Little Failure (21 page)

“Whatchoo got there?”

“Dzhas samsing.”

“More
new
T-shirts? Ooh, let’s see!” Laughter.

“Dzhas samsing for my mazer.”

Mrs. A–Z, not R:
“Sheket! Sheket bevakasha!”

“Your
mazer
goes to Macy’s?”

“Dzhas samsing for my mazer zey geeff daun ze stairs.”

More laughter, except from the liberals’ son and one other source. The kid who is hated even more than I am.

His name is Jerry Himmelstein (no, it’s not). He was born in the U.S.A. to a set of American parents with all the rights and privileges
entailed therein. And yet: He is the most hated boy in all of Schechter. I know that I must study him hard and avoid certain behaviors if I am to maintain my position as the second most hated.

It is Shabbat, one of the boys has been chosen to be the
Abba
(the Father, Hebrew), usually gentle Isaac or Yitzhak. (Every other boy here, myself included, is given the Hebrew name of Yitzhak; all we’re missing are the corresponding Abrahams, our fathers.) A girl, equally gentle Chava (Eve), is the
Imma
, or Mother. She is singing in a sweet preadolescent voice over the candles, “
Baruch atah Adonai … Le’hadlik ner shel Shabbat
.” We are all salivating over the braided challah bread and the sour-sweet Kedem “wine” and the promise of two Hershey’s chocolate candies to signal the end of the ritual. The Israeli kids in the back are inducting us into the world of adulthood.
Zain
, one of them says and grabs his crotch, then makes a challah shape with his hands.
Kus
, he says and sticks his fingers down an imaginary vagina (I know what that is! Oh, Emmanuelle!), then brings three or four fingers up to his nose and smells them.
Mmmm … kussss
. Even as Chava and Isaac are kosherizing the candles and the bread and the “wine” and the Hershey’s Kisses for Shabbat, we boys in the back are smelling our fingers with a far more religious expression, until Jerry Himmelstein breaks out in this explosion that he does, the one that sounds like:
AGOOF!

“Sheket!”
Mrs. A–Z yells.
“SHEKET, YELADIM!!!”
Quiet, children!

“It was Jerry! It was Jerry!” everyone tattles at once.

“Jerry,
shtok et-hapeh
!” Shut your mouth!

And everyone is laughing, even me, because that’s Jerry for you.

Agoof
is Jerry Himmelstein’s rallying cry and identity statement; it is half spoken and half sneezed, and it means: (1) I think this is funny; (2) I’m confused; (3) I don’t know where I am; (4) I want to be one of you; (5) please stop hitting me; (6) I don’t know how to express this
yet because I am eight years old, and my family is troubled, and the world in the way it is presently configured does not treat me as a human, does not afford me all the freedoms promised in the Declaration of Independence that hangs on the wall of class 2C, and I do not understand why it has to be that way.

Does
agoof
also mean “I have goofed”? Is it apologetic in nature? I will never know.

Jerry Himmelstein has both shirttails hanging out of the front of his pants like little dicks, while I normally only have one. “Jerry!” Mrs. A–Z will say, pointing at his shirttails.
“Agoof!”
Jerry Himmelstein’s shoes are untied like mine, but sometimes when he’s nervously swinging his little Jerry legs up and down in class, a shoe will fly up in the air and it will hit someone in the head who, if it’s a boy, will hit Jerry in the stomach by return mail.
“Agoof!”
Jerry’s brown hair descends down his head as if an Italian had emptied a kettle of his favorite food upon it, and his teeth are as yellow as egg yolks. His face darts back and forth looking for potential enemies. A web of spittle will attach to his face when he’s in full breakdown
agoof
mode. This will usually happen at a birthday party, let’s say his own. An SSSQ girl will tell him, in one way or another, that he’s not a person.
Agoof!
Then a boy will knock him down into the dirt or smush him with the leftovers of a magical Carvel Cookie Puss cake onto his pasta head.
Agoof!
Then it’s time to be picked for Wiffle ball, and I’ll be picked second to last and he will be picked last.
Agoof!
Then instead of hitting the Wiffle ball with the Wiffle bat he will clock himself with it, and then he’ll be lying down on the “plate” clutching at his own chin.
Agooooooof!
Then another girl, in OshKosh overalls or, later, in a Benetton sweater, will come over and, instead of administering help, inform him once more that he is not a person. And now all these
agoofs
have added up, as they must, and he sits there, hand to his jaw, hand to his stomach, hand to his face, hand to whatever part has been offended, and he’s wailing like something out of the Torah, like something before Abraham even, like when the earth was exploding into
place in Genesis.
Adonaaaaaaaaaai! Yaaaaaahweeeeeh!
And the more he wails, the more we laugh, the girls and boys of SSSQ, because it’s pretty wonderful, his pain, pretty wonderful as far as these things go.

I take the role of Jerry Himmelstein’s second-in-command seriously. I must be humiliated and hit, too. It is understood that anyone can hit me. That’s what I’m there for, to absorb the sunlit, nascent-mustachioed hatred of the future homeowners of eastern Queens. In a school without excessive discipline, without excessive leadership, without excessive
education
, speed bumps must be provided so that the whole enterprise can run smoothly. The Stinky Russian Bear, the Red Gerbil, will rise to the occasion!

In the back of the school bus, my friend, another Yitzhak, is punching me in the stomach. Yitzi is only several steps up the totem above me: He’s not from Forest Hills or Ramat Aviv, in the fancy north of Tel Aviv; he’s from Soviet Georgia, and there’s only his mother to care for him, the father I don’t know where he went. I like Yitzi quite a lot, because he can hit me in my own language, and when I cry out
Bol’no!
(It hurts!), he’ll know what it means. He also must know about my brand-spanking-new circumcision, because he never hits below the belt. His apartment is across the street from my grandmother, who watches me after school, and we’ll go there to play a handheld electronic game called Donkey Kong after the school bus drops us off. He won’t really hit me after we’re out of sight of the other boys, so I think this is probably just a way to assert his place. In a combination of Russian and English we try to discuss ways to move ahead in the ranks of SSSQ, me the impressionable Boy Wonder to his Batman, while his mother serves us delicious Georgian-style dumplings heavy on the onion.

He’s not a bad boy, Yitzi (one day, he’ll grow up to be a wonderful man). He’s just trying to become American, trying to get ahead. To that end, he has an amazing leather jacket with zippers, not made of
real Polish leather
but out of something much cooler, James Dean, for
all I know. Years later, in the back of a crowded minibus huffing its way onto Moscow Square in what is now St. Petersburg, I am reintroduced with
major prejudice
to that Yitzi smell, the combination of leather and onion and the back of a bus. I cry out, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” fighting my way out of the packed vehicle and into the broken sunlight. “But you’ve just paid,” the incredulous driver will say. “I forgot something,” I say to him. “I forgot something at home.” Which is the opposite of what I mean.

Tot kto ne byot, tot ne lyubit
, my father likes to say.

He who doesn’t hit, doesn’t love.

Or is it:
Byot, znachit lyubit
? He hits, therefore he loves. Said “jokingly” of violent husbands in Russian marriages.

Essentially he’s got it down. If you want to make someone love you, a child, say, you should hit him well. If you’ve come home from your new engineering job at a national laboratory on Long Island, exhausted and angry, because you don’t speak the language well and the Jewish boss was gone and you had to deal with the evil German one and the stinking Chinese one, and the Portuguese and Greek engineers who are often your allies didn’t intervene in your favor, and your wife’s a
suka
with her fucking
rodstvenniki
in Leningrad, her dying mother, and her sisters to whom she’s just sent three hundred dollars and a parcel of clothes, the money you will need not to starve if the German boss finally fires you, and your child is underfoot crawling in the shag carpet with his stupid pen or his Eastern Air Lines plane, you should give him one across the neck.

The child is shuddering beneath your hand.
“Ne bei menya!”
Don’t hit me!

“You didn’t do the math, nasty swine (
svoloch’ gadkaya
).” You’ve assigned the child math problems out of a Soviet textbook that’s more age-appropriate than the bullshit they teach at his Hebrew school, pictures of 4 + 3 – 2 Great Danes and then how many doggies do you have?, instead of

f”(x) = –4 * [cos(
x
)cos(
x
) – sin(
x
)(–sin(
x
))] / cos
²
(
x
).

And the bitch wife whom your wolfish relatives tell you you should really divorce pops out of the kitchen.
“Tol’ko ne golovu!”
Just don’t hit his head!
He has to think with the head
.

“Zakroi rot vonyuchii.”
Shut your stinking mouth.

Really,
suka
, can’t you see that love is in the air?

And then off you go, a smack across the left of the head, now the right, now the left. And the child is holding tight to the dizzying smacks, because each one is saying
You’re mine
and
You’ll always love me
, each one is a connection to the child that can never be broken. And what else is registering in that head being whipsawed left to right, right to left? The thing Mrs. R is singing in Hebrew as she’s marching the kids down the corridor.
Yamin, smol, smol, yamin
, left, right, right, left,
troo-loo-loo-loo
.