Little Failure (42 page)

I have never properly been off the Eastern Seaboard, and the flatness and waterlessness of the passing fields (wheat? corn?) and scrub make me nervous. I cannot comprehend this new terrain, and I cannot locate my place within it. All I can see is a python’s embrace of American highways and the top hats of bottom-tier fast-food restaurants,
such as the one they call Arby’s. And yet, because I am young, I am still hopeful that something good will happen to me,
razvod
or no.

Oberlin College lies southwest of the depressed city of Cleveland, near the even more depressed towns of Lorain, Elyria, and, cruelly enough, Amherst. The also depressed downtown area, a kind of addendum to the college, “boasts” an art deco theater named the Apollo. The town pipes in “Silent Night” all through the greater Christmas season to annoy the Jewish students and faculty. There is a five-and-dime store to go along with the Christmas music and the general feeling that time has left us all far behind. Young peasants and underemployed workers from the local farms like to tear down North Main Street in their pickup trucks shouting, “Queerberlin! You guys are a bunch of fucking Democrats.”

The college’s architecture is designed for LSD and psychedelic-mushroom experimentation, as it makes sense only when it is melting. Heavy blocks of Ohio sandstone have gone into everything from a turreted Gothic hall to a Mediterranean-style, red-tile-roofed chapel. Amid these iconoclastic structures can be found one of Newark Airport’s lost terminals, here reconfigured into a suicidal dorm named South, and the Conservatory of Music by Minoru Yamasaki, the designer of the original World Trade Center, which uncannily resembles a three-story version of that doomed structure. The two seasons are winter and summer. When the leaves turn color for that twenty-minute Ohio autumn, the whole crazy ensemble looks as beautiful as anything else in the world.

The human element wanders between these sandstone and cement giants, pissy looking and vegan, suffering from either Low Self-Esteem or Way Too Much Self-Esteem. A boy in a checkered shirt and multicolored Vans will walk by wearing a propeller on his red papal beanie, and if you try to take a picture of him and his beanie he will sneer at your presumption and make fun of you to his female companion whose jeans are a size skinnier than she is. And if you stop taking a picture of him, he will sneer at you for no longer paying attention to him. Lermontov covered all of this in
A Hero of Our Time
.

The first two pages of the
Oberlin Review
from April 5, 1991, bequeath the following headlines: “Discovery of Marijuana Plants Results in Arrests,” “Pro-Marijuana Activists Rally,” “Porn, Domestic Partnership Head Assembly Agenda.” A fourth article, entitled “CF [College Faculty] Discusses Admission Stats,” concerns the fact that the year I am admitted to Oberlin, 67 percent of all applicants have received a nod from the admissions office. I would like to have met the one-third of the applicant pool that failed this rigorous admissions challenge. To quote a faculty member from the article: “That level of selectivity is so embarrassingly nil.”

I have come to the right place.

The Subarus of parents are nestling in herds. I do not yet know the significance of this left-wing East Coast car. I also do not understand that many of the parents are themselves academics, many buoyed by family trust funds that will also see their children into the future. There are so many things that I do not know, except for the fact that my parents are about to get the
razvod
. So I kiss them very quickly (Papa, quoting Lenin in part: “You must study, study, and study, Little One”) and send them on their way back to Little Neck by way of the inexpensive Motel 6. There they will lie, in my imagination, at opposite ends of the bed, a strange Jewish-Russian silence between them along with some Oberlin promotional brochures, vistas of colorful hippies necking atop a painted rock. In my dorm room, surrounded by my hardworking, completely sober, thoroughly unbohemian new roommate—for his work ethic, he is immediately nicknamed the Beaver—I unpack the Apple IIc and the dot-matrix printer, feeling alone—and not the good alone I felt when I escaped the Sauerkraut Arms—while longing for Nadine’s hand.

Here’s another thing I don’t understand and won’t know for several weeks. On the way back home, my parents “make up.” In fact, once I depart the family scene the entire trajectory of their marriage changes. They will know as much love and happiness together as people
of their geography are allowed. The question I may ask now is
why?
Why does that which I longed for my entire childhood, peace between Mama and Papa, finally happen only as my parents and I separate? Were their daily and nightly fights an attempt to win my audience and attention? Did they enjoy my shuttle diplomacy? My teary “Papa really loves you, and he promises to be a better husband,” or practical “Mama has lost her mother and older sister, so we must be especially kind to her and allow her to send up to five hundred U.S. dollars per month to Leningrad.” Or, more likely, did the fact that they now had so few people to turn to in this country—so few American or Russian friends and decent, nonwolfish relations—finally leave them no choice but to turn to each other again? Maybe, without me, they finally remembered what they loved about each other in the first place: my father’s intellect, my mother’s beauty and will.

Will they be lonely without Little Igor? I certainly hope so. The other alternative: They were always better off without me. I was never a part of the family romance. I was only an impediment to it.

Only the full-size bed of the Motel 6 will know.

And now it is time to claim my own love. Hand-holding Nadine is here, prettier than ever in her neutral gray sweatshirt and denims, even as I bob around her in ugly khaki pants and a tie-dyed T-shirt that my middle-aged want-to-be lover Paulie and I bought at the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. (“Check out this T-shirt, Prince Pineapple,
maricón
.”) It features Marilyn Monroe’s smiling face from
The Seven Year Itch
, and I hope having this retro sexpot across my chest will prove edgy or interesting (it doesn’t). There’s a poster sale going on at the Student Union, and I buy a copy of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
and a number called
The Beers of the World
. I happily show them off to Nadine, who does not seem at all impressed. She lights a menthol, blows the green smoke out of the corner of her tight little mouth, and we head back to our dorm, a neo-Georgian
brute called Burton that envelops the northern quad within its two plantation-like wings. With my usual hunger I grab her hand, humming the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

“You know what?” Nadine says. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold hands.”

Elastic of underwear suddenly flooded with anxiety: “Why not?”

“Just there are a lot of potential rich husbands around here.”

She laughs a little.

I laugh a little, too. “Ha-ha,” I say.

Back in the dorm, alone, the Beaver off adding more difficult classes to his overbooked schedule, I lie down on the hard bed and have a ferocious, unmitigated Oberlin-grade panic attack. Here I am with a beaver for a roommate, with divorcing immigrant parents, and with no one’s hand to hold in the northeastern corner of a state whose unironic tourist slogan is “The Heart of It All.”

Oberlin does not have fraternities or sororities. It is also in a dry county. These and other factors combine to make it difficult for most students to abstain from quantities of beer and marijuana that redefine the term “copious” (for those interested, there is also a decent supply of heroin and cocaine). On my first evening at Oberlin I will smoke a half-dozen joints and drink the Beers of the World, or at least a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the bladder-busting local swill. Half comatose I will hold hands with the prettiest girl in the dorm, even as she makes out filthily with a hot resident adviser, everyone laughing at me, the sad drunk holding on to the beauty as she kisses her aesthetic equal, a man with long hair as soft and flowing as her own. Stoned, I grasp the warmth of that hand, forgetting whose it is—Nadine’s? my divorcing mother’s?—until I wake up in a room not my own, wearing some kind of Peruvian poncho and covered in what must be someone else’s drool. In the next year, I will drink and smoke, smoke and drink, trip and fall, fall and trip, until my endless alcoholic and narcotic exploits earn me my Oberlin moniker: Scary Gary.

As night falls on Oberlin, Scary Gary and the Beaver dim their lights. The Beav, exhausted from thinking and learning, snores up a storm from the get-go, but Scary Gary is scared shitless of a certain college peculiarity. The bathrooms in Burton Hall are coed.

To me, every Oberlin woman is already an angel, a deeply odorous creature with the potential of drunkenly holding my hand—and now I am supposed to make waste around her? Also the food served in the dining hall, a disingenuous attempt at beef au jus, a hairy salad of destroyed lettuces, a postapocalyptic taco, have made the Second Directive imperative. If I am to go on living, this crap must rush out of me
now
as if I were a re-creation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a poster of which I probably should have bought instead of Munch’s clichéd
Scream
. I circle the bathroom all night long hoping for an opening, so that I may lay a log. At three in the morning, as someone of the fairer sex is loudly vomiting Milwaukee’s Best, I slip into the stall as far away as possible, shyly undo my pants, and prepare to let loose. Just then the hipster boots of the girl whose hand I had drunkenly held as she kissed another slide into the stall between me and the vomiter. I tighten some rectal screw inside me, cancel the Second Directive, and run back to my dorm room. And that terrible shitlessness, essentially, is my first year at Oberlin.