Hole in My Life Read Online Free PDF

would get drunk and claim that Florida was their territory and everyone else had better pack up and move out. Parents made sure the kids were inside and the doors locked during these tirades. Davy let them shout and parade around in their native costume as they called on the spirit of Chief Osceola to help them regain their homeland. She only pulled out Ole Betsy and called them a bunch of “alligator wrestlers” when they walked onto Broward Boulevard to scare cars, or when they busted up furniture and threw bottles of Ripple and Boone’s Farm through the jalousie windows. She never called the cops on anyone. Her frontier policy was to work it out among ourselves. Besides, she felt for the Seminoles.
    â€œThey got every right to be pissed,” she said. “It wasn’t so long ago the government paid two hundred dollars bounty for every Indian killed by settlers.”

    When I told my school friends where I lived they thought I was joking. For most of them I might as well have been living in the Black Hole of Calcutta. When my drinking buddy, Will, came to visit, he was always nervous his new Camaro would get broken into or stolen. And when any of the motel kids knocked on my door for a treat (I always kept bags of candy from the store in my room), my friends reeled back in horror as if the kids had lice, ringworm, or rabies. But after meeting my neighbors they’d relax and realize that people on the other side of the tracks were warm-blooded, could tell good stories, and were as curious about white high school kids as we were about them. I named my room the “Bad Attitude Clearing House.”
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    Things were not going well for my dad’s business. The family had moved from Puerto Rico to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands with the hope that my dad could start a small construction company and make big money. He started the company, but there was not much money and my mom was worried. I had stopped asking for a monthly allowance. I just wanted to be one less thing to fret about. That was my goal. My letters home were lame, but they did not add to the general gloom and doom around the house. Even when I changed my mind and decided not to go to college, it didn’t bother them.
    At first I was going to go. I had taken all the tests that counted—the SAT and the Florida Placement Exam in order to
determine state college eligibility. There was only one kid out of our 700-student graduating class who was going to Harvard, and that was not me.
    After I was accepted to the University of Florida in Gainesville, the only school I applied to, I was required to attend an interview with the admissions office. Before I went up to Gainesville I looked over the course offerings. The school was strong in literature but just seemed so-so in creative writing. That bothered me, but not too much because I was accustomed to not getting everything I wanted.
    On a Wednesday I took off work time, packed a bag, and drove up the turnpike to I-75. I had changed the oil in my car, and had the brake pads replaced and the engine tuned. The car drove beautifully. I loved my car. I felt even more comfortable in it than I did in my room. They were about the same size and had about the same amount of furniture and closet space.
    I arrived on campus early. I drove around the dorms, the library, the classroom buildings, and the administration offices. It was 1971 and the campus was dozing. Across the country students were rioting over civil rights, Vietnam, social justice, and government cover-ups involving tapping phones and secret wars. While in high school I accepted that I was living in a void, but now that I was heading for college I needed some fresh air and fresh thinking. Granted, my mind was pretty
blank to begin with, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted or what I needed, but I was totally certain what I didn’t want. And I didn’t want the University of Florida. It looked just like a big,