Little Failure (35 page)

In our computer games, there’s a series of commands the player types on the status line when he finds himself in an entirely new environment.

All my books are packed for our move to the new house with the backyard. The wood-paneled closet is empty. I open it with the same trepidation as always, but the Lightman is sitting in the corner, shaking, little pinpricks of light falling off his body. Now that my asthma is gone, I can breathe in fully as I watch him disappear. But this is no catharsis for me, I’m afraid. No metamorphosis. Even as my tormentor drowns in the darkness around him, my fists are clenched. “You motherfucker,” I say in my now-perfect English.
You motherfucker
.

The author’s grandmother never passed judgment on the amazing shirt he is sporting here. He saved his best smiles for her
.

F
OR THE FIRST FEW YEARS
of my life in Queens, America, I have no idea where Manhattan is. There are two or three skyscrapers of maybe twenty stories apiece rearing up where Union Turnpike smashes into Queens Boulevard. I am under the impression that
that
is Manhattan.

Eventually, I am taken to the bargain emporiums of Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, where I spend most of the day rooting around the clothing bins like a curious piglet, pulling out underwear and belts, socks and slacks, a winter jacket with a hood designed to cover the head of an urban Goliath, not a little milksop like myself. There’s something
visually
unclean about this whole place; in contrast to the park-like spreads of eastern Queens, Manhattan’s colors are reminiscent of a Soviet newscast—tractor browns, beet reds, cabbage greens. Mama and I turn off Orchard Street onto Delancey, where the steel
cauldron of the Williamsburg Bridge overwhelms the cityscape, leaving me worried for the cars disappearing between its vast girders. And then—a loud pop. Gunfire! I grab my mother’s hand and pull myself into her coat. The violent, unhappy Manhattanites are shooting at us! We hear a few yelps from passersby, but soon the halfhearted terror gives way to laughter and Spanish. What happened? A car backfired, that’s what.

As a Hebrew school boy, I dream of someday moving to the most suburban of suburbs, where I will never have to look into another unfamiliar face, or indeed any faces at all. I see myself as a prosperous Republican left to his own devices in a backyard that stretches over a hill, swallows up a formerly public lake, and ends in a fierce bramble of barbed wire festooned with a
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign. It’s an appropriate way to spend the 1980s. Young immigrant to city:
Drop dead
.

And then I am accepted to the Stuyvesant High School for the maths
and
the sciences on Fifteenth Street, between First and Second Avenues and between the dangerous districts of East Village, Greenwich Village, Union Square, Times Square, and the Ladies’ Mile.

September 1987. Manhattan Island. The car of visiting relatives makes its way down Second Avenue, with me and my knapsack in tow. The relatives, from some second-tier American or Canadian city, glance out apprehensively at the busy, dirty city. “Leave him here,” my mother says. “
Igoryochek
”
—
Little Igor—“can you walk across the street by yourself?”

“Yes, Mama.” We are worried that just like at Hebrew school the nonmagnificent car of our relatives will create problems for me with the student body. We don’t seem to understand that more than half the students at Stuyvesant are lower- to middle-class immigrant strivers much like ourselves, that China’s Fujian Province, the Indian state of Kerala, and Russia’s Leningrad Oblast lie at different corners of the
same body of land. (The notoriously hard-to-get-into school requires top marks on a math test that students from the dweebiest countries can easily achieve.)

I also do not understand that I am about to walk into the rest of my life.

In the weeks before the start of Stuyvesant, I sit down with my mother and I tell her that I need to wear better clothes than I did at Solomon Schechter. I don’t tell my mother about the eight years of being subhuman at Hebrew school, because that would be tantamount to saying something bad about the Jews, which is treason, a capital offense. My parents sacrificed everything to bring me here to be free and Jewish, and I have taken that lesson to heart. I may have written my blasphemous Gnorah, yes, but only a year ago I led my parents on an insane hunt against crumbs of chametz, the leavened bread that is forbidden during the Passover holiday, castigating them for their lack of vigilance, nearly tearing off the shag carpet in search of month-old chunks of Lithuanian rye. When I pee I know that I am not allowed to think of any of the names of G-d or He will punish me, will lop off whatever’s left, although these days I mostly can’t help letting loose a stream of
YahwehYahwehYahweh
, followed by hours of deep existential grief.

“Mama, I have to dress better.”

In my quest for sartorial funding, I may have also mentioned to my mother that dressing better is a prerequisite for acceptance to an Ivy League college. This (sort of) lie may have loosened the clasp of her wallet, because getting into a top college has been the first, second, third, and last concern of all Stuyvesant students and their mamas from the day the high school was founded in 1904 and will be until the day its new waterfront campus finally sinks beneath the climate-stoked waves in 2104.

And so my first Stuyvesant memory actually takes place at Macy’s. My mother and I are roaming that midtown maze for the new hot brands, Generra, Union Bay, Aéropostale. I want to dress like the rich girls in Hebrew school did, so I am trying on loose, baggy shirts and
sweaters, which will also hide my tits and settle softly over the pink keloid scar taking up the real estate of my right shoulder. No one shops like my mother. A small budget is stretched out into a shirt for every day of the week and pants and sweaters for every other day. I come out of the dressing room, and Mama presses the shirts against my body, holds them tight, to make sure I don’t bulge out upstairs, and, if I’m trying on jeans, to certify there is at least the suggestion of an ass. Until I make the acquaintance of a series of girlfriends in my thirties who will accompany me to dressing rooms all over Manhattan and Williamsburg, this is the closest I come to the ministrations of a woman.

When we walk out of Macy’s with two tightly packed bags under each arm, I feel my mother’s sacrifice far more than when she talks about what she’s left behind in Russia. I love my mother truly, but I am a teenager. The fact that my mother has just visited my dying grandma Galya in Leningrad and found her unable to speak or even recognize her, while the rest of her family, cold and hungry, waited in line for hours to score a desiccated, inedible eggplant, means much too little to me.

All I can hear are the electronic zaps—
tttrick—
of the $39.99 Generra shirts being scanned at the counter, the green dollar figures adding up on the register, the final indignity, the New York sales tax, soaring the numbers into an unexpected new realm.
I am so sorry, Mama, to spend our money like this
.

At Solomon Schechter boys had to wear shirts with collars because that’s how Yahweh wanted it, but secular Stuyvesant has no dress code, and so we invest in a colorful collection of OP T-shirts. “OP” stands for “Ocean Pacific,” and it is a California surfers’ brand. I am, of course, the world’s most consummate Californian surfer. (“Dude, that breaker was boss! I am like so amped!”) Still, despite my lack of surfer credentials, these T-shirts are wonderful: They stretch out over the uncertainty of my teenage frame, and their bright visages of wave-riding surfers distract a little from the bobbing Adam’s apple above the neckline. One of the shirts features three grannies in polka-dot
dresses next to a long-haired surfer carrying his boogie board, and I’m guessing this is some kind of easygoing California humor, but it is also a reminder that in the center of Queens, so far from the scary world of Manhattan, there still lives my grandmother, who is proud of me for getting into the prestigious math and science academy.

Wearing my OP grandmother shirt, I walk through parklike Stuyvesant Square, sweaty-palmed and scared. I know I cannot be Gary Gnu any longer, but then what will I be? A serious, hardworking Republican boy bound for Harvard, Yale, or, in the worst scenario, Princeton. That’s me. I’ll be funny only when it’s called for.
No more clowning around
. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I have just seen Oliver Stone’s
Wall Street
with my family, and the lessons were clear. Don’t trust outsiders. Don’t get caught. Focus only on wealth creation. Greed is good. I also think I have a trump card: the $280,000 colonial my family has just bought in Little Neck. Packed in my school bag, just in case, I carry an engineer’s report testifying to our new house’s value, including a photograph of the house in the morning sun, its southern exposure swaddled by a row of hyacinths. Every step of the process, from picking out the actual house among a casting call of colonial look-alikes to calculating the mortgage payments, was done with my obsessive participation. I even created a Commodore 64 computer program called Family Real Estate Transaction Calculator to help us make sense of our descent into institutional debt. I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

And the other thing I want to do is to make a friend. Jonathan has gone off to the Ramaz School, a Hebrew school on the Upper East Side, many of whose children enjoy the kind of prosperity that would make my old Solomon Schechter comrades blanch. The difference between Stuy and Ramaz is too severe, the memory of our common suffering still too recent, and our friendship quickly fades away. Now there is no one to play Zork or eat juicy kosher kebabs with, no daily phone calls, no car rides with a kind native-born father, and I realize, after having a real American friend, that friendship is almost as important
to me as the acquisition of prime outer-borough real estate. Since I can’t use humor to advance myself at Stuyvesant, I must learn a different way to make people like me and spend time with me.

And so here I am standing in front of Stuyvesant High School in my Ocean Pacific granny T-shirt. The building is a muscular Beaux-Arts monster, five stories of brick academic excellence that scare the boy from Little Neck to no end. But my fellow first-year students look no better than I do. Most of the boys are my height, or maybe a little taller, thin, and pallid, smelling of something stale and ethnic, the world around them reflected in spectacles so thick they could generate solar energy. Our natural enemies are the truly urban kids from low-performing Washington Irving High School, a few blocks away, who will supposedly beat the shit out of us at will (in four years at Stuyvesant, I encounter exactly zero of them). A special “Safe Train” is arranged by the board of education at the First Avenue L stop. This subway train departs under full police protection to make sure our Einsteins are not attacked by ruffians as they connect to, say, the number 7 train to Flushing, Queens. Apparently, I’ve gone from a Judaic Benetton showroom to a holding pen for multinational nerds.

Which brings me to the next thing I notice.

About half of these kids are “Chinese.” I’ve been told to expect this interesting twist and to develop all kinds of formal strategies for relating to children of the Far East, because one day they might employ me. While it is an accepted fact that the black and Hispanic kids will be violent, the Chinese kids are supposed to be smart and polite, if maybe a little otherworldly, because their culture is just so different from normal culture. An important tidbit I pick up somewhere on the streets of Queens: You must never refer to these Chinese kids as “Chinese,” because some of them are actually Korean.

Inside, bedlam. The halls of the old Stuyvesant—the school presently occupies a deluxe mini-skyscraper in Battery Park City—were meant for a handful of boys at the turn of the previous century. By 1987, the school somehow crams in nearly three thousand geeks of both genders. Freshman orientation involves reams of printouts, sequences
of precalculus and full-on calculus and postcalculus and meta-calculus, along with lethal doses of biology, physics, and chemistry. A thick white-and-blue handbook gives us the first taste of what we’re to expect in the next four years: the College Highest Average Rejected, Lowest Average Accepted Chart (CHARLAAC),
^*
which we will soon know by heart. The numbers are numbing. Without at least a 91 percent average, even the lowliest Ivy League school is out of bounds.