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

by Moshe Kasher

  Then, one day, I was happily in the midst of my stroking when something started to go very wrong. My arm started to tingle and then go numb. My latent Semitic hypochondria immediately rang alarm bells. “Oh my God, I’m having a stroke. The bad kind, not the good kind.”

  I wanted to stop but I couldn’t as the terror and the ecstasy rushed into me. Trickling waterfalls of electric sand filled my arm and then back to my dick and then back to my arm. It shot through every square inch of my body and set my scalp on fire. My toes curled. My world changed.

  I CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!!!!

  I called Richard immediately to report the results.

  “Dude, you just keep going until it happens. I’m not sure if it’s good for you or not but it feels… I can’t describe it.”

  Richard was excited to try. “Hold on the phone, I’m gonna go into the bathroom and try it, I’ll be right back.”

  I waited as I wanted to hear his supplications as he thanked me for changing his world. Ten minutes later I could hear him bray from the background:

  He returned to the phone, “Wow, dude. Wow. I’m gonna go do that again, but my grandma wants to know if you want to come over for dinner.”

  “What, was she there when you did it? ‘Oh, now that you’re done jerking off, ask if he wants dinner.’ ”

  “Shut up, dude, she told me to ask you earlier. Yes or no, I really want to go try again.”

  “Yeah, okay, perv, I’ll see you tonight, have fun jerking off in front of your grandma.”

  “Fuck you.” He laughed and hung up.

  Dinner over there was always pretty good. They were American gentile-type people, not Jewish hippies on welfare, and therefore, the meals were a lot cooler. Meat and potatoes kind of things with Jell-O for dessert, contrasting with the tempeh rice torture device waiting for me at home with a side of cool disappointment for dessert. I leapt at the invitation.

  After gentile dinner ended, Richard’s dad lit a cigarette and his grandmother looked at me and said, “Richard, don’t you need to tell your friend something?”

  I looked around, confused. “Uh-oh, are you gay, Richard? I’m okay with it if you are.”

  Richard’s dad coughed. “I told you there was something wrong with the kid, Mom.”

  She looked at me with compassion, turned to Richard, and said, “Tell him.”

  Richard shifted in his seat guiltily. “We are moving to Lafayette.”

  “Lafayette?”

  Lafayette was a suburb of Oakland but was so phenomenally wealthy that you’d never know by looking at it. Apparently, Richard’s grandmother had liquidated her assets and bought a home there to set Richard up for success and, I suspect now, to get him away from his mother.

  “But we’ll still be best friends. I mean, you can come over all the time.”

  I paused, considering. This sucked.

  “Well, fuck, man, now I’ll be the only white kid at Claremont. Oh. Sorry I cussed, Mr. and Grandma Lilly. My mom lets me.”

  I’d been looking forward to middle school for a long time. A strange thing when you consider that middle school is one of the most horrible environments on earth. In terms of torturous social environments the order goes:

  Holocaust (various)

  Siberian Gulag

  Middle School

  Iron Maiden (torture device or concert)

  I had enrolled in Claremont Middle School filled with excitement and hope after having come precariously close to failing fifth grade. I was on my way into uncomfortable prepubescent adolescence. The world looked like my underdeveloped oyster. But now, with Richard gallivanting with wealthy cheerleaders (I imagined), I was suddenly alone, friendless, and about to get exiled into a social no-man’s-land.

  I saw pretty quickly that Claremont was deeply divided into racial and class strata. The semi-equality of elementary school dissipated the second it touched the blacktop at Claremont. The roles here were quite clearly demarcated. I just didn’t know where I fit yet.

  At Claremont Middle School, there were three kinds of white people. There were the white people who made it to the popular group (a multiethnic power clique brought together by their sheer disdain for others), the nerds, and the fuckups.

  A word on the nerds. These aren’t the classic nerds you may see in your mind’s eye. They aren’t bespectacled losers with acne so thick you don’t notice their Dungeons and Dragons customized pocket protectors. I’m not defending them, I’m just clarifying. Mostly, nerd just meant white. For some reason, white just conjured images of squares and losers in the imagination of Claremont’s consciousness. So the nerds, who would’ve just been “people” at another school, became the lowest rung of the social ladder at the watering hole that was Claremont.

  Among the black people, there was diversity. There was the square, the churchgoer, the clown, the thug, the ladies’ man, the crack dealer, the oft-flunked, the gay dude, the African, big-ass muthafucka, retard, rapist, nice to whites, hella tall, half Asian, knows karate, has a twin, black with freckles, going to college and more, and more and more. But if you were white, you were just white.

  Unless you were a fuckup. Fuckups weren’t white, they were fuckups. It was like you didn’t even notice their whiteness because the dysfunction was screaming so loud that you couldn’t pay attention to anything else. They were the kids people’s mothers told them to avoid. The kids who you can find at the back of any school campus. These were Claremont Middle School’s white boy terrors.

  The first fuckup I saw was Joey Zalante. Joey was an eighth grader when I first entered Claremont and was one of the most badass motherfuckers I ever saw. Early in the sixth-grade school year I saw him do the impossible. He won a fight with a black kid.

  At Claremont watching fights was a sort of holy ritual. As soon as anyone started squaring off, everyone, from the biggest to the smallest, from the toughest gangster to the dorkiest white boy, immediately dropped whatever they were doing and ran, streaming across the blacktop toward the conflict. We would gather around the gladiators, forming a kind of makeshift human Colosseum while the familiar but rather crude chant would begin.

  “A fight! A fight! A motherfucking fight!”

  To show you the odds Joey was up against, I will tell you the rest of this chant reserved only for interracial fights:

  “A fight! A fight! A nigga and a white! If the nigga don’t win, then we all jump in!”

  These calls would spread across the yard, calling onlookers like a pied piper, and we would gather hoping for a show.

  Something like this would happen almost every day, but to everyone’s disappointment, most of these conflicts would end without much violence. Often what we watched was just a sort of odd human version of two animals in the wild, puffing themselves up, presenting the equivalent of their bright red baboon assholes to one another in an attempt to frighten their foe away.

  Most fights looked exactly like this. The two “warriors” would walk around one another with their arms raised, screaming at each other. As the action got more intense, they would walk in concentric circles, closer and closer to one another until they were literally shoulder to shoulder engaging in a sort of alpha male waltz. Contact. Tensions would rise to the point of physical conflict. Not the good stuff, though; the fighters would shoulder-check each other and then back up to continue the dance. Usually this went on and on until a teacher came and broke it up. Of course, the moment a teacher took away the threat of an imminent beat-down, the circlers would go mad with rage, swearing that they were just about to beat the other’s face in. “You’re lucky this teacher is holding me back or that’d be your ass, motherfucker!”

  “What about the twenty minutes of slow dancing you guys just did?” I’d yell, too funny for my own good. “What was holding you back then?” Often this would earn me a death threat from both fighters, their mutual disdain for me providing a common ground for reconciliation. People called me the Gandhi of the playground. Wait, no they didn’t, they called m
e white bitch.

  Once in a while, though, our dreams came true and actual fists would fly, violence would ensue, and the masses would be sated.

  One of those times, Joey Zalante bent time and space. At least it looked that dramatic to me. He was standing in line for the poor kids’ lunch.

  The poor kids’ lunch line was a humiliating place to be. A separate line reserved just for the kids who couldn’t afford to select from the horrific smorgasbord that awaited students on the inside of the cafeteria, the poor kids’ line stacked kids up outside, huddled in the cold like the lines for the food kitchens the school no doubt expected these students to end up frequenting in the years to come.

  I stood in it every day that my mother didn’t pack me a horrible brown bag of hippie gruel: thick grainy slices of wheat bread with gritty natural peanut butter slathered on, pineapple juice, and fruit leather. Not Fruit Roll-Ups, mind you, fruit leather. A kind of actual leather made from whatever the brownest, most fecal-tasting parts of a fruit were. I imagined the factory workers at the Fruit Roll-Up plant sweeping the remnants of their work off the floor and dumping them into a bucket marked FRUIT LEATHER SCRAPS FOR TORTURING BAD CHILDREN.

  My brown bag lunches were so awful I prayed for the poor kids’ line.

  A snapshot of the poor kids’ lunch line would serve as a kind of predictive criminal lineup for Oakland’s future. The John Dillingers and Bonnies and Clydes of the world always waited in the poor kids’ lunch line. I was there standing in the back, waiting to get my juice cup and nacho cheese fries alongside a mealy pizza slice and an egg roll. Anyone who thinks welfare is an awesome meal ticket for undeserving people ought to be forced to eat one actual meal from below the poverty line. Following the most intense diarrhea of their lives would be the realization that being on government assistance sucks balls.

  Ahead of me in line was Joey, whom I would soon gaze upon lovingly as a prince among men. In front of him was Sean The Bomb.

  Sean The Bomb had fists of dynamite. At least so he told everyone who would listen. “I’m Sean The Bomb with the strength of King Kong. I got fists of TNT and my dick is long!”

  Sean was simply enormous for an eighth grader. Who knows how old he actually was, but he stood more than six feet and was thick as a wall. Sean was not smart, but if you were, you would avoid pissing him off. He carried himself with the air of the pimp that I’m sure he has since become. A rule with pimps is to never step on their shoes.

  At Claremont the crack-dealer kids could be spotted by their ever-changing Nike Cortez shoe collection. They called the shoes “Dougies,” and the cooler you were, the more pairs you had. If you wore a red shirt, you had to have matching red Dougies. Black shirt, black Dougies, and so on. But the poorer you were, the fewer pairs of shoes you had to work with. Sean The Bomb had yet to figure out how to monetize his explosive fists and, as a result, had only one pair of white Dougies. Joey made the mistake of stepping on them.

  “Get the fuck off my shoes, you dumb white motherfucker!” Sean exploded, pushing Joey back into the line behind him, food flying everywhere.

  “I ain’t white, you big-lipped bitch, I’m Italian.”

  Joey just spat this back, almost as if he wasn’t scared of Sean’s bombs at all.

  Sean tackled Joey without any pretense, no dancing, no chanting, no nothing. I held my breath.

  Gravel flew everywhere as the two rolled back and forth scraping, scrambling, beating the shit out of each other. Somehow, though, Joey managed to flip Sean on his back and to sit on his stomach, pummeling him from the top. Sean The Bomb was not conscious long. He got knocked the fuck out.

  I panicked.

  WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

  Joey got up and started dusting himself off as campus security ran over, too little too late. I looked around at the other people watching, flabbergasted.

  “Did you see what just happened?!? What does this mean!?! Is this the End Times?” I screamed with jubilation.

  All of the Caucasian kids at Claremont danced the hora together to celebrate. We cooked an ox in sacrifice and promised to name all of our firstborn sons Joey.

  Just before Joey disappeared into the swirling masses, slipping out of sight of campus security, I could have sworn he winked at me, as if to say, “Yeah, that was pretty cool, huh?” He winked at me! Not bad. I thought to myself that a fuckup seemed like a pretty cool thing to be. It was like a little Post-it note reminder that I stuck to the inside of my head.

  Note to self: Fuckups are afraid of nothing. You are afraid of everything. This information might come in handy someday.

  Somewhere along the line, I figured out that the more I made people laugh, the less of a loser I would appear to be. I shucked and jived for my classmates, hoping like hell no one would figure out how scared I was. When an in-class lecture confused me, I’d make fun of the shoes of a kid poorer than me. At the end of the lecture, the teachers would only remember me mocking the kid’s plastic Moon Boots, not that I had been unable to answer a single question on dividing fractions.

  This kind of behavioral distraction technique kept me feeling safe but made every day at school one where I fell incrementally behind without anyone really noticing, and as a result, when my final grades came in, everyone scratched their head and pointed at one another, trying to assign blame for the failure.

  It was a lesson in consequences. Shortly after school started in the seventh grade, I was sent to the retarded portable. A fat teacher/clinician combo meal of a woman approached me in class and pulled me aside with the private solemnity of an army officiant charged with the job of delivering the heartbreaking condolences to the next of kin.

  “You have learning disabilities,” she began, far too earnest for my comfort level. “LEARNING DISABILITIES.”

  She stared down at my puzzled face. “Do you know what that means? It means you learn differently than other students. Everyone learns differently and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people learn better with their ears.” As she talked, she pointed to her ears just in case I wasn’t aware of what an ear was.

  “Some people learn better with their eyes.”

  She pointed to her fat eyes.

  “We can’t figure out what you learn best with. It seems like something might be wrong with your brain.”

  She pointed to her fat head.

  “So we are going to bring you to a special classroom to help you learn. It’s called Portable Three.”

  Portable Three. The retard portable.

  “But isn’t that where the retarded kids go?” I asked.

  She was shocked. “We don’t use that word anymore. Differently abled.”

  “Do you use the word Down syndrome? Because the kid with Down syndrome goes to Portable Three. Do I have Down syndrome?”

  I never got an answer. To this day I’m not sure I don’t.

  Every day after fourth period, I would begin the long slog to the Portable Three DMZ at the back of the school. The first day there, I expected the door to open to a scene from an antebellum hospital for the mentally infirm. I expected young women chained to the door and people rocking in the corner picking at scabs. A woman with madness in her eyes would jump on top of me gasping, “Leave now… you’ll never escape this place.”

  What I got was much different. Portable Three looked a lot like a regular classroom. The fourth-period class was specifically for people like me, regular kids with an appropriate amount of chromosomes but an inappropriate amount of F’s on their report cards. The more severely disabled students were given classes earlier in the day and then sent home to lift heavy things for the carnival or eat paint chips or whatever.

  What I was expecting was a caricature of a special education classroom, but what I got was so innocuous that neither I nor any of the other students in there realized the real insidiousness of what was happening to us. It wasn’t Portable Three itself that would ruin you. It was the subtle left turn that your life makes when the public school system enrolls you in
a special education classroom.

  The special ed classroom is an open door with a friendly face beckoning you in, smiling, telling you, “Come in, come in! In this room is the help you’ve been looking for!”

  The moment you step in, the door locks behind you. The smiles disappear; your name glows white hot on their forms. You aren’t going anywhere.

  The second your name is written into the blank space marked “Student” on the form for the Individualized Education Program, or IEP, you have been kicked down a trapdoor into the sick wonderland of special ed. Every special ed student gets an IEP, and in it, the “plan of action” for your future is outlined. Every detail about your past failures is listed. Every goal for your future is put down on paper. Your plan is set.

  Every mistake you ever make again will be attributed to a “lack of educational support” or an “indication of unchanged educational deficiencies.” An inch at a time, you become a product of the system. You slide down that tunnel like Alice chasing a rabbit, slowly and cautiously at first, thinking you are after something nice and cute like Peter Cottontail or, as they put it, “a more appropriate educational modality,” but pretty soon you look back in the direction you came from to find that you have become quite lost. You couldn’t make it back if you tried. A while later you realize the bunny ahead of you has long since disappeared and you are surrounded with people as mad as hatters. Adults with their Cheshire grins assure you that you are “right where you need to be.” No one needs to shout, “Off with your head!” because they have been slowly taking your head away from you the whole time. A psychiatric guillotine has shaved your head away one thin slice at a time like a deli slicer. In three years I would find myself stuck, fucked up, and my life becoming curiouser and curiouser every second. That’s the wonderland of Portable Three.

  Of course, I realized none of this at first. All I knew was that Portable Three had a distinct corrosive effect on your social life. As soon as people find out you go there, you are out. No one likes a retarded friend.