One time, while reading The Catcher in the Rye, I drove my mother's car for two days without sleep to New Hampshire. I thought I might catch Jerome David Salinger taking out the trash. Or maybe he would throw coffee into my face or something.
Abraham Lincoln was once challenged to a duel by a man named James Shields. I am not sure if people still threw down gloves back then, or coffee, for that matter.
Certainly, gloves were not thrown down, as gloves were invented after the Civil War. They were suggested as part of a reformation project by General Grant, who was no stranger to cold fingers. He may have said, "Abraham, I am no stranger to cold fingers." To which Lincoln may have replied, "I believe I recall you mentioning that four-score."
Salinger's daughter once wrote that her grandmother had toyed with the idea of naming Jerome David after Abraham, despite the fact he was born with a crummy typewriter rather than a top hat and beard.
My own mother is a social worker. That's different from working socially, meaning she has an office in a county building rather than working on a street corner after the bars close.
Abraham Lincoln would not solicit prostitutes. Whereas, I mean he certainly would not solicit prostitutes of the Confederacy. Though I do remember on the playground hearing a ditty about old Abe Lincoln being a good old man who may have—as the limerick suggested—jumped out of a window with his dick in his hand. Doubtless, this would have been from a brothel window. His political career would have needed this infamous publicity like he needed another hole in the head.
The Confederacy is in the South, which is not where New Hampshire is. I have been to the South many times, but regretfully I must admit never having been to New Hampshire. I believe that Salinger may have mentioned that coffee beans are a chief cash crop of the Granite State, which would certainly be a better way to make money than the sales of granite, if Starbucks is to be believed.
Now that I think about it, Salinger is most likely the man who jumped out the window with his male organ in his hand, though perhaps this is sketchy as I recall the man wearing a top hat, by most eyewitness accounts. But Salinger may have been more likely to solicit prostitutes if they were young, as he seemed to have an eye for such creatures. This seems like something he would do, whereas I have only read about prostitutes.
By admitting I have read about prostitutes, it may be more accurate to say that I have thrown bottles at prostitutes. Or that may have been a protagonist in a book, books being cheaper than the penicillin or whatever prescription medication is needed to cure syphilis, a disease I may have contracted from prostitutes.
I can't even afford antidepressants, depression being something Lincoln suffered through before his brain took to leaking, something that Salinger bartered with before he took to living in a compound surrounded by reels of old movies. Sometimes when I go home to visit my mother, she will come in from her county office and food stamps and bag people with ugly babies and stump arms and she will cry. I will ask her, "Are you crying for those prostitutes?" and she will say, "You may have been a brilliant boy, if you weren't always so sad." And when I ask her if that is an allusion to The Catcher in the Rye, she will say Christmas is around the corner, and please lock the door as you go.