by Moshe Kasher
Partially this was because, due to apathy and financial restrictions, I was used as the conduit to relay information to my deaf mother.
At first, Oakland Public Schools didn’t want to hire interpreters, and so I was allowed the rare and inane privilege of sitting in on and interpreting my own parent-teacher conferences. This was to become a pattern, and no matter how far down the ladder I seemed to crawl, it didn’t seem far enough to warrant the school system’s breaking the bank on an interpreter. It took years until they woke up to what I was doing and sprang for what should have been an obvious thing. I got really good at it, too. Not at interpreting, mind you, but at subtly changing the message I was hearing and giving it over to my mother in such a way that she was never quite getting the real story.
“Mrs. Kasher, your son has been truant an unacceptable amount of days this semester.” The vice principal’s voice rose to a yell in the hopes that my mother would hear at least part of it.
I would look right at my mother and sign, “Mrs. Kasher, while your son has not yet been truant what I’d call an unacceptable amount of days this semester, we are concerned that he not make a pattern of it.”
I’d always give some of the real information, lest my mom just grin back at the vice principal and give a thumbs-up. She needed to look concerned enough not to arouse the curiosity of the teachers, and they needed to look satisfied enough with her answers not to make her smack me. It needed to look like what they’d said so that her lip-reading eyes wouldn’t suspect anything. A very delicate balance. I was a master. Often my mother and I would walk out of a meeting discussing how weird the faculty at Claremont was, how very paranoid.
Then came Justin Sabarro and I couldn’t ease the blow. His arteries blew open the doors of denial that I had been welding shut with misinformation. How could I deliver this message? “A boy here has a very big heart. Very loving! So loving that love literally explodes all over… Oh, forget it, his heart exploded.” I was fucked.
Justin was a fat kid in the seventh grade. At the time, the white kids in the lower grades looked up to us like we were gods. We were eighth graders and we were bad. We were like a rumbling pack of greasers, except we all thought we were black, so leather motorcycle jackets were strictly out of the question.
At this point, school attendance was mostly optional, and Donny and I and the boys had become more of a burden than anything else to the faculty at Claremont. The black gangsters and crack dealers, the Mexican gangbangers, and the white fuckups. We had arrived. Officer Joe made regular stops at the school to fuck with us.
Mostly this was just to scare us and to keep the administration at Claremont feeling like something was being done about us. He would saunter onto campus, walk right up to us in the yard, and stick his snout into our business.
“Hey, you assholes thinking about cutting class again?”
I hated this guy. “I was thinking about it, you know any good spots?”
“I’ll be watching for you,” he’d say, sneering at us.
“Is that Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson you’re pretending to be right now? It’s very convincing!” I never did know when to shut up.
Things changed dramatically when Justin fucked everything up. The stakes got raised all of a sudden, and it wasn’t something we were ready for.
Donny pulled me aside in the hall one day. “I’m fucked, man. That kid Justin had a fucking heart attack.”
It seemed hard to believe. This tiny piece of paper had somehow short-circuited a kid’s fragile little coronary system. This drug that had introduced me to the power of my mind had introduced him to the weakness of his heart. Anyway, there was little need to figure out how to believe it—Donny was standing in front of me, looking like he was working on a heart attack of his own. He was scared.
I’d never seen Donny without a kind of layer of protective gangsterism. Donny had always been the kind of person who walked through the world at ease. He seemed older than us all just because he was cool. People flocked to him for that reason and they worshiped him without knowing it. It was mostly because he was never afraid and always knew what the fuck to do.
“I don’t know what the fuck to do.” He looked scared.
Not good. He’s asking me? He’s my guide to things like this. “Um. I don’t know either, dude.”
We were all kind of stuck on stupid. Luckily Justin made our next step pretty easy to figure out.
Nikki, a girl Donny had been going out with on and off for months, went to visit Justin, to make sure he was okay.
“He tried to rape me!” she reported back to us after the visit.
How about that Justin, huh? Weak of heart, strong of dick. We paid Justin a visit that day. Heart attack or not, he got beat down by Donny while Jamie stood back, yelling about the Crips he would call if anything like this happened again. After that, Justin disappeared from Claremont and from Oakland altogether.
The Justin thing changed everything, however. Everyone’s eyes were instantly on us. We changed overnight from invisible white boys to “those guys.” Mrs. Hojo, the principal at Claremont, pulled us in, one by one, to ask about our connection to Sir Justin the Weakhearted.
I went in close to the end of the interrogation session after DJ had drooled all over her desk and Jamie had regaled her with tales of his childhood in Guatemala shucking coca plants for his uncle Pablo. Jamie and I locked eyes as he walked out and I walked in. The look said it all: “Keep your fucking mouth shut.” Easy. I’d been lying to therapists all my life. Principals were a piece of cake.
“Hello, Mr. Kasher.” She peered at me from behind a stereotypically principalish pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
“Hello, Mr. Hojo… Sorry, Mrs. Hojo… Sorry, I’m nervous.”
“It’s okay. Take a deep breath and tell me what you know about Justin Sabarro.”
My pudgy cheeks went rosy, I looked five years younger. “Is that the man who had a heart attack?”
Mrs. Hojo did not look amused. “The boy, yes. Did you sell him the LSD?”
“LSD? Is that like what the hippies took at Woodstock?”
She knew she was being worked. A look of anger flashed across her face. I’d won.
“You can go now. I’ll be calling your mother about this.”
I smiled. “She’s deaf, but would you like me to relay a message?”
“I’ll call your grandmother then; just get out of my office.”
I winked at Donny as he took my place in the interrogation room.
Maybe this thing was gonna blow over after all.
A few weeks later I was ambushed.
The UCSF Center on Deafness was my mother’s home base. A center focused on my mother’s two great loves: deaf equality and psychological diagnoses. Joy. I’d been in analysis at that point for eight years and I was only thirteen.
I got sent to analyst after analyst until at one point I was in therapy eight times a week. Individual therapy, behavioral counseling, group therapy, and my mother’s favorite: family therapy.
Our family therapist, Dr. Patty Susan, was a typical deaf fetishist. A hearing therapist fresh out of school with a dual degree in deaf studies and psychotherapy. People like this worship the deaf. These are the people who stop you in the streets to exclaim how beautiful sign language is, unaware that you just signed, “The roast beef gave me twelve hours of explosive diarrhea.”
Every week’s session was essentially an hour of Dr. Susan pointing out what a martyr my poor deaf mother was and what an asshole I was. To be fair, she was right. I was an asshole. The deeper into my little world I got, the more concrete my mother’s everlasting fear of something being wrong with me was made manifest. I was now the problem child my mother had always suspected I’d become. Strangely, the worse I became, the more deeply into her own neurosis my mother dove.
My mother has always been a frantic, emotional waterfall of a woman. She wielded emotions like weaponry. Love was her shield; guilt was her sword. The more I rebelled, the m
ore completely she tried to swallow me whole. She lived on my chest. When I became old enough that I could no longer wear the literal leash she tied around me when I was a baby, she began to work on weaving an emotional leash. That one I couldn’t chew through. It was forged out of strong stuff. She had a kind of psychic link to me that I just couldn’t shake. If I snuck out at night, my mother would wake up the next morning with my absence palpable in her brain, vibrating like Spidey sense. Somehow she always knew when I wasn’t there. To be fair, I left a lot. Having a deaf mother makes sneaking out of the house a rather simple affair. Actually it wasn’t really sneaking as much as just leaving in the middle of the night. I could tramp and stomp and break-dance if I so desired. I left almost every night. Unfortunately, often I would sneak over to a friend’s house and drink a bit too much and pass out. When I’d pass out, drunk on DJ or Donny’s couch, I could count on, at seven in the morning, being shocked awake by desperate banging on the front door. I’d shoot awake and sigh as the realization that my crazy mother had tracked me down sank in. I’d stumble to the car with her and try to ignore the trouble I was in. My mother would reach over and pat my leg, pretending to be reassuring me that everything would be all right but, in fact, patting me down for cigarettes or drugs. If she felt the hard square of a pack of smokes, she would, one hand still on the steering wheel, clinch her hand down, hard, on the pack in my pocket, trying to snap my smokes in two. I’d pull away and scream in rage, and the car would careen across lanes of traffic as we wrestled and struggled.
My mother’s insanity just compounded the deep mistrust and resentment I had for all the other adults surrounding me. I was a ball of hate. Of course, you could have split that ball in half and seen the white-hot magma core of fear. That’s what was really driving me. I didn’t really hate them, I really hated myself. I felt worthless, broken, and terrified. Then again, I couldn’t have told you that. All I knew was that I was angry. The complex language of suffering and fear bewildered me when I heard it coming from inside me. I couldn’t express it, I couldn’t translate it. To me it just sounded like snarls and screams, so that’s what I spoke in. Maybe I wasn’t an asshole after all. Maybe I just couldn’t figure out how to stop acting like one.
One day, I arrived with my mother to my weekly family therapy session hardly armed for battle. I’d forgotten to wear socks that morning. Maybe if I’d remembered, I never would’ve been put away. I was ill prepared for the escape to the streets. Damn those socks! I walked into Dr. Susan’s office and knew immediately that something was off. Maybe I could just smell the coffee breath of the cop sitting in the office. This wasn’t going to be a normal therapy session.
“So,” Dr. Susan started in on me, not making any mention of the huge black cop in the room, “your mother told me you and your friends sold LSD to a boy who had a heart attack. How did that make you feel?”
“Heartbroken?” I said, the paragon of compassion. “How should it make me feel? I don’t know, it wasn’t me who had a heart attack.”
Her eyebrow twitched and I could feel her set her clinical phasers to kill mode and gear up.
“And have you taken LSD?”
This was the time for evasive maneuvers, but the best I could come up with was, “Me? No. No… I just sell it. Er… sold it. I used to sell it.”
Unconvinced, the good doctor said, “And do you take other drugs?”
“No.”
“So if I took a urine sample from you right now, it would be totally clean?”
The cop laughed as she said this, and I imagined shooting his scalp off and seeing a brain made of stuck-together donut holes fall to the floor.
I thought quickly. “Okay… I’ve been in a car maybe… you know what hot boxing is? People smoking out the car? I might’ve gotten exposed that way.”
Doc thought quicker. “So if we tested for LSD, then, that would be negative?”
“Look,” I said, scrambling through my scrambled brain for something to throw the dogs off the scent, “I’ve been in a car maybe… you know what forced dosing is? Where hippies tie you up with hemp rope and rub whetted LSD crystals on your lymph nodes and genitals as a retaliatory action for deals gone wrong? I might’ve gotten exposed that way.”
The cop laughed again.
Dr. Susan shifted her ass in the seat, hunkering down for the assassin shot. “Well, we can’t even check for LSD, but thanks for the story. Do you drink?”
I could feel the walls closing in on me. This was definitely going somewhere…
“I mean, I have, you know, Passover, Bar Mitzvah, other Jewish stuff.”
As she spoke, Dr. Susan scribbled furiously on her clipboard. “Your mom told me you’ve been stealing from her, getting violent, cutting class, picking on retarded people?”
I was shocked. “But I’m retarded!”
“She said you’ve been tagging on the walls inside your house?” Every question she asked, she gained a kind of giddy confidence, like she was finally living out one of her grad school role-playing fantasies.
“There’s no way she can prove that was me,” I shot back, starting to realize the futility of the entire conversation.
Dr. Susan smirked. “She saw you doing it.”
Desperate, I shot back, “She’s deaf! You can’t trust what she sees!”
The deathblow.
“Here are your choices. I’m going to recommend that you be institutionalized for a few weeks. To have a safe space where you can be evaluated and find some proper medication.”
She passed me a pad of legal paper and a pen. “Here. I know it’s hard for you to say, so why don’t you write your answer. You write yes and you drive there. Or write no and be put in restraints and taken there in an ambulance.”
There was only one thing to write:
“FUCK YOU!”
I handed the paper back to her.
She smiled. “I guess that’s a yes then?”
I was then transported to the Ross Hospital teenage psychiatric lockdown hospital. The ride there was sick and panicky. I could feel doors slamming shut around my life a thousand per second. There’s a scene in the movie Labyrinth where Jennifer Connelly takes a wrong turn, walks through the wrong door, and finds herself tumbling down an endless black hole. Covering the walls are hands, thousand of bodiless hands that slap and brush by her as she falls. These hands could help her, could stop her, but they just tickle her with the suggestion of rescue. I felt just like that. I was still free, but I was on my way to a place where I knew I wouldn’t be. My mother, the one who was supposed to be my protector, was right there. She was the person who was supposed to put a stop to things like this. When my mind screamed for me to go to her, I was then smacked with the realization “Oh, that’s right, she’s the one sending you here.”
The doors clanged shut behind me. I was in the labyrinth.
One of the coolest things about being locked up in a mental hospital when you are thirteen is… wait, I’m thinking.
I looked out on the foot-thick door that closed after my mother when she left me in shock. How the FUCK did I end up here?
I sat, staring at that door for about an hour from the intake lounge, expecting it to fly open and a flustered young intake worker to run in with a stack of papers, screaming, “Mr. Kasher, Mr. Kasher! I’m so sorry, we have made a grave mistake! You don’t belong here. What a crazy lady your mother is, huh?”
We’d share a cigarette and a cappuccino and laugh at the insanity of women and the injustices of the world. Then I’d be released and I’d go get high.
I kept staring, but my intake worker never came. I slept that night on a thin hospital corner bed in a room devoid of sharp things, shoelaces to hang myself with, or anything remotely comforting.
I woke up the next morning and opened my eyes to the realization and the rotten flood of memory of the fuckup chicken coop I was sleeping in. I blinked my eyes awake.
FUCK.
I’m in a fucking mental hospital.
I a
m in a mental fucking hospital.
I am in a fucking mental fucking hospital.
A fucking MENTAL HOSPITAL.
MENTAL HOSPITAL.
Fucking Fuck.
There was no time to wallow in my anger, though, as the regimen of life in the crazy house is quite strict. Rounds began at 7 a.m. with an orderly opening your door with a policeman’s knock and a firm, “Kasher, out of bed for showers!”
I stepped out into the hallway in my foam “safe slippers” and smelled the fetid, chemical custard stink that wafts in every hospital and institution. I can never wash that stench memory out of my nose. To this day, every time I go to the doctor’s for an appointment, my nose sends me back to that hallway, staring down at my feet, wondering how it all happened.
I shuffled to the showers and was handed a measly towel and a hotel bar of soap. “Five minutes,” the orderly barked.
You know the feeling of tranquility and cleansing a nice long shower gives you? Yeah, that’s not available during the five-minute mental hospital shower. Even in there you feel institutionalized. I scrubbed myself and dreaded the rest of the day.
First up was some kind of group ball game led by the most chipper counselor you could ever hope to vomit directly in the face of.
“This is FEELING BALL!” Her gross shimmering teeth gleamed bright white in juxtaposition to the blackness emanating from my heart. “Emphasis on feeling! When I bounce the ball to you, you tell me how you are feeling about your new journey into mental health!”
The chipper little thing bounced the ball toward me with a huge smile. “Your turn!”
“What?” I couldn’t believe I was doing this.
“A feeling!” She grinned and I wanted to rip her face off with my mind.
“I feel like you are bad at your job.” I bounced the ball to someone else as my therapist’s electric grin went dim.