Room

All of a sudden he said ‘for chrissake, Holden. This is about a goddam baseball glove’. you said it had to be descriptive. What the hells the difference if it’s a baseball glove. He was sore as hell. He was really furious. I went over and pulled it out of his hands. Then I tore it up and through it into the waste paper basket. Then I lay down on my be and lit a cigarette. You weren’t allowed to smoke in the dorm, but you could if everyone was asleep or out and nobody could smell the smoke. Besides I did it to annoy Stradlater. It drove him crazy when you broke any rules.

Chapter 6 Stadlater and I

Some things are hard to remember, I mean I cant remember exactly what I was doing when I heard Stradlater’s goddam stupid footsteps down the corridor. I swear I cant remember. I was so damn worried that’s why. When I really worry about something I don’t just foul around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only I don’t go, I’m to worried to go. If you knew Stradlater you would have been worried too, I’d double dated with that bastard a couple of times, and I know what am talking about. He was unscrupulous. He really was. He came in griping about how cold it was. He started getting undressed, he didn’t say one goddam word about Jane. He asked me if I had written his goddam composition for him. I told him it was over on his goddam bed. He stood their reading it, and sort of stroking his bare chest and stomach, with a stupid expression on his face. He was always stroking his stomach or his chest. He was mad about himself.

Poem about Allie

He was called Allie
He died of Leukaemia
He was the nicest

Allie/Ackley

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 fielders mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it was that it had poems written all over the fingers and the pockets 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 nobodywas up to 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. His teachers were always writting letters to my mother telling her it was a preasure having a boy like Allie in the class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really ment it. He was also the nicest in lots of ways. People with red hair are supposed to get mad easily but Allie never did. God he was a nice kid though. I slep in the garage that night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows just for the hell of it. My hand still hurts once in a while. I cant really make a fist, but I dont care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway. Anyway, thats what I wrote Stradlater's composition about. I couldn't think of anything else descriptive. It was around ten-thirty, when I finished it. You could hear old Ackley snoring. That guy had just about everything. Sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, crumby fingernails. You had to feel a little sorry for the crazy sonuvabitch.

Movie

I didn't have a date or anything, so I and this friend of mine, Mal Brossard, that was on the wrestling team, decided to 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. He came through the goddam curtains, and stood on the shower ledge and asked who was going beside me. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you were 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. Bossard 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 seeing the movie. It was supposed to be a comedy, and all that crap. It was ony quarter to nine when we got back to the dorm. Ackley lay down on my bed. All he did was keep talking in this monotonous voice about some babe he was supposed to have had sexual intercourse with the summer before. He was a virgin if ever I saw one.

Chapter 5 Food

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'. They were these little hard, dry jobs that you could hardly cut. You always got these very lumpy mashed potatoes on steak night. For desert 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.

Jane

He went back into the room, but I stuck around in the can for a while, thinking about old Jane.
I kept thinking about Jane, and about Stradlater having a date with her and all. It made me so nervous I nearly went crazy. I already told you what a sexy bastard Stradlater was.