Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16

by Moshe Kasher

As early as I can recall, adults have been telling me there was something wrong with me. I was passed around, adult to adult, each one throwing their hands up and declaring, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him either!” Adults talked about me like that, right in front of me, all the time, as if my mother’s deafness somehow applied to me by association. I’d spend time in the mirror, trying to figure out what was looking back at me, what weird alien thing I was. According to my mother, I was born out of control, a feral kid, wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity of my own body. If you could see my little Jew body now, you would find that very difficult to believe. I’d snarl and snap, I’d bite and foam, I’d shake with anger when the slightest thing didn’t go my way, and my body would seize in convulsions of rage and uncontrollable emotion. Frightened, my mother sent me to a therapist. I was four years old. That is a demarcation point in my life. I was booted into the therapeutic garden and left to wander, entering an old rusty gate guarded by the ghosts of Freud and Jung. Being told, still wet from the womb, that you need therapy, it almost makes a boy feel broken.

In my family, divorce was a kind of sacred rite, passed down from matriarch to matriarch. My mother is a third-generation divorcée, which means that my great-grandmother left her husband. Divorce in 1917 was likely to turn a respectable woman into the town harpy, but the holiness of the divorce rite was so deeply embedded in her genetic code that even witch burnings and convents couldn’t keep my great-grandmother married. My grandmother’s heart fluttered when she saw us tumble onto her doorstep, bags in hand. “Finally,” she said, “you’ve come to your senses and left that fucking man. I’ve said it a thousand times, all men are pigs.” She looked down at my brother and me, “Except you boys, of course.”

Despite the endless fires of hatred that burned for Dick the Dick, my grandmother seemed to nonetheless have another flame burning for him. As far as I know, she was never with another man the entire forty years of her life after leaving him. She arranged her life neatly to live without romance, replacing it with poisonous resentment. That resentment bubbled over and then trickled down onto my brother and me, anointing us with holy oils, crowning us the princes of a man-hating coven.

Anyone who thinks welfare is an awesome meal ticket for undeserving people ought to be forced to eat one actual meal from below the poverty line. Following the most intense diarrhea of their lives would be the realization that being on government assistance sucks balls.

Just before Joey disappeared into the swirling masses, slipping out of sight of campus security, I could have sworn he winked at me, as if to say, “Yeah, that was pretty cool, huh?” He winked at me! Not bad. I thought to myself that a fuckup seemed like a pretty cool thing to be. It was like a little Post-it note reminder that I stuck to the inside of my head. Note to self: Fuckups are afraid of nothing. You are afraid of everything. This information might come in handy someday.

“We can’t figure out what you learn best with. It seems like something might be wrong with your brain.” She pointed to her fat head. “So we are going to bring you to a special classroom to help you learn. It’s called Portable Three.” Portable Three. The retard portable. “But isn’t that where the retarded kids go?” I asked. She was shocked. “We don’t use that word anymore. Differently abled.” “Do you use the word Down syndrome? Because the kid with Down syndrome goes to Portable Three. Do I have Down syndrome?” I never got an answer. To this day I’m not sure I don’t. Every day after fourth period, I would begin the long slog to the Portable Three DMZ at the back of the school. The first day there, I expected the door to open to a scene from an antebellum hospital for the mentally infirm. I expected young women chained to the door and people rocking in the corner picking at scabs. A woman with madness in her eyes would jump on top of me gasping, “Leave now… you’ll never escape this place.” What I got was much different. Portable Three looked a lot like a regular classroom. The fourth-period class was specifically for people like me, regular kids with an appropriate amount of chromosomes but an inappropriate amount of F’s on their report cards. The more severely disabled students were given classes earlier in the day and then sent home to lift heavy things for the carnival or eat paint chips or whatever. What I was expecting was a caricature of a special education classroom, ...

Before I got high, I had no idea that’s what had been wrong the whole time. It wasn’t that I had deaf parents. It wasn’t that I had a frantic angry mother or a fanatic absent father. It wasn’t that I was fat and retarded or crazy, angry, Jewish, or anything else. I just needed to get high. That’s the secret no one tells you when you’re a kid. That it feels fucking great. They tell you that you feel loopy and disoriented, but no one tells you that it crawls through your skin, filling in every place of deficit, every gaping crack where your humanity didn’t fuse. The thick warm lava of euphoria fills in the crevices of your psyche, and you realize your soul was an electric blanket that hadn’t been plugged in until just then. Parents and shrinks never tell you that you will forget all the reasons you had to hate yourself. They don’t tell you that shit because then everybody will want to get high. It’s that feeling—the numbing bliss of self-medication—that makes people become drug addicts. Lots of people get high; only some become addicts. It’s not the getting high that makes you an addict, it’s what the getting high does for you. If you start low and you get high, you make it up to normal for the first time. Getting loaded feels good; but if it’s the first thing that’s ever felt good in your life, you’re in trouble. That’s what I chased. It wasn’t the high, it was the feeling that I was all right. All right?

Right about the first time I got high, the famous thespian/professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper had just graduated from the Royal Shakespeare Academy and body slammed Andre the Giant. (The Royal Shakespeare thing was a lie.) He was at the peak of his fame and thus got a starring role in the seminal classic They Live. (The seminal classic thing was a lie.) I loved that movie. In it, Piper is a blue-collar schmo who happens across a pair of unremarkable-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary sunglasses. As soon as he puts them on, an entire secret alien world is revealed to him. There are aliens everywhere and apparently they have been here awhile. Billboards that to the naked eye seem to be Coca-Cola ads are shown to have messages for the alien occupiers. Famous actors have been aliens this whole time, their freaky alien faces revealed once Roddy slips the sunglasses on. A whole alien world had been running right under our noses, just beneath the surface. I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper after that first joint. Not like, I want to wear a kilt and beat up the Macho Man Randy Savage, but like, I knew about a secret fucking world that had always been there and mindless victims had been walking around it for years, pretending it didn’t exist. I saw the brave new world. I’m not sure what happens to normal people when they get high for the first time. I assume that they get high, feel delighted, and think, “That was soul stimulating. I feel enlightened but not overwhelmi...

I had my first drunken fight. Everybody should have one. I firmly believe that everyone should get punched in the face at least once in their life. It builds character. Getting your ass kicked teaches you that your body isn’t a glass menagerie figurine that could shatter at any trauma. You gotta get lumped up sometimes. Then heal and know you are all right.

There are moments in a life that make you think maybe there’s a thread of meaning through this bumbling little experience. Seconds and inches that peel open the epidermis of the universe to reveal the intricate nervous system of interconnectivity that lies within. Things that make you say, “There might be something to this God thing after all.” Little God moments. My God moment puttered up to me in a 1970 Datsun 510. It was a rusty thing with primer-gray-splotted rough blue paint. A little wagon that looked like it was going to self-destruct into a thousand pieces at any second. It pulled up and stopped right in front of my bus stop. Inside was a hippie angel. I mean this guy looked like a fucking R. Crumb character. A Frank Zappa of a man with dirty curly hair cascading down his shoulders, gray streaks flecking his bushiness, showing his age. Next to him was a man ripped from a Jimi Hendrix concert photo, a withered old hippie wanderer whose leather headband might not have been removed for years. A thousand years, a million. Namaste. Zappa turned his head to me and smiled. A big, white greedy smile. All love. I did my hand like, “Roll down the window.” The Man-Buddha complied. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, brother!” We were brothers. “You guys heading to Rockridge BART?” I knew the answer. “We are now!” Zappa popped the door open and slid his seat forward. “Jump in.” I leapt. Some people just won’t understand these things. I could sense the electric current in the air. Feel the po...

Donny was standing in front of me, looking like he was working on a heart attack of his own. He was scared. I’d never seen Donny without a kind of layer of protective gangsterism. Donny had always been the kind of person who walked through the world at ease. He seemed older than us all just because he was cool. People flocked to him for that reason and they worshiped him without knowing it. It was mostly because he was never afraid and

Every week’s session was essentially an hour of Dr. Susan pointing out what a martyr my poor deaf mother was and what an asshole I was. To be fair, she was right. I was an asshole. The deeper into my little world I got, the more concrete my mother’s everlasting fear of something being wrong with me was made manifest. I was now the problem child my mother had always suspected I’d become. Strangely, the worse I became, the more deeply into her own neurosis my mother dove. My mother has always been a frantic, emotional waterfall of a woman. She wielded emotions like weaponry. Love was her shield; guilt was her sword. The more I rebelled, the more completely she tried to swallow me whole. She lived on my chest. When I became old enough that I could no longer wear the literal leash she tied around me when I was a baby, she began to work on weaving an emotional leash. That one I couldn’t chew through. It was forged out of strong stuff. She had a kind of psychic link to me that I just couldn’t shake. If I snuck out at night, my mother would wake up the next morning with my absence palpable in her brain, vibrating like Spidey sense. Somehow she always knew when I wasn’t there. To be fair, I left a lot. Having a deaf mother makes sneaking out of the house a rather simple affair. Actually it wasn’t really sneaking as much as just leaving in the middle of the night. I could tramp and stomp and break-dance if I so desired. I left almost every night. Unfortunately, often I would sneak ...

I stepped out into the hallway in my foam “safe slippers” and smelled the fetid, chemical custard stink that wafts in every hospital and institution. I can never wash that stench memory out of my nose. To this day, every time I go to the doctor’s for an appointment, my nose sends me back to that hallway, staring down at my feet, wondering how it all happened. I shuffled to the showers and was handed a measly towel and a hotel bar of soap. “Five minutes,” the orderly barked. You know the feeling of tranquility and cleansing a nice long shower gives you? Yeah, that’s not available during the five-minute mental hospital shower. Even in there you feel institutionalized. I scrubbed myself and dreaded the rest of the day. First up was some kind of group ball game led by the most chipper counselor you could ever hope to vomit directly in the face of. “This is FEELING BALL!” Her gross shimmering teeth gleamed bright white in juxtaposition to the blackness emanating from my heart. “Emphasis on feeling! When I bounce the ball to you, you tell me how you are feeling about your new journey into mental health!” The chipper little thing bounced the ball toward me with a huge smile. “Your turn!” “What?” I couldn’t believe I was doing this. “A feeling!” She grinned and I wanted to rip her face off with my mind. “I feel like you are bad at your job.” I bounced the ball to someone else as my therapist’s electric grin went dim.

There were meals and groups and games and meds and movies and levels and points and, of course, a padded cell. It’s not so bad in there. Cool and soft and a place to wonder how you landed yourself in a place like this. There were babbling teens with thick gauze wrapped around their wrists and abuse victims who couldn’t make it back and secret drug addicts and Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ? Yeah, even he was in there. Or at least some guy said that’s who he was. I could feel, from deep underneath my belly, this fire of anger bubbling and smoking and trying to get out. I had been getting high so much at this point that it had been awhile since I’d felt that. But with a two-week break courtesy of my 5150 and that terrible Dr. Susan, the topical anesthetic I’d been dabbing at my life was starting to wear off. I couldn’t believe what they had done to me, where they’d sent me. I hated those fucking adults so much, I could hardly stand it. This therapeutic environment hardly seemed therapeutic. I was so angry I couldn’t believe it. And I imagine I’d have been angrier still had I known then what I know now due to the advantage of my 20/20 hindsight goggles—that all of my therapists were right. I wasn’t angry, I was scared. The anger just served as a line of defense from the terror that it protected. Sure, I hated those adults but mostly because they represented something I wasn’t. In control. Stable. Powerful. I was none of those things. I stayed angry because what was right ...

There was something I found so phenomenally satisfying about the process of cracking a therapist’s professional armor. I’d look for a small chink, poke my little vitriolic prick into it, and start pumping it until they lost their shit and I ejaculated victory all over them. When they lost it, I’d won. I felt so powerless, so at the mercy of these square-ass adults so much of the time, that grabbing their power from them felt orgasmic.

I went to bed at 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve that year. Celebrating from in bed, behind thick Plexiglas windows and walls, and hospital corners, determined never to have to come here again. Every second in that place was a screaming reminder: YOU ARE NOT NORMAL. At the same time, I found a comfort in that place. There was one normal kid there named Nate. He was an older kid, at least sixteen, and I thought he was as cool as anyone I’d ever met. He and I would hang out in group making fun of the real crazies and talking about all the pot we were going to smoke when we got out. I wanted to impress him with tales of how much I got high, and it never occurred to me that anyone was listening. Not too bright, but I was pretty medicated at the time. He wasn’t just cool, he was tortured by his life like me. We used to knock hello to each other from across the walls of our kitty-cornered rooms at night. I’d knock “shave and a haircut,” and he’d answer back, “two bits.” I guess we did that just to let each other know that someone else was there who understood. One night I knocked and no one answered. Nate was gone. He’d been released. That night, I cried myself to sleep, hyperventilating, terrified, and I really didn’t know why. I remember I cried when I got out, too. How quickly you get institutionalized. A two-week stay and I was ready to move in. Ready to be a thirty-year vet with my ass hanging out of a hospital gown doing the Thorazine shuffle, yelling about how the pudding on Tu...

My mother had been struggling her way through school for years, determined to become a teacher for the deaf. She chased her master’s degree like it would define her and cancel out the bad decisions she’d made in the past. My grandfather, Dick the Dick, had been an English professor at a local community college. Lecturing on such topics as “Spousal Abuse: How to Do It!” My grandmother was a teacher in the Oakland Public School System. No doubt setting up the curriculum that would allow me to fail years later. Her mother was a teacher in Arizona at the turn of the century. Her mother’s mother was a teacher in Utah in the 1800s, teaching Mormons to be creepily friendly (yeah, that was her idea!). Her mother’s mother’s mother was responsible for teaching Abraham Lincoln as a youth. (Not true!) Her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was Jesus’s after-school tutor, pop-quizzing him on things like “How to avoid the pull of Satan in the desert” and “Why the Jews seem cool now, but you should never trust them.” Her mother’s mother’s… oh whatever, you get the picture. My family valued education.

I hated New Bridge, but I loved it, too. I met kids like me who were so absolutely unacceptable to everyone that they were shipped off to be fixed. Every day I’d take the bus up to New Bridge and they would try to force me to talk about my feelings. I didn’t care about that; I was used to being analyzed. But right beneath that callousness, I sensed that something was shifting here. I hadn’t left that mental hospital behind. I hadn’t left Claremont. I hadn’t left that chaos behind, it was still all over me. The suspicion of something being deeply wrong with me that had defined my childhood was being made manifest here in these groups. What kind of thirteen-year-old goes to rehab? I couldn’t have articulated this shame, so instead I did what I always did when I was overwhelmed—I acted like an asshole.

My mother, who was at every group, every counseling session, following closely as the interpreter translated my raging stream of obscenities, had become a kind of model rehab parent, by which I mean constantly involved and totally oblivious to the fact that her own dysfunctions were at least part of the problem. She was constantly humiliated by me. The tables had turned. I grew up humiliated by how she said things; now she was humiliated by the things I said. “This place is a fucking joke! You bust us for stuff you know we are going to do anyway.” I looked right at Tim. “Do you just enjoy being a dick because you are an adult?” Tim bristled at this and shot back, “Do you enjoy wasting everybody’s time here? Standing in the way of the kids who want to get better here?” “Nobody wants to get better here! You dumb ass, can’t you see that? We are all fucking trapped here like little rats. We all want to go get high. Most of us already are!” Oops. Too much information. “Like who?” Tim asked, hungry. “Well, like your mother and I smoked some rocks together before I bent her over the soldering equipment.” Maybe I’d gone too far. Tim’s face flashed in anger, and I thought maybe he was going to hit me. I loved pissing adults off. My mom jumped in at this point, speaking through her interpreter, who was flustered by now, fucking up every fifth word. “Why don’t you hug some respect?” he’d ask. “Have. Have some respect.” I was simultaneously mocking him, correcting him, interpreting fo...

We sat there for a while, silently, she trying to forgive herself, me trying to blame myself. Eventually I got up and left her to her tears. I couldn’t deal with that shit. I told myself I didn’t care, but the only thing I wanted to do in that moment was go get fucked up and obliterate myself, obliterate the memory of my mother’s tears. I did just that. I wanted out of those memories. Maybe that’s a kissing cousin of caring. I got high and forgot. I got high and silently fortified another paper-thin membrane wall around my feelings. Next time, next time I’d feel even less. That’s all I ever wanted. I didn’t want to feel good. I just wanted not to feel at all. With shit like this happening around you, who would want to feel it? I wanted out, and lucky me, at the bottom of every forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor was a trapdoor into oblivion. I leapt in and checked out. The next day, my mom informed me of my summer plans. “Things are going to change. I can’t keep accepting you trying to control me and the family. Larry is going crazy, too.” “Fuck Larry.” My mother’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve been trying, but having you in the house kills the mood.” I mimed vomiting all over the kitchen. Poor Larry. Larry was my mother’s long-term boyfriend. The poor bastard. He had not signed on for me and, unlike most stepparents, actually tried his damnedest to just mind his own business. I hardly made that possible.

Oakland Public Schools had had just about enough to do with me by the time I’d dropped out. Between the endless fighting, the constant class cutting, the incessant pot smoking, and the general malaise of horrific behavioral problems, I had been deemed more of a nuisance than anything else. I became a problem rather than a student, and a crack opened up beneath me large enough to fall into. I dropped out of junior high after Peter Cooke beat my ass, and that was, unbeknownst to me, another trapdoor that opened up behind me and dropped me down into a deeper level of insanity. I was lost in the system. My mother and grandmother, probably due to the clinical, therapeutic lens through which they viewed the world, chose to send me down the path of the crazy, rather than the path of the criminal. But the truth is, at that age the difference is really marginal. Then again, maybe it is at any age.

I had, without quite understanding what I was getting myself into, agreed to go to a school with a rather telling name: The Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster. The second I arrived, I smelled something wrong. Thick security doors shot open and slid shut behind me, autolocking. Fortified entrances to schools, never a good sign. I looked around. This was not a place that was set up like any school I’d ever been to. At each of the entry and exit points of the one main classroom were adults standing sentinel, their eyes scanning back and forth at the students, looking for something, anything, to happen. You got the feeling as soon as you stepped in that anything could happen. You can feel when you are in a room of people who cannot control themselves. You can taste the tinny chemical dump of the insane when you share the air with them. The teacher droned on as if this weren’t a cuckoo’s nest situation and she was just teaching a regular class, not these mad kids. Meanwhile, the kids were muttering to themselves and pulling their hair out. Students looked up at me with evil grimaces I interpreted to mean, not “I’ll whoop your ass, white boy,” which I was used to, but rather, “I will eat your ass after disemboweling you, white boy,” which was new to me. People rocked back and forth or laughed at jokes that weren’t told. These kids were the people that made their fellow gang members uncomfortable with their level of violence. I scanned the room looking...

“Mother, father deaf” is how people like me establish ourselves with deaf people, the simple grammar a kind of entrée into deaf society. It’s a membership card into a very elite club. Regular hearing people can work all their lives in the deaf world, they can establish themselves as true allies to the deaf community, they can be loved by all, but they will always be “hearing” and “other.” But a kid with deaf parents, signing “mother, father deaf,” is instantly accepted as family. We aren’t hearing. We are the rare exception to the rule, hearing people trusted as insiders in a society that is inherently mistrustful of the hearing. Can you blame them? Envision how you would speak to a deaf person should you meet one in the street. Imagine your slow talking, buffoonish gesturing condescension… Now, would you want to talk to you?

Ray had been put in Seneca for a somewhat similar reason to me—no one could figure out what to do with him. He, like many deaf kids, was the only deaf student in a small school district, and being the only bruised fruit, he was left to wither on the vine. It wasn’t until he started smashing the other fruits that he got someone’s attention. He smashed enough to be diagnosed as “severely emotionally disturbed” and fell through a trapdoor of his own. Everyone around me was like that, trapped. Stuck in the greasy cogs of the system. Trapped in the first of what was absolutely certain to be an endless stream of institutions. Some of these kids were absolutely hopeless, no doubt, their heads fried by drugs or beatings or just biology playing a trick on them, flooding their brains with crazy-guy chemicals. But most were like me, kids who took a soft left turn at some point and didn’t even notice they were headed into no-man’s-land until they had gone so far that when they looked back, they realized they had no idea how to get back. They were trapped. They were lost. I lived among lost boys. I was lost, too.

When it was time to go home, I said good-bye to Ray and got back on the fucking yellow bus. I slumped into my seat as a severely disabled wheelchair-bound passenger screamed in impotent agony at her broken body, her broken brain. Here was my new school life, prison bookended by horrors. All I had wanted was to feel okay. I felt anything but. I convinced my driver to drop me off a half block from my house, lest the neighborhood boys see me getting out of the short bus. I went home and smoked a joint and reassessed. I needed to get the FUCK out of that school, and the way I would do that was to be an absolute angel every second of every day. I’d never make a peep, I’d never say anything smart-assed. Be invisible. I never made a sound. I stayed in Ray’s pocket. Months passed. My severe emotional disturbance was arrested for the time being. Every day at Seneca I had the realization that if there was a Hell, this was where the young people who lived there went to school.

At around the one-month mark, I sat in the park after school and a kid named Jonah busted out a joint. “Let’s smoke,” he said. “Nah, I can’t. I can’t smoke during the week or I’m fucked. I’ll never do my homework if I smoke now.” “Oh, c’mon, smoke now, you’ll get your head straight by six and then do your homework. That’s what I’m doing.” Oh yeah! It made so much sense now. Smoke and then do the work! At six. Do the work at six. Work at six. Six. Six. Six. Six. 666. I grabbed the joint. Oblivion. Of course at six, I was sitting in a bush with Donny smoking and drinking Maybeck away. Three months later, I was failing out of school and got officially thrown out after getting into a physical fight with our flamboyantly gay drama teacher. (Is there any other kind?)

No question I wanted Maybeck more than I wanted to get high. But, and I hardly realized it, I had already crossed over a little invisible line. Another Y in the road. I’d passed into the realm where desire had little or no effect on whether or not I drank and got high. I was heeding the beckoning of the reins-snapping monkey on my back, not engaging in a battle of will. I had lost control and I had no idea. I wanted to make it through that school more than I wanted to get high, of course I did; but here I was, high as fuck and booted from that school. I didn’t understand how I had managed to outrun my own mind. I kept going back to Maybeck for a few weeks. My new, exciting social life was there and the people I got high with were there, too. I didn’t want to let it go. Every day, I’d take the bus to Berkeley and show up at lunchtime with Donny in tow and we’d smoke with kids at The Grove, a eucalyptus forest by the UC Berkeley campus. We’d show up and just nonchalantly say hi and then sit down to get to the business of getting high. I kept showing up, unwilling to accept that I needed to move on from the fantasy of that school and accept what I was becoming: a fucking fourteen-year-old failure. I showed up one day alone, weeks after I’d been thrown out, and was rounding the bend into the grove when I heard my school friends talking about me. I crouched behind a bush and listened, shaking with shame, quaking with hurt. “It’s, like, kind of pathetic he just keeps showing up ...

After the mushrooms came Donny’s Ritalin, which we crushed up and snorted. Speed and mushrooms—to make the cartoons play faster. Now that we were high, it seemed like a really good idea to steal the car. Larry and my mother had spent years slopping together a VW bug out of two non-working cars. It was an eyesore of unparallelled proportions. Multicolored, unpainted, and rusted through the floorboards, my mother and Larry had been foolish enough to leave it at home, thinking I’d be too embarrassed to be seen in it. Little did they know that the mushrooms I’d be eating would make it look like a Transformer. I loved Transformers.

town.” To clarify, a real-life police officer allowed a drunk, high, unlicensed kid in a stolen car to drive down a windy mountain road at night. Sometimes there is only one set of footprints in the sand. That’s when God carries you. And that night, he carried me with a gentleness that suggested, “I forgive you for the phone sex, I totally get it.”

I squinted at the pills, willing myself not to hear the thought that was creeping in the side of my head: “This is a really lousy idea.” I chose instead to heed the other much less logical but much more compelling thought, “What the hell, why not? See what happens, it could be awesome. Fuck it.” Fuck it is the great battle cry of the drug addict. It’s the rebel yell we all scream as we charge into the dumb, the ridiculous, the dangerous pool of bullshit that we inevitably drown in. My hands were shaking as I crushed up these pills that had been jacking up my brain chemistry for the past year. Chunks of the protective easy-swallow coating stuck out from the white lines like coral rocks jutting out from a foamy surf, warning, “Bad idea! Pain Ahead!” I grabbed my surfboard and jumped in.

“Where is the car?” “Well, I don’t know in the classic sense of knowing. Well…” I thought fast in what seemed like a pretty good lie in the moment. “I…” I remembered the radio from last night. “I fixed the radio!” “What?” my grandmother asked, confused. “Yeah!” I yelled, gaining confidence. “I fixed the radio. I have a buddy who does that kind of repair work, and so I wheeled the bug down to his shop and fixed the radio to surprise Mom and Larry when they get back. Yep. That’s where the car is now. The radio-fixing shop.” A pretty good, pretty high-grade lie. Jamie would have been proud. “You pushed the car?” My grandmother looked dubious. “Well, yeah! I didn’t drive. I don’t have a license. That’s illegal! Duh.” “You pushed the car down the street to repair the radio?” “Yes. Exactly.” Why didn’t she believe me? I was lying, but there was no way for her to know that. “To repair the radio for your deaf mother.” I paused. “You know, I totally didn’t think of that! Ha ha!” My grandmother looked less amused. Just then I heard the car pull back into the driveway. Saved! “Well, there’s the mechanic now, delivering the car!” We walked downstairs together, me covered in vomit, my grandmother covered in doubt. Joey crawled out of the driver’s seat with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hands. “Hey, thanks for fixing the radio, champ!” “Yeah.” Joey stared at me, confused. “Anytime… champ.” I sat down in the driver’s seat and looked up at my grandmother with a confident smile. “Here w...

Corey and DJ entered that school with instant street stripes just by virtue of being from Oakland. They went from White Boys at Claremont to Those Guys from Oakland at Piedmont. Instant status. They quickly found themselves courted by the guys for protection and the girls for attention. DJ and Corey would, intermittently, bring new friends into our social circle with the express plan of softening them up to the point of being able to rob them. It was like a group of foxes bringing a new, fat chicken into the den and trying to convince them they were safe. “Hey, thanks so much for coming, the other foxes and I are really glad you are here.” Chicken looks up, wanting so bad to be accepted, eyes darting back and forth. “Why are you licking your lips?” Fox thinks quick. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, I have problems with dry mouth.” Chicken wants to believe, does. “Oh, yeah, I know how that can be, I was just afraid you might be about to pounce on me and eat me.” Fox tries to look shocked. “What?!? Me? What would make you think a thing like that?” “Well… you’re a fox. And there are feathers everywhere. And you have buckets of KFC littered around the den. And there’s your raging fox boner.” Fox looks down, his red face turning redder. “How embarrassing,” says Fox just before he pounces. Rich kids would be brought to us one by one, smiling that they’d been let in on a slummy secret. They would hang out for a few days, just long enough to feel comfortable, and then someone would set ...

We robbed, got robbed, and one of us even got punched in retaliation for the karmic punches we’d sprayed into the world. We didn’t realize it, but it was perfect. Or maybe we did realize it. We piled back into the Suburban a bit lighter. The engine spat to life and we were off, driving back to North Oakland, to home and safety. We rode in silence for a few minutes, breathing through what had just happened to us. I broke the silence. “Hey, you guys wanna go rob somebody?” The guys turned and looked at me. Donny cracked a smile. DJ, holding his face, punched me in the arm and started laughing. We all started laughing. The noise filled that truck. We laughed into the truck and we laughed into the air. We laughed like lost boys. Dave put on some Gangstarr, a track called “Soliloquy of Chaos.” A fitting soundtrack to the evening’s festivities. Someone produced half a joint, pulled from the ashtray of the Suburban. A smoke, a drink, and the whole debacle was puffed away. I curled in and fell asleep.

My little lost boy family was becoming as painful as my real family. Donny stood silently. He never participated. He never stopped it either. He stood and stared. I tried to laugh it off. I tried not to cry in front of the guys. I tried to stay tough. I couldn’t keep this up. I was falling apart. The next day I’d go back, pretending I forgot what they did, and what I’d said to myself. I’d go back because I didn’t have any other place to go. I took all that shame and turned it into rage that exploded at home. Anytime my mother ran screaming after me for coming home late or the cigarettes she found or the money I stole, I’d explode with rage, screaming in her face on a level I am simply not capable of anymore. A kind of primal snap. A little solar flare from the hellfire. I’d go mad. I’d throw whatever was in my hands at her head, trying to kill her. It got bad. I’d overturn kitchen tables and break the doors. I’d throw off my own shoes and toss them through windows. My body was racked with rage like the devil was squeezing my spine, pumping anger into me. My mom would run into the fracas and try to make me stop. Try to make me right. I’d throw her to the ground. I’d hit her. I’d kick her. I’d scratch her. My own mother. My grandmother, too. I’d become what she’d always told me men were. An abuser, that’s who I was. An abuser. I’d abuse at home and be abused in the streets. I’d abuse the ones I loved and be abused by the people I called friends.

Donny busted out a huge bag of mushrooms. More mushrooms, more madness. We passed it around, chewing the gross stems and caps, trying to ignore the taste. Mushrooms taste so bad and bring you to such psychedelic heights, it’s like tossing God’s salad.

My emotions were starting to flood out against my will. Years of medicating them with smoke and pills and malt liquor had stuffed them into places they didn’t belong. They would fall out when I didn’t need them, didn’t want them. Every time I got really angry, my bitch-ass tear ducts would betray me. I couldn’t start fighting without tears bursting out, declaring me a little sissy. It was all I could do at times like this to just stay perfectly still and hope I didn’t shake any bitch water loose upon my face.

Donny saw me walking funny and put a hand on my shoulder. It was like a grounding. I straightened right up. The guys took me into a Sharper Image store and left me there, staring at one of those pin table art things for what might’ve been hours, might’ve been years. I slipped away. I woke up in Jeremy’s recently deceased grandparents’ house. From the other room, I heard a crash and then DJ exploded through the thin walls like the Kool-Aid Man, drywall dust everywhere, Jeremy laughing in the corner with tears streaming down his insane cheeks, painting white dust streaks down his clown face. I woke up in Jeremy’s van again, on the freeway going ninety miles an hour. Everyone was painted white like geishas. We looked like we’d been partying In the Night Kitchen. Just then, Jeremy threw his hands into the sky from behind the steering wheel and started screaming, “I’m too high! I forgot how to drive! I forgot how to drive!” Too high? On a puff of nothing? Reality surged through my brain like an ice pick. What the fuck! I looked over at Donny as the van started swerving across five lanes of traffic screeching as it moved. He had an insane smile on his face. “You ready to die, bro?!!” “Fuck it!” I screamed. This was as good a time as any. Donny and I threw our heads back in end-of-life laughter as our doom approached. I decided to blip out. My brain went gray. I remembered no more. I woke up at home. I wasn’t dead. Pleasing. Somehow, organically we decided not to fuck with Jeremy...

Tina was happy to do it, too. Since she was not quite ready to fully commit to having a real Oakland boyfriend—someone scary to drive her around East 14th and show her life in the streets—my friends and I provided Tina with a kind of walk-on-the-wild-side middle ground, a social safari where a rich girl could make her existence seem grittier and more extreme without having to actually experience true dangers. In exchange for that escape from the dreary doldrums of Piedmont life, Tina gave us rides and brought us girls to hang out with.

“I really think I can fuck that Leah chick,” Corey said one day, so excited that we were all made uncomfortable by the erection he undoubtedly had in his pants. “Congrats,” I said. “Your mother must be very proud.” DJ, having the same mother as Corey, and being unable to understand the nuances of my joke, punched me in the chest yelling, “Cave Chest! Don’t talk about my mama!” Cave Chest was a charming game that DJ liked to play. The rules were simple—DJ yelled “Cave Chest!” and punched you in the chest. Presumably to cave your chest in. No one seemed to enjoy this game but DJ. “I’m a virgin,” Corey declared flatly with a humility that was rare for a teenage boy virgin. Corey began a rousing speech that would have made any army grab their rifles and follow him into battle. It went something like this: “I really think I could finally make this happen. Now I don’t know if I can do it alone, but with your help, I hope to take advantage of this crazy girl and to, once and for all, be able to declare myself a non-virgin. It won’t be easy. But I can’t think of a group of guys I’d rather engage in a sad attempt to fuck a mentally ill girl with!” As he said this, a Union drummer boy played the fife and drum. We all shed a tear at his courageous speech. We saluted. Of course we would help.

I threw some pants on and headed out the door with my mother, as always, standing in the doorway trying to forbid me to leave. “Where are you going?” she growled. “Out.” I was always going out. She was always in my way. I never considered back then what happened those moments when I pushed her to one side and slid out the door. Never considered that she sighed, wondering if I’d just stolen her money. Never considered that she cried, wondering if she’d see me again. Never even thought. All I knew was that she was in my way and that my friend needed me. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I looked at my mom and the shock of crow’s-feet cracking her face and I wondered if I’d caused them. At the time, though, all I knew was that she was in my way. “Get out of the fucking way,” I’d said to her, unconcerned if she knew what I was saying or not. I was becoming a monster and I didn’t even know it.

We partied that night, celebrating, drinking, smoking, sucking down nitrous. I felt my face vibrating from the gas and the relief. We all called Donny in New Mexico and yelled and cheered into the phone. It was a beautiful night. The air tasted freer. Still, though, somewhere deep, somewhere beneath the layer of intoxication, beneath the layer of relief, beneath the layer of anger, beneath all those sedimentary levels of delinquency, was a place of quiet pain. A little puddle of realization that, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything to Leah, I had, somehow, placed myself in a world where a girl like that had felt embarrassed enough and angry enough and crazy enough to accuse us of a thing like that. To put it simply, I wasn’t living right. That puddle of realization was rising and churning beneath the surface and soon would leak out from its deep place and flow, like veins of lava, into my conscious mind and melt the icy defenses of anger and self-righteousness that I’d built up over the years, fortifying them with drugs and delusion. The doomsday clock was ticking on my ability to defend how I was living. Perhaps I was just growing up. Or perhaps I was being weighed down by the karmic weight I had accrued. I just realized somewhere that I had created this problem. It was a small shade of the crumbling edifice of my great illusion: that I was the victim of the world’s cruelties and the injustices of the adults surrounding me. A tiny little beam of light was trying ...

Finally the principal of the school approached me and asked if I’d like to use my sign language skills in the afternoons by helping the autistic preschoolers. I agreed to do it. I still wonder why, in the midst of all that assholery, I would have cared a bit about helping some autistic kids. I must’ve had something in me that still wanted to be good, to be okay. Also I was fascinated by them. I’d walk downstairs and work with these kids, checked out from reality, and look at them with a kind of envy. There was agony in their existence, no doubt. They would cry and scream in glass-breaking shrieks if even the slightest anomaly blipped outside of their absurdly chosen comfort zones; if snack time didn’t have animal crackers, if there was purple Play-Doh and not yellow, it became a fucking crisis. But something about the lack of concern with the real world surrounding them made me jealous. If only I could check out like that. I felt useful down there, the severity of disability at Children’s Learning Center ironically providing me an opportunity to actually feel engaged in a school setting. I felt like I was doing something good. The problem seemed to always be that I could never do good for too long. One day, in the middle of class, I simply got up and walked out. I’d had enough. All this goody two-shoes stuff wasn’t for me. I needed to get the fuck out. Thus marked my re-entry into the high school dropout community. I was now three high schools down and no grades successful...

Joey flinched at me like he was going to punch me in the face but then went too far and, in fact, actually punched me in the face. “Oh, sorry, dude. I meant to almost punch you, not to punch you.” “Dude, what the fuck? Quit being such a dick!” I held the side of my face, screaming. “Who the fuck you calling a dick?” Joey reached back and punched me in the other side of the face. This time deliberately. To this day I have never again been punched by accident, apologized to, and then immediately punched on purpose. I swallowed my pride and held in my tears. There was business to attend to.

Very quickly, the entire party started streaming toward the parking lot. Suburban white kids came, screaming as the Oakland experience was brought to them. Kids were getting stomped left and right. A huge black dude I’d never met ran up on me, a bat in his hand. I screamed, “I’m with you guys!” and flashed him a North Oakland “N” symbol. He looked unconvinced for a second, hesitated, and ran off to stomp someone else’s head in. All I wanted was some weed. And I had caused all this. The real, scary truth was that I hated it. I didn’t like seeing my hippie get hurt. I didn’t like seeing these kids in terror. No more than I liked hurting my mother, or seeing her cry. I just needed to feel all right. After all, that was the thing I’d been after this whole time. Just a little comfort. None of this was me. I didn’t fully know it yet, but I was cracking. I was coming undone. I snapped out of it.

See, that’s how it happens. When you hustle like I did, you only notice the ups and downs of the day. Do I have money? Do I not? What should I do to get money now? Thoughts like “Where was I at last year at this time?” are rare and easily ignored for the more pressing issues of the day. Every line of moral defense you have is compromised. Every “I will never” becomes an “I might” becomes an “I did.” The moment you sink to a new low is the same moment that your conscience becomes compromised to the point that it won’t rebel against the indignity you are putting it through. That’s why so few addicts get clean. They never seem to even notice there is a problem because, for them, there isn’t. You ever wonder how addicts let themselves become such animals? That’s how. They forget they were ever human.

I think, the people who do get clean are the weakest lot in the addicted bunch. Sure, it takes courage to get clean, but that courage is usually inspired by pain and humiliation. The real hard-core addicts never get sober because they never notice the ache, they never notice the pain. They can’t be humiliated, they have nothing left to embarrass. And just like that, they die. So tough they die.

That’s one of the odd things about pathological liars. You keep trying to believe them, no matter how fantastical the tale. The idea that they are just lying to you, time after time, seems so counterintuitive that you still try like hell to believe.

Despite all my attempts to shut my thoughts off and numb out, I was stuck in my head, constantly thinking about myself and the way people thought of me. I couldn’t seem to get high enough not to care anymore. I think that’s why I slept so much. Make it all go away. Constantly worried, constantly scared. No one thought about me like I thought about me. The real problem was that the drugs I was taking were no longer taking that painful self-awareness away. My medicine was starting to fail me. My painkillers weren’t killing the pain. Addiction is like that. When you first start taking drugs, the thing that gets you hooked is that it takes the pain away. It kills the ache. It makes the wound numb. Life was the wound. Life seared and stung. The world stung. I was born a mess of paper cuts, the world was a pool of lemon juice I’d been shot into. So I found drugs, I found a painkiller that made me able to ignore the wound. I could walk upright. I could go forward. I could navigate the acidic reality. Of course, if you are wounded, and you find a medicine that makes you numb, you don’t correct for the wound. I should have been limping, I should have been wincing, holding back, walking tenderly. But in the bag and the bottle, I found a way to walk upright. To fight and scrap and tumble and give life the finger. Not taking it easy, my wound ripped into me. It cut me deep. It rended itself open. The wound ached. Life got worse. So, of course, I took more of my medicine. I took more h...

By the time we got to Pleasant Hill, we were both sloppy drunk, and as we tromped down the escalator, we saw two big BART cops sitting right at our only exit. We just decided to ride straight back to Oakland, tagging up the train cars. It was just like old times. Back upstairs, at the station, I sat on the bench, waiting for the train, and looked over at Donny. I sighed. “This isn’t working anymore,” I said, cracking a Budweiser. Donny looked up at me and I knew he knew exactly what I meant. I sighed. “I mean, is it normal? What we are doing? We are headed no place, doing nothing. I keep waiting for this thing to just change, on its own accord. I keep waiting for the balance to shift in my favor but I’m starting to think it’s never going to. I’m starting to think it’s never going to change. It’s like, is this my life?” I stared at my friend, my old friend, waiting for a laugh. It didn’t come. “I feel you.” Donny looked close to the edge. Weary. Cracked. Dusted. “New Mexico fucked me up, bro. It’s crazy there. I’m all jacked up. I don’t know what to do either.” “So now what?” We were both lost.

The next day, I walked into my mother’s bedroom and triumphantly announced I would be getting my shit together. An empty promise she’d heard before. The drug addict, the king of the empty promise. My mom looked at me wearily. She looked old. Tired. Tired of hoping for me. Tired of trying and watching me fail. To be fair, I was also tired of failing. I truly believed that things were just going to get better on their own. I couldn’t imagine I was just going to fail. I looked at my brother and his yellow brick road to success as something that should belong to me, too, but was just out of reach. I couldn’t understand how he had faced the same shit as me and always managed to alchemize it to gold. He was like a little Jewish Rumpelstiltskin, weaving feces into degrees.