I'm going to start with how I got kicked out of Pencey Prep - I was flunking four subjects, that's how. Old Spencer the history teacher, wrapped up in his crumby old blanket with smelly medicines and ointments from that company run by devil worshipers, you know, he asked how I felt about flunking out and all I could think about was the ducks in Central Park, where they went when the lagoon froze over. He could've used a bar of Irish Spring to wash away some of that old man smell, phony old fart.

I'm a madman about cleanliness, and there wasn't much of that at Pencey. Take this guy Ackley, always barged in. A real loser with pimples all over and rotten teeth that could've used a dose of Colgate One Hundred or Ultra Brite. Ackley sticks to you like white stuff from cheap underarm deodorants, then old Stradlater busted in. He's a slob, too, a secret slob who uses all the wrong brands like Vitalis, not quality tested products from Colgate-Palmolive.

Except when he mooches them off me. "Lend me your Rapid Shave - I've got this girl waitin' downstairs. Says she knows you - Jean Miner."

"Jan Miner." A funny old girl with a heart of soap and this sick old dog they fed with Science Diet kibble to keep his old breath tolerable. I'd told her about my little brother, Allie, who died from leukemia and wrote poems on the fingers of his baseball mitt

"Jean, Jan, what's the difference." Stradlater was massaging Lustre Cream into his hair, my Lustre Cream. "Oh, I need a favor, write me an English composition, something about a room? You're not going anywhere..." He came back, late, from making out with Jan in Coach Ed Bankey's lousy car - athletic bastards stick together! - mad that I wrote his composition about Allie, instead of some crumby room that could've used some Ajax, with more ammonia than the green stuff, and a coat of Murphy's oil soap, too, helping you care for wood.. I said he was a moron and he let me have one.

So I took a train into New York, and told the moron cab driver to take me to the Edmont, this crumby hotel where the perverts across the airshaft don't even draw the blinds. Dirt, I'll tell you - goddam city lives in it! I went downstairs to the Lavender Room and asked for a scotch and soda, but the waiter wanted to see my driver's license, so I took a cab to Ernie's, down in Greenwich Village. The driver was another moron - when I asked where the ducks in the Central Park Lagoon went over the winter, he started talking about goddam fish. Sorehead! Ernie's a phony and his joint was packed with dopes, but I got my scotch and soda - nobody cared how old you were. The place was so dark, and there were so many jerks.

I went back to the Edmont and the elevator guy asked "Innarested in a little tail?" Five bucks a throw, fifteen for all night. I was so depressed, I didn't even think. Then I stood at the mirror, flossing and soaking my hands in Palmolive so they'd be soft, the way girls like. Finally this prostitute knocked on the door. She could've used some Orabase for those canker sores all over her mouth.

"Allow me to introduce myself," I said. "My name is Jim Steele."

"Sunny," she said. "Let's go."

I asked if she felt like talking, if she wanted a cigarette while she started jiggling her foot. She was a lousy conversationalist, and I got depressed. "I haven't got all..."

"Look," I said, "do you mind if we don't do it? I've had an operation recently."

"Yeah? That's tough! But it's still ten."

"He said five. I'm sorry - that's all I'm shelling out." But old Sunny and Maurice, the pimpy elevator guy, took five more dollars and slapped me around like I was the one needing Mennen. I went to the bathroom to wipe away the blood with Handi-Wipes and relieve myself into a Baggie - then I looked in the mirror, as if I was a tough guy, like Charlie Whitman, who took personal care products up to that clocktower with his rifle - he killed, but he didn't offend. What I really wanted to do was jump out the window, but someone... the policemen... would've cracked jokes about my pimples. So I brushed my teeth with Ultra-Brite and got into bed.

Next morning old Sally Hayes said she'd come to see a show, Frank Munn and Virginia Rea. To kill time, I went up to see those wooden Indians at the Museum. There was this one old guy in the back of a canoe wearing a mask - he'd always frightened us, and I guess he frightened the rest of the Indians too. The teachers said he was the witch doctor, but I think his complexion was all rotten - he could've used some Mennen, some Teen-Spirit, too. Then I went over to Broadway to buy this CD my sister, Phoebe, was crazy about: "Imagine" by John Lennon, some old fart she heard on Grandma's record player before she died. This poor-looking family was on the sidewalk, but their dirt-happy boy didn't care, he was singing: "When a body cleanse a body, comin' through the rye." Just singing, not caring how poor he was, or that his clothes should've been tossed into a machine with Cold Power All... and him with them, too.

Finally old Sally showed, she looked terrific, but the theater was crumby with flits like stupid Ajax pixie flits, flitting around, singing: "Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum!" until the White Knight came along and floated them down the drain. Flits and actors - I hate actors. They're phonies. And I told Sally how phony boys' schools were, all those dirty boys wiping their dirty noses on their sleeves in dirty little cliques. I said we ought to go somewhere like the High Sierras, where everything is clean and the only dangers are avalanches, and a white tornado, sometimes, and she hit the ceiling. She asked me if I still wiped everything down and saved my eliminations in Baggies - and I said do you think I'd use Saran Wrap or some other crap? Baggies are alligator-tough. I guess she's one of those who don't care about dirt and disorderly living. Breaks my static barrier!

So I gave old Carl Luce a buzz to meet me at the Wicker Bar, which used to have these two French babes, one played the piano and one who sang. They were cute, but sort of dirty - I don't think the French are acquainted with Colgate-Palmolive's personal care products. But the Wicker was dead, full of flits and lesbians too. I told old Carl about being a Cleanser, riding my white horse through the rye with a big lance and touching children, making their clothes go magically clean, but he just sipped his dry Martini and said I ought to see a psychoanalyst. His father's one of them, lousy brainwasher. Morons!

I kept drinking until they threw me out. Then I decided to see old Phoebe, but that John Lennon CD fell out of the bag and shattered, just like the old phony did when some hero shot him, back when my father was a kid. Right on! I thought... next to actors, rock stars are the phoniest phonies of all. Making fun of Teen Spirit and blowing their heads off, right on! and their drunk wives and managers falling down at the funeral. Anyway, Phoebe told me about this Pageant for America she was in: "It stinks, but I play Tom Arnold. It's practically the biggest part! I'm dying and this ghost comes and asked if I'm ashamed of how I lived. Are you coming? Daddy can't, he has to fly to California." She kills me, with her schoolgirl complexion.

Then she asks did I get kicked out again and I said it was no big deal. "I'm going West, to the High Sierras. I'll be a cowboy, or fisherman or a State Trooper - a man who gets dirt on his uniform that only the strongest detergents get out."

"You couldn't be a cowboy. You hate cows! They're dirty. You hate schools and cows, you don't like anything!"

"That's not true," I said. "I like ammonia and Handi-Wipes, Eddie Cantor and the White Knight from Ajax." Then I heard a noise, my crumby parents coming back... I hid in Phoebe's closet, all full of clothes scrubbed clean and rainforest fresh and got so excited I called my old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, and he said I could come over to his swanky apartment down on Sutton Place.

"I didn't cut classes," I explained. "There were some I didn't attend because the room was so dirty you'd catch a disease being there, but I didn't cut any classes." Mr. Antolini talked on and drank highballs, but let me sleep on their couch until I woke up, feeling something wrong, and he was rubbing his hand over my forehead. Rough, like a lobster's claw - another phony flit who needed an appointment with Madge the Manicurist. So I spent the night at Grand Central, then walked around Broadway, all Christmasy, until I decided to start hitchhiking West. If I couldn't be a cowboy, I'd find a gas station job - wear one of those shirts with someone's name over my heart, maybe Jim Steele. I'd pretend to be deaf and marry a deaf-mute wife who'd wash my dirty Jim-shirts with Oxydol - but I had to say goodbye to Phoebe first, so I left this note at school. Someone had written "Fuck you!" on a wall, so I found a thousand and second use for my Handi-Wipes but, when I went over to the mummy room in the Museum to wait for Phoebe, I found someone else had written "Fuck you!" too, over all the mummy cases. I had to swipe some Galaxy from the janitor's closet to wipe that off - maybe I shouldn't pump gas, I thought, be a G-man instead, swiping and wiping. Which got me thinking to the White Knight and how people like old Carl Luce make everything seem sick.

Phoebe wanted to ride the carrousel, so I bought her a ticket and she rode around and around and it began to rain, a soaking rain that seemed to wash everything clean. It made me so happy, I wish you could've been there!

Well, that's about all I have to say - these psychoanalysts here keep asking what I'm gonna do, will I apply myself and DB asks, too. I don't know what the hell to say. Except that, no matter how crumby the job, I can persevere with God and with the proven brands of Colgate-Palmolive and that, someday, I will be stronger than dirt!

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