Game of Amateurs - Adaptation by Ja Eun Kim

JaEun Kim, 121024      

Mr. Garrioch

Catcher in the Rye Fan Fiction

2013. 03. 31

This is an adaptation of chapter 1 and 2, where Holden walks past the football game and visits Mr. Spencer.

Anyway, it was the Saturday of the club fair. The club fair was supposed to be a very big deal around KMLA. It was held only once in a year, and you were supposed to present all your goddam cheerfulness and pretend like your life was all about the goddam club activities. I remember around 11’o clock in that morning I was standing in the middle of the crowded Dasan lobby, right next to this crazy club which thought they were digging up all the injustice in the society. They were singing a song about the school’s corruption, and it was noisy as hell. You could see the whole event from there, the juniors reaching out and grabbing the freshmen to make them sign up for their club and all. You could hear them all yelling, because practically all the juniors and freshmen of the school were there.

           There were never many happy dudes at all here at KMLA. We were only allowed to think about the future. It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it. I like to be in somewhere at least were you can see a few happy dudes around once in a while, even if all they’re doing is just scratching their arms or playing the goddam Frisbee.

           The reason I was stuck in the middle of the goddam crowd, instead of occupying a table, was because I’d just finished the goddam Samuchim performance. Very big deal. We practiced for it from the early in the morning. Only, the crazy performance didn’t go well. We were supposed to shake our heads like madmen and pretend like we were crazy about the music and all. But I suddenly didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t in the mood to shake my goddam head. You really have to be in the right mood when you are doing such a phony stuff. So I threw the drumstick away in the middle of the goddam performance. Everybody was gasping like madmen when I just did it, but they soon resumed to carry out their phony fair. Look, nobody even recognizes me now.

           Anyway, I got out of Dasan and started to climb up the hill toward the English building. It was icy as hell and I damn near fell down. Everybody run out of their damn breath when they are climbing this hill. They complain, but they still climb. They all knew goddam clearly that this climbing business was damn hard and they also knew that they don’t want to do it. But they do it anyway. It’s the way this school is. As I was struggling along the empty road, I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy morning. Terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and only distant shouting of students down at Dasan was heard.

           Boy, I knocked that door hard when I got to the old Mr. J’s office. I was really frozen. Goddam Nubi is actually no good at all and I felt like my cheeks were falling off. “C’mon, c’mon,” I said right out loud, almost. “Come on in.” Old Mr. J finally answered it. They never open the door for you. They always call you out to give you a goddam lecture or make you do the goddam errand, but they never open the door for you.

           The reason I went all they way up to his office in the goddam weather was because he left me a note to come see him. It was probably about the ‘advisee homework’, I guess. He sent us a questionnaire that was loaded with a bunch of goddam phony questions. And I barely answered any.

           “Have a sit”. He said it without giving a glance at me. I sat down. And he never said anything. They do it if they want you to know that you’re in a trouble. He was typing something as if I weren’t in the goddam office at all, but I guess he was probably glancing me through the corner of his crazy eyes. To make sure that I was nervous and all.

I started to look around the office. Lots of old papers were stuck on the whiteboard. “Be the only one, not the best one.” and “Move their hearts, and Transform them”. Plus all those crazy sentences in Chinese characters. KMLA teachers are crazy about Chinese proverbs.

Why should I be someone special? I don’t mind if I had nothing special compared to the guys around me, if the guys were happy dudes who were nice enough to get along with. I won’t bother to transform anybody if they were already happy by themselves. The thing I guess I’ll probably do is just playing the goddam Frisbee.

           He finally opened his mouth. After a long, long lecture about how I should live the life wisely and set a clear goal to apply myself, he said, “Life is a game. You have to play it like a pro.”

           That killed me. God, he said it like thousand times since February. I don’t want to play anything like a pro. I don’t care if nobody was giving me the money or the goddam college acceptance letter for what I was doing. I’ll throw the goddam drumstick away whenever I feel like it. There are some games that you don’t need to play like a pro. For example, you can never throw a Frisbee exactly as you planned. They wobble and twirl like crazy as they fly off. But it never really matters, because the other player will catch it no matter how you throw it. It doesn’t really matter even if the other player misses it. You can always have a good fun playing Frisbee.

There were never many happy dudes here at KMLA.