Hole in My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

replied, sounding very uncool to myself.
    â€œWant to try some?” he asked.
    â€œNot now,” I said. “I have to go to work.”
    â€œTonight?” he asked. “Come over to my new friend James’s apartment in the Lauderhill Lakes complex. Apartment 311. We’re having a weed party there.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Yeah.” I was trying to sound enthusiastic, but it wasn’t working. I bought a shirt and left.
    All through my shift at the grocery store I was absentminded. I had read lots of books where people smoked weed. Some seemed to really enjoy it and got happy and hungry and
silly and had deep insights into themselves and the world. I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to be the other kind of smoker—the kind I had also read about who go off the deep end and let life drift way out of control, and become dependent on dope and other users to help them out, and are abused and broken down and the only deep insight they gain from the experience is that they have totally ruined their lives—and I’d end up like that girl from Go Ask Alice who went nuts on LSD and was locked in a closet after she imagined a million bugs were on her skin and to kill them she clawed off all her flesh and nearly bled to death.
    By the time I finished restocking the entire canned vegetable section at work I was convinced I would be a vegetable if I smoked. Yet I went to the apartment. Why? For the same deadhead reason people climb mountains—it was there and I wanted to try it. Plus, there was the slim possibility it would make me a better writer. I got that impression from reading William Burroughs.
    I knocked on the door. James answered. He was at least ten years older than the rest of us.
    â€œCome in,” he whispered, and as I entered the room I turned and saw him peek out the doorway as if I might have been followed by the police. He was so paranoid he scared me.
    Inside, the apartment was filled with smoke that smelled like an acrid palmetto brushfire. I coughed. On the living room
floor Glen and four other guys were sitting cross-legged around a tall brass-and-glass hookah. Jefferson Airplane was on the stereo. Glen grinned up at me.
    â€œWe’re trying to get high but it’s not working,” he said, disappointed. “We’re just down to stems and seeds. Want a toke?”
    He gave me the spitty plastic end of the hookah hose. I drew in some smoke and instantly hacked it out of my lungs.
    â€œI know what you mean,” he remarked. “We even filled the hookah with wine but it can’t take the burn out of this stuff.”
    I nodded my head in agreement as I gritted my teeth from trying to suppress more coughing. After it was determined the stems and seeds were a bust, I spent the rest of my time wondering just how long I had to hang around before politely leaving. I drank two beers, then said so long to Glen and James and the other guys I never met. They had stared at the floor the entire evening as if it were interesting. It just looked filthy to me.
    All the way to my car I expected cops to grab me by the shoulder just as they had when I was exchanging the hot stereo. I didn’t want to be busted and thrown in jail so that someday I could tell my sad tale to others, just as the prisoners had told their woeful tales to me.
    When I made it home I closed and double locked my door and pulled the curtains.

    â€œI don’t have to do that again,” I said to myself. But I must not have been listening.
    Â 
    I lived in the King’s Court for the whole school year. Davy baked and left cookies on my bed, and she always monitored my health and mothered me with homemade soup when I was sick. Her motel catered to a patchwork of local folks who were down on their luck. Florida was still pretty segregated, so the cultural mix was unique and mostly peaceful—blacks, whites, Hispanics, and some Seminoles. Every now and again the Seminoles