Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

Author:Jack Gantos
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

The next day and all throughout the week Rik worked the telephone and kept records of sales and contacts. Between delivering the hash around town, I sat around the bizarre lobby at the Chelsea, smoked hash, and updated the ship’s log. The art hanging, or leaning, against the hotel walls was so odd, so weird, so impossible to understand. I felt trapped by an intense ignorance. I couldn’t tell what was hip and what was hideous, or what was sane or insane. Plus, the lobby seemed a spiderweb of trapped psychotic poets and artists. Or so I guessed. Which ones were the real artists and which ones were the poseurs? Who did I want to meet? Who did I want to avoid? Perhaps they were just street people who had wandered in to flop down in the beat-up chairs and smoke pot or shoot up in the elevator. When I asked Rik his opinion of them he told me they were Andy Warhol’s movie-star friends.

“Ever see Chelsea Girls?” he asked.

I hadn’t. Had never heard of it.

“Well, half the cast is down there,” he said. “You ought to introduce yourself to them. Maybe you’ll get into one of his films.”

I was too shy for that.

“I thought I saw Dennis Hopper down there the other day,” he said. “You know, from Easy Rider. Everyone hip stays here. Jane Fonda. Jimmy Page. Bob Dylan. The place is crawling with famous people. Why do you think we’re here?”

I thought we were hiding. So I sat in the lobby with the ship’s log and peered up at everyone exotic who walked through the front door. Then, quickly, I tried to write a few lines describing them. Nobody looked famous. They all looked tired and strung out. The common difference between the men and the women is the women had fresh lipstick—their one attempt at sanitary glamour. Otherwise their clothes, especially their tights, platform shoes, and ratty hairstyles were as frenzied as they were filthy. They had plenty of style, but did nothing all day but cat around.

I had done a lot of nothing lately. And I was itching to get paid and move on. I knew a few writers had lived at the Chelsea. I asked the desk clerk and he had given me a list of names of authors who had either visited or written entire books there: Mark Twain, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Nelson Algren, and Arthur C. Clarke. It was pretty impressive. I went down to the Strand bookstore and bought books by the Chelsea authors. Naked Lunch by Burroughs and Look Homeward, Angel by Wolfe were a good start. And once again I began to think about what I would do with myself after I got my money. I knew I wanted to write books, but I wasn’t sure how to get started. I did know that I wasn’t going to get anything done by smoking hash and sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea, no matter how cool it was to do so.

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