Holden's Voice

So I’m in the middle of the street, bored as hell, so I decide to give old Piznarski a call. He lives way the hell out in Studio City, and he’s one crazy sonuvabitch. One time he gave me this pudding. I mean, it was all chunky and, I still ate it. Turns out it was just some tapioca, but he was convinced he had played the greatest prank of all time. That’s what he does, he either hates your guts, or he plays around with you and tells you about goddam everything. He hated this one junior, man did I hear about that bastard everyday. How he was guna get that sonuvabitch one day, it’s been like a month, and he’s given up. He gets angry quite frequently and overreacts. Then denies it for Chrissake. “Don’t overreact again,” I’d say. He was always doing that, overreacting. But the thing that killed me were his denials of it. Now if you could just picture Mike, picture this guy, shortish brown hair, quite tall, and the thing that killed me, was when he would move his hands forward, then back towards himself, down by his crotch, and he would make these animal noises when he did it. He says he got those from his dog. Anyway, it became a subconscious thing, that’s the part that killed me..
One time when this guy Rex and I were over at Piznarskis’ house, his dog came out, now if you see this dog, then you’ll believe that’s where he got the noises from. So he’s got this little fat pug dog. I mean this dog is fat. And it’s small too. This dog is the coolest fat dog you will ever meet. He walks around the goddam house all day, an Mike will yell, “Come here Champ,” that’s his name Champ, and Champ will come running up, more like waddling because of his fatness, and you will know he is coming by all the goddam noises he makes. But Christ, I feel sorry for the kid, I mean him having a pacemaker and all.
He almost died once on a roller coaster ride, then again in track. I mean I feel sorry for the kid. Not being able to do that kinda stuff. But I guess he just ignores that, doesn’t let it get him down. It would probably depress me as hell if I had a pacemaker. I mean he can’t even play football anymore, and that was like his favorite sport. I remember the day when he came to tell us he couldn’t play anymore. Boy did he blow up, overreact even, but that is understandable. All I know is that if I had a pacemaker. It’d depress the hell out of me. But he’s a good kid, never let’s that get him down
Anyway, Mike and I had Latin together, and that was about it, but we are close as hell. He basically runs the show in Latin. He’s a goddam genius in that class for Chrissake. He’s getting an A+. I have no idea how, he’s always making sexual comments, disrupting class and everything. He doesn’t even know how. Latin Genius, that’s what we call him in there. He really gets a kick outta that. And boy does he overreact when he gets an A- on something. You know the type that have to get straight A’s or else. Well that was Mike, but only in Latin. If everyone bombed a test or quiz and he got an A- he would still say “Aw man, I only got a 91” or something like that. Anyway, we shoot the bull during that class a lot, and I guess he does better than me cuz he has already had 3 years previous of Latin I, so this is his fourth year.
So anyway, I call Mike up and we decide to meet. We decide to go to Kleinerts. It’s way the hell up in La Canada if you’ve never been there, a nice house, not to bad a drive for me, but one sonuvabitch for him. After we are all there we decide to order a pizza. And old Piznarski has to have his goddam ham. And when we object to it you know what he does, he goddam overreacts. It ends up taking us about half an hour of arguing and we finally give into Piznarskis’ ham. That’s one last thing, he’s a real stubborn sonuvabitch, that’s another thing about him that kills me, it really does. That’s all you need to know about old Mike Piznarski, we are eating his goddam ham pizza now.