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 (26 page)

The ground was unsteady like a wave and undulated beneath my feet. The world felt like a fun house. Jeremy Moritz’s nose grew five inches, and he looked like a gargoyle, standing sentinel on a building. His nose kept growing until it slid, flattening onto the ground, springing into a bridge across reality into a world of broken glass visions. I skipped across.

We stepped into the mall and I immediately knew it was a mistake for me to be there. The walls bent in half like they’d turned into a rip curl and my body followed in kind. I felt like I was walking in half, my body folded in two, my head perpendicular with the ground. I could feel the force of gravity pulling me into the earth. Like there were a thousand little Batman-esque grappling hooks latched to my head, pulling me down. I felt like I hadn’t drank my V8. I was going to fall over at any second.

Donny saw me walking funny and put a hand on my shoulder. It was like a grounding. I straightened right up. The guys took me into a Sharper Image store and left me there, staring at one of those pin table art things for what might’ve been hours, might’ve been years. I slipped away.

I woke up in Jeremy’s recently deceased grandparents’ house. From the other room, I heard a crash and then DJ exploded through the thin walls like the Kool-Aid Man, drywall dust everywhere, Jeremy laughing in the corner with tears streaming down his insane cheeks, painting white dust streaks down his clown face.

I woke up in Jeremy’s van again, on the freeway going ninety miles an hour. Everyone was painted white like geishas. We looked like we’d been partying In the Night Kitchen.

Just then, Jeremy threw his hands into the sky from behind the steering wheel and started screaming, “I’m too high! I forgot how to drive! I forgot how to drive!” Too high? On a puff of nothing?

Reality surged through my brain like an ice pick.

What the fuck! I looked over at Donny as the van started swerving across five lanes of traffic screeching as it moved. He had an insane smile on his face.

“You ready to die, bro?!!”

“Fuck it!” I screamed. This was as good a time as any. Donny and I threw our heads back in end-of-life laughter as our doom approached. I decided to blip out. My brain went gray. I remembered no more.

I woke up at home. I wasn’t dead. Pleasing. Somehow, organically we decided not to fuck with Jeremy Moritz anymore. In a world of very scary things, that dude was too scary even for us.

Donny’s world was starting to spin out of control just like mine. One day, quite out of the blue, Donny’s biological father got in touch with him. Since I’d known him, Donny had been raised by his mom and stepfather, Sheriff John. Well, John wasn’t an actual sheriff but he sure liked to act like it. Donny, much like me, had been given increasingly limited access to the various areas of his house. In fact, his parents had taken it one step further. Upon John’s suggestion, Donny had been disallowed the privilege of ever being in his own house when his parents weren’t around. In the morning, they would kick him out on their way to work, and later that night when they returned, he was allowed back in. Privacy was not permitted. He couldn’t close his bedroom door or open his window. This was the world in which we lived. Every time Donny’s stepdad walked upstairs, we would woop like a police car and Sheriff John would sneer at us.

“You’ll never catch me alive, copper!” Donny would yell as John walked by his room, peering in to see what we were doing.

“Does that mean you’re planning on dropping dead?” Sheriff John was pretty good at comebacks.

Despite all of the antagonism and resentment between the two of them, John was the only father Donny had ever really known.

“My dad is a gangster. A straight G fool! He did time in prison!” Donny told me one night while we were frying balls on acid.

“Well, as glad as I am that you are bringing up prison during an acid trip, do you mind explaining what you mean?”

“I mean it. My biological father, not the sheriff, but my actual dad was straight Mexican Mafia, bro! It’s complicated, but basically, my dad was a gangster.” Donny seemed really proud as he said this, as if this man he’d never met was somehow genetically toughening Donny up. If he couldn’t be a father to him, at least he infused Donny’s DNA with enough street smarts to guide him.

“I don’t know everything about it but I know he spent years in San Quentin. Hard time. Fuckin’ cool, huh?”

The more Donny explained his father’s criminal past, the more excited he got. That might seem odd to you. This kid bragging that his dad was a crook. Well, consider that this was really the only story that Donny knew about his dad. The only narrative that his mother had provided for him. It was the only image he had of his father.

Divorced parents tended to do that. They only thought about their own traumatic memories of their former partners and so, without thinking of how fucked up it would make us, explained our fathers to us through the lens of that memory. Donny’s dad was a gangster, mine was an abuser, and the only people keeping us
from that criminal abuse were our heroic mothers. At least that’s the way the picture was painted.

Over the years, though, feeling half-fused by our childhoods, Donny and I would stare at those memory paintings looking for the information that could explain to us the kind of men we would become. Sadly, they were warped by resentment and so they looked like Hieronymus Bosch hellscapes. Good luck, boys! The journey to manhood became like walking through the forest in the dark. Hansel and Gretel trying to find their way home.

We grew up lost.

That’s not to say that these tales were false. Donny’s dad was a drunk and an absentee father and, I guess, a gangster, too. But he was still his father. And so when, fourteen years after Donny Moon was born, Papa Moon got out of prison, gave him a call, and said, “What’s up? I’m ready to get back in touch after all these years,” Donny got excited. Then he got high.

At that point, he hadn’t gotten high in months because he was still technically at that Kaiser Rehab in Walnut Creek, though he was already teetering on the edge of being thrown out. He, much like everyone who gets sent to adolescent rehab, rather than cleaning up and getting his shit together, met a new group of exciting people to get high with, people with new tricks and new drugs. People like James Burnside.

James Burnside was a stocky, strange kid. Long sideburns and a demeanor that suggested a madman who used his brain as a test tube for experimental drugs. Oh, did I mention that James was an amateur chemist who made experimental drugs? That’s probably why he seemed like that.

“This is Ozone, man,” James whispered into the air between
Donny and me, not quite looking at either of us. “It’s crushed-up morphine and acid and a few specialties that I threw in.”

“So, like, when did you first become a mad scientist?” I asked. “And are fifteen-year-old chemists common in your tribe?”

“Who the fuck is this guy, man?” James looked at Donny like he was ready to kill me.

“Don’t worry about him, man, he’s just always cracking jokes.” Donny looked at me like “Shut the fuck up.”

“You a fuckin’ cop?” James stared at me with ice in his eyes.

“Um, I’m fifteen.” I hoped this would get me out of my predicament.

“Excuses are like assholes.” James said this matter-of-factly like it made sense. Of course, it did not.

“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I get that. I’m not a cop, though.”

“Good.” He seemed satisfied. My life expectancy shot back up immediately.

James turned to Donny and said, “One of these pills is the equivalent of taking fifty-two hits of acid at once but, like, more intense.”

That was good. If there’s anything that fifty-two hits of acid screams for, it’s “more intense.”

“You wanna try this shit?” James whispered.

I looked around the room, trying to find a way out of this situation. I didn’t see one.

“Yeah, I guess I’m down.” I quivered.

“Not you, you fat fuckin’ cop.”

“I’m still not a cop.” How was I a cop again?

James seemed unfazed by this information. He stared at me as if trying to figure out some equation and then his eyes flashed understanding.

“Well, anyway, I only have one.” James turned to Donny like Moebius and Neo offering him a palm with a blue pill resting on it. “You down?”

Donny smiled. “Always.”

He swallowed his pill and began his orbit around the moon.

A few hours later Donny started acting strangely. This was not the kind of strangely that we were all used to from dropping acid, the stomach ache, the weird look in the eye; this was something different and off-putting. I noticed he was off when he began batting at things in the air that were not there. As if shooing off a phantom fly, Donny pawed at the air in a sort of cartoon slow motion that gained in speed and intensity until it became quite clear something was very wrong.

Jim began looking a bit concerned when Donny decided to lie down and make snow angels on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop where we’d been sitting. It doesn’t snow in Oakland.

“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
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