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

“This is it,” I told Monk. “What is it?” he asked, hardly interested. I looked at him seriously. “I quit, man, I’m out of the game. I gotta get my shit together. This is my last bag. I’m done.” Monk looked up. It looked like he was almost impressed as he handed me the bag. “That’s cool, man, whatever you need.” So the next day when I went to his house to buy a bag, he came to the door, looked at me, and sneered in disgust. I smiled and held out my cash. “Hey, lemme hold something, man.” Monk looked at me like he couldn’t believe me. He shook his head and held out a bag for me. “What hell are you doing here?” he snapped at me. “You said yesterday you were out of the game and here you are today. Dude, you’ve really got a problem.” I am here to tell you that if your drug dealer ever does an intervention on you, it’s time to get help. That’s when I started quitting. Every night I’d quit. Every night I’d swear I’d never do it again. I had to stop. I had to stop hurting people. I had to get my shit together. I had to get out of high school before I was thirty. I had to stop pissing anywhere other than the toilet. Every night I quit. And every morning I woke up and forgot about the promises I’d made to myself the night before. The thought to get high would hit me and I’d be at my dealer’s house or at Safeway with a bottle of gin in my pants before I even had a chance to argue with myself. It wasn’t how you would imagine it to be. I didn’t crumble. I forgot. I didn’t have a wrestl...

That’s how logic would dictate that the addictive thought process would work. Temptation stacked against prudence. Prudence crumbles. Temptation conquers. That’s how it should work. How it actually does work is much scarier. When it came right down to it, there was no moral struggle. There was no struggle at all. There was simply an empty space in my brain where the night before there had been a firm declaration never to do this again. When the thought to take a hit, hit, I simply forgot I was planning on quitting. I just forgot.

I had opened the door when Mike called me over to him. “Hey, man, you got a second?” He smiled. “Ha, I got all the time in the world. I’ve literally got nowhere to be.” “Listen, bro, I just wanna tell you, man—I get it. I get what’s going on with you. I’m not trying to lecture you, I just want you to know that. Just want you to know I get it. I drank for twenty-five years and smoked my life away. I couldn’t stop. I hurt people. I get it.” He stopped smiling and looked at me in my eyes. Looked at me like he got it. Looked at me like I was his equal. An adult hadn’t spoken to me like that ever. “I’m not supposed to be telling you this. You know? We aren’t supposed to interject our opinions. Ha, I could be fired for this, but your mom isn’t gonna snitch on me.” He signed to my mom in the car, “You aren’t gonna snitch on me, are you?” My mom laughed her tears away and signed back, “No.” “Look, man, I just need to tell you, you aren’t a bad kid. Sorry, you aren’t a bad guy, shit, you aren’t a kid anymore. You aren’t bad. You’re sick. I was real sick once. But I got well. My mom died this year and she died at my place. I was with her. She forgave me, you get what I’m getting at?” I didn’t, but I did. He pulled out a ten-year AA chip. “I stopped drinking a while ago and got my shit back together. Just don’t let these people tell you you’re a bad guy, because you aren’t. You’re lost. But if you want help, it’s there. You can call me, we can hit a meeting, whatever. I’m only tellin...

Why that day was any different, I don’t know. There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time. DJ looked up and I could almost see the lightbulb going off above his head. Electric currents shocking an idea into his atrophied brain. “Hey, let’s go to Brodricks!” Brodricks was a bar we’d found that, in the rush of after-work madness, never seemed to card for beer. No matter how young the commuter ambling up to the bar seemed to be. “Let’s go get ripped up!” DJ was stoked. Everyone was. Everyone agreed. Everyone. Everyone but me. “I can’t go, guys.” I surprised myself as the words came out of my mouth. I looked at the confused faces of the guys. These guys. The guys I loved. My other family. There comes a time. “Huh?” DJ was confused. He’d had an idea. It was a good one. “I can’t do it today. I gotta go.” Donny looked at me. He looked at me in the eyes. Every scene of every moment we’d ever been through together was playing, fast-forwarding in them. He saw it. Saw the change. Saw that something had died in me. My will had died. My childhood had died. He saw that I was done fighting. He saw it. He smiled. He grabbed my hand and slapped a half hug on me. “Right on, man, we’ll holler atcha later.” Donny held my gaze. I looked away. “Yeah, f’sho. Holler later.” There comes a time. When you have to walk alone. Take a right turn. “All right then, let’s bounce.” I could hear Corey salivating for beer. Hell, I was, too. All of my friends, a...