Hole in My Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

sprawling high school. It was everything I feared, and it gave me the creeps. As I drove around I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to go. I wasn’t going to just bump along to grade thirteen and not go to a real school where I’d be roughed up and challenged. By the time I parked my car and entered the admissions officer’s cubby, I was determined. The lady who met with me was very nice. She shook my hand and welcomed me to the college. She gave me a little booster bag full of university items: a mini orange football with a Gator logo, a Gator car decal, a Gator hat, a Gator hand towel, a Gator mug, and a rubber Gator for the top of my car antenna.
    I thanked her for the items and set them down by my feet. I was trying to come up with a way to tell her why I decided against attending the school. I suddenly wanted to blame it all on the Gator mascot, but knew I needed more than that, and more than just a gut feeling that the place was all wrong for me. Then she sealed the deal while pointing out a few freshman rules.
    â€œ … and you have to dorm on campus for the first two years, and during that time you cannot have a car.”
    I stared at her. I debated silently if I should tell her I loved
my car—needed my car—and that I had been living on my own long enough to never want a roommate. But I kept my thoughts to myself. I smiled. We chitchatted a bit and I left, and on the way home I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. All the way down to my toes I knew I had made the right decision. But I didn’t know entirely why. I guessed I would find out later. It was a good guess.

4 / pair of jacks
    Like every guy, I had read On the Road by Kerouac and wanted to cut loose and carom from coast to coast as he did without thinking of money or trouble or anything but the great freedom that awaited me like a ship heading to sea. I was looking for a change. I wanted to see something beyond high school and the King’s Court and a grocery-store aisle lined with canned vegetables. And I was especially itchy to feel new things, to shed my skin and grow. I couldn’t explain myself to anyone because I was only full of excited urges and notions and desires, kind of like the Hulk before he transforms. Plus, I had a strong sense that I needed to snap off my past in order to have a future. All year I had worked hard to keep myself together. I held my job, managed my own money, kept passing grades, and stayed out of deep trouble. But now my accomplishments just seemed like survival routines, and I wanted to move on to more romantic turf and find out who I was and what might happen to me when the rubber met the road. And, of course, I wanted to write. I figured if I crisscrossed Florida
from coast to coast as if I were tying up the laces on a high-top sneaker I would eventually stumble on something juicy to write about. I was full of hope. I had been reading constantly. I kept up my daily journal-writing routine, logging my favorite quotes and building my vocabulary. And now it was time for me to stop being a chippy high-school writer and to challenge myself.
    So I began to shut down the “Bad Attitude Clearing House.” I gave away all my thrift-shop furnishings to whoever would take them. I gave my suit and jacket and striped shirts and club ties and wing tips to a young guy who was looking for work. I kept my T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. I rounded up the little kids and passed out all my candy stash, which they gleefully devoured. They didn’t save one piece for later. And as I watched them prance and dance around the parking lot like sugared-up puppets, I told myself to stop rationing pleasure as if it were a paycheck. It was time to cut loose and have fun, and not worry about tomorrow. I wanted my candy, too.
    Reading On the Road, I felt more like Sal Paradise than Dean Moriarty. Sal was in love with everything and everybody. His eyes were as wide open as his heart. He