Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  Jonathan’s personality has not been reduced to the level where he has to call himself Gary Gnu III or the Mighty Khan Caesar, but he is clearly not cut out for SSSQ either. He has kind and attractive parents, an adorable sister, the collie of my dreams; and this perfect-to-my-eyes family lives in a spacious, castle-like Tudor in Jamaica Estates, the kind of Tudor Dr. Jason Robards and his beautiful elderly wife enjoyed before it was vaporized in The Day After. Jonathan is short like me, and his good looks are partially hidden by a layer of baby fat. When an Israeli throws a dodgeball at him with all of his compressed Canaanite fury, Jonathan will get hit and fall to the ground clutching his elbow, just like me. Another strike against him is that his mom and dad are too shy to participate in the shtetl network of SSSQ parents, a network that’s mirrored in the friendships of the kids themselves. My own parents (“Ver is man toilet?”), of course, are completely unclubbable.

  Finally, Jonathan is smart. Brilliant. And, as the old stereotype of Jews as the People of the Book dies a quiet daily death around us, Jonathan and I are also so very fucking bored. And now that my accent has faded and my English is strong and I can converse at a kilometer a minute, we become friends to the exclusion of everything else.

  Saturday is his house; Sunday is mine. Or the other way around. The Jamaica Estates Tudor with its dedicated computer room or my Deepdale Gardens apartment with its treacherous red shag carpet. His Apple //e computer or my new Commodore 64 with Datasette drive (forty-three minutes to load a game). And when our playdates are over and we are shuttled back to our respective homes in Papa’s Tredia-S, or his dad’s AMC wagon, we rush to our push-button phones to call each other, work out further clues to Infocom Software’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Zork II, the nerdacious new “interactive fiction” computer games that don’t just take over our lives but are our lives, our brains buzzing with the idea that there are problems in the world that can actually be solved.

  When Jonathan’s father drives me home I feel safer than ever. One day I want to have a son or daughter I can drive home in a sturdy car like this AMC wagon. My father has only recently taken to the road, and his car has been known to flip over a median and fall into a ditch, but Jonathan’s father is clearly to the wheel born. He asks me questions about school, and we laugh about some of the wackier aspects of SSSQ: Pilot Program and how easy the homework is, and whether Jonathan and I should go to Harvard or Yale when we grow up (Jonathan will eventually go to Yale, me not so much). When he delivers me to my own parents, their very expressions change; they become softer, as if the Americanness is transferrable somehow. In another decade I will find out that even as my parents are slowly clawing up the ladder, Jonathan’s father’s business—he owns a company that installs doors throughout the city—is in great difficulty, to the point that some of his SSSQ tuition is paid for in repair work. Later, cancer will take his life. The thought that this kind man, this perfect family, was going through something more painful than my own never occurs to me. On most days, I have my head so far up my family’s ass I can taste yesterday’s borscht. And that doesn’t leave much room for empathy for others, especially for Americans who the new Sony Trinitron says “have it all.” Sometimes, drunk off of three consecutive hours of Zork, I close the door to Jonathan’s cavernous bathroom, lie down on the soft mat riddled with collie hairs, and breathe in the floral air-freshener scent that even to this day I associate with home. What makes me want to cry is that Jamaica Estates is very close to JFK airport, and when the Soviets strike, my new family will be gone in a flash.

  My father is also like a second father to Jonathan. Here is this strong man, manly to a fault, who takes us fishing on a pier off the wealthy suburb of Great Neck. The docks are clearly meant for Great Neck residents only, but my father has found a hole in a chain-link fence, and the three of us scamper through illegally to fish off the rich man’s pier. “Prokhod dlya oslov!” Papa proudly declares. “Gary, translate.”

  “It’s the passage for donkeys,” I say to Jonathan.

  Sometimes we invade the pier of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point and haul in a catch between the hulls of the military training ships. I love my father’s gentleness with Jonathan, though I am a little jealous, too. Proud that I have a father who can sneak into enemy territory and steal striped bass with just a few jerks of his fishing stick, but wishing that my father could be like that all the time—his English wrong but patient, tender, instructive. “Over zer is mostly flyook and zer is flaunder … Guys, don’t pull feesh so fast! Give him time to get on hook, okay?” Guys. We are guys together in front of my papa. It occurs to me that if we had spoken English instead of Russian at home, my father would have lost some of the natural cruelty that comes with our mother tongue. Eh, you, Snotty. Eh, you, weakling. Because all I want to do now is to speak to Papa and Mama in Jonathan’s English. Which also happens to be my own.

  But it’s too late for that.

  Sexuality is ripening around us in a way that makes us scared. I can never tell Jonathan about Natasha, my Russian summertime crush, because talk of girls will remind us of our dalit status and shatter the pixilated world we’ve created around ourselves. One beautiful fall day, the parents of one of the wealthiest SSSQ kids rent out the top of the World Trade Center for his Bar Mitzvah, complete with a harpsichordist strumming a classical version of “Hava Nagila” in the sky lobby, sevruga caviar by the spoonful, men in uniform bearing the boy’s name on their lapels at the toilet stations, and a series of buses to ferry us from Queens to the monstrous twin skyscrapers.

  On the way home to Queens in the rented buses, two of the more advanced boys crowd around the girl who has developed the most breasts and jerk themselves off to her loud laughter. The news reaches our front row, and Jonathan and I are duly shocked. This never happens in our computer games. We have seen Brooke Shields in a swim-suit in People magazine, and we tried to put two Panasonic VHS recorders together to dub the R-rated version of the John Boorman film Excalibur, rife with both frontal and dorsal nudity (it never quite worked out for us). But the idea that two boys, one not even an Israeli, would take out their zains in the back of a plush rented bus and cream themselves over a girl is beyond our sense of reality. As I fold myself into my safe red Soviet comforter at bedtime, Papa sometimes makes an appearance in my bedroom with the encouraging words “Are you tugging yourself? Well, don’t tug too hard. It’ll fall off.” And then deep in the night Dr. Ruth Westheimer will whisper into my headphones the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms, but these are just words for me to put away for another lifetime, maybe for after law school. Am I supposed to tug at myself like those boys? Will that make my parents and my teachers happy? It’s too much to think about. I’d rather just play Zork with my best friend, Jonathan.

  ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire

  Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.

  ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.

  Revision 88 / Serial number 840726

  West of House

  You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

  There is a small mailbox here

  >

  In the dim light of Jonathan’s computer room his two five-and-one-quarter-inch Apple disk drives are twirling with anticipation. The > represents the so-called status line, upon which the player would give directions. For example:

  >W

  would mean the player wanted to go west. Or

  >Open mailbox

  would be another self-evident command. And so, without the intrusion of the graphics or sounds found in other video games, Jonathan and I journey into the Great Underground Empire, land of dungeons and treasure, trolls and grues and Elvish swords, and the dreaded Flood Control Dam #3. After hours of > we pause play and stagger onto the brightly lit world of Union Turnpike, to the Hapisgah (the Peak) kosher kebab restaurant, where Israeli waitresses ignore us as blithely as our own damsels at SS
SQ while heaping up some of the juiciest kebabs in Queens for pocket change. These are the rhythms of my new Life with American Friend: Union Turnpike, kebab platter with hummus and Israeli salad, video rental store, Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part 1, Mark Russell’s safe political comedy on PBS (“Read my lips, no new taxes, read my lips, they’re going to raise the old ones!”), and the wielding of our collective Elvish sword of great antiquity against enemies great and small.

  In school, we mostly wield our Elvish sword, too. We are inseparable. Of course, there’s my outsize Gary Gnu III personality, and sometimes I have to act out in public, have to make the class laugh. When I am cast as Julius Caesar in a school play I go around performing the Roman salute, which is, unfortunately, identical to the Nazi salute. “Heil Caesar!” I cry as I run around Hebrew school with my arm outstretched. Mrs. A looks at me with disgust. “That’s not funny,” she says. “You think everything is funny, but it’s not. Not everything is a joke.” And I feel like she’s punched right through my Gnu persona, this woman who I so wish would love me. I can barely breathe as I say, “It’s the Roman salute, Mrs. A. I lived in Italy once.” But Mrs. A has already brushed me aside and is talking once more of her daughter’s ballet excellence and how she and her favorite student’s family should get together soon in the “Berkshires,” whatever those are.

  There is one history teacher Jonathan and I love, and his name is Mr. Korn. Mr. Korn has three disabilities: (1) he stutters terribly (“T-t-t-tea-p-p-pot D-d-d-dome S-s-s-scandal …”); (2) his teeth are yellow and pebbly; and (3) he owns a total of three plaid shirts, each nearly as Soviet as my own. Mr. Korn actually wants us to learn something other than the birth order of Jacob’s sons. His signature line, the one he doesn’t stutter through, is “Stop and think about it.” Which is a weighty thing to ask of a class of troglodytes screaming at fever pitch about their zains and their father’s import-export business. I behave like a jackass in Mr. Korn’s class, but I do stop and think about what he has to say. About the fact that America is not merely a place for the extraction of capital but a landmass built partly on the miseries of others, that my future doesn’t have to be a mere triumphalist immigrant march from the streets of Queens to the Best Little Tudor in Scarsdale.

  To reward Mr. Korn for giving me an education, I torment him all the more. Robert is his name, so I scream out, “Hey, Bob!” whenever I burst into class. Or “Yessiree, Bobert!”

  Last year I learned that Mr. Korn recently died of a terribly well-known disease, because, in local parlance, “He liked theater,” and that knowledge merely affirms everything I know about the way the universe is held in place, the way the scales tip away from the good and the weak and toward the angry and the strong. Stop and think about it.

  As my outbursts grow worse, Mr. Korn sends me to the principal of general studies (the non-Hebrew half of the curriculum), another relatively humane man, with the unfortunate name of Mr. Dicker, whom we will soon reward with a heart attack. “How do you think you can work on your behavior?” Mr. Dicker asks. I stretch out my arm. “Now that’s a Roman salute, not a Nazi salute, right?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m Julius Caesar. Heil Caesar!”

  Back in the classroom Mr. Korn is going over our nonsensical essays on the ups and further ups of American history. I lean over the desk and feel his cigarette breath clouding the Fruit-Roll-Ups-and-Carvel-Flying-Saucer-ice-cream scent of an SSSQ classroom. Children are screaming around us. Jonathan is deep in sketching out our next rampage through the Great Underground Empire of Zork. “Hey, Bob,” I say.

  “Hey, G-g-gnu.”

  “I really think we paid too much for the Louisiana Purchase. Fifteen million bucks for Arkansas?”

  “I know, Gnu.” And we smile at each other, so many broken, stunted teeth between us.

  By eighth grade, Jonathan and I give up on a Solomon Schechter education entirely. We create our own game called Snork II: A Snork Forever Voyaging. We sit next to each other in class, and we play it all day long using pen and paper instead of the computer screen, coming up for air only when Mr. Korn stutters into class to complain about the Tet Offensive. I am the writer, and Jonathan is the player. His absurdist quest involves the rescue of a shipment of SSSQ’s Spanish textbooks, the Español al Días, which have been mistakenly kidnapped by Soviet intelligence and buried deep in a toilet in Leningrad. Jonathan is the main adventurer, but at times he is also joined by Gnu, Sammy “the Ursher,” and the Mighty Khan Caesar, in other words, our whole sorry gang. The adventure begins in Queens, continues on to Honk [sic] Kong, then mainland China (“Welcome to Communist China, the home of the whopper!”), the Orient Express, Venice, Germany, Sverdlovsk (where Lenin, who somehow never died, has been reduced to a third-rank poultry interrogator), and on to Leningrad. A series of self-destructing recorded messages, à la Mission: Impossible, drives Jonathan forward as I supply the horribly misspelled narrative and he writes commands into the status line (>).

  page 120

  Embankment (Leningrad)

  P.S. This message will self-destruct in thirty hours

  > Drop recorder.

  You wanna leave the recorder behind?

  > Yes

  Ya shure?

  > Yes

  Absoludly?

  > Yes

  Todally?

  > Yes

  I can’t hear ya!

  > Yes

  OK, you leave it behind it explodes 30 seconds later, and kills 60 people. Happy?

  > Yes

  I’m not

  > Go to party.

  Gnu takes you to Tipanovskaya Street … Coincidentally Gnu lived there. You see a party going on indoors, a guard is guarding the entrance.

  And on like that for hundreds of densely scribbled pages, with one-liners in the mode of Mel Brooks or maybe the Marx Brothers. “You are enemies of the state. We’re not shure which state but probably a sparsely populated one like Wyoming.” Riffs on “condems,” “vibrators” and “other exotic devices,” and occasional hints of romance, influenced, I suppose, by our recent dorkish reading of A Tale of Two Cities: “She’s beautiful, petite, and Victorian, what more do you want?”

  But there is something I want more than Dickens’s divine Lucie Manette, which is to take Jonathan on an adventure into my childhood, which is why A Snork Forever Voyaging can only go back to one place, back to Leningrad, back to Tipanov Street. At home, my parents and I are watching the reformist new Soviet leader Gorbachev on television with great suspicion. Is the smiling round-faced man with the giant wine splotch on his forehead really going to bring all that Soviet nonsense to an end? “Trust but verify,” as our hero Ronald Reagan likes to intone. And I rarely bring up Grandmother Galya, whom we’ve left behind, because I know that anything rodstvenniki-related can only bring trouble. I am forgetting what she looked like, I am forgetting the taste of the cheese sandwiches that paid for my first novel, and I am forgetting that I should love her even though she’s not here.

  Maybe that’s why I’m taking Jonathan back to Leningrad. I am telling Jonathan something I can never say to the boys and girls of SSSQ. That I am not some kind of Gary Gnu antelope whatever-the-fuck who is there to act crazy for their amusement. That I am a Russian boy, of Jewish lineage, sure, but a Russian boy from Russia, with half his life spent in that country.

  And Jonathan, because he is a true friend, will go there with me.

  Coincidentally Gnu lived there.

  My father stops hitting me. Perhaps it’s because I’m a little taller now, my jumble of sweaty dark black hair hanging just a few inches below his thick lips. Perhaps it’s American life, Jonathan’s family, slowly seeping into him. The last time he gives me “one across the neck,” I’ve allegedly been a grubiyan (a “boor”) to my grandma Polya. I suppose I have been rude to her, refusing to let her hold my hand as we cross the violent streets of Forest Hills (I am almost fifteen) and not being as appreciative of her eight-course meals now that each bite of a Klondike bar go
es right to my tits. But also I can sense my grandmother’s decline. Every year her mental faculties are withering, and the American drugs aren’t helping. A series of strokes are about to commence, reducing her to a wheelchair, one side of her body inoperable. Even before that happens, I want to withdraw from her. I cannot allow the woman who loves me so much to die slowly before me. I have to look away.

  And so my father gives me one across the neck. Fine. Good. I simmer quietly in my room. Every penny I earn doing chores has been spent decorating my bedroom to resemble the office of J. R. Ewing, the villain of the television show Dallas. Luckily, it already has the right wood paneling, and to further the vibe I’ve installed a desktop computer, a fancy-looking Panasonic telephone with an LCD, and a luxurious chair from the dump. All I need is the model golden oil derrick to make the look complete. But even without the derrick, whenever I feel blue I stride into my so-called office, grab the expensive phone, and, with what I think is a Texan accent, shout into the receiver, “Hi darlin’! You just hang tight, y’hear?”

  After giving me one across the neck, my father comes into my bedroom, and I brace my neck for another one. “Let’s go for a walk,” my father says. He seems sad. I sigh and shuffle the pile of carefully typed stories I am about to submit for rejection to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  We walk through the blooming Deepdale Gardens, past all the places where my father has entertained me with his Planet of the Yids tales and where he has given me the podzhopniks, the little side kicks in the ass. But those kicks symbolize gaiety and our funny father-son bond. Today, Papa is serious, and my neck is tense. He is taking his time with what he wants to say, and usually words just roll off him in thick bursts of anger or glee or philosophy. We are passing the five skyscraper-high, insect-like air traffic antennas down the street from us with their fearsome signage: WARNING THIS FACILITY IS USED IN FAA TRAFFIC CONTROL. LOSS OF HUMAN LIFE MAY RESULT FROM SERVICE INTERRUPTION. ANY PERSON WHO INTERFERES WITH AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL … WILL BE PROSECUTED UNDER FEDERAL LAW.