by Moshe Kasher
Donny’s mom got a call from the church’s personnel manager complaining about us.
“Hello, Ms. Moon, I’m calling to let you know that your son and a group of boys have been hanging about in our church, smoking marijuana, causing destruction to our property, and taking advantage of our handyman.”
Donny’s mom, unconvinced, asked the obvious question, “Taking advantage of your handyman? Those boys are thirteen.”
The church lady dropped a bomb. “Well, Ms. Moon, Michael, our former handyman, is mentally retarded.”
So that explained it! We literally did not know that, all this time, we had been hanging out with a sort of ne’er-do-well, drunken Forrest Gump (minus the inspirational story/good nature/running skills/happy ending). Now we knew.
See, Mikey Rip-It-Up was so especially cool to us, a group of thirteen-year-old boys, because he had the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy. He really was just like us. Sad.
Eventually, though, our minds had begun to build more sophisticated spiderwebs of thought and conniving and Mikey just stayed the same way. Mikey was gonna be thirteen for the rest of his life, and we, sad to say, were going to get older. The consequences of our age were going to chip away at us until some of us were dead, and some of us were in jail, and some of us got the fuck out of Oakland. But Mikey Rip-It-Up was going to stay the same. Too bad for him, our consequences ruined his little life. Mikey didn’t go back to his parents and ask for help after he got in trouble. He may have seemed like one of us, but he really wasn’t. We ravaged his life and left him severed from the charity that had been keeping him afloat. After we moved on, he sank.
Mikey hit the road and, as far as I know, is still roaming the streets of the old neighborhood, playing with little boys, hoping they won’t grow up.
Chapter 7
“Mind Blowin’ ”
—The D.O.C.
Our days and nights were spent wandering through Oakland, looking for ridiculous fun things to do. Life as a thirteen-year-old outlaw is very difficult. Having blacklist fun is a constant challenge when you are that young. Much of the activity must be done under the cover of darkness. Some criminal activity was easy, as no one would suspect a boy with such a cherubic baby face was such a badass. That’s how we all got away with going bombing.
Going bombing is what we called stuffing a backpack full of Krylon brand spray paint and going to cover the neighborhood with graffiti. The harder you crushed an area, the more solidly that place was yours. We owned Rockridge and much of North Oakland. Every block, every blank space and bus bench, was blanketed with our tags. Picking a tag was an important and definitive thing. It was like going on a Native American vision quest and coming back with a spirit animal. Except without any redeeming spiritual lessons. Or emotional journey. Actually maybe it wasn’t like a vision quest at all. But once a tag was chosen, it became your identity, and your nom de plume represented you on every bus in the East Bay.
We always sat at the back of the bus. We did it for Rosa Parks. No, we did it to get away with tagging. Every time we jumped on the bus, someone would pass around a Magnum marker with a fat tip or a streaker, a grease paint pen that was nearly impossible to clean off a window once it dried. If we didn’t have one of those tools, we went more lo-tech—shoe polish bottles with big round sponges soaked in black polish that would drip down from the letters we drew on the windows of the bus, weeping for the lack of artistic skill we employed. Or we would scratch our tags into the windows with sandpaper-tipped drill bits we called scribes. Anything we could do to get our names up. Did I mention that I was absolutely terrible at graffiti? I was. It was a source of deep shame, but I ignored it daily and tagged the hell out of Oakland anyway. Graffiti exists in two realms: quality and quantity.
Being a brilliant artist would get you respect and admiration, but if you only drew beautiful pieces in your sketchbook, you might as well have not existed. I tried every day to figure out how to draw old-school, New York subway–style murals, but I only ever managed to draw something that looked like very edgy piles of vomit. So I decided to go with option two. Bomb the village. Literally. I wrote my name everywhere I could. Every second I was out on the town was one where I scribbled my tag on whatever surface I could. I took a great pride in walking through my neighborhood and seeing my defacing tags staring back at me.
The P.A.G. had morphed into a graffiti crew called UCF, or Unconvicted Felons. Why people were so obsessed with outlaw acronyms back then is beyond me. Most graffiti crews had one. There was 640, a crew named after the penal code for vandalism; AS, or Altered States; the LORDS crew; and our rivals, BSK. Well, really, it wasn’t much of a rivalry. BSK was a crew from the neighborhood next to ours and truly a much more powerful entity than we ever could have hoped to be. With deep connections to Mexican gangs in East Oakland, they were a legitimately fearsome group of kids. If only we had known that before we started talking shit. Someone in UCF had somehow crossed out one of their tags that showed up in our neighborhood. To us it was a display of our neighborhood dominance. To BSK, it was a declaration of war. We were totally ready for war until they arrived, an entire bus full of scary-looking kids from grades above us.
The mob gathered in front of Claremont with bats and bottles, ready to rumble. We took one look at the army in front of the school and snuck out the back way, immediately disbanding the UCF. We reconstituted ourselves into a new, war-free crew called SS, or Simply Savage.
I then suggested that we not have an acronym that shared its name with the Nazi secret police and we changed again to IA, or Illegal Art. We were perhaps not the most loyal to our crew’s name, but we were certainly dedicated to the idea of graffiti. One day, we even climbed into a subway tunnel and risked our lives for it.
Tunnels are amazing. The act of man boring a tunnel through a mountain is a feat of human ingenuity that’s pretty incredible to think about. It’s so powerfully penetrative, it’s almost sexual. (In fact, whenever I see a woman these days, I think, “Man, I’d love to fortify her walls and use a boring machine to grind out a passageway that would allow transit to and from her ovaries.”)
There is and was something dangerous and exciting about the dark mystery of the subway tunnel, and it didn’t help that we had one staring at us from the mountain that separated Oakland from the Contra Costa County suburbs. We often stared at the opening of that tunnel from the other side of the fence and wondered what mysteries lay within.
One day we found out. DJ heard a rumor of a small room about a mile down the main tunnel that the BART train tore through.
“A fucking room! A little fucking room!” DJ drooled, his tongue working slower than his head once again.
I wasn’t sure why we should be impressed. “I mean, aren’t we in a room right now? What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is your fat belly, you little bitch.” DJ always became somewhat more articulate when he was finding a way to call me fat.
Of course, this was a bit unfair. Fat teens don’t really have “fat bellies.” It takes years of harrumphing, beer-swilling and Salisbury steak, “gotta get away from my wife” nights to grow a big fat man tummy. What I had was a soft boyish gel body. Pink puff tits and hairless “never had love” handles. The Lakota Sioux called me, “Swims with a T-shirt.” I wasn’t actually fat, I was undefined. The problem with DJ was that he didn’t appreciate nuance.
“You are a fat bitch!”
“Don’t I know it!” I shot back, settling into a familiar game. “I actually met your mom at the fat bitch support group I go to.”
DJ, out of options, punched me in the chest.
“It’ll be dope!” DJ continued, hardly noticing me rocking in the corner weeping. “We can shoot over the fence and we just have to walk single file down into that room and see what’s in there. Plus, it’s all virgin walls in there, and we could tag the whole fucking place up. Who’s in?”
I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, which was that I was scared, so instead I
just grunted in a manner I imagined sounded both tough and noncommittal.
Donny, the plan maker, the brains behind our brainless operation, appeared lost in thought. I stared at him, trying to psychically will him to nix the plan, and it looked like he was just about to when he cocked his head to the side and said, “I’ve got weed. We could smoke in there.”
Preparations began immediately.
We tromped up to the entrance of the BART tunnel silently, as if trudging toward a battlefield we knew could be filled with Vietcong.
Villagers ran up to us as we passed by, a single-file sentinel.
“You no go der!” they screamed, blessing us with incense. “Tunnel real bad, many enemy! American never return!”
But we soldiered on.
We arrived at the barbed-wire cyclone fencing and took in the signage placed there to warn kids like us against things like this. There were signs everywhere:
STOP! EXTREME DANGER IN TUNNEL!
NO, SERIOUSLY, THIS IS A BAD IDEA.
FUCK IT THEN, I GUESS YOU ARE GONNA DIE.
Ignoring the signs, we jumped past the razor wire and through truncheons of secondary security walls and finally we stood at the mouth of the tunnel, an expanse of blackness swallowing itself into the mountain.
This was not a good idea.
DJ, perhaps too dumb to be afraid, broke the silence, turning to me and saying, “Fats, you at the end of the line. You’ll slow us down.”
Fats complied.
We began our little march into the tunnel on an emergency platform barely a foot wide, feeling the wall for reassurance, putting one foot in front of the other.
I tried to keep in step with everyone else from the back of the line, but I could feel the emptiness of the tunnel drilling into my head from behind. I would have pissed myself if not for the electric third rail threatening execution.
We got about a quarter of a mile in, far enough that we couldn’t see the light from where we had entered, when something odd happened.
The air behind us got warm and then sucked away, like a vacuum hose had been clipped onto the other end of the tunnel.
We stopped in our fucking tracks.
The ground beneath us started rumbling and from the darkness two bright eyes blinked hello. We heard the loud, screaming, distorted beep of the train conductor blowing his horn.
Someone screamed what, at this point, was only too obvious:
“TRAIN!!!!”
Even as I heard that, all sound disappeared and then the train was there, shooting past us at what seemed like the speed of light. Woosh Woosh Woosh Woosh, the train flew by our faces, inches away. Had I been a little more Jewish in the nose, I might’ve lost it.
Despite shaking with fear, I felt a kind of calm. I peered into the windows of the train going by, and I could see the shocked faces of people on their commute home, their minds clearly not ready to have pubescent teenage eyes peering back at them from the darkness.
I became sort of hypnotized by these people, sitting there, commuting home, living their lives while flying by, when the screeching of the brakes jolted me out of my calm.
The train had come to a complete stop in the middle of the tunnel and from the front car I saw the conductor leaning out of his window, his brain trying to compute the information he was receiving, a group of teenage boys standing in a death trap.
In the moment of pause, Donny got his head straight, and from the front of the line he screamed, “Run!” We ran.
Now here, an unfortunate thing happened. When everybody flipped around to run out of the tunnel back from whence we came, guess who was now first in line? That’s right, Fat Ass.
I ran as fast as my fat ass could take me, but it was hardly fair. I was shaking with adrenaline and there was a back draft from the train still blowing against me. This was a “worst-case scenario.”
From behind me in the faceless dark I could hear dearest DJ screaming, “Run, you fat bitch, run!” I ran against the wind, against the shame, against my body. I ran like that.
It was like some kind of twisted, bizzaro scene from Stand by Me, except the only lesson at the end was that weed trumps life.
As the light from the tunnel opened up into the world, I turned back to see Donny had actually jumped down onto the tracks and was searching for something.
“Donny, what the fuck are you doing?” I asked frantically.
“I dropped the weed!” he yelled back, as if that made perfect sense.
“Are you kidding me? You have to get out of there.”
Donny looked up at me like I had just said the stupidest thing in the world. “Dude, it’s weed.”
No argument from me.
I leaned down and helped Donny out of the tracks but only after he had a baggy clinched in his hand. Trembling, we climbed over the fence and a few minutes later were crouched in a wooden play structure together and silently smoking. As the weed and the fear and the adrenaline mixed together, we couldn’t help but wonder what that little room looked like. I still wish we’d made it.
The best part of joining these guys wasn’t just making friends, but joining a world. I had a secret life no one knew about. At first, my mother was happy to let me go and to stay out as late as I wanted just because she was so happy that I’d made friends. Of course, my friends and I were not learning how to tie knots for the Boy Scouts and help old ladies across the street. We were learning how to kick some ass.
I had my first drunken fight. Everybody should have one. I firmly believe that everyone should get punched in the face at least once in their life. It builds character. Getting your ass kicked teaches you that your body isn’t a glass menagerie figurine that could shatter at any trauma. You gotta get lumped up sometimes. Then heal and know you are all right.
I got whopped as a kid. Big leather belts on my bare ass. Fuck it. My dad used to drag me around by my ears and twist them when I talked shit, which I realize now was a true cruelty, not because of some physical abuse issue, but because I’m already Jewish with floppy-ass Dumbo ears, and for my dad to pull on them was, well, it was anti-Semitic. Fuckin’ Jew.
But back to my point. Getting punched in the face is good for you. Unless you get punched in the face too many times or too hard, and then it stops being good for you and mashes your brain into soup. But getting your ass kicked is generally a learning experience. And this night, I was the professor. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t some “I’m the man” bravado. I’ve been in many fights and I’ve lost most of them. But this night I was the victor and it felt amazing.
To my credit, the motherfucker was talking shit. It was late at night, and a bunch of us were drinking on the upper field at the elementary school that Donny lived near. Donny was there and DJ and this kid Brian, whom you could never quite trust not to get violent. Some people just communicate in violence. Brian liked to strike. He wasn’t a gangster, he didn’t have guns. He just liked to strike.
The first time I tried nitrous oxide, I was with Brian. Donny knew Brian from back in the day. They had gone to camp together at Camp Winnarainbow, the hippie camp owned by that famous hippie clown Wavy Gravy.
Brian was a long-haired Hessian type. We all went down to Safeway late one night and stuffed cans full of whipped cream into our pants and walked out smiling in anticipation of the dessert party we were about to have. To me, it’s cute to think of thirteen-year-olds using something as innocent as whipped cream to get high with. It seems the perfect thirteen-year-old party drug. Get high and have hot cocoa after.
Later, up in Donny’s room, they told me what to do. “Crack it and suck it into your lungs,” Brian explained, the excitement flickering in his eyes. “Take as much as you can and hold it in.” I did as instructed. I peeled off the plastic ring from the spigot and pulled it toward me. The trick with whipped cream cans is not to shake them. You shake, you get a mouth full of cream. I cracked the thing and breathed in big. The rush of gas filled my chest and I held on to it. In about two seconds, my brain be
gan to rattle and shake and the hippie crack started to do its duty. Nitrous oxide makes a sound. The wah wah wah wah sound you hear in your brain when nitrous hits is what we used to call the sound your brain cells make when they die. The death knell of your poor little brain wondering what it ever did to hurt you. So I sucked in big and listened to the symphony of death going on in my brain that first time I puffed nitrous, and just then, just as my mind started to go mush and the ecstasy of the gas took over… bam! Brian, in his loveliness, punched me, as hard as he could, in the chest. When I think back on that night, I still have no clue what he was doing or why he decided that that was the right time for me to be assaulted. I do remember that I didn’t feel a thing and I laughed for twenty minutes about it.
So Brian was there on the upper field, polishing his brass knuckles or eating gunpowder or whatever someone like that does. And Donny was there and DJ and a bunch of other kids. And Gary.
Gary was a bitch. At least we called him that. I’m sure right now he’s a lawyer or a postal worker or a bank teller. I bet he’s a family man with love in his heart for his two daughters, Castanella and Deflores. He’s a saint, too. Deflores was born with an extra eyebrow, but it never stopped Gary from loving her. I bet he prays at night and donates to charity. I bet he never jerks off and thinks of all races equally. I’m sure Gary is amazing. But to me, he’ll always just be a little bitch.
And like a bitch, he talked some shit that night. I don’t know what. But I know it was too much for me to bear and I attacked him. I jumped on top of Gary and started pummeling him for the injustice I can’t even remember now. I punched him and punched him. I punched him so many times, my sweatshirt worked its way over my head and I was tied up in it. So I took it off and kept punching him. Then all of a sudden from my left, good ’ol Brian ran up and kicked Gary in the head with his steel-toed Hessian boots so hard I thought he killed him. It scared the shit out of me, but I guess Brian’s violence had its advantages, too. Let him punch you in the chest, and he’ll kick your enemies in the head. Seemed like a fair trade to me.