Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  And he still didn’t know how to dance. If his mother were alive, she could have put on a record and taught him. Hold my hand. Here, like this. Don’t look at your feet. Here, Vladimir. Like this. Yes, beautiful. Now move your feet. Wonderful. Oh, my wonderful little man. But all Vladimir had was Misha. He didn’t teach him how to dance, but he did buy Vladimir a corsage. He even showed him how to tie it to Olga’s pale thin wrist.

  That summer, the summer before he and Misha boarded a plane to John F. Kennedy International Airport, Vladimir got himself ready by watching subtitled American movies. None of them made any sense at all. It was like homework, except thankfully with beautiful Hollywood actresses. At the end of one these movies a blond-haired woman jumped out of an American automobile and ran into the dark mouth of an American forest, and Vladimir, watching from home, felt a strong compulsion to chase after her.

  “Who’s that?” he asked his brother, who knew everything.

  “Why?” Misha laughed. “Do you like her?”

  Noooooooooooo.

  Her name was Mariel Hemingway, Misha explained. The granddaughter of a famous American author.

  Vladimir loved Jessica, Marina, Olga (well, not so much her anymore), Tonya, Elena, Svetlana, the unnamed teacher, and Anastasia—but he loved them in a purely nonsexual way. He wanted to be around them, pick them lilies, stare at them through the frosted window of his apartment, but he did not want to kiss them. At most he wanted to be the kind of person who used to kiss girls, who had a long history of smooching and could therefore treat the subject with nonchalance. But Mariel Hemingway, this American blonde? Vladimir wanted to do things to her. He wanted to run his thumbs over her thick dark eyebrows.

  America! Misha and Vladimir took a cab from JFK to their new studio apartment in Manhattan. The Big Apple! The City That Never Sleeps! Within weeks, Misha had Vladimir enrolled in a nearby public school. Misha bought him pens, folders, and three-subject notebooks for his first day of sixth grade. But this American school was not what Vladimir had expected. With its giant asphalt yard and clock tower and fence-lined perimeter and uniformed guards and metal detectors and no-talking zones and cafeteria slop and lineups and mandatory periods of exercise and with its explosive undercurrent of tension, the school felt less like an enlightened educational institution and more like a Soviet penal colony. On the morning of his first day, a girl twice Vladimir’s size pushed him up against the classroom wall and grabbed his balls through his pants. In the afternoon, he watched an eighth grader drive a pair of scissors into a sixth grader’s skull, using his lunchbox as a hammer, the scissors as a nail. Vladimir came home with his teeth chattering.

  Misha pulled him out of classes right away and decided to send him to Catholic school. They picked one in Queens, where the price tags were lower—Misha, through his connections, was making good money, but not yet Manhattan tuition money. Besides, he reasoned, Queens probably had fewer black people and more immigrants, and a school with an immigrant-heavy population might be more accepting of a pole-thin Russian boy with middling (although quickly improving) English skills. And indeed the teachers were nicer and the classmates friendlier and Vladimir’s Manhattan residence gave him a certain amount of cachet, but there was one demerit, a problem almost as serious as steel-tipped scissors puncturing one’s cranium: Vladimir’s new school was all boys.

  They smelled like he did, like sweat, like feet, like poorly deodorized armpits. They didn’t carry a soft down of blond hair on the backs of their necks. Some of them didn’t even have necks. In class, Vladimir stared at the blackboard.

  At lunch he name-dropped Mariel Hemingway, but his new friends looked at him as if he were an alien from the interstellar Kingdom of Herbs. Vladimir learned new names: Alyssa Milano, Yasmine Bleeth, Jennifer Love Hewitt. “What about blondes?” he asked. You want blondes? Rebecca Romijn, Donna D’Errico, Gena Lee Nolin, Pamela Anderson. Yes, Vladimir wanted to say, but what about real blondes? Do you guys, like, know any actual girls? Do you have sisters, cousins, particularly horny housecleaners? The Baywatch babes are nice and all, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t exactly smell their Coppertone.

  One time, a cluster of girls were smoking in Astoria Park, and Vladimir and his friends—at Vladimir’s urging—approached them, asking to bum a cigarette or two. One of the girls slipped a Camel between his fingers and proffered her lighter, but when he saw the chipped nail polish on her fingers and when he smelled the smoke on her wet mouth and when he remembered the touch of her hand on his, he felt a stiffening in his too-tight parochial pants, and then Vladimir became very nervous indeed, and that’s probably why he stuck the wrong end of the cigarette in his mouth, and tried, unsuccessfully, to light its mentholated filter. Which everyone—the boys, the girls—thought was absolutely fucking hilarious. The filter! You were gonna light the filter? Oh my God! Har har har!

  “This is how we smoke in Russia,” he said miserably.

  It was not one of his better lies. Worse, for the next few months, it gave his friends’ taunts an organizing principle. Vladimir answered a question wrong in math class? Hey, is that how you find the radius of a circle in Russia? (“Russia” always receiving a heavy, Boris-and-Natasha inflection.) Vladimir shot an air ball in gym class? Does that count as a three-pointer in Russia? Vladimir mispronounced “subsequent”? Vladimir mixed up “orgy” for “orgasm”? Vladimir neglected to super-size his Extra Value Meal? Is that how you order fast food in Mother Russia?

  “That doesn’t even make sense, twat-face.”

  “Do you even know what a twat is?”

  “Do you?”

  “Do you?”

  They were his friends. They were mean to him. That’s okay. He was mean to them, too. Do you have HBO at home? Hindu Body Odor? Har har har! They were eighth graders.

  At home, while eating Chinese takeout, Vladimir said, “They want to know what you do for a living.”

  “Who does?” Misha said.

  “The kids at school.”

  Misha looked relieved. “Tell them to mind their own business.” There were rules, Misha had explained. Don’t talk about what I do. Don’t talk about anything that has to do with the family. “You know who talks?” he asked. “Blacks, that’s who. They run their mouths and don’t shut up and that’s why they’re always getting arrested.”

  “Can I tell them about Mama?”

  “What about her?”

  “Can I tell them about Dad?”

  “Yeah, tell them he’s drunk in a snowbank somewhere. Oh, come on. Don’t make that face. I’m sorry. Hey, stop it. I’m sorry. Tell them whatever you want about Dad.”

  “Can I say he’s in the KGB? That’d be phat.”

  “Don’t say ‘phat.’ ”

  “What do I say about you?”

  “Vladimir. You say nothing about me.”

  “You don’t understand! This is how you make friends.” It felt perverse—and strangely empowering—to instruct his brother on something. “They ask you questions, you tell them stories.”

  “Tell them I’m a student.”

  “You’re too old.”

  “Vladimir,” Misha warned. “Well, you are.”

  “Tell them I’m a grad student.”

  “In what?”

  “Perestan’ bit dabayobom!”

  “All I’m saying is if they ask, I want to have my story straight. Jeez. What if they tell their parents and then the parents meet you at, like, a PTA meeting or something, and they’re, like, ‘Hey, how’s the grad life going? You’re studying blankety-blank, right?’ I want you to be prepared, that’s all. I want you to know what’s coming. Maybe you’re in graduate school for business? Huh? Chemistry, maybe?”

  “Are you being a wise guy?”

  “No! I swear!”

  “Tell them I’m studying literature,” Misha said. He liked the sound of it. He imagined a life of quiet study, term papers, sitting between the wings of a library carrel, hunched over old-smelling books, his nose in Gogol’s “
Nose.”

  “Tell them I’m studying Russian literature.”

  “That’s wack.”

  “Don’t say ‘wack.’ You know who says ‘wack’?”

  Yeah, Vladimir thought. I know.

  For high school he went to McClancy’s in East Elmhurst, another Catholic all-boys school. He could’ve gone to school in Manhattan—his brother, at this point, was making enough bank to afford two tuitions, but some of Vladimir’s friends were going to McClancy’s, and so he wanted to go there too. He didn’t want to start over. He was tired, he told Misha, of starting over.

  New school, still no girls. The only women walking McClancy’s halls were the nuns, and while Vladimir considered himself an atheist, unafraid of divine retribution, there were boundaries even he could respect. The sticky-seated porno theater of his mind screened practically everything and anything, but nun flicks stayed in their titanium canisters, unwatched. Fair game, however, were the women on the subway. And at night, before his brother came home, Vladimir spent long hours humping the bed, fantasizing about Jess Yoffe and Tonya Valit and Marina Duvenskaya. Like an FBI supercomputer, he age-advanced their faces and bodies, approximating how they might look in 2002. He even entertained fantasies of the girl from his Manhattan school, the giantess who pushed him up against the wall and grabbed hold of his privates. At least she showed interest!

  It wasn’t all sex, however. He thought he’d be a good boyfriend—a great boyfriend. He’d open doors and pay for things. He’d tell her he loved her. He wouldn’t flinch or joke when she complained of menstrual symptoms. He’d kiss her shoulders. He’d sit with her in comfortable silence, sharing sections of the newspaper in a breakfast nook with sunlight streaming through the window (not that Vladimir had a breakfast nook or ever read the paper). But man oh man, what he really wanted was someone to confide in. He’d tell his girlfriend he doesn’t remember what his mother looked like. Unless he was looking directly at a photograph, he had to think of moms from TV and superimpose their faces onto a generic, housecoat-wearing body. It’s a shameful secret that he’s never told Misha, but when he gets a girlfriend and when the time feels right, he’ll tell her. If he gets a girlfriend.

  His clothes didn’t help. Five days a week he wore wool pants, polyester shirts, snot-green ties one step above clip-ons. Talk about the Kingdom of Herbs! With his ample allowance, Vladimir invested in a new look. He bought black baseball caps at the Queens Center Mall and 1980s basketball jerseys off eBay. He scoured vintage shops in the Village looking for the same type of baggy jeans Dr. Dre wore when The Chronic came out. Like the names on the basketball jerseys—Barkley, Drexler—Vladimir’s fashion sense was about twenty years out of date. Which is exactly why it’s cool, he thought. Wearing the clothes under his Catholic uniform, Vladimir received a negligible boost in popularity and a zero percent increase in attractiveness to females. So like a home-born American, Vladimir doubled down. He reinvested. He soothed his frustrations with the ointment of more spending, more shopping.

  Someone on eBay was selling a pair of the super-hard-to-get series III Air Jordans, mint condition, for only $245.

  “No way,” said Misha, who himself had a closet of wildly expensive shoes. But his objection to the Air Jordans wasn’t the price, but rather their status as signifiers. “What are you, black?” Misha asked. “Pick up your pants, bro. Air Jordans are for eggplants.”

  So what? Vladimir wanted to say. His favorite all-time athlete was Dominique Wilkins; his favorite movie star, Will Smith. He burned Nas CDs off his friends and kept them in jewel cases labeled “Van Halen.” So black people wear Air Jordans? So what? Vladimir wanted them. They were cool. If need be, he’d pay for them himself.

  He stole a beeper full of Ecstasy from his brother. His brother only had, like, tons of them. Misha gave them to dealers, who used the beepers to sneak E past bouncers at Webster Hall and Club Exit. Vladimir brought it to school, where he sold the X at a price he hoped wasn’t too high. Ten dollars a pill.

  Vladimir’s popularity skyrocketed, as did the general mood of the Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School. He bought the Jordans and kept them in his locker. He started hanging out with juniors and seniors. He pinched a couple more pills off his brother. He’d have to be careful here. He couldn’t get greedy. He bought an Orlando Magic Bo Outlaw jersey off the Internet.

  In the spring, with the pheromones poppin’ and the birds a-tweet-tweet-tweetin’, Vladimir met a girl. Let that sink in for a while. Her name was Vicki Rodriguez and she was the little sister of one of Vladimir’s new upperclassmen friends, George Rodriguez, McClancy’s starting point guard and a tenacious defender who had a habit of barking at opposing players. Vladimir had gone over to George’s apartment to sell him three pills of E and to play his new Xbox, and he met Vicki in the hallway, the two of them converging on the apartment’s only bathroom.

  “Are you going to be long?” he asked her.

  “It’s my fucking house,” she said.

  Vladimir grinned. When she came out of the bathroom he pestered her with questions—What school did she go to? Did she have to take the train there? What sorts of music did she like?—and Vicki, flattered by the attention and moderately intrigued by the accent, provided dutiful answers. Eventually, however, he ran out of things to ask. His bladder, so close to the bathroom, was throwing a tantrum, which made it difficult to concentrate. He and Vicki looked at each other and then looked away. Smiling politely, she started to slip past him, and Vladimir—confused as to why anyone would want to leave so perfect a hallway—asked her where she was going. To the mall, she said. To get a new wallet. Her old one, a pleather facsimile of the Dominican flag, had fallen apart at the seams, literally.

  “I can walk with you,” he said. “Over to the mall. If you want.”

  “Do you have any idea how fucking awkward that’d be?”

  “We could brainstorm names for our children. I’m thinking Victor, Vincent, uh, Vance maybe, Viggo. Fairly unusual names for a girl, I know, but …” If he’d had his tie on, he would’ve fiddled with the knot.

  At the mall, Vladimir tried to pay for her new wallet, but she wouldn’t let him. She did, however, allow him to buy her a cinnamon pretzel from the food court. As they walked through the mall, people stared—or at least Vladimir felt as if they stared—at their racial incongruity, the clash of their pigmentation. So what? A Dominican girl, Vicki had dark dark skin, as dark as skin gets outside of Africa, and while that certainly must have appealed to Vladimir, while it must have sated some unrecognized fratricidal craving, he felt attracted to this girl for reasons beyond that. She smelled like cream and ginger, and her hair looked soft, and she bit her cuticles just like he did, and she stood the wrong way on mall escalators so that the world seemed to get farther away, and when she took bites of the pretzel Vladimir could see the pink muscle of her tongue, and she had big boobs that she tried to cover up (if he hadn’t already fallen in love with her, he might have crassly referred to them as a sneak rack), and while she didn’t laugh at Vladimir’s jokes she at least knew they were jokes, and on the surface of her chin a pimple had formed, the pus of which was rising volcanically, and she told Vladimir that she was really, really looking forward to popping it. There are young men who did not find these habits and admissions attractive in the opposite sex, but in one afternoon at the Queens Center Mall Vladimir discovered he was not of their number.

  He walked her home, and when they got to her door she put a hand on the side of his face, as if the city had gone suddenly dark and she needed to make sure he was still there, in front of her. “I like you,” she said.

  “I like you, too.”

  Come on, you idiot. Kiss her.

  He didn’t. He went home, loving her and hating himself. The next day they saw a movie together. The day after that, they went to a pool hall on Northern Boulevard. The day after that, she couldn’t go out because she flunked an algebra test, so they talked for three hours on the phone. In the following days
they went back to the mall, saw another movie, ate slices of pizza, sat on a bench in Travers Park with a clear view of the handball courts. And still they had not kissed. Every unconsummated minute brought Vicki and Vladimir closer to Friendship Status. At home, Vladimir stared at himself in the mirror, wondering if he should shave his widow’s peak like Misha did, if maybe that would make him irresistible to Vicki, because clearly Vladimir stood incapable of making that first open-mouthed move himself, because he was a spineless, dickless, ass-licking loser. On Thursday—June 13, 2002—Vladimir, again, walked Vicki to her door, and again failed to kiss her. This time, however, she didn’t go inside. Instead, they turned back around and she walked him to the train station, where she passed through the turnstiles—like him, she had a student MetroCard, so the swipe was free, but still!—and she stood with him on the platform, keeping him company as he waited for his train home.

  They didn’t say much. Under the ground, through their rubber-soled shoes, they began to feel the first soft rumblings of an oncoming train. Vladimir stepped up to the cautionary yellow line, leaned out over the tracks, and peered into the mouth of the tunnel. The rumbling grew louder. On the tracks, newspaper sheets and magazine pages twitched nervously. The air changed. Still no actual, physical train, but across the walls bloomed a heraldic light.

  Vladimir decided he’d rather be the kind of guy who tries to kiss the girl and strikes out than the kind of guy who doesn’t try at all. Wetting his lips, he turned to Vicki, who had already opened her mouth.

  She tasted like she smelled, like ginger and cream. He clicked against the ridge of her teeth. He felt the slick underside of her tongue. Halfway through, Vladimir and Vicki remembered to close their eyes. It was the first French kiss for either of them, and not knowing when there’d be a second, they felt reluctant to stop. Eventually, however, they ran out of oxygen.