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

  Everyone had a yard buddy, except that huge guy Ray. He smiled and signaled that I should come stand with him.

  Uh-oh.

  So, let me get this straight, here at the Stab You in the Neck Academy, the place that is saturated with the worst of the worst baby Hannibal Lecters, is one boy twice the size of everyone else with no friends and a huge toothy grin beckoning me to stand with him?

  I’d never been raped and murdered, and it seemed totally unpleasant. I knew for sure that I was going to be killed like one of Lenny’s pets in Of Mice and Men, and I was trying to think of an excuse to scream like “My appendix!” or “My anal virginity!” when one of the Gestapo guards screamed at me, “Kasher, line up!”

  Yes, massa!

  I took a deep gulp and accepted my fate. Good-bye, cruel world!

  I feebly scooted over to Ray and smiled. He smiled back. He didn’t speak. I didn’t either. I whimpered.

  I could feel his big grin as he turned to me and smiled. Foreplay?

  He handed me a small notebook.

  I looked down and read, expecting a “We can do this gentle or we can do it rough” message.

  The note read “My name Ray. I’m Deaf.”

  Relief flooded my pores, I breathed again. I tossed my head back and laughed. Ray’s face scrunched up in anger, thinking I was laughing at him. He had cocked his fist back to end my life when I signed, “No no, don’t hit me! Ha ha, I’m just happy there is a deaf kid here!”

  Ray smiled big and shook my shoulder.

  “You deaf?” he signed to me, his eyes recognizing the fluency of my signing.

  “No, my mother, father deaf.”

  He smiled again.

  “Mother, father deaf” is how people like me establish ourselves with deaf people, the simple grammar a kind of entrée into deaf society. It’s a membership card into a very elite club. Regular hearing people can work all their lives in the deaf world, they can establish themselves as true allies to the deaf community, they can be loved by all, but they will always be “hearing” and “other.”

  But a kid with deaf parents, signing “mother, father deaf,” is instantly accepted as family. We aren’t hearing. We are the rare exception to the rule, hearing people trusted as insiders in a society that is inherently mistrustful of the hearing. Can you blame them? Envision how you would speak to a deaf person should you meet one in the street. Imagine your slow talking, buffoonish gesturing condescension… Now, would you want to talk to you?

  Anyway, this was a good thing. The biggest guy in this insane cesspool who was alone because no one knew how to talk to him was now my nuthouse school buddy. This was good news. Ray had been put in Seneca for a somewhat similar reason to me—no one could figure out what to do with him. He, like many deaf kids, was the only deaf student in a small school district, and being the only bruised fruit, he was left to wither on the vine. It wasn’t until he started smashing the other fruits that he got someone’s attention. He smashed enough to be diagnosed as “severely emotionally disturbed” and fell through a trapdoor of his own. Everyone around me was like that, trapped. Stuck in the greasy cogs of the system. Trapped in the first of what was absolutely certain to be an endless stream of institutions.

  Some of these kids were absolutely hopeless, no doubt, their heads fried by drugs or beatings or just biology playing a trick on them, flooding their brains with crazy-guy chemicals. But most were like me, kids who took a soft left turn at some point and didn’t even notice they were headed into no-man’s-land until they had gone so far that when they looked back, they realized they had no idea how to get back. They were trapped. They were lost. I lived among lost boys. I was lost, too.

  At Seneca, if we ever spoke out of turn, even one word, we had to stand, with our nose touching the wall, for five minutes. Standing there, with my nose touching the coolness of the concrete pylon in front of me, I thought, “If you weren’t severely emotionally disturbed when you got here, you sure would be by the time the bell rang to go home.”

  When it was time to go home, I said good-bye to Ray and got back on the fucking yellow bus. I slumped into my seat as a severely disabled wheelchair-bound passenger screamed in impotent agony at her broken body, her broken brain. Here was my new school life, prison bookended by horrors. All I had wanted was to feel okay. I felt anything but.

  I convinced my driver to drop me off a half block from my house, lest the neighborhood boys see me getting out of the short bus. I went home and smoked a joint and reassessed. I needed to get the FUCK out of that school, and the way I would do that was to be an absolute angel every second of every day. I’d never make a peep, I’d never say anything smart-assed. Be invisible.

  I never made a sound. I stayed in Ray’s pocket. Months passed. My severe emotional disturbance was arrested for the time being. Every day at Seneca I had the realization that if there was a Hell, this was where the young people who lived there went to school.

  I managed to straighten up enough to scramble and fill out a fevered application to a school called Maybeck High. It was known as a hippie school and a place that “creative thinkers” attended. I only hoped that “creative thinkers” meant “slightly severely emotionally disturbed.” Somehow, I pulled all of my intellectual resources into this application and managed to make something impressive.

  It was a private school and not something my family could afford, but I had a feeling that it was also the only place that would be willing to look at my inability to have graduated from junior high as a result of my being understimulated intellectually, rather than having been busy selling acid.

  I wrote an application that included a personal statement, a funny hard-luck story about my life that pulled at your heart-strings, not unlike the book you are currently reading.

  It worked. Somehow, not only did they let me in, but they worked out a deal with my mother where she could pay a paltry amount, I could work in their office twice a week, and we would be able to afford to keep me in that school. When I got the acceptance letter, I triumphantly showed it to my mother and grandmother as if it legitimized me finally as an intelligent human being rather than a psychological equation to be solved. My mother and grandmother beamed with pride. I felt like I’d been given a chance to start over, a clean slate.

  DJ, Donny, and I shared a joint in celebration that night.

  “Here’s to me never going back to that fucking Seneca Center.”

  I was feeling an unfamiliar feeling. Optimism?

  “I just have to make it in this school, man. I can’t fuck this up.” I meant it.

  Donny looked at me. “You’ll have to wait to get high till the weekends then.”

  I looked at him like he’d just spoken to me in Cantonese.

  “I’m serious, man. It’s something I figured out at Kaiser,” he said.

  Donny had also been sent away to a rehab recently, the Kaiser Chemical Dependency Program.

  “They said you could get high on the weekends? What the hell, your rehab sounds awesome!”

  “No, fool, they didn’t tell me that, it was something I figured out,” he continued. “The first things they tell you in rehab are the first two things you ain’t gonna do. Get rid of your homies and stop getting ripped up altogether? No one is gonna do that, but you gotta see through the message, though, man. At the rate we get high, there’s, like, no room for anything else. So, if you want to make it in school, just wait until Friday to get high and you should be all right.”

  It made a certain kind of sense. Odd, though, that I was getting this advice from Donny, the biggest weed smoker I knew.

  “But don’t you get high every day?”

  “Yeah, and have you noticed my school career going well?” Donny said flatly. It was a good point; he was in almost as much trouble as me and had recently been kicked out of a private Catholic school called St. Mary’s.

  I decided to take Donny’s suggestion seriously. If I wanted to pull myself out of this little nosedive I was in, I had cr
eated my chance. It didn’t make sense to me that I would be an educational failure. I knew that on some level I had a keen mind. The rest of my family was intelligent. I was the fucked-up one. The cause of all the problems. The “identified patient.” I would show everyone. I’d start this school and turn over a new leaf. Hardly a sober one but a sensible one at least. No getting high for me from Monday to Friday. I wanted this more than I remembered wanting anything.

  My first day, as if to confirm that I was in the right place, I saw that my math teacher had a hand deformity that left him with only his thumbs. So the moment I walked in, all I saw was his two big thumbs up. Waaaay up! I chose to take this as a positive omen.

  I loved it at Maybeck. I was being challenged for the first time since I could remember. There were pretty girls paying attention to me. There was a social scene that I could invite Donny and DJ into that made me valuable to them. It was a really nice four months.

  At around the one-month mark, I sat in the park after school and a kid named Jonah busted out a joint.

  “Let’s smoke,” he said.

  “Nah, I can’t. I can’t smoke during the week or I’m fucked. I’ll never do my homework if I smoke now.”

  “Oh, c’mon, smoke now, you’ll get your head straight by six and then do your homework. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Oh yeah! It made so much sense now. Smoke and then do the work! At six. Do the work at six. Work at six.

  Six. Six. Six. Six.

  666.

  I grabbed the joint.

  Oblivion.

  Of course at six, I was sitting in a bush with Donny smoking and drinking Maybeck away.

  Three months later, I was failing out of school and got officially thrown out after getting into a physical fight with our flamboyantly gay drama teacher. (Is there any other kind?)

  I’d been fired from the school production of Our Town for missing rehearsal repeatedly and mocking our teacher’s tremendously stereotypical “lithp.”

  I was teetering on academic probation and there seemed little hope of me making it to the end of the semester anyway. I was pulled from the production at the last minute and replaced with a clod from the grade above me. No charisma, no finesse, only enough manners to ingratiate himself with “Our Lady of the Stage.”

  On opening night, I barged into the theater, rooted my way backstage, determined to give the cast a good-luck hug. My flamboyant enemy met me instead.

  “Who thaid you could be back here?”

  “It’s said. I’m just here to wish the cast good luck.”

  “Thorry, no thanks.”

  “It’s sorry. You stuck the th, on thanks, though. C’mon, don’t be a dick, lemme just say hi.”

  I moved to scoot past him and realized that, lisp or no, he was a fucking man. He threw me up against the wall, slamming my head against it, waking me up.

  I started screaming every obscenity I knew at him. “You fat failure, get your FUCKING hands off of me. I’ll fucking slit your throat.”

  He smiled. “It’s pronounced thlit your throat.” He threw me outside onto the sidewalk, hard.

  “You couldn’t think of a more original high school production than Our Town?” I feebly whimpered into the concrete.

  I was kicked out the next day. I was baffled. I’d genuinely wanted to be at Maybeck. If you had offered me two doors, à la Let’s Make a Deal, and told me flat out, “Behind door number one is success at Maybeck, the ability to make it through school, and feel good about yourself. Behind door number two is… you guessed it: a bag of weed and a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor,” I would have laughed at the absurdity of the choice.

  No question I wanted Maybeck more than I wanted to get high. But, and I hardly realized it, I had already crossed over a little invisible line. Another Y in the road. I’d passed into the realm where desire had little or no effect on whether or not I drank and got high. I was heeding the beckoning of the reins-snapping monkey on my back, not engaging in a battle of will. I had lost control and I had no idea.

  I wanted to make it through that school more than I wanted to get high, of course I did; but here I was, high as fuck and booted from that school. I didn’t understand how I had managed to outrun my own mind.

  I kept going back to Maybeck for a few weeks. My new, exciting social life was there and the people I got high with were there, too. I didn’t want to let it go. Every day, I’d take the bus to Berkeley and show up at lunchtime with Donny in tow and we’d smoke with kids at The Grove, a eucalyptus forest by the UC Berkeley campus. We’d show up and just nonchalantly say hi and then sit down to get to the business of getting high.

  I kept showing up, unwilling to accept that I needed to move on from the fantasy of that school and accept what I was becoming: a fucking fourteen-year-old failure. I showed up one day alone, weeks after I’d been thrown out, and was rounding the bend into the grove when I heard my school friends talking about me. I crouched behind a bush and listened, shaking with shame, quaking with hurt.

  “It’s, like, kind of pathetic he just keeps showing up here, man. I mean, hello, you don’t go to school here anymore.”

  That same fucking kid Jonah who convinced me to get high at six was now judging me?

  A girl, Olivia, whom I’d had a crush on, laughed and agreed. “I mean, he never really did go to school here, did he? I mean, technically, yeah, but really he was just here to get high. We better smoke quick before he gets here and starts mooching off of us again.”

  They laughed. I could’ve cried.

  I didn’t go back to Maybeck after that.

  I took the bus back to Oakland, wondering what the hell I was going to do next. Wondering what the fuck was wrong with me, wondering if I’d ever be okay. Fuck it. I’d find a friend, a forty, and a way out of my brain.

  Donny and I drank Crazy Horse that night and laughed about everything. Everything was laughable. Fuck everything. Fuck the world.

  Jamie the liar had been missing for weeks. He popped up one day battered and bruised. He was speaking with a Mexican accent. This was new.

  “I been in prison, Holmes. I been into some real gangster shit. I’m a Norteno now.” Jamie pulled out a red rag and began waving it in front of us like a matador.

  The Nortenos are a Mexican street gang in Northern California that have a lasting rivalry with their Southern counterparts, the Surenos. Jamie’s claim to have gone to prison and joined the gang was, let’s just say, difficult to believe.

  Confounding our dubiousness was Jamie’s new friend, Miguel. Miguel was a terrifying-looking Mexican kid dressed head to toe in Norteno reds. He was the real thing. Miguel was a gangbanger from West Berkeley, a notorious Norteno neighborhood. He stood a foot taller than any of us and was huge, 250 pounds at least. He was tough and scary-looking, but there was also something quite off about him. Miguel muttered to himself and laughed at the end of his own sentences, having hardly made a joke. It was disconcerting but really, we were happy to have him around; when’s the next time we’d get to hang out with a real live Mexican gang-banger? Miguel looked a bit like a cartoon character of a sly weasel who was sent to prison and gained fifty pounds by lifting weights in the yard. When he looked at you, you couldn’t be sure you weren’t going to have to defend yourself from being eaten alive. Miguel was one of the more bizarre and off-balance people I had ever met, and Jamie loved to show him off like a prize buck he had shot while hunting.

  “Have you met my carnal, Miguel?” he’d say. “My true Norteno hermano!”

  We would all roll our eyes and then anxiously look to Miguel for some kind of reaction that would explain the social dynamic between the two of them. Had Jamie actually done something real? Or was this just some bizarre, long-form practical joke?

  Unfortunately all Miguel ever did was chuckle and shake his head at Jamie, as if he were the most adorable thing ever. Miguel eventually stopped being an exotic social anomaly and just became one of the boys. A real gangbanger! We were proud.

&
nbsp; I was prouder still of the day I fought Miguel. Normally, a six-foot-tall, 250-pound linebacker of a gangbanger would be enough to make me make up an excuse about how “fighting you isn’t worth it,” which is really just code for “having my face smashed in isn’t worth it because I really like my face.”

  But for some reason, that day I stood my ground. Maybe it was because Miguel had been hanging out with us so much he seemed just like one of the boys. We were sitting in his living room taking bong rips, trying to cash entire bowls full of Mexican schwag weed in one hit. Miguel finished his bowl. Donny finished his. I sucked in big and took as much as I could but started coughing halfway through. Everyone laughed at me, which was nothing new, but then Miguel started in on a little chant, “Faggot Ass Lungs! Woo!” He repeated this, over and over again, for most of an hour, until I’d had enough.

  “Faggot Ass Lungs! Woo!”

  “Dude, shut the fuck up. I’m not as used to finishing whole bowls of things like you. You don’t just finish bowls of weed, you look like you’ve polished off a few bowls of carnitas, too.”

  Miguel, not used to any of us talking back to him, looked puzzled and pissed. “Fool, I’ll slap the shit out of you.”

  I snapped, “I don’t give a fuck. Go ahead and do it!”

  Wait, what was I saying? I did give a fuck. I gave a fuck very much.

  “Wussup then, you little white bitch, let’s step outside.”

  Miguel got up and started walking outside, ready to fuck me up.

  Jamie, DJ, and Joey all looked at me like I was crazy. But I got up. Fuck it.

  Once outside, I grabbed a brick from the front yard of Miguel’s neighbor’s lawn, presumably to crack Miguel in the face with. I don’t know exactly how I planned to leap up and do that but it never mattered.

  Miguel looked at me and shouted, “Why don’t you drop that fuckin brick and fight me man-to-man, you little white faggot-ass-lunged bitch?”

  It hardly seemed fair, as I looked more like a kid Miguel was babysitting than a man when I stood next to him, but nonetheless, I dropped the brick and rushed him, screaming.