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

  Gary made it, by the way. He didn’t die. Later that night we drank together. I put my arm around him and told him, with a sensitivity far beyond my thirteen years, “It’s okay, bro, no hard feelings, just don’t act like such a bitch.”

  The kind of wisdom that I imparted to Gary was coming to me as a result of my exposure to this new drug-fueled consciousness. I walked around convinced that I had some private information that had been kept from the rest of the squares in the world. When I’d walk by a grizzled old hippie or a Rastafarian-looking man, I’d grin and nod my head as if to say, “Hello! Pot smoker here, too. I get it!” Lots of confused looks ensued, but I paid them no mind.

  My mother finally saved enough money to get us our own place, and we moved next door to a bar called the King’s X, a local hangout for the worst people possible. We had a metal bat that lived at our front door, and I couldn’t possibly tell you the number of times I had to run outside with that fucking thing and bang it on the ground to scare off some awful mess pissing on my front door or some disgusting trolls fucking in the weeds next to the house. People loved to pull up to the King’s X and rev their engines for forty-five minutes and play the latest Dr. Dre track at the highest volume possible without ripping through the space-time continuum. The bass would shake the house, rattling the windows and keeping me up at night. How lucky my mother was to be deaf. How awful our landlords were to rent her this place and not mention the decibel level her two hearing sons would have to deal with. We got used to it.

  My little rickety house was stationed about a mile from the Rockridge BART station, the home base for me and my friends. One mile. So far. I was fat and lazy and hated to walk. I slumped myself over to the 59A bus stop and waited for the bus to come. I loved to hitchhike. I honestly don’t know why, but every time I’d sit there, I’d throw my thumb up and start asking people if they were going my way. You think I could get a ride?

  Most people stared straight ahead as if they were deaf, at which point I would sign to them, “Can I get a ride?” and laugh to myself. Only to myself. This little life of mine.

  There are moments in a life that make you think maybe there’s a thread of meaning through this bumbling little experience. Seconds and inches that peel open the epidermis of the universe to reveal the intricate nervous system of interconnectivity that lies within. Things that make you say, “There might be something to this God thing after all.” Little God moments.

  My God moment puttered up to me in a 1970 Datsun 510. It was a rusty thing with primer-gray-splotted rough blue paint. A little wagon that looked like it was going to self-destruct into a thousand pieces at any second. It pulled up and stopped right in front of my bus stop.

  Inside was a hippie angel. I mean this guy looked like a fucking R. Crumb character. A Frank Zappa of a man with dirty curly hair cascading down his shoulders, gray streaks flecking his bushiness, showing his age. Next to him was a man ripped from a Jimi Hendrix concert photo, a withered old hippie wanderer whose leather headband might not have been removed for years. A thousand years, a million. Namaste.

  Zappa turned his head to me and smiled. A big, white greedy smile. All love. I did my hand like, “Roll down the window.”

  The Man-Buddha complied.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, brother!”

  We were brothers.

  “You guys heading to Rockridge BART?” I knew the answer.

  “We are now!”

  Zappa popped the door open and slid his seat forward. “Jump in.”

  I leapt.

  Some people just won’t understand these things.

  I could sense the electric current in the air. Feel the power.

  I sat down on the lamb’s-wool seat cover. No introductions were made. None were needed. We’d known each other forever, lifetimes.

  Led Zeppelin was blaring from the 8-track stereo.

  Of course it was.

  Was I in the past?

  “Hey, brother, you smoke?” The Hendrix Experience handed me a fat beautiful joint. Filled with adult weed.

  “Do I!” I sucked in, hard. I coughed out, harder.

  “Easy there, brother!” Zappa laughed.

  Adult weed!

  Somehow, no matter how good the weed was back then, some trick of nature or special club allowed the adults to get the best weed in the world. Parents’ stashes were filled with otherworldly shit. Crystal-crusted Indica and Maui Wowie, the best shit.

  Only one thing was more powerful than adult weed. Adult hippie weed. Oh Lord, give me strength!

  I smoked that joint and passed it back to Zappa, who put his hand up in supplication like Jesus.

  “No way, keep smoking, you only have it for a mile, we smoke all day.” He laughed like Santa. He laughed like the Buddha. He laughed like the universe.

  I sat there, laughing, smoking. My mouth turned into a desert. The desiccating hand of cottonmouth swabbed my tongue, and just at that moment, when I could take no more, Hendrix turned back to me and smiled.

  “Hey, you want a beer?”

  “I’d love one. Nothing sounds better.”

  He handed me a Red Hook Extra Special Bitter. My favorite nice beer. I never drank nice beer. But today I drank like an alcoholic king.

  The malt washed away my dryness. Hops washed away my sins.

  We pulled up to BART, my mind blown, my joint cashed, my beer drunk. What a ten minutes.

  I oozed out of the car and said my good-byes. Zappa pulled out a pack of smokes.

  “Oh my God. Are those Newports?”

  Newports. My cigarette. My favorite. Not a common smoke of the hippie. More a staple of the… well, you know.

  This couldn’t be.

  A FUCKING NEWPORT?!?

  “Yeah, brother, you want one?”

  “I’d love one.” I trembled as a tear welled up in my eye.

  “Here you go!”

  Zappa handed me a smoke and I stared at it, waiting to wake up in Kansas.

  I looked up.

  The Datsun was gone.

  The greatest moment in my life had passed. I lit the Newport and offered it to the Great Spirit.

  I smoked in enlightenment.

  If only every day were like this.

  Of course, it wasn’t. That moment was the best life could ever be for me. The pinnacle. The peak of my experience in the new drugged world I’d entered. I’d look back on that car ride over the years and wish I could go back. But, of course, right after the peak begins the descent.

  Back at Claremont, I walked the halls with a newfound confidence. The Jonos and Naomis of the world no longer seemed so attractive. The black kids no longer seemed so intimidating. Especially so for the real gangsters of the bunch. By and large, they got high, too, so at least in my mind, we shared some kind of understanding and kinship.

  I, much like all teenagers who start getting high, loved the iconography of weed. I drew pot leaves everywhere. The fact that this was incriminating never occurred to me, as I imagined that no one but me and “my people” even knew what a pot leaf looked like. I figured those square bears would just think I was really into Canada. I remember I drew a huge one on my folder for Portable Three, and when I pulled it out, a girl from class leaned over, stole a glance, and whispered to her friend, “Damn, this white boy crazy.”

  My heart swelled with pride and I beamed. “He sure is…” I thought. “He sure is.”

  To be thought of as crazy was just fine with me. At least that pulled me out of the anonymous few white faces at Claremont. I was known. I was different.

  Donny came up to me at lunch with Jamie and DJ. “Meet us out by the BART parking lot after school, we have to show you something.”

  Jamie leaned in and licked his lips. “It’s a really good something!”

  After school, I met the guys and they spoke in hushed tones. We quickly retreated into a bush that we had hollowed out in the back of the BART parking lot. Joey was in there waiting for us. Joey only came around th
ese days when semi-serious things were happening. He was too old and too connected at this point to waste his time with kid shit. This must’ve been important.

  In the bush, we were essentially hidden and could do the kinds of top-secret archcriminal stuff that is normally done in bushes.

  Donny smiled and pulled out a handful of paper. “This is—”

  “Paper!” I blurted out.

  DJ the brute gave me a menacing look.

  I blanched. “Right, sorry, go ahead, Donny.”

  “It’s white blotter acid.” Donny seemed intoxicated just holding the stuff. “And it’s the beginning of our empire.”

  I was confused. “We have an empire?”

  Donny started ripping out hits of acid, one at a time.

  He handed one to me.

  “The empire”—Donny pointed at his forehead—“starts in here. Put it on your tongue.”

  I did as I was told.

  I’d heard about acid. My mother told me about her experiences as a young woman in the sixties, how she ate acid and the world melted. It was meant to be a cautionary tale, but all I thought during that conversation was, “I’m gonna try that someday.”

  Today was the day, I guessed. Tuesday afternoon at three thirty was as good a time as any for a thirteen-year-old to drop acid.

  Jamie took his into his mouth and told us, “I once did acid with my grandpa, he had a pure LSD crystal in his office, and he handed it to me one day after I shot a deer. He licked it and told me to lick it. I was high for a week.”

  As one, we all rolled our eyes.

  Donny, always a little bit more spiritual than the rest of us, gave me a little pep talk.

  “You’re gonna go places in your mind you never even knew were places, so don’t fight it, just go with it.” I swallowed my dose and began waiting for it to hit me.

  We hung out for a bit just talking and smoking and I didn’t feel much of anything. Donny told me to just relax and wait.

  All of a sudden I felt a little tickle in my stomach, like a nausea, but not terribly unpleasant. I told Jamie.

  “That’s it, man, it’s coming. That’s the strychnine.”

  Strychnine is rat poison. It is said to be put into LSD to make it stronger—the poison was seen as some kind of hard-core badge of honor.

  Jamie leaned into me. “Rat poison, that’s what it is. It makes the shit even more powerful, but if you take too much, it could paralyze you.”

  Donny told Jamie to shut the fuck up.

  “Don’t listen to that shit. This is pure white blotter. As clean as it gets. No strychnine, no nothin’. Quit talkin’ like that, man, you’ll freak him out.”

  Jamie wouldn’t be stopped. “Also try real hard not to think of the impending nature of death or losing your mind. That’s a surefire way to never make it back from your trip.”

  “What do you mean, not make it back?”

  “After I licked that crystal my grandfather gave me, I spent two months in a forest, convinced I was a bear, living on nothing but berries and moss. I only made it back because my dad organized a search party and rescued me.” Jamie had a far-off look in his eyes and started grunting like a bear.

  “Now I know you’re lying. Your dad doesn’t love you enough to look for you,” Donny shot at Jamie, annoyed. He looked at me. “Let’s bounce. We gotta go handle some business.”

  Me! Donny was taking me to handle business!

  Donny and the guys were constantly doing just that, handling business, a kind of generic term for “doing something that you don’t need to know about.”

  We left Jamie behind with his cautionary tales and hopped on the bus to Berkeley with Frohawk, the sewer dweller. Joey walked with us to the bus stop, and just before we took off, he handed Donny a fat wad of cash.

  “Don’t fuck up,” he said to Donny and then looked at me. “And keep an eye on this kid, man, he’s just about to jump into the deep end.” Joey winked at me again and walked off. We climbed onto the bus, and my mind started to warp into its trip.

  The world followed behind me in slow motion. The outer reaches of my vision wove themselves into a detailed three-dimensional maze, and the patterns in the makeup of the city revealed themselves to me. I stared at a square inch of the bus seat’s fabric, the intricacies of its stitching calling out to me as it moved and pulsated like a handful of worms. We got off the bus right in front of UC Berkeley. This was about the time my mind exploded.

  It occurred to me that none of the information being disseminated in the classes held in the buildings behind me mattered in comparison to the knowledge that was being leaked into my mind, from my mind, by the ruptured pipeline in my brain. A system that had, apparently, been designed to keep this kind of flush of understanding from me, lest I be driven mad by the things I saw.

  I vaguely realized that I was alone and that, somehow, Donny and Frohawk had gone away; I just couldn’t figure out why I should care. I did care about my mother, of that I was pretty sure. And she would be home in about five hours, so I knew I had better go to her. I walked home from the UC Berkeley campus, a four-mile walk, mostly because I couldn’t remember what a bus was. I got home and realized that I’d lost my house keys on my way home and so I sat on my front step, staring at the inside of my eyelids, my head in my hands, for hours. By the time my mother made it home, I’d collected myself to enough of a degree that cohesive thoughts were possible again, so I just spent the rest of the evening telling my mother how much I loved her and the various ramifications of the deeper meaning of love. For most parents this kind of an odd interaction would be a red flag, but for my mom, it was exactly what she had been waiting for, and it made her psychoanalyzed heart swell with pride. “He finally gets it!” she thought. And that was true, I finally did.

  When I finally came down, my body ached but my mind felt sharper than it ever had. The next day at school, I finally hooked back up with Donny.

  “There you are, what the fuck happened to you yesterday?” I said. I was furious at having been left alone, although I couldn’t say for certain how and why that had happened.

  Donny just laughed and told me, “We left you on the steps and went to go handle some business. When we got back, you were gone. So what happened to you?”

  I sighed. “I don’t really know.”

  After that day, I started eating acid constantly. I’d drop acid in the morning before gym class and float the day away. Morning classes were spent staring at my fingernails and the white roots of my nails doing loop-the-loops, swimming by like fish in a tiny aquarium. At lunch, the boys and I looked for one another, as our faces were the only ones that looked normal. We ate acid the way we smoked pot. All the time. There were no powwows of psychedelic healing. We dropped acid because there was nothing else to do. We never did anything cool on acid. I remember watching The Doors movie, and when Jim Morrison and the band went to the desert to eat peyote, I thought, “You can go places when you get high?” We would drop acid and hang around the subway station or go to class or go write graffiti. Urban psychedelia.

  We ripped off slices of white blotter and made our world enjoyable. White blotter. Little white pages blowing my mind apart. The bad part about mind-expanding drugs when you are thirteen years old is that there really isn’t much to expand upon.

  “Did you ever notice canibus is spelled cani-BUS?” I asked Donny one night, lying in his bed, the Cream Disraeli Gears cassette autoreversing to the beginning of the album for the twentieth time.

  “Fucking, we should start a cani-BUS where people could ride the bus like regular but they could smoke weed, too. The CANI-BUS!”

  Donny was blown away by my entrepreneurial genius. “Whoa. Wait, isn’t it spelled cannabis?”

  I changed the subject.

  We started to become legends with the acid. Joey and Donny had been impressed with the strain of acid they had given me and returned to the source of it to buy many sheets more. I and the rest of the guys were about to turn the empire of our mind
s into a much more real world drug empire. We set up shop at Claremont and word spread quickly. People knew who we were and admired/feared us. The black drug dealers wanted nothing to do with “that white boy acid.” Because we weren’t seen as being in direct competition with them, they allowed us to peddle our wares in peace. Kids from other schools would cut class and come and buy blotter. Dysfunctional children from far-off lands such as Berkeley and San Francisco would load up their donkeys and make the long trek to the promised land of Oakland, where wise men were offering enlightenment for three dollars a hit. The money flowed, and we lived like boy-kings. That is, until Justin Sabbaro came along and fucked everything up with his weak-ass heart.

  Chapter 8

  “Things Done Changed”

  —Biggie Smalls

  This fat seventh grader walked up to us one day interested in stepping into a brave new world.

  “Hello, I would like to purchase some LSD, please.”

  “Name?”

  A nervous look around. A fat sweaty-brow wipe. Nothing too out of the ordinary. This was a sketchy world we were introducing kids to.

  “Justin Sabarro.”

  “Age?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Perfect. LSD is an amazing mind-expanding drug that costs three dollars, won’t find more bang for your buck anywhere. Transports you to another world, drippy walls, profound ideas, all that shit. Here you are and enjoy!”

  Little Justin popped a dose into his mouth in ignorant bliss. Oops, one thing I forgot to tell him, “Oh, and don’t take LSD if you have a weak mind, dead parents, or a history of heart problems.”

  He looked up, clutched his chest. “Heart problems?”

  Well, I wish I’d warned him like that. I didn’t. Justin Sabarro ate the acid, and fucked everything up.

  Up until that point, my mother was desperately seeking information about just how bad she could sense I was becoming. At home, things were a chaotic mess, mostly due to me. If she had been able to piece together what I was doing at school, she would have rung the alarm bell much earlier, but thankfully, I, for the most part, was able to keep her from that information.