Little Failure (43 page)

In the morning, although the toilets are coed, the showers on my floor are for men. There are no partitions in the shower room, and we stand about naked with one another, much like in prison or in the navy.

One man walks in with a toy bucket and shovel like kids have on the beach. He sings happily as he sudses himself down. His penis is enormous; even nonerect it describes full arcs in the dense Ohio steam. I try to will myself to grow a little when he’s around, so that I won’t seem puny, but nothing can hold a candle to his candle. “A mulatto,
an albino,” the big-dicked fellow cheerfully sings, as every reference in Oberlin in 1991 is to Nirvana’s
Nevermind
, every dorm room boasting at least one copy of the iconic album with the underwater baby swimming toward a dollar on a hook.

Men with smaller dicks enter the shower. The complaining begins.

“There’s too much reading for English!”

“Ganzel assigned
an entire book
to read!”

“I had to write
two
papers in one week.”

The Stuyvesant graduate in me is amused. During my first semester at Oberlin my longest assignment is watching Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. Students, townspeople, and other assorted losers are allowed to teach courses at Oberlin as part of the Experimental College.
These classes are for actual college credit
. The nice sophomore hippie next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles, which consists of us listening to
Revolver
, getting the munchies real bad, and then ordering in a Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple from Lorenzo’s (oh, the famished thirty minutes until the damn thing arrives). Sometimes we’ll drop acid and try to puzzle out “And Your Bird Can Sing” while walking up to various buildings and leaning on them.

It takes me but a few weeks to realize the frightening new prospect before me. Whereas in Stuyvesant I was at the bottom of my class, at Oberlin I can maintain a nearly perfect average while being drunk and stoned all day long. I get on the phone as soon as the first report card is issued.

“Mama, Papa, I have a 3.70!”

“What does it mean, 3.70?”

“An A average. I can get into Fordham Law easy. Maybe if I graduate summa cum laude, NYU or the University of Pennsylvania.”

“Semyon, did you hear what Little Igor has said?”

“Very good, very good,” my father says across the telephone line. “
Tak derzhat’!
” Keep it up!

Intense stoner feelings of love wash over me.
Tak derzhat’!
He hasn’t used that kind of language with me in half a decade. I remember
being a nine-year-old child in our Deepdale Gardens apartment, crawling up his hairy stomach, rooting around his chest hair, cooing with happiness, while he nonchalantly reads the émigré intelligentsia journal
Kontinent
. I call him
dyadya som
(Uncle Catfish). He is my best buddy as well as my papa. “What did you get on your division test?” he asks me.
“Sto, dyadya som!”
(“A hundred, Uncle Catfish!”) Prickly kiss on the cheek. “
Tak derzhat’!
”

Does it really matter that upstairs from me, at this very moment, Nadine is holding hands with a guy who looks to me like a famous actor, the one always in rehab or shooting at the police? Does it really matter that outside the window a bunch of hipsters in propeller beanies are tossing around a Hacky Sack, Oberlin’s primary sport, without inviting me, because somehow they can
smell
my desperate background, my internship with George H. W. Bush’s election campaign, my years as the head of the Holy Gnuish Empire?

Mother: “And what kind of grades are your colleagues getting?”

“People don’t really talk about grades at Oberlin, Mama.”

“
What?
What kind of a school is this? This is socialism!”

Socialism, Mama? If only you knew. There’s a student dining coop that doesn’t allow the use of honey because it exploits the labor of bees. But all I say is “It
is
ridiculous, but good for me. Less competition.”

“I noticed there were not many Asian students.”

“Yes,” I say happily. “Yes!”

“Mama and I went to an opera last night. Puccini.”

My father has said
Tak derzhat’
, and my parents have gone to see Puccini together. This means there will be no
razvod
. We will remain a family.

As soon as I hang up, I lustfully fire up my silver pot pipe and blow smoke at the Beaver until he stalks off for the library. Then, free of his redheaded, freckled, studious presence, I take care of my final need to the sound of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” For this, too, I will receive college credit.

I like going to classes because I can learn a lot. About the students, I mean. Here the great arias of self-involvement—far more operatic than Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”—wind their way through the boxy little classrooms as professors eagerly facilitate our growth as social beings and master complainers. I learn how to speak effectively within my new milieu. I master an Oberlin technique called “As a.”

“As a woman, I think …” “As a woman of color, I would speculate …” “As a woman of no color, I would conjecture …” “As a hermaphrodite.” “As a bee liberator.” “As a beagle in a former life.”

Only what will I say? Whom will I speak for? I raise my hand. “As an
immigrant
 …” Pause. All eyes on me. This isn’t Stuyvesant; here immigrants are a rare, succulent breed, even if the ones present usually have parents who own half of Lahore. “As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union …” So far, so good! Where can I take this? “As an immigrant from a developing country crushed by American imperialism …”

As I speak, people, by which I mean girls, are looking at me and nodding. I have shed every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown. The things I say in class are no longer meant to be funny or satiric or ironic; they’re meant to celebrate my own importance, forged in the crucible of our collective importance. There is no room for funny at Oberlin. Everything we do must move the human race forward.

And here’s what’s happening to me. I’m learning. The truth of the matter is that I should be nowhere near an institution like this. Oberlin is something nice you do for your child when you’re rich. Or at least comfortable. If I would ever have an American child I would happily send her to Oberlin. Let her enjoy the fruits of my labor. Let her have both clitoral and vaginal orgasms inside a gluten-free co-op.
But me? I’m still a hungry, kielbasa-fueled, fucked-up refugee. I still need to build a home in this country and then to buy an all-wheel-drive car to put next to it.

The problem is I learn too slowly. There’s a very popular upper-classman who wears a janitor’s shirt with the name
BOB
stenciled over his breast. I have also worked as a janitor before coming to Oberlin. My father got me a job washing floors in a former nuclear reactor in his laboratory. I was paid $10.50 an hour for buffing many hectares of radioactive floors and had to wear a device at all times that looked like a Geiger counter (the present state of my hairline reflects as much). I worked all summer long so that I could have money for pot and beer and Chinese food to buy for a prospective hand-holder, but my parents certainly supplied me with shirts and pants to wear. “Poor Bob,” I say. “He only has one shirt.
As an immigrant
, I know what that feels like.”

“Who’s Bob?”

“Over there.”

“That’s John.”

“Why does his janitor’s shirt say ‘Bob’?”

My hipster interlocutor looks at me as if I am a complete idiot. Which I suppose I am.

As an immigrant, my job is to fucking learn. And what Oberlin has to teach me is how to become a part of the cultural industries in a handful of American cities. How to move back to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg or San Francisco’s Mission District and be slightly known among a select group of my own duplicates. How to use the advance for the Serbian rights to my memoir to throw a killer party featuring the world’s second-worst banjo player and absolutely worst snake charmer. There’s a knock on the door of a labor seminar with my favorite Marxist professor. A package of cheese has arrived from France.
The People’s Cheese
we call it. The People’s Volvo. The People’s Audi TT Roadster. There are other ways to be fabulous, ways I could hardly imagine among the forty-by-one-hundred-foot lots of eastern Queens. You just constantly have to be sure of yourself. You can’t announce
your ambitions. You have to join a band where you dress like a chicken. You have to complain about the Soviet Union’s recent collapse even as your parents celebrate it. You have to bring a beach bucket and shovel to your morning shower. You have to go out with someone for the duration of junior year and get rid of them when you’ve had enough, and then you have to
complain
about the fact that a human being actually loved you.

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that’s why they call it an education.

My hair is growing and curling into locks and reaching toward my ass; my shirts are becoming flannelly just like Kurt Cobain’s. A child of Lenin is learning about Marxism in the Rust Belt from faculty whose office doors are festooned with signs reading
CARD-CARRYING MEMBER ACLU
and
LOBOTOMIES FOR REPUBLICANS: IT’S THE LAW
.

I am still majoring in politics, still paying respect to my parents’ law school dreams, but I am also doing something that Oberlin can respect as well.

I am writing again.

My first southern Christmas. Jennifer is holding the rambunctious Tally-Dog. I am so full of hush puppies and grits it hurts to lift my head
.

“U
H, YOUR TEETH ARE REALLY HURTING ME
, Gary. Could we try something a little different?”

I have a girlfriend.

Her name is Jennifer, known to most by her initials, J.Z.

I am lying next to her. I am twenty years old. Back at Stuyvesant, I have spent several nights next to Nadine in her Queens bedroom, both our eyes closed, an eighteen-year-old-sized distance between us, me dreaming of her bony frame, her dreaming, presumably, of another’s bony frame, a digital clock soundlessly keeping time by her bedside, wasted time.

If I could compress the unrequited love of the last twenty years it is possible that I could come up with art. But that is not the kind of artist I want to become. When it comes to the world, I want to know
it, touch it, taste it, and indefinitely hold it. Twenty years old, post-Leningrad, post–Hebrew school, postchildhood, post-God, I am a materialist without possessions. I do not believe in a Russian soul. The heart is an important organ, but it is just an organ. You are not what you want. You are what wants you back. Everything begins with her. Everything begins on the night when I lie with her in a building elegantly named Keep Cottage, a rambling timber-and-stucco mansion housing one of Oberlin’s renowned dining and residential co-ops, the kind where bees are kept safe from exploitation and a lone terrorist known as the Bacon Bomber, operating under cover of night, dusts the next day’s hummus supply with his eponymous foodstuff.