The Catcher in the Rye | Page 5

to say to me. He sat up more in his chair and sort of moved
around. It was a false alarm, though. All he did was lift the Atlantic Monthly off his lap
and try to chuck it on the bed, next to me. He missed. It was only about two inches away,
but he missed anyway. I got up and picked it up and put it down on the bed. All o\
f a
sudden then, I wanted to get the hell out of the room. I could feel a terrific lecture coming
on. I didn't mind the idea so much, but I didn't feel like being lectured to and smell Vicks
Nose Drops and look at old Spencer in his pajamas and bathrobe all at the same time. I
really didn't.

It started, all right. "What's the matter with you, boy?" old Spencer said. He said it
pretty tough, too, for him. "How many subjects did you carry this term?"
"Five, sir."
"Five. And how many are you failing in?"
"Four." I moved my ass a little bit on the bed. It was the hardest bed I ever sat on.
"I passed English all right," I said, "because I had all that Beowulf an\
d Lord Randal My
Son stuff when I was at the Whooton School. I mean I didn't have to do any work in
English at all hardly, except write compositions once in a while."
He wasn't even listening. He hardly ever listened to you when you said
something.
"I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing."
"I know that, sir. Boy, I know it. You couldn't help it."
"Absolutely nothing," he said over again. That's something that drives me crazy.
When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time. Then he said
it three times. "But absolutely nothing. I doubt very much if you opened your textbook
even once the whole term. Did you? Tell the truth, boy."
"Well, I sort of glanced through it a couple of times," I told him. I didn't want to
hurt his feelings. He was mad about history.
"You glanced through it, eh?" he said--very sarcastic. "Your, ah, exam paper is
over there on top of my chiffonier. On top of the pile. Bring it here, please."
It was a very dirty trick, but I went over and brought it over to him--I didn't have
any alternative or anything. Then I sat down on his cement bed again. Boy, you can't
imagine how sorry I was getting that I'd stopped by to say good-by to him.
He started handling my exam paper like it was a turd or something. "We studied
the Egyptians from November 4th to December 2nd," he said. "You chose to write about
them for the optional essay question. Would you care to hear what you had to say?"
"No, sir, not very much," I said.
He read it anyway, though. You can't stop a teacher when they want to do
something. They just do it.

The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in
one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all
know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere.

I had to sit there and listen to that crap. It certainly was a dirty tri\
ck.

The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for
various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what
the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they
wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for
innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite
a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.

He stopped reading and put my paper down. I was beginning to sort of hate him.
"Your essay, shall we say, ends there," he said in this very sarcastic v\
oice. You wouldn't

think such an old guy would be so sarcastic and all. "However, you dropp\
ed me a little
note, at the bottom of the page," he said.
"I know I did," I said. I said it very fast because I wanted to stop him\
before he
started reading that out loud. But you couldn't stop him. He was hot as a firecracker.