Allow me to backtrack to sophomore year.
My college roommate C-cup Irv and his parents live in Washington Square Village, two pieces of colorful NYU Warsaw Pact architecture set around a pleasant private park. Across the hall from Irv lives a sound editor who is friends with the former head writer of the soap opera As the World Turns. I want to say this soap opera writer, John, is x years old, but in the two decades I’ve known him he has never revealed his age. It’s not that he lies about it. It’s that he does not confess his age to anyone. “Too traumatic,” he whispers when asked, his face folding into a sort of grieving Jewish turtle expression, the kind my people reserve only for talk of their own extinction. In his apartment, I once found a college graduation photograph, which had John’s graduation date written on the back. He lunged across the room to grab the photo from me, demolishing a coffee table in the process, then yelping in pain on the floor while triumphantly holding on to the graduation photo. So how old is John? Since you can never really tell the age of Americans who lumber toward nonbeing on their own schedules, let’s just say that when I first meet him in 1993, he is old enough for me to turn him into a parental figure and young enough for me to understand him as a friend.
In 1993 John has left the soap opera world and is writing a script about a college-aged kid who kills his parents. (Vaguely appropriate, given that at the time I am trying to kill my own parents, or at least the first twenty years of my life spent with them.) His friend, the sound editor, suggests a suitable candidate from my generation. Enter Oberlin roommate Irv, the proud sexual omnivore and keeper of Big Blue, our three-foot bong. Enter Maya (name changed), a sweet, damaged round girl who is a dominatrix in the Vault, New York’s premier sadomasochist club, whom I will also pluck from life and pin, with a modicum of blood spilled, onto the pages of my burgeoning first novel under the name Challah.
Enter me.
John invites me out. I am so impressed to be meeting a real writer I tell John I will gladly pay for dinner. I take him to a fancy Indian place called Akbar on Park Avenue and Fifty-Ninth, where Paulie, my lecherous high school boss, used to take me. The restaurant has stained-glass ceilings that dazzle my Little Neck eye, and the waiters seem very proud of their powerful tandoor oven, from which emerges my very first pillowy naan bread, the steam rising magically around my fingers as I tear it apart.
I do not realize that this is the last fancy meal I will pay for in the next five years, nor that I am about to turn in one benefactor for another, this one without the urge to bend me over his desk. The writer Chang-rae Lee (about whom later) will remark that my characters are usually sons in search of fathers. It would be hard for me to argue his point.
At dinner, I am looking at a balding, curly-haired man in wire-rimmed glasses, part of his face hidden beneath a bushy mustache, his crisp Frank Stella shirt tucked into his denims. This is how I picture the cool, high-end fathers of Oberlin students who live in off-campus houses with funny names like Banana House or Eek-a-House! where everyone is in a band or very close to someone in a band.
Here is what John sees seated before him at Akbar. A twenty-year-old boy with scraggly, ass-length hair, outrageous, sparse Soviet teeth that would not flatter an Appalachian beaver (until my parents replace them in a year, I speak with a hand constantly held in front of my mouth, like a shy Japanese girl), and the pride of my wardrobe, a silk summer jacket, the kind worn by the actor Don Johnson in the TV serial Miami Vice, which I also wear with the sleeves partially rolled up, even during the month of January.
John takes all this uniqueness with good cheer, as my orthodontia and I question him about the writing life—I am particularly impressed that he has written for Knots Landing, a spin-off of my beloved Dallas. I have sent him some of my work from Oberlin, in particular a short play, which he has marked with encouragement (“funny,” “good passage”) and precise criticism (“get specific,” “awkward phrase”). At dinner, I am full of follow-up questions. How may I best fix this awkward phrase? What does getting more specific mean?
John is a Manhattanite through and through, as complicated and as rooted in place as anyone I’ve ever met, versed in restaurants and theaters and a market called Fairway, on Broadway at Seventy-Fourth Street, which stocks foods such as I could have only imagined: lemon anchovies, Roman artichokes, Idiazabal cheese from the Basque country. He also has no children, which is fortuitous for me but perhaps not so much for him.
Within a few months of our Akbar dinner, the Don Johnson jacket will be gone, traded in for one of John’s old Armani blazers.
Within a few months, we will be on the phone almost daily, me pressing him on the latest draft of a story or a poem with bratty impatience, as if his entire world revolves around my creative needs. “Have you read it? John? Hello? I cannot wait any lon-ger. Talk to me, Haimosaurus!” (John is not tall, but there is something colossal yet haimish about his presence and gait, reminding me of a powerful Hebraic dinosaur.)
Within a few months, I think seriously of transferring to Columbia or, more in tune with academic reality, NYU, to be closer to my new role model. Only my budding relationship with J.Z. will keep me at Oberlin.
Within a few months, John will take me, J.Z., and roommate Irv out to the River Café for my twenty-first birthday, and I will run off with my girlfriend to the parking lot to kiss her in front of the world’s most important skyline for at least as long as it takes a medium-rare filet mignon to grow cold.
Within a few months, J.Z. and I will be staying in his empty new apartment, sleeping together on his bare hardwood floors.
Within a few months, he will drop the idea of his script and start making a documentary film about me, Irv, and Maya the Dominatrix, which will eventually be titled Only Children, because he and his three subjects share an interesting quirk—a paucity of siblings.
And within a few years, I will drive him completely and conclusively around the bend. And he, in turn, will deposit me in front of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
John figures out that I’m a jerk pretty quickly. It happens while he’s filming a dinner with me, Irv, and his parents at their Washington Square Village pad. I love Irv’s apartment unreservedly, because it is at the center of the island where I want to live and because the laws of parenting, as I have known them, do not apply around here. There are garbage cans perched on shelves for no good reason, and most of the belongings are stuffed into bulging bags from the Duane Reade pharmacy. “You’re supposed to be the adult!” Irv’s mother yells at John, banging on his bedroom door. The three of us are huddled together, puffing reefer, a towel stuffed under the door Irv’s mama is trying to demolish. Irv, hurriedly putting out the joint: “Just a minute, Mom! We’re working.” And then we all laugh, mother included, at John’s lack of adulthood. Back in the living room, John shows us some footage of Maya the Dominatrix, whom he, in his infinite sympathy, is about to install in her own apartment, as she’s about to go homeless.
And I let loose. From behind my Russian rabbit teeth, a torrent of hatred so misdirected at a girl whose life is sliding off the rails, who has done me no harm, who is closer to me than I think. She’s fat. Suburban. Unsophisticated. This from a boy who has just scribbled “Aubusson” into his writer’s journal and underlined it no fewer than thrice.
“How can you say that?” John asks.
But I say more and more and more about the woman with the jangles of chains atop her cleavage, a woman who has just been pummeled with a cane at her job in a Manhattan S&M dungeon while sick with anemia and a bleeding ulcer, who has been in and out of homeless shelters and mental institutions since being abandoned by her family at age sixteen.
“So many people move to the East Village and then go to the opposite extreme of their suburban experience,” I say, venomously, to the camera. “That is so old. To make her character interesting, she has to be engaging and intelligent.”
“She’s not a character!” John shouts.
Drunk off of Irv’s Jap
anese plum wine (the strange tipple of choice that summer), and constantly fussing with my cheap new contact lenses, I am in high dudgeon, incensed that John would speak up for this fat suburban dominatrix. You can’t adopt her, I want to say to him. You have to adopt me! Because no one can have more pain than I can.
Partly, this is what being of college age is about, being an expert on everything. But also I am saying exactly what my parents would be saying about Maya. Spoiled American. Didn’t go through what we went through. Wasting her life. In fact, with my thick new stubbly goatee and my joyous sarcasm, I am a direct stand-in for my father. If only I could have one of those UN placards to place in front of me every time I sit behind a desk. Republic of Fatherlandia.
One night during summer break from Oberlin, after getting John to buy me dinner at Le Bernardin or La Côte Basque or some little East Ninth Street joint with perfect butter-and-garlic-soaked snails, the kind of food I could only have imagined while watching Dallas and eating my mother’s farmer’s cheese with canned peaches, we find ourselves in the subway. I am so happy to be back in Manhattan, so happy to be with my new best friend, so happy to have been so well fed, each hundred dollars spent on me equal to a new kind of love. Even the number 1 train slowly clanging along from downtown to midtown to uptown, even its crowded melancholy, pleases me to no end. I have to say something to immortalize this moment.
“I don’t understand why people want to root for the underdog,” I say.
And John just looks at me. At my gaping teeth. At my Don Johnson sleeves. He doesn’t want to say what he’s thinking. That to him I’m an underdog. That he knows who I am. That he’s scared of what I might become. That his own mother had told him growing up, over and over, “I’d divorce your father if it wasn’t for you.” That he was president of his Salem, Oregon, high school class, the boy who crowned the Queen of the Sweetheart Formal but still hid in the library with his sandwich when it came time for lunch. That he failed his parents by never becoming a lawyer, much as I will fail mine in the years to come.
He is a father figure to me. And I, strangely enough, am a father figure to him. Angry, controlling, steeped in the monstrous narcissism of the underappreciated child, unable to part with money: how familiar I must seem to my new friend. When John’s mother was dying, his father, a successful businessman, wouldn’t leave the car in a one-dollar hospital parking lot. “How can he spend the dollar,” John’s psychoanalyst told him, “when he’s losing so much.”
And so John’s unstated mission becomes this: How can he stop me from becoming my father? The first part of his plan, oddly enough, is for me to understand and acknowledge my love for my father, my childhood desire to emulate him.
My first year at Oberlin I wrote a poem called “My Reflection” about a trip Papa and I had taken to visit a distant relative in Florida. At a roadside diner, when my father had gone to the bathroom, the waitress had mistaken him for my brother and told me he looked dashing. When my father came out, I scurried off to the bathroom myself and tried to pose like him in the mirror, pleased that he looked so young, thinking that maybe he would not die during my lifetime. “I counted five gray hairs on top of my head” is the last line of the poem.
As part of his documentary, as part of his effort to show the audience that I am not just a full-time jackass, John has me walking around town reading “My Reflection” in various locations. He takes me to the Meatpacking District, which at the time is as blood soaked as the name implies, and asks me to read the poem while standing against a wall. “John, this wall is unsanitary,” I say. “John, it smells like lobster.”
“Just read the poem,” he says.
“It’s too much of a high school poem,” I whine. “It’s not inventive. I can’t imagine myself identifying like that with my father. I was trying to write a cute father-and-son relationship poem. This is Hallmark.”
John, always ready for an argument with the son he never had, says, “If you hadn’t felt it, you couldn’t have written it.”
“But I’m good at doing this kind of bullshit.”
“This strikes a nerve. It exposes something about you that you don’t want exposed. Tenderness, empathy, and a bond with your father.”
“It’s manufactured. My father and I haven’t had a real conversation in years.” John and I fight on for about an hour, until I stalk off with the words “I hope someone stuffs that camera up your ass.” But between us, this passes for friendly banter, and John, undeterred, follows me up a rotting pier jutting out into the Hudson with his camera, the signage reading AREA UNSAFE: KEEP OFF. In 1994, most of New York is still unsafe, so we ignore it. I sit down on the rotting pier and stare into the sunset over Jersey.
“Read the poem,” John says.
“You’re such an asshole!”
“Read the poem,” he says.
“I’m sick of this shit. This is no way to live.”
“Read the poem, Gary.”
Later that day, I’m having a predinner glass of Beaujolais at John’s apartment. Whenever John is distracted by a phone call I sneak off to the Dell desktop whose gigantic corpus is practically embedded into the herringbone floors of his study, bring a file up on his monitor, and write whatever comes to mind in the middle of one of his Word documents—e.g., “Another fine night here at Château le Moron,” which is what I call John’s apartment. Any man who fears mortality as much as John does usually keeps an outlandishly exact record of every aspect of his life, and so I find a file that contains the entire song list of a Tony Bennett concert. Sometimes with John, it feels like I’m reliving my childhood, or at least trying to imagine what childhood on these shores might have been like. I find a space between “Tangerine” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” and type in “Duet with Gary.”
I’m too young to even understand the significance of what I’ve typed. The desperate need for adult friendship and guidance, the relief of having found someone who can match my pitch and volume, can understand my song.
Duet with Gary. Have I ever been so sincere in my life? Will I ever be again?
Returning from Oberlin with my parents after graduation, I am thinking of John and the dinners at La Côte Basque and the easy sophistication and camaraderie that surely await me. Right about now, several hundred miles to the east, he is recording a voice-over to his documentary, introducing me to the viewer.
“I’ve never ceased to be amazed by Gary’s intolerance, mean-spiritedness, and selfishness,” the man who will one day be the witness at my wedding is saying into his microphone. “I don’t know if it was in spite of those traits or because of them that I would come to feel as close to this hostile Russian—too many years younger than me to mention—as I ever have to any friend.”
The hostile Russian is on his way home. He is cocky and still coated with praise from the Oberlin College creative writing department. He has just been treated to a McDonald’s lunch by his parents, the last such treat he will know in years. More tragic still, he cannot even begin to fathom the possibility of failure.
The author at a party on his first date with Pamela Sanders. He is so drunk he can barely stand. Notice the desperate white cravat around his neck. Poor author.
LET’S GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. To the Strand Book Annex in Manhattan. To the panic attack. To the book. I am standing there once again in the Fulton Street Strand, holding St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars, the baroque blue hues of the Smolny Convent Cathedral practically jumping off the cover. I am opening the book, for the first time, to page 90. I am turning to that page. I am turning to that page again. The thick page is turning in my hand. What happened at the Chesme Church more than twenty years ago?
When Jonathan and I used to play our Zork computer game after Hebrew school, there was a simple typed command—I—that stood for “inventory.” It would tell you how many swords and flasks and assorted magical loot you, the player, possessed at the moment. Curiously, a “Personality Inventory” or “Self-Report Inventory,” with its A
nxiety and Repression and Ego Strength Scales, is also used by psychologists to evaluate the mental conditions of a test subject. I am just saying.
If I were to type I in 1997, at the Strand Book Annex in Lower Manhattan, what inventory would appear?
1. There would be “Me.” Pony tail tied back with a girlish scrunchie. Receding hairline out in front. A heavy rotation of dead ficus trees. Five thousand dollars in debt to Chase Visa. A Little Failure of the first order.
2. There would be my new studio apartment in babylicious Park Slope. Three hundred square feet looking out onto a dank courtyard, the kitchen overrun with roaches of all sizes and colors, a gift from the old woman slowly, eternally, dying in the apartment upstairs. No baby.
3. There is my novel, which I’ve finished but which I also hate. At one point, I decide to throw out the five hundred pages that comprise the last draft. A good Oberlin graduate, I recycle the whole mess first, but, broke and indebted, I use the cheapest recycling bags. I return from work to find out that my recycling bags have burst, and my entire novel is scattered like a blizzard across Seventh Avenue, the Champs-Élysées of Park Slope, my name crowning every page, my friends chuckling at my random prose. “Who’s this Vladimir?”
4. My friend, adversary, and role model, John. The key to my future sanity.
The problem with Zork’s Inventory function is that it never really tells you what you don’t have. What you want. What you need still.
I no longer have J.Z. She is in North Carolina. Her boyfriend is a drummer who lives in a van. After almost three years of having a companion, someone to drive me to the hospital for my last asthma attack, someone to split a soggy tuna sub with at the Student Union’s snack bar, I am alone.
My grandma Polya. Her death is drawn out and cruel. I follow her to different hospitals, Manhattan’s Mount Sinai and a lesser one near her apartment in Queens, but it is hard to sit at her bedside, next to the green-hued monitors that chart her failing grasp on the world. She is dying in parts, as most of us do. Skeins of hard-won adulthood peeling off. The kindness is gone from her face, the kindness she once shared only with me, and what is left is a contorted Soviet grimace. I don’t know what to do. I give her strawberries to eat. I watch my father howl in anger and sadness. I kiss her forehead at the funeral parlor, and it feels cold and hard like a brick, inanimate. So much for George Anderson’s We Don’t Die.
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