That poor bastard.

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in 1961.  It was nothing I had to do, I think some girl told me to read a goddamn book once in awhile if I didn’t want to grow up to be a goddamn bore and all.  So I read one.  It was the first thing I had ever read that made me want to write;  write any goddamn thing I wanted.  And now this Salinger guy up and dies.  It sounds terrible when you think about it.

But what really knocked me out about reading his book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author— that Salinger guy— you wished that he was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.  But now you can’t.

It’s all very ironical when you think about it.  That poor bastard.

Like a lot of alienated youth of the early sixties, Holden Morrissey Caulfield reached into my chest and massaged my heart, made it beat a little faster, made me a little more alive.
And made we want to write.  At the time, it felt like heresy and betrayal.  I had already defined myself as a visual artist; I only used a pencil to draw.

But a few short years later I was a freshly-minted Navy puke, just another poor bastard headed to Vietnam.  And I found myself using a pencil to scribble thoughts in a journal.  I dug up that journal today, and discovered I was reading The Catcher In The Rye while marooned at Clarke Air Force Base in December of 1968, waiting for a flight back to the CONUS.*

Wayne McLaren (1940 – 1992)
Another poor bastard.

Sitting in Clarke Passenger Terminal, the universal aroma of Marlboros wandering through the scent of everything, and nothing at all.
I’m on my way home.
—from A Book Of Thoughts And I’m Not Sure What All

I hate cigarette smoke. And this fucking place has a visible blue haze that stinks like ass. And there’s cheap Christmas shit everywhere, Gene Autry is butchering Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a 110 other servicemen are smoking like chimneys, waiting to get the fuck off this rock.

The Navy has owned my ass for the past 720-some days, but now they are loosening their grip.  I’m too excited to sleep; but my midnight flight has just been delayed 24 hours, and I need to focus on something besides the shitty aluminum Christmas decorations that litter the terminal.

I bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a fucking Air Force Base terminal on Guam;  how crazy is that.  So why am I reading about Holden Caulfield?  It’s probably just something familiar;  something that connects me to home, to my past.  After all, Holden Caulfield was locked up; the poor bastard.

I’m being set free.

*CONUS: Continental United States

Tagged as: CONUS, Gene Autry, Holden Morrissey Caulfield, J.D. Salinger, Marlboro Cigarettes, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Catcher In The Rye, Wayne McLaren