Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

Recess. Out in the school yard, beneath a nearby sign that says VULCAN RUBBER (two words that will become significant, the first one in my teens, the second one, unfortunately, only in my twenties), the girls play hopscotch and the boys run around with their noisy selves and I sit by the side trying to occupy myself with a ladybug if it’s warm, and my mittens if it’s not, and my cold fingers if I’ve already lost my mittens for the day. I still can’t differentiate the boys and girls by name. They are just one large mass of Am Yisroel , the Jewish nation, the darker, more aggressive ones from Israel, the lighter, happier ones from Great Neck. The liberal kid whose parents bring me over to play with him walks by on his own accord. His house in Kew Gardens is something I lack the vocabulary to describe. First of all, the whole building is his own house, and there is grass in front of it, and there is grass in back of it, and grass on the sides, and there are trees that belong to him, which are his personal property, so he can even cut them down if he wants to and he won’t go to a labor camp. And inside the house, such games there are! Board games about taking over four railroads and entire neighborhoods and also “action figures” from Star Wars , which I don’t know what it is. But someone kind has given me something from the Star Wars , and what it is is a tall, very hairy monkey, with a white bandolier around its naked body and a scowl on its face. Sometimes, when I’m especially alone, I’ll take the monkey out, and the kids will shout “Chewie!” I guess that’s Monkey’s name. And then they’ll laugh because Chewie is missing half his right arm, so you can’t even stick in his black rifle with the bow attachment. So it’s both good that I have Monkey and it’s not good, because he’s deficient. I also have my pen that goes click, but nobody wants any part of that.

Anyway, out at recess, the liberals’ son comes over and says, “Gary, you want to play airplanes?” And first I look past him, because who would want to talk to me, and then who is this Gary anyway? And then I remember: It’s me. We’ve thought it over as a family, and Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already. So we take IGOR, and we move around the I, G, O , and R . So there’s GIRO (which would have been great for the last decade of the twentieth century) and ROGI (perfect for the first decade of the twenty-first), and GORI. That one’s nice, it’s the city where Stalin was born in Georgia, but still not perfectly right. But then there was that actor, Cooper, what’s his name? And so two vowels are traded for two others, and GARY I am.

“I want to play airplanes,” I say. More like shout: “I want to play airplanes!” Actually, why stint here? “I WANT TO PLAY AIRPLANES!” Because this is my chance to win over new friends. “To Jakarta,” I shout, “you fly Gonolulu, Gawaii, †or Guam, short rest, put benzene into wings, then Tokyo, stop Jakarta.”

The children look at me with keen American indifference or burning Israeli anger, the takeaway being sheket bevakasha , or maybe just sheket . In any case, Shut up already, you crazy freak .

The game of airplanes is as complex as every other interaction at SSSQ. The boys run around going “ ZHUUUUUUUUU ” with their arms outstretched, and then they knock one another down with those arms. I do not make it to Jakarta. I do not even make it as far as nearby Philadelphia Airport, at 39°52′19″ N, 75°14′28″. Someone bonks me on the head, and down I go, all passengers on the manifest dead.

There’s a movie theater on Main Street, and my father is excited because they are showing a French movie, and so it must be very cultured. The movie is called Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman , and it will be interesting to see how joyful these Frenchwomen actually are, most likely because of their exquisite cultural patrimony. (“Balzac, Renoir, Pissarro, Voltaire,” my father sings to me on the way over to the theater.) The next eighty-three minutes are spent with Papa’s hairy hand clasped to my eyes, the Herculean task before me: getting it unclasped. The less explicit parts of Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman are set in a Hong Kong brothel or a Macao girls’ boarding school, and then it’s all downhill from there. Despite my father’s best efforts I see about seven vaginas on the big screen that day, seven more than I will see for a very long time. Of course, we have to sit through the whole thing, since we have already paid for the tickets. And one of the male characters, a radio operator, is named Igor ( “OH, Igor, OUI!” ), my former name, so there’s that.

My father and I walk silent and dazed back to our apartment. “Nu?” my mother asks.

Silence at first, uncharacteristic silence.

“Nu?”

“Every three minutes there was a love scene!” my father shouts. “Every which way, they did it! Like this … And then like that. And then they turned her over and—” I hope that, at the least, my mother and father scrounged up the four dollars to see the movie by themselves and faithfully followed the series through Emmanuelle’s Perfume (1992) and Emmanuelle in Venice (1993) to its logical science fiction made-for-cable-TV conclusion, Emmanuelle in Space (1994). They deserved as much, the hardworking immigrants.

I’m not sure what to do with the knowledge gained at the soft French (actually, Dutch) hands of Emmanuelle. I am a little boy. But I know something is up, something hairy between the legs. Not between my legs, not yet, but between the legs of others.

At SSSQ, I find a book in English about Harriet Tubman, the former slave who rescued dozens of African Americans from a terrible place called Maryland. Maybe the Hebrew school librarian thought Tubman was Jewish (her moniker was Moses).

It’s a tough book because it’s in English, but there are many thrilling pictures of Tubman and her rescued slaves running through the awful Maryland on their way to Canada. And I am so angry at slavery, at this horrible thing , as angry as the people around me are at the blacks, so angry, in fact, that we’ve heard the new president, Ronald Reagan, is really going to give them one “across the neck.” Lying on my army cot, Emmanuelle in the back of my mind, Harriet Tubman out front, I conjure an imaginary friend, a black boy or a girl just fled from Maryland. I am still ecumenical on the subject of gender, so s/he is lying next to me, his/her arms around me, my arms around him/her, and I just say over and over something I picked up on the street, “It’s all going to be okay, Sally, I promise.”

The fastest way to fly to N’Djamena, Chad, is through Air France’s hub in Paris. Under optimal conditions, it can be done in sixteen hours and thirty-five minutes. I am flying there still.

*Eventually the State Department will add Kach to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, and the rabbi himself will be assassinated in New York in 1990.

†In Russian, the H is often rendered as a G , hence the famous university Garvard in Massachusetts and my future alma mater, the somewhat-less-famous one in Oberlin, Ogio.