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 had come home.

  My grandmother burned all of her life with unceasing resentment toward my grandfather, a man named, appropriately, depending on who you ask, Dick.

  Anytime his name would come up, my grandma’s knuckles would go white with rage. “That bastard, that piece of shit. An abuser that’s what he was, an ABUSER.”

  My little soft-palate mind registered, “Do not be an abuser.” Check.

  Despite the endless fires of hatred that burned for Dick the Dick, my grandmother seemed to nonetheless have another flame burning for him. As far as I know, she was never with another man the entire forty years of her life after leaving him. She arranged her life neatly to live without romance, replacing it with poisonous resentment. That resentment bubbled over and then trickled down onto my brother and me, anointing us with holy oils, crowning us the princes of a man-hating coven.

  About the time we arrived in Oakland, my mother started to notice there was something wrong with me. Or perhaps that was when my mother started looking for something to be wrong with me. Most likely it was a combination of the two. My grandmother had found the courage to leave Ol’ Dick through the support of a therapist she’d seen in secret for a year prior to her divorce. She impressed upon my mother that the only way through the trauma of her relationship with my father was to find a therapist.

  She went, and that cemented my mother’s deep and abiding belief in the power of analysis. 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.

  Therapy became, in my house, more than just a source for answers. It became a third parent. It was the pant leg of the father that I didn’t have around to tug on and ask for something when my mother refused me. When my mother’s characteristic franticness kicked in, she was intractable. If she decided something was correct, it would remain correct until the peacemaker of a therapist would step in. My mother, tired of being told what to do and when to do it by my controlling father, became addicted to being right. She was sure she was right, even when she knew damn well she was wrong.

  If my mother and I were engaged in an argument about, say, the blueness of the sky, and she swore with gasping incredulity that it was, in fact, green, all I had to do was wait until we went to family therapy to settle the score.

  I’d begin, “Dr. Therapist, my mother insists the sky is green.”

  “It is green,” my mother would snarl.

  “You see what I mean?” I’d point to my mother helplessly.

  Dr. Therapist would step in. “Now, Bea, you know that the sky is blue. It is blue.”

  “It is blue,” my mother would repeat like she had been hexed by Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  And that is how we found the truth in my family growing up.

  My first therapist was a man named Ruben, who had white hair and an extensive collection of turtlenecks. To this day I cannot think of psychoanalysis without picturing turtlenecks.

  Therapy for a four-year-old is different from regular therapy. Mainly, it involved Ruben sucking my penis while convincing me not to tell my parents. Just kidding. Ruben therapy was actually Nerf sword fighting: a Ruben-invented form of play therapy or, as it is commonly known, bullshit.

  Six-year-old therapy looked like this: Ruben would hand me a Nerf sword and I would beat him as savagely as I could around the legs, buttocks, and genitalia. Then I would leave and Ruben would, I assume, take notes on my form:

  WEEK ONE: Subject Moshe Kasher. The boy seems to have acute aggression issues and takes immediately to the swords. One note, he is slightly better than me at Nerf swords. Must remember to protect groin.

  WEEK TWO: Forgot to protect groin. Aggression continues. Subject will likely calm down by next week’s session if past participants’ behavior is any predictor. However, if the aggression continues at this level, I will exert myself physically in order to show the boy that I, too, am a man with power. Therapeutically this is known as alpha exertion.

  WEEK THREE: No change in aggression. Alpha exertion unsuccessful. MUST PROTECT GROIN!

  WEEK FOUR: Pain. Only pain.

  Ruben eventually told my mother that I was beyond help and I was too angry for therapy to work. What bullshit. I wasn’t too angry. I should have killed him for saying so.

  To combat my anger and energy, my mother and I never left the house without her first strapping a leash around my torso. I wish I were kidding.

  Every morning, when it was time to leave the house, my mother would strap a four-point harness on my back and explain to me how the day was to go.

  “No running in the streets, no hitting strangers, no hitting me, got it?” she’d repeat infinity times over infinity days. I didn’t got it.

  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.

  As a result, there was a lot of yanking on the leash. The heavy resistance of the weight of my young body at the end of the leash gave my mother confidence and assurance that I was there, and as a result, she paid a little less attention to me with every tug.

  But one should never doubt the tenacity of a four-year-old boy with severe behavioral issues. Or at least, one should never doubt the behavioral issues of a four-year-old boy with behavioral issues.

  I’d chew on the leather of the strap, enjoying the tangy “almost jerkyness” of the thing. One day, after being ignored too long and gnawing a bit too much, I broke the leather in two. Freedom. I stared at the two ends of the thing with giddy excitement. This was my chance to ruin everything. I loved doing that.

  I scanned the traffic to see how likely getting run over would be should I break across the street. I eyed the strangers to see if any of them looked enough like snatch-and-grab kidnappers to take the risk of running toward them, screaming, “Quickly, to your van! Take me, I’m yours!”

  This was my only chance to make a break for it, and I needed to maximize the amount of trouble I could get into in one movement. All the passersby looked benign and boring so I decided to dash into the streets. I shot out from behind my mother and hurled myself toward the street where the bliss of oncoming traffic awaited me.

  I could almost feel the impact of the car, the screams of horror, the looks of pity. Everyone would be nice to me. Women, or at least busty young girls, would throw themselves at me. People would pay attention to me! This was my moment. I was close, twenty yards, then ten, when the one sound that could’ve put a stop to my freedom run stabbed through the air: my mother’s hyena-like, piercing, unintelligible scream. Like a garbled banshee, my mother shrieked and everyone stopped. Pretty young couples looked at each other with disgust. Dogs yelped and ran in circles as if an earthquake were coming. Old men’s eyeglasses shattered. Young men clutched their throbbing heads in agony. The deaf wail stopped me in my tracks. I don’t even know why she used the fucking leash.

  I felt tied to her even when the leash wasn’t on. My job as the son of deaf parents was not just to be a son but, rather, also an ambassador of deaf culture to all of the boundary-less idiots of the world.

  “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.”

  It seemed, though, like everyone else was. Some people shot me looks of pity when they saw me walking down the street, signing to my mother. I got looks of heroic admiration from other people.

  People would ask me questions about my mother and my childhood right in front of her as if she didn’t exist.

  “Is she speaking English when she talks?” they’d ask, blissfully unaware that I might not be interested in
answering their trivia about what my life was like.

  “No, actually, it’s Crypto-Cyrillic. My mother is from the faraway past, sent here to warn us all!”

  People we didn’t know at all would come up to us and ask about our home life like it was their right to know and my duty to tell them. My entire life was like a cute baby that complete strangers could coo over and play peekaboo with. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. I just knew it was not normal.

  When your parents are deaf, nothing is normal. Everywhere you go, you are treated like retarded royalty. I walked around in a constant state of embarrassment, mortified when my mother was speaking, anxiety ridden that she would begin speaking when she wasn’t.

  My mom’s voice humiliated me. It made everyone uncomfortable when they heard it. I hated everyone. Even the lady at Taco Bell.

  I loved Taco Bell more than anything, and my mother used it as a bribery tool for good behavior. She couldn’t afford to take us out to eat, but she would offer me Taco Bell as a kind of desperate bargaining chip, especially after the little debacle at her friend Dimitri’s house when, upon discovering a small hole in the seat of my pants, I ripped it wide open and then ran into the living room, bent over, with my head between my legs, and exposed my anus to a group of her friends while screaming, inexplicably, “Cat! Cat! Cat! Cat!” After that, the money for Taco Bell was made manifest by the sheer desire to avoid such humiliation. Poverty shrank in the face of the anal cat dance.

  As she harnessed me up for another outing, she’d make the big offer, “Now, we are going to go out, okay? If you behave yourself and don’t piss on anything, or take off any clothing, I’ll take you to Taco Bell afterwards.”

  Mostly this wouldn’t work because as soon as I arrived where I was going, I would forget about the promise of zesty ground beef and pull my pants down to expose my zest instead.

  But sometimes it did work and I waited to hear the magic words, “Welcome to Taco Bell, can I take your order?”

  I’d step forward to order for us both, but my mother is a proud woman, unwilling to let me do for her what she felt she could do herself. She’d push me back and start ordering in her deaf voice.

  Deaf voice is, in fact, speech. Years of intensive speech therapy are required to turn the primal scream ejaculations of deaf people into the approximation of actual words that well-educated deaf people bring to the table.

  I understood my mother perfectly. The only problem is that when deaf voice meets hearing ear, the hearing ear gets afraid that chimpanzees are attacking it and cannot distinguish the words. Every word sounds to them like a scream: “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!”

  “Welcome to Taco Bell, can I take your order?”

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!” my mother replied, a confident smile on her face.

  “I’m sorry, what?” The poor minimum wager looked a little scared.

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!” my mom yelled again.

  At this point the girl just tried to guess.

  “Okay… um… three chicken burritos? Is that it?”

  Humiliated. Taco Bell was my place, but I just wanted to run away. I pushed to the front and blurted out the order, to the consternation of my proud deaf mother.

  “Three beef tacos and cinnamon twists.”

  My mother grabbed a handful of bills from her purse and pushed them onto the counter.

  Ms. Taco Bell looked down and her face scrunched up in confusion. “Um… I’m really sorry, but we don’t take food stamps here.”

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAR?”

  The girl behind the counter shifted uncomfortably and looked at the line forming behind us. “You know what? Just take it. It’s on me.”

  Like I said: royalty.

  Chapter 2

  “Under Pressure”

  —Tupac

  We were alone in Oakland, the three of us sleeping in my grandmother’s living room. My mother couldn’t get work. The whole system is stacked against deaf people. Would you hire one?

  Every woe my mother had, she found a way to blame on my father. Vocally. Loudly. He was responsible for her every difficulty. My mother would feed us a shitty meal or say no to us when we wanted candy and she would point east and sign, “Your father!” This kind of poisoning of the parental well had little effect on my brother, who had a pretty clear memory of his relationship with my dad. But for me, my mother was able to morph the image of my father into a kind of evil specter, floating behind us at all times, snatching fun things from our fingertips.

  When my father would send holiday gifts to my brother and me, my mother would itemize them, and if David received even one more chocolate than I did, my mother would hold them out and yell, “See? Your father loves your brother more than he loves you!” Those words would gut me. Unable to understand the little pettiness of ex-lovers (having hardly taken any at that point), I just assumed my mother was telling the truth. I didn’t understand why he loved David more. Well, I guess David always did have a stronger chin than me.

  Really, David had a stronger everything than me. He was the firstborn son in a Jewish family, and he played the hero right, according to biblical character arc. Somehow, my big brother was born with the tools to navigate right down the churning white water of my parents’ river of anger. I just drowned. He was born a quiet statesman, perfect. The perfect son. The perfect student. The perfect Jew. He was everything I wasn’t. While people looked at me with microscopes trying to figure out what was wrong with me, they only ever pointed to what he was doing just right. It wasn’t his fault. He was playing the role that made him feel safe in the insane world we were both born into. In fact, on quiet nights, David and I would huddle together and wonder how this was our life.

  Meanwhile, my mother’s resentment against my father grew the worse our circumstances got.

  The poorer we became, the more she openly slandered him, the more she hated him. When his mother, my baba, Helen Kasher, got sick with Parkinson’s, my father wrote my mother pleading with her to let me come to New York to visit and see her before she became too far gone to speak. My mother wrote back informing my father that no visitation had been agreed to and, therefore, I would not be coming for a visit. As a result, I have no memory of my baba. No memory. Just wisps and phantoms.

  Eventually the imaginary enemy of my father held us back so badly financially that we got on welfare. That’s where those food stamps came from. Food stamps and government assistance. Jews on welfare. That’s rare. Like seeing a leprechaun. If you could’ve caught us in the wild, we would’ve granted you wishes. By the way, this was old welfare. Back before it had been filtered to prevent shame. 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. In my day, the food stamp was an actual stamp, humiliating and bold. Light colored so as never to be mistaken for actual money (we poor people didn’t have that). It was larger than a regular dollar—like a Confederate note. MC Hammer’s face was on the twenty-dollar stamp, looking back at you, grinning with huge white teeth. Every time my mother busted them out, it was a trail of tears, the white note screaming to everyone, “Poor family here! Sneak a glance while you can! They can’t even afford fooooooood!”

  It might as well have been Kermit the Frog hopping out of my mother’s wallet in a top hat, dancing a soft shoe, singing “Welfare!” What a travesty. When the public assistance department found out that we were Jews, we were assigned a counselor to deal with the trauma. Then we were given a plaque and a private entrance to the back of the welfare office in order to avoid being seen by other members of the Jewish community.

  Of course I wasn’t just Jewish; I was mega-Jewish. I was Yiddish. When I was seven, my father and the justice system informed my mother, to her smoldering disappointment, that she would have to allow my brother and me to return to New York for visitation.


  I reluctantly returned to the city of my birth to visit the man who abused, the man who didn’t love me like he loved my brother. I was angry, of course I was. I also worshiped him a bit, of course I did.

  I went back to New York to find out that, in my absence, he had become a member of a Chassidic sect, the Satmars. My father had always been enamored of the Chassids. His childhood was marked by weekend trips to Zeidi’s house, staring at his gnarled, arthritic hands as they swept across the pages of the Talmud, looking for secrets hidden in the deep codex of the law.

  Somehow, the order and austerity of Zeidi’s world seemed pure and righteous to my father even when he was just a boy. So, when all the order left his life overnight, when his entire family slipped through his fingers, my father turned deeply into the religion his mother had thought she’d neatly left behind.

  He had gotten remarried to another deaf woman, named Betty Drummer, who had been raised behind the steep religious walls of the Satmar community.

  The Satmars are among the oddest and most insular of all the Chassidic groups. I’ll say that again. Of all the Yiddish-speaking, society-rejecting, gown and fur hat–wearing Chassidic groups, the group my father married into was the most bizarre and outside the lines of society. It would be like being among the fattest groups of Walmart shoppers.

  Normally, a person from my stepmother’s family would never have been allowed to even consider marrying a person like my father—a beardless painter who didn’t read Hebrew, much less speak Yiddish.

  But Betty had been married before and not to a nice man, so the fact that my dad was Jewish and increasingly observant was good enough for the odd Council of the Elders of Zion, who approved of the match. Betty, unlike my mother and father, has a powerful strain of hereditary deafness that shot straight through her genetic code. Betty and her sister, Barbara, are both deaf, as are all of their children and grandchildren. Their brother, Heshy, can hear, as can all of his children and grandkids. Painted down the female line of the Drummer family was a deaf gene. In the Satmar community, the pool of eligible men willing to marry a divorced deaf woman, guaranteed to birth other deaf kids, was a little small, and thus, my father was happily welcomed into the family.