1. First There was nothing, just a piece of Hubba Bubba. 2. And then it popped and the earth formed. 3. And the sugar of it turned into dust. 4. Just one piece of Nutra Sweet turned into a man.
God creates Adam (or, rather, Madman) and gives him a garden called Cleaveland, referring, I’m guessing, both to the unsuccessful city in Ohio and Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife”).
In subsequent chapters there are references to Wendy’s famous Where’s the Beef? campaign, Mister Rogers, Howard Cosell, Playboy magazine, and the Waldbaum’s supermarket chain. Every pop reference I have learned from the Zenith and elsewhere is crammed into use, alongside poor Jerry Himmelstein. The Twelve Gnuish Tribes multiply—“Princess Leia gave him Shlomo, Shlemazel, Shmuck, Nudnik, Dino, Gloria, Dror, Virginia, Jolly and Jim”—and somehow end up in Australia instead of Egypt.
Exodus becomes Sexodus. Henry Miller would have been proud. Moses is renamed Mishugana, and instead of a Burning Bush there is the Burning Television. God sends the Australians twelve plagues, the last one of which is Rabbi Sofer, SSSQ’s potbellied Hebrew principal and strongman, “and the Australians couldn’t take it anymore and they said go, go and take Rabbi Sofer with you.” The Gnuish tribes make their way from Australia to Hawaii, “the land of silk and money.” The fifth commandment handed down by the Gnuish God is simple: “Abuse your teachers.”
And G-d spoke: Don’t worry about ethics, this does not however mean you can act like John Macaenroe. Do not pray to statues of Michael Jackson or Tom Sellek: I am your G-d. If you see a blind man do not cheat him: for example do not sell him cocaine when it is really angel dust. Don’t swear in the name of Brook Shields, by doing so you are insulting my name.
And G-d continued: Whatever form of government you have tax the people highly and unfairly. You are not to become emotionally involved with Boy George or his mother. Allow abortion because what if someone like Jerry Himmelstein is born in such cases it is wise to say the two parents agoofed. And what if a natural disaster like Eedo Kaplan [an Israeli boy who harasses the two Russian girls in school] is born? Think about it. Here are things you should not crossbreed …
A long list that includes “Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Ferraro” and ends, sadly, with “Gary Gnu and any Female Gnu” and then the same words with which my father would end all of his Planet of the Yids tales: “To be continued.”
Once it is finished I read it over and over again. I cannot sleep. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. The next day in school I wait impatiently until recess, and then unfurl my Gnorah for a few kids, mindful of Rabbi Sofer’s thick presence. More children gather around me. With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric. By the final period, the Gnorah has been passed around the entire school. By the next day, it is being quoted in the boys’ bathroom, the center of power. Even Jerry Himmelstein seems pleased by my disgustingly cruel remarks about him. Not that I care. And as, in class, we recite mindlessly about the prophets and the women who loved them, as we chant things that mean nothing to us, as Rabbi Sofer waddles around with his bullhorn telling us what bad children we are, me and my small band of — wait, are they really my friends? — we laugh and rejoice in the Gnuish tribes and their hard, horny Sexodus from Australia and their worship of the much-loved Brooke Shields, who, rumor has it, really might be Jewish, or Gnuish, or whatever.
The Gnorah marks the end of Russian as my primary tongue and the beginning of my true assimilation into American English. Back in my stuffy bedroom in Little Neck, I eagerly jot down the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire (the HGE), which is built on solidly Republican principles. The love of two countries, America and Israel, the love of the smooth, always laughing, unconcerned-seeming Reagan, the love of unfettered capitalism (even though my father works for the government and my mother for a nonprofit), the love of the mighty Republican Party is a way for me to share something with my father. To my well-thumbed Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine I have added a subscription to the National Review. William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative magazine ostensibly has fewer space monsters between its covers than Isaac Asimov’s, but even though I can understand maybe 50 percent of the words Buckley and his friends use, I can already discern the angry, unhappy rhetoric about certain kinds of people that so neatly mirrors our own. On the cover of the Holy Gnuish Constitution I draw a set of scales marked “Welfare” and “Military Spending,” tipping resolutely toward the latter. Take that, you welfare queens with your Cadillacs. And then another unbidden delight. Having established my Republican bona fides by subscribing to the National Review, I am sent a thick card featuring an American eagle sitting upon two rifles. Even though I am too young to own a gun and to be able to shoot a black person on the subway who might rob me (I’ve actually taken the subway maybe thrice thus far), I am being welcomed, with great Second Amendment fanfare, into the National Rifle Association.
At SSSQ, another overly imaginative boy named David creates the Imperial Lands of David (the ILD), mirroring the Democratic politics to which most Queens Jewish kids’ parents subscribe. He calls himself the Mighty Khan Caesar. As a matter of course, the Holy Gnuish Empire and the Imperial Lands of David go to war. David and I talk peace treaties and how we will divide the known universe between us in the same way Spain and Portugal once split the globe according to the Treaty of Zaragoza. As we settle our foreign affairs, our followers run around the SSSQ gym stacked with prayer books, where in the morning we sing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and, with a feeling that almost brings us to tears, the “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. But today the kids are not crying out about Nefesh Yehudi (“the Jewish soul”). They are chanting my anthem (“Nefesh Gnushi …”) and hoisting my flag, the drawing of a gnu standing resplendent in the African veldt, photocopied from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
Until high school, I will never be called Gary again. I am Gary Gnu or just Gnu. Even the teachers refer to me as such. One of them, in a bid to forgo teaching for a day, decides to devote the class periods to the Constitution of the Holy Gnuish Empire. This development makes me so excited I have an asthma attack that lasts an entire week. The children, my Gnuish representatives, carry on while in his sickbed the Gnuish leader, mesmerized by the Lightman reconstituting himself in his closet, wheezes his way into some future world, some future personality.
Three years from now we will graduate, and a yearbook will be issued. There will be humorous quotes about each of the students — for example, the song titles that best personify us. The three other Russian children will get quotes solely about their Russianness (e.g., favorite song: “Back in the U.S.S.R.”), but mine will be about my Republicanism or my strangeness (“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”).
Better, stronger, faster.
But not really, of course. As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn’t particularly give a damn. And as the hoopla around my Gnuish Empire dies down, a beefy kid whose last name means both “Oak” and “Dullard” in Russian waddles over to me and says, “Hey, Gnu. What do you listen to? The classical music station?” And I begin to protest, because I’ve learned never to talk about high culture in public nor mention the fact that both my parents have musical training. “I don’t know about classical music!” I say, loudly, too loudly. “I have the Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger cassette tape and the Cyndi Lauper!”