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

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.