Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp (2 page)

TUESDAY, July 31
— Tomorrow I will be 14. A milestone in any man’s life. Time for some serious stocktaking. The issue can no longer be ignored: I am still a virgin. To be honest I have never even kissed a woman to whom I was not related by blood or marriage. In fact, I have never even held a girl’s hand. Nor do I have any immediate prospects for finding myself digitally, oscularly, or genitally linked.

Since my last birthday I have gained a total of three and one-quarter inches—two and one-half inches in height and three-quarter inch in erect penis length. If it were all the same to my DNA, I’d just as soon those figures were reversed. I am still struggling to reach six inches, while Lefty has already sprouted past seven inches. To be sure, less of his growth effort is being devoted
to mental development. Still, if I am not destined to be tall or good-looking, it’s only fair that I be granted some compensatory phallic elongation. At the very least, I should be spared the ravages of adolescent acne. (My face is beginning to resemble a pepperoni and eyeballs pizza.) I think they should take some of the billions they’re throwing away on dandruff cures and cancer research, and apply it to really important matters—like wiping out the scourge of acne.

WEDNESDAY, August 1
— Happy birthday to me. Thirteen was a crummy age; let’s hope 14 is an improvement. So far it’s been a real scrotum squeezer.

Mom gave me $20 this morning to get my hair cut. She likes me to get it professionally styled in a salon where they play loud rock music. That way I can come out looking like a successful real estate agent, junior division. Instead, I go to the $9 places and pocket the change. (I feel I am still too young to tip.) So I’m sitting there, minding my own business, when the barber says, “By the way, did anyone ever tell you you’re going to be bald by the age of 30?”

What! Yes, it seems all signs point to a clear diagnosis of incipient male-pattern baldness. But, I protest, my dad still has all (well most) of his hair. “No matter,” replies the learned barber, “baldness is inherited through the mother’s side.” Terror paralyzes me as I remember Uncle Al’s acres of clear-cut scalp. Apparently, I am going to grow up to be a short, pockmarked bald guy. My only hope for enjoying any intimate female companionship at all is to obtain great wealth—as quickly as possible. That’s it for literature. It’s get-rich-quick books for me from now on.

All this was so depressing, I had to go to Rasputin Records and buy two Frank Sinatra albums (both from the ’60s when he could still sing). The clerks are so condescending when you’re not buying the latest output of the Moist Panties, Puking Libidos, or other such heroin-addicted, heavy metal group. So I always tell them my purchase is a gift for my aunt in Cleveland. Personally, I feel the world would be a much better place if every radio station played Frank’s version of “My One and Only Love” at least once an hour. Fat chance!

Then, after dinner, Mom brought out this gaily wrapped package that was precisely the right size and shape to contain a 486 motherboard. Eagerly, I tore off the wrapping, ripped open the box, and stared in stunned disbelief. An official Rodney “Butch” Bolicweigski first baseman’s glove! Thanks, Mom.
Just what I always wanted. Another mitt for my closet. I now have enough gear to equip a triple-A ball team.

Mom persists in believing I will someday bring glory to the family on the playing fields of a grateful nation. Have I confessed to her that I’m always the last guy picked when they choose up sides? Yes. Have I abased my manhood by admitting to my mother that I throw like a girl? Yes. Does she listen? No! Just keep giving me mitts and someday I’ll turn into Rollie Fingers. What I can’t understand, if she wanted to breed jocks, why did she mate with a dork like Dad? He needs professional coaching just to pull a jockstrap on straight.

11:50 P.M. My birthday is almost over. No call or card from Dad. I am squeezing a zit on my chin the size of metropolitan Fresno.

THURSDAY, August 2
— Our neighbor, Mr. Ferguson, brought over three birthday cards for me that had been delivered to his house by mistake. The postman for this neighborhood shuffles through his route in a drug-induced haze. I suspect he even snorts his dog repellent.

Card Number One, from a prominent Marin advertising man, contained a check for $15 (no doubt an impressive sum back when he was a troubled teen). Card Number Two, from a voluptuous Marin hairdresser, contained a full-frontal Polaroid of the sender in her most revealing swim togs. I have seldom been so deeply moved. Timidly, I allow myself to fantasize that she may possibly be attracted to younger men. Card Number Three, from a globe-trotting flight attendant (my sister Joanie), contained a crisp new $100 bill. Not a bad haul!

Here’s the message in Dad’s card: “Happy birthday, kid. The birthday I’m really going to celebrate is your 18th! Ha-ha. Just kidding. Yours sincerely, Dad.” It would serve that miser right if the state extended the cutoff age for child support—say to 35.

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, yielding 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).