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

  The girl standing next to me whispered, “I’d suck your dick.”

  I was flattered until I realized she was looking through me to her hallucination a thousand yards away. I’d never had a blow job at that point, though, so I got real excited about the prospect of convincing this girl I was the lizard king and getting a royal suck-off. But since there was a total lockdown after hours, I could do little with that invitation except jerk off to the memory of it well into adulthood.

  Crazy Dick Suck Girl got bounced the ball. She looked at the happy little ball bouncer and growled, “I feel like kicking your fucking teeth out.” Ahh, apparently I wasn’t the only one.

  Dick Suck snarled at the chipper little counselor and threw the ball directly at her head, knocking her down.

  Alarms blared.

  Orderlies ran in, not to exonerate me like in my fantasy, but to strap my new friend into four-point restraints and drag her into the quiet room. She kicked and foamed like a feral raccoon. Maybe I’d pass on that blow job after all. Welcome to the nut house. Enjoy your stay.

  That night I went to bed again, one day down, with no clue when this would end.

  The next few days were spent in and out of groups, engaging in a pathetic attempt at in-house schooling and hours upon hours of psychological testing.

  They gave me thousand-question personality tests and talk therapy sessions, role-playing, pills, and Rorschach inkblot tests, on which there were inky shapes of figures with fat bulges in their crotch and big busty chests, but if you said you saw she-males, you had “gender identity issues.”(No fair!)

  I got diagnosed. Drug addicted, oppositional defiant disorder. Conduct disorder. Clinically depressed. Narcissistic, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and “on his way to becoming a first-class sociopath.” First-class. I guess if you’re going to be evil, best to do it in style.

  There were meals and groups and games and meds and movies and levels and points and, of course, a padded cell. It’s not so bad in there. Cool and soft and a place to wonder how you landed yourself in a place like this. There were babbling teens with thick gauze wrapped around their wrists and abuse victims who couldn’t make it back and secret drug addicts and Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ? Yeah, even he was in there. Or at least some guy said that’s who he was.

  I could feel, from deep underneath my belly, this fire of anger bubbling and smoking and trying to get out. I had been getting high so much at this point that it had been awhile since I’d felt that. But with a two-week break courtesy of my 5150 and that terrible Dr. Susan, the topical anesthetic I’d been dabbing at my life was starting to wear off. I couldn’t believe what they had done to me, where they’d sent me. I hated those fucking adults so much, I could hardly stand it. This therapeutic environment hardly seemed therapeutic.

  I was so angry I couldn’t believe it. And I imagine I’d have been angrier still had I known then what I know now due to the advantage of my 20/20 hindsight goggles—that all of my therapists were right. I wasn’t angry, I was scared. The anger just served as a line of defense from the terror that it protected. Sure, I hated those adults but mostly because they represented something I wasn’t. In control. Stable. Powerful. I was none of those things. I stayed angry because what was right beneath that was too painful. I was scared. A scared little kid.

  Every day would end with a line of questioning from some doctor or another.

  “Are you ready to talk about your drug use or behavioral problems?”

  “I’d really love to talk to you about that, but unfortunately, I don’t have either of those problems. I really thank you for your concern, though.”

  “Do you think your sarcasm is helping you get out of here sooner?”

  I could feel his annoyance start to spill into his voice and crack his therapeutic veneer.

  “I don’t know, do you think the anger in your voice is helping you get through to me?” I grinned real big.

  “You little prick.” He’d lost it.

  There was something I found so phenomenally satisfying about the process of cracking a therapist’s professional armor. I’d look for a small chink, poke my little vitriolic prick into it, and start pumping it until they lost their shit and I ejaculated victory all over them. When they lost it, I’d won. I felt so powerless, so at the mercy of these square-ass adults so much of the time, that grabbing their power from them felt orgasmic.

  Unable to get me to conform to any sort of talk therapy, they began prescribing me medications, one at a time, willy-nilly, attempting to see if they could toss enough chemicals into my bloodstream to make me better. All they ever did was make me feel crazier. Zoloft, Ritalin, and Desipramine saturated my blood, scraped my bones, serrated my brain, and whirlpooled my focus. I swear to God, every second that I was force-fed psychotropics, I could feel them, almost physically, in my body, changing my chemistry, fucking my brain. I stayed on meds for years.

  I went to bed at 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve that year. Celebrating from in bed, behind thick Plexiglas windows and walls, and hospital corners, determined never to have to come here again. Every second in that place was a screaming reminder: YOU ARE NOT NORMAL.

  At the same time, I found a comfort in that place. There was one normal kid there named Nate. He was an older kid, at least sixteen, and I thought he was as cool as anyone I’d ever met. He and I would hang out in group making fun of the real crazies and talking about all the pot we were going to smoke when we got out. I wanted to impress him with tales of how much I got high, and it never occurred to me that anyone was listening. Not too bright, but I was pretty medicated at the time. He wasn’t just cool, he was tortured by his life like me. We used to knock hello to each other from across the walls of our kitty-cornered rooms at night. I’d knock “shave and a haircut,” and he’d answer back, “two bits.” I guess we did that just to let each other know that someone else was there who understood. One night I knocked and no one answered. Nate was gone. He’d been released. That night, I cried myself to sleep, hyperventilating, terrified, and I really didn’t know why.

  I remember I cried when I got out, too. How quickly you get institutionalized. A two-week stay and I was ready to move in. Ready to be a thirty-year vet with my ass hanging out of a hospital gown doing the Thorazine shuffle, yelling about how the pudding on Tuesdays has arsenic in it because the Libyans are trying to kill me. Fuck that. I got out and went back to the real insane asylum—Oakland Public Schools.

  “Yeah, that’s him. That kid was locked up in a mental hospital.”

  I could feel the other eighth graders’ eyes burning into me back at Claremont. Somehow, while I was away, this school that had been my world shifted on me. People were freaked out by me.

  “You think he’s dangerous?”

  You see, kids at Claremont were used to hearing about someone going to jail. That was par for the course in Oakland. But a mental hospital, that was something different. No one knew quite what it meant. Even though I’d already been at Claremont for years, when I returned from Ross Hospital, I returned, at least in their eyes, as something frightening.

  “I heard he ate a kid here last semester.”

  “I heard he thinks his dad is a walrus.”

  “I heard he’s Jewish. Like for real.”

  Of course, my real friends weren’t scared of me. Donny and the gang agreed with my assessment that my lockdown was mostly due to my mother’s insane overreactions. But kids at Claremont seemed genuinely freaked. I heard their whispers in the halls. It was embarrassing, but I have to admit, part of me loved it. The idea of them being scared of me, when I was so scared of everything, was delicious. There was one kid who wasn’t scared, though, Peter Cooke. A seventh grader with a big mouth.

  He saw me in the halls and just had to say something. “This fool is straight crazy! You ate somebody? You Hannibal Lecter or some shit?”

  “Are you talking about me eating your mother’s pussy? ’Cuz I kind of think she liked that,” I shot back, pun
chy from a day of glares and sideways comments.

  Peter swung back, this time below the belt. “At least my mom can fuckin’ hear me!”

  So I slapped him across the face as hard as I could. I had hoped that my dangerous cannibalistic reputation would put a stop to everything once I initiated contact. Almost no one wants to be eaten alive with their peers watching. Peter hadn’t gotten the memo, however, and he squared off on me, ready to scrap.

  Here’s how the fight went. I’d swing on Peter, he would dodge my fist, and then he would punch me in the face. Then, I would swing again and he would dodge and again he would… punch me in the face. This went on and on and on until the fight was broken up. Apparently Peter actually knew how to “fight.” The next day I had two black eyes and a week-long suspension.

  By the end of the week, though, I still had the traces of the black eyes. I looked like a little wounded raccoon. It had been a rough few weeks.

  “I’m not going back to school looking like this,” I told my mom flatly.

  “The hell you aren’t. I can’t stay home and watch you.”

  “I don’t need you to watch me. Just let me stay home.”

  My mother laughed so long and so loud that I began to be offended.

  “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do then?”

  My mother smiled at me with what was either compassion or sadistic delight—I couldn’t determine which. “Maybe I can help.”

  And then, like a true gangster bad boy, I let my mommy put makeup on my wounds. I looked like a geisha who had been beaten up and then started listening to hip hop. Finally I was satisfied with the job in a suspension of disbelief that I can only account to a drug haze.

  “No one will know, right?” I asked my mom, my tranny trainer.

  She cringed.

  I took my painted-lady face back to school with my pride low and my tail tucked firmly between my legs. When I returned, the whispers were louder, and they weren’t so much whispers anymore. My myth had been shattered.

  I took a deep breath and entered the halls of Claremont for what I didn’t know would be the last time ever.

  A kid walked right up to me and snickered. “Ha ha, you got your ass beat!”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I did, thanks for saying something. I had almost forgotten, so I appreciate the reminder.”

  This was gonna suck.

  All day, kids filled me in on even more of the details, as if I could ever forget any part of that humiliation.

  I knew I was going to be getting fucked with when I returned, and so far, all of this I could take. I thought I might just make it until a kid named Cornuts, perhaps the only kid in Claremont with a bigger mouth than mine, walked up to me and took his turn fucking with me. “Ha ha, you got your ass beat by a seventh gra—!”

  He stopped short, staring at me like he saw something very wrong. He leaned in close to me, his pupils contracting in a kind of confused semi-recognition.

  Horror.

  Terror filled my blood as my mind tried to will him from understanding what he was looking at. Time slowed to a psychedelic crawl. Cornuts’s head cocked to the side to allow the impossible information he was receiving to register to his whole brain. His eyes lit up. He got it. He knew.

  No… No… NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

  He spoke. “Is that makeup?”

  Cornuts turned to the gathering crowd, and screamed, “THIS NIGGA’S WEARING MAKEUP!!!!!”

  That was it.

  I never went back to Claremont again. I was a junior high school dropout. I was thirteen years old and I’d just gotten out of a mental institution and had dropped out of the eighth grade. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway if I hadn’t dropped out. My report card from Claremont that quarter arrived in the mail the next week. Truancy and sleeping in class meant I was going to flunk out if I hadn’t dropped out. Staying at Claremont was not an option. Another year there would have been some kind of fucked-up dystopian horror version of Groundhog Day, except Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow would instead have been Cornuts screaming, in slow motion:

  “THIIIS NIIIGA’S WEAAARRRING MAAAKEUUUP!!”

  My mother and grandmother were devastated. I absolutely refused to go back to Claremont. I absolutely refused.

  This refusal was a kind of emotional atomic bomb in my family.

  My brother had been a straight-A student since anyone could remember. He had gotten through Claremont an unscathed exemplary student and been offered a full scholarship to the best private college-prep high school in Oakland, where he had gone on to continue to get straight A’s and, I assume, participate in fancy-lad sodomy parties where they wiped the cum off each other’s chests with their paisley ascots.

  My mother had been struggling her way through school for years, determined to become a teacher for the deaf. She chased her master’s degree like it would define her and cancel out the bad decisions she’d made in the past.

  My grandfather, Dick the Dick, had been an English professor at a local community college. Lecturing on such topics as “Spousal Abuse: How to Do It!”

  My grandmother was a teacher in the Oakland Public School System. No doubt setting up the curriculum that would allow me to fail years later.

  Her mother was a teacher in Arizona at the turn of the century.

  Her mother’s mother was a teacher in Utah in the 1800s, teaching Mormons to be creepily friendly (yeah, that was her idea!).

  Her mother’s mother’s mother was responsible for teaching Abraham Lincoln as a youth. (Not true!)

  Her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was Jesus’s after-school tutor, pop-quizzing him on things like “How to avoid the pull of Satan in the desert” and “Why the Jews seem cool now, but you should never trust them.”

  Her mother’s mother’s… oh whatever, you get the picture. My family valued education.

  So my refusal to return to school and, more disturbingly, my refusal to care at all about the repercussions devastated them. They had no idea what to do.

  Luckily for everyone, good ol’ Dr. Patty Susan called my mother with a suggestion. Guess what? It was a shitty one!

  “Apparently, the doctors at Ross Hospital overheard him constantly bragging to his friend Nate about how often he drinks and gets high with his friends Donny and DJ and Jamie. I’m sending you some pamphlets about an outpatient rehabilitation center for adolescents in your area called New Bridge.”

  Only slightly lower on the “you are going nowhere” list than mentally ill junior high school dropout is mentally ill junior high school dropout in rehab. I was thirteen going on fourteen when I entered my first drug rehab. The New Bridge Foundation. A rehab for kids!

  New Bridge was run by ex-cons and former junkies who, not surprisingly, had an odd bedside manner. My first day at New Bridge, I was welcomed by a scary man named Clarence and his soliloquy about “just what the fuck we are doing here.”

  So… just what the fuck are we doing here? This is the New Bridge Foundation. We are a New Bridge back to life. Won’t you please walk across with us? In New Bridge there are some rules. This is a UA cup. You will piss in it in front of me twice a week. This is the part of my job I enjoy the most. I’m a fucking ex-con. I shot hundreds of thousands of dollars of dope and borax and HIV and hepatitis into my arms. I have veins of steel and blood of mercury. I have killed men with my bare hands and purchased men in prison for matchsticks. Don’t fuck with me or I will treat you like a pretty cell mate.

  We will also learn arts and crafts here. We will learn how to make stained glass and then we will talk about our feelings. Do not cross your arms as this is the universal sign for being closed off and defensive. If you are closed off and defensive I will punch you in the stomach as hard as I can.

  I’m not sure it went exactly like that, but that’s the best I can recall. The stained glass thing was real, though. For some odd reason, we would spend hours processing feelings and being yelled at and then retire to a basement to solder glass. I’m not sure what t
he therapeutic value of that was, but I do remember I soldered a glass effigy of a spray can and was quite pleased with myself.

  Every rehab has a familiar trope: “You need to get rid of your using friends. You need new playmates and new playgrounds and playthings.”

  The idea, of course, is that until a person leaves his drug-based social unit behind, he has little hope of staying sober.

  It’s logical and sensible. Unfortunately it’s also the most unrealistic request to make of a teenager who is getting high and fucking up because he hates literally everyone but his friends.

  My buddies were the only thing I had. Getting high with Donny and Joey and DJ and Jamie and Corey and all of those fuckups was the only thing in my life I enjoyed. And these fucking adult ex-cons were trying to scare me straight and telling me to get rid of them? And do what? Make fucking stained glass? Yeah, right. More to the point, I was, at this time, completely unconvinced I had a problem with drugs. What I had was a problem with adults having a problem with my drugs. To me, drugs were the solution to my problems. I used to feel alone, ashamed, and broken, remember? Drugs and my friends made those feelings go away. Anyway, I could quit whenever I wanted to, I just didn’t happen to want to.

  One of the good things about New Bridge was that they convinced my mother and grandmother to deprioritize getting me back into school, as they felt my “recovery” ought to come first. One of the bad things about New Bridge was that my “recovery” also got in the way of my “drug use.” Twice a week, on random days, I had to piss in a little cup next to Clarence’s greedy eyes. This forced me to figure out some creative ways to leave the world behind.

  Leotis, the semi-homeless buccaneer, had been to rehab a thousand times and told me what to expect from my time there. “Those fucking piss tests make it pretty much impossible to smoke weed for any considerable period of time without getting caught. You got be careful.”

  This was true. Pot, more than any other drug, stores itself in your system and builds up over time, the more you smoke. You might beat the test once or twice, but eventually you are going to get caught. That didn’t stop people from trying. No one, and I mean actually no one, at New Bridge was there attempting to be sober. We were all just trying to figure out how to beat piss tests.