Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

“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?

ON ELECTION DAY 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.”

“But what about Gorbachev? What about glasnost?” Mrs. Sacciatelli of Howard Beach wants to know. “Didn’t Ronald Reagan say, ‘Trust but verify’?”

“I would never second-guess the Gipper, Mrs. Sacciatelli. But when it comes to Russians, believe me , they’re animals. I should know.”

Come Election Day, I am invited to attend what is sure to be a Republican victory party at the Marriott Marquis, the ugly slab of a building near Times Square, whose revolving restaurant will one day host my mother’s birthdays. The invitation to the party features a scornful cartoon of the big-eared Dukakis sticking his head out of an M1 Abrams tank (the most unfortunate photo op of his campaign), and I expect an evening of arrogant crowing, of being pressed to the bosom of my fellow conservatives while dancing a Protestant hora over the grave of American liberalism.

Yes, tonight is a special night. It is the night I am to meet a Republican girl from a clean, white home. Her name will be Jane. Jane Coruthers, let’s say. Hi, Jane, I’m Gary Shteyngart from Little Neck. My family owns a colonial worth two hundred eighty thousand dollars. I’m the brains behind the Family Real Estate Transaction Calculator. I go to Stuyvesant High School, where my grades aren’t so great, but I hope to get into the honors college at the University of Michigan. I guess tonight it’s going to be curtains for the governor of Taxachusetts, hee-hee .

I enter the ballroom, a dark, gap-toothed immigrant wearing sweat socks and brown penny loafers and my special and only suit, a highly flammable polyester number. I navigate the room filled with sparkling Anglos clutching single malts without a word said in my direction, without a pair of happy blue eyes reflecting the gray sheen of the crisp nylon tie I had picked up for two dollars from a Broadway vendor. As George Herbert Walker Bush racks up state after state on the big screen above us, as cheers and laughter circulate around the massively hideous ballroom, I stand alone in a corner biting down on my plastic cup filled with ginger ale and swatting the colorful balloons that seem to have an affinity for my static-inducing polyester, until a pair of teenage blond lovelies, the girls I had been waiting for all my life, finally approach with needy smiles on their faces, one of them beckoning me to come hither with her hand. I’m so excited I somehow fail to see myself for what I am — a short teenage boy, born to a failing country, trapped inside a shiny gunmetal jacket, carrying about a mop of the blackest hair in the room, blacker even than Michael Dukakis’s Hellenic do.