You’ll Just End Up Missing Them...
You’ll Just End Up Missing Them...
Versions
December 15, 2020
Mementos
Hi. This is a story I'm going to tell you....
None of us were supposed to be there, even though we were invited. But there we were.
It was just before Christmas vacation 1988 and a half-dozen of us gathered in the basement of the old house that we were renting on the edge of campus. We all had a beer in hand, someone was puffing on a cigar, six college boys looking stupid, feeling immortal.
I was the coolest one. Take my word.
One of the guys - I won't tell you his name - had called us into our secret meeting space - no girls ever allowed - to show us a movie. He had one of those old 8-millimeter projectors, the same kind we had all grown up with, the kind dad would break out and show monster movies, Laurel & Hardy, and family vacations once the film finally got developed.
But this day we weren't watching any of those things. With six college guys gathered around a movie reel you would think we would be watching a dirty movie, and that's absolutely what I thought it would be.
No. And the owner of the reel would not tell us what it really was. He sipped his beer and smiled as we hung up an old bed sheet - that had plenty beer and Dorito stains - to serve as a screen. We each pulled up a chair, dimmed the lights and the damp, cool basement became ominous. A cavern of the forbidden.
The scratches and blips and a 3-2-1 countdown hit the screen first as we heard the projector spin its story which then opened with a scene of a tall teenage boy, probably about 17, with a crewcut, and dressed like it was about 1950, sitting at a desk looking out into the sunlight with the ocean in the distance. He took a deep breath and opened up the journal on the table in front of him and the camera spied on the words he was writing and his narration joined in.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is..."
Holy Joe.
We gasped. We jumped. We swore. We high-fived. We chugged our beer and puffed the cigar.
There it was, The Catcher in the Rye - the movie.
Doubtlessly you know there is no movie of The Catcher in the Rye.
But there it was. There we were.
All six of us had read The Catcher in the Rye. Many times. Three of us had read it in our freshman literature class, the other three of us, including me, first read it in high school, and while the six of us became best friends in college because we all loved sports, beer, girls, cigars and all of us, of course, lived in the same dorm our freshman year, and many other factors, one of the things we all shared was our love of this book. Our borderline obsession with it.
It hardly made any of us unique. Millions love that book, and many have been bewitched by it and by the mystery of the secretive author, J.D. Salinger. But that didn't make it any less special for us.
What can I tell you about the next 90 minutes in that basement? Was the movie good? Did it live up to the book? It doesn't matter. And no, I cannot tell you who directed it, who was in it, where it was made, or when.
And I sure as hell can't tell you what happened to it.
We got drunk that night, went home for Christmas - though a couple of the guys stayed in the house over Christmas break - and there was a fight, an ugly fight, because one of the guys told some people that we had the movie and he wanted to show it to other people.
It's tough to keep secrets around boys and beer.
It's probably not true but in my memory that day in the basement was the last time the six of us were ever together, when it was just the six of us. There were plenty of parties the final semester and always a parade of other guys and girls in and out of the old house that cost us $750 a month to rent but I don't remember a night when, for the whole night at least, it was just us six friends.
We were young, drunk, dumb, and wishing we could step into the pages of something sad because that, we thought, would make us happy.
More than 30 Christmases ago.
They tore down the house a long time ago. Now there's a parking lot.
That's the story I'm telling. --TK
Tuesday, December 15, 2020