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I'll Never Change My Name Page 7
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When my father was twenty-three, he lost his own father, whom he adored, who was his hero, who represented the only person on earth for whom he had any sort of filial love. He died three years before I was born, and so I was named after him, my paternal grandfather, Valentin Chmerkovskiy.
Even my mother spoke about him with reverence. “This was the greatest man,” she would say, with a faraway look in her eyes. “I married your father because I was in love with your grandfather.”
Throughout my childhood, I was always more intimate with my mother, but more influenced by my dad. Just as my dad’s father was his hero, my father was mine. Honestly, even today I have a hard time with people telling me, “When I was growing up, Michael Jackson was my idol.” Or LeBron James, Fred Astaire, or Steve Jobs or whoever else they say, anyone in the world. Really? I’d think. Did you have a father growing up? How can your idol be anybody besides your father? I have to check myself, because not everybody has been fortunate enough to have the type of father that I have, or to benefit from the kind of relationship that I enjoy with my parents.
In Russian there’s a phrase that translates to “hands of gold” in English, and as applied to my grandfather it meant that everything he put his mind to turned out to be a great success. His passing was a blow that my dad never really recovered from—an emotional and spiritual blow, yes, definitely, but also a financial one. From that moment on, my father had to make his way on his own.
We were Russians in Ukraine, we spoke the Russian language at home, and I think that a little of the philosophical Russian sadness invaded all our souls. The citizens of Eastern Europe were well known for their brand of weary cynicism, and there were many Russian phrases that foretell the future as a disaster waiting to happen. Doomsday was always just around the corner. In the unlikely event that anything positive occurred, the standard response was to say, “tfoo, tfoo, tfoo,” spit over the shoulder, and knock on wood three times, just so as not to jinx it. I don’t think of it as superstition as much as paranoia. Every silver cloud had a gray lining and a slight sense of pessimism afflicted us all.
My dad’s answer to his father’s untimely death was to step into a phone booth and come back out as Superman. He did what everyone else in Ukraine was doing, which was to hustle relentlessly for the smallest scrap of advantage, the most minuscule amount of gain, but he did it in a supercharged way. When you’re just scraping by, life very quickly becomes a Darwinian game of survival of the fittest. Aleksandr Chmerkovskiy was fiercely determined to be the fittest of the fit. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
Among countless tales of borderline danger and risk of legal consequences, one stood out in particular. My father probably would not want me to tell this story, but I have to portray the extremes he went to in order to keep our family afloat. Somehow Pops and his cousin found out that in Poland there was a shortage of big industrial scales, the kind that weigh slabs of beef at meat packing plants. The contraptions were going for the equivalent of a hundred dollars a pop in Warsaw. That’s where the demand was, and my father looked around Odessa and discovered a source of supply close at hand.
He and his cousin went to the town’s central market after it closed for the night, bribed the sole security guard with a bottle of vodka, and grabbed all the scales they could, ten of them, as many as they could squeeze into a borrowed compact car. They drove the stolen trove to Poland and sold it off for a thousand bucks. They then bought as many Levi jeans as they could and drove back to Odessa to flip the merchandise.
From very early on, that kind of hustle was in me. It was like a heritage passed down from my father and grandfather. I was not scared. I would not back down. The hustle was in me because my father was in me, and I sure didn’t want to apologize for that.
I refused to judge him. It was never my place within the family to question anything my parents did. When I was a kid their favorite phrase was “Who asked you?”—which in Russian was, “Kto tebya sprashivayet?” The phrase had pretty much the same nuances in Russian as it did in English, and it would haunt me every time I sat down at the table.
“Mom, I don’t wanna eat this borscht.”
“Oh?” she would say. “Kto tevya sprashivayet?”
“Mom, I don’t wanna practice the violin.”
“Kto tevya sprashivayet?”
“I don’t wanna wear these hand-me-down clothes.”
“Kto tevya sprashivayet?”
Or whatever the issue in question, there was an automatic, universal response to any complaint.
“Kto tevya sprashivayet?” Who asked you, little one?
My folks have never understood the common American practice of parents becoming pals with their children. There was a distance between us that was filled with love, a distance that basically turned into bottomless respect as I grew older. The distance might have been based a little bit on fear, but it also bred a rock-hard sense of accountability. I was held responsible. I never wanted to disappoint or hurt my parents, who had given so much to me. I didn’t want to disappoint my father, didn’t want to anger my mother. That’s why, later in life, one of the greatest moments came when I realized I had become friends with my dad. It’s when I finally knew I was an adult.
My mom had just as much steel in her as my dad, but she hid it under a warmer, softer exterior. She was the quiet storm in our household. I have her borscht in my blood. She doesn’t get credit for anything when she should get credit for everything, literally everything. But my mom is the type of person who never made it about her. She was never front and center. That was her complexity and that was her insecurity. But she was always there for us, the steadfast anchor that my father, Maks, and I depended upon.
Her biggest fear was that the shadowy, illegal world of the Odessa hustle would somehow take over our lives. That, and the army. Somebody once said that the time not to become a parent was eighteen years before a war, and in Ukraine the prospect of war lurked everywhere, all the time. The authorities required all males to register for military service at age sixteen. The possibility of her sons being gobbled up by the army in Ukraine really frightened my mom. Her youngest brother had served in Afghanistan when the Soviets were there. He saw his best friend die in his arms and he returned to civilian life a shattered man.
My parents might have been the twin suns of the family, but there was another planet orbiting around them, a big one, a Jupiter to my Mars: my brother, Maksim.
We are different. That is what people fail to understand when they lump Maks and me together as the “Chmerkovskiy brothers.” Our differences do not diminish our deep love and loyalty, or interfere in any way with the crazy-ass level of respect I have for my older sibling. In fact, our differences probably only serve to emphasize our brotherly feelings. If we were exactly alike it would be no big deal to love each other, because it would be like loving a version of ourselves. But to love someone totally different from yourself, that takes strength.
Maybe it was because he spent six more years growing up in Ukraine than I did, and the experience left a deeper stamp on him, but it is not too much to say that darker currents run through my brother’s soul than run through mine, Russian currents, Odessa currents. He was Shakespeare’s Hamlet while I was more like Prince Hal. Or to put it more into Russian terms, he was Andrei and I was Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Later on, when they labeled Maks as “the bad boy of ballroom dance,” he didn’t object to the “bad” as much as he did to the “boy.”
We’re both alphas, and at times having two of us in the same household was like putting two wolverines in a cage. He’s a Capricorn, which is a goat, and I’m an Aries, which is a ram, so my parents had to watch this sheep and goat going at it time and time again. But when we weren’t fighting, our efforts were channeled in the same direction. Together we were unstoppable. We bulldozed through things. When the direction got muddy and we found ourselves bumping heads . . . Well, it still made for a pretty epic moment. When it comes to the two
of us, it has only ever been extremes.
Once we moved to the States, I developed a level of American optimism that Maks could never fully embrace. My father had a personal brand optimism, too, not so much hopefulness but confidence that consistency and hard work would pay off. He believed that as long as you show up and work hard, your minuses would turn into pluses and success was just around the corner.
My brother had a very different kind of optimism that came from a very different place. It was less about entitlement and more of a fundamental demand for fairness. That things should be fair was his only rule. There might have been a little more arrogance involved in Maks’s kind of confidence, a brashness and a sense of pride. He was fair but firm, very firm in his expectations. The good life for him represented a delayed payment for the sacrifices he had endured, and he believed he had endured many. But the luxuries that my brother dreamed of simply gave me anxiety.
Maks’s attitude: “I paid my motherfucking dues, I deserve whatever I go after, and I deserve it more than the guy next to me because I’ve worked harder than the guy next to me.”
All this is probably Val-style overanalyzing. Really, the main emotion I feel for Maks is a ferocious form of gratitude. He blazed my path. I watched him power through life’s heartaches and disappointments while I marched behind him, benefiting from the wisdom of hindsight. I was spared a lot of trouble because of all the things I learned from my brother’s experience.
Then again, I proved from a very early age that I was quite capable of creating trouble all by myself.
Odessa
My earliest memories of Odessa, the city in Ukraine where I was born, are of a courtyard. The crumbling old estate house where my family lived had been broken up into apartments after the Russian Revolution, but it featured a central space where kids played and adults gathered to smoke and gossip.
We were in Courtyard 27, on the corner of Baranova and Artema streets in the center of Odessa. Except for a brief moment when the sun passed over at noon, the courtyard was always in the shade, and I remember it being bathed in a weak, green light. Although in reality it was usually overflowing with life, for some reason in my mind’s eye I always see the big courtyard as deserted, a very romanticized Chernobyl-like scene, straight out of the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max.
In the middle of the space was an abandoned car, a rusted-out Zaporozhets that no one ever drove. It was just there. The Zaporozhets was the Soviet version of an economy compact, a “car of the people.” Manufactured in Ukraine, the “Zapo” was a notoriously shitty automobile, a “soap box on wheels.” Even so, people had a lot of affection for this poor man’s Lamborghini.
That broken-down car in the courtyard served as a fitting symbol for the permanently stalled Ukraine economy, in a country that seemed to be just rusting away. But the folks around me growing up were still very much vibrant and alive, and when a car stopped working it was typical of them to use it as a decoration or a jungle gym for kids.
The courtyard represented a real community, where my neighbors simply laughed at bad luck and trouble. People are what made my young life brighter, not the possessions that they did or didn’t have. The surroundings weren’t lavish, in fact they were pretty shitty, but I loved my home and was proud of it. I wouldn’t want to have grown up in any other place in the world. That paradox—bleak surroundings coupled with a ridiculous sense of pride—is the essence of my childhood. It taught me that circumstances can’t break your spirit.
In retrospect I can paint you a picture of a really great time in my life. The world of Odessa might be difficult to grasp for anyone who hasn’t experienced it. What outsiders see first is the bleak economic landscape. There was little money around, no jobs, zero opportunity. The streets of Odessa were like a series of dead ends, one after another, and if you traveled down enough of them, cynicism started flowing through your veins.
My dad was always hustling, finding any way he could to support his family. For a while he shuttled back and forth to Turkey, buying Levi denims and leather goods there to sell at the central street market back home. I grew up in a country where you had to stand on line for five hours to purchase a piece of chicken, where you were given little ration tickets to pick up a loaf of bread once a week, and where stores would run out of everyday basics all the time.
But a child sees life through a different lens. What I saw didn’t break me, but simply led me to appreciate my family. I grew up much more preoccupied with people than with possessions. I didn’t need a big-ass front yard with a picket fence, because I could play with my friends Yura and Andrei. We used our imagination to make the best of what we had. A shitty courtyard? No! A realm of games and magic and joy. The skill of using imagination to transform reality is still incredibly useful to me today.
Odessa is “The Pearl of the Black Sea,” a kind of St. Tropez made not for billionaires but for commoners, with a beautiful seaside atmosphere and gorgeous women everywhere. Paris might be a city where you fall in love, and New York is capital of the world, but Odessa is the most charming city in Eastern Europe, with St. Petersburg maybe a close second. The natives know that and believe that, and the pride of Odessans can be intense. In my heart, I have zero loyalty to Ukraine or to Russia. But I was born in an incredible fairy tale of a place, and that’s where I’m proud of being from, and not a foot outside of the city boundaries.
Everyone I have ever met who came from Odessa turned out to be vibrant and interesting. Natives affectionately refer to the place as “Odessa Mama,” which is also the title of a popular song. In conversation, they will always ask, “Have you been there? Oh, you have to go. You have to go! Odessa is the most wonderful place in the world!”
In the presence of a native don’t ever pronounce it like the town in Texas, don’t say it as though it rhymes with “Vanessa.” Put a little soulful James Brown spin to the middle syllable. “Ohd-yeah-sah.”
Various streets and neighborhoods in the city have completely different flavors—Romanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish influences from the south, Russian or the Caucasus from the north and west. You might even run into a vampire or two from nearby Transylvania. Much of the architecture has a French influence, which gives off a classic, stately vibe. Romance is always in the air. The seaside setting adds to the charm—and it is a sea, not an ocean, the Black Sea, locals are very definite about that.
Back then, unless you were some privileged political refugee like Angela Davis, the whole Russian empire wasn’t a popular place to move to as much as a place to escape from. The constant threat of war was one reason. In the past Odessa had been overrun by Turkish armies, Russian Cossacks, and Nazi stormtroopers—you name it. To this day the whole area remains in the middle of a tug of war between Russia and Ukraine.
Amid all this history and atmosphere I took my tiny place in the world on March 24, 1986, officially becoming my parents’ problem to deal with. Whether I’m remembering it through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia or because it really was the Pearl of the Black Sea, growing up in Odessa seemed like paradise to me. I guess that unless you’ve spent your early years abused or starving, all childhood days appear golden in hindsight.
The first specific incident I remember took place in Courtyard 27 when I was five. My brother was playing a Ukrainian kid’s game similar to Pogs, the bottle cap game that was so popular in the United States in the mid-1990s. Instead of cardboard milk bottle caps, we played with the wrappers of Turbo, a particular brand of gum. The packaging unfolded into little pictures of a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, or some other high-end sports car—anything but a Zaporozhets! In our eyes, anything foreign was way cooler than anything home-grown.
The game was to flatten the gum wrappers out, stack them, then hit the stack with the edge of your palm. As long as your own “car” landed right-side up, you got to collect all the other wrappers that flipped over. We kept going until one player had won all the cars. A simple, mindless game, but one that held endless fascination for us as ki
ds. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford to pay attention, as the phrase goes, so we had to make do with what we had, which was countless collections of discarded gum wrappers. But everything is relative, and Turbo was like currency to us. I played as if the stakes were life and death, a little competitor even as a young kid, already determined to win any contest that came my way.
That day I hung on a railing watching my brother play, and this being Ukraine naturally the railing was broken. On the other side was a one-story drop into a concrete basement entranceway, where trash got stacked up to be collected. Maks made a sudden move and backed into the broken railing. Like the action in a TV cartoon, the metal railing rebounded and catapulted me into the air. I went sailing, flying headfirst down into a pile of garbage, where I crashed onto a box that had a nail sticking out.
There was blood, a lot of it. It happened to be my mother’s birthday. It’s funny how you don’t remember all the times of soft kisses, the empty hours, or the safe and secure moments you had as a kid, but the bloody ones always remain sharp in your memory.
Having an older brother might have allowed me a little more leeway in the world of mischief, a little larger field of action. In his early teens Maks was already a miniature adult, old beyond his years. I skipped along behind him, always acting out, always curious and outgoing, always tiptoeing on the edge of danger. I was the one who went sailing over the railing. He was the one who walked his bleeding little brother up to our mother’s birthday party.
I was ambitious and very social, while he was way more timid, way more shy. I was the kid who cut up books and set the pages on fire under the dinner table while the family sat eating. Maks was the one who was reading those books. He was introverted. I was an extrovert.