Justin Porter Stephens

My story of a story of a run in with J.D. Salinger

I’d meant to post this last week after his passing but I kept procrastinating until it was out of the news cycle and virtually off topic again. Anyway. When I was in college I briefly dated a girl whose mom met J.D. Salinger. Being a newly-minted English major, this excited me to no end. (At the time, I felt like I had practically met him myself.) She told me that when she was eighteen she worked at a summer camp near Cornish and one day her and some of her female coworkers decided to play old Jerry a visit. Being a group of eighteen year old girls, he let them in, hanging out on the porch, giving them beers and regaling them with the story of a recent interloper who showed up at his door, claiming he was Holden Caulfield. Salinger apparently answered, “Like hell you are!” and drove him to the nearest airport in a fit of anger.

What I always inevitably think about when remembering this story is: those few tales of random people speaking to him at the post office or in town about all the novels he’d written since “Hapworth” may be truer than we think. And that somewhere, there’s another person writing a blog entry about how the father of someone they dated in college crashed Salinger’s house claiming to be Holden Caulfield.