Over the past few years, life has dealt Zevin yet another new hand: adulthood. There’s been homeownership, a torn knee ligament, dinner parties at which the table was set with silverware intended to beguile. Yikes. "I tend to write about these phases, these turning points," he explains. "When we bought our first house, which was a complete shit hole — I mean, it was a dump; nobody else bid on this house except for us. It’s true. I didn’t exaggerate. There was no floor. I meant to bring pictures. But now it’s great — at that point, I felt like all I was doing was to engage in home improvements, somehow, which, of course, I suck at."
Zevin trails off for a while, drolly sharing his home-improvement techniques. "I think it’s a Jewish thing. I don’t even have a toolbox. I use glue to fix everything — every kind of glue. Two-ton epoxy is my favorite. And it’s all in this shoebox; I call it the Jewish Toolbox. It’s filled with glue. All I would do is try desperately to fix up the house ... and then I got real into the lawn. I said, this is weird. And it’s happening to everybody. We’re all, like, really into yard work. Where does that come from? I never even noticed. All the apartments I lived in in Somerville, the last concern on my mind was whether or not there was a ya-rd! I just wanted to know, is there a patch of floor I can put my mattress on? And now I’m obsessed with the yard. Last week I was at Home Depot spending all kinds of money. I rented a thatching machine." He shakes his head in wonder. "I rented a power spreader for seed and fertilizer. Every now and then I step back and think, ‘Who is this guy? This is crazy!’ "
Sure, it was crazy. But it was great material, a fact lost even on Zevin until he found himself shelling out $65 for manure one afternoon. "It was a load of shit in my hands, and I was paying money for it," he marvels. "And I thought, maybe this is the true day that I’ve turned uncool."
And so began The Day I Turned Uncool, the first of Zevin’s books to be classified as memoir instead of humor. It comprises chapter essays in the form of confessions, many of which were originally published in the Phoenix. Some representative chapters include: "I Have Turned into a Pet Person"; "Caffeine Has Become My Recreational Drug of Choice"; and "Expanding My Horizons Isn’t Worth the Hassle Anymore."
The book has already met with advance praise. P.J. O’Rourke calls it "one of the great feel-good books of all time, if you’re my age. If you’re some punk of 39 or less ... suck it up, dude. It gets so worse." Election author Tom Perotta gamely challenges Zevin’s claim to uncool, asking, if so, "how come he’s so funny?"
And an assistant editor at Glamour, who is currently battling leukemia and read the book while in the hospital, laughed her way through it and wrote a rave review in last month’s issue. "Growing up isn’t pretty," she wrote, "but in Zevin’s world, for both men and women, it’s pretty damn funny." In an unanticipated boon, the magazine is putting on a leukemia benefit and including the book in gift bags. "There is nothing uncool about that," the author says soberly. "I think it’s very cool."
COOL-NESS IS undoubtedly charged for Zevin. He recalls being cool once: his junior year in college. "I felt remotely cool. But looking back at the pictures now, I look like the biggest dork in the whole world." These days, Zevin doesn’t even pretend to be cool — or at least he professes that uncool is the new cool, or something like that.
After a cup of strong coffee at Someday, which he painstakingly explains is his muse during the "brainstorming phase," Zevin hops in his Jeep — still redolent of dog, from a stint a few years back as a dog walker — to pick up photographs. At the shop in Arlington, the saleswoman informs him the slides aren’t ready yet. "Come back Monday," she says.
Zevin’s a little ruffled, but he agrees. Walking out, back to the doggie car, his attention — and mood — quickly turns. "Now that’s what I’m talking about," he says, gesturing enthusiastically toward a stack of mulch bags piled high in the parking lot. "But I’m thinking I can probably get them for cheaper at the Home Depot in Watertown," he says, with genuine excitement.
In work and in life, Zevin mixes up Jewish neurosis, boyish playfulness, and urbane detachment. "While everybody else stresses out, I’m taking notes," he says. "I guess that ability to step outside of your own life and see it objectively is either the sign of a schizophrenic lunatic or a humor writer — or both, which I think is the case with me." At that, he breaks into laughter.
Zevin hosts a radio show on WMFO, Tufts University’s community radio station, which he has been doing for six years. Called Everyday People, the show, which runs every other Thursday between 5 and 6 p.m., provides a forum for Zevin to bring the innate curiosity and sense of humor evident in his writing to interviews with normal people — a man who shines shoes on Newbury Street, an ordinary teenager, a women who works the checkout at a grocery store.
On a recent show, Zevin quizzed the checkout woman about how much various items cost, on the fly: Red peppers! Yellow peppers! Five onions! Case of Coke! On another show, during a call-in segment, a caller berated a pregnant woman for contributing to the problems of overpopulation. "An educated listener," Zevin mumbled quietly.
Though he may cringe at the label Gen X — "no wonder there’s an X; it’s like the mark of shame" — there’s no doubt that he speaks to his peers, who are finding themselves similarly mad about lawn care, obsessed with protein intake, and pushing up bedtime. "The big misconception about Generation X is that we’re all still these 21-year-old, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing slackers," he notes. "The fact is ... we’re in our 30s. We have houses and dogs and lawns, and, like, IRAs. I mean, I have an I-R-A. I didn’t even know what that was until a few years ago." He shakes his head.
Most days, you’ll find Zevin just where he was when he showed off his wedding ring, noting the weirdness of using the word "spouse," and recalling his days manning the machines at Rolling Stone: at the Someday CafŽ. In fact, the Davis Square coffee shop appears on the acknowledgements page in all three of his books — and the Somerville Arts Council is preparing to put one of his essays in the window of the cafŽ, as part of the Windows Arts Project program.
Hell, call Someday CafŽ his Yaddo. "This is the closest I’m ever going to get to Breadloaf," he jokes. But he has his own community. Sitting outside, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in on a particularly steamy Friday morning, he pauses briefly to exchange pleasantries with a man passing by, tossing off a wave and a "hey." "That’s the mailman," he says, by way of explanation.
Truly, Zevin is a Cambridge-Somerville Fixture. "I live approximately seven and a half minutes away, in North Cambridge. But we have to call it NoCa," he instructs. "I’m trying to get everyone to call it NoCa, because it needs a name. It’s a little bit nondescript right now. NoCa," he repeats the word again, the sound of a smile infusing the pronunciation. "Remember."
AFTER GRADUATING and landing a job, a wife, and a house, the obvious next step on the path to Total Adulthood might be to produce a litter of little Zevins. It could even lead to another book, one not unlike the latest work of P.J. O’Rourke, who chronicled his life as a paternal newcomer in The CEO of the Sofa.
Having kids is yet another hurdle Zevin says he’s up to. "I do need some more material, so, uhh, who knows?" he muses. "It seems like a good enough reason to procreate. I’ll get a book out of it. Also, it would be fun. I’ve been thinking lately that it would be fun to have a kid ’cause you’d get to play with remote-control airplanes and stuff like that."
For now, though, he’s got his eye on more immediate concerns — buying that bag of manure, for starters. Ah, growing old. "Uncool," Zevin concludes, with a smile, "is cool."
Dan Zevin will read from The Day I Turned Uncool on June 20, at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, in Brookline; and on June 26, at 7 p.m., at WordsWorth Bookstore, 30 Brattle Street, in Cambridge. For more information, log on to www.danzevin.com. Nina Willdorf can be reached at ninawilldorf@earthlink.net
