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

He left a scholar; he arrived an immigrant.

I was Jewish, but not quite. I was hearing, but not quite. I belonged in my family, but not quite. However, back in Oakland, I was quite white.

The more severely disabled students were given classes earlier in the day and then sent home to lift heavy things for the carnival or eat paint chips or whatever.

No one needs to shout, “Off with your head!” because they have been slowly taking your head away from you the whole time.

It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve never been admired for anything, being admired at all—even if it is for being the world’s biggest fuckup—feels pretty good.

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.

I’m not sure what’s worse: DJ socking that chick in the face, his apology where he explained he never would have hit her if she didn’t look so much like a guy, or the fact that, years later, I ended up fucking that guy. I wish I was kidding.

Leotis had an aura that made him seem like the wisest man who had ever lived. In retrospect, the wisest man who ever lived can probably afford walls.

Mikey hit the road and, as far as I know, is still roaming the streets of the old neighborhood, playing with little boys, hoping they won’t grow up.

How quickly you get institutionalized. A two-week stay and I was ready to move in. Ready to be a thirty-year vet with my ass hanging out of a hospital gown doing the Thorazine shuffle, yelling about how the pudding on Tuesdays has arsenic in it because the Libyans are trying to kill me. Fuck that. I got out and went back to the real insane asylum—Oakland Public Schools.

I couldn’t deal with that shit. I told myself I didn’t care, but the only thing I wanted to do in that moment was go get fucked up and obliterate myself, obliterate the memory of my mother’s tears. I did just that.

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.

Stealing from your deaf, welfare-assisted mother is like killing a man. Well, I imagine it is anyway. The first time you do it, you feel sick and wonder what’s happened to you. Then, very quickly it changes from a shameful secret to just what you need to do. It’s just a source of income. Then you move on to stealing from your grandmother.

Two weeks later Corey and DJ were in jail and the police were after us all.

That was one of the mightiest medicines of drugs. Their ability to make any crisis, no matter how severe, muted. They never made the problem go away, just the consciousness of that problem disintegrated one grain at a time until all that was left was the moment.

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.

The real, scary truth was that I hated it. I didn’t like seeing my hippie get hurt. I didn’t like seeing these kids in terror. No more than I liked hurting my mother, or seeing her cry. I just needed to feel all right.

I grabbed that cup and flipped my little dick into it and began to fill it. Full to the brim. Bye-bye, self-respect.

You ever

wonder how addicts let themselves become such animals? That’s how. They forget they were ever human.

The real hard-core addicts never get sober because they never notice the ache, they never notice the pain. They can’t be humiliated, they have nothing left to embarrass. And just like that, they die. So tough they die.

The world stung. I was born a mess of paper cuts, the world was a pool of lemon juice I’d been shot into.

I didn’t need to feel good, I couldn’t. I needed to heal. I needed to heal.

I walked into the hospital room and saw my father in the full repose of his weakness. My hero was broken. My anger was, too. All the anger I might have ever had seemed useless.