The Confusion of Nemo Chapman
Nemo Chapman was a teenager devoted to the South De Kalb County YMCA, “a guy down on one knee helping out a little kid, or with kids just hanging around his neck, following him everywhere he went.” When Nemo was presented with the award for Outstanding Camp Counselor, the kids all leaped to their feet, chanting “Ne-mo, Ne-mo, Ne-mo!”
After graduating from high school, Nemo and his friend Mike McFarland spent the summer in Chicago where they performed a comedy act in churches and Christian nightspots. In the fall, Nemo went back home to Georgia and enrolled at South De Kalb Community College, hoping to get a degree that might help him land a job with the YMCA. It was then that Mike suggested Nemo read J.D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the story of a mixed-up teenager who, “distraught at his discovery that the world seems to be made up of phonies, runs away to wander around New York.“
The following summer, Nemo volunteered for the Y's international program and was sent to Lebanon. But when civil war erupted there, the YMCA was evacuated. Nemo was then sent to work with Vietnamese refugees at a resettlement camp in Arkansas where he quickly became the hero of all the Vietnamese children. He rose through the ranks to become Area Coordinator and a key aide to the Program Director, who said, “He was really caring with the refugees and he worked his tail off to do everything exactly right. He was a super kid.”
When the resettlement program ended in December, 1975, Nemo said to his friend, Rod Riemersma, “We're all going to get together again. One day one of us is going to be somebody. About five years from now, one of us will do something famous, and it will bring us all together.”
Holden Caulfield, the tortured protagonist in Salinger's book, describes to his kid sister Phoebe the job of his dreams: “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… I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all…“
But who will keep Holden Caulfield from falling off that “crazy cliff”? Who is there for him? Sadly, no one stepped out from the field of rye to stop Nemo Chapman, either.
When the New York police arrived on the scene five years later, December 8th, 1980, they found Mark David “Nemo” Chapman sitting on a curb reading The Catcher in the Rye. John Lennon lay dead on the sidewalk beside him. Looking inside the book's cover, the police found written these words: “This is my statement.” And it was signed, “Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye.“
Sometimes people – people just like you and me – do sick and twisted things.
And we have no answers why.
Roy H. Williams
PS – If you didn't receive last week's memo about The Death of Hype, it's because I included three short examples of “selling” phrases that have been so overused that they're no longer effective. Almost as if to prove my point, the SPAM filters on servers all across America saw those phrases and sent the memo immediately to the trash. You'll find that memo, as well as all the others for the past year, in the Monday Memo Archives. Just look for the MMM Archive icon in the left column of the home page, right under Course Descriptions at wizardacademy.org. – RHW
PPS – For perhaps the most thorough retracing of the steps that led Mark David Chapman to New York that fateful night, look for the investigative report by Fred McGunagle. Incredible stuff.