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

Oakland Public Schools had had just about enough to do with me by the time I’d dropped out. Between the endless fighting, the constant class cutting, the incessant pot smoking, and the general malaise of horrific behavioral problems, I had been deemed more of a nuisance than anything else. I became a problem rather than a student, and a crack opened up beneath me large enough to fall into. I dropped out of junior high after Peter Cooke beat my ass, and that was, unbeknownst to me, another trapdoor that opened up behind me and dropped me down into a deeper level of insanity. I was lost in the system. My mother and grandmother, probably due to the clinical, therapeutic lens through which they viewed the world, chose to send me down the path of the crazy, rather than the path of the criminal. But the truth is, at that age the difference is really marginal. Then again, maybe it is at any age.