Gross - The Mensch Handbook: How to Embrace Your Inner Stud and Conquer the Big City

Copyright 2014 by Max Gross

Originally published as From Schlub to Stud in 2008

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by David Sankey

Cover photo credit Thinkstock

ISBN: 978-1-62914-397-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-046-4

Printed in China

To my parentswho never loved me enough!

Zhlub

Zhlob

Pronounced ZHLUB or ZHLAWB, to rhyme with rub or daub. From Slavic: zhlob , coarse fellow.

1. An intensive, ill-mannered person. He acts like a zhlub , that zhlub .

2. A clumsy, gauche, graceless person. Vassar-Shmassar, the girls still a zhlub .

3. An oaf, a yokel, a bumpkin. What can you expect from such a zhlub ?!

A Jew came running into a railway station, the perspiration pouring down his face, panting and crying, Stop, train, stop!

A zhlub said, Whats the matter?

I missed my train! the man exclaimed. By twenty measly seconds! The way youre carrying on, said the zhlub , one would think you missed it by an hour!

See also KLUTZ, BULVON, GRAUB.

Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish

Table of Contents

Introduction

Not too long ago, I went out on an assignment in Brooklyn with a photographer. There might have been something forlorn or melancholy or just plain exhausted about the look on my face because as I slumped down in the passengers side of the photographers van, he said, Max, you look tired.

A week earlier, my girlfriend had told me that she didnt think our relationship was going well. I really do love you, she said, but sometimes you can love a person and just not be able to live with them. I collected the sundry shirts and books I had left in her apartment, put her keys down on the kitchen counter, and bid her farewell. You should call me in a week or so, I said, and we can discuss this further.

I never heard from her again.

Whats been going on? the photographer asked innocently, unaware of all that his question was about to unleash.

How was I going to start? It wasnt just that my girlfriend had broken up with me. That was, indeed, bad (We were serious enough that we had discussed a future wedding and children.). Nor was it the fact that I was sleeping on my parents couch, which made it worse. Not that my parents were bad people. Difficult, certainly (as these pages will attest), but hardly bad. But after a certain age, living with ones parents has the unsavory taste of failure.

But there was something else, too, which was shameful and difficult to talk about, as if I was admitting to being a sex offender or having a venereal disease.

My apartment has bedbugs, I announced.

That was the reason I had moved back in with my parents. And it was at least part of the reason my girlfriend had broken up with me.

The photographerwho was an extremely likeable and laid back southerner of the Owen Wilson varietysuddenly stiffened.

Really? he said quietly.

Yeah, I said. And last week I broke up with my girlfriend.

The photographer started the car and we drove along in silence for a few moments.

Wait a minute, the photographer said. Didnt you also just get audited or something?

Oh, yes. I might not have mentioned that. The previous November, I had gotten the letter from the IRS requesting an examination of my expenses. I had spent much of the winter sifting through receipts and credit card statements and making desperate late night phone calls to my best friend, who is a lawyer.

Yeah, I said.

The photographers eyes went wide for a split second and then he broke into an unfettered laugh.

Max, he bellowed, youre in hell!

And for the first time in more than a month, I didnt feel like screaming or weeping. For that brief, fleeting moment, I actually felt good. Because Ilike many baffled patients before mefinally had a diagnosis.

Yes, I was in hell.

These were the dark days of schlubdom.

I have a syndrome, you see. It can alternatively be called fecklessness or cluelessness or haplessness. But for the purposes of this book, I will call it schlubbiness. I am a world-class schlub, and at that particular moment, being a schlub felt like a curse.

What is a schlub? The basic definition, as I see it, is this: Someone a little unkempt. A little out of shape. A little clumsy. A little gauche. A little insulated. A little bookish. A little too enchanted with Woody Allen and Philip Roth. (Oh, and The Simpsons .) A little daunted by the outside world and all its demands. And, finally, a little luckless (Like, they probably wont print this book.).

I have made numerous questionable decisions over the yearssometimes professionally, sometimes romantically, and certainly stylisticallyand they all felt as if they were conspiring to run my life off the tracks.

I couldnt help but feel that if I had been a little savvier with women, things wouldnt have spun out of control with my girlfriend. If I had been a little more organized and rigorous with my expenses, I wouldnt have been audited. If I had kept a neater apartment, it wouldnt have been infested with bugs.

But, having since reflected on this at length, I think I was being much too hard on myself.

Being a schlub isnt all that bad. In fact, I think you will discover, as I have, that it has definite advantages. Yes, that rotten spring was a definite low point for mebut as time went on, things started to improve greatly. Two years later, I am not unhappy. I owe the IRS no money. I have a hot girlfriend. I have a bug-free apartment.

In that time, I dont think Ive gotten significantly less schlubby. In fact, Ive grown to embrace my schlubbiness.

Fellow schlubs: You have nothing to lose but your zitz . In fact, you have reason to celebrate. Being a schlub is desirable. Hopefully, I will show you how to make life work a little bit smoother through the suggestions and observations in this book.

For non-schlubs out there, here is the ultimate primer on the weird and unkempt people you encounter on the subway or meet in a bar. You might find us a little too disorganized and unserious, but I think you can learn something from us, too. While life is certainly a serious business most of the time, I often think it is taken way too seriously. A schlubby indifference to stupid minutiae can liberate you from stress.

In the summer of 2007, when the movie Knocked Up came out, I (and all the other schlubs I knew) nearly wept for joy. With a big, lumbering galoot like Seth Rogen as the public face of our movement, the whole world could now come to appreciate the benefits of schlubbiness. True, the Rogen character in Knocked Up was a man who was not equipped to deal with the worldand he needed a level-headed Katherine Heigl to steer him away from the rocky shoalsbut he had a great, bottomless heart.