Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp

by C. D. Payne

  I am rich! Gripped by the fever of materialism, I wander happily for hours through the great shopping mall of the mind. “Spend, spend! Acquire, acquire!” whispers the sweet subliminal music.

  FRIDAY, August 3 — My bankroll is down to $87. All I have to show for it is a headache, a stomachache, sore feet, an I’M SINGLE, LET’S MINGLE tee shirt, a tube of industrial-strength zit salve, and a paperback book: How I Made One Million Dollars in High School and Was Accepted by Yale by Herbert Roland Pennypacker.

  Why are people so suspicious when a 14-year-old youth pulls out a $100 bill? OK, maybe I could be a crack dealer. What’s it to them! I wonder if teen millionaire Herbert Roland Pennypacker has this problem.

  SATURDAY, August 4 — I came back from the library to find Mom cuddling on the couch with Jerry, her repulsive boyfriend. They immediately leapt apart and pretended to be fascinated by the wallpaper. I can’t imagine why my mother wishes me to believe her relationship with Jerry is platonic. Anyway you slice it, I’ve got her beat for celibacy champ in this family.

  Jerry is a long-distance truck driver, which fortunately keeps him out of town a lot. His ultimate ambition is to go on permanent state disability. (Every man needs a dream!) He files claim after claim (for a different incapacitating debility each time), but the stuffy bureaucrats in Sacramento continue to insist on solid X-ray evidence of degeneration. (He should send them a scan of his skull.) Jerry says if he were African-American he would be “pulling down a big state check, no questions asked.”

  After 12 years with Dad, Mom apparently decided she needed a less intellectual consort. Not that Dad’s nonstop cultural one-upmanship qualifies him as a deep thinker. His mind ranges widely: from arid to vapid, with stops at banal, insipid, and shallow. But Jerry’s gray matter doesn’t even register on the gauge. The needle sits there at Cretin and doesn’t budge.

  Physically Jerry is also a curiosity. He is completely devoid of an ass. I suppose he must sit on his spine. His pants hang perfectly flat, while out front his angry red beer gut balloons out like the front end of a ’51 Studebaker. As long as Mom’s known Jerry, I’ve been struggling to think of a commendable thing to say about him. No luck. He may be God’s perfect asshole.

  11:30 P.M. Woke up to the sounds of a woman screaming. It was Mom. I’d scream too if Jerry were making love to me. Improbably, the dolt seems to have some talent in this area. Mom did a lot of hollering with Dad, but never that I can recall out of pleasure. Do all women scream at the moment of ecstasy? Why don’t they have 800 numbers where teens can call up with questions like these?

  SUNDAY, August 5 — Another typical East Bay summer morning: foggy, gray, and bitterly cold. I began this cheery day by sharing the breakfast table with Jerry. After ten minutes of listening to him slurp his Cheerios, I was ready to go for the meat cleaver. Pouring his coffee, Mom said, “Isn’t it nice of Jerry to drop by so early?”

  The woman takes me for a complete idiot.

  After breakfast Mom turned on the furnace and we sat around reading the Sunday paper. Jerry read the sports pages and all the used-car ads. He believes a man should never keep a car longer than two months. That way, he says, “you always have the thrill of owning a new car.”

  However stimulating his current vehicle, Jerry always keeps a big FOR SALE sign taped in the back window—so as not to miss any passing impulse buyers. So far he’s had only tepid interest in his present car—a battered ’76 Chevy Nova, painted (by Jerry) in camouflage colors.

  Lefty dropped by and we wanked off to my Penthouse collection. He has marked all of his favorite spreads (so to speak), but usually selects the Pet who resembles a mature Millie Filbert. After wiping up, he informed me his sister found his addendum to her diary and is now on the warpath. Because of the journal’s inflammatory contents, she can’t rat on Lefty to their parents. But she has promised to make his life “a living hell.” We both agreed it is not wise to cross a sexually frustrated woman. I was disappointed in her reaction, as I half expected her to call.

  Dad was supposed to take me out for a belated birthday dinner, but he never showed. So I had takeout pizza with Mom and Jerry. The latter drank an entire six-pack of Colt .45. Even his loving girlfriend looked appalled.

  MONDAY, August 6 — I painted my bedroom! The ghastly pink is no more. What a lot of tedious work. I’m glad I’m an intellectual and so do not have to look forward to a lifetime of such menial drudgery. I’d much rather sit in front of a computer terminal and get my brain irradiated all day by an electron beam.

  The khaki was rolling on too brown, so I mixed in some green I found out in the garage. Turns out when you combine latex and oil-based paints, the colors tend to separate on the walls. After a period of extreme indecision, I decided I liked the mottled effect.

  When Mom got home from work, she let out a scream and said it looked just like the prison cells of IRA detainees in Ulster. These unhappy chaps do something to their walls you won’t find in Better Homes and Gardens. I told her not to worry, that faux wall treatments were all the rage now and that a decorator would have charged thousands to produce the same effect.

  She said she would never step foot in my room again. Best news I’ve heard in months!

  Lefty just called in a panic. His sister told him that she saw Millie at the mall holding hands with some college guy. I told him not to worry, that it was just part of Martha’s campaign of psychological warfare. Lefty is naturally feeling vulnerable, as he has not seen Millie all summer. He desperately wants to phone her, but is too chicken. He says this separation anxiety “is almost enough to make a guy look forward to going back to school.” Coming from Lefty, that is a remarkable statement.

  TUESDAY, August 7 — Dad called from his office to apologize for missing our dinner engagement. Someone broke into his Beamer and stole Lacey’s purse. Since it contained both her address and door key, Dad had to stay all night at her apartment to protect her and her valuables until she got the locks changed. A good story, but he must have forgotten he’d used the same one on me about six months before. Only the bimbette had changed.

  I asked Dad if he was giving much thought to my back-to-school wardrobe. He asked me if I was giving any thought to a summer job. With the conversation thus at an impasse, we hung up.

  Lefty came over in a blue funk. His sister heard on the grapevine about his penile eccentricity and told his parents. Naturally his mother got hysterical and wanted to see it, but Lefty fought her off like a wild man. He has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning at 10 A.M. “If I don’t kill myself first,” he says.

  To cheer him up I suggested we call Millie to see how she was doing. Lefty was dubious, but finally his curiosity won him over to the idea. I dialed the number while Lefty listened in on the extension. After many rings, Millie’s mother wheezed a dispirited “Hello.”

  “May I speak to Millie, please?” I asked politely.

  “Who is this?” sniffled the voice.

  “Uh, a school friend,” I said.

  “Not that monster Willis, is it?” she demanded.

  “No, it’s Nick. Nick Twisp.”

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” said Mrs. Filbert. “Millie is indisposed. And will be for about the next seven and a half months.” Click.

  This put Lefty in an even darker mood. It’s not easy to hear your childhood sweetheart may be expecting another man’s child. Especially when the status of your own manhood is in question.

  “My life is a living hell,” said Lefty as he departed.

  WEDNESDAY, August 8 — I counted 39 hairs in the shower drain this morning and 27 more on my comb. The long emasculating march toward disfiguring baldness has begun!

  I also squeezed 17 engorged pustules on my face and seven erubescent carbuncles on my neck. It will be a miracle if I don’t get blood poisoning. Yet, though I look like a medieval plague victim, the world expects me to go on being a happy, busy teen. I despair, knowing every fresh eruption places another oozing wall between me and the soft, yi
elding warmth of feminine flesh. Or, to put it more succinctly: pimples postpone pussy. Perhaps I should give up fried food.

  Lefty may have to get an operation! He has something called Peyronie’s disease. In three months if vitamins don’t straighten him out, surgeons will be chasing him with machetes. He is feeling totally humiliated. The doctor injected him with something that gave him a killer hard-on, then he had to lie there and have his erection professionally examined. At first his mother insisted on being in the room, but Lefty refused to unzip until she split. Most embarrassing of all, the doctor was a woman! And kind of a cute young one too.

  “The first time a woman touched my dick,” said Lefty, “and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I sure hope I’m not gay.”

  Good news. Jerry is off on the road again. I hope he’s hauling cucumbers to Bolivia. He sold his Chevy to a sailor at the Alameda Naval Air Station. The camouflage should fit right in on the base. At least one car in the parking lot will be fooling our enemies (whoever they may be).

  I asked Mom at dinner if she really liked Jerry. Her reply: “That’s none of your damn business!” After five minutes of angry silence, she went on: “Jerry is OK. You should try to be nicer to him. How many men do you think there are who’d be interested in a 41-year-old woman with two kids, no money, and stretch marks? He’s no Cary Grant, but he’s better than nothing.”

  Mom is a realist about everything except her age. She’s 43.

  THURSDAY, August 9 — Lefty and I went for a hike up in the hills above the UC campus. This is not like me, but even my body requires some exercise occasionally. Lefty wanted to get out of the house. He made the mistake of telling Martha he disliked her Joe Cocker album, and now she plays it incessantly.

  It was sunny and mild, with a few fleecy white clouds floating like becalmed zeppelins above the azure bay. (I may save that sentence for recycling in a future novel.) Rounding Inspiration Point, we were startled to spy in a secluded clearing down the ravine a naked couple making love. Naturally, we crept closer for a better look. Finally, those Cub Scout forest skills were starting to pay off! If only I’d thought to bring my binoculars. They looked like Cal students—a cute Asian coed and her honkie jock boyfriend, happily humping away in the brown grass. They climaxed, rested for a bit, then hopped to it again—while Lefty and I looked on in breathless silence.

  After the show, we lurched off to find our own secluded spot for some manual hydraulic relief. My explosive discharge felled a mature eucalyptus grove. Lefty’s dislodged a dozen three-ton boulders. Yet afterwards we both agreed crazed teen horniness locked us ever tighter in its torrid embrace. My body is broadcasting a desperate signal: It needs it bad. Very bad.

  SUNDAY, August 12 — Another fun-filled Sunday in Marin with Dad and Lacey. One of the tragic consequences of divorce is that the kids are legally obligated by the courts to spend a fixed amount of time with their dads. In normal families, dads and children happily ignore each other.

  It was a killer hot day. Even though the air conditioning in Dad’s Beamer was on the fritz, he made us ride over with the windows up so the other motorists wouldn’t think he didn’t have any. The only compensation was an outrageously sexy bead of sweat the stifling heat brought out on Lacey’s upper lip. I longed to daub it off—with my tongue.

  Once in Kentfield, Dad said he would take me to buy some school clothes if I washed his car. I agreed and got totally fried by the sun while de-griming the fine German steel. Dad watched me like a hawk lest I drop the sponge and pick up some paint-marring grit. (We both suffer from extreme blemish anxiety.)

  After lunch (at McDanold’s) we went clothes shopping in the shiny Beamer—to the Sebastopol Flea Market! I got three shirts, two pairs of pants, a jacket, and a belt—for a miserly total of $8.65. Dad was prepared to spend more, but I drew the line at previously owned shoes. This fall I shall be going to school dressed in the height of fashion—for the year 1973.

  Lacey had on a groin-swelling yellow polka-dot sunsuit and alien invader’s sunglasses. She flirted with all the bikers selling motorcycle parts and even knew two of the most criminal-looking by name. Dad was extremely jealous and did a lot of inward seething. He looks like heart-attack material to me; I just hope he’s adequately insured.

  Dad sprang for hot dogs at the flea market, so he didn’t feel dinner was called for later. I took my hunger and new wardrobe back to Oakland. (But I am not going to let him weasel out of the promised birthday dinner!)

  While I was cooking up some frozen french fries (I feel the link between fried foods and acne has not yet been positively established), the sailor dropped by with two of his buddies looking for Jerry. It seems the Chevy went only 17 miles before the engine blew up. They also found evidence of a banana in the transmission. When I told them Jerry was out of town, they looked quite crestfallen and promised to return. They also left the dead Chevy in the driveway. Across the camouflaged hood someone had spray-painted, “Pay up or die!”

  MONDAY, August 13 — Millie Filbert is getting married! To Willis, the alleged father of her alleged child. She’s 15 and he’s 20. Martha heard about it on the grapevine and woke up Lefty this morning with the news. He exclaimed, “This is a day that will live in infamy!” Just kidding. Actually, his precise words were “Great fucking balls ache!”

  Lefty came over immediately for some peer counseling. I told him Millie was a cheap tart and he was well rid of her. He agreed and said he hoped she had a long and difficult marriage to an inveterate wife-beater. He said if he’d known she was such an easy lay, he definitely would have gotten up the nerve to ask her out. Instead, he wasted all those years worshipping her from afar. Then, for emotional closure, I had him tear up the Penthouse Millie-look-alike Pet. Lefty said he was feeling better, so we had a morale-boosting whack-off session. Even though he has been sneaking extra doses of his vitamins, he still looks as crooked as ever. Millie will never know what she missed.

  I think the sunburn helped my acne. So I am trying to spend more time outdoors. Even if I die of melanoma in 20 years, I feel it will have been worth it. I asked Mom for some money to buy sunglasses, but instead she gave me her old pair. It took me 45 minutes to chisel out the rhinestones. That accomplished, they still don’t look like a style Tom Cruise would wear.

  Like an early-morning erection, the sailor came back. (I am trying to introduce more similes into my prose.) This time Mom had the pleasure of chatting with him. The sailor demanded she write him a check! She explained that was impossible, but said she would try to contact Jerry. While the sailor waited, seething nautically, she called Jerry’s dispatcher, who gave her the number of a motel in Iowa City. When she called the motel and asked for Jerry’s room, a woman answered! The woman said Jerry was in the shower and could she take a message? Mom turned red, hung up, and told the sailor she would get him his $900. Even if it was the last thing she ever did.

  TUESDAY, August 14 — Mom found my Polaroid of Lacey! She claimed she discovered it “while putting away some clean socks.” Yeah, like I always keep my argyles hidden in the back of my bottom desk drawer. With the parental Gestapo on patrol around here, privacy stops at the bathroom door. And even that sanctuary is hardly inviolable.

  Mom really hit the roof when I told her the well-proportioned semi-nudist was Dad’s latest girlfriend. She stared in horror at the photo, her face contorted by revulsion and envy. Then I got a 25-minute grilling about Lacey. Mom takes a morbid interest in Dad’s love life (don’t we all?), so I don’t mind inventing a few details here and there to watch her boil. To cope with my torrid revelations, Mom chain-smoked throughout the interrogation.

  I told her no, Lacey did not appear to live with Dad, but she did hang her bra and panties in his bathroom. I said I didn’t know if it was serious, but they spent a lot of time in the bedroom taking naps. I revealed that Lacey liked to sit on Dad’s lap during Masterpiece Theatre and blow into his ear. (I made that up.) I said she called him “Thunder Rod” and he called her “Sugar Puss.” (Tru
e, believe it or not.) I told her Lacey liked fast cars, knew bikers by their first names, and carried a small flask of brandy in her décolletage. (All true.) I said she came from a prominent San Francisco family, graduated from Stanford at 19, had an IQ of 163, and did secret work for the government involving hair. (More or less lacking a factual basis.) Finally, I said Lacey was fun to be with, had a good sense of humor despite being such an intellectual, and had a mature outlook on the beauty and wholesomeness of the human body. Therefore, I wanted her photo back.

  Mom snorted, “That’s what you think, buster.” She said she was keeping the Polaroid for evidence and had half a mind to have Lacey prosecuted for corrupting a minor. “You’re still a child,” lectured Mom, taking multiple deep drags on her cigarette. “You should be out playing sports. Not looking at disgusting pictures of naked harlots.”

  I replied that Millie Filbert had played softball for years, but that hadn’t stopped her from getting knocked up.

  Mom told me to get my mind out of the gutter. So much for trying to reason with a woman.

  WEDNESDAY, August 15 — A sunny day, so I put on my sunglasses and my I’M SINGLE, LET’S MINGLE tee shirt and walked all the way downtown to the library. We live about three miles up from the center of town—in the nervous zone between the affluent hills and the seething flats. Seeded baguettes in one direction, barbecue in the other—it’s a short trip either way.