Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  But in my mind I’m already gone. I read about Cornell’s “old boy, old girl network,” and consider the marvels of a world in which I can be an Old Boy sitting around a fireplace at a university club with other Old Boys and maybe a sexy Old Girl, networking hard. Cornell, of course, is a difficult college to get into, but I have a chance at its School of Hotel Administration, because Paulie has gotten a bullshit note from one of his friends testifying to the fact that I am one of the finest bellhops at a prestigious Manhattan hotel. The brochure for kindly, progressive Grinnell College in Iowa literally makes me cry. All those morally strong boys and girls, all those international flags hanging amid the Gothic architecture. I curl up in my old Soviet comforter as Mama and Papa launch new fusillades downstairs. What kind of a person would I be if I went to a place like Grinnell? What if I jettisoned all of it, foreigner, Gnu, Gordon Gekko wannabe? What if I started from nothing? Am I crying because of the razvod downstairs? Am I crying because I can’t wait to be loved for the little nub inside me, whatever it may contain? Or am I crying because, in a sense, I know I’m about to commit an act of suicide, an act that will take me fully through my twenties and thirties, fully through a decade of psychoanalysis, to complete?

  I get into Michigan first. A red Jeep belonging to some rich friends of Ben’s and Brian’s is flying up the West Side Highway with me in the back screaming “Mee-shee-gun!” at the transvestites of the Meatpacking District. Then, my head filled with the lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on endless loop, I am puking into a Penn Station wastebasket. Then, having drunkenly taken the Long Island Rail Road’s Port Jefferson line some two hours into Long Island (Little Neck, where my family lives, lies along the Port Washington, not Port Jefferson, line), I find myself stumbling down an unknown train platform, until I fall down with my legs dangling over the rails. A bored conductor pulls me out of harm’s way and tells me to get some coffee in me. “Michigan,” I say to him. “I’m-a college gone.”

  “Go Blue,” the conductor says.

  But I will not be going to the university in Ann Arbor. Nor will I be attending Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, to which I am shockingly admitted. Over senior year, I have fallen in love yet again.

  She is a tiny, book-addicted Jewish girl, red hair out of myth, thin lips, and negligible chin like my own. She is from alternative Queens, the part over which the radio station WLIR runs roughshod with its Depeche Mode and its Cure. Her name is Nadine (it’s not). She is smart and worldly and not a part of our stoner clique. Somewhere I pick up that one of her parents or grandparents is a Holocaust survivor, knowledge I have no idea what to do with. In any case, Nadine is tough and strong and owns that strange combination of boyishness and femininity I so loved in Natasha, my first crush. When she says “Gary” over the phone in her sexy, cigarette-ruined voice, I think how wonderful that my American name isn’t Greg.

  Are we going out together? Not really. But we like to hold hands. And we like to sing “I Touch Myself,” the surprise hit song of 1991 by an Australian band called the Divinyls. So here we are walking up and down the lengths of Stuyvesant High School, holding hands, singing “I don’t want anybody else / When I think about you / I touch myself.” And this is what I’ve always wanted: someone to hold hands with while we sing about female masturbation, while others watch. Now I’m a real person, aren’t I?

  Over at her house we lie next to each other, and I try to kiss her briefly, or I almost accidentally skirt her small breasts through her thick sweatshirt, trying to discern nipple. Or we go see Terminator 2: Judgment Day, our hands tensely locked together for 139 minutes (we stay through the credits), and then we walk out into the city heat, still together. Or we go to a bookstore by Penn Station that like so many of them no longer exists, where I shyly pick out something pretentious.

  On bad days, Nadine says, “You know you’re depressed when you can’t even make yourself come.”

  Nadine is going to an academy for shy people in Ohio named Oberlin, which I recall as once ranking number 3 on the U.S. News & World Report list of America’s top liberal arts colleges but lately has been plummeting down that list. It also has a good creative writing program, and I can double major in political science for law school. Oberlin’s Lowest Average Accepted is about 5 points below my current 88.69, so getting in will be easy, and hopefully there will be enough financial aid not to bankrupt my parents. And if I go to the little school in Ohio, I will have someone to hold hands with when I get there, my sweet nongirlfriend with the sultry voice. I will have a head start.

  “I honestly believe that you and Nadine will end up getting married,” a Stuy friend of mine, a handsome swarthy Greek whom I have recently introduced to marijuana (pay it forward), writes in my Stuyvesant yearbook. And then his final assessment of my life chances: “Good luck, Gary. You’ll need it.”

  * * *

  * Oh no it’s not.

  † Let’s just say it’s a company that runs off the sweat of many brawny men with commercial driver’s licenses.

  ‡ Let’s just say it’s a certain island nation.

  § Again, a certain island nation.

  On the left, one of the first days of the author’s Oberlin career. On the right, one of his last.

  OBERLIN COLLEGE WAS ESTABLISHED in 1833 so that people who couldn’t otherwise find love, the emotional invalids and Elephant Men of the world, could do so. The college, to its immense credit, was one of the first in the nation to admit African American students and the first to grant degrees to women. In 1970 it made the cover of Life magazine by ushering in the age of the coed dormitory. By 1991, I have concluded that of all the colleges before me, Oberlin would allow me to lose my virginity to an equally hirsute, stoned, and unhappy person in the least humiliating way possible.

  And, of course, my main reason for choosing Oberlin. Here, I will have someone to hold hands with from day one, my not-exactly-girlfriend Nadine. Just as I once marched into Stuyvesant with an engineering report on my family’s $280,000 Little Neck colonial, at Oberlin my secret weapon will be an emaciated Jewish girl with a sexy burst of red hair and a pack-a-day habit.

  My father’s Ford Taurus is crammed to the roof with asthma inhalers and Apple IIc paraphernalia. I have already alerted my future roommate to expect a party animal par excellence who will subject him to the Talking Heads album Little Creatures without interruption. The roommate, who will prove to be incredibly square and studious, a double major in economics and German from a quiet suburb of the District of Columbia, will get the true Oberlin experience out of me, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth in 1995 dollars.

  The Taurus is winding its way between battle-scarred Little Neck and our appointment at Oberlin’s financial aid office. I talk to my mother or I talk to my father, but they do not talk to each other. There is an unspoken sadness amid the inhalers and the Apple IIc—the sadness of the fact that when they return to New York my parents will definitely get the razvod. And so the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” booming out of the Taurus’s dying speaker system, feels about right. Ever since we arrived in America twelve years ago, I have been trying to keep my parents together, but today my diplomacy has come to an end.

  As we pass from Pennsylvania, which contains the Ivy League university of the same name, as well as well-regarded Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, and into the flatlands of Ohio, I can’t help thinking that had I been a better student this razvod would not be happening. If Mama and Papa had been more proud of me, they would stick together if only to say, “Our son goes to Amherst, number two top liberal arts college according to U.S. News & World Report.”

  Nadine and I have chosen to live in the same dorm.

  I have never properly been off the Eastern Seaboard, and the flatness and waterlessness of the passing fields (wheat? corn?) and scrub make me nervous. I cannot comprehend this new terrain, and I cannot locate my place within it. All I can see is a python’s embrace of American highways and the top hats of bottom-ti
er fast-food restaurants, such as the one they call Arby’s. And yet, because I am young, I am still hopeful that something good will happen to me, razvod or no.

  Oberlin College lies southwest of the depressed city of Cleveland, near the even more depressed towns of Lorain, Elyria, and, cruelly enough, Amherst. The also depressed downtown area, a kind of addendum to the college, “boasts” an art deco theater named the Apollo. The town pipes in “Silent Night” all through the greater Christmas season to annoy the Jewish students and faculty. There is a five-and-dime store to go along with the Christmas music and the general feeling that time has left us all far behind. Young peasants and underemployed workers from the local farms like to tear down North Main Street in their pickup trucks shouting, “Queerberlin! You guys are a bunch of fucking Democrats.”

  The college’s architecture is designed for LSD and psychedelic-mushroom experimentation, as it makes sense only when it is melting. Heavy blocks of Ohio sandstone have gone into everything from a turreted Gothic hall to a Mediterranean-style, red-tile-roofed chapel. Amid these iconoclastic structures can be found one of Newark Airport’s lost terminals, here reconfigured into a suicidal dorm named South, and the Conservatory of Music by Minoru Yamasaki, the designer of the original World Trade Center, which uncannily resembles a three-story version of that doomed structure. The two seasons are winter and summer. When the leaves turn color for that twenty-minute Ohio autumn, the whole crazy ensemble looks as beautiful as anything else in the world.

  The human element wanders between these sandstone and cement giants, pissy looking and vegan, suffering from either Low Self-Esteem or Way Too Much Self-Esteem. A boy in a checkered shirt and multicolored Vans will walk by wearing a propeller on his red papal beanie, and if you try to take a picture of him and his beanie he will sneer at your presumption and make fun of you to his female companion whose jeans are a size skinnier than she is. And if you stop taking a picture of him, he will sneer at you for no longer paying attention to him. Lermontov covered all of this in A Hero of Our Time.

  The first two pages of the Oberlin Review from April 5, 1991, bequeath the following headlines: “Discovery of Marijuana Plants Results in Arrests,” “Pro-Marijuana Activists Rally,” “Porn, Domestic Partnership Head Assembly Agenda.” A fourth article, entitled “CF [College Faculty] Discusses Admission Stats,” concerns the fact that the year I am admitted to Oberlin, 67 percent of all applicants have received a nod from the admissions office. I would like to have met the one-third of the applicant pool that failed this rigorous admissions challenge. To quote a faculty member from the article: “That level of selectivity is so embarrassingly nil.”

  I have come to the right place.

  The Subarus of parents are nestling in herds. I do not yet know the significance of this left-wing East Coast car. I also do not understand that many of the parents are themselves academics, many buoyed by family trust funds that will also see their children into the future. There are so many things that I do not know, except for the fact that my parents are about to get the razvod. So I kiss them very quickly (Papa, quoting Lenin in part: “You must study, study, and study, Little One”) and send them on their way back to Little Neck by way of the inexpensive Motel 6. There they will lie, in my imagination, at opposite ends of the bed, a strange Jewish-Russian silence between them along with some Oberlin promotional brochures, vistas of colorful hippies necking atop a painted rock. In my dorm room, surrounded by my hardworking, completely sober, thoroughly unbohemian new roommate—for his work ethic, he is immediately nicknamed the Beaver—I unpack the Apple IIc and the dot-matrix printer, feeling alone—and not the good alone I felt when I escaped the Sauerkraut Arms—while longing for Nadine’s hand.

  Here’s another thing I don’t understand and won’t know for several weeks. On the way back home, my parents “make up.” In fact, once I depart the family scene the entire trajectory of their marriage changes. They will know as much love and happiness together as people of their geography are allowed. The question I may ask now is why? Why does that which I longed for my entire childhood, peace between Mama and Papa, finally happen only as my parents and I separate? Were their daily and nightly fights an attempt to win my audience and attention? Did they enjoy my shuttle diplomacy? My teary “Papa really loves you, and he promises to be a better husband,” or practical “Mama has lost her mother and older sister, so we must be especially kind to her and allow her to send up to five hundred U.S. dollars per month to Leningrad.” Or, more likely, did the fact that they now had so few people to turn to in this country—so few American or Russian friends and decent, nonwolfish relations—finally leave them no choice but to turn to each other again? Maybe, without me, they finally remembered what they loved about each other in the first place: my father’s intellect, my mother’s beauty and will.

  Will they be lonely without Little Igor? I certainly hope so. The other alternative: They were always better off without me. I was never a part of the family romance. I was only an impediment to it.

  Only the full-size bed of the Motel 6 will know.

  And now it is time to claim my own love. Hand-holding Nadine is here, prettier than ever in her neutral gray sweatshirt and denims, even as I bob around her in ugly khaki pants and a tie-dyed T-shirt that my middle-aged want-to-be lover Paulie and I bought at the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. (“Check out this T-shirt, Prince Pineapple, maricón.”) It features Marilyn Monroe’s smiling face from The Seven Year Itch, and I hope having this retro sexpot across my chest will prove edgy or interesting (it doesn’t). There’s a poster sale going on at the Student Union, and I buy a copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and a number called The Beers of the World. I happily show them off to Nadine, who does not seem at all impressed. She lights a menthol, blows the green smoke out of the corner of her tight little mouth, and we head back to our dorm, a neo-Georgian brute called Burton that envelops the northern quad within its two plantation-like wings. With my usual hunger I grab her hand, humming the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

  “You know what?” Nadine says. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold hands.”

  Elastic of underwear suddenly flooded with anxiety: “Why not?”

  “Just there are a lot of potential rich husbands around here.”

  She laughs a little.

  I laugh a little, too. “Ha-ha,” I say.

  Back in the dorm, alone, the Beaver off adding more difficult classes to his overbooked schedule, I lie down on the hard bed and have a ferocious, unmitigated Oberlin-grade panic attack. Here I am with a beaver for a roommate, with divorcing immigrant parents, and with no one’s hand to hold in the northeastern corner of a state whose unironic tourist slogan is “The Heart of It All.”

  Oberlin does not have fraternities or sororities. It is also in a dry county. These and other factors combine to make it difficult for most students to abstain from quantities of beer and marijuana that redefine the term “copious” (for those interested, there is also a decent supply of heroin and cocaine). On my first evening at Oberlin I will smoke a half-dozen joints and drink the Beers of the World, or at least a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the bladder-busting local swill. Half comatose I will hold hands with the prettiest girl in the dorm, even as she makes out filthily with a hot resident adviser, everyone laughing at me, the sad drunk holding on to the beauty as she kisses her aesthetic equal, a man with long hair as soft and flowing as her own. Stoned, I grasp the warmth of that hand, forgetting whose it is—Nadine’s? my divorcing mother’s?—until I wake up in a room not my own, wearing some kind of Peruvian poncho and covered in what must be someone else’s drool. In the next year, I will drink and smoke, smoke and drink, trip and fall, fall and trip, until my endless alcoholic and narcotic exploits earn me my Oberlin moniker: Scary Gary.

  As night falls on Oberlin, Scary Gary and the Beaver dim their lights. The Beav, exhausted from thinking and learning, snores up a storm from the get-go, but Scary Gary is scared shitless of a certain co
llege peculiarity. The bathrooms in Burton Hall are coed.

  To me, every Oberlin woman is already an angel, a deeply odorous creature with the potential of drunkenly holding my hand—and now I am supposed to make waste around her? Also the food served in the dining hall, a disingenuous attempt at beef au jus, a hairy salad of destroyed lettuces, a postapocalyptic taco, have made the Second Directive imperative. If I am to go on living, this crap must rush out of me now as if I were a re-creation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a poster of which I probably should have bought instead of Munch’s clichéd Scream. I circle the bathroom all night long hoping for an opening, so that I may lay a log. At three in the morning, as someone of the fairer sex is loudly vomiting Milwaukee’s Best, I slip into the stall as far away as possible, shyly undo my pants, and prepare to let loose. Just then the hipster boots of the girl whose hand I had drunkenly held as she kissed another slide into the stall between me and the vomiter. I tighten some rectal screw inside me, cancel the Second Directive, and run back to my dorm room. And that terrible shitlessness, essentially, is my first year at Oberlin.

  In the morning, although the toilets are coed, the showers on my floor are for men. There are no partitions in the shower room, and we stand about naked with one another, much like in prison or in the navy.

  One man walks in with a toy bucket and shovel like kids have on the beach. He sings happily as he sudses himself down. His penis is enormous; even nonerect it describes full arcs in the dense Ohio steam. I try to will myself to grow a little when he’s around, so that I won’t seem puny, but nothing can hold a candle to his candle. “A mulatto, an albino,” the big-dicked fellow cheerfully sings, as every reference in Oberlin in 1991 is to Nirvana’s Nevermind, every dorm room boasting at least one copy of the iconic album with the underwater baby swimming toward a dollar on a hook.