I had to write this composition, for Stradlater. So I kicked pimple buster , Ackley out so I concentrate. After he left, I put on my pajamas and bathrobe and my old red hunting hat and started to write. The thing was , I couldn’t think of a room or a house or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he has to have. I’m not too crazy about describing rooms. So I decided to write about Allie’s baseball mitt, it’s a very descriptive subject, it really is. My brother, Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was left handed. You probably think how can a baseball mitt be descriptive but the thing about Allie’s baseball mitt was that, he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He’s dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18Th, 1946. You would of liked him. He was two years younger than me, but fifty times more intelligent. His teachers were always writing letter to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. AND THEY WEREN'T SHOOTING BULL. He was the most intelligent he was also the nicest. He never got mad and people with red hair were suppose to get mad very easily but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.

I was only 13 when he died and they were going to have psychoanalyzed and all because i broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and i broke all the goddam windows with my fists, just for the hell of it. I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand still hurts, when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist anymore- not a tight one. I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinists or anything anyway.