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

  “Jim, is this normal?” I asked, trying desperately not to sound too policey.

  “Man, I don’t know. No one’s ever taken this much at once. This was kind of an experiment.” Jim looked scared.

  I couldn’t believe this shit. “An experiment? You don’t experiment with people, you idiot!” Now normally, boldness was not my strong suit unless I was surrounded by friends who were bigger and stronger than me, but this fucking yahoo was going to kill my friend and that gave me courage.

  Jim jumped up in my face and snarled, “What the fuck are you going to do about it, fatso?”

  “It’s not what I’m going to do about it, you suburban white boy, it’s what half of North Oakland is going to do to you if you fucked Donny up.”

  Jim and I had squared off, ready to box, when, as if to break the tension, Donny suddenly stood up, stared at the two of us, and then vomited bright green bile all over the sidewalk as everyone in the Edible Complex Cafe stared in horror.

  Donny staggered and then grabbed me and clung to my shoulder. Steadying himself, he whispered, “Don’t let anyone see me throw up.”

  I was confused. “Um, that just happened, like in the past, and you also did it in front of a huge plate-glass window with coffee drinkers and tons of chicks watching, so I’m not sure how much I can do to help hide that.”

  Donny looked at me quizzically and asked, “Wait, who are you?”

  I was now very concerned.

  “Jim, what do we…” I looked around but Jim had determined his chemical experiment a failure and slunk off into the night, leaving me to deal with a best friend who didn’t know who I was.

  “You don’t recognize me?” I asked, a bit confused about just what a situation like this called for.

  “Man, I don’t recognize anything.” Donny’s pupils were so dilated at this point he looked like a frightened lemur.

  He started batting at things again and then suddenly just stopped and stared off into space like he was Commander Data and he had been manually shut down (nerd joke!). I had no idea what to do.

  “You sit right here. I’ll be right back.” I ran inside to try to call Joey and ask him what I should do.

  Joey picked up the phone, mad. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Donny’s on some weird fucked-up drug, man, he’s trippin’. I don’t know what to do, he’s like freaking out right now.”

  “Why the fuck are you calling me about this shit?” Joey snarled.

  Joey had become increasingly unstable in recent months as coke had flooded into our social group. He’d been snorting for days. Perhaps it was a mistake to have called him.

  “Don’t be fucking calling me at home with this shit,” Joey spat at me.

  “Okay, man, okay. Sorry to bug you.” Images of Sean The Bomb unconscious on the playground flashed in my mind.

  “Where the fuck is Donny now?”

  “He’s sitting outside batting at invisible mosquitoes, I think.”

  “Well, go get him, you fucking idiot! Don’t leave him by himself.” Joey hung up the phone with a clang.

  I walked back outside with no more information than when I had entered other than the fact that I now knew I was an idiot.

  When I arrived at the spot where I had left Donny, the rumors of my idiocy were confirmed. Donny was gone.

  Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!

  I had lost my best friend who was so out of touch, he didn’t even know I was his best friend. This didn’t bode well.

  I spent the next four hours frantically searching the streets of Oakland calling out his name. I never found him, though. Years later, after his brain had re-formed itself, he told me what happened, as best as he could piece it together:

  Shit, I disappeared. When I lost track of you, I just started, like, wandering. I was in and out of the world, in and out of touch, man. I don’t know exactly what happened but I went over to Corey and DJ’s to try and get straight. I don’t remember much but Corey told me he knew something was wrong with me. I was peeling wallpaper off of his walls and talking to my hands and shit. We smoked a joint to try and chill but then his mom came home and fucked everything up. Parents were always fucking things up back then, huh? It’s like, all I ever wanted, all I ever wanted back then was to just get them off of my back and be able to hang out with my friends. It’s funny, right? I mean it was such a small thing, just kickin’ it with your homies, but it was the only thing I wanted. Parents were always ruining everything. So anyway Corey’s mama came home and started being weird about me, asking like “what’s wrong with him” and shit. Corey told me I had to leave. At that point I was just a puddle. I didn’t even know who I was. I ended up back at my house somehow. Shit, I’d lost my identity but retained my address. Funny what you are able to hold on to, huh?

  I went into my room and locked it and shut the lights off. I was determined to just let it pass in the dark, but my mom insisted on talking to me, trying to figure out what I was up to. She was like banging on the door like, “Open this shit up! Let me in!” I felt like it was the devil banging on the door into my soul. Fuck that. I cracked the locks open on the window and jumped down a story and a half onto the sidewalk and ran over to Terry Candle’s place. At this point, I’m like a full on, demon possession level madman. Terry was there and his mom, too, but you know she was chill and we smoked some weed and they plopped me down onto the couch in front of the Super Nintendo and I played F-Zero for a couple hours. Somehow that grounded me. I calmed down. I came back into my body and my mind. But I guess Terry’s mom called mine because I heard a fuckin’, like, police knock on the door and my mom barged into the living room. I tried to bolt out the back door but Sheriff John was there and he grabbed me, bear hugged me so I was trapped. My mom starts screaming at me, “You’re high! What are you on?!? What are you on?!?” Which is like the worst thing ever to scream at a dude who’s freaking out because he’s high. I kept muttering something about something slipped in my drink. Is that funny? Even in the middle of a fucking code red psychedelic freakout, I was still worried about getting busted. Of course, I start losing my shit again with the fuckin’ KGB interrogation going on. They start saying, “We are headed to the ER to see a doctor,” and now I really start flipping out. I almost tore my hair out. Somehow I convinced them to take me home and my mom just sat there with me, holding me, telling me it was going to be okay for like twelve hours. It took that long for me to start believing her. Took me months to feel normal. Actually, scratch that. I never felt quite normal again.

  I caught up to Donny, like, two days later, having heard nothing from him and fearing him dead. When I saw him, he looked changed, like Moses stumbling back from Mount Sinai or, more accurately, like a fourteen-year-old boy who took fifty-two hits of acid. That shit was scary. For him and for me. But it was nothing compared to what happened next. Even fifty-two hits wasn’t as big of a mind fuck as that.

  Chapter 12

  “Why Do We Live This Way?”

  —Geto Boys

  The mind fuck began with the ultimate Piedmont prize—a girl to drive us wherever we wanted to go. We were still all too young to drive, so DJ and Corey adopted a semi-permanent chauffeur in a Nissan Maxima. A nice Chinese girl from Piedmont who wanted desperately to be a bad black girl from Oakland. Her name was Tina Yee.

  Finding a girl from a town like that to come slum it in Oakland was advantageous to us and exciting to her. If you could find a lady friend with a driver’s license and a car, you could introduce the wonders of new social vistas into the group. All of a sudden we were driving to San Francisco to parties, and trips to the East Oakland dope spots were easy in-and-out affairs.

  Tina was happy to do it, too. Since she was not quite ready to fully commit to having a real Oakland boyfriend—someone scary to drive her around East 14th and show her life in the streets—my friends and I provided Tina with a kind of walk-on-the-wild-side middle ground, a social safari where a rich girl could make her existence seem grittier and
more extreme without having to actually experience true dangers. In exchange for that escape from the dreary doldrums of Piedmont life, Tina gave us rides and brought us girls to hang out with.

  Tina had a friend named Leah Krauss, who, I suppose you could say, was “fucking nuts.” Leah had been in and out of mental institutions since she was a little girl and had the kind of skittish, hypersexual, hyperfrantic energy of a girl who had been exposed to horrors.

  There were rumors that she had been thrown out of school the previous year for hurling a pair of scissors at her teacher like a throwing knife. My kinda girl, right? Maybe due to my shame about my own mental health, though, I kept a sort of wide berth and left her to the other guys. Not that that made a difference.

  Leah was constantly throwing out suggestive comments, the kind that keep fifteen-year-old boys’ attention.

  “I sucked twelve dudes off in a day once,” she’d throw out into the group as we sat around drinking forties. All of us shot malt liquor out of our mouths at once like an intricate statue in an Italian fountain. Leah grinned at the reaction she got and happily accepted as Corey scooted closer to her and offered her a joint.

  “I really think I can fuck that Leah chick,” Corey said one day, so excited that we were all made uncomfortable by the erection he undoubtedly had in his pants.

  “Congrats,” I said. “Your mother must be very proud.”

  DJ, having the same mother as Corey, and being unable to understand the nuances of my joke, punched me in the chest yelling, “Cave Chest! Don’t talk about my mama!”

  Cave Chest was a charming game that DJ liked to play. The rules were simple—DJ yelled “Cave Chest!” and punched you in the chest. Presumably to cave your chest in. No one seemed to enjoy this game but DJ.

  “I’m a virgin,” Corey declared flatly with a humility that was rare for a teenage boy virgin. Corey began a rousing speech that would have made any army grab their rifles and follow him into battle. It went something like this:

  “I really think I could finally make this happen. Now I don’t know if I can do it alone, but with your help, I hope to take advantage of this crazy girl and to, once and for all, be able to declare myself a non-virgin. It won’t be easy. But I can’t think of a group of guys I’d rather engage in a sad attempt to fuck a mentally ill girl with!”

  As he said this, a Union drummer boy played the fife and drum. We all shed a tear at his courageous speech. We saluted. Of course we would help.

  A plan was laid for Corey to get laid. We would all gather back at our safe place, the monastery, and drink and get high with the two girls. Corey, at some point, would pull Leah off to the side and make himself a man.

  In typical fashion, by the time that night arrived, the rest of us had busied ourselves with smoking and drinking so much that, by sundown, we were completely tapped.

  “Are you guys fucking kidding me?” Corey asked, pissed. “How am I supposed to get with this bitch if I don’t have anything to get her high with?”

  This alone ought to have been a sign that perhaps this was not a true love connection, but since that was hardly the point, we ignored it.

  “Sorry, dog.” Donny stepped up to take the blame for it. “We just forgot.”

  I just stayed silent, knowing anything I said pushed me closer to Cave Chest.

  “Well, shit, what am I supposed to do now?” Corey was desperate.

  It was seven twenty, and the girls were supposed to arrive any second.

  “I’ll go back to my house and grab a couple Ritalin pills,” Donny volunteered.

  Donny had been taking Ritalin to treat the attention deficit disorder he had been diagnosed with during the great ADD epidemic of the early nineties. At that time, essentially any problem you had would be blamed on ADD, and you would be given speed to calm you down, in a sort of Zen opposite-logic pharmacological experiment. No one ever seemed to connect the dots that the very kids who would display the symptoms of ADD were the ones who loved to crush up speed pills and snort them. Donny’s parents never quite noticed the fervor with which Donny treated his ADD.

  That was really what was going on much of the time back then. People willfully ignored things that were right before their faces screaming, “PROBLEM!” Except my mother, of course. She noticed everything, and when there was nothing to notice, she simply imagined problems. I never got away with shit. Well, maybe I got away with a lot, but I also got busted more than any of my friends. I still can’t figure out if it was because I was more of a badass than my friends or if it’s because my mother was the biggest badass of us all. It might seem like I got away with murder, but my mother was on me, always catching me in some lie, busting me for some infraction. I spent my life being grounded. Not that it made a difference.

  Donny and I ran back to his place to snag a couple pills and to fabricate some fake buds. Such good friends we were. There was no weed to waste on this chick but we’d certainly be willing to create the illusion for Corey.

  We’d done this before, usually when we were down on our luck and low on cash. If my mother’s purse was ever locked up in such a way that I couldn’t get to it, we could make some fake bud and sell it to some marks from the suburbs. It took a sort of taxidermist artistry to make this without arousing suspicion. The idea was for something so realistic-looking that you’d be long gone before they figured out it was fake. We’d gotten quite good at it.

  Donny busted out a variety of herbs from the kitchen cabinets and we got to work. I took Elmer’s Glue and squeezed a dime-sized puddle into my palm. This reminded me of my phone sex days.

  Donny sprinkled thyme and oregano into my palm and I rolled us up a fake bud. With the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, Donny then stabbed the top of the bud with the stripped-down center vein of a dried leaf, providing it with a dry green stem. Beautiful. Then the final touch, while it was still sticky from the glue, we snipped little pieces of purple thread which we embedded into the body of the bud, making it look like purple kush. Yeah, it might be fake but we didn’t sell low-quality fake product. This shit was the bomb. Or at least it looked like the bomb.

  We then stuffed the bud into a dank baggy that we had used to carry roaches of real joints. The smelly half-burnt butts of our adventures had permeated the bag and infused it with stinky, sour skunk smells. No one would ever notice the difference by looking, and if our suspicions were correct about how rookie this chick was, she might not even notice it when she smoked it.

  We put all the stuff into a bigger ziplock bag and headed back toward the monastery to hand it off to Corey and hope he got his way.

  As we walked back, we laughed at the idea that the only real drugs we had at that point had been provided to us by Donny’s primary care physician. Something was wrong with that picture.

  We arrived at the monastery happy and ready to pull a fast one on Leah, not realizing that, in a couple weeks, the joke would very much be on us.

  We got to the monastery and met a party in full swing. Leah and Tina had arrived and everyone was drinking forties. Everyone was there that night. All but Joey, who just seemed to never leave his room anymore. We’d called him earlier that afternoon to invite him down but he’d just snapped at us and hung up. Never mind that, there was a party to attend.

  Miguel and a Puerto Rican kid named Danny Soto had come through with a case of stolen warm Olde English 800 and, feeling generous, passed them out among the revelers. DJ was there, drunk. Corey, of course, was sitting next to Leah whispering possibly sweet but more likely dumb nothings in her ear.

  “Here’s that weed you asked for.” I plunked my creation down in Corey’s hand and he passed it off to his lover to be. What a romantic.

  After enough Olde English, the night got hazy for me and for everyone else, I imagine. Corey and Leah stole off to a dark corner and the rest of us sat on the grass and enjoyed a summer night, drunk, laughing, and talking shit. Nothing new or special about it.

  An hour later, Corey stormed out after Leah wit
h her frowning and him pleading. “Aww, c’mon, come back, I won’t try anything else, okay?”

  “We’re leaving!” Leah demanded and looked at Tina with a “This is not negotiable” glare.

  Tina and Leah left, and I yelled, “Enjoy the weed! It’s pretty powerful stuff! Try it with pasta!” Donny and I enjoyed a laugh and Corey socked me in the arm.

  “What fuckin’ happened?” Donny asked as soon as the girls were out of earshot.

  “Ah fuck… I dunno. She let me finger her and everything. Then I whipped out my dick and she just like freaked. She looked at me like I was crazy and just stormed off!” Corey looked pissed.

  “You whipped out your dick?” Donny asked, incredulous.

  “Well, like, yeah.” Corey looked confused.

  “Just out of nowhere? Just boom, here’s my dick?” Donny was falling apart at the seams trying to hold back laughter.

  “I mean, um, yeah, isn’t that what you do?”

  “Naw, dog, that’s what you do!” Miguel cackled.

  I jumped into the fray. “Never has something so small scared someone so much!” We all lost it. Corey got pissed and told DJ to kick our asses. DJ was too busy laughing at his brother to comply. Just then Donny whipped his dick out for us all to see and yelled, “Isn’t this what you do?”

  We laughed for what felt like hours and then forgot all about that night.

  Two weeks later Corey and DJ were in jail and the police were after us all.

  I got a call one afternoon from a muffled voice. “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Donny?” I asked, confused. “Is that you?”

  “Don’t say my fucking name!” Something was off here.

  “Um, okay?” I was confused.

  “Meet me at the corner of College and Hudson at four.”

  The phone hung up with a clang. What the hell was going on?

  I threw some pants on and headed out the door with my mother, as always, standing in the doorway trying to forbid me to leave.