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

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 ...