Little Failure (40 page)

This is what I’m learning. Men and women, in various combinations of gender, are exchanging small bits of sexual information with their eyes, then rounding the next corner as if they had never met.
Yes
, my eyes say to nearly every woman who passes, but they only scowl and avert their eyes (
No
) or smile and look away (
No, but thanks for thinking of me
). Finally, on a soupy summer day, a young woman walking ahead of me lowers her shorts so that the curve of her posterior is visible. She turns around and flashes a brief, gap-toothed smile. She starts to walk faster. I can barely keep up. There are now several men on her trail, most of them young professionals in suits, all of us silent and needy. Every few blocks, she lowers her shorts a bit more, bringing out little bellows of disbelief from her followers. Suddenly she runs across the street and disappears into a doorway, laughing at us before slamming the door. We look around to discover we are on Avenue D, in the shadow of some fierce-looking projects. This is the farthest I have been from Little Neck, and I am never going back.

The greatest lies of our childhood are about who will keep us safe. And here an entire city is coming together with its fat, ugly arms around me. And here, for all the talk of muggers and blade swingers, no one will hit me. Because if there is a religion here, it is the one we’ve made. Parents, obey thy children in the Lord, for this is right.

The author has been rightfully crowned the King of Medieval Times. To the left is his blushing queen
.

B
ACK IN
Q
UEENS
, my parents sense that I’m going off the rails, but they’re actually quite nonviolent about it. My father patiently tries to diagram the workings of a combustion engine so that I may survive physics. My mother begs forgiveness from teachers on my behalf. Everything is being done to make sure I can recover grade-wise in time for law school. And while my mother is unhappy that I show up at three in the morning drunk—“Why, why didn’t you
call us if you were going to be nine hours late?” “I ran out of quarters, Mama!”—my parents did both grow up in Russia and understand how young adult life works. On the few occasions when I return from a virginal night out with a girl, my father will take time out from slicing up one of his prized heirloom tomatoes at the kitchen table to query, “
Nu
, are you a man yet?” He’ll lean in and smell the air around me. And I will sigh and say, “
Otstan’ ot menya
,” Leave me alone, and stomp, stomp, stomp upstairs to my
Playboys
and my
Essays That Worked for Law School
.

The elite among us, on the other hand, are waist-deep in
it
. There are parties all the time now. I am introduced to the best of Manhattan real estate. Lofts on Mercer Street, classic sixes along Amsterdam, a penthouse on West Tenth Street with wraparound views of that still-living, still-breathing animal Greenwich Village. A Battery Park City apartment so close to the towers of the World Trade Center that after a few joints I think I can spot my reflection within their steel-and-glass sheaths (not possible). There’s teenage canoodling everywhere. And why not? The apartments all seem to be abandoned by their adult owners. The parents are gone. Building rocketry in distant lands, advising the Croatian constitutional court, growing coffee in the highlands of Kigali. All these brilliant progenitors of all these beautiful people are time zones away. It never occurs to me that having goofy immigrant parents in uncool Little Neck is somehow preferable to the wild state of affairs so many of my coevals now find themselves debauched in.

And so, in a dozen empty apartments, among several dozen hairy people, there is the happy exchange of sex to which I am not privy. Pleasantly stoned, headed to the bathroom, I hear light moans and giggles from one direction, bedsprings from another. I stand in front of the door, aroused, confused, trying to summon my Dr. Ruth knowledge. That sounded like a vaginal orgasm. That one, clitoral for sure. Out on the terrace, the sun is setting over the flaming fire-lookout tower of Jefferson Market and Fellow-Sufferer John is dismantling
a turkey deli sandwich over a thing of beer. “Jew,
wakka-wakka
,” he says. “Hermeneutics.” And so on and so forth, for a good long while, until we take the Long Island Rail Road home.

Whom am I in love with? Let me count the girls. Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? I love indiscriminately and openly. A tall, classically pretty girl with circles under her eyes. I take her to the Central Park Zoo, my idea of romantic. She brings a friend. Then one of her long, alternative fingernails accidentally scratches my hand something terrible, a scar I still bear. There’s a fluffy buxom blonde with clear blue eyes who lives in a Village townhouse with her divorced mother. Mama opens the door, appraises my harmlessness, and allows Fluffy out for a date to the Bronx Zoo, where I buy her an elephant we name Gandhi. I take her to a French restaurant in midtown. “Let’s just be friends.” There’s Sara whom I have tantric sex with in metaphysics class. There’s a tall Korean girl, Jen, who lets me massage her feet. “You have to be greedy, selfish, and immoral to survive in this lifetime” is Jen’s yearbook quote. Mine: “ ‘Virtue has never been as respectable as money’—Mark Twain.” Soul mates. There’s curly-haired, skinny Alana (not her real name), whose Fifth Avenue apartment and permissive parents I will soon appropriate for my first novel. I spend many nights, head spinning, on her spare couch, next to a bathroom smelling of kitty litter and two actual cats, Midnight and Cinnamon. Past midnight, lovesick, Alana comfortable in her big bed elsewhere, I once again stare out of the kitchen window next to my couch at the spire of a brown Gothic church. A mutual friend of ours has told me that Alana thinks my nose is too big, so that’s not going to happen. Interesting about the nose: My father had always called me Yid-face, but he had said my lips were the problem. Now the nose, too. Anyway, I am in an apartment full of brilliant Manhattanites, next to a box of kitty litter, and outside a moon hovers over the church and the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue at the juncture where it leads up to the dramatically European
flourish of the Washington Square Arch. The famous street is empty save for one beat-up old taxi. It is going to snow soon.

But someone does love me. His name is Paulie.
^*
He’s in his forties. I have an after-school job working for his ____
^†
company in the meatpacking part of town, although it’s hard to tell what exactly I’m supposed to be doing there. To bait me into his middle-aged clutches, Paulie puts up an advertisement on the Stuyvesant work board asking for a smart teenager and promising six dollars an hour. He first hires me and a Russian girl, but the Russian girl smells of meat and sweat, so she lasts only a few days. At my behest Paulie hires Alana, too, but it’s not her he wants! It’s me! Half of our days are spent tearing down city streets in his car as he leans out the window and shouts in his ____ accent
^‡
to passing women, “Hey, beau-tee-ful! Jew got a nice ass! Don’t deny it!” Over the course of several years, we get lucky, let’s say, never. “I’m no fag,” Paulie says, brushing aside the curly remains of his dyed hair, but he does talk about how he would like to bend me over the desk and do ____ and ____ to my ass.

I am incredibly flattered by Paulie’s attentions. Although he’s much older, he also wants to become a writer someday, maybe chronicle his escape from ____
^§
on a raft with the help of the CIA. At work, I’m in charge of getting lunch for the whole crew, mainly burgers from Hector’s Cafe or arroz con pollo from the Dominican place. He yells at me when I get it wrong, but when I get it right he calls me Prince Pineapple, along with some snatches of Spanish. “Nice going, Prince Pineapple,
puta maricón
.” I can smile for an hour after he says that. One day Paulie takes me down to Florida for a little vacation, a jaunt that will inspire a long, scary chapter of my first novel. On the morning
before I leave, my father sits next to me on the couch while my mother rifles through the bag I’ve packed for Florida to make sure I have my asthma inhaler and sunscreen. “Your boss …,” my father says. He sighs. I flex my white winter toes.
Does Papa suspect that my boss wants to pork me?
“Sometimes,” my father says, “I’m jealous of Paulie because he seems like more of a father to you than I am.”

“Oh, no,” I say, “please. You’re my father.”

Several days later Paulie and I are sitting in a rented Buick in front of a deluxe Sarasota condo, his hand on my knee. Paulie points at the condo. He looks exhausted from pursuing me, as exhausted as I would be pursuing all those girls back at Stuy if I were his age. “Look,” he says. “That condo up there can be yours. Your family can use it anytime. Think of how happy you’ll make your parents. I just want …” And his hand creeps up my thigh.

I laugh the way girls laugh when I try to put the moves on them, and then I take his hand off my thigh, feeling its heat and heft. I’m a little scared and a little happy that my second father takes such an interest in me. If only I were at all turned on by him. This is just like one of those Tolstoy novels where X loves Y, but Y loves Z.

There’s a picture from that trip with someone’s arm over my shoulder. Not Paulie’s, but the Queen’s. I am standing there, curly haired, wearing some kind of Mexican blanket pullover along with the paper crown of Medieval Times, a dinner-and-jousting-tournament place near Orlando. The Queen looks like an advanced teenager in full medieval regalia. Off to the side, Paulie is laughing at me, making motions with his hand to show what I should do to Her Highness. My shoulders are slightly hunched, arms dangling beneath them, because it’s unusual for a woman to touch me, but my off-white, Soviet-toothed smile tells me that I am loved. It is one of the happiest moments of my life to date.