Lads: A Memoir of Manhood

by Dave Itzkoff

Overview

"What I wanted after college was a job and my own apartment, but what I needed was a good comeuppance, and that’s what I got."

When Dave Itzkoff graduated from Princeton in 1998–the first member of his family to earn a college degree–he expected to be rewarded with a career, and a life, that mattered. Instead, he ended up convinced that he was selling the entire institution of manhood down the river.

After a series of personal and professional experiences stripped him of any lingering sense of entitlement, Itzkoff found himself working as an editor at Maxim, the pugnacious frontrunner in a new breed of men’s periodicals dubbed "lad magazines." There, he was initiated into a culture of heavily retouched girlie pictorials, dirty jokes, disingenuous sex advice, and shopping guides for expensive electronic gadgetry. And as Maxim continued its inexorable rise to become the most successful men’s magazine in modern publishing history, Itzkoff was left wondering what his work–and his life–really meant.
Lads is the hilarious, heartbreaking story of Dave Itzkoff's efforts to define himself as a man while working at a magazine that was purveying a vision of young manhood–a state of perpetual adolescence–that was seductive to all but viable for none. Lads takes us deep inside one young man’s struggle with identity, responsibility, and sexuality, in an unsparingly candid account of how men really relate to one another, as fathers and sons, as employers and employees, as colleagues and friends.

Lads is trenchant. Lads is perceptive. Lads is alarmingly funny. This is an unforgettable debut from a young writer of astounding talent.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588364319
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2004
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	321 KB

About the Author

Dave Itzkoff is an editor at Spin magazine. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Sunday Styles section, Details, Playboy, and the New York Press. He lives in New York City. This is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

1.
 
ALL GOOD THINGS
 
What I wanted after college was a job and my own apartment, but what I needed was a good comeuppance, and that’s what I got. A liberal arts education had provided me with many valuable lessons: Do not attempt to take the determinant of a nonsymmetrical matrix. Do not carry a balance on your credit card. Do not enroll in two consecutive semesters of any course taught by Joyce Carol Oates. Do not mistake two hundred and fifty years of consistency for proud tradition. And do not, under any circumstances, tell a girl that you’re attracted to her unless you’re absolutely certain that she reciprocates those feelings, and even then, do not do so unless she’s already confessed as much to you first. But only some of these lessons would prove useful outside the classroom, and I desperately needed to find out which.
 
The days leading up to graduation had been a flurry of activity, of neglecting to say good-bye to the people I hoped to stay in touch with, of constantly crossing paths with the people I prayed never to see again, and of trying to cram all my possessions into four equal-size cardboard boxes. And then it was over. Hours before the ceremony, I had been listening to varsity rowers–turned–investment bankers and mechanical engineers–turned–management consultants discuss how they were going to divide up the known universe. Now, in the time it took me to drive the length of the New Jersey Turnpike, I had completed my transformation into another shut-in who lived with his parents. All I had to show for the experience was a piece of paper written entirely in Latin, mounted on a plaque with my alma mater’s name at the bottom. Still, it wasn’t a total wash. “Don’t you get it?” a former roommate had explained to me. “Your résumé is going to say ‘Princeton’ on it. You automatically win.”
 
The meager amount of defiance I could muster at the time had been channeled into my entry in the senior class yearbook, the same stock picture of a yawning tiger that stood in for every student who didn’t bother to submit a photograph, accompanied by my insightful parting words for the class of 1998: a lyric from a Bob Dylan song that ended with the line “I’m goin’ back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.” To the extent that rock music can ever mean anything, it was a perfect encapsulation of my feelings in that final semester—my overwhelming urge to get as far away from institutional insularity as possible and return to Manhattan. It was more than just the city of my birth—it was the town where my fellow Jews had turned up their ample noses at my arriving ancestors and sentenced them to a life of sharecropping in the South, where previous generations of Princetonians had come to seek themselves in alcoholic binges and the arms of dubious women with names like Zelda, where no one cared if you succeeded and everyone hoped that you’d fail. I thought I had a score to settle, but the quotation was more of a boast than a battle plan. Instead of going back to New York City, I found myself driving parallel to it, and then past it, to resume my life in exile, in a suburb so sleepy and unremarkable that not even Billy Joel would have bothered to commemorate it in verse.
 
As a sort of graduation gift, my parents had offered me their assistance in transporting some of my belongings home, and when I pulled into the family garage they were waiting for me, shuffling things around, preparing to turn the space into a permanent shrine to the four years I spent apart from them.
 
“It’s the college boy,” my father bellowed. “Mama, come see the college boy!” This wasn’t his normal speaking voice, but a special tone he adopted when one of his children was within earshot.
 
“Aaaaay,” my mother called back, clapping her hands. She was every bit as wiry and willowy as he was big and burly. I was the first member of the family to have earned a college degree, and they were the last generation who hoped to see their children grow up to be smarter than they were.
 
“So, college boy, what did they teach you? Say something clever.”
 
“Do you think it would be all right if I just unpacked in peace?” I was carrying one of the four heavy boxes, and I was angry. It was too early to be feeling so weary—too early in the day, too early in the summer, too early in my life.
 
It had been seven years since my parents had moved the family to a town called New City, a community every bit as generic as the name suggested, and one they had never even heard of until they traveled there to buy their first SUV. After a combined ninety-seven years of living in New York, they had thrown in the towel. My father had a good year in business—his first ever, as far as any of us could recall—and decided it was his turn to acquire property, just as he had seen his friends do during the previous decade. “What is this rent?” went his carefully reasoned rationale. “Why should I be flushing my money down the toilet when I could be putting it into something I can own?” His irrational exuberance did not quite explain why he was taking out a thirty-year mortgage at the age of fifty-one.
 
For my sister, starting a new high school posed no problem and she adjusted marvelously, but for me, it was an adolescent nightmare more scarring than acne. My parents bought me whatever they could afford to help me adapt—new clothes, new car, new nose—but I made no enduring friendships, put down no roots. As badly as I wanted to get out of college, I had once wanted to get in just as intensely. And as sure as I was that I had no desire to return to suburbia, I was starting to feel with equal certainty that I would never escape it. “You know, that bedroom will always be yours,” my father would remind me during the occasional phone conversations we shared while I was away. “You can come back to it any time you want.” I know, Dad, and that’s what I’m afraid of!
 
Aside from the odor of cat urine that now permeated the air, that ammonia aroma that people who have lived in houses smelling of cat urine for several years never seem to notice, everything about my parents’ home was just the way I had left it, just the way I’d remembered it. Entering my own bedroom was like wiping away the last four years of my existence—the walls remained covered with posters and newspaper clippings from an era when my affections for Walt Disney movies and professional hockey could still be openly paraded, with the framed, approved learner’s permit from the day I passed my driving test—a genuine fucking accomplishment, given that it had taken me three tries. And there, in one corner of the room, was the same bed I had slept in since my boyhood, the same box frame that I had used since I had outgrown my crib, the same antique that I was too ashamed to ask my parents to replace, lest it call any further attention to the incongruous plight of a twenty-two-year-old sleeping in a five-year-old’s bed.
 
But in the days following my return, I began to perceive that certain things were different. My father had gained weight, which made him look more docile than he usually was; he hardly seemed to have any bones in his body, mean-spirited or otherwise. He was also spending considerably more time on the living room couch. That he was on the couch at all wasn’t news—since we had moved into the house, he and my mother had stopped sleeping in the same bed. There was no incident or argument that had resulted in this arrangement; it was just something that had become the routine. Besides, it was easier for both of them: She could rest quietly while he slept with the television on all night, another habit he had developed since we left the city.
 
Now he had expanded his viewing schedule from an already healthy 10.5 hours a day, from the time he got home from work in the evening to when he left for work the following morning, to an even more impressive twenty-three hours, being the full length of a day minus the time he got up to go to the bathroom or the refrigerator. There had also been a significant change in his attire; he had gone from wearing clothing to slogging around the house in ratty undershirts and cotton briefs. In practice there was surely something wrong with this behavior, but to see it set down on paper, it sure does sound like somebody’s idea of the American dream.
 
It was especially sad to see him like this knowing what he had been like in his prime. My father was a furrier, after his father, and after his father’s father, and it was not a vocation into which he entered willingly. As he had told me many times before, his line of work was not so much a calling as it was the result of having failed his freshman year of college—twice. Instead of attending his classes, he stayed in his dorm room the whole semester and played poker. Given a second chance, my father instead gambled away another term, at which point my grandfather forcibly removed him from school and drafted him into the family profession.

Editorial Reviews

After graduating from Princeton in 1998, Itzkoff entered the world of lad magazines, first at Details and then at Maxim. His book's central irony is that at the center of the hot babes-filled men's mag world, one of its editors can't get no satisfaction. So much of Itzkoff's time in New York is spent being teased, led on and rejected by neurotic women that the book sometimes resembles an ode to onanism. It's fantastic gallows humor; even in the bleakest scene-an attempted suicide-Itzkoff maintains his satirical flair, marveling that drugstores allow crying, inebriated customers to buy as many bottles of sleeping pills as they can carry. But beyond the pleasures and pains of reading a glint-eyed insider's account of the publishing world and its denizens, this is a more universal story of a troubled father-son relationship. Itzkoff's dad is a manic-depressive furrier struggling to stay straight and sane after a decades-long cocaine addiction. Itzkoff eventually leaves Maxim and reconciles with his father-the move from lads to dad a sign of a late-but-redemptive maturity. Unlike with MAD or National Lampoon, there are arguably few things of lasting value that have come out of Maxim's success so far, but Itzkoff may be the exception. Agent, Nina Collins. (Sept. 14) Forecast: Promotions targeting "gossip Web sites" and "men's trend-setting magazines" will attempt to market this book to the elusive lad-lit market. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Itzkoff, currently an editor at Spin magazine, has authored a modern-day coming-of-age story that recalls Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War and John Knowles's A Separate Peace. As in those classics, this work features someone struggling with issues of identity and trying to fit in while facing ridicule and criticism from peers, family, and friends. After graduating from Princeton in 1998, Itzkoff ends up first as an assistant to the editor in chief at Details, then as an editor at rival magazine Maxim. Not only does he have grave doubts about his ability to handle the various jobs that he was assigned, but he also questions the content of the very publications for which he is working. In addition, he doubts his ability to maintian a normal relationship with a woman and wrestles with issues of his own sexuality. Itzkoff's wit and candor give this memoir an edge. Besides being a captivating read, it provides insight into a niche of popular magazine publishing that experienced rapid growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Recommended for public libraries and academic libraries supporting media, publishing, or journalism programs. Valeda F. Dent, Hunter Coll. Lib., New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Driven by a series of demons he's eager to detail, debut memoirist Itzkoff lays bare the torments of his young, post-collegiate life as an aspiring editor in the testosterone-scented offices of men's magazine publishers. With his seething resentment, sexual desperation, and near-crippling insecurity, the author bears more than a passing resemblance to Philip Roth's Portnoy. This time, however, our narrator's Jewish mother is basically off the hook; it's Dad who is the ultimate source of their son's sufferings. Itzkoff bookends his coming-of-age tale with portraits of his father, a furrier who drowned disappointments in cocaine. When the story opens after Dave's graduation from Princeton in 1998, Dad has retired to the New Jersey suburbs to drift around the house in his underwear; at its close, he has nearly died of a drug overdose. Meanwhile, his son, determined not to be this kind of man, is bouncing around the Manhattan offices of men's magazines, first at Details, then Maxim. Working for these publications is less fulfilling that Itzkoff had imagined, however; full of loathing for himself and everyone around him, the author portrays his professional milieu as a waking nightmare of puerile torment and emotional distance. Offering plenty of dirt for those interested in four-year-old magazine gossip, the author isn't shy about describing the debauchery and flawed human relations that were the rule in his places of employ. In fact, he isn't shy about describing anything, including his difficulties with relationships, his various bouts of drug use, and the very specific details of an unpleasant session with a prostitute. At every possible moment, Itzkoff shoehorns in self-deprecating Jewishslurs, mentioning his high-school nose job at least twice. Taken as a whole, however, the author's tale has a not-unappealing nervous energy, and his jumpy, edgy prose will probably keep readers turning the pages. Surprisingly readable, despite the author's abundant disgust for himself and others.

Kirkus Reviews