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- naturally. He was a virgin if ever I saw one. I doubt if he ever even gave anybody a feel.
Anyway, finally I had to come right out and tell him that I had to write a composition for
Stradlater, and that he had to clear the hell out, so I could concentrate. He finally did, but
he took his time about it, as usual. After he left, I put on my pajamas and bathrobe and
my old hunting hat, and started writing the composition.
The thing was, I couldn't think of a room or a house or anything to describe the
way Stradlater said he had to have. I'm not too crazy about describing rooms and houses
anyway. So what I did, 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 fielder's 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 at
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. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing
letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their
class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that
he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways.
He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,
but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I
started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was
around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a
sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the
fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was sitting there,
about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red
hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he
thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and
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 slept in the garage the night he died, and I
broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all
the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken
and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll
admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand
still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist any more--
not a tight one, I mean--but outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a
goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.
Anyway, that's what I wrote Stradlater's composition about. Old Allie's baseball
mitt. I happened to have it with me, in my suitcase, so I got it out and copied down the
poems that were written on it. All I had to do was change Allie's name so that nobody
would know it was my brother and not Stradlater's. I wasn't too crazy about doing it, but I
couldn't think of anything else descriptive. Besides, I sort of liked writing about it. It took
me about an hour, because I had to use Stradlater's lousy typewriter, and it kept jamming
on me. The reason I didn't use my own was because I'd lent it to a guy down the hall.
It was around ten-thirty, I guess, when I finished it. I wasn't tired, though, so I
looked out the window for a while. It wasn't snowing out any more, but every once in a
while you could hear a car somewhere not being able to get started. You could also hear
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