Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp (55 page)

“Nick, you’re a lucky guy. Traveling to India to study. How long are you going to be there?”

“Oh, eight or nine years, I expect.”

“Wow! And you’re not even taking a suitcase.”

“Uh, no. I’ll be buying everything I need in Pune. With my 10,000 captive rupees.”

“Redwood High will miss you, Nick.”

“Thanks, Tina,” said François, unlocking my rigid knees and sliding closer to our alluring driver. “You know, Tina, you’re probably the last American girl I’ll ever see during my teenaged years.”

“Really, Nick?”

“That’s right,” François confirmed. “And I’m glad it’s you.” “Why, Nick?” she asked, the softness of her voice contrasting with the firmness of her foot upon the accelerator. “Because you’re a special person.” “Oh, I’m not so special.”

“Yes, you are,” said François. “You’re intelligent, beautiful, and a great writer.”

“You really think I can write, Nick?”

“You’re a natural, Tina. That interview you did with me after I won the scholarship captured the essence of my being.”

“Mr. Perkins says my sentence structure needs work.”

“Your sentences are perfect, Tina,” said François. “All your structures are perfect.”

“Nick, what time did you say your plane leaves?”

“Not ’til 7:05
A.M.,”
replied François.

Five minutes later we were parked behind a used tire rack at a darkened gas station, our eager tongues exchanging the lingering flavors of cranberry sauce and sage stuffing. As I reached for the enticing convexities inside her blouse, I felt a hand slowly pull down the zipper over my throbbing T.E. (Thunderous Erection).

“Nick,” whispered Tina, “here’s a going-away present from the women of America.”

Three minutes later, 14 years of dangerously compressed libido gushed into the enveloping warmth of Tina Manion’s inquisitive mouth. She didn’t seem to mind.

François, still inflamed, wanted more. “Tina,” he implored through the mind-fog of ecstasy, “let’s do it!”

“Sorry, Nick,” she said, straightening her clothes and starting the engine. “I have to be faithful to my boyfriend.”

Twenty-two hours later, as the world continues to heave and lurch around me, I savor those few minutes alone in the dark with Tina. Clearly, God invented this diversion as an incentive to keep us plodding on doggedly through
darkest adolescence. It is the light at the end of the tunnel—a tunnel you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to identify.

Yes, I made it on the plane to Bombay.

No, I’m not in India.

At the last minute, I slipped off the plane in Los Angeles. No way I could live 12,000 miles from Sheeni Saunders. Even if she does (temporarily, I hope) despise the very smog I breathe. It also helped that my seatmate, an enterprising Pakistani fellow, offered me $150 in cash for my ticket. And chipped in another C-note for my passport!

SATURDAY, November 22
— My second day in Los Angeles. I’m staying in my sister Joanie’s tiny condo in Marina Del Rey. It’s not as cramped as you might suppose; Joanie is presently out of state slinging airline hash. Kimberly, her cute but suspicious roommate, reluctantly let me in after I divulged a few intimate details about Joanie only a close family member (or IRS extortionist) could know.

Still suspicious, Kimberly has refused to lend me a door key, so I haven’t dared leave the apartment. To distract my feverish mind from my desperate situation, I’ve been watching TV and snacking from Joanie’s meager food stocks (all their kitchen stores are rigorously labeled as to ownership). Kimberly has consented to sell me two cans of Diet Pepsi—at somewhat above the normal retail markup. She’s studying for her MBA at USC and therefore, I expect, has been trained to see in my unexpected arrival an entrepreneurial opportunity. If I didn’t need to husband my cash reserves, I’d offer to lease a door key from her.

Every few hours I have to erase all the frightening messages from police detectives that have accumulated on Joanie’s answering machine. I don’t know why they imagine my sister is so well informed as to my whereabouts. We see each other no more than twice a year. And hardly ever talk on the phone. (In truth, no one in my family likes his or her relations very much. This entrenched dislike may be our strongest familial bond.)

In clearing the tape, I’ve also been wiping out some sappy messages from “Philip,” presumably Joanie’s respectably married physicist boyfriend in Santa Monica. He calls at least once an hour in a cultured but panicky voice to demand Joanie “quit fooling around and not do anything desperate.” I don’t know what that’s all about, but I’m hoping it’s sufficiently serious to give me some leverage over Joanie in my time of need. I asked Kimberly if my sister was having any problems, but she went off on an indignant tangent about three missing Oreo cookies and an unexplained shortfall in her skim-milk carton. As usual, François has denied any knowledge of the affair.

2:30
P.M
. Dad just left a message for Joanie in which he expressed a desire to strangle me with his bare hands. Maybe Mom informed him she was cutting off my child-support payments.

3:30
P.M
. I just called the hospital in Santa Cruz. Bernice Lynch has emerged from her sedative-induced coma and is expected to recover fully. What a weight off my conscience. Not to imply, as François points out, that I was in any way responsible for her swallowing those pills. If I were as unpopular and unhappy as she, I’d probably want to get it over with too. In fact, the idea doesn’t sound so bad right now.

5:15
P.M
. Mom just left a phone message telling Joanie to call, adding, “If your no-good brother took that plane to India, I hope he stays there and is never heard from again!” I wonder if a psychologist would conclude I am receiving powerful “don’t exist” messages from my parents?

SUNDAY, November 23
— Joanie is back. She stumbled in at 1:30 this morning looking like something the cat dragged in: hair a mess, makeup smeared, dark circles under her eyes. Finding me asleep in her single career woman’s queen-size bed did not improve her mood.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she demanded, snapping on the light and dumping her airline travel bag on the floor.

“Oh, hi, Joanie,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “Did you have a difficult flight?”

“I repeat, what the fuck are you doing here? Nick, are you in trouble again?”

“Well,” I sighed, “there have been a few misunderstandings with the police. But it’s OK. Everybody thinks I’m in India now.”

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, slumping into a chair. “This is all I need. On top of everything else!”

“What’s the matter, Joanie?” I asked. “Philip keeps calling and leaving messages for you not to do anything desperate.”

“I don’t wish to speak to that man!” she screamed. “If he calls here again, tell him he’s going to be sorry. Very sorry!”

“What’s wrong, Joanie?”

“None of your business. Nick, you can’t stay here. You’ve got to leave!”

I gulped. “Now? It’s the middle of the night.”

“OK. You can leave tomorrow. But get out of my bed. I need to be alone. You can go sleep on the sofa in the living room.”

“No, I can’t. Kimberly says it’s her sofa and she doesn’t want people ruining the upholstery by camping out on it. That’s why I moved in here.”

“Well, then go sleep on the floor. The living-room carpet’s nice and soft.”

My sister lied. The thin beige pile offered all the resiliency of a rock maple bowling alley. Every ten minutes I had to shift positions to relieve the excruciating pressure on my skeletal promontories. I rose at 7:05 feeling like I had spent the night tumbling in an industrial-size clothes dryer.

As I was climbing back into my one change of clothes (and the same four-day-old socks and underwear!), a strange man dressed in coordinated jogging togs emerged stealthily from Kimberly’s bedroom. He was in his early twenties, about five-eleven, deeply tanned, with eroding black hair, and dark eyes that blinked at an accelerated frequency.

“You must be Nick,” he said, blinking.

“You must be the West Side Strangler,” I replied.

He smiled. “No, I’m Mario, a friend of Kimberly’s. I arrive late and leave early. I’m a busy guy.” He looked at his watch, then consulted a second timepiece on his other arm. “Damn, I’m late for my run. Got to go.”

In a flash, he was out the door.

Wow, Kimberly has a boyfriend. I wonder how much she charges for that?

2:10
P.M
. At 11:30, my sister finally emerged from her bedroom. Dressed in sweat pants and a ratty sweater, she looked as rested as I felt.

“You still here?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I replied.

“You have any breakfast?”

“No.”

“You want to go out?” she asked.

“OK.”

Although the coffee shop on Venice Boulevard was less than a quarter mile away, Joanie drove there in her old brown Honda Civic. Once a Twisp, always a Twisp. I rolled down the window and inhaled the warm breezes off the ocean. Late November and it was still like summer here. No wonder people were shoving in by the millions.

Joanie waited until I had wolfed down my pecan waffles before she began the third degree.

“OK, let’s hear the whole ugly story,” she sighed, gulping her sixth coffee refill. Her untouched omelet lay congealing on her plate.

“Aren’t you going to eat your eggs?”

“No, Nick. You can have them. I’ll just throw them up.”

As I reached for her plate, a familiar alarm bell rang in my head. “Joanie, you’re not … expecting anything, are you?” Next to my mother, Joanie is the least likely candidate for motherhood I know.

“That’s none of your business,” she replied peevishly. “A woman’s reproductive
system is no one’s concern but her own. Other people should just butt out.”

“Other people like Philip?” I asked.

“Especially that lying degenerate asshole,” replied Joanie. “Now, why are you in trouble with the cops?”

Since Joanie can see through me like a fluoroscope, I was obliged to give a relatively candid and thorough review of the events of the past week. She listened gravely, shaking her head now and then during the most gruesome parts.

“Nick,” she said, when I had finished, “six months ago you were just another brownnosing honor student. What happened?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” I replied pensively. “I fell in love with Sheeni. All I want is to be together with her. The rest is all a big misunderstanding.”

“Some misunderstanding. Maybe you should just turn yourself in and face the consequences.”

“Joanie, I can’t do that! I don’t want to go to jail. How will I ever get into a decent college?”

Joanie sighed and drank her coffee. If she
were
pregnant, I figured the kid must be doing cartwheels by now from the massive caffeine overdose.

“So everyone thinks you’re in India?” she asked.

“Right. No one will be looking for me here.”

“But they’ll find out soon enough that you never showed up at that Indian school.”

“Yes, but fortunately India is a very big country. They could be looking there for me for years. By then I might have a full scholarship and be attending Stanford under an assumed name. Mom and Dad don’t care. They’re glad to be rid of me. They said so on your answering machine.”

“What happened to my messages?” demanded Joanie. “The tape was empty.”

“Really?” I replied innocently. “I must have erased it by mistake.”

“Well, our jerk of a father probably won’t miss you. I don’t know about Mom. Now I wish I hadn’t loaned him that money for his bail. I’ll probably never see it again. And I was counting on it for…for my, uh, expenses.”

“Dad is a mess,” I agreed. “He’s the last person I’d ever loan money to.”

“I only did it for you, Nick! So you wouldn’t have to go live with Mom and Lance.”

“I know, Joanie. I really appreciate it. I guess I’ve messed up your life too.”

“Don’t worry,” sighed Joanie. “It was already messed up. By a real professional.”

“Joanie,” I implored, “can I stay with you for a few days? Until I get a job and my own apartment?”

“Nick, you’re only 14 years old!”

“I know,” I replied, “but I’m a mature 14.”

Joanie groaned. “I think I’m going to kill myself. Sometimes I think that’s the only sensible way out.”

“Really?” I asked, intrigued. “I often think that too.”

“I was strongly suicidal in high school,” confided Joanie.

“Is that why you went out with all those industrial arts majors?”

“Watch your smart mouth!” she replied.

I’ve heard that line before.

6:30
P.M
. Joanie finally relented and gave me a spare key, saying I could stay “for just a few more days.” She also told a Berkeley police detective who phoned this afternoon that she hadn’t seen me in months and thought it likely “my brother at this moment is somewhere in India. We’re all very concerned about his welfare.”

“There, I hope you’re satisfied,” she said, hanging up the phone. “I have just laid myself open to charges of obstruction of justice and harboring a fugitive.”

“Thanks, Joanie,” I said. “I hope I can do the same for you someday.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m very grateful, Joanie. If it weren’t for you, I’d be out on the streets.”

“Well, you may be out there soon enough,” she replied grimly. “I repeat, Nick, you are not my responsibility. I have problems of my own.”

To lend tangibility to my gratitude, I vacuumed the apartment, shopped for groceries (with my own money!), and cooked a gourmet dinner (Mrs. Crampton’s famous cheese-and-pimento-stuffed pork chops). I even invited Kimberly, who hadn’t looked especially pleased to hear I would be hanging around awhile.

Right before dinner Joanie had a screaming argument in the privacy of her bedroom with someone on the telephone (my guess Philip). This fresh emotional turmoil appeared to take the edge off her appetite. (I hope the kid had the foresight to set aside a few calories for those lean days.) While Joanie picked at her food, Kimberly ate like the cute, but voracious Republican she revealed herself to be. She said she and Mario recently toured the new Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and found it “profoundly inspiring.” Since I was at that moment harboring designs on her sofa, I was forced to listen with a pretense of interest. Over dessert (pumpkin pie, for which I’ve had a curious
craving ever since circumstances deprived me of it on Thanksgiving), Kimberly rattled on about her “marvelous marketing” courses at USC.