Carpenters. I like him a lot. Our teacher told us he still lives over in N.H. but has given up writing. That blows my mind. Why would someone just give up when they are going great guns? Oh well. The football team here really sucks but I’m learning to like soccer.
The coach says soccer is football for smart people and football is football for ass-holes. I can’t figure out yet if he’s right or just jealous.
I’m wondering if it would be oh to give out your address to some people who were at our party graduation night. They want to write and say thanks. One of them is Patty Strachan’s mother, you will remember her, the one that made such a pisshead of herself when her ‘precious daughter’ fainted at the lawn party that afternoon. She now figures that you’re an ok person. I’m not going with Patty anymore, by the way. I’m not much on long-distance courtships at my ‘tender age’ (ha-ha), and Patty is going to Vassar, as you might have expected. I’ve met a foxy little chick here.
Well, write when you can, my man. My dad made it sound like you were really ‘bummed out’ for what reason I do not know since it seems to me that you did everything you could to make things turn out right. He’s wrong, isn’t he, Johnny? You’re really not that bummed out, are you? Please write and tell me you are oh, I worry about you. That’s a laugh, isn’t it, the original Alfred E. Neuman worried about you, but I am.
When you write, tell me why Holden Caulfield always has to have the blues so much when he isn’t even black.
Chuck
P.S. The foxy chick’s name is Stephanie Wyman, and have already turned her on to Something Wicked This Way Comes. She also likes a punk-rock group called The
Ramones, you should hear them, they are hilarious.
C
October 17, 1977
Dear Johnny,
Okay, that’s better, you sound ok. Laughed my ass off about your job with the Phoenix Public Works Dept. I have no sympathy at all for your sunburn after four outings as a
Stovington Tiger. Coach is right, l guess, football is football for assholes, at least at this place. Our record is 1-3 and in the game we won I scored three touchdowns,
hyperventilated my stupid self and blacked out. Scared Steff into a tizzy (ha-ha).
f waited to write so I could answer your question about how the Home Folks feel about Greg Stillson now that he is ‘on the job’. J was home this last weekend, and I’ll tell you all I can. Asked my dad first and he said, ‘Is Johnny still interested in that guy?’ I said, ‘He’s showing his fundamental bad taste by wanting your opinion.’ Then he goes to my mother,
‘See, prep school is turning him into a smartass. I thought it would.’
Well, to make a long story short – most people are pretty surprised by how well Stillson’s doing. My dad said this: ‘If people of a congressman’s home district had to give a report card on how well the guy was doing after four months, Stillson would get mostly Bs, plus an A for his work on Carter’s energy bill and his own home heating-oil ceiling bill. Also an A for effort.’ Dad told me to tell you that maybe he was wrong about Stillson being the village fool.
Other comments from people I talked to when I was home: they like it around here that he doesn’t dress up in a business suit. Mrs. Jarvis who runs the Quik-Pik (sorry about the spelling, man, but that’s what they call it) says she thinks Stillson is not afraid of ‘the big interests’. Henry Burke, who runs The Bucket – that el scuzzo tavern downtown – says he thinks Stilison has done ‘a double-damn good lob’. Most other comments are similar.
They contrast what Stillson has done with what Carter hasn’t done, most of them are really disappointed in him and are kicking themselves for having voted for him. I asked some of them if they weren’t worried that those iron horsemen were still hanging around and that fellow Sonny Elliman was serving as one of Stillson’s aides. None of them seemed too upset. The guy who runs the Record Rock put it to be this way: ‘If Tom Hayden can go straight and Eldridge Cleave can get Jesus, why can’t some bikies join the establishment? Forgive and forget.’