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

People called me the Gandhi of the playground. Wait, no they didn’t, they called me white bitch.

Anyone who thinks welfare is an awesome meal ticket for undeserving people ought to be forced to eat one actual meal from below the poverty line. Following the most intense diarrhea of their lives would be the realization that being on government assistance sucks balls.

Before I got high, I had no idea that’s what had been wrong the whole time. It wasn’t that I had deaf parents. It wasn’t that I had a frantic angry mother or a fanatic absent father. It wasn’t that I was fat and retarded or crazy, angry, Jewish, or anything else. I just needed to get high. That’s the secret no one tells you when you’re a kid. That it feels fucking great. They tell you that you feel loopy and disoriented, but no one tells you that it crawls through your skin, filling in every place of deficit, every gaping crack where your humanity didn’t fuse. The thick warm lava of euphoria fills in the crevices of your psyche, and you realize your soul was an electric blanket that hadn’t been plugged in until just then. Parents and shrinks never tell you that you will forget all the reasons you had to hate yourself. They don’t tell you that shit because then everybody will want to get high. It’s that feeling—the numbing bliss of self-medication—that makes people become drug addicts. Lots of people get high; only some become addicts. It’s not the getting high that makes you an addict, it’s what the getting high does for you. If you start low and you get high, you make it up to normal for the first time. Getting loaded feels good; but if it’s the first thing that’s ever felt good in your life, you’re in trouble. That’s what I chased. It wasn’t the high, it was the feeling that I was all right. All right? Getting high that first time was like seeing for the first time. It w...

Tunnels are amazing. The act of man boring a tunnel through a mountain is a feat of human ingenuity that’s pretty incredible to think about. It’s so powerfully penetrative, it’s almost sexual. (In fact, whenever I see a woman these days, I think, “Man, I’d love to fortify her walls and use a boring machine to grind out a passageway that would allow transit to and from her ovaries.”)

everyone should get punched in the face at least once in their life. It builds character. Getting your ass kicked teaches you that your body isn’t a glass menagerie figurine that could shatter at any trauma. You gotta get lumped up sometimes. Then heal and know you are all right.

Some people just communicate in violence.

I lived among lost boys. I was lost, too.

the acidic reality.

The great irony of the addict is that the thing he takes, which is the only thing that has ever made life feel good, stops working long before he considers the possibility of life without it.