WE ALWAYS HAD the same meal on Saturday nights at Pencey. It was supposed to be a big deal, because they gave you steak. I’ll bet a thousand bucks the reason they did that was because a lot of guys’ parents came up to school on Sunday, and old Thurmer probably figured everybody’s mother would ask their darling boy what he had for dinner last night, and he’d say, “Steak.” What a racket. You should’ve seen the steaks. They were these little hard, dry jobs that you could hardly even cut. You always got these very lumpy mashed potatoes on steak night, and for dessert you got Brown Betty, which nobody ate, except maybe the little kids in the lower school that didn’t know any better―and guys like Ackley that ate everything.
It was nice, though, when we got out of the dining room. There were about three inches of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down like a madman. It looked pretty as hell, and we all started throwing snowballs and horsing around all over the place. It was very childish, but everybody was really enjoying themselves.
I didn’t have a date or anything, so I and this friend of mine, Mal Brossard, that was on the wrestling team, decided we’d take a bus into Agerstown and have a hamburger and maybe see a lousy movie. Neither of us felt like sitting around on our ass all night. I asked Mal if he minded if Ackley came along with us. The reason I asked was because Ackley never did anything on Saturday night, except stay in his room and squeeze his pimples or something. Mal said he didn’t mind but that he wasn’t too crazy about the idea. He didn’t like Ackley much. Anyway, we both went to our rooms to get ready and all, and while I was putting on my galoshes and crap, I yelled over and asked old Ackley if he wanted to go to the movies. He could hear me all right through the shower curtains, but he didn’t answer me right away. He was the kind of a guy that hates to answer you right away. Finally he came over, through the goddam curtains, and stood on the shower ledge and asked who was going besides me. He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in a goddam boat, he’d want to know who the guy was that was rowing it before he’d even get in. I told him Mal Brossard was going. He said, ” That bastard… All right. Wait a second.” You’d think he was doing you a big favor.
It took him about five hours to get ready. While he was doing it, I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn’t throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed
my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn’t throw it at anything. All I did was close the window and walk around the room with the snowball, packing it harder. A little while later, I still had it with me when I and Brossard and Ackley got on the bus. The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I told him I wasn’t going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn’t believe me. People never believe you.
Brossard and Ackley both had seen the picture that was playing, so all we did, we just had a couple of hamburgers and played the pinball machine for a little while, then took the bus back to Pencey. I didn’t care about not seeing the movie, anyway. It was supposed to be a comedy, with Cary Grant in it, and all that crap. Besides, I’d been to the movies with Brossard and Ackley before. They both laughed like hyenas at stuff that wasn’t even funny. I didn’t even enjoy sitting next to them in the movies.
It was only about a quarter to nine when we got back to the dorm. Old Brossard was a bridge fiend, and he started looking around the dorm for a game. Old Ackley parked himself in my room, just for a change. Only, instead of sitting on the arm of Stradlater’s chair, he laid down on my bed, with his face right on my pillow and all. He started talking in this very monotonous voice, and picking at all his pimples. I dropped about a thousand hints, but I couldn’t get rid of him. All he did was keep talking in this very monotonous voice about some babe he was supposed to have had sexual intercourse with the summer before. He’d already told me about it about a hundred times. Every time he told it, it was different. One minute he’d be giving it to her in his cousin’s Buick, the next minute he’d be giving it to her under some boardwalk. It was all a lot of crap, naturally. He was a virgin if ever I saw one. I doubt if he ever even gave anybody a feel. Anyway, finally I had to come right out and tell him that I had to write a composition for Stradlater, and that he had to clear the hell out, so I could concentrate. He finally did, but he took his time about it, as usual. After he left, I put on my pajamas and bathrobe and my old hunting hat, and started writing the composition.
The thing was, I couldn’t think of a room or a house or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. I’m not too crazy about describing rooms and houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He’s dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His
Teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just saying that—they really meant it. Allie wasn’t just the most intelligent member of the family; he was also the nicest in many ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.
I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, I was teeing off and had a hunch that if I turned around suddenly, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had.
God, he was a nice kid. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he’d nearly fall off his chair. I was only thirteen when they decided to have me psychoanalyzed because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken by then, and I couldn’t do it. It was a stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly knew I was doing it. You didn’t know Allie. My hand still hurts sometimes when it rains, and I can’t make a real fist anymore—not a tight one, anyway—but outside of that, I don’t care much. I’m not going to be a surgeon or a violinist or anything.
That’s what I wrote Stradlater’s composition about. Old Allie’s baseball mitt. I happened to have it with me in my suitcase, so I got it out and copied down the poems written on it. I just had to change Allie’s name so no one would know it was my brother and not Stradlater’s. I wasn’t too crazy about doing it, but I couldn’t think of anything else descriptive. Besides, I sort of liked writing about it. It took me about an hour because I had to use Stradlater’s lousy typewriter, and it kept jamming on me. The reason I didn’t use my own was because I’d lent it to a guy down the hall.
It was around ten-thirty when I finished. I wasn’t tired, so I looked out the window for a while. It wasn’t snowing anymore, but every once in a while you could hear a car somewhere struggling to start. You could also hear old Ackley snoring. You could hear him right through the shower curtains. He had sinus trouble and couldn’t breathe well when he was asleep. That guy had just about everything—sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, crummy fingernails. You had to feel a little sorry for the crazy sonuvabitch.
