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

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.

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.

And I saw her. Naomi. Jewess. Woman. Popular. A real twelve-year-old knockout. All legs and flat chest and braces.

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.

No one, and I mean actually no one, at New Bridge was there attempting to be sober. We were all just trying to figure out how to beat piss tests.

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.

Being a fifteen-year-old drug addict is a constant job of scraping and stealing enough money to get high. No one’s allowance is big enough to cover the bill of addiction.

You see, in the Bay Area, bastion of the social equality movement, wealth was something to be ashamed of. There were no Upper East Side rich kids avoiding slumming it with the kids from the Bronx or Harlem, like in New York.

My little lost boy family was becoming as painful as my real family.

Life raked into me. I had to shovel the painkiller into me. I got ripped nearly in two. There came a point where I was all wound. I couldn’t see where I stopped and where the wound began.

I am here to tell you that if your drug dealer ever does an intervention on you, it’s time to get help.