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

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...