Little Failure (45 page)

Her friend Michael is different, too—multilingual and cosmopolitan in a way that belies an upbringing in Plattsburgh, New York, well versed in the martini shake and the use of bitters and colloquial Yiddish. Let me now expand my warm menagerie of friends circa sophomore year, 1992 to 1993. I have two new roommates. Irv (not really his name, though it kind of ought to be) has beautiful C-cup breasts and a Japanese girlfriend from the Conservatory of Music. He is stoned even more than I am and spends a good part of the day sucking with great delicacy upon his own thumb. He will approach a trio of hippie chicks in our dorm with the suave entrée “So I hear you guys are having a bit of a gang bang tomorrow night.” My other roommate is Mike Zap, who introduces me to the music and thought of the then-inflammatory rapper Ice Cube. We will begin many evenings with the rousing cheer: “Po-lice eat the dick straight up!” per Cube’s album
Death Certificate
. Mike is Pittsburghian by nature, covers sports for the
Oberlin Review
(the most thankless journalistic task in our deeply uncoordinated college), and, with his kindness and relative normalness, provides a useful compass for the rest of us freaks. When visiting his home in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Squirrel Hill I feel shades of my Hebrew school friend Jonathan, the smooth running of decent parents and functional household, here bound together by two of the most
genial animals I have yet come across, a black dachshund named Rudy and a caramel one named Schultz.

The five of us—me and J.Z. and Michael and my roommates, Irv and Zap—together we are what I’ve always wanted out of life, a community among whom I do not have to feel second-rate. As in love as I am with J.Z., I am also in love with the fact that she and I share our best friends. Two weeks into sophomore year, the enormous three-foot sky-blue bong in our dorm room attracts hordes of first-year students who have heard of its legendary smoky output. The best thing about Big Blue is that it is so big it requires more than one person to operate, and, sure enough, either breasty Irv or Zap with his scruffy new beard and adorable high laugh will do the honors with the bowl and hold the “carb,” as I lean back and fill myself with laughter and lunacy. “
Po
-lice eat the dick straight up!” Disgusting, polluted Ohioan winds knock at the bay windows of Noah Hall, but up here we are all in this together. And then, filled with smoke and friendship, I get to shut my eyes and dream entirely of her.

I pursue her the only way I know how. Fakely and manipulatively. I insult her. Something about her upper chest being covered with freckles, freckles that I dream only of kissing. A tough southern girl, she writes me a letter short on ceremony: “… Enough bullshit! You also have some insecurities that you need to address.”

What? Me? Insecure?

She closes with the directive “Write what you feel uncensored” next to a big heart and her initials,
J
and
Z
.

Sensing an opening, I pounce. I write what I feel. I write and I write and I write and I write and I write, a flood of lovelorn missives that will have no equal in my life, because my next relationship, a full eight years later, will already take place in the age of email. Even after we break up post-Oberlin, fourteen-page letters come sailing from New York to North Carolina and fourteen-page letters come sailing
back. Hell, we write to each other while we’re
at
Oberlin, both of us guarded and scared of each other, neither of us used to opening our mouths and letting the emotions change the timbre of our voices. Emotions are weaknesses where we come from. And when summer puts an end to Oberlin and we are mostly apart, we write throughout our working days, me at an immigrant resettlement agency—$8.25 an hour—and her, for half that sum, behind the counter at an American automotive store called Pep Boys.

The most beautiful collection of letters and numbers I have ever seen, on a simple white envelope, about half a year into our relationship:

RAL NC
#1. Someone from America, the real America, has written to me. In front of my parents’ house, the sparse traffic of Little Neck behind me, I open the Christmas letter, and I go deaf to the actual world. Her thin red lips are speaking to me, the noise of my parents—“Igor! Snotty! It is vacuuming time!”—so much Russian nonsense behind the drawn-out, southern cadences of her voice. I absorb the letter, the love and the angst both (for she is, like me, not altogether a happy person), while locked in the upstairs bathroom, the water running. And then with the vacuuming still undone, with my mother’s pristine floors still covered with minuscule traces of dust that upset her careful world to no end, I begin to write back.

About myself, sure. I am deeply into learning, admiring, and respecting myself. But what about
her
? Lost in the shocking scenario of finally being a Boyfriend, constantly worried that amorous North Carolinians named Jason will keep kissing her on the neck in my absence, constantly trying to devise ways in which she can love me more, can I really see the sad, lovely girl in front of me, all five feet and three inches of her? She is the child of a shattered family, a fun-house image of what my own family might look like if the
razvod
had gone through. The sullen Armenian father, a genius at some branch of computer science, alone in his Research Triangle countryside ramble, goading his children to do worse. The southern mother in her little modern ranch, dividing her time between eating, sleeping, drinking down glasses of white wine, and playing bridge. The cold, angry older half sister, radiating negativity out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The younger brother, who calls her Nate for some reason, lighting his farts and drag racing down the sunbaked Carolina tar.

In the mail from North Carolina, a postcard with a photo of Yoko
and John Lennon’s “Bedpeace,” and in her pretty scrawl, “We’ll be having some of that soon!”

From other letters:

I feel that I must type that last one over again, because when I first read those words, they were not read only once.

“I love you, Gary.”

The plane touches down in Raleigh-Durham. Early summer, just a few weeks after Oberlin has closed for summer fumigation and ideological reset, but we cannot wait to see each other a day longer. I’m covered in a plaid thrift-store shirt,
très
Keep Cottage, where we first kissed, which I wear all the time because it makes me feel loose and boyfriend-like. There’s a string around my neck with a single marble-like blue bead that I don’t dare take off, even in the shower, since it is a gift from her. For the next half decade, whenever I am anxious, I will spin the bead between my thumb and index finger. Even when she is gone. Especially when she is gone.

I’ve had three Bloody Marys on the plane because that’s what LaGuardia-Raleigh jet-setters like me are keen to do. And also because by this point in my life I can’t survive a few hours without a drink. Outside I can already sense a different world, her world. Looking out the plane window, I see nothing but North Carolina green. Forest upon forest, blessed by the mellow local sun, cut apart by small rivulets of sprawl that the migrating Yankees are said to be bringing with them as they take over the college towns of Durham and Chapel Hill and beyond.

There she is past baggage claim, my pale half-Armenian marshmallow now made slightly red by the aforementioned sun, just as I’ve been reddened by the aforementioned vodka. (I am now twenty-one, and my bingeing is legal.) She is wearing the vintage green-and-gold, vaguely Asian-styled silk shirt that I bought for her twentieth. I hug her. Boy, do I hug her.

“Easy. Easy there, Shteyni-dawg.” Shteyni-dawg is my nickname, used not just by J.Z. but our friend Michael, Breasty Roommate Irv, and Kind Rapping Roommate Zap.