When I think back on my young-adult years as a drug smuggler, which I wrote about in Hole in My Life, I can never say for certain what caused me to abandon my “better self” and impulsively gamble my freedom on a chancy crime that led to my imprisonment. The easy answer is, “I was led astray by the drugs and money.” Surely part of that is true. And yet it has to be something deeper than that. Some character flaw that was invisible to me. A small weakness that grew larger as I became a little older.
I was always a liar. But one thing I failed to realize about being a liar is that you know when you are deceiving someone else, but when you deceive yourself you believe you are telling the truth. This is a common deception, and so I grew worse while telling myself I was getting better.
Then two things happened at once, and those two things were like two dry sticks rubbing together to make a flame. I had already gone to five schools in seven grades and had done the best I could at keeping myself on a straight and narrow path. It wasn’t easy, but I was toeing the line and I vowed that I would read more books and write more in my journal and this time be ready for eighth grade.
But that summer we suddenly moved again. Maybe this move was just one too many, and at the new house I let myself drift further and further from my books and writing until I gave up on all the smart things I had planned on achieving before school started. Still, I told myself I might get lucky and make a great new friend over the summer—he’d be a popular kid, and he’d help me fit in at my new school. That plan almost worked because for a few summer weeks I did make a great new friend, Gary Pagoda.
Afterward I tried my best to forget him and for a time I had, but then the embers of that summer blazed up inside me. I know I have changed names and other details, but this story is what remains inside of me.
Just by chance Gary was my next-door neighbor and he was everything I had never been. He took me under his wing for only a short time, but he had a powerful effect over me. He showed me how to be his double and learn to love trouble while being cruel and crushing my true self. And that’s how I prepared for a different life to begin, by becoming everything I’d never been before.
I told myself that being Gary Pagoda was exactly what I needed. Not fitting in at school was going to be the secret to my success. And that was the truth as I told it to myself, and this is how it played out.