by Moshe Kasher
Through the entire sixth grade I had managed to stay mostly socially neutral. I was almost popular. I had kept the weirdness of my home life to myself and tried very hard to make fun of the losers when it seemed appropriate in order to ingratiate myself with the cool kids.
I knew that I, too, was a loser, but as long as they didn’t know, I figured I’d be okay. I was such a ball of social anxiety and so desperate to fit in that I wasn’t quite accepted into the cool-kid club, but I wasn’t exactly rejected either. I clung to that with the hope that someday, I, too, could be a vapid shallow dickhead. Ahh, to be popular.
Then came Portable Three, and all of a sudden they just iced me. I had been summarily dismissed.
Early in the year of seventh grade, one of the leaders of the popular pack, a kid named Jono, was having a birthday party and I had not been invited. It burned my little twelve-year-old heart. I was crushed. Then, to my delight and shame, I found an invitation to the party that had been discarded underneath someone’s desk. I quickly snatched it up and stuffed it into my pocket and ran home. I didn’t know what to do.
On the one hand, this invitation was my ticket to the coolest party in seventh grade, sure to be chock-full of awkward protosexual tension and manipulative shame games. On the other hand, I hadn’t been invited. Well, not officially. I could choose to look at my chance discovery of an invite as God himself inviting me. “Fuck it. I’m gonna go,” I decided. “Ride or die.”
Then I did something even more repulsive. I bought Jono a birthday present. That was the first time I snatched a ten-dollar bill from my mother’s purse.
This motherfucker hadn’t even invited me to his shit, and I was stealing from my mother’s lean wallet and picking him up a gift certificate to Amoeba Records. I was pathetic and I knew it, but I ignored the voice in my head chanting, “Stay home, save your money, they don’t want to hang out with you anyway.” I charged forward, desperate to make this work, to make sure the class assholes or “classholes” didn’t fall out of love with me due to the suspicion of mild retardation. I went. Berkeley Iceland.
More than just a skating rink, Berkeley Iceland was the home of much of the romantic hows and whys of local East Bay youth. Your love life for the next six months could be made or broken at Iceland. It was so important a social playground, its name belied its significance. It should have been called “FallontheICEandbealoserforlifeLAND.”
Like any skating rink, you’d start by shoving your foot into a little hepatitis-exchange boot and clip-clopping your way toward the ice. I crouched, just off the ice, and gave myself a little pep talk.
“You can do this,” I told myself, absolutely sure that I couldn’t. “No one will notice you weren’t invited. Hell, maybe you were! Maybe that was your invitation on the ground. It must’ve fallen out of your desk and somehow been kicked into another classroom to land under Sarah Blakley’s desk. Then maybe she doodled her name on the envelope and redropped it. You know how girls doodle!”
Yeah! I had been invited. At any rate, at least I could skate. My grandmother had sent me to figure-skating classes, determined, I imagine, that if she had to have a man in the family, she’d need to make sure that he wasn’t in any way manly. I zipped out onto the ice toward the section where the kids from class were. And I saw her. Naomi. Jewess. Woman. Popular. A real twelve-year-old knockout. All legs and flat chest and braces. Mmmmm.
I liked her even though I’d once happened to look at her right when she exhaled a bit too forcefully and shot a green grossness out of her nose. It was the kind of thing that makes your romantic memory bank scream, “Nooooooo!!!”—but I shoved the memory down and kept liking her.
I skated up to the Claremont kids and tried to look “cool and invited.” So far so good. Jono was nowhere to be seen, but Naomi, in her silence, seemed to have agreed to let me skate the slow jam next to her as long as I didn’t speak or make eye contact with her.
The slow jam was the epic romantic crescendo of the skating experience. Skating behind Naomi, staring at her flat little child butt, I finally knew what love was. Bell Biv Devoe crooned over the crackling loudspeakers, and I wrote a song in my mind about what I imagined someday would be the R&B-level love between Naomi and me:
And I wanna thank you, for letting me a-skate a-next to you.
Some-day, I’d like to have a-sex with you.
It was perfect. Then from all the way across the ice, I saw a grimacing monster. Jono was making double time, speed skating up to me. He slid to a stop, covering me in teenager-flavored shaved ice.
He looked me up and down, confused. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, happy birthday, Jono! I’m just partying, you?”
Jono snarled, “I didn’t invite you to my party, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“What?” I asked, in that way people say “What?” while they scramble to think of a good lie to say.
“But… you did invite me.” That oughta do the trick, I thought.
“I did? When?” I wasn’t expecting such a sophisticated comeback.
“You know, that time, when you did?”
That didn’t work.
“Get the fuck out of here.” I could see Jono moving from “confused” to “I’m gonna kick this white boy’s ass.”
This was bad.
“But I was just skating with Naomi.” I turned to Naomi for confirmation, but she had skated off long ago to her girlfriends and was mouthing what my expert “son of a deaf kid” lip-reading picked up as, “He just wouldn’t stop skating behind me, it was so gross.”
I wanted to yell, “Gross? Gross!?!? What about that green snot thing, you asshole?!?”
I thought better of it, though, because I really saw a future between us, and you don’t talk to your future wife that way.
Don’t be an abuser.
Anyway, I had bigger problems to contend with: Jono.
I pulled out the gift certificate and meekly bleated, “I got you something.”
Then something happened. Jono looked down at the impotent little envelope in my hands and realized that I’d bought him a gift. I looked into his eyes and I saw something shift. A little of the ice and the callousness in him melted. In that moment, we stopped jockeying for position and trying desperately to be accepted by our peers and we became who we truly were, just two of God’s kids trying to make it in this world. Jono took the envelope out of my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “Get the fuck out of here, you retarded motherfucker.”
I started smoking that night.
I left Iceland on foot, close to tears. I started rapid-fire calling to mind the various horrible things that had happened to me, to date, just kind of diving into humiliation. My mind went into a “people suck” spiral. The good thing about my indulging in memories of people being cruel to me was that I had a lot of source material from which to draw. I remembered Conoy the crack-addicted fourth grader telling me I could eat my fucking freckles when I asked him for a piece of licorice. He made fun of my mother’s voice, and when I protested, someone told me his brother had been murdered so I couldn’t be upset.
I remembered a kid named Armando calling me fat in front of everyone. I remembered my brother and me being taken hostage for hours at my elementary school while two kids threatened to beat our heads in with baseball bats. “This is our get back for slavery, motherfucker!” My brother begged them to let me go and kick his ass instead, but they weren’t really interested in kicking ass, just humiliating us. They made my brother kiss their shoes to win my safety. It didn’t work. They convinced us, in our terror, to let them into our house and stole David’s prized Gary Carter rookie card.
I remembered my mother telling me my father loved my brother more than me. I remembered believing her. I remembered all that shit and I needed a smoke. When I got home, I was covered in sweat and tear-streaked. I slipped on my trench coat.
I had this supercool trench coat back then. I had just turned twelve years old and was not too savvy on
fashion versus costume. It was the last item left in my “It’s cool to look like a 1920s crime fighter” repertoire. The bad news was it made me look like a gigantic loser. The good news was I was too big of a loser to know, and it had a trapdoor in the sleeve.
That trapdoor changed my life. After that first night, when my shame spiral led to a successful tobacco heist, I made a ritual of walking into Safeway intent on stealing some smokes. I wore my trench coat convinced that the trapdoor made it the perfect shoplifting accessory. I thought I was slick as hell, a boy-child slinking my way into a grocery store wearing an ankle-length trench coat. The fact that there is not a look that more conspicuously screams “SHOPLIFTER!” was totally lost on me.
I stole whichever pack my trembling hands brushed against first. Some days it was Virginia Slims, and I smoked like a gay playwright for a week. Thank God, the day I met Donny, I brushed against Marlboro Reds.
It was about a month after Jono’s party and I’d just finished a trenchcoat raid on Safeway. I walked outside in my supercriminal coat with my plunder weighing heavy in my pocket. As soon as I got far enough away, I pulled out my smokes to see what I’d gotten. Marlboros… cool. I think cowboys smoked those. I’m a fuckin’ cowboy, why not?
Just then someone approached me from the left. “Hey, man, where’d you get those cigarettes?” Shit! Someone had seen me even with the trench coat on. I didn’t even know that was possible.
I turned to my left, expecting to see a security guard. It was Donny Moon, the king of the fuckups. Joey Zalante, the mythical black giant-killer, and his crew had moved on to high school and seemed to have vetted a group of badass kids in the grades below them to succeed them in terrorizing the school. Donny was their choice for leader. Nobody would’ve said so out loud, but it was obvious. Donny was just like Joey in a lot of ways—tough, fearless, charismatic, and capable of being scary as hell. Donny was short, but he had so much bravado and self-confidence that no one, including him, ever noticed.
He wore a Starter jacket and walked around without fear of it being stolen. Starter jackets were these hooded puffy coats with the emblem of your favorite sports team gaudily embossed on their back. They were the pinnacle of hood style in Oakland. If you had a pair of Nike Air Jordans (a shoe even more coveted than the Dougie) and a Starter jacket, you were essentially a deity in Oakland. You could simply nod at any woman and receive an obligatory blow job.
At the time, a popular pastime of black kids was to run up behind white boys with Starters and grab the hood, strip it from them, and run off. No one ever did that to Donny, though. He had grown up in the Bushrod Park area—the grimiest, most murderous part of North Oakland. He was buddy-buddy with the Bushrod boys, which gave him a kind of “ghetto pass” that allowed him to liaise between the white kids and the toughest kids in school. This was a privilege that commanded respect.
And here was this dude, approaching me, asking me about my smokes. Fucking badass.
“Where’d you get the smokes?” he repeated, staring at me as if he were trying to figure me out.
“I took them. See, I have this trench coat and—”
“Uh, yeah, I noticed the trench coat, dork. So you stole ’em?”
“Yeah… totally,” I stammered, trying to figure out how to sound even cooler.
“Lemme buy half of them from you. I need some smokes bad, man.”
“Yeah, cool, I know how that can be, I’ve been smoking a little while now and I’ve even inhaled a couple of times.”
I took out the pack and split it in half. I gave Donny one extra. I guess I didn’t know it at the time, but that eleventh cigarette was my admission fee to the fuckups.
Donny took the cigarettes and stared at the handful I’d given him. He looked up at me, lit one right there, and smiled. “That’s pretty cool you stole smokes, man, you should come kick it with us sometime.”
I kept it chill. “Sure, sounds cool.”
I told you I was a fucking cowboy.
Chapter 4
“The Chronic”
—Dr. Dre
I called Richard the next night and told him what happened.
“I dunno, man, it was a weird night,” I explained to him.
“This Donny dude sounds sketchy to me,” Richard said, tossing his suburban wet blanket on the fire of dangerous excitement I was feeling.
“Yeah, he is sketchy! That’s what’s so awesome. He’s like us, y’know, fucked up, but cooler.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line.
“Richard?”
“I’m not fucked up,” Richard said, hurt.
“That’s not what I meant. I just meant like how we throw stuff at stuff and stuff, Donny and his friends do things like that, too, whatever, he’s the only potential friend I’ve got right now.”
A pause.
Richard said, “Hey, I gotta get going.”
“What, do you have a varsity football match or something? A sock hop?” I resented his escape from Oakland, even though I thought Lafayette sounded boring as hell.
“Something like that, I got invited to a birthday party tonight, gimme a call tomorrow.”
“Oh. All right, man, talk to you later.” I slunk down into my chair and hung up the phone.
A birthday party. That suburban motherfucker.
Back in Oakland, Donny started bringing me around the guys. A jalopy little group of true-blue fuckups. Together they made up the P.A.G., a little proto–street gang that stood for the “Pure Adrenaline Gangsters.” It was such a faggy name that it probably should have been named the Pure Hard-core Adrenaline Gangsters. P.H.A.G.
It was a broken group of boys. All of them, and I mean every single one of them, came from divorced homes. Most from fucked-up, abusive ones. Donny introduced me around.
There was DJ and Corey, a pair of brothers so incongruously proportioned they looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito from the movie Twins. DJ was enormous and incapable of having a violent thought without enacting it immediately with his fists. He carried penny rolls around with him wrapped in duct tape to increase the force and weight that his fists bore. He was the Luca Brasi to Donny’s Don Corleone.
Corey, on the other hand, was kind of the Joe Pesci of the group. Little, obnoxious, loud, and always instigating things. He was a couple of years older than us but a couple of years less mature, so everything worked out just fine.
Terry Candle, or as he was more well known, Monk, was a half-Japanese kid with a meticulous mind and a mother who had deep connections to pot farmers in Northern California. He got the nickname Monk because he could never be seen without a thick hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head, making him look like a very small Benedictine drug dealer. I didn’t know it at the time, but his mother’s relationship to those pot-growing hippies up north made him the main weed peddler to the white-under-thirteen set in North Oakland.
And then there was Jamie. Jamie James was a kid so ridiculous he seemed like he must have been concocted by a screenwriter; bright orange hair and a preposterous pubescent peach fuzz mustache, Jamie looked like a clown. He acted like one, too. He was a pathological liar. It was impossible ever to know if he was telling the truth about anything. The victim of frequent, severe, man-sized beatings at the hands of his father, eventually his personality fractured into so many pieces that he just picked them up and shaped them into whatever fit the situation best. Unfortunately he did it poorly, and the result was a guy that only the P.A.G. could love.
Having a pathological liar as a friend scars you. To this day, if I ever meet anyone who tells too many crazy stories, I assume they are lying and I start to imagine a soft orange halo glowing about their countenance like a patron saint of dishonesty.
Guess who else was sometimes around? Joey! Imagine! The Italian giant slayer. He who fought a black kid and lived to tell the tale. This was like a Jewish kid in the sixties getting to hang around Sandy Koufax. I was hanging out with my hero. I tried not to swoon.
&
nbsp; Little by little, the guys got used to me being around. I’d walk through the halls at Claremont and DJ would nod his head at me, “ ’Sup?” I felt like I’d been let in on a secret.
After a few weeks of infrequent invitations to steel off across the street during lunch and smoke cigarettes with the guys, I guess I had been promoted. Donny came up to me and told me to meet him at his house that day after school.
If I’d known what I was getting myself into that day, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to show up, but then again, I’m not sure I would have had the courage not to.
I approached the back of Donny’s house and unlatched the gate to his backyard.
“Donny?” I called.
I rounded the bend into the backyard and saw everyone standing there—DJ, Corey, Joey, and the crew.
Donny grabbed me by the arm and announced to everyone that I’d decided to join the P.A.G. I’d done no such thing.
I looked over at Donny. “Uh, Donny, uh… we haven’t really discussed this in depth.” I was a bit nervous, not sure I was ready to take the plunge into being a full-fledged baby gangster.
Donny just winked at me.
I looked around at this little ragtag group of white bad boys and gulped a deep gulp.
These were the kids mothers said to avoid, and I was being asked to jump into the deep end with them.
“It ain’t nothin’, homeboy,” Jamie reassured me, speaking in the lilt of a character from a seventies blaxploitation film.
DJ rolled his eyes and muttered, “He’s too fucking scared.”
Jamie slipped his arm around me and said, sounding more like an old-school traveling hippie this time, “Just be cool and go with it.”
Joey, not really a member of the gang himself, but more like an outside consultant, just smoked and watched me.
I had seen this before. I was being tested. Much like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, the tribal warriors were trying to see if I was brave enough to be one of them. I knew what I had to do.
