Little Failure (27 page)

The more I watch, the more the questions keep mounting.
Just
what exactly is going on in this country of mine? And why won’t President Reagan do something about it?
For instance:

The Brady Bunch:
Why are Mr. and Mrs. Brady always so happy even though Mrs. Brady has clearly already had a
razvod
with her previous husband and now they are both raising children who are not theirs? Also, what is the origin of their white slave Alice?

Three’s Company:
What does it mean, “gay”? Why does everyone think the blond girl is so pretty, when it is clearly the brunette who is beautiful?

Gilligan’s Island:
Is it really possible that a country as powerful as the United States would not be able to locate two of its best citizens lost at sea, to wit, the millionaire and his wife? Also, Gilligan is comical and bumbling like an immigrant, but people seem to like him. Make notes for further study? Emulate?

Planet of the Apes:
If Charlton Heston is a Republican, are the monkeys Soviet?

After three hours of watching television and eating government cheese on Grandma’s food-stamp-bought Ritz crackers I am ostensibly as American as anyone else. In the kitchen Grandma is preparing still more food for the next day’s feedings, and I now wonder how it is possible to love someone so much just because she gave me what I wanted when no one else would.

Although I am afraid of heights I climb out on the fire escape some six floors above the patchy grass of central Queens and watch the TWA jets descend sharply into LaGuardia Airport. Soon Papa will come and take me home to Little Neck, to my real home, where my parents will fight about the wolfish relatives until 10:30
P.M
., until it is time for all of us to get enough sleep to face another difficult day in America.

Outside Grandma’s apartment, the car honks stretch way out to the Grand Central Parkway, and people in the apartment house next door are playing English and Spanish radios and just being alive and free,
and the air is city-scented with gasoline and grilled meat, which is in its own way delicious. When I shut my eyes I hear the addictively cloying
Three’s Company
theme song (“Come and knock on our door / We’ve been waiting for you”) and the commercial for Juicy Fruit gum sung with such intense abandon it makes me scared (“
Jew-seh froooot is gonna moooove ya
/
it gotta taaaaste that cut raaaaght throoo ya-ugh”
).

Even a few years back I was angrier than I am now, and when I’d watch the TWA jets descend I wanted some of them to fall out of the sky and explode against the little houses beyond the jumble of redbrick apartment buildings. But now I just think,
Vow
, how lucky are people that they can take a flight somewhere. And will that be me someday up in the air again? Where will I land this time? Will it be at Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld? At Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, so I can fight Omar and the other Arabs? Will someone other than Grandma ever love me?

“You’re Gary Gnu.” It’s some kid on a public, non-Jewish playground.

Me: “Vat?”

“Your name’s Gary. So you’re Gary Gnu. From the Great Space Coaster.”

“Vat coaster?”

“Don’t be a dick. You’re Gary Gnu.”

“I am Gnu?”

But before I am Gnu, let me discourse on one more television show I have caught on Grandma’s Zenith. It is called
The Six Million Dollar Man
. First, let’s be honest here: This man is expensive. Not ten-million-dollar expensive per the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes we almost won, but nearly two-thirds as expensive. Steve Austin is his name, and he was an astronaut until a terrible accident deprived him of many body parts and he was resurrected at taxpayers’ expense to have all kinds of adventures. (Famous opening sequence: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … We have the technology.”) As in love as I am with Colonel Wilma Deering of
Buck Rogers
, I am even
more fascinated with bionic Steve Austin. Because when I think about it, the man is a cripple. He is missing one arm, two legs, and one eye. Imagine if I showed up at SSSQ without those things, and with my toy Monkey missing an arm as well. The Israeli kids would mop the floor with me, or the parts of the floor Jimmy and George, the two black custodians, have missed. And yet, Steve Austin is not deficient. Although parts of him aren’t real, Steve takes advantage of his new powers. He is, in the words of the show, “Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don’t work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

In my “novel”
Invasion from Outer Space
, I include a chapter called “Bionic Friends,” about, well, two bionic friends. The pretty Ms. S, now sadly a Mrs., likes that chapter in particular, and I remember the incident with her sneaker at the Show and Tell, when one of the kids pointed at her sneaker and said “Pee-yooh”:

She laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!

Me, back on the playground: “Who is Gary Gnu?”

“It’s you, dick. Your name is Gary, right? So you’re Gary Gnu, asshole.”

It is hard to argue with this Christian boy’s logic.

Gary Gnu is a comical furry green muppet in a mauve turtleneck on the children’s television show
The Great Space Coaster
. All the other kids at SSSQ are familiar with him, but I do not watch
The Great Space Coaster
because it comes on in the morning when I am without Grandma’s Zenith. A gnu is one of the “stocky, oxlike antelopes of the genus Connochaetes,” resident of Africa. Gnu is pronounced
nu
. Gary Gnu clearly has a problem with the silent
g
in his name because he adds it to every word that starts with the letter
n
in annoying fashion: “Absolutely
gnot
. You’re a
gnuisance
who’s sure to bring
gnothing
but
bad gnews
.” His motto on
The Great Space Coaster
is “No
gnews
is good
gnews
with Gary Gnu.” I do not know any of this, but as the goy-boy on the playground pointed out, the antelope’s name is Gary just like mine. So I try it out on the kids. “I’m Gary Gnu!”

“Gary Gnu! Gary Gnu! No gnews is good gnews!”

Well, that went over pretty well. No “Commie” or “Red” there. And then I am reminded of Thurston Howell III, the millionaire on
Gilligan’s Island
who is so inspiring to a young Republican immigrant. “I’m Gary Gnu the Third.”

“Gary Gnu the Third! Gary Gnu the Third! No gnews,” etc.

And then it hits me. I’m not a Russian. Never was. I’m an antelope. I’ve always been an antelope. It is time to commit this discovery to paper.

I write my own Torah. It’s called the Gnorah, an allusion to my new Gnu-ness. The Gnorah is written on an actual scroll of paper to give it the feel of a Torah. I type it on a new kind of device that my father has brought over from work, which is a computer keyboard that receives signals via a telephone line and translates such signals into dot-matrixlike characters that it then spits out on paper. To make the whole thing even more Torah-like I have my father carve two sticks to simulate the rollers used for scrolling the Torah.

The Gnorah is a hatchet job directed at the entirety of the SSSQ religious experience, the rote memorization of ancient texts, the aggressive shouting of blessings and counterblessings before and after lunch, the ornery rabbi who claims the Jews brought on the Holocaust by their overconsumption of delicious pork products. In Hebrew, the words of the Old Testament are pure gibberish to our ears.
Bereishit bara Elohim …
(In the beginning God created …). In English, the words are not much better, the start of a long lesson in overzealous genealogy meant, I suppose, to convey to us youngsters the permanence and uniqueness of our race. Only take one look at the redheaded merchant’s son unable to form two coherent sentences in English, incurious about any and all aspects of life save the ongoing excavation of his own nose, and
bereishit
, indeed. The Gnorah merely, humbly, takes the Old Testament to its own logical conclusion circa 1984.

God creates Adam (or, rather, Madman) and gives him a garden called Cleaveland, referring, I’m guessing, both to the unsuccessful city in Ohio and Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife”).

In subsequent chapters there are references to Wendy’s famous Where’s the Beef? campaign, Mister Rogers, Howard Cosell,
Playboy
magazine, and the Waldbaum’s supermarket chain. Every pop reference I have learned from the Zenith and elsewhere is crammed into use, alongside poor Jerry Himmelstein. The Twelve Gnuish Tribes multiply—“Princess Leia gave him Shlomo, Shlemazel, Shmuck, Nudnik, Dino, Gloria, Dror, Virginia, Jolly and Jim”—and somehow end up in Australia instead of Egypt.

Exodus becomes Sexodus. Henry Miller would have been proud. Moses is renamed Mishugana, and instead of a Burning Bush there is the Burning Television. God sends the Australians twelve plagues, the last one of which is Rabbi Sofer, SSSQ’s potbellied Hebrew principal and strongman, “and the Australians couldn’t take it anymore and they said go, go and take Rabbi Sofer with you.” The Gnuish tribes make their way from Australia to Hawaii, “the land of silk and money.” The fifth commandment handed down by the Gnuish God is simple: “Abuse your teachers.”

A long list that includes “Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Ferraro” and ends, sadly, with “Gary Gnu and any Female Gnu” and then the same words with which my father would end all of his
Planet of the Yids
tales: “To be continued.”

Once it is finished I read it over and over again. I cannot sleep. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. The next day in school I wait impatiently until recess, and then unfurl my Gnorah for a few kids, mindful of Rabbi Sofer’s thick presence. More children gather around me. With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric. By the final period, the Gnorah has been passed around the entire school. By the next day, it is being quoted in the boys’ bathroom, the center of power. Even Jerry Himmelstein seems pleased by my disgustingly cruel remarks about him. Not that I care. And as, in class, we recite mindlessly about the prophets and the women who loved them, as we chant things that mean nothing to us, as Rabbi Sofer waddles around with his bullhorn telling us what bad children we are, me and my small band of—wait, are they really
my friends
?—we laugh and rejoice in the Gnuish tribes and their hard, horny Sexodus from Australia and their worship of the much-loved Brooke Shields, who, rumor has it, really might be Jewish, or Gnuish, or whatever.