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

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 ...