Men with smaller dicks enter the shower. The complaining begins.
“There’s too much reading for English!”
“Ganzel assigned an entire book to read!”
“I had to write two papers in one week.”
The Stuyvesant graduate in me is amused. During my first semester at Oberlin my longest assignment is watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. Students, townspeople, and other assorted losers are allowed to teach courses at Oberlin as part of the Experimental College. These classes are for actual college credit. The nice sophomore hippie next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles, which consists of us listening to Revolver, getting the munchies real bad, and then ordering in a Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple from Lorenzo’s (oh, the famished thirty minutes until the damn thing arrives). Sometimes we’ll drop acid and try to puzzle out “And Your Bird Can Sing” while walking up to various buildings and leaning on them.
It takes me but a few weeks to realize the frightening new prospect before me. Whereas in Stuyvesant I was at the bottom of my class, at Oberlin I can maintain a nearly perfect average while being drunk and stoned all day long. I get on the phone as soon as the first report card is issued.
“Mama, Papa, I have a 3.70!”
“What does it mean, 3.70?”
“An A average. I can get into Fordham Law easy. Maybe if I graduate summa cum laude, NYU or the University of Pennsylvania.”
“Semyon, did you hear what Little Igor has said?”
“Very good, very good,” my father says across the telephone line. “Tak derzhat’!” Keep it up!
Intense stoner feelings of love wash over me. Tak derzhat’! He hasn’t used that kind of language with me in half a decade. I remember being a nine-year-old child in our Deepdale Gardens apartment, crawling up his hairy stomach, rooting around his chest hair, cooing with happiness, while he nonchalantly reads the émigré intelligentsia journal Kontinent. I call him dyadya som (Uncle Catfish). He is my best buddy as well as my papa. “What did you get on your division test?” he asks me. “Sto, dyadya som!” (“A hundred, Uncle Catfish!”) Prickly kiss on the cheek. “Tak derzhat’!”
Does it really matter that upstairs from me, at this very moment, Nadine is holding hands with a guy who looks to me like a famous actor, the one always in rehab or shooting at the police? Does it really matter that outside the window a bunch of hipsters in propeller beanies are tossing around a Hacky Sack, Oberlin’s primary sport, without inviting me, because somehow they can smell my desperate background, my internship with George H. W. Bush’s election campaign, my years as the head of the Holy Gnuish Empire?
Mother: “And what kind of grades are your colleagues getting?”
“People don’t really talk about grades at Oberlin, Mama.”
“What? What kind of a school is this? This is socialism!”
Socialism, Mama? If only you knew. There’s a student dining coop that doesn’t allow the use of honey because it exploits the labor of bees. But all I say is “It is ridiculous, but good for me. Less competition.”
“I noticed there were not many Asian students.”
“Yes,” I say happily. “Yes!”
“Mama and I went to an opera last night. Puccini.”
My father has said Tak derzhat’, and my parents have gone to see Puccini together. This means there will be no razvod. We will remain a family.
As soon as I hang up, I lustfully fire up my silver pot pipe and blow smoke at the Beaver until he stalks off for the library. Then, free of his redheaded, freckled, studious presence, I take care of my final need to the sound of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” For this, too, I will receive college credit.
I like going to classes because I can learn a lot. About the students, I mean. Here the great arias of self-involvement—far more operatic than Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”—wind their way through the boxy little classrooms as professors eagerly facilitate our growth as social beings and master complainers. I learn how to speak effectively within my new milieu. I master an Oberlin technique called “As a.”
“As a woman, I think …” “As a woman of color, I would speculate …” “As a woman of no color, I would conjecture …” “As a hermaphrodite.” “As a bee liberator.” “As a beagle in a former life.”
Only what will I say? Whom will I speak for? I raise my hand. “As an immigrant …” Pause. All eyes on me. This isn’t Stuyvesant; here immigrants are a rare, succulent breed, even if the ones present usually have parents who own half of Lahore. “As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union …” So far, so good! Where can I take this? “As an immigrant from a developing country crushed by American imperialism …”
As I speak, people, by which I mean girls, are looking at me and nodding. I have shed every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown. The things I say in class are no longer meant to be funny or satiric or ironic; they’re meant to celebrate my own importance, forged in the crucible of our collective importance. There is no room for funny at Oberlin. Everything we do must move the human race forward.
And here’s what’s happening to me. I’m learning. The truth of the matter is that I should be nowhere near an institution like this. Oberlin is something nice you do for your child when you’re rich. Or at least comfortable. If I would ever have an American child I would happily send her to Oberlin. Let her enjoy the fruits of my labor. Let her have both clitoral and vaginal orgasms inside a gluten-free co-op. But me? I’m still a hungry, kielbasa-fueled, fucked-up refugee. I still need to build a home in this country and then to buy an all-wheel-drive car to put next to it.
The problem is I learn too slowly. There’s a very popular upper-classman who wears a janitor’s shirt with the name BOB stenciled over his breast. I have also worked as a janitor before coming to Oberlin. My father got me a job washing floors in a former nuclear reactor in his laboratory. I was paid $10.50 an hour for buffing many hectares of radioactive floors and had to wear a device at all times that looked like a Geiger counter (the present state of my hairline reflects as much). I worked all summer long so that I could have money for pot and beer and Chinese food to buy for a prospective hand-holder, but my parents certainly supplied me with shirts and pants to wear. “Poor Bob,” I say. “He only has one shirt. As an immigrant, I know what that feels like.”
“Who’s Bob?”
“Over there.”
“That’s John.”
“Why does his janitor’s shirt say ‘Bob’?”
My hipster interlocutor looks at me as if I am a complete idiot. Which I suppose I am.
As an immigrant, my job is to fucking learn. And what Oberlin has to teach me is how to become a part of the cultural industries in a handful of American cities. How to move back to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg or San Francisco’s Mission District and be slightly known among a select group of my own duplicates. How to use the advance for the Serbian rights to my memoir to throw a killer party featuring the world’s second-worst banjo player and absolutely worst snake charmer. There’s a knock on the door of a labor seminar with my favorite Marxist professor. A package of cheese has arrived from France. The People’s Cheese we call it. The People’s Volvo. The People’s Audi TT Roadster. There are other ways to be fabulous, ways I could hardly imagine among the forty-by-one-hundred-foot lots of eastern Queens. You just constantly have to be sure of yourself. You can’t announce your ambitions. You have to join a band where you dress like a chicken. You have to complain about the Soviet Union’s recent collapse even as your parents celebrate it. You have to bring a beach bucket and shovel to your morning shower. You have to go out with someone for the duration of junior year and get rid of them when you’ve had enough, and then you have to complain about the fact that a human being actually loved you.
The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the po
wer structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that’s why they call it an education.
My hair is growing and curling into locks and reaching toward my ass; my shirts are becoming flannelly just like Kurt Cobain’s. A child of Lenin is learning about Marxism in the Rust Belt from faculty whose office doors are festooned with signs reading CARD-CARRYING MEMBER ACLU and LOBOTOMIES FOR REPUBLICANS: IT’S THE LAW.
I am still majoring in politics, still paying respect to my parents’ law school dreams, but I am also doing something that Oberlin can respect as well.
I am writing again.
My first southern Christmas. Jennifer is holding the rambunctious Tally-Dog. I am so full of hush puppies and grits it hurts to lift my head.
“UH, YOUR TEETH ARE REALLY HURTING ME, Gary. Could we try something a little different?”
I have a girlfriend.
Her name is Jennifer, known to most by her initials, J.Z.
I am lying next to her. I am twenty years old. Back at Stuyvesant, I have spent several nights next to Nadine in her Queens bedroom, both our eyes closed, an eighteen-year-old-sized distance between us, me dreaming of her bony frame, her dreaming, presumably, of another’s bony frame, a digital clock soundlessly keeping time by her bedside, wasted time.
If I could compress the unrequited love of the last twenty years it is possible that I could come up with art. But that is not the kind of artist I want to become. When it comes to the world, I want to know it, touch it, taste it, and indefinitely hold it. Twenty years old, post-Leningrad, post–Hebrew school, postchildhood, post-God, I am a materialist without possessions. I do not believe in a Russian soul. The heart is an important organ, but it is just an organ. You are not what you want. You are what wants you back. Everything begins with her. Everything begins on the night when I lie with her in a building elegantly named Keep Cottage, a rambling timber-and-stucco mansion housing one of Oberlin’s renowned dining and residential co-ops, the kind where bees are kept safe from exploitation and a lone terrorist known as the Bacon Bomber, operating under cover of night, dusts the next day’s hummus supply with his eponymous foodstuff.
I have a girlfriend. I do not fully know how to kiss her, but I have a girlfriend. Thank you, Oberlin College. Without your extended welcome to the weird, without your acceptance of the not yet fully baked, without the fathomless angst you impose on all those who walk under your Memorial Arch, the angst that leads to the hapless intercourse your students have been waiting for throughout their miserable teenage existences, without these things it is conceivable that I would not have ravaged a woman with my Pentagon-shaped Soviet tusks until my thirties. It is also conceivable that without you I could have gone to Fordham Law School. But more on that later.
I am twenty years old. It is spring of sophomore year. I should be nineteen, but because I didn’t know English when I came to America, I am always one year behind. Jennifer lies in my arms, the soft and nonangular bulk of her, the fact of her and the fact of me. We are floating through space. That is true of everyone on the planet, but it is most true of people who are holding each other for the first time, with their eyes closed at night, half asleep. Next to us, just as a point of reference, her roommate, another Jennifer, whom we will soon nickname the Aryan (she is from North Dakota and has transparent eyes), is snoring with difficulty and occasionally calling out terrible things in her sleep. Every time I drift off into slumber Jennifer’s roommate’s grief awakens me, reminds me of what I’ve been most of my existence—an unhappy person getting by.
But then how to explain the Jennifer in my arms, the warm tattoo her head is making against my neck. How to explain the presence of another in my life, the thing I can only describe as not-aloneness?
And one more thing I want to tell you. Morning as I walk out of Keep. I’m winding my way through a large chunk of the Oberlin campus, past the cement constructions of the diarrheal new dining hall, past the thousands of bicycles old and new that Oberlin students tend to see as an extension of themselves, one of the few objects they may fully possess without ideological heartache, and into the green collegiate expanse of my own North Quad, where my New England–style dormitory with my two roommates and our shared three-foot bong awaits my announcement of love.
Rewind my journey seven-eighths of the way; hold it on the path between Keep Cottage and the dining hall. In slow motion, with the tips of my fingers still to my nose, I turn back and look at the array of Keep’s bay windows staring back at me. Is she there looking at me, too? What does it mean if she isn’t?
It is spring, real spring, which in Ohio must mean the end of April, not March. Where I am standing is a parking lot with a sprinkling of passed-down Subarus and Volvos. And as I look back at Jennifer’s window, the ecstasy of our joining is itself joined to the future moment of our parting—because we must part eventually, no? And somewhere amid the midwestern spring happiness, among the rebirth and the Easter around me, I can already suss out the death of us, the death of something to which I know I am not yet entitled. My teeth are really hurting her. Can we try something different? Yes, we can try. But will it help?
We meet during one of those legendary Scary Gary moments of which I myself have no perfect recall. I am being carried through North Quad by a bunch of fellow drunk and stoned revelers, of which I am the drunkest, the stonedest, and, naturally, the scariest. There are three versions of this incident I have heard. In one, I am being carried out of my dormitory, because I have thrown a raucous party, angering my roommate, the Beaver, and the Beaver has thrown me out to party elsewhere. In another version, I am being carried into the dormitory, into the path of the angry Beaver, whose redheaded studies or redheaded sleep I am about to interrupt with my intruding horde. In the third version, which holds to its own kind of recycled Oberlin logic, I am first carried into the dormitory and then carried out of it.
“Party at my room!” I am shouting. “Everybody come! Burton 203!” I have my first growth of goatee at this point, I have my Peruvian poncho with a hemp pin attached to the heart. As I am being tossed up and down by the many weak Oberlin arms, am I thinking of the book I have just read—Nabokov’s Speak, Memory—in which Vladimir Vladimirovich’s nobleman father is being ceremonially tossed in the air by the peasants of his country estate after he has adjudicated one of their peasant disputes? Yes, that is precisely what should be on my mind. Because literature is slowly seeping into my goatee along with the Milwaukee’s Best and the vile coat of fried buttery fat surrounding the Tater Tots served in the cafeteria. Inside the dorm room, the Beaver, who, if I take a step back from my growing snobbism, is actually a kind, smart boy named Greg, is trapped behind his economics textbook, as my silver pot pipe is produced, as thirty lungs are readied, as the cans of beer are popped with so many skinny index fingers, as my sophomore next-door neighbor, my Beatles Studies professor, opens the CD tray—remember how it used to sound, the mechanical woooosh of a CD player?—and puts in Rubber Soul.
Somewhere amidst all this I see a face, a circle of pale within the darkest hair around, and then a chin descending into a perfect dimple. There are at least a dozen women in the crowded, pot-smoke-filled room, and my love forms halos around each of them, even as I try to edit them down to one. My weekly mission is to develop an unrequited crush and then to smoke and drink my way out of it. Tonight, I keep returning to the circle of pale within the nimbus of dark, and to what’s underneath: ethnically dark brown eyes and thick eyebrows. She has a loud, sparse laugh that goes away quickly and a slightly unsettled manner, like she doesn’t fully belong here. Not in the way that most people really don’t belong at Oberlin but in the same way I don’t belong at Oberlin. As I will soon learn, neither of us really understands why a band must dress like a chicken. And our hearts are at least partly with the Bacon Bomber and his sabotage of the hummus and peanut butter supplies of the co-ops. And our hear
ts are at least partly in Russia and Armenia, where her father’s family is from, and the American South, from whence her mother hails with great difficulty.
I am being a little bit charming. The new kind of charming I’ve developed, drunk within three seconds of passing out, drunk enough to sway to Rubber Soul’s “Nowhere Man,” finding a kind of personal beat there, drunk enough to expel large quantities of comical intellectualized thought at anyone caught in my path. Something, something, Max Weber, something, something, Protestant joke, something, something, Brezhnev reference. Those who have come across my first novel will know exactly the song I am singing.
“That is one aspect of you that I especially envy,” she will write to me in a letter shortly, “your ability to get people to listen to you, and hold their attention.”
Yes. The years of being shunted, of observing from behind a language barrier, of listening from a bedroom adjoining my parents’ and trying to figure out a way to douse the flames, have produced a calculating, attention-seeking mammal of few equals.
And from a much-later letter from her: “I felt a kind of desperation in you, a sadness which I saw in Oberlin before we were going out.”
She is with her friend Michael, an upstate Jewish polyglot and easily the smartest person within the Oberlin class of 1995 (from which he will Marshall Scholar his way directly into Oxford). He will become one of my best friends, too. I sit down next to Michael, the thickness of his glasses matched by the saucerlike depth of my own contact lenses, and we begin a back-and-forth in Russian that’s the easiest and most true interaction that I’ve had at Oberlin to date. Something about the Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky perhaps? The collapse of the Soviet Union just a few months ago? The nostalgia that Nabokov thinks is vulgar poshlost’, but that we as boys of nineteen and twenty are not yet ready to dismiss out of hand? And as we spit out the Russian, more revelers pour into the room, the funk of my pot pipe seeping into the floor below and the floor above. But I care for none of them tonight beyond a bullshit “Hey, wha’s up? Beer in the fridge.”
Little Failure Page 26
