Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos Read Free Book Online Page A

about. Maybe I could begin to write something important there.
    I drove down to Elizabeth Bishop’s small house. I hadn’t read her poetry and wished I had. Someone once said that all
writers should read into their weaknesses. And I was weak in poetry. But nothing could blunt my happiness. Fate, it seemed, had brought me down to Key West. Fate brought the storm. And I felt fated to write. I still didn’t have anything significant to write about so I just smoked another joint and recorded observations and reflections—just like Sal Paradise.
    And like Sal, I missed my Dean Moriarty. I wondered what had happened to Tim Scanlon, so I called his home in Plantation, Florida. His mom answered.
    â€œIs Tim there?” I asked.
    â€œYou aren’t Jack, are you?” she asked harshly.
    I told her I was Dave, “his other friend.”
    â€œHey,” he said when he came to the phone, “what’s goin’ down?”
    â€œWhat happened, man?” I asked. “I waited forever at the motel.”
    There was silence. I thought I could hear his mother close a door. Finally he replied, “It was awesome. I had to sample the crop. It was like pure THC and sent me into a total genetic high. I couldn’t tell where I was. Finally I walked around the campus in a trance until security picked me up and called my folks. They had to drive up and get me and now they’re royally pissed.”
    â€œWhat happened to the weed?” I asked.

    â€œOh, well, the good news is the security people were potheads and they just kept the stash. But the bad news is we lost all your money.”
    I took a deep breath. Money wasn’t easy for me to come by.
    â€œI’ll pay you back when I get working,” he said. “Promise.”
    I didn’t listen to much after that, and when I got off the phone I didn’t know what to think.
    I retreated to Sloppy Joe’s bar, where Hemingway drank and played cards with his mob of friends who would then go out in his yacht and try to spot and sink Nazi U-boats with hand grenades. I sat at the bar and read A Moveable Feast and cried with a kind of jealous disappointment because that beautiful time in history had passed me by and the contrast between the lush enchantment of Europe and my welfare-motel life was suddenly very sad indeed.
    But I dried my eyes and after a few beers and a couple of joints around back I imagined the great books I might write. Of course, I didn’t write a word. It was easier to smoke joints and have someone deliver drinks than it was for me to deliver sentences.
    The next morning I woke up with blisters on my forearms and hands. I was a born-and-bred Catholic and thought immediately it was some sort of writing stigmata and that I should get to a church. But then I remembered the chair at Hemingway’s
house had been lodged in a manchineel tree and must have been coated with a little bit of the tree’s caustic sap. Ponce de León died from a manchineel-sap-coated arrow, and I figured I was a dead man, too. But after a few days of itching I figured it must have been the arrow that killed him, because I recovered just fine.

1 / st. croix
    From the first week I landed in St. Croix I became part of a drug culture. Drugs were available everywhere at all times. Especially reefer. You could smell it on every other breath of air. In bars, on street corners, in passing cars, on buses, at the beach—people grew it in their home gardens and smoked it like cigarettes. It was so much a part of everyday life even the local police didn’t bother with it, which is why the island was also a depot for smugglers. The U.S. customs office was kept busy inspecting oil tankers from the Middle East which supplied crude oil to the refinery at Hess Oil. That left sailboats and speedboats from the British and French and Dutch and independent islands to slip into St. Croix at night and unload their cargoes of marijuana and