Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

“I’ve got his number. Dope is his game. But I don’t give a damn where his money comes from as long as it helps get us off this rock.”
    I felt the same way. I wanted off.
    Â 
    Since I didn’t have much money it didn’t matter how lousy the bookstores were, and the library was little help. It was so hot
and humid inside I had to scrape the mold off the spines of the books in order to read the titles. Nine out of ten books I looked up were missing. The librarians just shrugged when I mentioned the apparent theft problem. And if I complained too much they turned up their desk radios and played at being busy.
    Because I couldn’t find the books I wanted, I read what was available. The biographies were closest to the ocean and were especially moldy and not as desirable for the thieves. I read a few books about revolutionaries: Che Guevara, Emma Goldman, an odd book titled Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist, and a book by Alexander Berkman titled ABC of Anarchism . All this political.reading made me think the island was ripe for an all-out race riot and political revolution just like the Haiti Graham Greene had written about in The Comedians.
    Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.
    I was still trying to find something significant to write about and so, like all those political writers, I realized the only thing for me to do would be to jump right into the middle of
the racial tension and use my wits. I remembered reading a quote from a newspaper journalist that stuck with me: “Where there is blood, there is ink.”
    I thought I’d put that quote to work. I got my notebook and a pen and ventured down to the Black Revolutionary Party headquarters to see if I could interview any of the leaders. There were about twenty black guys sitting under fluorescent lights in an old warehouse. They were playing cards and drinking rum. The walls were covered with Black Power posters, pictures of Malcolm X, and green, red, and black maps of Africa. When I walked in, all heads turned toward me. It wasn’t quite like stepping into a military ambush, or being on the front lines in Spain, or witnessing the aftermath of an atomic bomb, but the atmosphere around me was definitely hostile.
    There was a man in the back sitting at a desk. I assumed he was the leader. He had an Afro-pick stuck in his ball of black hair and he was talking loudly to someone on the telephone. When he saw me he abruptly hung up and gave me a long, studied look.
    â€œWhat you want, white boy?”
    That question sure cut to the chase and everyone watched to see how I’d take it.
    There was no going back. “I’m looking to interview someone
about the race relations,” I replied. “They seem pretty bad to me, and I want to know more.”
    â€œWhat’s there more to know than what you can see with your own eyes?” the man shot back. “The white people own the island and the black people work it like wage slaves.”
    That brought loud agreements from the other men, but they seemed to laugh and enjoy the situation more than be angry. For the moment, the oddness of my showing up was funnier than it was confrontational. That was a relief, but I wasn’t sure how far I could keep going.
    â€œI guess I want to know what you are going to do about it. I mean, how are you going to go about getting your share?”
    â€œSee,” the man said, pointing at me, and looking to the other men in the room as if he were a preacher, “see, this question goes directly to the heart of the matter. Because we don’t want a share of what we own, we want all of what we own. And that is the issue that cannot be solved with the white man unless we come to