Rumpus: Have you thought of what might have resonated for him in your story? Rumpus: Really? Have you met him personally? Gantos: Yeah, it’s optioned now to Daniel Radcliffe. Rumpus: I was going to ask you about that. I would love to have him in Hole in My Life.
Gantos: Sometimes when I’m writing I think of him as a character. If you watch Boardwalk Empire, with Steve Buscemi. But later in my life, I could see the tipping point coming. Gantos: In the early ’70s, I couldn’t see that at all. Rumpus: Part of the reason you went to prison, the reason I went to prison, is changing. In prison he had a change of heart, started writing children’s books. He was a gang leader, Crips or the Bloods, I think. Rumpus: I just thought of another luminary besides you. You don’t often get children’s book writers who’ve been to prison. Jack Gantos: Particularly in my field, children’s books. The Rumpus: Your second act has been pretty incongruous, no? It just seems so unlikely. After the staccato of opening pleasantries, we dug in, and found affinity. We sat side by side at the bar in the back. I first met Jack last year, in the crowded lobby of the Ace Hotel in Manhattan (we continued our conversation more recently over the phone and email). A lifelong reader and lover of literature, Gantos has since published nearly 50 books, many of them for children and young adults, and won major awards, including the Newbery Medal for his 2012 autobiographical novel Dead End in Norvelt. See, he was saying, I will make something better of myself if you let me out, something smarter. Inmate Gantos impressed his parole board by applying to college and getting accepted.
So he turned himself in, got sentenced to six years, and ended up serving a year and a half in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky. The authorities knew who he was, where his family lived, that he’d been selling the hash around town out of a shopping cart he freewheeled down the streets. They knew of his role in the smuggling of 2,000 pounds of hashish into New York City, on a boat he’d helped sail up from the Virgin Islands. In 1971, Jack Gantos, a twenty-year-old, good-kid criminal, dodged the Feds at the Chelsea Hotel.