by Moshe Kasher
I was too weary to ask. I just showed up and did the entire battery of their hardest schoolwork in less than an hour. I’d spend the rest of the afternoon with my Walkman headphones on, feet up on the desk, a pinch of snuff in my lip spitting into a Snapple bottle in defiance. Finally the principal of the school approached me and asked if I’d like to use my sign language skills in the afternoons by helping the autistic preschoolers. I agreed to do it. I still wonder why, in the midst of all that assholery, I would have cared a bit about helping some autistic kids. I must’ve had something in me that still wanted to be good, to be okay. Also I was fascinated by them. I’d walk downstairs and work with these kids, checked out from reality, and look at them with a kind of envy. There was agony in their existence, no doubt. They would cry and scream in glass-breaking shrieks if even the slightest anomaly blipped outside of their absurdly chosen comfort zones; if snack time didn’t have animal crackers, if there was purple Play-Doh and not yellow, it became a fucking crisis. But something about the lack of concern with the real world surrounding them made me jealous. If only I could check out like that. I felt useful down there, the severity of disability at Children’s Learning Center ironically providing me an opportunity to actually feel engaged in a school setting. I felt like I was doing something good. The problem seemed to always be that I could never do good for too long.
One day, in the middle of class, I simply got up and walked out. I’d had enough. All this goody two-shoes stuff wasn’t for me. I needed to get the fuck out. Thus marked my re-entry into the high school dropout community. I was now three high schools down and no grades successfully passed. This wasn’t going well.
That night I got invited to a kegger at Lake Temescal. Temescal is a lake just up the hill from Rockridge. Far enough from the city to escape the cops’ eyes. Close enough to walk if you had to. How I ended up there I don’t really know. I was drunk, already having spent the afternoon soaking my high school dropout memories in gin.
I stumbled out onto the field at Temescal, looking for something to do. I found it. A girl I knew from the neighborhood called me over to introduce me to the guy who was hosting this outdoor soiree.
I didn’t know this guy and wondered what hell he was doing in my neighborhood, having a party.
It wasn’t that it was forbidden, it just wasn’t really done. People in Oakland didn’t try to own blocks like the gangbangers in L.A. Those guys claimed absolute ownership of neighborhoods, and they’d defend to the death any trespass. We didn’t get down like that. It was just, if you blew into the neighborhood, you made yourself a target for the hungry eyes of a group of kids so desperate for cash and drugs that they were robbing each other. And those guys were friends. It was always preferable to rob a stranger over a friend. That’s the kind of questionable closeness the relationships in Oakland yielded.
The party was nice enough. Too bad there was a dirty mole in the mix. Me. I sat down with the birthday boy and chatted him up a bit. Nice kid, a hippie from the hills, he busted out a big brown paper bag and pulled out a handful of buds.
I’m sorry, but you pull out a gallon-sized bag of weed in front of a stranger wearing a Fila hat and you should expect to get jacked.
He kept talking but I stopped listening—that bag was all I had my eyes on.
A big fat brown bag of weed. That would look so nice on my mantel. Or in my lungs. Or converted to cash that sat, plump in my pockets.
Mmmm.
I looked around. There were hippies everywhere. People I could only assume were deadlock connected to Weed-Bag Man. If I tried anything, they would pray to their Avatar Gods, trap me in a Maypole circle, and kill me with kindness.
That bag, though.
It was whispering to me, calling my name. Like a valentine, it said, “Be Mine.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped up, muttered something about being right back, and rode my bike, as fast and hard as I could, to Joey’s house about a mile away. Donny was gone and I needed help. Tough, Sean The Bomb type help.
I charged into his backyard, back by where his room was, and banged on the window. The blinds opened into a peephole and Joey’s angry eye peered through.
“Dude, what the fuck are you doing here!” Joey slid open the door and grabbed me by my shirt.
“Stop! I’m telling you! I’ve got something for us. An opportunity to split like a pound of weed.”
Now, let’s be fair here. I had no idea how much weed was in that bag. It might have been a poor man’s Russian doll of bags until he got to the little teeny bag in the middle that contained weed.
But I took a gamble. Too big of a gamble, actually.
“A pound?” Joey’s rage was ebbing, being replaced by his entrepreneurial spirit.
“Maybe more!” I said, digging my grave deeper.
“Maybe more, huh?” I knew, at this point, Joey was in. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that Joey owed hundreds of dollars to Fat Pete for all the coke he’d been snorting lately.
Fat Pete was a thug of gigantic proportions. He was huge. Both in the gut and in the game.
Fat Pete was white, but so dedicated to the wannabe black lifestyle that he had started to actually look ethnically ambiguous. His skin may have been white, but his soul was mulatto.
Pete was the guy who had recruited Terry Candle into his empire of crime and black accents. I feared Fat Pete the way Iraqis feared Saddam Hussein. A leader, but a terrifying one.
Looking back, I realize that Pete was a petty drug dealer, a small-time coke peddler with serious drug and deep-fried food problems. At the time, though, he seemed like the closest thing to Pablo Escobar I could ever hope to meet. A legend of extreme proportions.
Apparently, Joey owed him six hundred bucks’ worth of coke that was meant to have been sold but was sniffed into Joey’s nostrils instead.
Unbeknownst to me, pounds of theoretical hippie weed was exactly what the doctor ordered to pay off this debt.
Before I had time to protest, Joey was on the phone with Fat Pete making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. A bucket of KFC. Just kidding.
“Dude, why’d you tell fucking Pete about it? That was our lick, man!” I was pissed. This shit had nothing to do with Pete, but I could envision my pounds of weed transmogrifying into a snack for him. I imagined him deep-frying the buds and sucking them into his cheeks, cackling as he dangled them just above his mouth, licking his lips like a fat cat holding a proletariat mouse by the tail in a pro-communist propaganda poster.
“Bitch, I told Pete because I fucking wanted to tell Pete. You got something to say about it?”
Joey flinched at me like he was going to punch me in the face but then went too far and, in fact, actually punched me in the face.
“Oh, sorry, dude. I meant to almost punch you, not to punch you.”
“Dude, what the fuck? Quit being such a dick!” I held the side of my face, screaming.
“Who the fuck you calling a dick?” Joey reached back and punched me in the other side of the face. This time deliberately.
To this day I have never again been punched by accident, apologized to, and then immediately punched on purpose.
I swallowed my pride and held in my tears. There was business to attend to.
We set out in Joey’s bucket, a ’92 Toyota Celica jalopy with a modified exhaust that screamed when he accelerated. I didn’t even know what we were doing anymore. As we left, Joey grabbed a barbell handle from his drawer, a heavy metal pole just the right size for cracking someone’s skull with. I kept staring at it, lying there, gaining violent inertia with every second closer to Lake Temescal we came. The fucking pole was all I could look at.
We burned into the parking lot with some kind of uncanny synchronized timing. Fat Pete and three carloads of North Oakland D-boys pulled in right behind us. Holy fuck. This wasn’t supposed to be the deal. First it was just me. Then it was me and Joey. Then Joey invited Fat Pete, and now it looked like all the thugs in North Oakland had heard it was fre
e-plunder night down at Lake Temescal. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
The cars parked, stacked up right at the entrance of the park, and we all jumped out. It was like an army. It was like a stampede. There were some twenty dudes, each one more terrifying than the last. I was the weakest link.
As this army of Oakland stormed the field, my hippie locked eyes with me. His hand raised in a hello, his eyes widened in fear. I waved back. Joey ran up on his side and hit him with that pole. He went down, hard. Then there was no more party.
Very quickly, the entire party started streaming toward the parking lot. Suburban white kids came, screaming as the Oakland experience was brought to them. Kids were getting stomped left and right. A huge black dude I’d never met ran up on me, a bat in his hand. I screamed, “I’m with you guys!” and flashed him a North Oakland “N” symbol. He looked unconvinced for a second, hesitated, and ran off to stomp someone else’s head in.
All I wanted was some weed. And I had caused all this. The real, scary truth was that I hated it. I didn’t like seeing my hippie get hurt. I didn’t like seeing these kids in terror. No more than I liked hurting my mother, or seeing her cry. I just needed to feel all right. After all, that was the thing I’d been after this whole time. Just a little comfort. None of this was me. I didn’t fully know it yet, but I was cracking. I was coming undone.
I snapped out of it.
No time for pondering my identity, people were getting beaten half to death. Half of the North Oakland Bushrod boys were here. People were getting hurt. People were getting robbed. I was getting the fuck out of there. I never found out what happened to my hippie. I hope he was okay.
I took off into the night, figuring my weed was done for. I had some trouble imagining, realistically, in the wasteland of that party, saying to my big friend with the bat, “You see, Pookie, this was my lick. I planned this. So when you think about it, that’s really my weed.”
“But of course!” Pookie would reply, hugging me close to him. “It wouldn’t be fair to deprive you of your share of the plunder. It’s the pirate’s way!” Then he would toss me the weed and a jar of Grey Poupon.
More likely I would’ve whimpered, “Do you think I could pinch a little of that bud? I actually planned this whole thing. I know I don’t look like much, but I’m a thinker! Ha ha.”
“I think you can suck my dick. And stop talking to me before I break your fucking jaw.”
Oh Pookie!
Fuck that, I was out of there.
I stole home along the side of the road.
Some hippies pulled over.
“Hey, you need a ride, man? There’s some crazy dudes up there at the lake. You oughta be careful. You gotta get away from them!”
I felt like dying.
“Yeah, I know I do. I’ll be careful. I’ll be all right.” I looked straight on into the night. The kids drove on.
What was I becoming?
As if all the insanity surrounding me wasn’t enough, I started to become aware of a more frightening insanity bubbling up from inside me. The years of psychotherapy, psychoactive medicine, and psychedelic drugs were making me psycho. You know, like “Norman Bates” psycho. You know, like “seeing things” psycho. Everywhere I walked, I saw a three-dimensional pancake following me. It lived in the left side of my periphery. It joined me in all of my affairs. Turn to the left? Pancake. Look up? Pancake.
Pancake, Pancake, Pancake.
You know, like “pancake-hallucinating psycho.”
I was becoming emotionally brittle and any interaction at all was likely to lead to a full-on rage-filled blowout.
At home all my brother had to do was speak to me and things would sizzle of control. I’d throw baseball bats at his head and freak out the second after at the danger of what I’d just done.
I couldn’t look in the mirror without grimacing and making faces at the awful asshole I saw in front of me. I couldn’t even look at me. I couldn’t even look at me.
Oh, but it wasn’t all that bad! It wasn’t all just violence and self-hatred! No! There was piss, too! Lots and lots of piss.
Somehow, I’d also become lazy as fuck. Diabetic coma lazy. My room was at least four doors down from the bathroom. At least ten feet away. I’d raise my lazy head, my brain swarming from the dance of weed and acid and psychotropics whirling around each other like dervishes, cutting my head to shreds. My bladder cried out like a Little Shop of Horrors villain, “Drain me!” I’d begin to get up and then the reality of how far that bathroom was would hit me. Ten feet. Four doors. Too far. Plus if I leave my room, I might see my mom. Might see my brother. Might hurt someone else.
My eyes scan my room, looking for something. Boot, no. Penthouse magazine, no. Wendy’s cup! Yes. Better than a toilet, it’s right here.
I grabbed that cup and flipped my little dick into it and began to fill it. Full to the brim. Bye-bye, self-respect.
I didn’t even notice, to be honest. See, that’s how it happens. When you hustle like I did, you only notice the ups and downs of the day. Do I have money? Do I not? What should I do to get money now? Thoughts like “Where was I at last year at this time?” are rare and easily ignored for the more pressing issues of the day. Every line of moral defense you have is compromised. Every “I will never” becomes an “I might” becomes an “I did.” The moment you sink to a new low is the same moment that your conscience becomes compromised to the point that it won’t rebel against the indignity you are putting it through. That’s why so few addicts get clean. They never seem to even notice there is a problem because, for them, there isn’t. You ever wonder how addicts let themselves become such animals? That’s how. They forget they were ever human. It wasn’t gross that I was pissing in cups and leaving them littered around the room. I simply had to piss and the bathroom was too far away.
Simple, simple.
In that way, I think, the people who do get clean are the weakest lot in the addicted bunch. Sure, it takes courage to get clean, but that courage is usually inspired by pain and humiliation. The real hard-core addicts never get sober because they never notice the ache, they never notice the pain. They can’t be humiliated, they have nothing left to embarrass. And just like that, they die. So tough they die.
My room quickly became a filth pit of decomposing piss jars. Sometimes, I’d fill a cup too much and rank piss would spill over and splash back onto my belly. Sometimes I’d just piss on the floor, no cup needed. Sometimes I’d bunch up a towel and piss in it. I’d piss in the heater because it made a funny sound. And a funny smell, I found out right afterward.
Oh, fuck you! Don’t judge. I told you there was a lot of piss coming. Also I told you I was losing my mind. My mother, usually a bastion of codependent over-involvement in my life, the woman who lived on top of my chest the first fourteen years of my life, suddenly became totally uninterested in coming into my room. Hmm. I wonder why she didn’t want to come in. Into my dank, burnt-piss-stank science-experiment room. I finally had my privacy.
I was spitting on the floor. I’d been tagging on the walls in my house. Just like, you know, writing with permanent ink on my house’s walls. My mom would look at me like I was an insane person, shake her head, and say, “I know you did it.”
I was starting to be desperate for drugs, even as I pretended desperately not to need them.
I got high alone all the time and it had started to bother me.
“Smoking alone, that’s dope fiend shit,” Jamie told me as we sat together under a bridge one day, smoking out of an apple. “For real, after you start smoking alone, it’s a real short hop to sucking dick for crack.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “A real short hop? It seems like a longer hop than you are giving it credit for.”
“No, dude, I’m telling you. Only a fiend smokes alone.” Jamie was so sure of himself, I believed him.
That’s one of the odd things about pathological liars. You keep trying to believe them, no matter how fantastical the tale. The i
dea that they are just lying to you, time after time, seems so counterintuitive that you still try like hell to believe.
“I don’t want to be a fiend,” I told myself.
I had this bike back then. A bad bike. A junkie bike. I’d bought it for ten bucks from a drunken Indian.
That’s the truth.
Everything that could be wrong with it was. The handlebars rotated 360 degrees. The brakes had never worked, and I needed either to put my heel down and scrape my sneakers along the gravel or just leap off the bike altogether and run to a stop. There was no seat. But there was a seat post. A gay joke waiting to happen. Oh, and one day it exploded. Bet you didn’t know a bicycle could explode, huh? I was riding along, trying precariously to keep my butt away from the seat post, when the entire bike just poofed into pieces. Just all of a sudden… boom… Legos! The bike disintegrated beneath my weight into a pile of scrap metal. My ass slammed into the seat post and my virginity was nearly taken. The bad virginity.
As horrible as the bike was, ironically, I used it to try and prove to myself that I wasn’t an addict.
I’d ride for hours, the weight of the bag in my pocket pulling me down, my bike squeaking beneath me, looking for a friend to smoke with to prove that I wasn’t fucked up. When no one was available, I’d ride my shit bike over to Harmonica Guy or some other homeless dude.
Oakland had an array of the oddest homeless people in the world. In the eighties, Ronald Reagan had opened up the California state mental hospitals to save money. “Don’t worry!” he said. “We will build community centers to manage these people.” Then, after releasing them, he did no such thing.
As a result, we got characters straight out of a comic book. Harmonica Guy was a local homeless guy who sat on a street corner, shucking and jiving for the passersby. He danced around, high on crack, playing the blues. An odd little man.
Then there was Ray, the Vietnam vet who stood on his perch at Rockridge BART like a British Beefeater, never moving, never abandoning his post. His face was burned and mangled from shrapnel. His mind was charred and wasted from trauma. Ray would stand there and scream at the top of his lungs, again and again, shaking the Vietcong demons away. He dressed in rags and scared children away. We loved fucking with him.
