2000-07-13 - 18:58:08

Continuing the story of my younger sister, who bears the pseudonym "Janis" in this journal.

After my relationship with my sister was torpedoed by that scheming gossip Mary, Janis then began to systematically show everyone in the family how little she cared about them and their narrow-minded opinions.

Before I go further, I have a confession to make, and this unfortunately applies to many of my journal entries.

I have a rather poor memory, especially recently. This may be a fallout of my diabetes and the high blood sugar that goes along with it. The thing I have the hardest time with is chronology, in other words I can't remember what order things happened in. All I can guarantee is that the events I am going to describe did, in fact, happen.

First off, I think, is that Janis ran away from home. It happened during the winter months, I believe, just after she turned sixteen.

She managed to save up some money, probably gotten from our father, and early one morning called a taxi which took her to the bus station.

She had been gone for several hours when my mother noticed it was supernaturally quiet around the house. She knocked on the door to Janis' room, and when she got no answer, she went inside. Janis was not there, but there was a note left on her bed.

It read (and I am not making this up): "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours. If it doesn't, it was never yours to begin with."

I am paraphrasing, of course. This sounds kind of stilted and phony, but Janis often sounded that way, as if all her dialogue was cribbed from TV commercials.

Perhaps I am remembering wrongly, but while my mother and father were concerned, I recollect being the only one who was truly worried.

About two days later I got a phone call from Janis at the store. She was calling from a pay phone, yelling in my ear. She was in New York, calling from a phone at the corner of 55th and Broadway, in the theater district. She was fine, and she didn't want anybody to worry. She told me that she was staying at a hotel with a weekly rate of $99. She sounded happy and excited.

This alleviated my worries somewhat, but I was still afraid of what the Big Bad City could do to someone as na�ve and inexperienced as Janis. I decided to go down and look for her, to see if I could convince her to come home.

I had some good friends down in New York, and I stayed with them while I hunted for my sister.

First off, I tried a shelter for runaways in Greenwich Village (I think) that seemed to cater to gay teenagers. Janis was hanging out there on occasion, but had no desire to talk with me. The kindly, bearded priest who ran the place was sympathetic, but firm: I was not to be allowed to see her. I left my friend's phone number with him and told him I would be in New York three more days. I then tried to think of an alternative plan.

My friends and I then got out the Manhattan Yellow Pages and tried to do a little deduction. It didn't seem to be a bad assumption that the place where Janis was staying was not far from where she had made the phone call. We also had an important clue - the weekly rate of the hotel was $99.

The first place we called had a weekly rate of $350. No good. However, the second place was exactly $99 a week. That sounded promising, so we took the subway over.

It was about a block from the corner of Broadway and 55th, and it looked like the sort of place that would have rents that low. In other words, a fleabag.

My friends and I walked into the tiny, dingy lobby. Its main feature was a glass booth, rather like that for a ticket seller at a theater, that the desk clerk sat in. He was a youngish Indian fellow.

I told him I was looking for my sister, and gave him her name. He did not recognize it. I then took out a recent picture of Janis that I had brought down with me. When he saw it, the guy behind the thick glass nodded vigorously. He remembered her, she definitely was staying there under a different name. It was some uncreatively mangled version of her own name.

He told me the room number, but he said that he couldn't let non-guests into the hotel. So I called her room from the lobby phone.

She picked it up on the second ring.

"Janis," I began, "This is your brother Uber, and I'm down in the lobby..."

Her response was immediate. "AAUUUGHHH!" she bellowed, and slammed down the phone.

A couple of minutes later she angrily called down to the front desk, and told the Indian guy that she did not want to talk to me, and I should go away. He shrugged at me sympathetically. I thanked him and left.

I actually felt like Sherlock Holmes, finding Janis first crack out of the barrel in a city of eight million. However, I was unsuccessful in my main goal, which was trying to get her to come back home.

I hung around New York for a couple more days, visiting the hangout center in Greenwich Village each day. And every day, she refused to speak with me.

Finally, I had to go home. I couldn't afford to hang out in New York forever, so I returned to Frown Town in defeat.

To my great annoyance, two days later she called our father, and said that she wanted to come home. At what was probably great expense he hired a limo to drive down to New York and bring her back home again.

Some years later I found out the full story.

In that 99-dollar-a-week hotel, Janis met a woman who lived a couple of doors down from her, who had a rather interesting name: "Peanuts." This woman also had a rather interesting job: she was a prostitute.

Janis had a grand old time with her new friend Peanuts, learning about the joys of woman-to-woman love.

That is, until Peanuts stole all her money. Suddenly, New York didn't seem like such a fun place anymore, so she called our father and got a ride home.

Now, like I said before, my mind is hazy on the chronology, but it seemed after this Janis really went on a tear. While she didn't exactly "come out" to the rest of the family, she made it plain to one and all where her sympathies lay.

She began, somehow, bringing home the oddest collection of people. Most of whom were big ol' truck-driving, motorcycle-riding, cigar-chomping dykes. That sounds rude, but there really is no other way to describe them. For the most part they were quite a bit older than Janis.

By this time I wasn't living at home anymore. I heard most of this from my brother Harry, who was not having a good time with all of this. One particular incident really made him angry.

He came home from work one day and, a little distracted, he left his wallet on top of the television set in the back room. By the time he retrieved the wallet, there was a couple of hundred dollars missing from it. Obviously Janis, or more likely one of her visitors, had taken the money.

He was, understandably quite upset. He got even angrier when somehow this was put forward as being HIS fault. After all, he shouldn't have left it lying around. He made the point that why shouldn't he be able to leave money lying around? It was his house, after all!

And I didn't escape my part in this parade, either. One time I was very much discomfited when Janis brought home one of MY old girlfriends!

I had gone out with Roberta when I was working at the high school library one summer, after I had graduated. We hadn't gone out together very long. I admit that I didn't treat Roberta very well, but to be blunt, she creeped me out. She would just sit next to me while I was working, staring at me owlishly, not saying anything. I felt like I was being stalked. Frankly, I prefer a girlfriend that can hold up her half of the conversation. I'm funny that way. Still, I did not end this infatuation with any skill, and I made Roberta cry.

Well, Roberta wasn't looking at me owlishly any more. Instead, her look was one of pure hatred. Apparently she had decided that men were no good, and had decided to play on the other team. I also recall her being around the house when Harry's money went missing.

I also found out later that Janis and her girlfriends had made a point of having sex in every room of the family house. Their favorite places: my room and Harry's room.

Janis also developed a very bad habit. Whenever I brought one of my girlfriends around the house, she would try to hit on them the minute that I was out of the room. I found this incredibly disrespectful, and my poor girlfriends found it incredibly uncomfortable. I recall that at one point, when I was bringing Lilac around the house, the poor dear would follow me around from room to room like a puppy, in order to avoid being left alone with Janis.

Lilac made it plain that she did not like Janis at all. This dislike had little to do with the fact that Janis was warm for her form. It had everything to do with Janis' college adventures.

My parents had sent both my brother and myself to college. They paid the whole shot, which was nice of them. They offered to do the same thing for Janis, but she essentially turned them down.

This really made Lilac angry, because she had to take out all sorts of loans and jump through all sorts of hoops to get her degree, and here was spoiled little Janis, turning down a free ride.

In fact, Janis had gone to college for one semester, but it had been a disaster.

As her high school career was ending, my parents started to nag Janis about what she was going to do afterwards. They offered to pay for college, but first she had to find a college for them to pay for.

This, again, was a little unfair. Both Harry and I had a lot of help picking out our schools. Janis, on the other hand, was expected to do the legwork herself. However, to tell the truth, she did not seem terribly interested.

As part of some mass mailing Janis got a postcard from some small university on Long Island. She sent it back and was accepted, just like that. Hey, that was easy!

The only reason Janis wanted to go this low-grade institute was that it was close to New York City.

Her only semester there was a catastrophe. Among all those fashion-conscious Long Island girls, Janis stood out like a bag lady at a debutante's ball. Her roommates especially were quite mean to her. One of them stole her phone card and rang up nearly $1000 worth of long distance charges.

Janis was kicked out of school because she spent all of her time hanging out in New York, and never went to any classes. So she came back home again.

I have one last anecdote before I end this chapter.

In the mid-1980s our grandmother Ida had her 100th birthday party. It was quite the affair, and it was held in a very posh hotel in San Francisco, on Nob Hill.

The representatives from our branch of the family: myself and Janis.

At the time, I didn't understand the reason why we were chosen. Now I can think of several reasons why, most of them not very complimentary. My father couldn't be bothered to go, because Ida was not really his mother, she was his father's second wife. I think he always felt betrayed that his father remarried and moved to San Francisco some years after his first wife, Dad's mother, was killed in a car wreck.

The truth of the matter: Janis and I were our family's second string representatives. I'd almost consider sending us a calculated insult, if I didn't know that my father was too confused and self-absorbed to think of doing something like that.

Aside from seeing Grandmother Ida again, I was looking forward to seeing San Francisco. But there was another side of this event I was interested in observing: Janis was actually going to wear a dress!

I couldn't even remember the last time that I'd seen Janis in a dress. Had it been Kindergarten? I was dying of curiosity to see what it looked like.

When the day of the big birthday party came, I finally got my chance to view it. Oh boy.

It was some sort of peasant skirt that looked like it had been picked out of a Salvation Army bin for a dollar ninety-eight. Everyone else at the affair was wearing prom gowns and tuxedos, while Janis looked like she'd tumbled out of a time machine from 1969. The cousins gaped in horror as Janis clomped around the ballroom in her boots, ragged skirt, floppy hat and denim jacket.

From my point of view, I wasn't embarrassed at all by the fact that Janis was lowering the class of the event. I thought that my cousins were a bunch of snobs. They were treating me like a country bumpkin, too.

But I really did like my grandmother Ida, and I was sorry that I didn't share any of her 100-year-old genes. She was still pretty sharp considering that she was a century old, was partly deaf, mostly blind and could hardly walk.

At one point she motioned me aside and in a stage whisper asked me: "There's something VERY ODD about Janis, isn't there?"

I laughed, and replied something like: "You said a mouthful, Ida!"

Concluded, tomorrow