Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

You are no longer twenty as you were when we met. You are pushing thirty. The wounded child in a defensive rage has become an adult man hurting himself and inflicting pain on others .

You are still close enough to the beginning of adulthood that you can change .

Do you want to spend your life as a frightened angry person taking your deepest fears and problems out on innocent bystanders, as well as on yourself? In five or ten years, you could be a father bestowing upon his children the same kind of misery that you now enjoy. That’s how it works .

Your inability to empathize makes it difficult for you to put yourself in the skin of the characters you write .

You have to decide to take yourself seriously, not in a phony self-pitying way, but in a serious, dignified way .

It’s impossible to discuss these issues for long without thinking of the role your drinking plays. Last spring’s birthday dinner comes to mind, when you drank a bottle of wine at Danube and a large pitcher of sangria at Rio Mar. About half way through the evening you were incoherent, uncomprehending and slurring your words. A highlight was a disjointed monologue about how you have no drinking problem .

When do you reach the point that you are no longer so fragile that you can’t see beyond your own pain?

When do you stop being pitiable Gary hiding in the Stuyvesant bathroom and emerge to become a man who stands up to the inner demons that are driving him?

When I first read these dispatches, a Pamela Sanders — grade anger boils within me. Fucking John. What does he know about writing? Or hiding out in bathrooms? He’s just a television writer. And, anyway, I’m too old to have a father figure. I’m “pushing thirty,” as he, the man obsessed with his own mortality, has just reminded me. But the thought of going it alone, with nothing but the pricey Kiev-style cutlet awaiting me in Little Neck, turns my anger to despair. I must find a new way to manipulate John, to keep my caviar fund intact, to keep the Duet with Gary humming along. As a gesture of kindness, I take John out to Barney Greengrass for sturgeon and eggs. At first I’m excited by the idea that I’m repaying a vast debt to John by buying him some animal protein on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but perhaps it is the Russian nature of the sturgeon that turns my mood from magnanimous guest of the Upper West Side to pure Leningrad citizen, circa 1979. When the $47.08 check is slapped on the table, the color of my face turns from lox to whitefish, and I have a minor panic attack on the spot. No! No! No! My American papa has to pay for this, not me. If he doesn’t pay, then I have nothing but my real parents! I run out of the restaurant, the edges of my eyes blurring with crazy tears, leaving John to settle the bill once more.

And then, finally, after all the bilked meals and goods and services and cash, and in response to yet another one of my requests for cash, there is this:

We the undersigned agree to all the terms specified herein .

Gary will borrow the sum of $2200 from John .

The term of the loan is two years .

On the 27th of each month, Gary will pay to John $50.00 of the principal .

In addition, on a quarterly basis, i.e. every three months, on the 27th of the month, Gary will pay to John one quarter of the year’s worth of interest on the remaining principal. The rate of interest will equal the interest which is being paid at that time on a two-year United States Treasury Bill .

Gary further acknowledges that part of his stated purpose in borrowing the money is to embark in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis with a trained certified professional, preferably a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst M.D. He hereby gives his word that this was not merely a ploy to receive the loan but that he does indeed intend to proceed with this plan .

It gets easier.

It gets easier fast.

It is fashionable now to discredit psychoanalysis. The couch. The four or five days a week of narcissistic brooding. The reaching over to pluck Kleenex from the quilted tissue box beneath the African pietà thing. The penis-y Freudianism underlying it all. I have made fun of it myself in a novel called Absurdistan , my hero, the overweight and self-indulgent Misha Vainberg, son of a Russian oligarch, constantly calling his Park Avenue shrink while the real post-Soviet world disintegrates around him and people die.

The truth of it is that it is not for everyone. It is not for most people. It is difficult, painful, and tedious work. It feels, at first, like a diminution of power rendered upon a person who already feels powerless. It is a drain on the bank account and it takes away at least four hours a week that could be profitably spent looking oneself up on the World Wide Web. And, quite often, there is a seeming pointlessness to individual sessions that makes my days studying Talmud in Hebrew school brim with relative insight. But.

It saves my life. What more can I add to that?

I hit the couch four times a week. I mean that literally. I jump on that couch; I hear the thwack of my body against it, as if I’m saying to my analyst, who is partly a stand-in for John: Fuck you. I don’t need this. I’m more real than this talking. I’m more real than your silence. I hate my shrink so much. The smug, silent authority who charges me fifteen dollars a session. The money, the money, the money. I am always the keeper of accounts. And always will be.

“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say into his silence.

He’s ripping me off, there’s no doubt about it. The gray-haired, gray-bearded, native-born presence is taking money from me, fifteen dollars at a time. My mother was right about everything. This country was built on the coins of fools like me. “Hide your quarters,” she would warn me before my college friends came over to visit my apartment.

Thwack , the angry retort of my body against his couch.

Well, I’m not going to be different. I’m not going to be one of those people. The animal petters. The smilers. The helpers. The Benefactors. The sandwiches-for-the-homeless makers. Stop pushing me. Stop pushing me with your silence .

“What else comes to mind about that?” my analyst says after I quiet down.

What else comes to mind about that? I want to get up and beat you like you once beat me. I want to have that power over you. I want to be so big that all you can do is hide your head beneath my assault, offer me up your pretty little ears .

You with your innocent silence. You think I don’t see your rage? Every man has it. Every man, every boy, has the power to humiliate another with his strength .

“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say.

Four times a week, I have a lunch date with reality. I talk, he listens. Later I find out that he is half Anglo and half Armenian, just like J.Z., and I wonder if being in the company of a person who shares in at least some of her nucleic acids soothes me. In the intervening years, she, too, has become a doctor.

Reality. I’m learning to separate the real from the not. As soon as I say something out loud, as soon as I publicize it into the afghan-carpeted Park Avenue air, I realize it is not true. Or: It doesn’t have to be true.

I think you’re charging me too much.

I am a bad writer.

I should be with a woman like Pamela Sanders.