Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

Grandma has a television set .

The television came with the apartment, along with the crumbling divan and the scary children’s clown drawings, probably because moving it would require all the men of the Twenty-Third Soviet Arctic Division. The screen is not big, but it is encased within a kind of gigantic wooden armoire (not too different from the three-ton Hungarian specimen Grandma has brought with her from Leningrad), and the whole contraption stands on two sturdy legs splayed at a decisive angle. The Zenith is probably from the latter portion of the 1950s or the very early 1960s, and the problem with it is that, like a dog too old to run after the ball, it’s no longer interested in catching the electromagnetic signals that transmit picture and sound. Or rather it catches either picture or sound.

The only way to get the sound is if I hold on to the tip of the antenna and then point one of my arms outside the window. Then it is possible to follow the plot but not to see the action. In reverse, if I don’t become a part of the antenna, if I lie opposite the Zenith on Grandma’s divan, it is possible to see the action but not to hear anything but cold static. Soon I catch on to the fact that episodes of the most popular series are frequently rebroadcast on American television. I turn myself into the antenna to hear the storyline and, upon commercial break, jot down as much of the dialogue as I can. When the show is reaired a few months later, I watch it with my notes, so that I am able to put the dialogue and action together.

Given this method, it is still hard to understand why Buck Rogers is trapped in the twenty-fifth century or why the Incredible Hulk is sometimes green and sometimes not. Buck Rogers, a favorite of the schoolchildren — all the boys have a crush on Colonel Wilma Deering, played by shapely model Erin Gray in a sexy one-piece jumpsuit, but none’s crush is greater than my own — requires special adjustment because it comes on at 4:00 P.M. on WWOR, channel 9. The thing about channel 9 is that to receive transmission between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M. necessitates more than just my leaning out the window while holding the antenna. Exactly every seven seconds I have to make a “come over here” motion with my hand, as if inviting the electromagnetic signals into Grandma’s living room, so that I may hear Colonel Wilma Deering cry, “Buck Rogers, I’m ordering you back to the base! This is against all principles of modern aerial combat!” as her blue eyes open up in hot, simulated panic and, if I may extrapolate, desire.

Later I have Grandma petition my parents to buy her a Hitachi nineteen-inch television with limited remote-control capacity. They don’t realize that the three hours I spend at Grandma’s before Papa rolls in on his car-boat are spent exclusively on being fed like some pre-foie-gras goose and watching her Zenith. I lie and tell them that I am doing my homework for those three hours, and Grandma keeps mum; she’s just happy to see me eating Doritos while the Germans are not advancing past the border set down by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Homework at SSSQ takes about three minutes of my time. You add up how many hot-air balloons there are floating in a photograph of New Mexico, and then you identify some prophet and miserably scratch into the machberet , the blue Israeli notebook. (My father has already called the Hebrew school and demanded that they give me more difficult math problems. They have categorically refused.) And then when you’re done with the Prophet Ezekiel you’re free to watch Diff’rent Strokes . The problem is that even with my growing English vocabulary and the excellent visibility on Grandma’s new Hitachi, Diff’rent Strokes , ostensibly the story of a rich white man who adopts many black children, makes no sense on cultural grounds. In fact, none of it does.

The more I watch, the more the questions keep mounting. Just what exactly is going on in this country of mine? And why won’t President Reagan do something about it? For instance:

The Brady Bunch: Why are Mr. and Mrs. Brady always so happy even though Mrs. Brady has clearly already had a razvod with her previous husband and now they are both raising children who are not theirs? Also, what is the origin of their white slave Alice?

Three’s Company: What does it mean, “gay”? Why does everyone think the blond girl is so pretty, when it is clearly the brunette who is beautiful?

Gilligan’s Island: Is it really possible that a country as powerful as the United States would not be able to locate two of its best citizens lost at sea, to wit, the millionaire and his wife? Also, Gilligan is comical and bumbling like an immigrant, but people seem to like him. Make notes for further study? Emulate?

Planet of the Apes: If Charlton Heston is a Republican, are the monkeys Soviet?

After three hours of watching television and eating government cheese on Grandma’s food-stamp-bought Ritz crackers I am ostensibly as American as anyone else. In the kitchen Grandma is preparing still more food for the next day’s feedings, and I now wonder how it is possible to love someone so much just because she gave me what I wanted when no one else would.

Although I am afraid of heights I climb out on the fire escape some six floors above the patchy grass of central Queens and watch the TWA jets descend sharply into LaGuardia Airport. Soon Papa will come and take me home to Little Neck, to my real home, where my parents will fight about the wolfish relatives until 10:30 P.M., until it is time for all of us to get enough sleep to face another difficult day in America.

Outside Grandma’s apartment, the car honks stretch way out to the Grand Central Parkway, and people in the apartment house next door are playing English and Spanish radios and just being alive and free, and the air is city-scented with gasoline and grilled meat, which is in its own way delicious. When I shut my eyes I hear the addictively cloying Three’s Company theme song (“Come and knock on our door / We’ve been waiting for you”) and the commercial for Juicy Fruit gum sung with such intense abandon it makes me scared (“ Jew-seh froooot is gonna moooove ya / it gotta taaaaste that cut raaaaght throoo ya-ugh” ).

Even a few years back I was angrier than I am now, and when I’d watch the TWA jets descend I wanted some of them to fall out of the sky and explode against the little houses beyond the jumble of redbrick apartment buildings. But now I just think, Vow , how lucky are people that they can take a flight somewhere. And will that be me someday up in the air again? Where will I land this time? Will it be at Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld? At Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, so I can fight Omar and the other Arabs? Will someone other than Grandma ever love me?

“You’re Gary Gnu.” It’s some kid on a public, non-Jewish playground.

Me: “Vat?”

“Your name’s Gary. So you’re Gary Gnu. From the Great Space Coaster.”

“Vat coaster?”

“Don’t be a dick. You’re Gary Gnu.”

“I am Gnu?”

But before I am Gnu, let me discourse on one more television show I have caught on Grandma’s Zenith. It is called The Six Million Dollar Man . First, let’s be honest here: This man is expensive. Not ten-million-dollar expensive per the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes we almost won, but nearly two-thirds as expensive. Steve Austin is his name, and he was an astronaut until a terrible accident deprived him of many body parts and he was resurrected at taxpayers’ expense to have all kinds of adventures. (Famous opening sequence: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … We have the technology.”) As in love as I am with Colonel Wilma Deering of Buck Rogers , I am even more fascinated with bionic Steve Austin. Because when I think about it, the man is a cripple. He is missing one arm, two legs, and one eye. Imagine if I showed up at SSSQ without those things, and with my toy Monkey missing an arm as well. The Israeli kids would mop the floor with me, or the parts of the floor Jimmy and George, the two black custodians, have missed. And yet, Steve Austin is not deficient. Although parts of him aren’t real, Steve takes advantage of his new powers. He is, in the words of the show, “Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don’t work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.