NICK HAD just landed a clerkship at a brand new prefab luxuriana by the sea. I met him as he got off work one night, at the twelfth floor lounge of his motel overlooking the ocean and the honkytonk Boardwalk.

Nick was my old midnight caper friend, with whom I used to spend the lonely hours between midnight and eight in the morning during summers in Daytona Beach, playing golf in the moonless nights by flashlight, seeing how many times we could go around a traffic circle without getting dizzy, riding on the top of the hood of my car down the beach with no driver (steering with our feet through the open sunroof, and a book on the accelerator pedal) or driving through the Tomoka swamp roads to watch the phosphorescence on the drooping Spanish moss. I was very curious to see him because rumor had it that he was engaged.

Nick was a veteran of the drug years. His jobs included: lifeguard in nearby Ormond until thrown off the corps for dereliction of his tower (he took long lunches); mate on a charter fishing boat; bagman for a big lettuce caper; treasure hunter for a load of cocaine left in the ground by dealers near an old launching pad near Cape Canaveral (foiled by a flash flood); and stunt car driver for a shoestring film that ran out of money. His heritage was Greek, and he knew all about fencing things in underground Daytona, and who burned down what restaurant for what insurance money.

He also knew about women who wanted action. He had been a lifeguard since he was 14, and women swarmed after him since the beginning. Despite knowing about the women who had paraded their needs before him year after year. Nick had the grace to retain a surviving romanticism.

The latest, and what looked like the enduring target of his affection, was a sweet young thing from near Nashville, Penny: age sixteen, and soon graduating from high school into the arms of her dreamboat, Nick.

YES, YES. IT was all true. She had come down with her parents last summer, and the moment that Nick gave her parents the key to their room the girl was his. The little brother came back ten minutes later and said. "You better not see my sister. There'll be trouble with my father." This was in August and she's been swooning ever since. Nick himself is in a bit of a swoon. He had flown to the family's ranchhouse near Nashville twice during the fall. His visits enjoyed the family's blessing until Penny's mother did an about-face and revealed that Nick was 23, not the harmless 19 he was purported to be. The father now swears that he will kill Nick, and if Nick tries to enter the county, he will swear out a warrant. Every phone call they make is possibly overheard, and through these stormy times Nick's phone bills have jumped from eighty to two hundred dollars a month.

Penny has sent Nick the journals of her life back home during their absences, and they are already two loose leaf volumes of every waking minute. It seems she is the best English student in her class, and thrives on well looped y's and I's, which is fortunate since the loves and the your take a predominant part in her manuscript. Mostly it goes something like this Well last night Nick and I told Dad. No matter how hard we argued we couldn't win him over, and unless he relents I will just die...Nick is just the most perfect person in the world...Mother read my diary yesterday and I am so mad at her I can't speak... Yesterday old ----------came over and he drove me around for an hour and kept trying to convince me that I should take him back! I'm so mad I just can't speak. No one can ever take Nick's place!...

Dear Diary, if I don't get to see Nick, I think I will just die. But don't worry diary, I wouldn't kill myself. I love him too much to ever lose faith... Dear Diary, every time Nick and I say goodbye, it rains. Dear God, those raindrops match my tears. It's good to know that you are on our side...Dear Diary, I told dad what Nick and I thought up, but it didn't work and I'm going to have to see the doctor tomorrow...

Nick explained to me that he and Penny told her father that she was six weeks pregnant, so they'd have to get married.

Dear diary, I worry that I am making Nick uneasy and I fear that he will leave me...If I were Nick, I would leave...I can be such a bitch...Nick just called and now I can sleep in peace...

Nick seemed in perpetual bliss, and got even further into that state when I offered to read aloud both volumes of Penny's journals so he could get a little different perspective on the whole thing. By that time I had drunk two tequila sunrises. So the reading was full of emotion, but no little imprecision as well. None of this bothered Nick, who smiled away. He said this time it was the real thing. He said he'd given up all the girls who once crossed his path and he didn't miss them. He understood, he said, that Penny would pass through several stages of growth that he has already gone through. I asked him if he could face disappointment and he gave a brave answer: "If I try and fail I haven't lost anything," he says. "And Timmy, I think I can do 'er."

NICK HAD learned a few new things about love himself. When the name Debby Bartosch came up in one casual conversation. Penny pressed Nick about her. "Aw, don't worry about her," said Nick. "You'll like Debby when you meet her." This was the Debby Bartosch who went with Nick and me to the annual Pelican Avenue New Year's eve party, and at which Nick and Debby were scheduled to perform a "crab mating dance" for the throngs. They somehow failed their scheduled performance and ended up wrapped up in the same blanket in the back room, both passed out over a bottle of mad duck champagne. Maybe some year, I keep hoping.

So Penny writes in her diary, not privy to any of this knowledge in any mere factual way, but already possessing the fullfledged instincts of her feminine heritage: "I will not want to meet Debbie Bitch. Why doesn't Nick realize this? I will hate her. I don't want to share Nick with anyone else in the world!"

The more I heard of Penny, the more often I watched him deal with marathon phone calls; I began to share in his hypnosis. No longer was I just a listener, as Nick plunged deeper into some sort of blessed state. A fool possessed, perhaps, but I was getting caught in the undertow.

My work was done in Daytona and soon I would have to return North. I mentioned that I wanted to see the country music scene in Nashville on my way. And that was all the hint Nick needed to decide that he had been away from Penny too long. With a hastily agreed upon hundred-dollar loan Nick quit the motel and we were on our way.