Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
遇到人生的關鍵時，我就會拿起《麥田捕手》，重新再讀一遍。它給我的不是勇氣、夢想，或任何積極而正向的鼓舞，而是某種被了解的寬慰。
再見了，麥田捕手，再也沒有人能同你這般描寫迷惘與失落。
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html?pagewanted=1&hp
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 28, 2010
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.
With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.
The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”
Many critics were more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”
Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”
He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New Yorker. Avoiding Mr. Shawn’s usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students.
After Mr. Salinger moved to New Hampshire his publications slowed to a trickle and soon stopped completely. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” both collections of material previously published in The New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.
In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out “Hapworth” in book form, but he backed out of the deal at the last minute. He never collected the rest of his stories or allowed any of them to be reprinted in textbooks or anthologies. One story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was turned into “My Foolish Heart,” a movie so bad that Mr. Salinger was never tempted to sell film rights again.
Befriended, Then Betrayed
In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.
He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him.
Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime.
In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger turned him down, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Mr. Hamilton went ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not without some cost to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 he also sued Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.” In July a federal judge indefinitely enjoined publication of the book.)
Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind,” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.
Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.
But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or, like the character in the Stanley Kubrick film “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, though she had never seen them.
Early Life
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day, 1919, the second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale’s. Like the Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage. Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws. The family was living in Harlem when Mr. Salinger was born, but then, as Sol Salinger’s business prospered, moved to West 82nd Street and then to Park Avenue.
Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger, then known as Sonny, attended the progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. (He told the admissions office his interests were dramatics and tropical fish.) But he flunked out after two years and in 1934 was packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for Holden’s Pencey Prep. Like Holden, Mr. Salinger was the manager of the school fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the school yearbook, Crossed Swords, and wrote a school song that was either a heartfelt pastiche of 19th-century sentiment or else a masterpiece of irony:
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of gray;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here.
In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University, Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where the father’s plan was for him to learn the ham business. Deciding that wasn’t for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him striding around campus in a black chesterfield with velvet collar and announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel.
Mr. Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, “The Young Folks,” to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post — formulaic work that gave little hint of real originality.
In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” that was an early sketch of what became a scene in “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the magazine then had second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young people to run away from school, and held the story for five years — an eternity even for The New Yorker — before finally publishing it in 1946, buried in the back of an issue.
Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted. He served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers, and was stationed for a while in Tiverton, Devon, the setting of “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” probably the most deeply felt of the “Nine Stories.” On June 6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1945 he was hospitalized for “battle fatigue” — often a euphemism for a breakdown — and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, very briefly — a doctor about whom biographers have been able to discover very little. Her name was Sylvia, Margaret Salinger said, but Mr. Salinger always called her Saliva.
A Different Kind of Writer
Back in New York, Mr. Salinger moved into his parents’ apartment and, having never stopped writing, even during the war, resumed his career. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” austere, mysterious and Mr. Salinger’s most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different kind of writer. And like so many writers he eventually found in The New Yorker not just an outlet but a kind of home and developed a close relationship with the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, himself famously shy and agoraphobic — a kindred spirit. In 1961 Mr. Salinger dedicated “Franny and Zooey” to Shawn, writing, “I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”
As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies’ man and dated, among others, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who in many ways resembled Franny Glass (or vice versa); they were married two years later. (Ms. Douglas had married and divorced in the meantime.) Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce, claiming that “a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”
The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had written for The New York Times Magazine titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” They moved in together but broke up abruptly after 10 months when Mr. Salinger said he had no desire for more children. For a while in the ’80s Mr. Salinger was involved with the actress Elaine Joyce, and late in that decade he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse, who is considerably younger than he is. Not much is known about the marriage because Ms. O’Neill embraced her husband’s code of seclusion.
Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O’Neill and his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons. His literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.”
“Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it,” the statement said. “His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.”
As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family. In Mr. Salinger’s fiction the Glasses first turn up in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Seymour, the oldest son and family favorite, kills himself during his honeymoon. Characters who turn out in retrospect to have been Glasses appear glancingly in “Nine Stories,” but the family saga really begins to be elaborated upon in “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam” and “Hapworth,” the long short story, which is ostensibly a letter written by Seymour from camp when he is just 7 years old but already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, wife of the camp owner.
Readers also began to learn about the parents, Les and Bessie, long-suffering ex-vaudevillians, and Seymour’s siblings Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo; about the Glasses’ Upper West Side apartment; about the radio quiz show on which all the children appeared. Seldom has a fictional family been so lovingly or richly imagined.
Too lovingly, some critics complained. With the publication of “Franny and Zooey” even staunch Salinger admirers began to break ranks. John Updike wrote in The Times Book Review: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.” Other readers hated the growing streak of Eastern mysticism in the saga, as Seymour evolved, in successive retellings, from a suicidal young man into a genius, a sage, even a saint of sorts.
But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.
2010年1月29日 星期五
2010年1月11日 星期一
2010年1月4日 星期一
十年(VIII)
在阿姆斯特丹的第二個晚上我見到了Wally。當時我正斜倚在薑子姐和Rob家的沙發上看著電視播的「全民公敵」。Rob正與一個瘦小的老頭在門口談話，之後請他進屋，從冰箱裡拿了瓶啤酒給他，然後幫我們引介。Wally有著一頭披散至肩的白髮和滿臉的大鬍子，衣著邋遢卻不至於骯髒，他步履有些蹣跚，行動不是很方便，以一個老人來說，他握手的手勁之大讓我嚇了一跳，而他微微欠身的周到禮貌則讓我有些不好意思起來。
「啊，Neil Young。他是我的好朋友。」Wally指著我T恤上的圖案說。我當這是一種特殊的荷式幽默，僅笑笑沒多什麼。Wally接著和Rob小聊了一陣，便告辭回去，臨走時我注意到他向Rob伸手，Rob塞了點錢給他。
我向Rob問起了這位老先生。「他的名字是Wally Tax，W要當作V發音，」Rob細心的解釋，這是我繼“dank”以後的第二堂荷語課。他接著跟我說Wally是荷蘭六０年代當紅的搖滾樂隊The Outsiders的主唱，可以說是當時荷蘭的披頭，彼時他一出門就被瘋狂的歌迷團團圍住，需要雇用數名保鏢幫他開道。之後Wally轉往美國發展，還拿了一座葛萊美獎。但後來日益嚴重的毒癮、酒癮與稅務問題使他一蹶不振。
「所以啦，他說他和Neil Young是朋友，這還挺有可能的。」
現在的Wally住在薑子姐和Rob家旁，Rob偶爾會買點東西帶給行動不太方便的他，Wally偶爾向他們討些小錢，手頭也不寬裕的他們卻不太拒絕，更不時請他喝啤酒或是抽根菸，這也解釋了為什麼不抽煙的他們家裡卻有菸灰缸以及滿滿的菸屁股。即便現在，Rob說，還是有許多歌迷從美國、亞洲等地專程前來，就為了見Wally。據說Kurt Cobain也是他的歌迷，還曾經表演過他的作品。驚愕之餘，我更因為沒有把握機會和這樣的搖滾傳奇人物多有接觸而感到扼腕，Rob塞給我一瓶啤酒，安慰我說反正Wally常來，接下來幾天一定有機會再見到他的。
「今天去哪裡玩啦？」嬌小的薑子姐這時推著自行車進門，Rob給了她一個大擁抱，「他怎麼啦？」薑子姐指著我問。
Rob報以一個無可奈何的笑。
當天晚上Rob從他的CD堆中翻出了一片Wally的個人作品“The Entertainer”，02年的作品，然而封面上的他看起來要比當晚的他年輕得多，而那詭譎的表情讓我想起Iggy Pop。我將那張專輯放進我的CD Player，在黑暗中躺在沙發床上靜靜地聽著Wally以帶著蒼涼和創痛的嗓音唱著：
I am an entertainer
Shit, I'm funny....
「啊，Neil Young。他是我的好朋友。」Wally指著我T恤上的圖案說。我當這是一種特殊的荷式幽默，僅笑笑沒多什麼。Wally接著和Rob小聊了一陣，便告辭回去，臨走時我注意到他向Rob伸手，Rob塞了點錢給他。
我向Rob問起了這位老先生。「他的名字是Wally Tax，W要當作V發音，」Rob細心的解釋，這是我繼“dank”以後的第二堂荷語課。他接著跟我說Wally是荷蘭六０年代當紅的搖滾樂隊The Outsiders的主唱，可以說是當時荷蘭的披頭，彼時他一出門就被瘋狂的歌迷團團圍住，需要雇用數名保鏢幫他開道。之後Wally轉往美國發展，還拿了一座葛萊美獎。但後來日益嚴重的毒癮、酒癮與稅務問題使他一蹶不振。
「所以啦，他說他和Neil Young是朋友，這還挺有可能的。」
現在的Wally住在薑子姐和Rob家旁，Rob偶爾會買點東西帶給行動不太方便的他，Wally偶爾向他們討些小錢，手頭也不寬裕的他們卻不太拒絕，更不時請他喝啤酒或是抽根菸，這也解釋了為什麼不抽煙的他們家裡卻有菸灰缸以及滿滿的菸屁股。即便現在，Rob說，還是有許多歌迷從美國、亞洲等地專程前來，就為了見Wally。據說Kurt Cobain也是他的歌迷，還曾經表演過他的作品。驚愕之餘，我更因為沒有把握機會和這樣的搖滾傳奇人物多有接觸而感到扼腕，Rob塞給我一瓶啤酒，安慰我說反正Wally常來，接下來幾天一定有機會再見到他的。
「今天去哪裡玩啦？」嬌小的薑子姐這時推著自行車進門，Rob給了她一個大擁抱，「他怎麼啦？」薑子姐指著我問。
Rob報以一個無可奈何的笑。
當天晚上Rob從他的CD堆中翻出了一片Wally的個人作品“The Entertainer”，02年的作品，然而封面上的他看起來要比當晚的他年輕得多，而那詭譎的表情讓我想起Iggy Pop。我將那張專輯放進我的CD Player，在黑暗中躺在沙發床上靜靜地聽著Wally以帶著蒼涼和創痛的嗓音唱著：
I am an entertainer
Shit, I'm funny....
隔天上午我沿著運河走到某間唱片行，老闆娘是個頭髮花白的婦女，我問她知不知道Wally，「當然知道呀，The Outsider在我們那個年代可紅的呢。Wally Tax是主唱，瘦小的傢伙，」她比畫了Wally的高度，然後戴上老花眼鏡，從一大落CD中翻出幾張The Outsiders的唱片，「Wally雖然瘦小，但可是號麻煩人物呢，典型的搖滾壞男孩。」
我看著那幾張唱片封面，不難辨認出年輕的Wally：他總是和所有人不同調，大家往東看，他就往西；樂隊的眾人站著，他就漠然地蹲在角落，彷彿不屬於他的樂隊、不屬於人群、甚至這個世界。
**** **** **** ****
阿姆斯特丹是我03年三城之旅的第一站。免費的住宿和合法的大麻是吸引我來到此地的主要原因，然而前幾天我只享受到前者，包含薑子姐和Rob的真誠款待。早餐Rob都會多幫我擠一杯新鮮的柳橙汁，然後放上Rufus Wainwright的Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk：
Cigarettes and chocolate milk
These are just a couple of my cravings
Everything it seems I like is a little bit stronger,
a little bit thicker, a little bit harmful for me……
睡眼惺忪的薑子姐就在廚房的流理台簡單梳洗，紮個馬尾出門。相當真實又帶著單純的美好的晨間光景。而這首Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk一直到現在都是我最喜愛的Rufus Wainwright的曲子，很長一段時間我也用這首歌當作起床號。
阿姆斯特丹是一個非常小的城市，三天之內該去的地方都去過了：運河、A片博物館、煎餅、紅燈區、梵谷美術館、海尼根總部、肯德基（我承認那不是荷蘭特產，但在那裡我才領略三塊雞套餐與沾美乃滋的薯條是多麼地美好）。唯有大麻我一直還沒試，不曾抽過煙且生性怯懦的男子如我，只能走過一間又一間放著大聲雷鬼音樂、昏暗且瀰漫大麻味的「咖啡館」，卻總無法提起勇氣進去。
「明天，明天我一定去，不然就白來了。」薑子姐與Rob也鼓勵我試試看，「不然吃大麻蛋糕好了，對沒抽煙習慣的人來說反而可以更high。」Rob說。但我要的不是high，而是「抽」大麻這個「行為」，那才能讓我像個搖滾樂手呀；「吃蛋糕」？！拜託，那只會讓我看起來像是個窩囊且過胖的小學生而已。
接下來幾天我見過幾次Wally，但他總來去匆匆，時而只在門口和Rob談幾句，時而跑進來抽根煙拿瓶酒咕噥幾句便離開，我只得繼續懷著那些準備好要跟他攀談的台詞，期待下次能派上用場。
在阿姆斯特丹的最後一個午後，我終於試了一根大麻，結果是我在風光明媚的運河邊，抱著垃圾桶狂吐，彷彿自己的胃都要吐出來的那種猛烈吐法。除了嘔吐以外，我根本沒有接近於喜悅的反應，也別說high了。只有在回薑子姐與Rob家的路上，電車到了我們三人昨晚買冰淇淋的小店時，我突然很想吃冰淇淋，完全無法遏抑的強烈食慾襲來，於是原本癱軟在位子上的我隨即由行進中的電車跳下，穿越馬路，買了一球香草冰淇淋，然後搖搖晃晃地回到住所。
「我試了第一根大麻，」我躺在沙發床上吃著冰淇淋，跟進門的Rob說，「老天。」他看到我的狀況後，搬了把椅子坐在我身邊，細心地看護著我。隔了一會兒Wally也來了，「他試了第一根大麻，」Rob跟Wally說，「老天。」他的反應和Rob一模一樣，也搬了一把椅子坐到我身邊，那時我才約略意識到自己可能看起來有點糟。
「我爸抽大麻抽的可兇了，」Wally說，「你知道，大部分的人抽大麻，都是一群人分享一根，傳著抽，」他用手比劃了一下，「但我爸可是每次都一個人抽一根；不只如此他一天得抽上十幾二十根。」
「老天。」我說，想要接著這話題跟他攀談，然後，我就睡著了。
醒來的時候已經天黑，坐在我身邊的人換成薑子姐和Rob。那時候我已經可以辨認出人們臉上那「他試了第一根大麻，老天。」的表情。睡醒以後的我感覺好多了，但還是懶洋洋的，於是我婉拒了薑子姐和Rob當晚至附近聽爵士樂的邀。，他們要出去時Wally又上門了，「那就由我來陪陪這位小朋友吧。」
Wally拿了罐啤酒坐到我身邊，像是再自然也不過地問我能不能給他一些錢，我將牛仔褲裡的零錢全都掏出來給了他。他看起來很開心，點了一根菸。我跟他說我睡到剛剛，到現在頭腦還有點昏昏沈沈的。
「能睡著真好。我從來沒真正地睡過覺，」Wally羨慕地說，「我想這跟我媽有關。」他母親在二次大戰時被抓入納粹集中營，當時所有女人被帶到廣場上，納粹命令她們把衣服全脫了，在廣場上奔跑，然後他們便向這群赤身裸體的女性開槍掃射。他母親存活了下來，但從此再也無法成眠，並且經常半夜發出淒厲的慘叫。受此影響，Wally從小就沒辦法躺在床上好好睡上一覺，「我無法入睡，到後來則是完全不需要睡眠，我不停地抽大麻，配上酒精，累的時候就坐著打個盹。」
我們聊起搖滾樂。他講起那些神明般的人物，就像許久不見的老同事：Neil Young是個很棒的人，有個愛他且支持他的美滿家庭，只是這些年他的頸椎病變越來越嚴重；Jimi Hendrix曾經和他一起Jam過，是個很不錯的傢伙，就是喝太多酒、用太多藥、睡太多女人了；他為Eric Clapton不幸痛失愛子感到無比的同情，這麼好的人不應該有這樣的遭遇；The Rolling Stones？這幫傢伙可是老朋友啦，當年他們可是一起表演、也一起廝混過，「前幾天Mick才和我聯絡呢。」我說我前陣子才在倫敦看了他們的演唱會，覺得Mick Jagger聲音的狀況不太好，「他們發聲都錯誤了，」Wally和我分析怎樣才是正確的歌唱技巧：不應該用喉嚨去唱，而要善用丹田的力量，「像Mick那樣唱法，加上大量的菸、酒和藥物，嗓子不壞才怪。」
「那Bob Dylan呢？你認識他吧？」我興奮地問。
「他是個混蛋，」Wally說，「他說很欣賞我的作品，他來荷蘭的時候我們見過幾次面。你知道他最大的問題是什麼嗎？」他喝了口啤酒，吸了口菸，「當你是個搖滾巨星時，大家都會把你當作神；而他最大的問題，就是他把自己當作神。而這也讓他成了個不折不扣的混蛋。」
又喝了幾瓶啤酒後Wally才回去。他說他那邊有一些和Kurt Cobain合作的錄音，他回去翻一翻，再請Rob寄給我。他和我握手道別，祝我後續的旅程一路順風，然後一跛一跛地消失在門口。
**** **** **** ****
Rob告知了我Wally的死訊。當時薑子姐、Rob和我坐在信義區的某金融大樓的階梯上吃著剛出爐的麵包，沒有太多的哀傷與不捨，只有像是畫質不好的DVD播放時偶爾會出現的短暫停頓。
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”對搖滾樂手來說，死亡彷彿是一種華麗的謝幕。於是有了神秘的符碼如27、od、.38、12/8、DOA，以及如密西西比河、巴黎蒙帕那斯公墓、紐約中央公園等朝聖的地點。樂迷們熟記並感嘆、讚美許許多多年輕即燃燒殆盡的生命。
然而我目睹了一個fade away的老靈魂。我從來也沒有機會查證Wally所說的一切，我無法得知究竟他和那些搖滾神祉是否相熟，更沒有收到那些他宣稱和Kurt Cobain合作的錄音，我沒有他的簽名，我們也沒有合照；而我能給予他的，也就是當時牛仔褲右邊口袋的一把零錢、短暫的聆聽與崇拜。
或許Wally和我，就是具體而微的樂手和樂迷的關係吧。
又或許搖滾樂手就像我們的夢想：有的成就輝煌，有的短暫卻燦爛炫目，然而更多的則是隨著時間和現實環境，漸漸地凋零、默默地消逝，直到無人聞問。
那天和阿茲聊到20歲時的夢想，「當搖滾樂手！開唱片行！」講出來以後覺得有些蠢，頗難為情；30歲的志向可就實際了些，少了些樂趣，還有些不是靠自己獨立能完成的。
然而2009年4月3日的那個夜晚，當燈光亮起、吉他響起、場館的地板隨著眾人的跳動而波動時，那一瞬間我的夢想彷彿實現了。
I live my life for the stars that shine
People say it's just a waste of time
When they said I should feed my head
That to me was just a day in bed
I'll take my car and drive real far
They're not concerned about the way we are
In my mind my dreams are real
Now you concerned about the way I feel
Tonight, I'm a rock n roll star!
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