where my NRA membership card used to be: “Dinner’s on me. Jew Money Power!”

  I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing. Because what I do is part performance art, part ineloquent plea for help, part unprocessed outer-borough aggression, part just me being a jackass. None of it will lead me where I want to go, which is simply, pathetically, into the arms of a girl. But every Valentine’s Day, I go to the corner florist on First Avenue and buy three dozen roses, and I give one to each of the thirty-six girls I have a crush on, my silent tribute to the fact that somewhere deep inside the beige-and-black Union Bay sweater there is a person who wants what everyone else wants but is too scared to say it.

  On my drunk, stoned lips I am wearing a smile I would describe as depressed but optimistic. If I had to guess, that smile comes from my matrilineal line, somewhere before Stalin but after the pogroms, when the apples hung plumply from the branches of Belorussian trees, and my grandmother’s family’s kosher butchery was in its prime. I will soon find myself absolutely stunned when looking into the white space of my Stuy yearbook. I find one of the girls of our crew has penned: “I always thought you were a sweetheart underneath that ridiculous grin.”

  The Park girls sit around us in a semicircle talking about Grinnell and Wesleyan, dear ones all, but, in contravention of all teenage rules, or perhaps in full support of them, it’s the boys I’m interested in. Getting in with the boys, getting in with this crowd of stoners and freaks, that is what my teenage years have become.

  To my left, cleaning the resin out of his chrome Proto Pipe, is Ben, half Vietnamese, half Finnish, tall and square shouldered, with rockstar hair and an easy laugh, dressed in a dramatic German army coat with a paperback sticking out of one pocket, usually Siddhartha or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which neither of us will ever finish—which, as far as I know, no one will ever finish. Girls like to do tarot card readings with Ben or lean against his broad back in times of need.

  Ben doesn’t like me at first. I’m a tough sell: a supposed Republican who talks up a storm about Ayn Rand and supply-side economics. When we first meet, Ben takes out a large water gun that he carries in his backpack for just such emergencies and sprays me well and good, my sweater stinking like a wet sheep all through chemistry. But at a party held inside a rambling Park Slope brownstone, at the behest of his free-floating and lovely girlfriend, Ben apologizes for being mean to me. “You try too hard,” he says, passing me his Proto Pipe in a gesture of goodwill. “Everyone can tell.”

  More than twenty years later I find myself in an acting class taught by Louise Lasser of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman fame (also Woody Allen’s second wife). Ms. Lasser rakes the students with hell-fire for our cloying attempts at acting, reducing many young women to ninety minutes of sobbing. After my sad attempt at the Meisner technique (Actor 1: You are wearing a blue shirt; Actor 2: I am wearing a blue shirt), she screams at me: “You know what your problem is, Gary? You’re fake and manipulative!”

  And I want to say, Yes, but this is New York. Who’s not fake and manipulative?

  You try too hard. Everyone can tell.

  Back on our bench in the Park, to my right, Brian is making out thoroughly with his girlfriend. Handsome and boyish, half Jewish, half black, with feminine lips so many of the girls around us have kissed, Brian is as preppy as we get, white tee tucked away beneath an oxford shirt, khakis, the whole package confusingly, antagonistically, wrapped in a leather jacket, its collar draped in soft brown fake fur. Brian’s pretty-boy lips are locked fully with his stoned blond girlfriend’s, and his hands are everywhere. It is understood that Ben and Brian are the best of our number, that they have access to the females and to the glory. If either were to speak down to me I would take it in stride, happy that I am spoken to, happy to take notes on how I can do better. Do I try too hard? Gentlemen, I’ll try harder.

  At the lateral level of Ben and Brian is another tall boy of stunning appearance, like them also of complex racial herit
age. I cannot really talk about him at length because he seems so utterly outside of the galaxy in which I claim residency, and in the end I am a writer, not an astronomer. I’d like to similarly sigh at the stunning and cosmopolitan progression of their girlfriends. I see blue eyes, stoned smiles of unimpeachable placidity. I smell patchouli. I hear Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart.” I feel the ease and happiness of these young women in the world.

  Stretching away from Ben, Brian, and the Other Guy is a constellation of about a dozen boys emitting various degrees of funk. At one rung, close to Ben and Brian, but with only half membership in their caste, are me and John. As fellow eastern Queens sufferers, John and I are the barbarians trying to get through the gate with our laminated Long Island Rail Road monthly tickets and our willingness to do anything—John actually wears a lamp shade for the duration of a house party. My buddy is a beefy, hairy dyslexic in Hawaiian shirt and fedora and, like me, a budding writer and poseur. Although he usually addresses me as “You dolt,” John is dear to my heart. I am not sure if he is completely insane or a genius. At times his writing is hilarious in a teenage gonzo way (random urban violence, German midget porn, exploding Saigon hookers, New York mutts out looking for love) and inching a little bit toward our mutual sadness—the sadness of being unable to communicate with others sans lamp shade.