Little Failure (39 page)

Or brandishing my new Discover card, the one that has found a snug place in my wallet where my NRA membership card used to be: “Dinner’s on me. Jew Money Power!”

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing. Because what I do is part performance art, part ineloquent plea for help, part unprocessed outer-borough aggression, part just me being a jackass. None of it will lead me where I want to go, which is simply, pathetically, into the arms of a girl. But every Valentine’s Day, I go to the corner florist on First Avenue and buy three dozen roses, and I give one to each of the thirty-six girls I have a crush on, my silent tribute to the fact that somewhere deep inside the beige-and-black Union Bay sweater there is a person who wants what everyone else wants but is too scared to say it.

On my drunk, stoned lips I am wearing a smile I would describe as depressed but optimistic. If I had to guess, that smile comes from my matrilineal line, somewhere before Stalin but after the pogroms, when the apples hung plumply from the branches of Belorussian trees, and my grandmother’s family’s kosher butchery was in its prime. I will soon find myself absolutely stunned when looking into the white space of my Stuy yearbook. I find one of the girls of our crew has penned: “I always thought you were a sweetheart underneath that ridiculous grin.”

The Park girls sit around us in a semicircle talking about Grinnell and Wesleyan, dear ones all, but, in contravention of all teenage rules, or perhaps in full support of them, it’s the boys I’m interested in. Getting in with the boys, getting in with this crowd of stoners and freaks, that is what my teenage years have become.

To my left, cleaning the resin out of his chrome Proto Pipe, is Ben,
half Vietnamese, half Finnish, tall and square shouldered, with rockstar hair and an easy laugh, dressed in a dramatic German army coat with a paperback sticking out of one pocket, usually
Siddhartha
or
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, which neither of us will ever finish—which, as far as I know, no one will ever finish. Girls like to do tarot card readings with Ben or lean against his broad back in times of need.

Ben doesn’t like me at first. I’m a tough sell: a supposed Republican who talks up a storm about Ayn Rand and supply-side economics. When we first meet, Ben takes out a large water gun that he carries in his backpack for just such emergencies and sprays me well and good, my sweater stinking like a wet sheep all through chemistry. But at a party held inside a rambling Park Slope brownstone, at the behest of his free-floating and lovely girlfriend, Ben apologizes for being mean to me. “You try too hard,” he says, passing me his Proto Pipe in a gesture of goodwill. “Everyone can tell.”

More than twenty years later I find myself in an acting class taught by Louise Lasser of
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
fame (also Woody Allen’s second wife). Ms. Lasser rakes the students with hell-fire for our cloying attempts at acting, reducing many young women to ninety minutes of sobbing. After my sad attempt at the Meisner technique (Actor 1:
You
are wearing a blue shirt; Actor 2:
I
am wearing a blue shirt), she screams at me: “You know what your problem is, Gary? You’re fake and manipulative!”

And I want to say,
Yes, but this is New York. Who’s
not
fake and manipulative?

You try too hard. Everyone can tell
.

Back on our bench in the Park, to my right, Brian is making out thoroughly with his girlfriend. Handsome and boyish, half Jewish, half black, with feminine lips so many of the girls around us have kissed, Brian is as preppy as we get, white tee tucked away beneath an oxford shirt, khakis, the whole package confusingly, antagonistically, wrapped in a leather jacket, its collar draped in soft brown fake fur. Brian’s pretty-boy lips are locked fully with his stoned blond girlfriend’s,
and his hands are everywhere. It is understood that Ben and Brian are the best of our number, that they have access to the females and to the glory. If either were to speak down to me I would take it in stride, happy that I am spoken to, happy to take notes on how I can do better.
Do I try too hard? Gentlemen, I’ll try harder
.

At the lateral level of Ben and Brian is another tall boy of stunning appearance, like them also of complex racial heritage. I cannot really talk about him at length because he seems so utterly outside of the galaxy in which I claim residency, and in the end I am a writer, not an astronomer. I’d like to similarly sigh at the stunning and cosmopolitan progression of their girlfriends. I see blue eyes, stoned smiles of unimpeachable placidity. I smell patchouli. I hear Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart.” I feel the ease and happiness of these young women in the world.

Stretching away from Ben, Brian, and the Other Guy is a constellation of about a dozen boys emitting various degrees of funk. At one rung, close to Ben and Brian, but with only half membership in their caste, are me and John. As fellow eastern Queens sufferers, John and I are the barbarians trying to get through the gate with our laminated Long Island Rail Road monthly tickets and our willingness to do anything—John actually wears a lamp shade for the duration of a house party. My buddy is a beefy, hairy dyslexic in Hawaiian shirt and fedora and, like me, a budding writer and poseur. Although he usually addresses me as “You dolt,” John is dear to my heart. I am not sure if he is completely insane or a genius. At times his writing is hilarious in a teenage gonzo way (random urban violence, German midget porn, exploding Saigon hookers, New York mutts out looking for love) and inching a little bit toward our mutual sadness—the sadness of being unable to communicate with others sans lamp shade.

In the end, John’s deep desire to make me understand that “Western literature, post-Enlightenment, is centered around illusionism” is just too hard to take at 2:00
P.M
. after the consumption of half a case of beer and the elementary particles of Ben’s Proto Pipe. I’d rather
touch foreheads with Sara in metaphysics class. Four years later, after John discovers something called humor studies, I have no choice but to place him smack in the middle of my first novel.

And now let’s zoom out a little. A bench on the eastern half of Stuyvesant Square, a then-shabby park divided by the screaming traffic of Second Avenue. A bunch of boys sitting on the bench, several stinking of Indonesian Djarum clove cigarettes and unwashed hair. Occasionally, for exercise, we will get up to play Jihad Ball with a rubber Koosh ball.

The rules are simple: You take the ball, point to someone, and shout, “I do declare jihad on
you
.” Then you throw the ball at the jihadee and watch the rest of your friends pile on him. Ben and John are passing around the Proto Pipe, talking, as we all do, veryfast, veryfast, veryfast, Freud, Marx, Schubert, Foucault, Albert Einstein, Albert Hall, Fat Albert, Fats Domino, Domino Sugar refinery. Across the cement expanse of the Park, just a jihad ball’s throw away, sit endless numbers of Asian girls picking away at stir-fry, steamed
mandoo
dumplings, and thick rounds of vegetable
kimbap
in white Styrofoam containers. In theory, at least, they are living the Stuyvesant dream of good grades and bright futures. A part of me wishes I could join them, but even more of me wishes I could understand who they are.
^*
When the senior yearbook comes out I will be able to peek just a little bit inside their hearts:

Meanwhile, Brian’s lips are attached to his girlfriend’s, a fact I jealously espy, and mine are attached to a tallboy in a brown paper bag. Since I’ve started drinking, I’ve started
drinking
. Kahlúa and milk with Sara, Fifth Avenue rooftop screwdrivers with Alana, another girl I’m chastely in love with, vodka and tonic, vodka and grapefruit juice, vodka and vodka, pitchers of hard cider in the afternoon at the Life Café on the corner of Tenth and Avenue B. In true alcoholic fashion, I divide the day into quadrants of booze, the rise and fall of the sun regulated by clear and brown liquors. I’d tasted alcohol many years before Stuyvesant—I am from a Russian family, after all—but here with my outcast friends every twenty-four ounces’ worth carries me a little bit away from the dreams I can no longer fulfill. Because even as I’m chugging away in the Park, my mother is deep in the bowels of the Beaux-Arts Stuyvesant building, standing at the head of a long line of similarly teary Asian mothers, begging the physics teacher to pass me in her sweet but not fully there English, telling him, “My son, he has trouble to adjust.”

Booze. It sands away the edges. Or it makes me all edges. Take your pick. When I laugh now, I hear the laughter coming from far away, as if from another person. I hear that bright, crazy laughter of mine, and then I hear it submerged in the bright, crazy laughter of my colleagues, and I feel brotherhood.
Ben! Brian! John! Other Guy! I do declare jihad on
you
!

Would it be outrageous to say that at this point in my life alcohol is the best thing to ever have happened to me?

Absolutely. It would be outrageous. Because there’s also pot.

In an attempt to help me deal with peer pressure Mama and the newly arrived Aunt Tanya have shown me how to smoke a cigarette and stream it quickly out of the right side of my mouth without really inhaling. The three of us stand in the backyard of our Little Neck house, fall leaves scrunching underfoot, fake smoking, and acting nonchalant like in the movies. “
Vot tak, Igoryochek
,” Mama says as I let the smoke spill out of my mouth, my nose hungering after its sweet, forbidden smell. That’s how it’s done, Little Igor. Now I can pretend
to smoke cigarettes or pot just like the cool kids. I apply this knowledge to my first fifty or so encounters with the evil weed, pretending to be even more stoned than the rest of my friends, screaming my nonsense: “Peace in the Middle East! Gary out of the ghetto! No sellout!” But on the fifty-first time, somewhere at the beginning of junior year, I forget to exhale.

If alcohol obliterates me, the pot unpeels me. Down to the nub. The last 234 pages you have just read—they never happened. There was no Moscow Square, no
Lenin and His Magical Goose
, no
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
, no “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology,” no Gnorah, no Mama, no Papa, no Lightman, no Church and the Helicopter. Down to the nub, as I’ve said. But what if the nub’s no good either?

And when the pot laughter comes out of me, it is slow and deliberate, starting from my toes and ending in my eyelashes. As it travels up my body, it tickles the nub, and it doesn’t matter whether the nub is good or bad, just that it’s there, stored away for future use.

How does one transition from Republican striver to absolute stoner? I will never be fully accepted into the crowd, much as I will never learn the words to Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” If I’m lucky, I’m maybe invited to every
third
party, and the prettiest of the girls still keep their distance from me. But the “hippies,” as they’re called, are the closest I have to a group of friends. When I see carved into a rotting school desk the words “Fuck all Hippies, Gideon take a shower,” I feel angry at the author of such words and also a strange wish that I myself could smell that bad. If only I could be the opposite of what I was raised to be. If only I could be a fully natural being like this Gideon, whose father happens to be some kind of American genius at something and whose family lives in a sprawling West Village penthouse.

I love the boys, but Manhattan is my best friend. Walking down Second Avenue on a Friday night, I pass a man and woman in cheap tight
clothes, standing in the middle of the sidewalk crying in each other’s arms. Crowds of teenagers gingerly walk around them, not exactly stunned by this display but respectful of the unabashed emotion. Everyone around me is silent for at least a block. I double back to take another look. The woman’s face is barely visible, but as she leans back I notice her slightly Persian cast, the parabola of her long lashes, her coarse red lips. She is beautiful. But so is everyone else. It is hard to walk from the Safe Train on Fourteenth Street to the school on Fifteenth without falling desperately in love.