Thirty Years Later

by TFSyndicate

An old high school assignment, fresh from the archives. I was told to write what the main character, Holden Caufield, ended up doing in the years that followed the story. This is what I came up with.

S'me. It's been 30 years since my breakdown, and my stay at the rest home back in '49 really helped. Remember how I said that you don't know if you're going to do something until you do it? For me, it's applying myself in my studies. Sure enough, I actually did it. I went back to New York and attended a new school conveniently located near my apartment, called Ray's High School (Don't look for it-it's not there anymore). My grades increased dramatically thanks to the hard work I put in, compared to the bum grades back in Pensy and those other schools. Everybody at Ray's was really sorry for me, even the principal. However, I gave up doing extracurricular sports to avoid a reprisal of the fencing incident. My parents were really happy to hear that I'm doing much better at Ray's. I was good enough to stay there for the rest of my high school career.

Now it's 1979. I'm living in an apartment in Greenwich Village, splitting my time between two jobs: Filling up cars at Ray's Gas (One of my old dream jobs), and preparing the dough at a Ray's Pizza. I am still single, and I'm still thinking of Jane, Sally, and Sunny the prostitute. Jane finally broke up with Stradlater, so now I feel better about her: I can swoop in for the kill when I'm ready. For Sally, I felt sorry for insulting her when we went ice skating at Rock Center, but I haven't got the nerve to formally apologize. I heard Sunny the prostitute died in a gun accident.

As for the family, Dad had died, which is truth-be-told a relief, because I like Mom better. D.B. came back to write episodes for sitcoms: These are the only shows that I do not deem phony, as long as they keep you tuning in next week. I occasionally drop by and pitch him some ideas which he takes into consideration. Ol' Phoebe is now a model for magazine covers, which I think is the phoniest job ever. Fashion has changed significantly since '49. Lookit: everybody's wearing bell-bottoms, leather jackets, skirts that get smaller every day, and shirts that are so short that their belly buttons are showing. This is cute, sure, but to a 40's guy like me, it's nonetheless distracting.

It's not just the dress codes that have turned phony, it's also the music. Nobody has ever heard of a 78 record, like "Little Shirley Beans". Nowadays you got morons like David Bowie and Elvis Costello and the Moody Blues, who want you to think their songs are cool. The only musician I could stand was Bob Dylan, but only before he decided to turn from acoustic to electric. That's when I decided to draw the line. This new-fangled "stereophonic" sound is also phony too. I stick with MONO.

So anyway, 30 years have passed and pop culture took a turn from lame to phony, even my own family fell under the spell. If there was a time machine that would take me back to the 40's, I'd use it. But there isn't, so I'm just going to have to keep living with it, because we all know that this is something that will never end. Okay, peace out.