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 (20 page)

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 created 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.