Rain

"Hurry up - the things gonna start again." I told Phoebe.

Then all of a sudden she gave me a kiss. Then she held her hand out, and said, "It's raining. It's starting to rain." Then what she did - it damn near killed me -she reached out my red hunting hat and put it on my head.

"Don't you want it?" I said.

"You can wear it a while."

"Okay. Hurry up, though, now. You're gonna miss your ride. You won't get your own horse or anything."

I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why.

I must be a madman, being all lonely as hell at first and then being so goddamn happy next. It was just Phoebe looked so nice in her blue coat and all. And I was feeling just happy, like everything finally had its place. Sure it wasn't perfect, but at that moment it was. I could've stayed frozen in that moment forever and I'd be happy.

Guaranteed

On bended knee is no way to be free
Lifting up an empty cup, I ask silently
All my destinations will accept the one that's me
So I can breathe...

Circles they grow and they swallow people whole
Half their lives they say goodnight to wives they'll never know
A mind full of questions, and a teacher in my soul
And so it goes...

Don't come closer or I'll have to go
Holding me like gravity are places that pull
If ever there was someone to keep me at home
It would be you...

Everyone I come across, in cages they bought
They think of me and my wandering, but I'm never what they thought
I've got my indignation, but I'm pure in all my thoughts
I'm alive...

Wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere
Underneath my being is a road that disappeared
Late at night I hear the trees, they're singing with the dead
Overhead...

Leave it to me as I find a way to be
Consider me a satellite, forever orbiting
I knew all the rules, but the rules did not know me
Guaranteed

This song makes me feel lonely as hell, but at the same time confirms my loneliness. So that I won't be afraid of it anymore. I know I'm lonely but now I know I was meant to be lonely.

A special kind of fall

"All right. Listen to me a minute now.... I may not word this as memorably as I'd like to, but I'll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway." Mr. Antolini said. "This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really got started."

Damn that's depressive. But I could see that happening to me. I know there's something missing in my life. Something I've always looked for but could never find. I've tried to look everywhere, I've tried to talk to people. But all I get out of it is feeling lonely as hell. And all I want to do is leave society for good and just live in the woods where I don't have to see anyone anymore.

$8.85

"Here," old Phoebe said. She was trying to give me the dough, but she couldn't find my hand in the dark.

Eight dollars and eight-five cents.

Then all of a sudden, I started to cry. I couldn't help it. I did it so nobody could hear me, but I did it. It scared the hell out of old Phoebe when I started doing it, and she came over and tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you can't just stop on a goddamn dime.

Boy, I scared the hell out of poor old Phoebe. The damn window was open and everything.

It was a helluva lot easier getting out of the house than it was getting in, for some reason. For one thing, I didn't give much of a damn anymore if they caught me. I really didn't. I figured if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wished they did, in a way.

Then I wouldn't have to deal with all this planning and looking for where the hell to go. At least I'd be with my parents and Phoebe and I'd have a roof over my head. But no one stopped me, and I was getting all depressed when I walked out that door, back into the cold lonely as hell night.

Chewing the fat

"Anyway, I like it now," I said. "I mean right now. Sitting here with you and just chewing the fat and horsing-"

"That isn't anything really!" Old Phoebe said.

She was trying to ask me what kinds of things I liked. But why can't someone just like sitting down and chewing the fat like I was. There's nothing wrong with just sitting around. In fact, I'd much rather do that than go out and watch a damn movie in the theatres or talk about phony things like movie stars and Corvettes.

I just like talking sometimes. Sitting and talking and chewing the fat.

People

People never give your message to anybody.

I told a waiter to go invite old Valencia for a drink with me, but I bet you he didn't even give think twice about it. He said yes and all, but he probably couldn't care less.

People never have any time for other people. And when they have to listen, they pretend to be interested but all they're really thinking about is what they wanna say after the other person shuts up. No one cares about anything enough.

Here's my idea, I said

It was during the date I had with Sally when I suddenly got this idea.

"Look," I said. "Here's my idea. How would you like to get the hell out of here? What we could do is, tomorrow morning we could drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont,and all around there, see. It's beautiful as hell up there. It really is." I was getting excited as hell, the more I thought of it. "We'll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till the dough runs out. Then, when the dough runs out, I could get a job somewhere and we could live somewhere with a brook and all and, later on, we could get married or something. I could chop all of our own wood in the wintertime and all, Honest to God, we could have a terrific time! Wudaya say?"

She didn't take it too well, but I still kept at it. But then things started heating up and by the

time I got too excited, Sally was getting sore as hell, and we both

hated each others guts by that time.

But the funny thing was, I meant it when I asked her. Every word of it. I could just see the whole thing, living all alone with her in the woods with nothing but the sunset and trees and a creek. No more phonies, no more Ackleys or goddamn Stradlaters. I swear I could die a happy man living a life like that.

Certain things

Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

Just place them in a pretty little case and keep them there. So that you don't forget everything. So that there's still something to come back to when you don't know where the hell you are anymore.

The museum

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of the water hole. Nobody'd be different. The only think that would be different would be you.

It wouldn't be big changes though. But every time you'd come back to that museum, there'd be something different about you. There's never any time to just stay still, and be the same for just a while. There's always gotta be some goddamn change happening, even if you don't want it to.

Nuns

I met a couple nuns during breakfast when I was at a breakfast bar, and they were real friendly, you could tell. It was refreshing almost, talking to them.

Anyways, I took their check off them, but they wouldn't let me pay it. The one with the glasses made me give it back to her.

"You've been more than generous," she said. "You're a very sweet boy." She certainly was nice. She reminded me a little bit of old Ernest Morrow's mother. When she smiled, mostly.

I like nice smiles. Usually you can tell right away by the person's smile if they're a big phony or not. But usually the person's more phony than real. It's hard to find someone that's not phony nowadays.

I don't know about old times in the past, but I haven't met very many genuinely nice people in my life.

I will try to fix you

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse.

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above earth or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
But if you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream, down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face and I...

Tears stream, down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face and I...

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you.

I'm no goddamn softie, even though the lyrics are quite corny, but after listening to this song, I didn't feel so damn depressed anymore. I was still sad as hell but not too sad that I'd jump off a window.

No one should be so damn lonely like this. We just need to stop being phonies and start acting like respectable human beings.

What a goddamn night

It took me quite a while to sleep after the incident with Maurice and that girl Sunny barging into my room to steal $5.00 from my wallet. I wasn't even tired - but finally I did. What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed.

I doubt anyone would even notice me gone. Maybe my parents would get into a fit, especially my mom. And maybe D.B. and Phoebe would miss me. And I'd miss Phoebe too.

But all this goddamn loneliness is just about killing me. And getting a beating from that fat old moron, Maurice, didn't help all too much. But my life is just pathetic, I don't even know how I've lasted this long. If there was one goddamn thing in my life that I could stay for, I'd be happy. That's all I'm asking for, one thing.

Jesus and his Disciples

I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.

If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones.

I don't understand why you're supposed to like the Disciples. All they did was fail Jesus every time He tried to teach them to do things right. But I guess they didn't know any better.

Sunny

There was this girl, Sunny in my room. She was a prostitute, but she got all damn nervous and made me feel more depressed than sexy when she pulled off her dress so sudden. It didn't make me feel sexy at all.

"Ya got a hanger? I don't want to get my dress all wrinkly. It's brand-clean." She said.

"Sure," I said right away.

It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going into a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all.

I wanted to ask how she became a prostitute. She was young as hell, around my age. But she was so damn peculiar I couldn't get around to it. She made me nervous when she was jiggling her leg up and down on that seat. I still tried to talk to her though. I even offered her money and said I didn't want to do anything else. But I couldn't really say anything much, she wasn't too interested in having a conversation.

Lillian Simmons

You could tell the waiter didn't like her much, you could tell even the Navy guy didn't like her much, even though he was dating her. And I didn't like her much. Nobody did.

It was funny, watching her block up the whole goddamn traffic in the aisle. But she was so phony I felt almost sorry for her in a way. She wasn't a goddamn witch or anything but nobody liked her much at all. And she didn't even know it. She just kept at it with her phony as hell comments like "In Hollywood! How marvelous! What's he doing?"

But you can't hate a person like that too much, when they don't mean much harm. They just don't know how to talk right, they think they gotta act all phony. I just hope one day they learn how to carry a normal conversation without using marvelous or grand every goddamn second.

Yale, my ass

My father wants me to go to Yale, or maybe Princeton, but I swear, I wouldn't go to one of those Ivy League colleges, if I was dying, for God's sake.

There were phonies coming in the goddamn window back in Elkton Hills, so you can imagine how many phonies would break through the goddamn school walls in a school like Princeton. I'm sick of them. They're so clueless, they never really see what's going on outside. And you can never have a decent conversation with them. It's just a waste of time trying to fit yourselves in their lives, especially when you're stuck with them in a goddamn school.

Streets

New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed.

I get so damn lonesome all the time now I'm starting to wonder if I'm going crazy. I wonder how many people've walked down these same streets of New York and felt so lost. It makes me wanna do something, anything. It's frustrating. I'm always trying to find a way somewhere, but there's no goddamn road to follow, you know?

Thinkin' about ducks

I was riding in this cab and I gave the driver my regular address, just out of habit and all - I completely forgot I was going to shack up in a hotel for a couple days and not go home till vacation started. So I asked him to turn around when he got the chance.

Then I thought of something all of a sudden. "Hey, listen," I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know

where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?"

He looked at me like a madman and said "Are you tryna kid me bud?", so I just sat there and started thinking about those ducks. Then I came up with this crazy logic that if I knew where they went for the winter, I'd find out where I'm supposed to go.

Penn station

The first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz. I left my bags right outside the booth so that I could watch them, but as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up.

When I think about it, there's nobody to call up, really. I don't know how to explain it, but I'm always looking for something. And when I call someone up for drinks, I think I'll find it, but really I don't. Maybe it's there for a while, but it never really stays, you know?

And it's not like anybody's gonna stop to listen to what I really have to say. There's the occasional conversation now and then, and maybe if I'm lucky even an intellectual one, but it's like this need to be listened to never gets satisfied.

Anyways, maybe I'm sounding like a complete moron. But all this thinking's getting me depressed. I just wanna get the hell out of here.

Such a shame how time flies

Wake up when it's dark outside
We're making small talk with the sky again
Catch a snowflake on my tongue
Make a wish that daylight comes again

Talk my snow out through the blinds
Hope to God it sticks this time
Daylight breaks, the sun comes up
Watch as the white Christmas comes to march
March, march

Baby with the snow outside
It's just you and me and no one else
Talk about the year's gone by
Ain't it such a shame how time flies

This city's a mess...

I'm not bitter all the time. Sometimes I get a moment that freezes in time, and I just want it to stay that way forever. Especially this one night I was with Jane, sitting on her porch where we were playing checkers. All the stars were out and the wind was blowing sort of gentle. It was peaceful, with just me and Jane. I liked that.

Jane

"That's a professional secret, buddy." He said. "That's a professional secret."

I couldn't remember too much, but the next thing I knew I was on the goddamn floor and he was on my chest holding my wrists. He kept shouting at me to shut up and I kept calling him a goddamn moron. Then he really let one go at me, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor bawling and screaming. I just laid there for a while, I didn't even bother to get up, until I heard him walk down the hall to the can.

I went over to Ackley's room, and stuck around for a bit. I laid down on Ely's bed and just started thinking about Jane and all. I think that she'd like how I still remember the way she puts all her kings in the back row, or that she used to do ballet, but stopped because she thought it'd make her legs lousy. I wouldn't care one bit, though. She could dance all night with her little ballet shoes and I wouldn't mind.

Allie

I had to write a composition for Stradlater, where I was supposed to describe a house or a room or something. But I'm not too crazy about describing rooms and houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie's baseball 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 to bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946.

Stradlater read it while he was stroking his bare chest and stomach with this stupid expression. Then suddenly he said, "For Chrissake, Holden. This is about a goddamn baseball glove."

Then I said "So what?" Cold as hell.

Stradlater's a goddamn hot-shot, he is. He thinks he's all mighty and handsome and that everyone wants to do favors for him because he's so great. But what the hell's the difference if it's about a baseball glove? He asked me to do his goddamn composition for him, and that's what I did.

Then all of a sudden I imagined Allie there, watching Stradlater getting sore. But Allie wouldn't get mad, he never got mad at anyone. He'd just stand there with his red hair, all quiet, though. And I'd be really sorry I wrote about his baseball glove for someone who didn't give a damn about his poems.

So I just said, "All right, give it back to me, then." I went over and pulled it out of his goddamn hand. Then I tore it up.

I'm leaving Pencey

Old Spencer, my history teacher, wrote me a note saying he wanted to see me before I went home. He knew I wasn't coming back to Pencey. So I stopped by his house today.

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules." He said.

Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing.

All the hot-shots go on living with their Corvettes and their buddies and their girlfriends. And they pay good money to watch phony movies, then they come out and say how grand it was.

If there's one word I hate, it's grand. It's so goddamn phony I could puke every time I hear it.

But what's a game about it when you're not a hot-shot? You don't go to the movies or watch the game with your friends. You spend your time just trying to survive in a school full of phonies. You can't have a decent intellectual conversation with anyone - you can't even read a decent book without getting distracted - and all you want to do is run away and hide in the woods where you can watch the birds fly south for the winter.