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The Catcher In The Rye Tour (1999)

In the novel, Holden Caulfield recalled the madman stuff that happened to him the previous Christmas. He had just been expelled from Pencey Prep, a fancy school in Pennsylvania. My wandering begins when I depart from a fancy school in Connecticut. Holden had to leave because he flunked all his subjects except English; I have to leave because summer classes are finished. Of the East Asian students, I’m the only one whose first language is English. (Note the amazing parallels.)
Holden stood on top of a hill next to this crazy cannon that was in the Revolutionary War, trying to feel some kind of goodbye. I stand in the quad beside a giant sculpture of a lipstick ascending tank tracks and say goodbye to the squirrels.
Holden went to his history teacher Mr. Spencer’s house, and remembered how Spencer had shown him an old Navajo blanket he’d bought at Yellowstone Park. My classmates and I go to a history professor’s house and look at his collection of Native American art.
Holden’s roommate Stradlater had a date with Jane Gallagher, whom Holden had a crush on. I arrange to have brunch with my date to the senior prom, a disaster neither of us refers to.
Stradlater asked Holden to write his English composition. It had to be descriptive as hell, so Holden wrote an essay about his dead brother’s baseball mitt. A couple of days before the end of classes, I go to a baseball game. Three hours of unremitting tedium, only slightly alleviated by drink.
Holden took the train to New York. On the train he met the good-looking mother of Ernest Morrow, the biggest bastard that ever went to his crumby school. On the train to New York I encounter an ugly racist bastard.
At Penn Station, Holden took a cab and asked the driver about the ducks in that lagoon on Central Park South. Where do the ducks go when the lagoon freezes over the winter? At Grand Central, I take a cab to Central Park South. It’s the hottest summer in recent memory. The ducks look enervated.
Holden checked into the Edmont Hotel, where they gave him a room with a view of the other side of the hotel. I check into the Essex House and get the same view. Unlike Holden, though, I do not see a distinguished-looking gentleman put on an evening gown and pose before a mirror, or a couple squirting highballs out of their mouths at each other. My neighbors have the sense to close their curtains. Emerging from the hotel, I see the street teeming with limousines spewing bejewelled matrons, all oblivious to the reek of horseshit wafting from Central Park.
Holden walked to the museum with the Indians to look for his kid sister Phoebe. Later, he waited for her outside the museum with the mummies. My kid sister Cookie joins me in New York and we go to the Museum of Natural History to look at dinosaur bones. Then we go to the Metropolitan Museum to look at art. Cookie insists on reading all the labels and makes herself sick.
Holden watched Phoebe on the carousel in Central Park, and felt so damn happy all of a sudden. Cookie and I ride the carousel many times. It makes us happy.