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

My mother believed in therapy the way that people believe in Jesus. It was simply infallible. It contained all of life’s answers. It was perfect. So when I began showing signs of the rage that would later come to define me, there was only one thing to do. Send me to therapy.

Most days, we’d leave the house and immediately my mother would have to yank me back from playing in traffic or biting a woman’s vagina or whatever other mess I got myself into. I was unusually horny as a toddler.

“Now, can your mother read?” a ranger asked us once as we pulled into a state park, handing me the maps she was sure would baffle my mother. “Yes,” I replied, handing them back over to my mother defensively, “she is deaf, not retarded.”

These days the food stamp is just an allusion to a bygone era. Poor families nowadays are simply issued a discreet-looking card, impossible to differentiate from a credit card in order to maximize dignity. What bullshit. Underprivileged, poverty-stricken youth have it so easy these days.

Payos, the Chassidic side locks, are very important to the Satmars. It’s through those wacky sideburns that God is made aware of how abjectly devoted you are to him. I mean, you are willing to make yourself look completely ridiculous for him. This pleases the Lord.

Not Fruit Roll-Ups, mind you, fruit leather. A kind of actual leather made from whatever the brownest, most fecal-tasting parts of a fruit were.

The theme of my Bar Mitzvah was the Holocaust.

Mushrooms taste so bad and bring you to such psychedelic heights, it’s like tossing God’s salad.

All of this blew my mind. I was raised by two women in a feminist, bordering on man-hating house. I was raised to assume that all of the things I heard on television relating to men abusing women were spot-on true. My grandmother and mother watched the Clarence Thomas trials with “I believe you, Anita,” tears in their eyes. They cursed at the television coverage of William Kennedy at his trial and assumed he was guilty until proven otherwise. I assumed as much, too. It had never occurred to me, until that moment, that women could or would ever suffer that level of indignity for something false. It was like betraying a sacred trust.