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

“Oh my God, I’m having a stroke. The bad kind, not the good kind.”

Dinner over there was always pretty good. They were American gentile-type people, not Jewish hippies on welfare, and therefore, the meals were a lot cooler. Meat and potatoes kind of things with Jell-O for dessert, contrasting with the tempeh rice torture device waiting for me at home with a side of cool disappointment for dessert. I leapt at the invitation.

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.

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?

In a way, this was true. I eventually realized that the Burning Bush God I’d been looking for in the Torah had actually been growing on a bush in Northern California this whole time, waiting for me to burn.

Ahh, St. Ides, the patron saint of cirrhosis.

Everybody liked to talk about what a dick I was, but no one talked about the communication savant I was becoming.

There is no better way to begin a psychedelic trip than with chile-picante-flavored CornNuts. That’s how the ancient Mayans used to do it.

Fuck it is the great battle cry of the drug addict. It’s the rebel yell we all scream as we charge into the dumb, the ridiculous, the dangerous pool of bullshit that we inevitably drown in.

Popov Vodka is so cheap there are potato chunks and miniature Russian peasants floating in it. But it does the trick.

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.

I hadn’t expected this. I’d been telling myself for years what every addict will identify as a familiar trope: “I could quit if I wanted to, I just don’t want to.” Then came the day that I wanted to. Then came the realization that I couldn’t. The moment you need control is the moment you realize you’ve lost it.