Chapter 5

We had the usual meal on Saturday night at Pencey. It was suppose to be a big deal because they gave you steak. It was nice when we got out of the dining room. The snow was three inches thick and coming down like a mad man. I didn’t feel much like staying in, so me and this friend of mine, Mel Brossard decided to have a hamburger and maybe see a lousy movie. Ackley came along with us just for the hell of it, he never did anything on a Saturday night anyway.
While I was waiting for Ackley to get ready I opened my window and packed a snowball with my hands. I didn’t throw it at anything though. I started to throw it at a car, but it looked so nice and white, I didn’t want to ruin it. We got the bus into Agerstown but didn’t end up seeing the movie because Brossard and Ackley had both seen the picture that was playing. We just got a couple of hamburgers and got the bus back to Pencey.

When we got back to the dorm Ackley came and lay on my bed. He just talked in this very monotonous voice about come girl he was suppose to have had sexual intercourse with the summer before. It was a lot of crap, naturally. He was a virgin if I ever saw one. After Ackley left I put on my pyjamas, bathrobe and my new hunting hat and started writing this composition for Stradlater. I didn’t know what to write about so I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. He had this left-handed mitt and used to write poems and stuff on it so that he had something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He’s dead now. He got leukaemia and died when we were up at Maine, on July 18th 1946. You’d have liked him. I was only 13 when they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. I’d slept in the garage the night he died ad broke all the goddamn windows with my fist. It was stupid I know and I hardly even knew I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie.

Anyway that’s what I wrote Stradlater’s composition about, old Allies baseball mitt. I just had to change the names and stuff so nobody knew I had written it.