Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

Or in reference to some contemporary rap song and the latest news on television: “Peace in the Middle East, Gary out of the ghetto, no sellout!”

Or brandishing my new Discover card, the one that has found a snug place in my wallet where my NRA membership card used to be: “Dinner’s on me. Jew Money Power!”

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing. Because what I do is part performance art, part ineloquent plea for help, part unprocessed outer-borough aggression, part just me being a jackass. None of it will lead me where I want to go, which is simply, pathetically, into the arms of a girl. But every Valentine’s Day, I go to the corner florist on First Avenue and buy three dozen roses, and I give one to each of the thirty-six girls I have a crush on, my silent tribute to the fact that somewhere deep inside the beige-and-black Union Bay sweater there is a person who wants what everyone else wants but is too scared to say it.

On my drunk, stoned lips I am wearing a smile I would describe as depressed but optimistic. If I had to guess, that smile comes from my matrilineal line, somewhere before Stalin but after the pogroms, when the apples hung plumply from the branches of Belorussian trees, and my grandmother’s family’s kosher butchery was in its prime. I will soon find myself absolutely stunned when looking into the white space of my Stuy yearbook. I find one of the girls of our crew has penned: “I always thought you were a sweetheart underneath that ridiculous grin.”

The Park girls sit around us in a semicircle talking about Grinnell and Wesleyan, dear ones all, but, in contravention of all teenage rules, or perhaps in full support of them, it’s the boys I’m interested in. Getting in with the boys, getting in with this crowd of stoners and freaks, that is what my teenage years have become.

To my left, cleaning the resin out of his chrome Proto Pipe, is Ben, half Vietnamese, half Finnish, tall and square shouldered, with rockstar hair and an easy laugh, dressed in a dramatic German army coat with a paperback sticking out of one pocket, usually Siddhartha or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , which neither of us will ever finish — which, as far as I know, no one will ever finish. Girls like to do tarot card readings with Ben or lean against his broad back in times of need.

Ben doesn’t like me at first. I’m a tough sell: a supposed Republican who talks up a storm about Ayn Rand and supply-side economics. When we first meet, Ben takes out a large water gun that he carries in his backpack for just such emergencies and sprays me well and good, my sweater stinking like a wet sheep all through chemistry. But at a party held inside a rambling Park Slope brownstone, at the behest of his free-floating and lovely girlfriend, Ben apologizes for being mean to me. “You try too hard,” he says, passing me his Proto Pipe in a gesture of goodwill. “Everyone can tell.”

More than twenty years later I find myself in an acting class taught by Louise Lasser of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman fame (also Woody Allen’s second wife). Ms. Lasser rakes the students with hell-fire for our cloying attempts at acting, reducing many young women to ninety minutes of sobbing. After my sad attempt at the Meisner technique (Actor 1: You are wearing a blue shirt; Actor 2: I am wearing a blue shirt), she screams at me: “You know what your problem is, Gary? You’re fake and manipulative!”

And I want to say, Yes, but this is New York. Who’s not fake and manipulative?

You try too hard. Everyone can tell .

Back on our bench in the Park, to my right, Brian is making out thoroughly with his girlfriend. Handsome and boyish, half Jewish, half black, with feminine lips so many of the girls around us have kissed, Brian is as preppy as we get, white tee tucked away beneath an oxford shirt, khakis, the whole package confusingly, antagonistically, wrapped in a leather jacket, its collar draped in soft brown fake fur. Brian’s pretty-boy lips are locked fully with his stoned blond girlfriend’s, and his hands are everywhere. It is understood that Ben and Brian are the best of our number, that they have access to the females and to the glory. If either were to speak down to me I would take it in stride, happy that I am spoken to, happy to take notes on how I can do better. Do I try too hard? Gentlemen, I’ll try harder .

At the lateral level of Ben and Brian is another tall boy of stunning appearance, like them also of complex racial heritage. I cannot really talk about him at length because he seems so utterly outside of the galaxy in which I claim residency, and in the end I am a writer, not an astronomer. I’d like to similarly sigh at the stunning and cosmopolitan progression of their girlfriends. I see blue eyes, stoned smiles of unimpeachable placidity. I smell patchouli. I hear Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart.” I feel the ease and happiness of these young women in the world.

Stretching away from Ben, Brian, and the Other Guy is a constellation of about a dozen boys emitting various degrees of funk. At one rung, close to Ben and Brian, but with only half membership in their caste, are me and John. As fellow eastern Queens sufferers, John and I are the barbarians trying to get through the gate with our laminated Long Island Rail Road monthly tickets and our willingness to do anything — John actually wears a lamp shade for the duration of a house party. My buddy is a beefy, hairy dyslexic in Hawaiian shirt and fedora and, like me, a budding writer and poseur. Although he usually addresses me as “You dolt,” John is dear to my heart. I am not sure if he is completely insane or a genius. At times his writing is hilarious in a teenage gonzo way (random urban violence, German midget porn, exploding Saigon hookers, New York mutts out looking for love) and inching a little bit toward our mutual sadness — the sadness of being unable to communicate with others sans lamp shade.

In the end, John’s deep desire to make me understand that “Western literature, post-Enlightenment, is centered around illusionism” is just too hard to take at 2:00 P.M. after the consumption of half a case of beer and the elementary particles of Ben’s Proto Pipe. I’d rather touch foreheads with Sara in metaphysics class. Four years later, after John discovers something called humor studies, I have no choice but to place him smack in the middle of my first novel.

And now let’s zoom out a little. A bench on the eastern half of Stuyvesant Square, a then-shabby park divided by the screaming traffic of Second Avenue. A bunch of boys sitting on the bench, several stinking of Indonesian Djarum clove cigarettes and unwashed hair. Occasionally, for exercise, we will get up to play Jihad Ball with a rubber Koosh ball.

The rules are simple: You take the ball, point to someone, and shout, “I do declare jihad on you .” Then you throw the ball at the jihadee and watch the rest of your friends pile on him. Ben and John are passing around the Proto Pipe, talking, as we all do, veryfast, veryfast, veryfast, Freud, Marx, Schubert, Foucault, Albert Einstein, Albert Hall, Fat Albert, Fats Domino, Domino Sugar refinery. Across the cement expanse of the Park, just a jihad ball’s throw away, sit endless numbers of Asian girls picking away at stir-fry, steamed mandoo dumplings, and thick rounds of vegetable kimbap in white Styrofoam containers. In theory, at least, they are living the Stuyvesant dream of good grades and bright futures. A part of me wishes I could join them, but even more of me wishes I could understand who they are. *When the senior yearbook comes out I will be able to peek just a little bit inside their hearts: