Perfect Day for the last of the Bananafish

Celebrating a Deathday™: Writing deity Jay Dee Salinger ascended into heaven on this day (January 27, 2010), which was something of a good thing — you'll forgive me for saying — as funeral authorities couldn't get past the triple-dead-bolted doors of his Cornish, New Hampshire home to get at a body. Sadly, by the time he was carried away on angel wings to that great writing nook in the sky, the revered Salinger was more famous for being a press-whore-turned-recluse than he was a bloody writer, as his autobiographical tale of teen angst, “To Catch Her in the Rye”, was nearly sixty years-old. As a young man, Salinger was a minor league baseball "catcher," whose dreams of a professional career were dashed when he couldn't handle a knuckle ball, so he traded in his chest protector for a ballpoint pen and never looked back, except when he was being stalked by that Joyce Maynard bird who kissed and told on him later in life. Salinger named the rye-drinking, self-imagined sex maniac Holden Caulfield after the rye-drinking actor William Holden (his boyhood camp mate and pen pal, who died rather unheroically in 1981 after an incident with a rye bottle left him lethally cartwheeling into a cocktail table, but not before bedding Keith Partridge’s ex-wife Kay Lenz in a likeable bit of 70's fluff called “Breezy”.) In Salinger’s original manuscript, Holden Caulfield was a mouthy, prep school baseball catcher who ditches his traveling squad at a bus station to chase down some floozy in a farm field (pictured) and, later, more honourably, to take his little sister Phoebe Cates for a carousel ride. Salinger’s agent Seymour Somebody convinced him to lose the baseball angle and to change his Judeo-Christian birth name from Jerome David Salamander to the more approachable Jay Dee Salinger, as Jerome was thought to be a name more befitting a dance instructor and salamanders are loathsome and lizard-like. It was good advice and brought Salinger good favour for many years. His later work included the collection "Eight or Nine Stories," the carpentery instructional “Raise High The Roof Beams”, which met with mixed reviews — “Of course you raise the beams high,” tradesmen screamed, “they’re for the damned roof top, aren’t they?” — the foodie-themed stage play “I’ll Have The Bananafish”, and something called “Franny and Zooey”, which was made into the movie “Benny & Joon,” about a good-looking eccentric named Benny (or possible Zooey) who falls in love with the cute-if-flat-chested headcase named Joon (or possible Franny). After the film flopped, Jay Dee assembled his final press conference, where he announced to his fawning, ink-scribbling worship community that he would never again allow his work to be commissioned for film and, indeed, would never publish again whilst alive, though he was considering five works for posthumous release. And that was bloody that. Though he continued to write, he never published — never left the house, in fact, except in dead of night when he ran out of Pudding Pops® — which is why he’s largely forgotten by the youth of today, who if you asked to name a famous Jay Dee, they’d probably say Jay Dee Fortune, that wanker from the reality show “RockStar™: INXS”, who replaced the late Canadian singer Michael Hutchinson, who auto-asphyxiated himself to death, causing grave embarrassment to his family and bandmates, but alas, no greater shame than having Jay Dee Fortune shrieking like a banshee on stage in his place. But I digress. Today we pay homage to the saintly Jay Dee Salinger. And Holden Caulfield. And Franny and Zooey. And we raise high a glass — if not a roof beam — in their honor!