Little Failure (28 page)

The Gnorah marks the end of Russian as my primary tongue and the beginning of my true assimilation into American English. Back in my stuffy bedroom in Little Neck, I eagerly jot down the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire (the HGE), which is built on solidly Republican
principles. The love of two countries, America and Israel, the love of the smooth, always laughing, unconcerned-seeming Reagan, the love of unfettered capitalism (even though my father works for the government and my mother for a nonprofit), the love of the mighty Republican Party is a way for me to share something with my father. To my well-thumbed
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
I have added a subscription to the
National Review
. William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative magazine ostensibly has fewer space monsters between its covers than Isaac Asimov’s, but even though I can understand maybe 50 percent of the words Buckley and his friends use, I can already discern the angry, unhappy rhetoric about certain kinds of people that so neatly mirrors our own. On the cover of the Holy Gnuish Constitution I draw a set of scales marked “Welfare” and “Military Spending,” tipping resolutely toward the latter. Take that, you welfare queens with your Cadillacs. And then another unbidden delight. Having established my Republican bona fides by subscribing to the
National Review
, I am sent a thick card featuring an American eagle sitting upon two rifles. Even though I am too young to own a gun and to be able to shoot a black person on the subway who might rob me (I’ve actually taken the subway maybe thrice thus far), I am being welcomed, with great Second Amendment fanfare, into the National Rifle Association.

At SSSQ, another overly imaginative boy named David creates the Imperial Lands of David (the ILD), mirroring the Democratic politics to which most Queens Jewish kids’ parents subscribe. He calls himself the Mighty Khan Caesar. As a matter of course, the Holy Gnuish Empire and the Imperial Lands of David go to war. David and I talk peace treaties and how we will divide the known universe between us in the same way Spain and Portugal once split the globe according to the Treaty of Zaragoza. As we settle our foreign affairs, our followers run around the SSSQ gym stacked with prayer books, where in the morning we sing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and, with a feeling that almost brings us to tears, the “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. But today the kids are not crying out about
Nefesh
Yehudi
(“the Jewish soul”). They are chanting my anthem (
“Nefesh Gnushi …”
) and hoisting my flag, the drawing of a gnu standing resplendent in the African veldt, photocopied from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

Until high school, I will never be called Gary again. I am Gary Gnu or just Gnu. Even the teachers refer to me as such. One of them, in a bid to forgo teaching for a day, decides to devote the class periods to the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire. This development makes me so excited I have an asthma attack that lasts an entire week. The children, my Gnuish representatives, carry on while in his sickbed the Gnuish leader, mesmerized by the Lightman reconstituting himself in his closet, wheezes his way into some future world, some future personality.

Three years from now we will graduate, and a yearbook will be issued. There will be humorous quotes about each of the students—for example, the song titles that best personify us. The three other Russian children will get quotes solely about their Russianness (e.g., favorite song: “Back in the U.S.S.R.”), but mine will be about my Republicanism or my strangeness (“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”).

Better, stronger, faster.

But not really, of course. As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn’t particularly give a damn. And as the hoopla around my Gnuish Empire dies down, a beefy kid whose last name means both “Oak” and “Dullard” in Russian waddles over to me and says, “Hey, Gnu. What do you listen to?
The classical music station?
” And I begin to protest, because I’ve learned
never
to talk about high culture in public nor mention the fact that both my parents have musical training. “I don’t know about classical music!” I say, loudly, too loudly. “I have the Duran Duran
Seven and the Ragged Tiger
cassette tape
and
the Cyndi Lauper!”

But the “Oak” and a small, pretty Mesopotamian-eyed girl in the
seat next to him are already laughing at my terrible affliction. If only they knew what a wide berth I have given to my father’s Tchaikovsky and my mother’s Chopin. How in my father’s car, on the way home from my grandmother’s, I turn on the Duran Duran tape as loudly as he will let me, and, with my face turned to my window, as if I’m watching the fascinating cement scenery of Grand Central Parkway go by, I
mouth
the British words I cannot even begin to comprehend (“The re-flex, flex-flex”) under my tuna-fish breath. I
mouth
them with every last little bit of hope inside me.

The author poses as the popular music singer Billy Idol on the toilet of his family’s upstate bungalow. Puberty is coming, and the author is about to get chubby
.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1985. I am about to become a man according to Jewish tradition. As in the past few summers, my family is staying in a Russian bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. The colony consists of a dozen sunburned wooden cottages squeezed in between some unimpressive hills and a daunting forest-and-brook combination that to kids from Queens might as well be the Amazon. During the workweek it is just our grandmas and their charges (a few grandpas have survived World War II to play competitive chess beneath the easygoing American sun), our lives revolving around the intermittent delivery of stale baked goods from the back of a station wagon. “Bread! Cakes!” an unhappy middle-aged local woman yells at us, and the grandmothers and kids jostle for a week-old raspberry Danish on sale for a quarter that tastes as good as anything
we have ever known. (I clutch my change so tight it makes treads in my palms.) Otherwise, we children play The Fool, a Russian card game requiring little skill, and launch shuttlecocks into the air with our defective badminton rackets, not really caring whether they come down or not, because we are relaxed and happy and among our own kind.

My grandmother is always in the background, chewing an apricot down to its pit, her eyes firmly affixed on my once-skinny and now-somewhat-flabby body. She is making sure nothing and no one will cause me harm. The other kids have similar minders, women who grew up under Stalin whose entire lives in the USSR were devoted to crisis management, to making sure the arbitrary world around them would treat their children better than it had treated them. These days my grandmother is talking about going to “the next world,” and that Bar Mitzvah summer, having passed a milestone of my own, I begin to see her as an older woman in decline, the shaking hands clutching the apricot pit, the trembling voice as she begs me to swallow another forkful of sausage. She is a figure as anxious and helpless before eternity as any other. Maybe this is what America does to you. With the daily fight for survival abated, one can either reminisce about the past or face the singular destiny of the future. For all her talk of the paradise to come, my grandmother does not want to die.

On weekends our parents come up to visit from the city, and on Friday nights we kids sit at a picnic table by the quiet country road running past our bungalows, alert as terriers for the difficult sounds our fathers’ secondhand cars make. I remember my first love of that year—not a girl, but the gleaming new Mitsubishi Tredia-S sedan that my parents have bought, a boxy little number known mostly for its fuel efficiency. The beige front-wheel-drive Tredia-S is proof positive that we are ascending to the middle class, and whenever my father and I are out on the road I rejoice upon seeing the more basic Tredia model (the one without the
S
).

My father is at the apex of middle age, a deeply physical man who
feasts with great emphasis upon entire garlic cloves on hunks of black bread and, with his small, tough physique, best resembles a cherry tomato. He lives for fishing. Each year he plucks hundreds, if not thousands, of fish out of streams, lakes, and oceans with his fishing stick and a chilling competence. He single-handedly empties out a lake near Middletown, New York, leaving behind just a small school of dazed, orphaned crappies. Compared with my father I am nothing. The Bar Mitzvah may soon make me a man, but when we enter the forbidding grasshopper-ridden forest by the bungalow colony, and he reaches into the ground with his bare hands to sift for the juiciest worms, I feel coursing through me the Russian word for “weak”—
slabyi
, an adjective that from my father’s mouth reduces me to near zero.

“Akh, ty, slabyi.”
Eh, you, weakling.

When we aren’t fishing, we entertain ourselves at humble cinemas in towns with names like Liberty and Ellenville. The movie of the summer is
Cocoon
. Its premise: Aliens, Antareans to be exact, descend upon southern Florida to offer eternal life to a group of nursing-home residents, played by the likes of Wilford Brimley and Don Ameche. At this point in my life, Hollywood can sell me anything—from Daryl Hannah as a mermaid to Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and Al Pacino as a rather violent Cuban émigré. Watching movies in the air-conditioned chill I find myself wholly immersed and in love with everything that passes the camera lens. I feel close to my father, removed from the difficulties of worm gathering while being attacked by aggressive grasshoppers, free of my constant fear of getting my thumb impaled by one of the gigantic rusty hooks with which he terrorizes the local trout. At the movie theater my father and I are essentially two immigrant men—one smaller than the other and yet to be swaddled by a thick carpet of body hair—sitting before the canned spectacle of our new homeland, silent, attentive, enthralled.

Cocoon
has everything I want from a movie. Here is the geriatric Don Ameche break-dancing after being energized by the aliens’ fountain of youth, while back at our bungalow colony my grandmother and her fellow senior citizens mull over the price of farmer’s cheese. Here are Floridian palm trees, ocean breezes, and Tahnee Welch—daughter of Raquel—taking off her clothes while Steve Guttenberg, playing essentially himself, peeks through a peephole. I have never seen a woman as easily beautiful, as effortlessly tanned and New World lovely, as Ms. Welch the Younger. The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.