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

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...