Little Failure (19 page)

Over in the leafier parts of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills, the tribal hatred of blacks and Hispanics stands out partly because there aren’t really any blacks or Hispanics. My mother’s one encounter with
“criminality” on Union Turnpike: A big white cracker in a convertible pulls up to her, takes out his penis, and shouts, “Hey, baby, I have a big one!”

Still, everyone knows what to do when you encounter a dark-skinned person: You run.

Because they want to rape us so very badly, us in our jackets made of
real Polish leather
. And “the Spanish with their transistor radios,” you know what else they have, other than the transistor radios? Switchblades. So if they see a seven-year-old Russian boy walking down the street with his asthma inhaler, they’ll come over and cut him to death.
Prosto tak
. Just like that. The lesson being you should never let your seven-year-old boy out alone. (In fact, until I turn thirteen, my grandmother will not allow me to walk down a quiet street in peaceful Forest Hills
without holding her hand
. Eyes darting one hundred meters in every direction, she is ready to cover my body with hers lest one of those animals with the switchblades comes near.)

Oh, and if you save up enough money for a Zenith television set with a Space Command remote control, a strong black will surely come by, hoist it onto his shoulder, and run down the street with it. And then a Spanish will run down the street after the black with his transistor radio for accompaniment, playing his
cucaracha
music. One of them will slip the Space Command into his pocket, too, and then you’ll really have nothing.

And so, the safety of our own kind.

And so, the Solomon Schechter School of Queens.

Or
Solomonka
, as we Russians like to call it.

Only they’ll be beating the shit out of me in
Solomonka
, too.

I can’t speak English too good, so I’m demoted by a grade. Instead of starting in second, I am sent to the first. In every grade through senior year of college I will be surrounded by boys and girls one year younger than I am. The smarter kids will be two years younger. In the annual class photo I will find myself handed down from the top
row with the tallest kids to the bottom row, because even as I grow older I somehow grow relatively smaller.

How can I be so stupid (and so short)? Aren’t I the kid who knows the difference between
The Allegory of Day
and
The Allegory of Night
in the Medici Chapel? Aren’t I the author of
Lenin and His Magical Goose
, a masterwork of socialist realist literature, written before I learned to properly make
kaka
atop a toilet bowl? Don’t I know the capitals of most countries except for Chad? But here, at age seven, begins my decline. First through the wonders of Hebrew school, then through the tube of American television and popular culture, then down (or should I say
up
?) the three-foot bong of Oberlin College, the sharpness of my little boy’s intelligence will diminish step by step, school by school. The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing why, will be mostly replaced by survival and knowing perfectly well why. And survival will mean replacing the love of the beautiful with the love of what is
funny
, humor being the last resort of the besieged Jew, especially when he is placed among his own kind.

SSSQ
, I write, worriedly, on the upper-right corner of every notebook for the next eight years. The Solomon Schechter School of Queens. The shorthand is imprinted on my mind, SSSQ. The S’s are as drunk as Step-grandfather Ilya, and they’re falling all over one another; the
Q
is an
O
stabbed between the legs at an angle. Often I forget the
Q
entirely, leaving just the quasi-fascistic SSS.
Please work on your penmanship
, every teacher will dutifully write.
Pen
I know because it is my main toy.
Man
is someone like my father, strong enough to lift a used American air conditioner he has just bought for one hundred dollars.
Ship
is like the cruiser
Aurora
docked in Leningrad, the one that fired the fateful shot that started the October Revolution. But
pen-man-ship?

SSSQ is my world. The hallways, the staircases, the rooms, are small, but so are we. Four hundred kids, grades kindergarten through
eight, marching in two lines, boys and girls, height order. There’s one Hebrew teacher, Mrs. R, middle aged, in large owlish glasses, who likes to make us laugh as she leads us, sticking two hands in front of her nose, making a little flute, and singing, “
Troo-loo-loo-loo-loo
.” Other than dispensing mirth to scared children, her task is making sure that every boy is wearing his yarmulke. The first, and nearly last, words of Hebrew I learn:
Eifo ha-kipah shelcha?
(Where is your yarmulke?) That’s the sweet part of the day, being taken to class by Mrs. R. But in class with Mrs. A–Q and S–Z, not so much. Because I don’t know what I’m doing. With my missing scissors and my missing glue and my missing crayons and my missing yarmulke and my missing shirt, the one with the insignia of a guy on a horse swinging a mallet, a
polo
shirt, I learn much too late, I am also missing. In fact, often I am in the wrong room, and everyone cracks up over that, and I, in my untied shoes, stand up and look around, mouth open, as Mrs. A through Q or Mrs. S through Z goes out to get Mrs. R. And Mrs. R with her light Israeli accent will stand with me out in the hall and ask me, “
Nu?
What happened?” “I—,” I say. But that’s about all I know: “I.” So she’ll bend down to tie my shoelaces while we both think it over. And then she’ll take me to the right room, and the familiar faces of my classmates will fill up with a new bout of laughter, and the new Mrs. A to Z (but not R) will shout the word that is the official anthem of Solomon Schechter:
Sheket!
In English, “quiet.” Or, more plaintively,
Sheket bevakasha!
“
Please
be quiet.” And everything will fall into its usual state of entropy, students who can’t be quiet, and teacher who can’t teach, as Hebrew, the second language I don’t know, the one that doesn’t even appear on boxes of Honeycomb, bonks me on the head, coconut style. And I sit there, wheezing myself into an asthma attack that won’t come until the weekend, wondering what possibly can happen to me next, as my shoes magically untie themselves, and then it’s recess time, and Mrs. R takes us outside with her sweet
troo-loo-loo
past hallways with maps of Israel drawn years before the one my parents call “that
farkakte
Carter” and his Camp David Accords gave the Sinai Peninsula away to the Egyptians, and the walls filled
with children’s thank-you notes in bright Magic Marker, thank-you notes to the one who watches over us, the one whose name can’t even be written out fully, he’s so special, the one they call G-d or, sometimes, just to add to the confusion, Adonai. As in
Sh’ma Yisroel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
.

Recess. Out in the school yard, beneath a nearby sign that says
VULCAN RUBBER
(two words that will become significant, the first one in my teens, the second one, unfortunately, only in my twenties), the girls play hopscotch and the boys run around with their noisy selves and I sit by the side trying to occupy myself with a ladybug if it’s warm, and my mittens if it’s not, and my cold fingers if I’ve already lost my mittens for the day. I still can’t differentiate the boys and girls by name. They are just one large mass of
Am Yisroel
, the Jewish nation, the darker, more aggressive ones from Israel, the lighter, happier ones from Great Neck. The liberal kid whose parents bring me over to play with him walks by on his own accord. His house in Kew Gardens is something I lack the vocabulary to describe. First of all, the whole building is his
own
house, and there is grass in front of it, and there is grass in back of it, and grass on the sides, and there are trees that belong to him, which are his personal property, so he can even cut them down if he wants to and he won’t go to a labor camp. And inside the house, such games there are! Board games about taking over four railroads and entire neighborhoods and also “action figures” from
Star Wars
, which I don’t know what it is. But someone kind has given me something from the
Star Wars
, and what it is is a tall, very hairy monkey, with a white bandolier around its naked body and a scowl on its face. Sometimes, when I’m especially alone, I’ll take the monkey out, and the kids will shout “Chewie!” I guess that’s Monkey’s name. And then they’ll laugh because Chewie is missing half his right arm, so you can’t even stick in his black rifle with the bow attachment. So it’s both good that I have Monkey and it’s not good, because he’s deficient. I also have my pen that goes click, but nobody wants any part of that.

Anyway, out at recess, the liberals’ son comes over and says, “Gary, you want to play airplanes?” And first I look past him, because who
would want to talk to me, and then who is this Gary anyway? And then I remember: It’s me. We’ve thought it over as a family, and Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already. So we take IGOR, and we move around the
I, G, O
, and
R
. So there’s GIRO (which would have been great for the last decade of the twentieth century) and ROGI (perfect for the first decade of the twenty-first), and GORI. That one’s nice, it’s the city where Stalin was born in Georgia, but still not perfectly right. But then there was that actor, Cooper, what’s his name? And so two vowels are traded for two others, and GARY I am.

“I want to play airplanes,” I say. More like shout: “I want to play airplanes!” Actually, why stint here? “I WANT TO PLAY AIRPLANES!” Because this is my chance to win over new friends. “To Jakarta,” I shout, “you fly Gonolulu, Gawaii,
^†
or Guam, short rest, put benzene into wings, then Tokyo, stop Jakarta.”

The children look at me with keen American indifference or burning Israeli anger, the takeaway being
sheket bevakasha
, or maybe just
sheket
. In any case,
Shut up already, you crazy freak
.

The game of airplanes is as complex as every other interaction at SSSQ. The boys run around going “
ZHUUUUUUUUU
” with their arms outstretched, and then they knock one another down with those arms. I do not make it to Jakarta. I do not even make it as far as nearby Philadelphia Airport, at 39°52′19″ N, 75°14′28″. Someone bonks me on the head, and down I go, all passengers on the manifest dead.

There’s a movie theater on Main Street, and my father is excited because they are showing a French movie, and so it must be very cultured. The movie is called
Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman
, and it will be interesting to see how joyful these Frenchwomen actually are,
most likely because of their exquisite cultural patrimony. (“Balzac, Renoir, Pissarro, Voltaire,” my father sings to me on the way over to the theater.) The next eighty-three minutes are spent with Papa’s hairy hand clasped to my eyes, the Herculean task before me: getting it unclasped. The less explicit parts of
Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman
are set in a Hong Kong brothel or a Macao girls’ boarding school, and then it’s all downhill from there. Despite my father’s best efforts I see about seven vaginas on the big screen that day, seven more than I will see for a very long time. Of course, we have to sit through the whole thing, since we have already paid for the tickets. And one of the male characters, a radio operator, is named Igor (
“OH, Igor, OUI!”
), my former name, so there’s that.