by Moshe Kasher
“I’m the one with a fucking gash on my face. Why don’t you kick her out?”
Pantera Dad lunged at me, his eyes popping out of his head. His wife held him back or I might have been the first fatality in the Kaiser Adolescent Chemical Dependency Program.
A sign in the break room would’ve read, IT’S BEEN ONE DAY SINCE OUR LAST WORKPLACE ACCIDENT (MURDER!).
“All right, I get it. I really tried this time.” I got up and made my way to the door.
Tim looked up at me. This time he didn’t wink. He turned to my mom. “If you’d like, you can stay in family session without your boy and we can discuss a plan for his future.”
My mother. To her ever-loving credit, she stood up, raised her bandaged hand, and signed to the group, with Mike speaking for her, “If you won’t help my son, who clearly needs that help more than any of these kids, you can’t help me.”
She grabbed my hand in hers and we walked out of group together.
I squeezed her hand gently, and signed, just to her, “Thanks.”
Two rehabs down.
Me, Mike Hicks, and my mom took that elevator to the ground floor.
My mom, crying again, got in the car and started it up. I had opened the door when Mike called me over to him.
“Hey, man, you got a second?” He smiled.
“Ha, I got all the time in the world. I’ve literally got nowhere to be.”
“Listen, bro, I just wanna tell you, man—I get it. I get what’s going on with you. I’m not trying to lecture you, I just want you to know that. Just want you to know I get it. I drank for twenty-five years and smoked my life away. I couldn’t stop. I hurt people. I get it.” He stopped smiling and looked at me in my eyes. Looked at me like he got it. Looked at me like I was his equal. An adult hadn’t spoken to me like that ever.
“I’m not supposed to be telling you this. You know? We aren’t supposed to interject our opinions. Ha, I could be fired for this, but your mom isn’t gonna snitch on me.”
He signed to my mom in the car, “You aren’t gonna snitch on me, are you?”
My mom laughed her tears away and signed back, “No.”
“Look, man, I just need to tell you, you aren’t a bad kid. Sorry, you aren’t a bad guy, shit, you aren’t a kid anymore. You aren’t bad. You’re sick. I was real sick once. But I got well. My mom died this year and she died at my place. I was with her. She forgave me, you get what I’m getting at?”
I didn’t, but I did.
He pulled out a ten-year AA chip.
“I stopped drinking a while ago and got my shit back together. Just don’t let these people tell you you’re a bad guy, because you aren’t. You’re lost. But if you want help, it’s there. You can call me, we can hit a meeting, whatever. I’m only telling you this because someone told me the same thing once upon a time. Saved my life.”
I was shaken up, close to matching my mom’s tears tit for tat. “Cool, man, I appreciate it, thanks.” I turned to jump in the car. Mike grabbed my shoulder. Grabbed me right where Pantera Neck had. I let him.
“Remember, though, you’re gonna have to take a right turn someday. You’re gonna have to decide, you know? There comes a time. You’re gonna have to walk alone. Someday, you’ll have to turn right. You’ll have to walk alone.”
“Yeah, well, thanks.”
He hugged me. Why was he hugging me?
“You don’t need to get good, you need to get well. Later, bro.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, later.”
I jumped in the car. We drove away.
My mom put her hand on my leg. I looked down at her hand. My mom still loved me. That made one of us.
Chapter 16
“Free”
—Goodie Mob
It was a Wednesday six months later. Or maybe it was a Tuesday a month later. It was a day. In the afternoon. The fog was playing on the ground, unrolling itself onto Oakland like an old gray rug. The fog was everywhere, it was in me too. I’d just been thrown out of the newly minted Oakland branch of the Kaiser Adolescent Chemical Dependency Program. I’d joined right after Walnut Creek Kaiser kicked me out. They kicked me out and shuffled me to a nearly identical program closer to home. You know the comfort you feel when you are out of town or in a foreign country and you go to a chain restaurant that you might resent back home but, in that moment, the familiarity brings you comfort?
This was like the exact opposite of that.
I knew every trick. I’d heard every word. The walls were decorated with the same “Don’t leave before the Miracle happens” crocheted wall art. I’d managed to gather a few weeks of sobriety but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I got kicked out again.
Another rehab. I was a flagship member. First to be enrolled, first to be kicked out.
Three rehabs down.
This was my life. Nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed.
I laughed about it sometimes. I cried about it, too.
The boys and I were gathered at Rockridge BART again, trying to drum up a plan. One more afternoon in Oakland.
Donny was there. He’d been kicked out of Kaiser right after me for spitting on Pantera Neck in retaliation for getting me kicked out.
That’s my boy!
DJ was there, penny rolls in his fists.
His brother Corey was there, scheming.
Jamie was there, lying.
Miguel was there, being weird.
Even Joey was there that day.
We were all there, all together. The remains of the Pure Adrenaline Gangsters. The remnants of us all.
The lost boys. Kids without a compass.
I knew.
That day, I knew.
Why that day was any different, I don’t know. There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time.
DJ looked up and I could almost see the lightbulb going off above his head. Electric currents shocking an idea into his atrophied brain.
“Hey, let’s go to Brodricks!”
Brodricks was a bar we’d found that, in the rush of after-work madness, never seemed to card for beer. No matter how young the commuter ambling up to the bar seemed to be.
“Let’s go get ripped up!” DJ was stoked.
Everyone was. Everyone agreed. Everyone. Everyone but me.
“I can’t go, guys.” I surprised myself as the words came out of my mouth. I looked at the confused faces of the guys. These guys. The guys I loved. My other family.
There comes a time.
“Huh?” DJ was confused. He’d had an idea. It was a good one.
“I can’t do it today. I gotta go.”
Donny looked at me. He looked at me in the eyes. Every scene of every moment we’d ever been through together was playing, fast-forwarding in them. He saw it. Saw the change. Saw that something had died in me. My will had died. My childhood had died. He saw that I was done fighting. He saw it.
He smiled.
He grabbed my hand and slapped a half hug on me.
“Right on, man, we’ll holler atcha later.” Donny held my gaze. I looked away.
“Yeah, f’sho. Holler later.”
There comes a time. When you have to walk alone. Take a right turn.
“All right then, let’s bounce.” I could hear Corey salivating for beer. Hell, I was, too. All of my friends, all of them, turned and walked away.
I turned right and walked home alone.
I never looked back.
Six months sober, age sixteen, I entered the Spraings Academy, another non-public school designed for people for whom every other educational modality had failed. I sat in the waiting room for another ridiculous dance. I’d done this so many times before. They’d talk to me, test me, attempt to fix me, and then label me: Broken. Damaged. Done.
They called me in. I took a seat.
I sat across from Dr. Violet Spraings, and she asked me a question no one in the educational world ever had.
“So, what do you want
to do?” She smiled.
I thought about it.
“Well, I’ve been a freshman for going on forever. I’ve never passed a grade since seventh. To be honest, I’m just not willing to stick it out. I’ll just drop out if I have to but I’d rather find a way not to. So I guess, what I want to do is have someone help me get my GED and get me out of here.”
Dr. Spraings leaned forward and looked me in the eyes. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. Let’s do that. You give me the rest of this school year and I’ll set you up to be tutored all day with the specific goal of you getting your GED.”
“Are you serious?”
“Totally.” She frowned. “Are you?”
“What do you mean, am I?” I asked.
“I mean, are you going to work your ass off for me? Even when you want to quit again, are you going to stick it out? I need you to tell me you are serious, too.”
“I’m serious. I promise.” For the first time since I could remember, I knew my promise meant something.
“Okay, then we will do it. It will take me a while to arrange a schedule where I can get you a tutor to work one-on-one with you all day. In the meantime, you’re just going to have to sit in my office and read this book. But read it deep, try and study it. I think you might really get something out of it if you do. Deal?”
I smiled big. “Deal!”
She passed me a beaten-up crimson-covered book, and I started my first day at my last high school.
I opened the cover and looked at the title page.
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger.
Three years passed. I’d gone back to school and entered community college when I was eighteen, only six months behind when I might’ve started college had I been a normal kid who graduated high school on time. Two years later I was ready to apply to transfer to a university. I applied to only one. The University of California at Santa Barbara. I’d been doing well. I had a strong GPA with only one weak spot.
I’d taken pre-algebra four times and failed four times. Apparently seventh grade is a lousy time to stop studying math if you are to acquire those algebra skills that will come in so handy later in your life as a stand-up comic. I hadn’t been able to fulfill the requirements to transfer because of those damn math classes.
I applied anyway, thinking, “Whatever, algebra, no big deal; they’ll let it slide.”
Apparently the admissions office did not share my “let it slide” philosophy. I was denied entry.
I appealed the decision. I wrote the school explaining my past, explaining my weakness. Explaining myself. Explaining why.
And in the last paragraph of my appeal, I explained one more thing: “I’m clean and sober. Have been for five years. Your school is filled with active alcoholics. Drunken surf bums who drink 40’s of Mickey’s malt liquor before class (white boy drink, remember?). And you need me at your school. Just to be me. Just to be sober. You need me.”
And they said: “Okay!”
I walked the stage two years later. They called my name and then said, “Graduating with honors.”
This isn’t amazing. Lots of people graduate college. It’s amazing for me. I looked down at my mom, smiling at me. Crying for me. Crying good tears now. I signed to her, “I love you.” She signed back, “I love you, too.” That makes two of us.
One seat was missing. My grandmother was too sick to make it. I drove home to Oakland, where she lay, dying.
I took her hand in mine and whispered, “I graduated college, Grandma.”
She squeezed my hand and whispered back, “Of course you did.”
In the book of Judges, we meet Samson. The ultimate Jewish man. He knocked down temple walls with his bare hands. He slew an army with the jawbone of an ass. His long flowing hair provided him with supernatural strength and turned him into a Jewish Superman. And let’s be frank, the Jews don’t have many Supermen. Despite all the resentment and anger I had, my Samson was my father. Everyone’s is.
But, of course, Sampson’s power was gone when he lost his hair. His potent hands rendered flaccid. Every Superman has a kryptonite.
In February of my twentieth year, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He died in May. I was there. This isn’t amazing. Lots of people are there when their parents die. It’s amazing for me. I was never there.
I walked into the hospital room and saw my father in the full repose of his weakness. My hero was broken. My anger was, too. All the anger I might have ever had seemed useless. He was skinny. So skinny. My dad the dynamo was a wreck, stuck in bed. The tumors in his head had swollen, pushing into his ocular nerve, forcing one eye closed. A little one-eyed skeleton. The blood left my face. The lightning struck my heart. I couldn’t breathe. I walked out of the room after waving a pathetic hello. I had to catch my breath.
“Is he afraid of me?” my dad signed weakly to my brother.
I pulled myself together and walked back into the room. Back to my father, the one we’d left in New York, so many years ago. “I’m here, Daddy,” I signed to him.
“Of course you are,” he signed back.
“You feeling okay?” I asked, the answer written all over his body.
He smiled. Lifted his hands up and mimed playing a sad little guitar.
A joke for me. One last joke.
I took his hand. Held it tight. Felt him there.
A week passed. My father was worse. Skinnier. Closer.
I’d been meaning to try and talk to him. To tell him how sorry I was for so many things. To make things right. I’d prepared some kind of formal speech, laced with recovery aphorisms and apologies. I sat down next to him and told him I needed to speak to him. My affect was frank. My motives were pure. My methods were shit.
My poor, weak dad tried his best as I launched into a speech about my past and the mistakes I had made. But he was weak from cancer and chemo, and five minutes into my grand attempt at making amends, I was interrupted by the sound of him snoring. My father had fallen asleep.
I sat, silently, next to him, laughing at myself a little. Crying to myself a little. I got up to go. Just then my dad rustled awake. He meekly raised his hands and signed to me. A full sentence. It had been days since he’d had the strength to say more than one or two words at a time. “Water.” “Bed up.” “Bed down.”
All of a sudden he signed to me a string of words that must’ve sapped him. His body was so broken, his hands so weak, I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“I don’t understand,” I signed back.
He repeated himself.
“I’m so sorry, I don’t understand.” I felt like an asshole. For him this was running up to a marathon runner at the finish line and saying, “Sorry, didn’t see it, start over.”
He did. I understood. “I’m so lucky that you are my son.”
“I’m lucky you’re my dad,” I signed back. Tears falling down my face. It was the last conversation we ever had. It was perfect. It said everything.
I was in the room when he disappeared. The King’s reign had come to an end. Days earlier, he’d slipped into a coma—lifeless. I remember staring at him, asking God to take him, thinking: “He’s dead already.” When his heart stopped and something else left, I realized how wrong I was. I sat there, next to my father, as he breathed his last. I looked back at him and saw that he’d left the room. I was happy I hadn’t.
I clawed my shirt in two in that moment, according to the rites of Jewish grief. The sound of the cloth ripping in two, slicing through the room, scraping the roof of my mind. My dad was dead.
I sat, the next week, close to the ground, receiving visitors along with the rest of my family as we sat shiva. Shiva is a kind of psychedelic experience where you sit, high on grief, as a parade of your loved one’s history comes to pay respects. You just sit. All day long you sit and hear tales of how much people loved the person you loved.
I got to hear all the stories my mother never told me about my father. To hear what
an amazing guy he could be. What an artist. What a man.
We sat and did nothing all day. When you sit shiva, you aren’t even allowed to cook for yourself. If you are hungry, someone cooks for you. They don’t want you distracted. You just sit. You sit with your grief.
Three times a day, local men gather at the house of grief to make sure ten men are present. You need ten men to make what’s called a minyan, a quorum that forms a kind of express channel of communication to God. You need a minyan to be able to say Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer for the soul of the dead.
Three times a day, you are interrupted in your sitting to stand and speak to God. To tell the stories you’ve been hearing about your loved one back to the Lord. To stand and pray.
The time for the afternoon prayer had come one day and I stood, in a daze, to pray once again. Mordechai Ben David, the Chassidic rock star from my Bar Mitzvah, was the tenth to arrive. He took his fancy black coat off and assessed the scene. Me, my brother, my father’s deaf best friend Billy, and six local penguins made ten. Well, at least we thought it did.
“We have to wait for one more man,” Mordechai Ben David yelled to us.
“Why would we do that?” my brother asked. “There’s ten men here.”
“There’s nine officially,” the Pig spoke. “The deaf one doesn’t count.”
In my dead, deaf father’s house this peacocking asshole refused to acknowledge another deaf man as a man at all.
I needed to say something. I needed to scream, “Get the fuck out of my father’s house,” but I couldn’t. I was broken by grief, and the remnants of my childhood terrors still danced in my head. Screaming was hardly being invisible. Me, the one who always had something to say to the adults who wronged me, simply sat there impotent and ashamed. We waited for one more man. We prayed to what must have been a very disappointed God. I just sat there and thought, “If I ever write a book, I’ll be sure to include in it what an asshole Mordechai Ben David is.”
A week after sitting down, we got up. During shiva, the soul is said to be lingering in the room, hearing all the stories about itself. My dad, maybe hearing for the first time. A week later, you stand, open the door, and walk around the block, setting the soul of the dead free, letting it go.
