Little Failure (37 page)

The teacher—an African American woman in a bright designer blouse, an impeccably coiffed bun at the back of her neck—questioningly clicks her brilliant chalk against the board as the immigrant students call out the right and proper answers. She calls, they respond. Except for one student in his Ocean Pacific T-shirt covered with waves of flop sweat under the armpits who is staring blankly at the board as the new language of Sine, Cosine, Tangent is called out around him, as students who got the answer only
partially
right smack themselves violently across the forehead. “Nice going,” one of them keeps saying to himself, sarcastically. “Nice going.”

Won’t someone please take me back to Hebrew school? I’ll do anything, I’ll believe anything! I’ll memorize the Passover Haggadah. I’ll chant all the gibberish at the top of my lungs.
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha parabola
. Just get me out of here. Just let me be a good student again, so at least my parents will have
that
.

In biology class, I am paired with a Vietnamese girl of some ninety pounds, most of them brain matter, who swiftly dismembers a frog
and labels all of its organs in English and Latin. “Aren’t you going to do
anything
?” she says as I stand there with my scalpel as impotent as it is erect. “Are you, like, retarded?”

I was once the Red Gerbil; I was once Gary Gnu. You could spit at me or bean me with your spit-covered Carvel ice-cream stick or not invite me to your Great Neck roller rink Bat Mitzvah. But you could never say I was stupid. And now I am. Stupid enough to almost fail out of Spanish class. Stupid enough to stare at a page of geometry for half a day and come away with nothing but the conclusion that triangles have three sides. And if I could understand what a negative feedback loop is in biology class, I could maybe understand that the more I feel stupid, the stupider I become. The anxiety grows and reinforces itself. The tests—and they are daily—grow more difficult, not less. And with each week, with each test, I am getting closer to
it
.

It
is the report card.
It
tells you what your station in life will be. Because the immigrant children of Stuyvesant do not have backup plans. We will not be filling in at our daddy’s firm or taking a gap year in Laos. Some of us are
from
Laos.

The report card, printed on flimsy dot-matrix toilet paper, is handed out in morning homeroom, our eyes instantly skirting past the individual grades to the bottom number, the average.

I am crying even before I see the four digits.

82.33.

Essentially, a B.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton?

Lehigh, Lafayette,
maybe
Bucknell.

What does it mean for an immigrant child of the top rank to go to Bucknell University?

It means I have failed my parents. I have failed myself. I have failed my future. We may as well have never come here.

Stuvyesant in 1987 resembles a Lower East Side tenement at the turn of the last century: The school’s snot-colored passages are filled to
bursting; central hallways form their own crowded Broadways; smaller hallways are the equivalent of major crosstown streets. The first-year students latch on to others who look like them; they travel in packs. Here is Tiny Taiwan, Mini Macao, Petite Port-au-Prince, and Lesser Leningrad. Despite my first-day success playing Ultimate Frisbee with some future jocks, I am still much too shy and unsure of myself to fully make friends, and I spend half my lunch breaks hiding out in the bathroom, where a triad of Chinese “toughs” smoke at one another.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, a Filipino-or-maybe-Mexican kid accompanies me to a sandwich shop called Blimpie, where I buy a breaded chicken sandwich that is too big, but that I eat anyway because it costs 499 cents. My parents give me six dollars a day for food, which makes me comparatively rich, but the guilt of eating an expensive breaded chicken while getting a Lehigh average is too much to bear.

“Yo.”

“ ’Sup.”

“What’s your average?”

“82.33.”

“Shit.”

“I know.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Lehigh.”

“Fuck.”

“Maybe Bucknell.”

“You might as well go to SUNY-Albany, save some money, do really well, and then transfer someplace better.”

“Haverford accepted an Albany transfer with just a 3.78 in 1984.”

“Dude, that was 1983. Their selectivity ranking’s gone up since then.”

“I thought they dropped to ninth place on
U.S. News & World Report
.”

“Medicine or law after?”

“Law.”

“Hastings in California. They’re a sleeper school, but they take a lot of SUNY kids.”

“I just got the latest
Essays That Worked for Law School
.”

“My mother just left one under my pillow with Duke, like, highlighted three times.”

Just two fifteen-year-old kids with ghastly new mustaches talking, one a relatively spoiled son of a Russian engineer, the other trying to work his way out of his parents’ grocery store.

Just two boys shooting the shit.

The weather has turned cold. My first Manhattan winter. Snowdrifts form around Beth Israel’s psychiatric ward, where, soon enough, two of my classmates will find a home, one after retiring to Central Park to build his own igloo in the middle of the frozen night. On the 1.5-floor landing of our new Little Neck colonial, I stare out the window as the snow makes pretty the future site of my father’s productive raspberry patch. (Between my father’s weekly fishing and his growing fruits and vegetables, we will soon be entirely self-sustaining!) The next house over is already in Great Neck. Little Neck is middle class; Great Neck is
rich
. That next house over had been the plan for me. Until now.

“Son of a bitch!” my father cries from the first floor. “He promised to vacuum the stairs! Look at that
debil
. He’s just going to stand there with his mouth open.”

“I’m thinking about homework,” I lie. And then with some of the attitude I’ve been working on in high school, “
Otstan’ ot menya
.” Leave me alone.

“I’ll give you
otstan’ ot menya
!” my father shouts. “I’ll beat your ass!”

But he doesn’t.

I flop down on my bed with my biology text. How Does the Structure of a Paramecium Enable It to Function in Its Environment? How
Is the Heart Adapted for Its Function? I’ve covered one of my walls with a poster of the troop uniforms of the different NATO nations, which I ordered out of an anti-Communist survivalist magazine. Above my new color TV I’ve hung a CIA recruiting poster. On a third wall: an ivy-covered quadrangle of the University of Michigan, my new reach school. My parents have started subscribing to
Playboy
, and once they’re through with the issues in their bedroom I stack them openly next to my bed.
Essays That Worked for Law School
will soon lie beneath a
Playboy
issue featuring topless La Toya Jackson, sister of Michael, wearing a snake around her glistening neck. Meanwhile, old friend Chekhov is yellowing away on a bookshelf across the landing.

My Ocean Pacific T-shirts have given way to a black-and-beige Union Bay sweater that, unbeknownst to me, marks me as the ultimate in Bridge and Tunnel. In warmer weather, the children of Stuyvesant High School used to cluster around the front and back entrances of the school, waiting for their next pop quiz the way astronauts wait for the mission countdown clock. Now they seek refuge inside the school’s vast auditorium. Some of them, depleted by study, are asleep on their backpacks as if they had just survived a terrible natural calamity and are now huddled in a FEMA shelter. Some of the Asian kids, with touching familiarity, are asleep on each other’s laps. Nearly all of us have headphones on, gigantic fuzzy headphones plugged into a tiny reward for all our hard work, a late-model Aiwa Cassette Boy with the new equalizer function that makes one feel just a little bit like a DJ.

Back home in our sweaty bedrooms, our outsiders’ angst finds itself in the “Eurotrash” new-wave tunes of a Long Island radio station called WLIR (later renamed WDRE), broadcasting from deep in the suburban interior of Garden City. We—and by “we” I mean young, pimply Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Indians—are lost between two worlds. We go to school in Manhattan, but our immigrant enclaves of Flushing, Jackson Heights, Midwood, Bayside, and Little Neck are too close to Long Island for us to resist WLIR, that clarion call of
squeaky synthesizer music, narcoleptic goth outfits, and spiky, inclined hair. The usual British suspects rule the airwaves: Depeche Mode, Erasure (their ecstatic hit “Oh l’Amour” is an inspiration to the loveless), and, of course, the princes of the gelled-hair set, the Smiths.

Who will rescue us from ourselves? Who will teach us about the right drugs and the proper music? Who will integrate us into Manhattan? For this we will need the native-born.

They occupy the far-southern edge of the auditorium, just a few rows hanging over the precipice beneath which the string section is perpetually tuning away. They hail from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. The boys are hippies, stoners, and punks or just kids who have extensive personalities and interests but lack the work ethic to compete with the fierce academic warriors of Stuyvesant. The girls wear long, flowing skirts, tie-dyes with pictures of horses and mandalas on them, slashed jeans, flannels, green army jackets, and peasant kerchiefs and seem to have struck a reasonable balance between self-expression and academic achievement. That is to say, they will one day attend college. The vibe is densely unmaterialistic. When I present evidence of my family’s $280,000 Little Neck colonial, the girls are too kind to tell me that their parents’ classic sixes on the Upper West Side are worth four times as much.

Unlike Haverford and the UC Hastings College of the Law, these kids have flexible admissions standards.

Maybe they will be my friends.

Prom for one?

O
N
E
LECTION
D
AY
1988, I come to the Marriott Marquis ballroom thinking, This is the day. The day I will finally get laid.

I have volunteered for George Bush Sr.’s scorched-earth presidential campaign against the hapless Michael Dukakis, laughing along with Bush’s racist, hysterical Willie Horton commercials and all they imply about the liberal Massachusetts Greek. Compassion, after all, is a virtue only rich Americans can afford, tolerance the purview of slick Manhattanites who already have everything I want.

I plug away at Bush’s New York headquarters, manning the phone banks with two older women in fur-trimmed coats. Our duties are to call the Republican faithful and solicit their support. My colleagues,
who despite their garb never seem to shed a drop of sweat in the lingering summer heat, have a grand old time on the phone, laughing and flirting with old classmates and lost loves while I clutch the receiver with shaking hands, whispering to suburban housewives about the twin evils of taxes and Soviets. “Let me tell you something, Mrs. Sacciatelli, I grew up in the USSR, and you just cannot
trust
these people.”