by Moshe Kasher
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Table of Contents
Copyright Page
For my mother. I wouldn’t be here without you.
Acknowledgments
I didn’t even know this thing was a book, and without the help of many, it probably wouldn’t have been. Many thanks are due. First and foremost to my manager, Josh Lieberman, for having the vision to crush my dream of putting on a one-man show while building a new vision for me that became this book. To the master, Richard Abate, for handing me the building blocks and teaching me how to stack them. To my editor, Ben Greenberg, for his faith in me and for putting my manuscript and talents to the whetstone. Together we made something razor-sharp. To Flag Tonuzi, for designing the perfect cover for this book. To everyone else at Grand Central. To all the kids I grew up with in Oakland, for teaching me how to survive. Thanks to Oakland Public Schools, OPD, every therapist I ever had, every adult I ever hated, and everyone who made a mistake with me. I ain’t mad acha. To everyone at the Gersh Agency and to Dave Becky and everyone at 3arts. To every stand-up who inspires me. To everyone I forgot: I didn’t mean it. To every gangster rapper, ever (especially those whose songs made my chapter list). To all my dear friends, especially my brother from another mother, Mr. Moon, for allowing a sliver of his story to be told by me, and for living his life with me all these years. To Jeremy Weintraub, for his help and support. To John Rose, for helping me untie the knot. To the chief conductor, for all the music. To Arlene and John. To Larry Wilhoit, the finest step entemologist I could have asked for. To my entire wild, insane, brilliant family: Kashers, Swirskys, Sterns, Worthens, etc. A very special thanks to my brother from the same mother, David Kasher, the world’s sexiest rabbi, for the constant patience, feedback, love, and criticism, and for helping me name this book. And finally, always, to Oakland.
Author’s Note
About the Artwork
Each of the inserts you see throughout the book demarcating its different sections was drawn by Oakland artist and graffiti legend Eskae aka Ezra Li Eismont. I first met Ezra when I also used to write graffiti back in the day, and when I hung up my paint can due to a lack of any measureable artistic talent, Ezra did the world a favor and kept painting. He is now an internationally recognized artist and a real good guy. Check out his work at www.ezrali.com.
Also, all of the calligraphy you see was hand drawn by Emily Snyder, a master calligraphy artist and owner of the business www.queenofquills.com. Have her write something for you.
About My Name
The names in this book have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. With one odd exception. The documents that I have included throughout the book are, you might notice, describing someone named “Mark Kasher.” Yes, that’s me. Like many American Jews I was given a “slave name” in order not to arouse suspicion should the Gestapo ever make a resurgence here in the USA. Mark is the Toby to my Kunte Kinte. At about sixteen, I began going full-time by my middle name, Moshe. I was feeling a desperate need to re-create myself with a new identity. Read the book and you’ll soon see why.
Introduction
Memoirs are inexact things, messy around the edges and distorted by the twists and turns of memory. Sometimes details get lost or hazy and confusing. I’ve been in the middle of telling a story only to realize, “Oh shit, this didn’t happen to me, this is a Steven Segal film plot.” Although, strangely, I did once rescue the President from hijackers on a plane. See, there we go again. You’ll never know if that last part is true.
As you go back through the creaky secret rooms of your memory, you find places damaged by time and neglect. You can dust them off, but often you want to present them in a form that is understandable to people, and I can imagine polishing a corroded memory and making it prettier or more compelling than it deserves to be.
Under the weight of all of that, I would like to offer you my memoir: a drug-filled journey through the harrowing years of my youth. I have tried as best I can to give it over with honesty and accuracy. But you’ll be shocked to realize that a drug-addicted, mentally ill journey of violent insanity is a bit of a hazy cat’s-cradle to untangle. Hazy or not, this is my life.
I even found, at points, when diving into my memory that I was surprised at how bad things had gotten when I was young. Surprised by my own memories. Do you remember that scene from the movie The Princess Bride when, after Princess Buttercup is swallowed by the Snow Sands in the Fire Swamp, Westley cuts a vine from a nearby tree and dives in after her? He’s in there, breathless, blind, feeling around for what’s important. That’s how I felt the entire time I was swimming around in my memories. I felt swallowed by them, and only the lifeline of my adult brain made me feel safe and like I’d emerge again, able to breathe.
Writing this book was painful and illuminating, exciting and emotional. I can only hope that reading it makes you feel that way, too. When I was a very young man I remember reading books like Catcher in the Rye and The Basketball Diaries and thinking secretly, “Look, here are people who are just as broken as me.” It gave me a private thrill to know that I wasn’t the only piece of damaged machinery out there. So I suppose I’d like to say to the person who’s reading this book who feels like I did when I was young—like a factory defect from the human being plant: I get it. You’ll be okay. Hell, maybe someday you’ll even write a book about it.
Chapter 1
“The Dayz of Wayback”
—NWA
I was born ugly. Babies are ugly. At least I’ve always thought so. Little pruny creatures. Shooting down the birth canal, the final seconds of prelife bliss tick to a sudden stop and a gross little thing is bungeed into the world. Leaving behind the vaginaquarium floating bliss of yesterday, it pops into the world. Here comes Baby, covered in gel and matter, wrinkles and blood, shit and life juices. I’ve always imagined a mother looking down and in the first millisecond thinking, “Goodness, what is that?” But before she even has a chance for that thought to shoot up her synapses and reverberate in her mind, the doctor smacks Baby’s bottom and the little one shrieks its first cry. That cry, quick as sound, quicker, jams itself into its mother’s ears, derailing that first repulsed thought. It circumvents her brain. It shoots into her heart. Mommy forgets all about that first thought when she hears that wail. Her only thought now is, “My son!”
My mother never heard that wail. My mother is deaf.
My shriek flew up to her ears and, finding two broken, swollen drums, ricocheted back and meandered around the hospital room looking for somewhere to roost before it impotently spilled onto the hospital floor.
And though her second thought no doubt was a loving one, I’ve always wondered if that first “Eww, gross,” thought didn’t make it to my mother’s brain and, planting itself deep inside her, make her ask, years later, “What is wrong with this kid?”
My earliest memories are of flying fingers. Flesh-colored strings zapping through the air, signifying meaning. I didn’t realize my first word was “spoken” in sign language. How would I have known that wasn’t just how everyone talked?
I didn’t realize my mother was deaf, but I did realize that if I cried when she wasn’t looking, it made no difference to her. If I wept in view of her, her face would screw up in compassion and she would reach down and scoop me up to make me feel okay again. I took this information and imprinted it into my brain.
As early as I can recall, adults have been t
elling me there was something wrong with me. I was passed around, adult to adult, each one throwing their hands up and declaring, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him either!” Adults talked about me like that, right in front of me, all the time, as if my mother’s deafness somehow applied to me by association. I’d spend time in the mirror, trying to figure out what was looking back at me, what weird alien thing I was.
According to my mother, I was born out of control, a feral kid, wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity of my own body. If you could see my little Jew body now, you would find that very difficult to believe.
I’d snarl and snap, I’d bite and foam, I’d shake with anger when the slightest thing didn’t go my way, and my body would seize in convulsions of rage and uncontrollable emotion.
Frightened, my mother sent me to a therapist. I was four years old. That is a demarcation point in my life. I was booted into the therapeutic garden and left to wander, entering an old rusty gate guarded by the ghosts of Freud and Jung. Being told, still wet from the womb, that you need therapy, it almost makes a boy feel broken.
Oh, and my mother and father are both deaf.
People are always fascinated when I tell them that.
“They are both deaf?” they ask, winding up for a dumb question: “What are the odds of that?”
I suppose they imagine two lost deaf people wandering across the land with a sign in hand reading: DEAF LONELY HEART SEEKS MATE!
Having no experience with deaf people, folks usually assume they are rare as unicorns and that only magic could bring two of them together.
The real story is less magical, more practical.
In 1967, the World Games for the Deaf preliminary trials were held in Berkeley, California.
All the way in Brooklyn, New York, Steven J. Kasher, my father, the deaf, sickly son of two Jewish communists, was determined to make those games. Lord knows why. My father was hardly an athlete. He was a slight, scrappy, monkey of a boy, a shock of jet-black curls wrapped around his head like Art Garfunkel’s long-lost evil, dark-haired cousin. Nonetheless, my father walked into the living room and announced to his family that he was hitchhiking to Berkeley and that he’d be leaving that afternoon.
His mother, my baba, Helen Kasher, wrung her hands with worry.
She hated when he left New York. She hated when people left her.
Baba was raised in Hungary, the first of five children raised by a mighty Chassidic patriarch, my great-grandfather Zeidi. Zeidi was the undisputed leader of the family, a chicken butcher by day, a Torah scholar by night, a saint by apocryphal family history. Zeidi isn’t a name, by the way. Zeidi is just the Yiddish word for “grandfather.” But in my family, Zeidi wasn’t just someone’s grandfather, he was Grandfather. He was Zeidi. As far as I know, everyone called him that, including his wife. Sounds like their sex life was rockin’. Give it to me, Grandpa!
His daughter, Helen, seemed to be the only one who was not convinced of his beneficent grandfatherness. Sometime in the 1920s, Zeidi sailed to America alone, waving good-bye from a ship’s bow vowing to send for everyone soon. I imagine a sad man with patches holding together his oversized suit playing a plaintive song on the fiddle behind Zedi as he yelled down to my baba and the rest of the family.
“I’ll see you all soon!” he’d cry as the ocean brined the sides of the ship. “In the meantime, there will be some really exciting news coming from Germany soon that should keep you guys busy!”
For years Zeidi struggled alone in Brooklyn to kill enough chickens to send for the family. Unfortunately for him, every chicken throat he slit further cut the cord of connection to his oldest child, my grandmother.
And as she saw the world around her fall into ashes and all of Europe go septic with anti-Jewish infection, all she was able to see was that her father left her.
By the (nick of) time that Zeidi brought the family over, the gulf between them was more profound than the space between New York and Hungary.
To the shock and horror of the family, the second they stepped onto American soil, my grandmother threw a pair of pants on and declared herself free of the shackles and poison of religion. She cursed the Torah. She decried Judaism and all other faiths as divisive and archaic. She joined the American Communist Party and marched for civil rights. She vowed never to have anything to do with Judaism again. Then she married my grandfather, a Jewish, Yiddish novelist, Duvid Kasher.
Hardly the huge anti-Jewish rebellion she’d been planning.
My grandfather was a quiet, thoughtful man whose hands shook with the reverberation of the things he’d left behind in Poland. He was a writer who had chewed on Yiddish prose in coffeehouses in Warsaw with legends like Sholem Aleichem. He moved to America to escape the horrors and left behind the linguistic fluency that defined his career. He left a scholar; he arrived an immigrant.
When they had my father, their endogamic, muddied, closed-circuit DNA code zapped my father’s nervous system, leaving him deaf and addled with Gaucher’s disease, a rare disorder that strikes eastern European jews almost exclusively. An ironic proof to my baba that Judaism literally was poison.
Nonetheless, my father was born a fighter. Not expected to live past the age of six, he gave everyone the finger and did what the fuck he wanted. A scrappy firecracker, my dad took control of every room he was ever in. He sparkled with charisma. He was electric. My father was like a king.
The Deaf King.
So when the king stepped out onto the field of the World Games for the Deaf trials and dusted his hands off, my mother’s jaw dropped.
A week later she left a note on her mother’s kitchen table: I moved to New York. I’ll be okay.
And that is how two deaf people met and made me.
Seven years later, an old brownstone co-op building in Queens housed a family on the edge. In a one-bedroom apartment were my mother, my father, my big brother, David, almost four years old at the time, and a nine-month-old baby, handsome and charismatic as hell for an infant, but simmering with latent drug addiction, learning disabilities, and violent tendencies.
I was lying in my crib wondering when I could get out and start smoking and listening to hip hop when my older brother leaned in to say hello. I smacked him in the face.
“Why did he hit me?!?” David wailed.
“He must be angry already.” My father laughed.
Oh, Ha Ha, Father.
When no one was looking, I somehow made my way out of the crib and climbed down into the bathroom.
In there I found an array of pretty things: brightly colored makeup kits and glittery perfume bottles. My hand stopped on a Liz Taylor’s “White Diamonds” bottle. I grabbed it and wrenched the labial cap off the thing. I took a gulp of perfume. I kept gulping. The fact that I took a sip of perfume makes some sense to me. A baby smells a pretty thing and tries to see if it tastes pretty, too. The concerning detail is that I polished off the bottle. That night was my first night in a hospital due to out-of-control drinking. Out of control. That’s how my mother always described me. She’d sign, “You were just always out of control.”
Apparently my father was, too. My mom told me stories of how scared she was, of how he threw her around, but to be honest, I never believed her. It wasn’t until years later, when I started throwing her around myself, that I thought there might be something to the story.
My father, the charismatic lightning rod of our family, sometimes burned, sometimes exploded.
Sometimes, according to my mother, lightning struck.
My father would spend hours in his studio, painting enormous canvases with rich oils, trying like hell to get his demons out in the painting. He’d gone to art school and was an emerging talent. The deaf beatnik painter from Brooklyn. It was a backstory gallery owners salivated over.
But my dad also raged. He also fumed and yelled. He also grabbed my mother by the hand so hard he broke her fingers. Seems like my dad might’ve been born angry, too.
; In the spring of 1980, when I was almost a year old, my mom took us on a two-week vacation to California. We never returned. These days, stealing your children away across the country like that would be considered an abduction. But back then the Fathers’ Rights Movement was barely gaining steam, and my dad was mostly powerless to do anything but sit there and wait for us to come home.
Twenty years later, after his body caught up with him and he sickened and died, I found a wall calendar in a pile of his stuff as my family and I did that sick divvying of the loot that happens when someone dies. There in the square for April 18 was my father’s unmistakable handwriting, packed with flourishes and loops. Even his scribble had pizzazz. The box read:
April 18th: Bea and the boys leave to California
Each day we were gone was crossed with a big X. Each day ticked off in anticipation of seeing his family again. Eventually, I imagine, he realized, sick to his stomach:
“They aren’t coming back.”
Eventually, the X’s stopped. When the X’s stopped, my life in Oakland began.
We moved in with my grandmother straightaway. My mother’s mother, Hope. There was never any question of going back. In my family, divorce was a kind of sacred rite, passed down from matriarch to matriarch. My mother is a third-generation divorcée, which means that my great-grandmother left her husband. Divorce in 1917 was likely to turn a respectable woman into the town harpy, but the holiness of the divorce rite was so deeply embedded in her genetic code that even witch burnings and convents couldn’t keep my great-grandmother married.
My grandmother’s heart fluttered when she saw us tumble onto her doorstep, bags in hand.
“Finally,” she said, “you’ve come to your senses and left that fucking man. I’ve said it a thousand times, all men are pigs.” She looked down at my brother and me, “Except you boys, of course.”