Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
—HOLDEN CAULFIELD
His mind racing too fast for sleep, Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations for the event he had planned to stage in New York City. He had already been gone from the Sheraton for nearly an hour when the alarm clock on the nightstand began chiming at 9 A.M. in the empty room.
Before leaving the hotel, Chapman had neatly arranged and left behind a curious assortment of personal items on top of the hotel dresser. In an orderly semicircle, he had laid out his passport, an eight-track tape of the music of Todd Rundgren, and his little Bible, open to the The Gospel According to John (Lennon). He also left a letter from a former YMCA supervisor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where, five years earlier, he had worked with refugees from the Vietnam War. Beside the letter were two photographs of himself surrounded by laughing Vietnamese children. At the center of the arrangement of personal effects, he had placed the small Wizard of Oz poster of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.
After laying out the mementos, he had walked in and out of the room several times, returning to the dresser and refining the arrangement each time he stepped back through the door. He wanted to be sure it would be the first sight to meet the eyes of the people who, he was sure, would be visiting his hotel room before the day was over. It would let them know that he had, at one time in his life, been more than the failure he was now—more than the creature he sensed he was about to become.
“I woke up knowing, somehow, that when I left that room, that was the last time I would see the room again,” Chapman recalled. “I truly felt it in my bones. I don’t know how. I had never seen John Lennon up to that point. I only knew that he was in the Dakota. But I somehow knew that this was it, this was the day. So I laid out on the dresser at the hotel room … just a tableau of everything that was important in my life. So it would say, ‘Look, this is me. Probably, this is the real me. This is my past and I’m going, gone to another place.’
“I practiced what it was going to look like when police officers came into the room. It was like I was going through a door and I knew I was going to go through a door, the poet’s door, William Blake’s door, Jim Morrison’s door. It was like I was going through a giant door. And I was. I was leaving my past. I was leaving what I was, going into a future of uncertainty. There were tremendous feelings of Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye. The paragraphs and sentences of that book were flowing through my brain and entering my blood, influencing my thoughts and my actions. My very soul was breathing between the pages of The Catcher in the Rye.”
Satisfied at last with the arrangement on the dresser, Chapman put on his trench coat and hat and draped his silk scarf around his neck. Before leaving the room, he stood before a full-length mirror and studied the outline of the gun in his coat pocket. After tearing, fitting, and discarding several thick pieces of cardboard to try to conceal the telltale image of the deadly chunk of steel, he finally fashioned one that he was satisfied would do the job.
During the previous two days, he had found his hand getting sweaty and uncomfortable when he had to keep it in the coat pocket concealing the pistol for long periods of time. Sliding the cardboard into the coat, he smiled when he saw that it made the weapon seem to disappear. He was pleased with his impromptu craftsmanship.
Spinning like a model before the mirror, Chapman observed that the cardboard remained in place, masking the deadly silhouette even when he moved. Snapping his hand quickly into the pocket, he found that the mask slipped obligingly aside as his fingers closed around the butt of the gun. In the manner that he had been taught as a security guard, Chapman suddenly twisted, crouched, and aimed the pistol at his image in the hotel-room mirror. Gripping the unloaded gun combat style, in both hands, the hammer clicked five times as quickly as he could flex and unflex his finger.
Still watching himself in the mirror, he reached into the pocket of his trousers and withdrew five stubby bullets. Feeling their weight in the palm of his hand, he visually inspected each one. They were hollow-point slugs, dimpled at their leaden tips to ensure that they would shatter on impact. Chapman had flown all the way from New York City to Georgia, during his first trip to the city a month before, to get the special bullets from a friend. He knew that hollow points vastly increased the destructive power of bullets when they struck any soft target—especially something as soft as a human body.
He inserted the cartridges into the five empty slots in the cylinder of the gun. Still watching himself in the mirror, Chapman held the loaded pistol aloft in his right hand and snapped the chamber shut with a flick of his wrist.
“The Catcher in the Rye of my generation,” he announced to his looking glass image. “Chapter Twenty-seven.”
He picked up the copy of the new John Lennon album he had purchased on Saturday and slid it snugly under his left arm. Before leaving the hotel room, he turned around for a final look at the items on the dresser. Should he find himself unable ever to speak again, he hoped the assemblage would tell the story of his life. He hoped the story would be told in a way that the world would understand. He wondered whether he should go back and write something, a statement of intent. Remembering that he still had to find and purchase a copy of The Catcher in the Rye somewhere in New York City, he decided that he would leave behind no other clues. The book would be his final statement and gift to the world.
As he closed the door behind him and walked down the hall to the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor of the hotel, he reflected to himself: “It’s almost like something a person who was going to commit suicide would do. Before they kill themselves, people lay out the things that mean the most to them.”
Chapman stepped off the elevator into the lobby of the Sheraton and walked past the checkout desk. Even though he didn’t plan on returning to the hotel, he wanted to preserve the room in which his carefully constructed memento collection was enshrined. He believed that everything was in place as he stepped from the hotel and walked along the crowded, Monday-morning sidewalks in search of The Catcher in the Rye. It was still early and he walked for several blocks before he found a small stationery store and bookshop that was open.
To his relief, soon after entering the shop he spotted the familiar red jacket of the paperback. The golden letters blazed before him from the bookshelf like a warm and comforting fire:
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
J. D. SALINGER
It was the only copy on the shelf. Chapman took it reverently into his hands and moved into line behind a woman at a cash register. As he leafed through the first few pages of the book, he realized that he had left his pen back at the hotel and he picked up a new one from the store counter, a black plastic Bic.
Outside the bookstore he eagerly took the book and pen from a paper bag. Putting his foot against the rim of a webbed, yellow trash basket near the curb, he placed the book and the Double Fantasy album on his knee. He held the pen reflectively for a moment in his hand before pressing the tip against the inside cover page of the book.
“This is my statement,” he wrote. He paused for a moment and underlined the word This. He signed the statement: “Holden Caulfield” and paused again. After several moments, he added “The Catcher in the Rye.”
As he wrote in the book, Chapman recalled a letter he had sent several months earlier to James Lundquist, a University of Minnesota literature professor. Chapman had read a critical, unauthorized biography by Lundquist of J. D. Salinger, the enigmatic author who had gone into seclusion shortly after making Holden Caulfield come alive on the pages of the book in which Chapman now sought to live. In his letter, Chapman had thanked Lundquist for writing about Salinger. He said he had gained great insight by reading about the man who wrote The Catcher in the Rye. He signed the letter “The twenty-five-year-old Catcher.” He wondered if the literature professor had ever gotten the letter. He wondered if he had bothered to read it, or even thought about answering. It didn’t matter anymore.
Chapman stood on the sidewalk reading at random from the book the passages that he almost could recite by heart. Near the end of the novel, on page 187, he found the dialogue he was looking for:
“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking.”
He felt a chill of meaning as he continued to leaf through the book. On page 197 he read: “It was Monday and all, and pretty near Christmas, and all the stores were open.”
“Amazing,” he murmured aloud to himself. “The coincidence is just amazing. A Monday. Pretty near Christmas.
“History and time. Synchronicity.”
As he slipped the stiff, new paperback into the left pocket of the trench coat, Chapman felt the inky words of J. D. Salinger begin to mingle with his own blood.
He saw his purpose with crystal clarity. Sliding his left hand into the trench coat, caressing the book with the tips of his fingers, he began walking north, toward Central Park and the Dakota.
“I remember actually feeling, thinking perhaps I would become Holden Caulfield. Not that I would become crazy. That I would actually become Holden Caulfield.
“The book is very poignant, very strong. Almost spiritual, it’s so strong. Like Holden, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone else.
“I remember feeling like I was going to go into a fetal position, a coma—just kind of vegetate—and it was such a vivid image I had of a man who wouldn’t have to have anything to do with the world anymore. A man who just wants it to be black all around him.
“Something was awry and I was caught up in it.”