So after one of these seven-hour torture sessions, as I was standing, pinching my cottonwool cheek, in front of a smallish poster hanging crookedly on the wall of the building that housed the art studio where I was taking a painting class that semester, I met Rachel, who worked as a nurse in a hospital on Kissena Boulevard and who would sometimes come to class in her white coat and cap and we’d drink coffee together in the cafeteria—even her stockings were white—and she’d tell me about her brother the garbageman who made a lot more than she did and that was without any kind of degree at all, can you believe it? What, you’ve already got a degree, Rachel? Yeah, the art’s just for fun, just for myself, you can’t make a living that way, hey maybe I should go into garbage too before it’s too late, whatever you say, it’s a steady income.
“But wait, I thought you’d decided to be an artist,” said Rachel sternly.
“That’s this semester. Last semester I was a structural linguist.”
The poster read The Beatles: Let It Be—a documentary, show times, address. I didn’t know Rachel all that well then, otherwise I would have invited her. But who knows whether she would have gone with me or not: in the first place she worked nights, and in the second place the Bee Gees, not the Beatles, were her favorite group.
Aside from some parts of Manhattan, and Flushing, where we were living at the time, I didn’t know New York at all, and the film was being shown at somebody’s house in the Bronx, way the hell far away. And so I get off the subway two stops early by mistake, and I’m walking out in the street, and it’s already getting dark, then I go through some park, and it’s dark already, then I go along the street again and it’s really dark, and finally I find the street from the poster, and on this street there's an old two-story wooden house, and on the wall of the house is that same poster, only in color: Lennon in granny glasses, McCartney in a robber beard—Let It Be, in short, and I perk right up and even congratulate myself for not turning tail, although there in the park, to be honest, the thought did keep going round my mind: drop the whole idea and go home before it’s too late, after all it’s really dark, and I don’t know the neighborhood, I mean maybe they show Let It Be on TV once a month here, how should I know, I haven’t been in the States that long, I hardly even watch TV, who’s got the time.
But I go inside, and it’s loud and crazy and packed with students; doesn’t seem like anybody here knows me, and I don’t know anybody either; downstairs there are pinball machines, students standing around them, beers in hand; Buds are forty cents. “Finally,” I think, “finally I’m home; these people came to hear the Beatles, I mean it’s something sacred for them too, I mean if I hadn’t had the Beatles in my life, I’d be a total outcast here, total.”
Then some longhaired guy leaned over the railing from the second floor and yelled, “Hey down there it’s starting!” and I hurried upstairs.
In the darkened room, on a small TV screen, the exasperated Beatles were yapping at each other between songs, squabbling; Lennon and Yoko waltzed to “I, Me, Mine,” then at some point Harrison got a shock from his microphone. Then the film ended, the lights came on and the television went off. They were showing the film on a big videocassette—this was in the late seventies. And then some creep in granny glasses sidles up to me, and he’s little and wimpy and fidgety and curly-haired with a speech defect, and he says pensively, “You know it’s surprising; who would have guessed back in Hamburg in the late fifties what the Ba-Beatles would m-mean to the whole world in j-just a couple of years?”
“Yeah, really,” I agree. "Who could have guessed.”
“So where are you from?” asked the creep when he heard my accent.
“Russia.”
“No, seriously? My b-b-baba's from Russia,” said the creep.
“Seems like everybody's baba here is from Russia,” I answered.
“So how did you end up here, are you a student?” asked the creep.
It turned out that Mr. Wimp was studying music and working part-time in a store selling prints, frames, etc. When he found out that I painted, he livened up a little.
“Hey,” he shouted to his friend, who was entertaining some girls over on the couch by the television, “how about selling this guy a p-pair of p-paintings. he’s stud-stud-studying to be an artist.”
His friend burst out laughing, then said:
“We should suggest that to Stan on Monday.”
“Stan's my b-b-boss,” explained the creep.
I smiled politely.
“But tell me something,” asked the creep suddenly. "You probably thought that in America the streets were paved with gold or something, am I right?"
“No, I didn't think that,” I answered.
“No, I mean in the f-f-figurative sense.”
“I didn’t think it in the figurative sense either,” I said.
At this point the creep got up from his chair.
“Here's the thing,” he said. “In v-v-view of of the fact that you and I have rather different ba-backgrounds and interests, and also given that we belong to two v-vastly different cultures, I just can’t see that we have anything to ta-talk about, and so good-bye and good luck.”
“Bye,” I said, and the creep went and sat down with his friend and the two girls.
Suddenly somebody announced that in ten minutes there’d be another showing of the film. “No, uh-uh," I decided. “I’m not watching the Beatles yap at each other all over again.”
“Hmm,” I thought on the way home, “found yourself some real kindred spirits, didn’t you? He’s got a b-baba from Ba-berdichev and he’s nuts about the Ba-Beatles, and he’s Jewish, and a musician—but he’s got nothing to say to me. Just when, I wonder, will I ever feel like I belong?”
Really, when? Things just didn’t seem to click with me and Americans, however hard I tried. How to approach them, how to get started . . . damned if I knew. I suddenly recalled Sevka’s mama asking, “How are you going to play them, Pavlik?” But now it didn’t seem so idle a question. For example, literature, as a way to meet people and communicate with them, obviously didn’t work here. You can’t walk up to somebody at college and toss off, “I seem to recall that there was this passage in Hemingway . . .” I mean here they read Hemingway in high school. At home he was the idol of all the graduate engineering types. All you had to do was sashay around town with a copy of Islands in the Stream under your arm and everybody knew who you were and what you did. But here? What do they read here? Rachel always had her nose in some Harold Robbins book and even called him a genius. What Nancy read . . . I didn’t have a clue. The young emigre crowd read Sidney Sheldon and pored over What Color is Your Parachute?
About the young emigre crowd. I had, let’s be honest, mixed feelings toward them. On the one hand (to quote Woody Allen, to quote Groucho Marx, to quote Sigmund Freud, to quote . . . these days I can quote with the best of them) I didn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member, but on the other hand a guy’s got to feel like a member of something. So from time to time I would go to those Brighton Beach parties where cow-eyed young ladies of marriageable age swilled vodka, their fleshy feet pounding Bukhara carpets (brought with great pains from Odesa) to the beat of Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer while their swains flashed twenty-five dollar finger rings, fiddled with the keys to recently-acquired used Chryslers and Pontiacs, and lustfully eyed their chunky Terpsichores. After every such party I swore I’d never come to another one, but three weeks later, every time, I’d again find myself surrounded by my fellow countrymen and women. Once, half-crocked, I even got into one of my fellow countrywomen’s pants, a pleasant surprise which immediately led her to inquire in a throaty voice why I’d hidden my feelings from her all this time. I was about to answer that I hadn’t hidden anything at all, but deciding that that would sound rude, I tossed back half a glass of vodka on an empty stomach and invited my Terpsichore to a Led Zeppelin concert scheduled for early June at Madison Square Garden.
Here, to digress a little, I have to admit that this was a group I really, really liked. Sevka and I cranked the second Led Zeppelin album—he'd bought it for thirty rubles from a classmate’s old man—until it didn’t have a groove left on it. The needle skittered like crazy across all the tracks. Except for the last one, that is—a hardly-touched blues number called “Bring It on Home” where Robert Plant is trying to sound like some toothless old black man. That one was definitely for fans only. Like me. That is, I could listen to it no problem (I could listen to anything by Led Zep), while Sevka would always skip it because those blues set his teeth on edge, but anyway, everything else on the album, even those bits that we called the “vacuum-cleaner effects” in “Whole Lotta Love”, Sevka and I listened to till our heads exploded. In short, it came to where Sevka finally took the second Zeppelin, which was totally unplayable by that time—you could practically see through it in some spots—and nailed it to the wall, and there it hung all through ninth and tenth grade. So obviously, seeing our idols in the flesh was a major event. That’s why when I heard about their upcoming US tour I starting running from room to room like some halfwit, and insofar as my musical gifts would allow (which in the opinion of eyewitness Dora Mironovna, Grandpa’s second wife, were quite limited at best), doing Page on air guitar, Plant on vocals and Bonham on drums all at the same time; I crowned the whole performance with a St. Vitus’s dance on the kitchen table, after which I pulled myself together, jumped down, wrote out a check for the tickets and sent it to the address given on the radio.
My Terpsichore, alas, had never heard of Led Zeppelin, but she accepted my invitation with pleasure. Before the concert she and I decided to have a bite to eat in a little Chinese place right there on Seventh Avenue, and by eight o’clock we were joining the crowds besieging Madison Square Garden. “Life is tragedy for those who feel, and comedy for those who think,” I read to my Terpsichore from the fortune cookie.
“What’s yours?”
“I threw mine away. I never read them. What’s the point? How do they know what my life’s all about?” asked the girl.
In line outside the entrance, I suddenly took it into my head (I was in a good mood, felt like goofing around) to feed the police horse next to the barriers the last bits of my fortune cookie but the mustachioed guardian of law and order on its back shot me such a threatening glance from under his blue helmet that I quickly changed my mind. “What’s wrong with you, don’t you know horses don’t eat sweets?” admonished my Terpsichore, shaking her head, as we got to the escalator. She shook her head a lot that evening.
In the hallways of the Garden, on every floor, there was a brisk trade in programs, T-shirts, posters, photographs; a couple of years earlier I would have given my last kopeck for any of it without batting an eyelash. But not now. Now I couldn’t care less. Now, in a matter of mere minutes, something much much bigger was about to happen to me, much bigger than T-shirts and posters—it was them, their music, ooohh yeeaahh!
The heavy scent of marijuana filled the packed hall. The crowd was drinking beer, smoking. The whole scene looked more like a soccer match than a concert. Our seats were somewhere up in the rafters, behind the stage; dark netting hung between it and us. Somebody next to us was wondering out loud whether they’d raise the net when the concert started, or not. Some joker behind us yelled, “Lose the net! My brother’s blind from birth! I’m his seeing-eye dog!” Everybody around us started whistling. “Some seats,” my companion shook her head. I explained that I’d bought the tickets by mail, that they didn’t give me a choice, and that basically for fifteen dollars she should be thankful she could see anything at all. “You call this seeing?” my Terpsichore said with another shake of the head. I decided not to spoil the occasion for myself, not to react to her every little remark, but suggested instead that we move to some empty seats closer in. And that’s what we did.
By eight-thirty, finally, the lights went down, and the whole hall, which was now at a boiling point, started stamping and roaring. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice came from somewhere in the rafters, “the first concert in the North American tour . . .” Something on stage exploded, the spectators groaned. And then amidst the incessant pop and flash of press cameras from the first row, out onto the stage THEY came—slowly, almost lazily, Jimmy Page in an army hat and long white scarf, smoke wafting from his cigarette, blonde beast Robert Plant in a wine-red shirt and faded jeans, chubby John Bonham in a clown derby and a T-shirt with a printed bow tie. What John Paul Jones wore I can’t remember. Page hit the first chord, they all leapt up and shook their fists in the air. That the band was playing “The Song Remains the Same” was something I didn’t guess until the very end because the acoustics, with all the noise in the hall, were fairly mediocre. But that didn’t seem to bother anybody. The audience knew all the songs by heart. The crowd was going wild. Well, that is not quite the whole crowd. There was one exception. I don’t know whether it was the music or the sweet-and-sour pork that was just too heavy for my Terpsichore, but somewhere between “The Battle of Evermore” and “The Rain Song” I suddenly realized that the girl had fallen asleep. To Jimmy Page's guitar riffs! Is that an outrage or what? Definitely an outrage! And so I decided to find a seat somewhere away from my Terpsichore. And I found one. Far away. In a different section, and closer to the stage. And I made the right move, because John Paul Jones was already playing the introduction to “No Quarter.” I love that song. And after the concert I never called the Terpsichore again. And I never returned her calls. I mean really, what could I possibly have in common with somebody who falls asleep at a Led Zeppelin concert? Probably about as much as the Beatlemaniac from the Ba-bronx had with me. That is, absolutely nothing. The extremism of youth, you say? I suppose. You say, beggars can’t be choosers? Maybe some can’t, but I can. And there’s not a thing I can do about it. So, I was born to be the only member of my own personal club; other people have a tough time getting in. It was tough for the Terpsichore, for sure. Here’s how I remember her: lust in her eyes, a dry throaty laugh, and “ . . . horses don’t eat sweets.”
*
My whole family, and Rachel too, saw me off. Papa was carefully cradling a used meter for which he’d laid out 250 dollars cash. I guess I forgot to say that at some point he’d decided to say the hell with Wall Street and switch from an elevator to a cab. At least the route varies, and the money’s better, especially if you’ve got a radio.
“So we came all this way just so you could live three thousand miles from us?" he said.
“I’ll come visit, Papa,” I answered.
“You be sure to eat right,” said Mama.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” I said.
“But you know we might never see each other again given the state of my health,” said Grandpa.
“We’ll see each other, definitely,” I said. “Just don’t get sick on me.”
“What’s the harm in finding yourself a nice wife first,” said Dora Mironovna, “and then leaving.”
“I’ll find one out there,” I said.
“Enroll in school right away,” said Mama. “don’t waste time.”
“Choose a decent major.”
“Attorneys make a fine living.”
“And dentists don’t?”
“Who’s the girl?”
“We’ll help with the money.”
“Got to be American. She’s smiling. They're always smiling.”
“But she has sad eyes.”
“Why didn’t you bring her to meet us before now?”
“Hello. How are you?”
“Personally I’ve never been anyplace except for Pennsylvania and Maryland. No, actually, I was in Florida once, but I was six years old and don’t remember much about it. The only thing I remember is all the armadillo corpses strewn along the road to Fort Lauderdale, that’s where my grandma lived, but she doesn’t live there anymore. We, my brother and I, brought her here, to an old folks’ home. She was always a very social person; even now she’s got tons of friends. True, she thinks she has even more—she’s got Alzheimer's, every morning she gets acquainted all over again,” said Rachel.
