I Am Nobodys Hero, But You Were Mine

Holden has a roommate who always looks the "GQ" part, only Holden knows this impostor shaves his face each day with a dirty razor.

Holden brings a hooker with a green dress back to his room, and then confuses her with his need to simply talk. She sends her pimp after him.

I am not surprised when I find Holden frantically scrubbing the word "Fuck" off the museum's wall.

All he ever wanted was to be the Catcher in the Rye

All we ever wanted was to be caught.

There once was a boy who made films. When he was small, he knocked out all the windows in his parent's garage, peed on the bushes in an act of self-defiance. We used to talk and smoke cigarettes back in college. We never kissed, but I'm sure the taste of his mouth would have been familiar. This was not love or anything like it, just two people who got to a point where The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a Saturday Night made more sense than tequila shots at the bar.

I remember when the makeshift family who was clearly not a family for me, sat around that Olive Garden table eating macaroni with processed cheese. Later that night, drinking beers in my parent's basement, he told me I did not belong. I knew it was a compliment.

This friendship was a gift, fleeting and small. It carried with it all the simplicity that real friendship should. Like how he came to my room one night, an impromptu gift, he handed me salvation in a small white novel, inscribed with the words love John. This was my foray into a world so like mine, my heart to heart with the one character in literature who made certain sense. The way we both made sense out of our friendship, for all the ways we did not make sense to the outside world.

Holden wonders where the ducks go when the lake is frozen over.
Holden without a home holds onto the end of a payphone.
Holden hoping to hear Jane's voice on the line.
Holden hanging up every time he does.

I wish I could have told him to have more faith.
I wish there were not baseball mits left after little boys died,
and older brothers who did not sell out your dreams to Hollywood.
I wish for parents present and accounted for.
I wish. I wish. I wish.

I wish that all the Holdens of the world could stumble across a John.
It would have made for a very different ending to that novel.