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

  Officer Joe, ignoring the conventions of probable cause, or perhaps assuming our very existence was probable cause, would search us on sight—every time, every day. Joe lined us up against the wall and a waterfall of contraband would spill out onto the streets. Sakura 64 permanent markers, pot-pipes screwed together from stolen plumbing supplies, knives, and pepper spray rolled down College Avenue, lowering property values with each rotation.

  Officer Joe would then throw us up against the wall and cuff us, spin someone into a chokehold, and then drive us around in his car for an hour or so just to scare us. A piece of shit, that’s how I’d describe him. (Author’s note: My editor feels that the description of Officer Joe is a juvenile one. That I sound immature in calling him these names in my current narrator’s voice. After much soul-searching and questioning, I have found that any other description of him is impossible. Really, he was a dick. In other news, I have just given money to a Sudanese charity in what can only be described as a mature act and anything but juvenile.)

  One day, the higher-ups at the Oakland Police Department assigned Officer Joe a police bicycle. This was in the early days of bike cops, and you can’t imagine how long and loud we laughed when Officer Joe rolled up with his bike and his little cop shorts.

  “You have really pretty legs, Officer Joe,” I spat out, barely able to keep a straight face.

  Joe, not amused.

  He trailed behind us that day for about an hour. Everywhere we walked, he followed at a distance of about fifteen feet, his bike giving him agility his beat car never had. Maybe this bike thing wasn’t so funny after all.

  We walked; he rolled. We turned left; he turned left. Finally Donny spun around and asked him, “Why the hell are you following us?”

  “It’s a free country.” He smiled, obviously enjoying this game a bit too much.

  “It is a free country!” I yelled back, one of my more brilliant ideas popping into my head. “Run!”

  We all scattered in different directions, running at full speed playing cat and mouse through the streets. We darted here and there yelling at one another in code about where we would eventually meet once we shook this guy. We agreed on the monastery.

  The monastery was an apple grove in the middle of Oakland, surrounded by an abbey, where Jesuit monks walked around in contemplation of the Lord and where we got fucked up and hurled apples at passing traffic. It was a space open for the public to enjoy, but by the time we got through with it, they built a six-foot fence around it and locked the gates forever. For a while, though, it was our spot.

  We found each other there, breathing heavily and giddy with defiance. Someone had procured whiskey, and we cracked it and passed it around as we planned our next move.

  Luckily, our next move walked right up to us. A group of guys from the grade below made the mistake of thinking they could find safe passage in these, the apple trees of the Lord. As they approached, DJ, our biggest, loudest, scariest friend, jumped up and screamed, “Break yo’ self! Empty yo’ mothafuckin’ pockets!”

  Translated loosely from the original gangster, this means, “Hello! We are robbing you! Give us your money!” Usually this kind of belligerence would be enough to get us ten bucks, but unfortunately, this group of fellas had an upstart. A short, chubby kid with a bald head boldly stepped forward and fearlessly confronted DJ with the bravery/stupidity of a hero:

  “Fuck you!”

  I felt DJ’s excitement level rise at this kind of gauntlet toss. He cocked his head to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. That, in fact, this little shit had said what we thought he said.

  DJ grunted, “The fuck you just say to me?”

  No hesitation, the little shit in question repeated, “I said fuck you!”

  Then things started to move in slow motion. DJ’s face lit up and I imagine his dick moved a little bit in anticipation of the violence he was about to inflict. The little bald dude didn’t seem worried in the least and even smirked a bit.

  DJ cocked back and fired on him, a one-two, face-chin combo, broken nose—a DJ special. Wiped the smirk right off his face. Even in the dark, I could see the blood start to leak down his face. As the kid grabbed his nose in pain, all of his friends started to yell at once, like a Greek chorus, bringing us bad news: “Dude, what are you doing?!? That’s a girl!! It’s a girl!!”

  You just don’t hit a girl.

  That’s the rules. Don’t tag houses, trees, or cars (unless they are white box trucks); don’t backwash into the forty-ouncer; and don’t hit chicks. The rules. There is no chapter in the rules on what to do about chicks that don’t look like chicks, though. Well, there is now.

  DJ stammered, waves of adrenaline and shame flooding his system at once, turning him into an even less articulate version of himself, a very inarticulate boy.

  “What?! Oh shit. I’m so sorry; I thought you were a dude! You just look so much like a guy, I’m sorry!”

  I’m not sure what’s worse: DJ socking that chick in the face, his apology where he explained he never would have hit her if she didn’t look so much like a guy, or the fact that, years later, I ended up fucking that guy. I wish I was kidding.

  We always looked for places like the monastery. With cops like Officer Joe on our backs, we had to have places to go. We crawled through Oakland looking for secret hiding places where we could be cool for a while. In the back of Chabot Elementary School, we found a freeway underpass behind cyclone fencing. We threw a rug over the barbed wire and climbed in. We set up a little living quarters complete with stolen barbecues and lawn furniture. For a while that was our spot. We moved on.

  We staked claims on garage roofs with branches pulled down into canopies of subterfuge. We tromped around the neighborhood exploring places like Huckleberry Finn trippin’ down the Old Miss.

  We climbed up things and opened up manhole covers. We found abandoned houses and hollow bushes and made them our territory. We found alleys and garage roofs and sewers. Yes, sewers.

  The sewer. Frohawk’s place. Nate was his real name, but everybody called him Frohawk. A tall black guy with this grubby Mohawk. Get it? We’d found Frohawk one day when we were on a desperate search for someone to buy us booze. He was nineteen so he couldn’t buy it for us, but he had some warm gin back at his place. His place turned out to be a bit farther away than we’d expected.

  He lived in the sewers underneath Oakland. Literally. He was a hobo of some kind. A literal gutter punk, the kind who sits on the sidewalk and harasses you for change. That was Frohawk. He’d been homeless for years and found a place beneath the city where he could sleep undisturbed.

  Walk about a half mile down a drainage tunnel off College Avenue with a lit candle and a bottle of hairspray to torch any spiders or rats you might see and you’d get to an antechamber, and that’s where Frohawk nested. Nate had decorated the place with a stolen mattress and couch cushions. Everywhere you looked, there were empty bottles and candle stubs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, huddled together for warmth in the corner. There were rats and black widows and piles of cholera dust and skeletons and gold doubloons from shipwrecks and ghosts and gnomes and sewage water; there were dwarfs mining for precious metals and pet alligators grown to enormous size and then there was us, with another awesome place to get high.

  Nate actually lived there. That was his house. After a while, Nate introduced us to Little Mikey Rip-It-Up’s place. The ultimate spot. The land of milk and honey to a thirteen-year-old drug addict.

  Little Mikey Rip-It-Up was a thirty-five-year-old man who lived in the attic of the First Church of Christ on College Avenue in Rockridge. Mikey had been given the job of fixing things and cleaning up around the church in exchange for free room and board. It never occurred to us that it was odd that a man lived above a church. Actually it was sort of cute. A little man living a little life in a little triangle of attic space carved out for him by the Lord himself.

  Mikey looked a bit like an Eskimo elder with a face scrunched up from years
of facing tundric ice winds. And much like an Eskimo, he was the type of guy you’d never know was there unless you smelled him. I’m kidding about Eskimos, but not about Mikey. He didn’t smell great. Perhaps that was in part due to the fact that I never officially located a shower in his little parsonage in the attic of that church.

  Imagine! A thirty-five-year-old friend. Lucky. Mikey was awesome. He bought us cigarettes and booze and pornography and we hiked back to his place and smoked and drank and jerked off and made Top Ramen and punched the walls in. “Punch the fuckin’ walls in!” we’d scream.

  Okay, relax. I know how it sounds, but it wasn’t like that. Mikey was one of us. It wasn’t an Old Man Don situation.

  Now, Old Man Don owned an antique shop in town with an open-door policy: if you were young and broke, Don showed you his antique and you made some money the old-fashioned way. And no, I’m not into antiques.

  No, Mikey was one of us, nothing creepy. Yeah, he was thirty-five, but he was cool.

  More important, though, he offered us a better option than participating in the thirteen-year-old/bum-barter economy. Usually, if you’re thirteen and need to get drunk, you have only a few options: find a crooked store; ask a crooked man; or take your crooked ass into the booze aisle and steal some shit. The crooked stores were the hardest to find. Fines and piety kept most of the local liquor stores out of reach.

  The next thing to do was find a bum. Bums like smoking crack. Yes, all of them. Crack, however, costs money that they don’t have, because the bum industry is one of the worst-paying on the market. That’s where we came in. For a five-dollar tip, we were able to get drunk, and the bums were able to smoke rocks. It was a good system; everybody got paid, so to speak. That is, until we met Little Mikey Rip-It-Up and threw the entire bum/kid economy to the wolves.

  We were not the first to find Mikey. His place was constantly inundated with people eager to partake of the warmth of the church’s secret shelter. A steady cast of characters came in and out of Mikey’s place. Mikey and his flophouse attracted every strange hobo and street urchin in town. In his small way, Little Mikey Rip-It-Up was the ambassador of College Avenue, an ambassador representing only the cream of the crap.

  At Mikey’s, we met guys like Leotis, an older black guy who lived mysteriously, like a Jack London character, in a tent in Tilden Park. I suppose technically that made him just a homeless person, but to us, he was an urban buccaneer. He even looked a bit like a buccaneer, with his trademark thin red ascot wrapped around his neck, cutting through his black skin like a wound. Surprisingly, he always wore a crisp white dress shirt that sparkled whiteness in defiance of the woodsy home from which it emerged.

  Leotis had an aura that made him seem like the wisest man who had ever lived. In retrospect, the wisest man who ever lived can probably afford walls.

  “The thing y’all don’t know about… is life itself,” Leotis explained as we listened with rapt enthusiasm. “I been hustling for forty years.”

  “Please,” I thought, “teach me how to hustle.” I could, at that time, only dream of a life spent living in municipal parks in a ten-dollar tent.

  A street philosopher, Leotis loved to pontificate. I imagine in the Middle Ages, he would have rambled into town in a great silken wagon, addled with trinkets and baubles, and the town would gather around, to hear him dazzle with charisma.

  “The thing thou dost not knoweth about, is life itself!”

  “Huzzah!” the people would scream back. “Huzzah for Lord Leotis!”

  But flash-forward two thousand years to 1992, and Leotis was simply a creep who lived in a park.

  Leotis always hustled but he never hustled alone. His main partner in crime was Shane.

  Shane was about twenty-five when we met him, his cheeks already puffy and swollen from years of alcohol abuse. He always had the perfect amount of stubble, too. Not perfect as in: Hollywood-chic, but perfect as in: Yes, in fact I do drink beer with cigarette butts in it—what of it?

  Shane was funny and liked us and would tell us about how to get by and make some quick cash if you needed it.

  He taught us about Carlo Rossi. “Carlo Rossi is the best wine a man can buy,” he told us. Hard to argue with. Only the best comes in 2.5-gallon bottles. Rossi was the finest wine we ever drank. We started with Cisco, and then came Boone’s Farm, and on the nights of celebration, we cracked Rossi.

  Shane liked Rossi but I liked Cisco. Leotis, a Cisco drinker, taught me the “bang for the buck principle.” In the world of cheap drink, there are levels. Here’s Leotis’s Talmudic treatise on the wisdom of cheap drinks:

  Malt liquor is standard alcoholic drinking fare, but there are levels. First, there’s Mickey’s—known as “white boy drink,” reserved for chicks and people who are still employed. In the middle of the spectrum is Olde English, a drink for Shakespearean alcoholics. And then there’s the bang-for-the-buck favorite, St. Ides. Ahh, St. Ides, the patron saint of cirrhosis. The only thing better than St. Ides is Crazy Horse, a true rarity, but if you ever see it on the shelf, you have to go for it. You know a drink is strong when, without any self-consciousness or irony, it is named after a leader of a culture that’s been decimated by alcoholism.

  Wino wines had similar strata. Boone’s for girls, Rossi for groups, and Cisco for real men. Cisco was my favorite. A lethal sort of synthetic bum wine, it was made out of a combination of distilled Now and Laters, Ajax, and broken dreams. People called it Liquid Crack. I called it dinner.

  Shane’s favorite was always Rossi. He and Corey came home one day with two jugs of the stuff and a look of delight—and a girl! Melissa.

  Melissa was, for a time, Shane’s girlfriend. The only one of us who had one. She was an alcoholic, too, but much like alcohol, there’s also a spectrum of alcoholics. Melissa wasn’t quite young and dumb like us, but also not as old and crushed as Shane and Leotis. She was pretty, although a few more years of drinking the way she was would take care of that. Mostly, though, she was sweet and quiet and racked with a kind of combination love/shame for Shane. Her father had been an alcoholic and had beaten her, and probably worse, all of her life. And—like many kids with alcoholic parents—in the ultimate irony, she started drinking to make that pain go away.

  As we passed around the jugs of wine, Shane showed us how to cradle them in the crook of our elbows in order to raise the jugs to our lips without struggling with the weight of the thing.

  “It’s like my arms were made to hold bottles of wine!” Shane mumbled, barely comprehensible.

  “You sound like such a fucking drunk, Shane,” Melissa shot at him, clearly a bit embarrassed that Shane seemed to love this jug of piss wine more than her.

  Shane, red-faced and humiliated, shot back, “You shut the fuck up!” She did.

  I heard Melissa eventually ended up getting the courage she was looking for at the bottom of the wine jug and left Shane.

  I still see Shane now and again, wandering the streets, babbling to himself, piss stains crusted on his pants, his mind a joke. He hasn’t recognized me in years.

  Leotis disappeared into the forest a long time ago to go join the Narinan resistance or to hustle up a life or something. But before everything changed, we had our little hustler training ground.

  No matter where we started our day, we all always ended up at Mikey Rip-It-Up’s.

  Mikey Rip-It-Up loved to rip it up. He’d crack bottles of booze and drink till we told him to stop. He’d take any dare. He’d lick a car battery or punch himself in the face ten times if we asked. He just didn’t give a fuck. I remember his teeth, too. They didn’t give a fuck either. Yellow, grimy—like God knit him a little canary sweater for each tooth. A teeny Christmas present of yuck. Man, when you’re thirteen and you have a thirty-five-year-old to hang around with, you are king. He was thirty-five, but cool. And he’d never kissed a girl! Just like most of us.

  When I found that out, my mind was blown.

  “Wait a minute, dude, you’ve never kissed a gi
rl?” I asked him, terrified at the possibility of going another twenty years without getting some.

  Mikey giggled and shook his head. “No, I’ve never kissed a girl, nope. I would, though. I’d kiss a girl. I’d fuck a girl, too.”

  “Yikes. Good to know. But wait, how can you be thirty-five and not have kissed anyone?” I was almost angry at this point.

  “Shut the fuck up, dude, you’re always talking.” DJ punched me in the shoulder to accentuate his point.

  “He’s got a point, though,” Jamie said, defending me. “I first French-kissed a girl when I was six.” Jamie looked off into the distance after this lie, a self-satisfied grin on his face, ignoring the eye rolling going on all around him.

  I looked back at Mikey Rip-It-Up. “So, seriously, you never kissed a girl?” I just couldn’t let it go. It was disturbing.

  Mikey, however, was disturbingly unfazed by the question that should’ve sent him into existential angst, or at least horny frustration. He simply mumbled to himself and we all changed the subject.

  There was something a bit unsettling about Mikey’s admission that he’d never been with a girl. But since none of us ever had been either, it fell mostly within the realm of our circle of normalcy. Then again, our circle of normalcy included four of the seven layers of Hell, so that’s best taken with a grain of salt.

  We spent every day at Mikey’s place and treated it like our home. We were loud and hardly subtle about what we were doing. A parade of clear-eyed, sad-faced teenage boys tromped into Mikey’s place every afternoon and every night; we emerged bleary-eyed, stumbling men. We treated the place like shit. We tagged on Mikey’s walls and told the other janitors to fuck off. We climbed onto the roof and threw pinecones at passing cars. Basically, despite the fact that we loved Mikey Rip-It-Up, all we ever did to his place was rip it up.

  Eventually the church took notice. Apparently the Presbyterian Church is weirdly uptight about thirteen-year-old boys getting high in the attic with their thirty-five-year-old custodian. They asked Mikey to leave the church, his house, and his position, and they called our parents and let them know what had been going on.