by Moshe Kasher
Kids ate niacin and tried to flush their systems, we drank teas and cranberry juices and tried to wash the THC from our bloodstream with water. Once I drank a quart of vinegar, seared my insides, and vomited up acidic poison. But I passed my drug test!
The second time I got a pass-guaranteed tea, drank it, and failed. I eventually had to resort to just drinking and eating acid, snorting speed, sucking down nitrous, and eating mushrooms. Life in rehab is so tough.
I hated New Bridge, but I loved it, too. I met kids like me who were so absolutely unacceptable to everyone that they were shipped off to be fixed. Every day I’d take the bus up to New Bridge and they would try to force me to talk about my feelings. I didn’t care about that; I was used to being analyzed. But right beneath that callousness, I sensed that something was shifting here. I hadn’t left that mental hospital behind. I hadn’t left Claremont. I hadn’t left that chaos behind, it was still all over me. The suspicion of something being deeply wrong with me that had defined my childhood was being made manifest here in these groups. What kind of thirteen-year-old goes to rehab? I couldn’t have articulated this shame, so instead I did what I always did when I was overwhelmed—I acted like an asshole.
I would cross my arms and mock everyone. I talked so much shit the other kids told me to shut the fuck up. You know you are an asshole when other drug-addicted kids in rehab are telling you to chill out. But they liked me, too. I was saying what they were thinking.
FUCK THIS PLACE.
“Fuck this place!” I’d yell across the room during family group. My mother’s sign language interpreter struggled to keep up with the pace of my vitriol. Health insurance was a little more able to afford interpreters than Oakland Public Schools. The interpreter didn’t seem to be too grateful for the opportunity to interpret for a real-life teenage dickhead, though. I was pissed.
A new counselor, fresh from university, had started work that night at New Bridge and seemed intent on fucking with me.
“Hi, everyone, I’m Tim Hammock and I’ll be heading up the adolescent groups here from now on. I’m very excited about the new job and very excited about some of the changes I plan to implement here in the near future. We have some kids I really think want to change, some kids who want help. And we have some kids who are essentially just here to be road bumps on the highway to someone else’s recovery.”
Tim looked right at me. I blew him a kiss.
I had been caught going to a party with a kid at New Bridge named Mateo, who was old enough to drive, and another, much stupider boy in rehab named Thor.
Thor was named after the Norse god who wielded a mighty hammer, but our Thor seemed a lot more like he had been beaten in the head with an actual hammer.
The previous weekend, after we all had been drinking, Mateo and I dropped Thor off. Later that night, he took his dad’s car without permission and, when stopped at a red light, saw a police cruiser drive by. Even though they were driving right past him, not giving him a second look, Thor’s little fish brain was sure they were going to bust him. He floored it through the red light as fast as he could go. The cops probably high-fived at what an easy bust they’d made as they flipped their car around and threw the siren on.
Thor led them on a high-speed chase that ended with him driving the car directly into someone’s living room, crashing into their house, jumping out of the car, and continuing the chase on foot. Thor not smart.
Tim buckled down in his seat and leaned forward. “Thor has made some bad choices in the last week and he knows it. But after talking to him, I’m convinced he wants to change, and to prove it to us all, Thor has agreed to empty his contracts here, on group level.”
Emptying your contracts is essentially rehab doublespeak for snitching on all of your friends. As a way of avoiding the lengthy jail stint he was sure to be facing, Tim had convinced him to dish all of the dirt he knew about the other people in the rehab. This not only served as some kind of sick proof of sincerity, but also shook the group up and pulled all the secrets and dirt to the surface.
There was a lot of dirt. Gerald was gay, Claire kissed the space where Mateo’s dick and balls met in the bathroom during group, Pablo was flirting with the ex-whore receptionist, I went to that ecstasy party, and we were all getting high.
Thor’s confessional done and everyone’s secrets on the table, I yelled, “Fuck this place!” searing Tim with my glare. “And fuck you for using Thor’s stupid ass to bust us.”
Thor looked up from his stupid stupor. “Did you just call me stupid?”
My eyes darted to Thor’s hulking girth. Yikes. “Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”
Thor smiled and nodded, satisfied at this.
My mother, who was at every group, every counseling session, following closely as the interpreter translated my raging stream of obscenities, had become a kind of model rehab parent, by which I mean constantly involved and totally oblivious to the fact that her own dysfunctions were at least part of the problem. She was constantly humiliated by me. The tables had turned. I grew up humiliated by how she said things; now she was humiliated by the things I said.
“This place is a fucking joke! You bust us for stuff you know we are going to do anyway.” I looked right at Tim. “Do you just enjoy being a dick because you are an adult?”
Tim bristled at this and shot back, “Do you enjoy wasting everybody’s time here? Standing in the way of the kids who want to get better here?”
“Nobody wants to get better here! You dumb ass, can’t you see that? We are all fucking trapped here like little rats. We all want to go get high. Most of us already are!”
Oops. Too much information.
“Like who?” Tim asked, hungry.
“Well, like your mother and I smoked some rocks together before I bent her over the soldering equipment.” Maybe I’d gone too far.
Tim’s face flashed in anger, and I thought maybe he was going to hit me.
I loved pissing adults off.
My mom jumped in at this point, speaking through her interpreter, who was flustered by now, fucking up every fifth word. “Why don’t you hug some respect?” he’d ask.
“Have. Have some respect.” I was simultaneously mocking him, correcting him, interpreting for my mother, and participating in the group dialogue all at once. Everybody liked to talk about what a dick I was, but no one talked about the communication savant I was becoming.
My mom shot back, “Don’t blame Tim for catching you do something mistake.”
I sighed. “Doing something wrong. Not mistake. Wrong. Seriously, guy, you are making her sound like Frankenstein.”
“Right, sorry.” The flustered little interpreter hardly looked grateful for the public correcting I was helping him with.
“It’s time for you to take responsibility for your own acting.”
“Actions! IT’S FUCKING ACTIONS. Jesus. You”—I turned to the interpreter—“go back to interpreting school. Mom, leave me the fuck alone. The rest of you, go fuck yourselves.”
I was asked to leave New Bridge. Tim winked me a good-bye. What a prick.
Chapter 9
“Sorta Like a Psycho”
—RBL Posse
With my first stint at “recovery” over and the monkey of Claremont off my back, I thought I was headed into an amazing summer. Unfortunately my mother wasn’t as excited about things as I was.
I came home the next night and she was sitting at the table crying. When I walked in, she looked up at me and started sobbing. “What did I do to make you like this?” she signed.
Oh Jesus. This kind of conversation was starting to happen more and more, and I just couldn’t deal with it.
“I try so hard to help you change. I just keep believing that you’ll somehow change yourself and become better. But I’m just starting to think you are going to be like this forever. I wonder, did I make you like this? I wonder sometimes what you would be like if I wasn’t deaf.”
My mom looked up at me with t
his helplessness on her face that I’ll never forget. I remember it because I remember thinking, “She doesn’t get how helpless she really is. Nothing she can ever do or say is going to change me. I’m not changeable.” I went to her and sat down on the chair next to her. Took her hand. Tried to care. Tried to be human again. I looked at the books she had piled up around her on the kitchen table, The Difficult Child, Tough Love, Parenting a Child with ADD, dozens more books whose titles pointed to the theme of my household: I was broken and it was the only topic of conversation.
I hated my mom’s crying. I loved her. But never, not for one second, did it occur to me to change for her. I only thought how crazy she was for crying over me. Maybe first-class sociopath wasn’t so far off the mark after all.
We sat there for a while, silently, she trying to forgive herself, me trying to blame myself. Eventually I got up and left her to her tears. I couldn’t deal with that shit. I told myself I didn’t care, but the only thing I wanted to do in that moment was go get fucked up and obliterate myself, obliterate the memory of my mother’s tears.
I did just that.
I wanted out of those memories. Maybe that’s a kissing cousin of caring. I got high and forgot. I got high and silently fortified another paper-thin membrane wall around my feelings. Next time, next time I’d feel even less. That’s all I ever wanted. I didn’t want to feel good. I just wanted not to feel at all. With shit like this happening around you, who would want to feel it? I wanted out, and lucky me, at the bottom of every forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor was a trapdoor into oblivion. I leapt in and checked out.
The next day, my mom informed me of my summer plans. “Things are going to change. I can’t keep accepting you trying to control me and the family. Larry is going crazy, too.”
“Fuck Larry.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve been trying, but having you in the house kills the mood.”
I mimed vomiting all over the kitchen.
Poor Larry.
Larry was my mother’s long-term boyfriend. The poor bastard. He had not signed on for me and, unlike most stepparents, actually tried his damnedest to just mind his own business. I hardly made that possible.
Larry was a Ph.D. student of entomology at UC Berkeley. Nerdy, meek, and funny, he was a damn sight better than my mother’s ex-boyfriend, Ward, who used to enjoy nothing more than throwing us around the room to exert his authority.
Larry just sat back and read such nerd anthems as The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and the classic, The Principles of Pesticide Alternatives in the Controlling of Northern California Aphid Populations. My mother, after much searching, had found her beta male. He was content to sit back and wait to be bequeathed a little deaf pussy. And I couldn’t even let him do that.
Cool or not, he was still an adult, and thus, I hated him even if he was pretty nice. One day I pissed him off so bad by waking him up repeatedly with my screaming matches with my mom that he actually screamed, “FUCK YOU!” Larry grew some nuts! I was impressed.
At any rate, my insanity had pushed their relationship to the breaking point, and it definitely would have been snapped in two had I simply been allowed to loll about the house all day, no school, no rehab.
My mother had other plans.
“This is a contract. I am going to tell you the school options you have and then you are going to sign it and agree to go back to school this summer. If you don’t, I’m sending you away.”
Oakland Public Schools, at least at the time, had a couple of different routes they would send you on if you started fucking up. There were the continuation schools, which were like regular schools if someone had had a hard life and been sent to prison; and then there were the special ed schools, which were like regular schools if they had had a schizoid break and lost their minds.
Oakland Public Schools had had just about enough to do with me by the time I’d dropped out. Between the endless fighting, the constant class cutting, the incessant pot smoking, and the general malaise of horrific behavioral problems, I had been deemed more of a nuisance than anything else. I became a problem rather than a student, and a crack opened up beneath me large enough to fall into. I dropped out of junior high after Peter Cooke beat my ass, and that was, unbeknownst to me, another trapdoor that opened up behind me and dropped me down into a deeper level of insanity. I was lost in the system.
My mother and grandmother, probably due to the clinical, therapeutic lens through which they viewed the world, chose to send me down the path of the crazy, rather than the path of the criminal. But the truth is, at that age the difference is really marginal. Then again, maybe it is at any age.
I was informed that I had flunked eighth grade and that if I didn’t want to go back for another year of junior high, I needed to spend some time in a school that would help me close some of the academic credit gaps I had accrued. I agreed to what was to be one of the great bait-and-switch jobs of all time.
The next day, the short yellow bus came to pick me up and take me to school.
The short yellow bus is the lowest form of transportation possible for the adolescent. It’s the retard bus, the transport for kids who can’t walk, talk, or think. I saw that thing pull up in front of my house and I turned red. I looked at my mother like, “You have to be kidding me.”
She just signed, “Go,” and pointed to the bus. My self-esteem plummeted 50 points the second I climbed aboard and was greeted with thick-browed paste eaters waving a happy, “Hello, mister!” Fucking kill me now.
If this information got out to my friends, I would be a virgin for the rest of my life. The fucking short yellow bus! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get girls while taking the short yellow bus? It’s hard. You have to unbuckle their helmet. You have to convince the girl your penis is made of candy. You have to bribe the bus driver to look away. I’m kidding!
I had, without quite understanding what I was getting myself into, agreed to go to a school with a rather telling name: The Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster.
The second I arrived, I smelled something wrong. Thick security doors shot open and slid shut behind me, autolocking. Fortified entrances to schools, never a good sign.
I looked around. This was not a place that was set up like any school I’d ever been to. At each of the entry and exit points of the one main classroom were adults standing sentinel, their eyes scanning back and forth at the students, looking for something, anything, to happen. You got the feeling as soon as you stepped in that anything could happen. You can feel when you are in a room of people who cannot control themselves. You can taste the tinny chemical dump of the insane when you share the air with them. The teacher droned on as if this weren’t a cuckoo’s nest situation and she was just teaching a regular class, not these mad kids. Meanwhile, the kids were muttering to themselves and pulling their hair out. Students looked up at me with evil grimaces I interpreted to mean, not “I’ll whoop your ass, white boy,” which I was used to, but rather, “I will eat your ass after disemboweling you, white boy,” which was new to me.
People rocked back and forth or laughed at jokes that weren’t told. These kids were the people that made their fellow gang members uncomfortable with their level of violence.
I scanned the room looking for friendly faces. There were few. One kid, a guy named Ray, smiled at me. A gorilla of a boy, simply enormous, he was as good an ally as I could hope to have here. I smiled back.
When you become involved with clinical settings such as this, you grow adept at scanning a room and tasting its energy to see what role you are going to play in each situation. Some places, New Bridge, for example, I’d quickly become the loudmouth clown and get people to like me by making them laugh. Some places, I’d become quiet and try to be invisible. Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster was such a place. “Keep your fucking head down,” I told myself.
I took a seat. Within seconds, perhaps to impress the new kid
, a boy named Jonathan, who had been sharpening his pencil with fervor, lunged at another student and tried to jab the pencil into his neck. He barely had begun to swing when security swarmed upon him and pulled him, foaming and kicking, mad with rage, into the built-in padded cell at the back of the classroom. Four huge men, hardly even having an emotional response to the seizure of anger they were holding, tossed that kid into the “quiet room,” hard. Jonathan screamed fucking murder for the rest of the period. The funny thing about the quiet room is that by the time you end up in one, you are anything but quiet. Just another bullshit clinical term. It wasn’t a quiet room, it was a padded fucking cell. A padded cell right here in class! How convenient. Where the fuck was I?
I’ll tell you, there is nothing quite so distracting to a lecture on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria as the low, deep thudding of a severely emotionally disturbed youngster’s head repeatedly slamming against an inadequately padded cell door. I think that child was left behind.
After the attempted murder, a Mexican kid sitting next to me leaned in and hissed, “What you claimin’, fool?” He was essentially asking me what gang I was affiliated with. I puffed myself up and answered, “I’m from Oakland, man, we don’t gangbang!” The Mexican kid stared at me with dangerous eyes for a beat and then nodded his acceptance and turned away. I tried to look tough as I evacuated my bowels.
The bell rang for recess. Everyone, like a military operation—no, more like a prison routine—lined up in twos. I looked at the line; everyone was paired off, relationships having been already established.
Finally, the bell rang for recess. Kids opened their palms to show that they weren’t carrying anything as we were released, two by two, out onto the yard to essentially just get some air and walk laps around the yard. It was as if they were training us to be the prisoners they were sure we were to become.
