by Moshe Kasher
I stepped forward, crouched into Tae Kwon Do horse stance, took a deep breath, and announced, “I am ready to join.”
Everyone laughed hysterically. No one asked me to leave, though. Joining was not easy. Over the course of the next few weeks, I had to join like five fucking times. The thing about the gang was that it wasn’t really a gang at all, rather just a name for the group of fuckups that I had fallen into. In fact, the name was the last little piece of youthful innocence in us. It was a juvenile name, like a little clubhouse, akin to the “He Man Woman Haters Club” from The Little Rascals. It wasn’t the name that mattered, but the affiliation. The problem with it not being a “real” gang, however, was that the rules were rather undefined. Especially the rules concerning how to join.
Every P.A.G. initiation ritual I went through was somehow deemed insufficient afterward and then they’d ask me to perform some other pain ritual or sexual humiliation in order to be accepted in. I stuck my finger up my ass and tried to write my name on the wall in shit; I whacked my little pubescent dick against an ice-cold school bench; I drank a dead goldfish, and I put out a cigarette on my arm.
It was a Camel wide. I fucking remember that—believe me, you would, too. As this new group of guys gathered around, I jammed the lit end of this cigarette into my forearm and shook in pain while my flesh bubbled and smoked. All the guys cheered and slapped me on the back for what at the time felt like the best decision I’d ever made.
The burn got infected quickly, but unwilling to ask for help, lest the FBI be called in to investigate the P.A.G., I just slapped a Band-Aid on it and hoped for the best.
A month later it was putrescent and crusted gold and my arm felt like a fifty-pound water balloon. It only hurt when I moved it or laughed or talked or pointed it downward or upward or breathed, so I figured it was probably okay.
A few weeks later, I flew home for a visit with my dad in Brooklyn. After eyeballing it for a while, he finally said something about the Band-Aid that never came off. He forced me to show him and then immediately vomited on my arm. Maybe that didn’t happen. He did, however, make me go to the hospital and save my arm from gangrene or amputation. What a square my dad was.
Worst of all, two months after my trial by fire, the P.A.G. disbanded. Not like anything whatsoever changed, not like we stopped hanging out or doing the exact same things we did before the end of the P.A.G. era; they just decided that the gang was lame and that it was over. I guess I should’ve been grateful. There was talk of ritual rape as my next induction ceremony. Despite it all, I never regretted the burn. I would look down at the scar over the years and grin a little, remembering the time I burned my way to fuckup.
It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve never been admired for anything, being admired at all—even if it is for being the world’s biggest fuckup—feels pretty good.
I sighed a sigh of deep relief when they took me in. These were the first people in my life who weren’t asking me what was wrong with me. They didn’t give a fuck. There was something wrong with them, too. But more to the point, they got that the true problem was that there was something deeply wrong with everyone else. The world of adults and rules was fucked. Our parents were hypocritical shit bags. The police were corrupt bastards. Our teachers were incompetent assholes. Only we got it. Only I and this group of lost boys understood. We weren’t really in a gang so much as holding each other up. I had people. I wasn’t alone.
I realized, after hanging out with these guys for a while, that they were smoking pot. Pot. Our parents called it grass, they called it dank. If it was really good, they called it The Chronic. The D.A.R.E. program called it a gateway drug.
I made a decision that I’d smoke with those guys if they asked me. Fuckin’ weed! Bill Clinton said he didn’t inhale and the nation laughed at him. I didn’t. The first time I smoked weed, I related more to Bill Clinton than the black community did. I fucking tried. I’d been smoking cigarettes for months at that point, but the only time I’d inhale was when I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of smoke. I imagined that that was how people got lung cancer, just one too many accidental inhalations. I mean, it couldn’t be what you were supposed to be doing, right? I wanted nothing more than to look cool in front of those guys, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I propose, with zero knowledge of anatomy or anything scientific, that it’s an unnatural act for your lungs to allow smoke in. That’s why people die of smoke inhalation. So when Donny invited me to the bushes to smoke some weed and I didn’t get high, it was my lungs being a bitch, not me. I meant business. My lungs pussied up.
I wanted to do it right lest I not be invited to the fuckup birthday party. Little did I know the fuckups don’t have parties, they fuck up other people’s parties. They also don’t tend to get rid of friends. Friends leave but not because they are asked. It takes a lot to be one of these guys. You gotta be willing to get robbed and beat up and have your parents’ house sacked and all that kind of shit.
In exchange, though, you get a group of motherfuckers who will rob or beat the shit out of someone on your behalf at a moment’s notice. That meant a lot to me. That meant the world.
So, when my pansy-ass lungs wouldn’t submit to my will, I freaked out a little. I needed these guys to know I was serious. So, like none of the women I’ve ever been with, I faked it.
To be fair, I wasn’t positive I wasn’t high. I mean, maybe this was it, maybe pot felt exactly like not smoking pot, you just felt cool and tough for doing it.
I walked from that bush to my grandma waiting in the car to pick me up after school and I tried to convince myself that I was a changed man, that I had gotten high. But it wasn’t until the next time I fired up that I realized how wrong I’d been.
The first time I got high for real was at Tommy Klark’s house. His older brother passed me a joint and my lungs opened up to the smoky gateway through which I passed into a new world. The THC drip-dropped its thick syrupy coating over my brain and I floated away. So this is what it’s like to be high…
I smoked and smoked and every hit chipped away another part of my life… puff puff… gone were my worries. What was there to worry about, it’s Ganja Time! Puff puff, gone was my retardation; I could puff away the extra chromosome and feel my Down syndrome become more of a Down Situation… puff puff, shit I was smart! And even if I wasn’t, fuck smart! Puff puff, gone was my fat! I had smooth, sculpted muscles under there somewhere. Puff puff, gone was my fear of being rejected by the cool kids. I’d jumped through a Mario warp zone way past the cool kids. Fuck those square pieces of shit. I didn’t need to be popular, I didn’t want to be popular, I didn’t want to be anything. All I wanted was to kick it with these guys and stay high for the rest of my life.
I’m not sure if there’s a heaven, but if there is, I’m pretty sure it’s gotta look something like Tommy’s backyard.
After that, things get hazy. We started drinking Everclear margaritas. Everclear, for the uninitiated, is essentially potable rubbing alcohol. It’s 99 percent alcohol and you can feel your suffering trachea disintegrate while you drink it. I ate a Popsicle and sprinkled salt on it. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. Somebody put on the song “While the City Sleeps,” by Mc 900 Foot Jesus, and we all slam danced around the room until we collapsed in a heap. I’ve never had a better night.
Before I got high, I had no idea that’s what had been wrong the whole time. It wasn’t that I had deaf parents. It wasn’t that I had a frantic angry mother or a fanatic absent father. It wasn’t that I was fat and retarded or crazy, angry, Jewish, or anything else. I just needed to get high. That’s the secret no one tells you when you’re a kid. That it feels fucking great. They tell you that you feel loopy and disoriented, but no one tells you that it crawls through your skin, filling in every place of deficit, every gaping crack where your humanity didn’t fuse. The thick warm lava of euphoria fills in the crevices of your psyche, and you realize your soul was an electric blanket that hadn’
t been plugged in until just then. Parents and shrinks never tell you that you will forget all the reasons you had to hate yourself. They don’t tell you that shit because then everybody will want to get high.
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?
Getting high that first time was like seeing for the first time. It was as if I’d been wearing blinders my whole life, and with that first hit, they shot off and I saw the world in its full repose for the first time. The world had seemed so small and myopic before that first hit, and as I exhaled, I inhaled the new scene before me. The world expanded forever. It was bright and clear and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I felt like I could see forever. My life had, until that point, been a dark, small, little place, the rules and dynamics of which had been set by all of the people who controlled me. I had no power over anything. And then, just like that, my world popped open. I could see for miles.
Right about the first time I got high, the famous thespian/professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper had just graduated from the Royal Shakespeare Academy and body slammed Andre the Giant. (The Royal Shakespeare thing was a lie.) He was at the peak of his fame and thus got a starring role in the seminal classic They Live. (The seminal classic thing was a lie.)
I loved that movie. In it, Piper is a blue-collar schmo who happens across a pair of unremarkable-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary sunglasses. As soon as he puts them on, an entire secret alien world is revealed to him. There are aliens everywhere and apparently they have been here awhile. Billboards that to the naked eye seem to be Coca-Cola ads are shown to have messages for the alien occupiers. Famous actors have been aliens this whole time, their freaky alien faces revealed once Roddy slips the sunglasses on. A whole alien world had been running right under our noses, just beneath the surface. I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper after that first joint. Not like, I want to wear a kilt and beat up the Macho Man Randy Savage, but like, I knew about a secret fucking world that had always been there and mindless victims had been walking around it for years, pretending it didn’t exist. I saw the brave new world.
I’m not sure what happens to normal people when they get high for the first time. I assume that they get high, feel delighted, and think, “That was soul stimulating. I feel enlightened but not overwhelmingly so. I await another appropriate occasion for mind expansion in a reasonably far-off time, when I will make a conscious and mature decision to take a mood-altering substance again.”
Not me. I realized in that little high sambo slam-dance circle, right before I melted into hemp butter, that I never wanted not to be high again. I would do whatever it took to get high forever, all the time, for the rest of my life. I was twelve years old and I’d found my calling. Stay high, stay drunk, at all costs.
I went out to visit Richard a few days later. I jumped on the BART train and watched through the window as the scenery flicked by like an old-time nickel arcade changing from Oakland’s grime to Lafayette’s shine. I felt like a different person.
When I got out there, I suggested to Richard we sneak off to go smoke cigarettes. He’d tried those and hated them but agreed to do it. We sat out on a hill and I fired up a stogie, took a hit, and passed it to him.
“You’re inhaling it now, like my dad does,” Richard said, his voice a mix of impressed and concerned.
“Ha, yeah, I learned how.” I stared at my old friend, took a deep breath, and told him, “I smoked weed, too.”
He stared at me, confused. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, I smoked weed, dude, it was awesome. It’s not like they say it is, you know? It felt awesome. Like jerking off but you’re just cumming the whole time. It’s crazy.”
Richard took it in in silence, put the cigarette out, stood up, and said, “Promise me you won’t do that ever again.”
I laughed. “C’mon, man, what are you talking about?”
He seemed near tears as he yelled, “Fucking promise me!”
I got a taste of how serious it was. I stared at my friend for a second, trying to figure out what to say. What could I say?
“I can’t do that, man, sorry. These guys are my only friends out there. It’s different for you, you’ve got this awesome thing going on out here, you’re playing baseball and shit, making tons of friends, I don’t have any of that. Besides, all that shit they’ve been telling us about drugs is a lie anyway. The D.A.R.E. shit? It’s bullshit. They just don’t want us to know the secret.”
“What fucking secret?”
“Why don’t you let me bring some by sometime and I’ll show you.”
A look of anger passed over Richard’s face, he was quiet a long time, and then he whispered, “I can’t be your friend if you do drugs. You have to choose. That shit or me.”
I never saw Richard again.
Chapter 5
“N.Y. State of Mind”
—Nas
Just after my mind had been blown open by my newfound experiences, my brother and I flew back to New York for a visit with my father. Back to Sea Gate. Back in time. My mind had been thrust into the future by weed and alcohol even as my body flew back to the Stone Age. There was no place I would have less liked to be at that moment.
This isn’t to say I was unaffected by the allure of Jewish life. Growing up, I was sliced exactly down the middle of my psyche. As a boy, I said I wanted to be either a baseball player or a famous rabbi when I grew up. Neither career held any actual interest for me but just satisfied a deficit I imagined I had. Baseball for my manhood, Torah for my soul. I didn’t have much of either.
My Bar Mitzvah was a tragedy. It was a kind of farcical movie shoot. Extras were hired to play the parts of my friends and loved ones, and I was given the starring role of “Fat Uncomfortable Kid.” I’ve never had less fun. I’ve had the pleasure (?) of meeting rich Jews who had pleasant experiences with Judaism and Bar Mitzvahs. They had elaborate parties to celebrate their ascent into manhood with themes like “Indiana Jones” and “The Yankees.” Everyone dressed up and cheered as a Harrison Ford look-alike cracked his whip into a piñata, spilling a waterfall of chocolate coins onto the floor. I’ve always felt chocolate money to be an odd choice of a treat for a people so concerned with their reputation as shylocks and money-grubbers. What are gentiles supposed to think when they see us training our children to actually eat money?
The theme of my Bar Mitzvah was the Holocaust. An old rabbi mumbled in Yiddish and I hurriedly said the blessing over the Torah reading, terrified that I would fuck it up, bile shooting into my stomach, my guts turning to liquid, my asshole quivering and clenching to prevent me from unleashing a chocolate waterfall of my own.
After the horror show that was the liturgical part of my Bar Mitzvah came the “party.” You know how parties are supposed to be fun? Now imagine the opposite of that. I sat, fat and awkward, in the chair of honor and received the guests. I knew none of them. A local Chassidic celebrity, Mordechai Ben David, crooned Yiddish songs to my father’s delight. He had sprung Mordechai Ben David’s performance on me as a big surprise, and he looked at me with joy in his eyes when the concert began. My father, being deaf, was spared the shocking realization of just how awful even the best of all Chassidic pop songs are.
My father signed to me, “Mordechai Ben David! See? He insisted that he be able to come perform here.”
It wasn’t until years later that I realized my father must have begged him to come and sing.
I just smiled and wished that my dad had hookups on a Snoop Dogg performance instead. My entire experience of Judaism was largely based on f
ear and terror, which was perhaps appropriate, as we are commanded to fear God always. I did. I mostly feared other Jews who acted as God’s thuggish earthling enforcers. Every second I sat in the synagogue, or shul to use the Yiddish, I was paralyzed by the fear that I would be called up again to do any sort of liturgical rite. Being asked to wrap the Torah or to open the Ark or anything of the sort was said to be a great honor, but for me it was the stuff nightmares are made of. I would try, with every shred of my being, to make myself invisible. My entire consciousness, every second that I sat in shul, was focused on being transparent.
My brother, on the other hand, went the exact other way with Judaism. He saw it as a pool of my father’s approval into which he could jump and be baptized (sorry) a true and actual Jew. He shucked and jived and looked almost like he knew what he was doing. My brother would sit at home in California and teach himself Hebrew for hours on end lest he be caught sitting in shul with an English prayer book, the ugly English lettering exposed for all to see, a sign that might as well have been flashing neon reading, THIS GUY HAS NO CLUE WHAT’S GOING ON! I felt like a fraud from the start. I was filled with shame.
Shame drove my father’s family. Everyone was ignorant for different reasons—he and his new family because of their deafness; me and my brother because of our California-ness. My father’s response was to keep it all a great secret.
When we would go out to a place where my father suspected there might be members of the Chassidic community, he would coach us on interrogation techniques. The Chassidic community is a particularly intrusive one and the big Jewish noses correspond exactly to big Jewish nosiness. It’s not unusual for a complete stranger to lob a few quick questions at you in order to assess where you are at religiously and educationally. This allows your interrogator to feel: (A) Smug if you are operating below his children. (B) Embarrassed if you are learning at a higher level than his children. (C) Interested in arranging a marriage if you are operating at an equal level to his children. It’s a very disconcerting process.
