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

  I thought fast in what seemed like a pretty good lie in the moment.

  “I…”

  I remembered the radio from last night.

  “I fixed the radio!”

  “What?” my grandmother asked, confused.

  “Yeah!” I yelled, gaining confidence. “I fixed the radio. I have a buddy who does that kind of repair work, and so I wheeled the bug down to his shop and fixed the radio to surprise Mom and Larry when they get back. Yep. That’s where the car is now. The radio-fixing shop.”

  A pretty good, pretty high-grade lie. Jamie would have been proud.

  “You pushed the car?” My grandmother looked dubious.

  “Well, yeah! I didn’t drive. I don’t have a license. That’s illegal! Duh.”

  “You pushed the car down the street to repair the radio?”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Why didn’t she believe me? I was lying, but there was no way for her to know that.

  “To repair the radio for your deaf mother.”

  I paused.

  “You know, I totally didn’t think of that! Ha ha!”

  My grandmother looked less amused.

  Just then I heard the car pull back into the driveway. Saved!

  “Well, there’s the mechanic now, delivering the car!”

  We walked downstairs together, me covered in vomit, my grandmother covered in doubt. Joey crawled out of the driver’s seat with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hands.

  “Hey, thanks for fixing the radio, champ!”

  “Yeah.” Joey stared at me, confused. “Anytime… champ.”

  I sat down in the driver’s seat and looked up at my grandmother with a confident smile. “Here we go.”

  I smiled, flipped on the radio.

  Silence.

  Somehow the radio had rebroken itself.

  I felt God’s hands snatch away from me. I crashed hard onto the sand. Apparently God, much like everyone else, was tired of my shit. Once again, I was fucked.

  Chapter 10

  “Illegal Business”

  —Mac Mall

  “Get out of bed!” My mom snatched the covers off me for the fourth time that morning. “Get up, get up, get up!”

  My mother and Larry were back from vacation, and after a debriefing from my grandmother, my mother stormed into my room determined to get to the bottom of the story. The problem was, I was crashed out after having stayed up for days.

  My mother was constantly experimenting with creative ways of getting me out of bed. She would grab my feet and tickle-torture me, pour ice water on my head, snatch the covers off me with little reverence for the morning erection she might be uncovering.

  “You can’t just sleep forever. You have to get up!” my mom screamed at me as I lunged for the covers, falling out of the bed.

  “Look at you,” she signed, disgusted. “This isn’t working. You are going to have to get back in school if you want to keep living here.”

  “Don’t you remember? I need to focus on my recovery instead.” I tried to look sincere.

  “What recovery? You got kicked out of New Bridge months ago.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been going to meetings and staying clean the last few months,” I lied.

  “You have?” My mom looked so hopeful, it was sad.

  “Of course,” I said, pulling the covers over my legs. “I learned a lot in New Bridge. I’m pretty hurt you didn’t notice.”

  My mom’s deepest hopes manipulated, she crumbled. “I’m really sorry. I had no idea you were taking sobriety so seriously.”

  “I’m super serious. Jeez.” Just then I had an awesome idea, evil but awesome. “In fact, I’m on the ninth step right now.”

  My mom looked impressed. “That’s great! What happens in the ninth step?”

  “You don’t know? How seriously are you taking my sobriety?” I stared deeply at her, accusing her of not caring enough about me, her deepest fear. “The ninth step is the most important step of all. It’s where we make amends to people we have harmed through our drinking and drug use.”

  My mom looked so sincerely pleased that it was hard to do what I knew I had to do next.

  “Yeah, it’s a pretty big deal. And well, here’s the thing… I owe some people money. People I stole from and some people whose property I damaged. You know I don’t have a job, so…”

  My mom looked at me, pride in her eyes, naïveté and codependency hemorrhaging from her every pore like an emotional Ebola virus, covering her reality sensors, making her insane with the desire to help. She smiled. “How much do you need?”

  I grabbed the money and jumped on my bike, went to Terry Candle’s house, and we sucked that amends money into our lungs.

  I have been to many twelve-step meetings, but I’ve yet to meet another addict who spent his amends money on drugs. I’m still kinda proud.

  I figured out ways to hustle money daily. Being a fifteen-year-old drug addict is a constant job of scraping and stealing enough money to get high. No one’s allowance is big enough to cover the bill of addiction. I had no job, I had no stuff, I had only my ingenuity and a sociopathic bent.

  My house became like a puzzle. How to break into places I didn’t belong and then how to take things I didn’t own. I squinted at locks for hours, trying to see them from different angles that I could break into. A kitchen knife became a screwdriver. A doorstop became a wedge to pry open a door. I pried freedom from my house against its will. I scaled the walls on the outside of my own house and ran out the backdoor with a handful of cash as the police banged on my front door, looking for a cat burglar that oddly resembled the kid who lived inside.

  I started, little by little, taking stuff around the house and selling it for drugs.

  I’d strip the house of stuff I thought wouldn’t be missed. A little thing here or there.

  I’d grab big atlases from the bookshelves and nice hardcover books like The Power of Myth and A Guide to Western Civilization and take them to the bookstore and sell them.

  I’d grab stacks of CDs from Larry’s CD collection and take them to Amoeba Records to sell. What a responsible business that place was. They saw a fifteen-year-old blurry-eyed kid with his pants sagging and Fila cap cocked to the side selling a handful of Wagner and Vivaldi CDs and never even raised an eyebrow.

  I guess they just figured I was more into Vivaldi’s later work.

  No one asked questions, they just took the goods and gave me money. I took that money to the dope spot and they gave me the real goods. The only ones who lost out were my parents. I took money and credit cards, I took CDs and books, I sold my own clothing and my grandmother’s collections. Her jewelry disappeared. When I needed cigarettes, I stole my mother’s food stamps and walked to Safeway, snagged three packs, and brought them to the back of the store where the coffee grinder was. I’d drop the packs into a one-pound coffee bag and fill it with arabica beans, covering my plunder. I’d then walk to the front of the store confidently and plunk down the beans.

  “Just the coffee then?” the clerk would ask me, suspicion dripping from her eyes.

  “Yep! Just that!” I’d reply cheerfully.

  “Cinnamon hazelnut coffee and nothing else? At one o’clock in the morning?” She knew something was wrong but couldn’t place it.

  “What can I say… I’m a hazel-NUT!” I smiled big.

  I’d drop the food stamps and try to look like a hard-luck case.

  When I needed booze, I’d walk directly to the hard liquor aisle and grab a bottle. It would be in my pants before I had a chance to hesitate and before anyone had a chance to notice me. I stole hundreds of bottles of booze. Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin had a bumpy bottle that gripped my waistline and prevented the bottle from slipping out, so I mostly trafficked in that. I’d also grab Maker’s Mark bourbon, which came with a hand-melted wax topper that I could pull out a bit and rest on my belt for grip, ensuring that it wouldn’t slide down my pant leg and crash onto the floor, revealing my crime, wasting my medicine.
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  I got good at it. It became like an art. I’d make it in and out of the grocery store in less than five minutes. No one saw me coming.

  As soon as the bottle’s coolness was against my waist, I’d glide up to the front counter and ask an inane question that would give me an excuse to walk right out again.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, pudgy and innocent. “Do you guys have birdcages?”

  Now, I knew that no Safeway in Oakland, or indeed in history, had a birdcage for sale. But they didn’t know I knew this.

  “No, sweetie, we don’t carry those.” The poor clerk tried to soften the blow.

  “Aw, man! I just found an injured pigeon and wanted a home for it. Well, wish me luck!”

  “Good luck, sweetie.” She’d stare after me as if I were a boy hero as I left, limping, frightened that the bottle would fall out.

  “And he’s got a limp, too,” she’d likely think. “That poor, sweet crippled child.”

  “God bless us!” I’d turn back and yell. “God bless us every one!”

  My friends were impressed with my thievery, but they manipulated it, too. They knew that I was desperate for their approval, and they used that to get themselves free booze.

  “C’mon, man, get us some drink!” Joey would yell at me. “I’d do it myself, but you’re just so good at it!”

  “Aw, I’m all right,” I’d mutter, pride painting my face red.

  “All right? You’re the best! No one does it like you!” Joey was really leaning into this role, pouring it on. I knew what he was doing, but I chose to ignore it.

  “Yeah, all right, Joey, what do you want?”

  “Bailey’s Irish Cream.” Joey smiled.

  “Irish Cream? Ugh. Why waste your time?”

  “Because, motherfucker, that’s what I want. I’m getting it for a bitch. Don’t fuckin’ ask questions.” Joey cocked his fist back like he was gonna sock me.

  Embarrassed and too scared of Joey to tell him to go fuck himself, I just gulped, tightened my pants, and went into Safeway. This wasn’t right, of course. Bailey’s, besides being a drink for gay leprechauns, had a fat bulky bottle that just didn’t work for my needs. The edges were too smooth, the sides were too oblong. I never stole Bailey’s. I stopped and thought about it. Another mistake. I never stopped. A fifteen-year-old kid staring thoughtfully at stacks of bottles he wasn’t even close to old enough to purchase was a suspicious sight. Fuck it. Ride or die. I grabbed the bottle and pushed it into my belt and rested it precariously on my waist and bolted for the door.

  Waiting for me at the exit of the store was a huge black man wearing street clothes, holding a badge.

  “Hey, pal, you take something that wasn’t yours?” Just like that he grabbed me, flipped me around, and snatched the bottle from my waist.

  My friends were all there, waiting for the booze, and as soon as the cop grabbed me, they turned and started walking away.

  “Get off of me!” I yelled, struggling to get away.

  “Look at your friends, huh? Look at them walk away. Real nice guys.”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself,” I snarled, pissed. “What are they supposed to do? Rush us and try to spring me free?”

  “Something other than just walk way, I guess,” he said, a little sad, a little mad.

  The cop walked me back into a little room and my grandma got another “Come pick up your kid” call. She showed up, wringing her hands, looking ashamed, rescuing me like she and my mother always did.

  The guy just shook his head at me when he saw her. “I should have just sent your ass to jail.”

  I’d never been caught stealing before and it stung. But what stung more was that I couldn’t get that security guy’s words out of my ears. They rang over and over. “Look at them walk away… Look at them walk away.”

  My grandmother drove me home in silence but my head was loud with that ringing. Look at them walk away.

  Another disappointment. Another failure. My mother’s suspicions that something was terribly wrong with me had been, at this point, fully confirmed. Zeidi’s prophecy that I would become a great holy man had been proven false. I was an utter failure. Everyone knew it. Everyone but me.

  I was convinced that I was the victim of a persecution campaign. I mostly lamented the idiocy of the people around me. If they would just get off my back, if they would just stop trying to find things that I had done wrong, I would be free and okay.

  I knew in some dull way, at the base of my brain, that I wasn’t meant for this. I was smart, I knew that, and I looked at my brother and his successes as a sort of ripe fruit dangling from a branch just out of my reach. I could see it, understand how fresh and perfect it would taste, bursting onto my dried-out-bone leather tongue, but somehow, I was powerless to grab it.

  “If you’d just stop fucking up, you could get high if you wanted. I get high but I never get into the shit you do.” My brother had begun a familiar speech about getting high responsibly. Hardly a resonant message to a fourteen-year-old.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said to him. “No one ever expects you to fuck up so no one ever looks.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said, “but you fuck up so much no one could manage to not look. You’re waving a flag in their faces like, ‘Look! Over here! Bust me!’ ”

  What a logical idiot my brother was. In so many ways, my brother was the only real partner in the world I had. He was the only person in the world who had been through the ridiculous insanity of my family and lived to tell the tale. And yet, he wasn’t just living, he was thriving. It was like looking at the mirror and the reflection coming back smarter and better-looking than you. David seemed to have it together and he just wasn’t the asshole I was. So how could I blame my family or my circumstances for any of my problems? He even offered to give up getting loaded for me.

  “Look,” he said, “would it help if I quit, too? We could quit together. I’ll stop smoking weed and drinking and you can, too, and we can, like, do it together? Like, as brothers! What do you think?”

  “I think my suspicions of your hidden homosexuality have been confirmed.”

  “All right, man, make jokes. It doesn’t bother me. I’m not the one entering my second year as a high school freshman. I’m not the one they are installing locks on the windows for.”

  This was true. Dead-bolt locks were being drilled into the windows all through the house. A fire hazard for sure, but Tough Love didn’t concern itself with such details. Maybe if I burned to death in a fire, I’d finally learn my lesson. As the flames licked at my feet and the soles of my shoes melted, I’d scream in anguish, “You guys were right! I’m the creator of chaos in the family! I’ll chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaange! What a world! What a world!”

  After I got busted with the car gone and with the evidence of my lost weekend everywhere in the house and my grandmother shrieking about my shoplifting adventures, my mother again attempted to buckle down.

  “Things are going to change around here,” my mom said, kicking me awake and affecting the no-nonsense air of a deaf drill instructor.

  Part of the problem with getting tough all of a sudden after years of being a codependent mess is the deep groove of pattern that you have carved yourself into. I knew my mother’s ways and I could tell this newfound sternness was some new affectation. I could count on her to be crazy but never tough.

  “Okay, so is this some new thing you are doing? This tough-guy act?” I laughed.

  “This is the new way we are going to live. I’m installing locks on every door in the house, on every window, too. No more sneaking around stealing things, I’m putting my foot down.”

  Of course, the problem with my mom keeping me from going into her room as a means of stopping me from stealing was that she was quite an absentminded lady. Sure, she’d lock the windows and her bedroom, but she’d also leave her purse lying around, its gaping mouth wide open as if inviting me to take a bit, just enough to feel okay. My mother was broke and I knew it was wrong on some lev
el, but I simply had no choice.

  I took full advantage of her absentmindedness, knowing that she’d never quite remember exactly how much money she had in her purse on any given day. I took a twenty here, a twenty there, and then I’d bring her her purse and admonish her for leaving it lying around.

  “You really need to be more careful with your purse. It’s okay now that we are at home, but if you leave it around in public, you are gonna get ripped off.”

  She’d sign, “I know,” and I’d jump on my bike and ride to Monk’s house to buy a twenty sack.

  Stealing from your deaf, welfare-assisted mother is like killing a man. Well, I imagine it is anyway. The first time you do it, you feel sick and wonder what’s happened to you. Then, very quickly it changes from a shameful secret to just what you need to do. It’s just a source of income. Then you move on to stealing from your grandmother.

  I know what you’re thinking. That’s sick. And I know it. And I knew it then. But the moment you get desperate enough to steal from your mother’s purse is the same moment that you simply don’t have any choice in the matter. I’ve known grown men who have robbed their parents blind. No one’s ever high-fived about it. Everyone who is like that wishes they weren’t. You just have a little beastly monkey on you snapping the reins, saying, “Do it.” Denying the monkey is not an option. At least you know your mother will still love you afterward. You have to feed the monkey.

  Over the course of weeks I started to see the changes in the house, though. I couldn’t open my window. I was on house arrest. I couldn’t enter any rooms in the house save my bedroom and the bathroom and kitchen. Valuables were stockpiled in locked rooms, but somehow I managed to break in, steal them, and sell them to pawnshops.

  I stole colossally. I stole damnably. I stole like an animal. Oh wait, animals don’t steal. I stole like an asshole. Yeah, like an asshole. There were times I felt like a terrible person, but mostly, I just did what I had to do. I’d push my feelings about what I was doing to the side and replace them with the relief that comes from knowing your moment of discomfort is about to end. The moment I even had the money in my pocket was the moment that my relief began. It wasn’t just the high itself, but the knowledge that the high was coming. That I held in my pocket the means through which to make myself okay. I had control. I, the most powerless person I knew, had power. In the recovery world a familiar admonishment is to “live in the moment.” No one lives more in the moment than an active drug addict. I was always willing to accept a catastrophe that would be taking place in some abstract future for a fleeting moment of pleasure that could occur right now. The future had no meaning to me. I had no future anyway. Everyone told me that. Even my mother had adjusted her message from “Get your shit together and you can do whatever you want in life,” to “Get your shit together or you’ll never do anything in life,” to “Get a life.”