Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, the adult life

Last night I went to eat dinner at Donovan’s Pub which is rumored to have the best old-school burger in Queens, NY. Good burger. Heinous time. My extended family got obnoxiously drunk and I watched the waiters and busboys deal with a gaggle of drunken Harris’ in horror @ my pending adult life. This was all in preparation for a Billy Joel concert***, the results of which I can capture for you in a conversation between my mom and dad:

dad: why did you have to get so drunk?

mom: i wasn’t drunk

dad: then why were you hugging the security guard? 

After dinner, I met some friends at Bourbon Street NYC for 50 cent drafts, which were not actually drafts, but cans of Coors Light, which I guess doesn’t warm as quickly as drafts, but at least they were still 50 cents. On the train I started rereading J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, a book that was given to me by my fiction professor Tom Bailey, when I was a freshman at Susquehanna University & making fine but vain attempts at writing fiction. He gave me the copy because he said he had two. Inside one Elyse Upbin had signed her name into the corner cover, and also drew a heart with her and Roger’s name in it. Apparently Bailey has no qualms about giving Elyse’s property away.

I tried to take a picture but my camera is to low-tech to get real up-close and capture the essence of Elyse’s love:

I’m giving a lot of the plot away here:

Man did my ears go red for “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and less-admittedly-so for “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” “Bananafish” was just so creepy and pedophiliac there’s no way I couldn’t have liked it, especially after the loon of a husband blows his brains out in the same room as his sleeping wife like he just couldn’t wait to walk the extra 15 feet to the bathroom. I stared out the window of the train after reading it, and I kept thinking of the moment in the water at the beach where he kisses the little girl’s wet foot and then paddles her back to shore. Creepy indeed.

“Uncle Wiggly” for one has a strange name, and a similar well-to-do feel that most of Salinger’s fiction has.  It’s Eloise (and isn’t Eloise a perfect name–the only Eloise I’ve ever known was a rich bitch) and Mary Jane sitting on the couch drinking martinis, ignoring the maid and talking about dry, failed marriages. And the wonderful lives they thought they would lead with wonderfully funny and intellectual husbands. It was all very scary in that post-graduate coming-to-terms-with-the-passage-of-time zippy doo kinda way. Anyway, the part that got me reeling in this story was the last line where Eloise says, after drunkenly ordering her young daughter around and stumble-bumping into inanimate objects, “‘I was a nice girl…wasn’t I?” After seeing my family drunk and arguing vehemently about kitchen backsplashes, it’s a wonder I didn’t foul the train with my half-digested 30lb cheeseburger I’d eaten only a while ago with all the future I was seeing.

On that note, Nine Stories is really one of those books that everyone should read and that most people have at least heard of, making it easier to bump it to the top of the ol’ list. Give it a read if you haven’t. Or give it a re-read; I liked it much more on the second go. 

Lastly, I started reading “The American Scholar,” a speech/essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which was in a textbook that I’m thinking of choosing for a Rhetoric class I have to teach so that my time at Iowa doesn’t wind up costing me. This excerpt was swell:

“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates… man hopes: genius creates.” 

Anything gets me in a good mood if it implies poetry has a point!

***ps: for those of you who for some reason stumbled upon this blog looking for the guest appearances at the Billy Joel concert, they were Tony Bennett and John Mellencamp. lolz