I'll Never Change My Name Read online

  I was also the one who got kicked out of kindergarten after two weeks. Kindergarten! How in the fuck do you misbehave badly enough to be expelled from kindergarten?

  I was guilty of multiple offenses, it turned out, a pretty long rap sheet for a five-year-old. I was a little kid decked out in denim head to toe, courtesy of my father’s Turkey-to-Odessa Levi hustle. I thought I was hot shit. During recess one day a teacher found me swinging on the schoolyard gate, poking my hand out to adults passing by on the sidewalk.

  “Spare change? Spare any change?”

  The school authorities called my moms and pops. “Why is your kid begging during recess?”

  Unfortunately for me, my parents had the same question, one that I’d eventually have to explain, either after the inevitable ass-whupping or before. Maybe I had once seen a panhandler on the street somewhere. Maybe it was a form of street art for me. At any rate, the incident represented an early introduction to the joys of paid performance.

  It was also strike one according to the kindergarten authorities. Strike two came when they found me tying my schoolmates together with their own tights, the long stockings that Ukrainian youngsters traditionally wear. I would pull a kid’s tights up from the waistband, stretch them out, and knot them to another kid’s before anyone knew what was happening. My poor, innocent schoolmates had never been pranked precisely in that way before. There were tears.

  Tears also came with strike three, the stunt that got me officially expelled from kindergarten, when I took to speeding on the merry-go-round and—potentially, allegedly, your honor, I reserve the right not to incriminate myself—I may or may not have pushed kids off at high velocity.

  “Mr. Chmerkovskiy, we’re afraid that your son Valentin plays too rough with the other children. We are going to have to send him home.”

  That was me. I was not the Fast and Furious but the fast and curious, and there was very little logical reason for anything I did. “Keep it moving,” was always my motto. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but I was a discoverer of trouble, a busy little man fascinated with adventure.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE IN MY YOUNG LIFE BESIDES TROUBLE, though, just a hint of light amid the doom-and-gloom backdrop of the Russian soul, like a door cracked slightly open in a prison. Opportunity entered my life around the same time I got expelled from kindergarten. The scar from my fall into the garbage pit probably wasn’t yet fully healed.

  I was riding in the family’s beat-up Soviet truck with my father and his cousin, Joseyk. Like every other adult male relative we always called him “uncle.” My uncle Joseyk was just out of prison, where he had served time for buying items overseas for a certain price and then reselling them in the Soviet Union for a little bit more—a seven-year stretch for embracing the simplest, most fundamental concept of capitalism. What America was built upon landed him in prison.

  To my young eyes Uncle Joseyk was as cool as Frank Sinatra. Beyond the fact that he had spent time in prison—and prison in the Soviet Union was no joke—he had a flair about him, a charisma that was infectious, a quality that in current slang would be called “swag.” Uncle Joseyk represented the first time I discovered swag in action. He had spent years in lockup but somehow knew his way around a jazz piano, and could wail out on an accordion, too.

  Riding in the backseat, I didn’t have a thought in my head, I was just idly singing along with whatever song was on the radio. A popular Russian rock band, Lyube (“Любэ”) played its hit tune, “Батька Махно.” It was the national reciprocal of U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” and like much of Soviet rock music those days, the lyrics had a lot of military references. This was during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S.S.R.’s version of Vietnam, where the army took a huge hit.

  The song kicked off with an army trumpet and a gunshot, then segued into a stomping melody that sounded like a group singalong in a bar. The lead vocalist, Nikolay Rastorguyev, pronounced dark-shit sentiments somewhat along these lines:

  In Afghanistan you die slowly alongside your friends . . .

  I was humming along to lyrics I didn’t understand. My uncle turned his head to look at me, listened for a beat, then nudged my dad.

  “Hey, he’s really got potential,” my uncle said.

  Pops snorted in disbelief. “What? Valya? Potential in singing? Based on what?”

  In Russian culture, the knee-jerk response was to question everything, always with a slight hint of pessimism.

  “Yeah, I can hear it,” Joseyk said. “He has pitch. He was singing along in tune.”

  “All right, okay, he has pitch. So what?”

  “You should try him out for music school.”

  My father shrugged him off, going back to worrying about the million other problems he had playing in his mind.

  If you said “music school” in Odessa, everyone knew what you were talking about: the National Academy of Music, housed in a beautiful old Beaux Arts building in the center of town. I always consider Odessa to be the Eastern European equivalent of New Orleans. There was always a lot of music around, not only classical but also ethnic, pop, and especially jazz—the city was known as the “Jazz Capital of Russia.” The families of George Gershwin and Bob Dylan both emigrated to America from there.

  A couple of knockaround Odessa dudes driving in an old beater of a truck, fantasizing “you should try him out for music school”—that would be like two street guys who were living a poverty-stricken existence in the Bronx, say, thinking they could dash out and enroll a kid in a music program. Not just any music program, either, not something remotely possible, but rather something ultra-prestigious and wildly out of reach, like disdaining New York’s Fame high school, LaGuardia, and instead aiming directly for Juilliard.

  Why not? Why not upgrade your rust-bucket Zaporozhets, and not for a Ford but for a Bentley? Maybe because it’s totally impossible?

  My father broke his silence. “How would we do this?” he asked my uncle.

  That moment changed my life. Whatever it is that gives somebody a fresh perspective, that’s what makes things happen, that’s what sends people on a unique path. Everybody has different perspectives at different times. My dad was a little more cynical in his outlook, maybe because he was preoccupied with scratching out a living for his family. So he didn’t even hear my pitch-perfect humming in the backseat. But my uncle did, because he came to it from a perspective that was slightly different from my father’s.

  My father could be forgiven, since it wasn’t as if his younger son was singing all day long. In fact, as a kid I rarely ever sang. From my dad’s perspective, I wasn’t musical. If anything, my parents were afraid that I was going to end up becoming some sort of extreme sports maniac, a BMX or motocross rider, something like that, because I hurt myself all the time as a kid, falling off shit, running into things.

  In that moment, Uncle Joseyk could have heard me and said nothing. As rare as talent itself is, I think it’s almost as rare for a person to recognize and encourage someone else’s talent.

  But my uncle called me out, and then it became a matter of the simple domino effect that happens whenever someone decides to believe in another person. It’s why today I instinctively and consciously try to seize every opportunity to encourage someone else to feel as though they can do anything they want to do. Even if they don’t wind up pursuing their dream, for a moment they’ll feel good because someone else sees a possibility in them, just as Uncle Joseyk saw a possibility in me.

  The next week, miracle of miracles, my father managed to sign me up for an audition at the Music Academy. My mom dressed me up in the nicest, most formal clothes I had, the outfit I wore whenever there was a formal occasion. I don’t remember asking questions, and I don’t remember getting any answers. That wasn’t the way in our family. As a kid I was expected simply to show up and take care of business, with no input from yours truly required.

  We went to the Music Academy as a family, but I had to head into the audition room a
lone. I’m sure there were plenty of stage parents who drilled and drilled their children for the perfect performance. Pops and my mom were more casual: Here you are . . . Do your best . . . Let’s see what happens!

  I met the instructor, a severe woman with hair wrapped so tightly in a bun that it pulled the features of her face backward. Some folks in Beverly Hills would pay top dollar for that kind of skin treatment.

  She plunked out an “A” on a piano and nodded at me. I vocalized an A note as best I could, singing it at the top of my lungs. She sounded a few more notes for me to sing, then cupped her hands and clapped out a rhythm that I had to repeat, which I did precisely. For my grand audition finale, she asked me to sing a song of my choice. So I did the tune that I had hummed along with in the car with my uncle.

  In Afghanistan the skies are black with smoke

  There I was, belting out lyrics harsh enough to traumatize any kid, with so much heart and conviction that I won the room over and I knew it. The teacher conferred in whispers with a balding administrator who had come in while I was singing. Everyone on that faculty looked like what they were—Soviet-era music school teachers. I finished and stood there, with a normal six-year-old’s empty expression on my face, like a motel with a neon “Vacancy” sign burning out front.

  I don’t know if they found me comedic, but charisma and a pair of little brass balls played a big role, since I definitely wasn’t the most talented kid auditioning that day. Ms. Hair Bun spoke some more to Baldy, then turned to me.

  “What instrument would you like to play?” she asked.

  She caught me off guard. My mind rattled through the possibilities. Guitar? Nuh-uh. The Music Academy definitely wasn’t a Jimi Hendrix sort of place. Something small and manageable, like a flute, maybe, but that was too girly.

  “Violin,” I said, unknowingly sealing my fate for the next decade or so.

  Somehow out of nowhere I had just been accepted into a world-class music school. I believe it was the first time my parents discovered their kid was special.

  Back at home, they asked me, “Why did you say you wanted to play the violin? None of us play it and you’ve never in your life ever held one.”

  To which I replied, “Can you see me carrying a piano to school every day?” I don’t think so, I thought to myself, sarcasm that I would never say out loud to my parents.

  I had chosen one of the smallest instruments, which ended up being one of the hardest to learn. My logic was to try to make my life easier, but instead I made it incredibly more difficult. Little did I know that the Academy required piano study for all students, because piano was how we learned solfeggio, otherwise known as music theory.

  MY BEGINNING EFFORTS WERE PAINFUL, BOTH FOR ME AND FOR everyone else with ears in the vicinity. I’ve read that clinical physiologists have determined that out of all musical instruments the violin is the closest in sound to a human voice, which was why it has such an eerie ability to trigger extreme depths of emotion. Listeners can hear the violin crying, but when they are subjected to the attempts of a six-year-old beginner, innocent bystanders can feel like crying themselves. My sound fell somewhere between very bad singing and a cat being strangled.

  The rule was that I had to practice for an hour every day after school. Scales repeated endlessly easily qualify as among the most annoying sounds in the world. We were crowded into a two-room apartment, where my parents slept on the foldout couch in the living room, and where Maks and I had our bunk beds in a tiny space nearby. So there was no place to run, no place to flee from my wretched practicing.

  “Okay, you see where the clock is now?” my parents (usually my mom) would ask. “If you practice until three you can go outside and play.”

  I could hear other kids in the courtyard having fun, and they could hear me inside playing scales. I kept one eye on the clock and one eye on the sheet music on the stand in front of me. To the T, to the minute, to the absolute second that three o’clock came I’d drop the violin as though it were on fire and rush my ass outside to be a regular kid again. It didn’t matter if I was in mid-vibrato—when the big hand hit the twelve I was gone quicker than Usain Bolt at the 2016 Olympics. I wouldn’t even bother to put the violin in its case, I’d just toss it on the bed and head right out.

  So what happened next was really my fault. I was outside after practice one day when I heard a surprised shout from inside our apartment. Apparently Maks had been reading and was so focused on his book that he sat on my violin and crushed it. The instrument wasn’t exactly a Stradivarius, but it was the local version of the best, costing a lot more than we could afford to spend. My parents were furious at the loss. Maks caught an ass whooping, and I tried my best to look as though I felt bad.

  “Oh, damn,” I said mournfully, while really, on the down-low, I was the happiest kid in the world, because the accident meant that practice would be put off indefinitely. But I underestimated my parents, because they came up with a new violin for me in two days. That’s just the way they were. If you were their kid and you had committed to something, you had to live up to your responsibilities. Not only did I have to start practicing again after a too-short break, I was now sentenced to make up for the time I lost, practicing for two hours a day instead of one.

  After years of study I finally came to believe that the ability to create music is almost a superpower. That’s why I feel music education is so important for children. It doesn’t matter whether they become a CEO, an insurance salesperson, or a garbage man, it’s important for kids to develop their “passion palate”—enthusiasms that will further their individuality and help them find happiness and fulfillment.

  There was music on the Academy’s syllabus, obviously, but there were also classes in math, science, and language. It was a prestigious musical institution that still emphasized the fundamentals of learning. The glorious architectural monument of a building added a sense of romance to ordinary school days.

  I entered when I was six and remained for two years, leaving only when our family immigrated to the States. This was the first time that my path diverged from Maks’s, who attended a school focused mainly on math and science.

  I loved being there. The Academy had classes for first grade through twelfth, and I would always hang out on the upper floors, where the older high school students studied. I was up there so often they adopted me as a kind of little brother.

  Maks was walking me to school one day and we saw a pair of tough-looking tenth graders heading toward us. They looked menacing to him, and when he told the story later, my brother always emphasized how nervous he became.

  “Look at these two,” he muttered to me. “We’re definitely going to get jumped here.”

  Before I could respond, the older kids broke out in smiles. “Hey, Val, what’s up?”

  They were my friends from the upper floors of the Music Academy. “This is my brother, Maks,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you!” they responded, slapping me five as they headed on past.

  Walking away, I couldn’t help teasing my brother. “I guess we didn’t get a beatdown after all.”

  If I hadn’t been such an empty-headed little kid during the incident, I might have realized that my relationship with Maks was beginning to change. We were moving in different directions. Though I was a solid ten inches shorter than my brother back then, I always packed a harder punch.

  Those were golden days, and way before ballroom dance, hip-hop, or Hollywood came into my life, I had already been deeply and permanently influenced by “Odessa Mama,” a city that served as a third parent to me.

  When I finally got to America, no one understood where I was coming from. Friends I met in Brooklyn couldn’t grasp it, in New Jersey no one knew, and in West Hollywood they definitely didn’t know. People from Odessa are like people from New Orleans—we’re proud of our heritage, and we speak differently, act differently, create differently. We infuse our conversation with comedy and sarcasm and jazz, and we carry our hometown with
us wherever we go.

  Immigrant

  The decision to leave Odessa didn’t come easily for my family. In recent times there were essentially two waves of Russian immigration to America. The first came in the 1970s, when the government loosened the emigration rules for Jewish “refuseniks”—outcasts, poets, and activists who spoke out against the Soviet society. The second started when Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders in the early 1990s officially ending totalitarian rule and giving independence to fourteen Soviet republics, Ukraine being one of them.

  I hope that last development can help clear up how I could be a Russian coming from Ukraine. The U.S.S.R. was like the U.S., in that it was made up of numerous supposedly separate-but-united states. (Critics challenged that idea, saying, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—four words, four lies.”) In America, how many New Yorkers live in New Jersey, and how many New Jerseyans live in New York? In the same way, a lot of Russians lived in Ukraine. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was as if New Jersey had now been made a separate country.

  My father was in his late teens in the 1970s, and at that time he saw those who left simply as traitors, betraying the ideals of national pride and loyalty. He was always an idealistic man, especially in his youth. For him, the sentiment back then was, We’re proud Russians, so we are gonna stick it out no matter what.

  Years later, with the Russian economy thoroughly in the toilet, things were different. It was time to leave. Now my dad was a parent of two and no longer a kid in his teens. He left behind that prideful, patriotic, kneejerk response in favor of a little more common sense. There’s no opportunity here, and it’s not a safe environment to raise the children—it has to be better somewhere else. That somewhere else was the United States of America.

  There’s heaven, and right next door is America, and that’s how Eastern Europeans looked at it. For anyone to dream about going to the States was a laughable ambition. Contrary to popular belief, it’s really hard to get to come to America. The immigration authorities don’t just hand out visas like red roses.