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 (25 page)

They collected the pile of slop with a grimace.

“Get the fuck up!” the gunslinger of the bunch yelled. We jumped up like Marines after a push-up drill.

We got the fuck up.

We stood there, scared but also a bit frustrated at the turn of the events.

Jamie leaned forward to our captors. “You know it’s funny, we rob people, too! I mean less tough kids than us obviously. I’m pretty impressed that you caught us slipping actually.”

“Shut. Up.” the short one with the gun snarled.

“Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.” Jamie tried to look cool as he nodded assent.

I took a step forward.

“Hey, um, guys? You have my house keys. They can’t be useful to you, would you mind throwing them back to me?” The other guys looked at me like I was insane, but what the fuck, I needed my house keys. If I lost my keys, I just straight up couldn’t get into my house. My mother’s absentmindedness had allowed the flashing light system that was wired into our doorbell to fall into
disrepair years ago. Without the lights flashing, my mom had no way to know anyone was at the door. I’d stand outside of my door for hours just hoping my mom would look out the window for me. So I asked for my keys back.

The tall dude with the loot in his hands stared at me for a second and then tossed me the keys. I smiled at him, grateful.

“Thanks.”

People started asking for their shit back, and piece by piece we stole back the shit they’d stolen from us.

This was like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy robbery.

The tall guy, apparently sick of how pathetic we were and how pathetic we were making him feel, muttered, “Broke-ass motherfuckers,” and lunged at DJ, clipping him in the jaw, dropping him back to the sidewalk.

DJ screamed like a wounded child/wildebeest and collapsed. Inside I grinned a bit and thought, “Karma’s a bitch.”

The guys drove off and left us panting, hearts pounding on the sidewalk. Then Dave Hansen looked up and grinned. “Well, they didn’t get everything.” He pulled out the new bottle of vodka safely hidden in the deep pockets of his hoodie. We all smiled. Maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all.

I guess after all that, we ended that evening at a moral zero.

We robbed, got robbed, and one of us even got punched in retaliation for the karmic punches we’d sprayed into the world. We didn’t realize it, but it was perfect. Or maybe we did realize it.

We piled back into the Suburban a bit lighter.

The engine spat to life and we were off, driving back to North Oakland, to home and safety. We rode in silence for a few minutes, breathing through what had just happened to us. I broke the silence.

“Hey, you guys wanna go rob somebody?”

The guys turned and looked at me. Donny cracked a smile.

DJ, holding his face, punched me in the arm and started laughing.

We all started laughing. The noise filled that truck. We laughed into the truck and we laughed into the air. We laughed like lost boys. Dave put on some Gangstarr, a track called “Soliloquy of Chaos.” A fitting soundtrack to the evening’s festivities. Someone produced half a joint, pulled from the ashtray of the Suburban. A smoke, a drink, and the whole debacle was puffed away. I curled in and fell asleep.

Things were beginning to unravel. My friends, my cadre of support, my second family—they loved to beat my ass. They threw me around and used me as their whipping boy for the sins they couldn’t look at in themselves.

“Damn, you’re a fucking crazy dog,” they’d say. “You talk to your mama like that? You’re nuts, Pork Chop.”

Pork Chop. Sweet boys. They’d call me
Pork Chop
and
Fat Ass
and other things and sock me in the chest and throw me around and slap me when they got pissed. I’d leave, lump in my throat, night after night, walking myself home alone in the dark, tears streaming down my face swearing to myself, “I’ll never hang out with them again.”

My little lost boy family was becoming as painful as my real family.

Donny stood silently. He never participated. He never stopped it either. He stood and stared. I tried to laugh it off. I tried not to cry
in front of the guys. I tried to stay tough. I couldn’t keep this up. I was falling apart.

The next day I’d go back, pretending I forgot what they did, and what I’d said to myself. I’d go back because I didn’t have any other place to go.

I took all that shame and turned it into rage that exploded at home.

Anytime my mother ran screaming after me for coming home late or the cigarettes she found or the money I stole, I’d explode with rage, screaming in her face on a level I am simply not capable of anymore. A kind of primal snap. A little solar flare from the hellfire.

I’d go mad. I’d throw whatever was in my hands at her head, trying to kill her.

It got bad.

I’d overturn kitchen tables and break the doors. I’d throw off my own shoes and toss them through windows.

My body was racked with rage like the devil was squeezing my spine, pumping anger into me.

My mom would run into the fracas and try to make me stop. Try to make me right.

I’d throw her to the ground. I’d hit her. I’d kick her. I’d scratch her. My own mother. My grandmother, too. I’d become what she’d always told me men were.
An abuser, that’s who I was
. An abuser. I’d abuse at home and be abused in the streets. I’d abuse the ones I loved and be abused by the people I called friends.

Jeremy Moritz was a kid from Piedmont that DJ and Corey brought around one day. Just like Dave Hansen he had a car and long money so we welcomed him in. Unlike Dave Hansen, however,
Jeremy Moritz was completely insane. No, really. He was toxically, chemically, Manson-level insane. A disgusting, violent weasel of a twerp, everyone loved him but me. Maybe that’s because he liked to hit me. I was so tired of being slugged and punched and fucked with, and Jeremy Moritz made everything worse.

Jeremy had a kind of skittish, ratlike energy. He came from money but had the demeanor of some kind of street crackhead. Am I painting the picture that I disliked him? Maybe that’s because he almost killed me.

One summer day, me, Jeremy, and the rest of the guys sat in the cemetery smoking cigarettes and talking shit. Maybe it’s odd but the cemetery was a constant source of sanctuary for us. The brothers at the monastery were increasingly hostile toward us, but at the cemetery, the ghosts of dead delinquents rolled out to greet us every time we arrived.

We’d spend our days in the cemetery getting high, sitting on the larger graves and looking at the city. At night, we’d sneak back in and spook ourselves by getting drunk among the ghosts and creaky noises of a hundred-year-old cemetery. We’d climb in mausoleums. We’d write graffiti on graves. We’d outrun the security guard we’d affectionately named
Elmer
after the big
Elmer’s Security
logo we read on the door of his white pickup. We’d knock graves over. We’d fuck shit up.

That day was a mellow one. Donny busted out a huge bag of mushrooms. More mushrooms, more madness. We passed it around, chewing the gross stems and caps, trying to ignore the taste. Mushrooms taste so bad and bring you to such psychedelic heights, it’s like tossing God’s salad.

We passed the bag to Jeremy Moritz but he waved them off,
citing something about clashing with his psych meds. What a pussy. I was pumped full of meds at the time but I didn’t let that stop me.

I constantly felt the sway of psychotropics charging through my bloodstream, zapping my psyche, making me different. From the first day I started on a regimen of meds at Ross Hospital, I could feel them in me every second I was awake. I hated those things.

The only bright spot was that anytime I saw “Caution, do not combine with alcohol or other drugs” on the side of the bottle of the new medication they were experimenting with on me, I got excited in anticipation of the chemistry experiment I was about to conduct on my brain.

Zoloft + weed = buzzy high with a tinge of tweakiness.

Desipramine + malt liquor = a drunk with 3-D visuals.

Ritilan + Nothing = Meth

You get the picture.

I hated being on psych meds, but at least this way I could make them fun. That’s how I lived. But Jeremy Moritz was too scared.

“Don’t be a pussy, fucking eat some,” I told him, dangling the shrooms in his face.

Out of nowhere, he snapped, tackled me, and threw me into a bush of razor grass. I got sliced to pieces, blood scratches crisscrossing me all over, as if little Zorros had declared victory on me.

I pushed him off me and he started laughing like everything was just hilarious.

I swallowed hard, holding back tears of shame. Ugh. I felt like such a bitch.

My emotions were starting to flood out against my will. Years of medicating them with smoke and pills and malt liquor had stuffed
them into places they didn’t belong. They would fall out when I didn’t need them, didn’t want them.

Every time I got really angry, my bitch-ass tear ducts would betray me. I couldn’t start fighting without tears bursting out, declaring me a little sissy.

It was all I could do at times like this to just stay perfectly still and hope I didn’t shake any bitch water loose upon my face.

No one noticed anyway because just then Jeremy jumped off me and, I suppose to prove his manhood, took a little pinch of mushroom powder from the bottom of the bag we had all eaten from and sprinkled it on some hash he had packed into a pipe and smoked it. By the way, smoking mushrooms has absolutely no psychoactive effect (this information will be important later). He puffed those mushrooms like it was the toughest thing anyone had ever done and then stood up declaring, “My grandparents just died!”

All of our faces dropped, and DJ’s brother Corey put a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder to comfort him.

Jeremy shrugged Corey’s hand off and cackled, “Let’s go fuck their old house up!”

We looked around confused and then, deciding there was nothing better to do, jumped into Jeremy’s minivan and drove out of the cemetery toward his grandparents’ place in Concord. The mushrooms kicked in and my brain melted.

We drove out to the suburban wasteland of Concord, one of those places that isn’t quite a podunk little town, but only because it has a mall. A terrible, terrible Orange Julius mall. But at least it was an actual mall.

In Oakland, the malls we had were on planes of existence far below the malls in Concord. We only had ghetto malls. If you’ve
ever been to a ghetto mall, you know. It feels similar to what I imagine walking into a refugee camp in Somalia would feel like. There are people slaughtering live goats, there are tribal feuds, and it’s possible to buy products by yak barter.

The ghetto mall usually has 80 to 90 percent of its storefronts closed due to violence or economic inactivity, and the stores that do remain are mostly odd places you have never heard of. There are ethnic hair supply clearinghouses with such creative names as “Ge-Cho-Hair-On,” “We Be Doin’ Hair and Shit,” “Tyler Perry’s House of Haircare,” “nappy 2 happy,” “The NAAAHCP or National Association of African American Hair Care Products,” and “The Place Where Black People Can Buy Haircare Products.” There are your Korean import fire hazard electronics stores. Only the finest brands are available at these stores, like electronics from “Bro-shiba” and “Smacintosh,” and there’s indigestion medication from Mrs. Butterworth and tennis shoes made by Alpo.

The food court would be one Vietnamese lady making egg rolls and a closed-down Popeye’s Chicken. Oh, and there was always a Chess King. A place for pimps to buy pimp peacock feathers. It was a ghetto mall.

Far beyond the urban blight of Oakland, though, was the Pollyanna expanse of the Sun Valley Mall. A place that dreams were made of. A mall with real stores like Sears and Macy’s to frolic in. A place where gentile children could pretend to visit their God, Santa Claus, at Christmastime. In Oakland, the Santa was just a fat homeless guy with a bag of garbage at his side. At least he was real.

We pulled up to the Sun Valley Mall and my brain was liquid. I didn’t know it until I stepped out of the van but I’d never been higher on psychedelics in my life.