Lads by Dave Itzkoff

Author:Dave Itzkoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588364319
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

9.

SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JEWS

There are only two things in this life that frighten me. One is the unfamiliar. The other is the familiar. Since I often don’t trust myself enough to distinguish one from the other, it is my strategy in almost any situation to remain quiet until I can safely determine which of the two categories it falls into. But not everyone embraces this philosophy.

“Have you seen this shit?” Parker wanted to know. “I mean, have you seen it?” He had been away hardly a week, and he wasted no time in reasserting his presence. Toting an unpublished layout under his arm, he was making his way from one cubicle to the next as he proudly presented the pages to editor after editor, imperiously propping himself up on the front ends of his feet. Something we were about to print was evidently wrong, and he seemed both horrified and delighted to have discovered the flaw.

In a previous incarnation I had known, Parker was a man who could comfortably recount his liaisons with underclass coeds in painstaking, pornographic detail—it was he who had once taken me aside and explained to me the etymology and implementation of a sexual technique known as “the Jersey Meathook.” With a wink and a smile, he could tolerate our jokes about his expanding girth, his sexual staying power, and the fidelity of his new wife. But what he could not stand to see in the pages of Maxim was a picture of a man in a skirt.

The image was part of a fashion spread scheduled to appear in our September 2000 edition; entitled “Rebellious Behavior,” the feature had been photographed outside the dormitories of Princeton University (where else?), depicting a trio of models dressed in postmodern punk attire that would surely have sent old Scott Fitzgerald scrambling for his brandy snifter. Ordinarily, objecting to the impropriety of our fashion stories was as practical as protesting the clumsy mise-en-scène of the Zapruder film, but in this case, Parker felt he had a valid complaint with the sixth and final photo in the sequence: a young man with a distant look in his one eye not obscured by his tousled hair, with tattoos on both biceps, wearing a cutoff Smiths T-shirt, a sterling silver choker necklace, and a checkered kilt valued at $695. With its precarious mix of the sacred and profane, its delicate juxtaposition of Gothic architecture and Gothic rock stars, of androgyny and our alma mater, the picture had raised many issues that Parker was not prepared to confront. Or, as he summed up the circumstances, “It’s a guy in a fucking skirt.” The honeymoon was over.

A few months into Keith’s editorship, there were all kinds of evidence both numerical and empirical at our disposal to confirm that his first issues of Maxim were the most successful we’d ever produced. There were a dozen different ways of interpolating the data in the “pink sheets,” the salmon-colored pages produced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and distributed to our desks at regular intervals, to prove that we were connecting with the public.

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