Itzkoff - Lads: a memoir of manhood

LADS

A MEMOIR OF MANHOOD

Dave Itzkoff

V I L L A R D N E W Y O R K

Table of Contents

for my father
who else?

I have looked upon the world for four times seven years,
and since I could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury,
I never found man that knew how to love himself.

IAGO, Othello

ALL GOOD THINGS

What I wanted after college was a job and my own apartment, but what I needed was a good comeuppance, and thats 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 youre attracted to her unless youre absolutely certain that she reciprocates those feelings, and even then, do not do so unless shes 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 rowersturnedinvestment bankers and mechanical engineersturnedmanagement 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 maters name at the bottom. Still, it wasnt a total wash. Dont you get it? a former roommate had explained to me. Your rsum 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 didnt 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 Im goin back to New York City, I do believe Ive had enough. To the extent that rock music can ever mean anything, it was a perfect encapsulation of my feelings in that final semestermy 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 birthit 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 youd 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.

Its the college boy, my father bellowed. Mama, come see the college boy! This wasnt 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 wearytoo 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 businesshis first ever, as far as any of us could recalland 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 adaptnew clothes, new car, new nosebut 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 thats what Im 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 Id remembered it. Entering my own bedroom was like wiping away the last four years of my existencethe 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 learners permit from the day I passed my driving testa 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-olds 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 wasnt newssince 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.