Jerome David

I had lunch on Thursday in a place called Urban BBQ. It's located right next door to a purveyor of fine beers that had a truly impressive selection of craft ales. Not knowing what I was doing, I picked out a Mont Blanc blond, a six of 14er ESB, and a Belgian-style ale from Argentine made by a brewery named "Jerome." (I got the Cerveza Diablo.)

As we made our way to the front to pay, one of my friends found out from his phone that J.D. Salinger had died.

I got home that night and thought about that famous Jerome some. I drank the Jerome ale. I had much too much homework to do, but I still set aside some Friday metro reading - Seymour, An Introduction.

A lot of people talk about how the last novella in the Glass family saga is dark, disjointed, and of course, serves as the final coda for Salinger's most challenging and (to some) infuriating characters. I always enjoyed "Raise High the Roof Beam" and "Seymour" because of the tone, the playfulness, and Salinger's refusal to put any meat on Seymour Glass's skeleton. But as I reread it this time, I also realized that there's something else that happens in "Seymour": it's Salinger erasing himself shortly before he disappeared. Here he confuses his own biography with Buddy Glass's and suggests that Salinger's body of work is in fact Buddy's.

At this point, it doesn't seem to me merely chummy to mention that I've written about my brother before. For that matter, with a little good-humored cajoling I might conceivably admit that there's seldom been a time when I haven't written about him, and if, presumably at gunpoint, I had to sit down tomorrow and write a story about a dinosaur, I don't doubt that I'd inadvertently give the big chap one or two small mannerisms reminiscent of Seymour - a singularly endearing way of biting off the top of a hemlock, say, or of wagging his thirty-foot tail. Some people - not close friends - have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn't go into the young leading character of the one novel I've published. Actually, most of these people haven't asked me; they've told me. To protest this at all, I've found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me or told me anything of the kind - for which I'm grateful, and, in a way, more than a bit impressed, since a good many of my main characters speak Manhattanese fluently and idiomatically, have a rather common flair for rushing in where most damned fools fear to tread, and are, by and large, pursued, by an Entity that I'd much prefer to identify, very rougly, as the Old Man of the Mountain.

RIP.