by Moshe Kasher
Chapter 11
“You’re in Shambles”
—Del the Funkee Homosapien
Things were beginning to unravel. My friends, my cadre of support, my second family—they loved to beat my ass. They threw me around and used me as their whipping boy for the sins they couldn’t look at in themselves.
“Damn, you’re a fucking crazy dog,” they’d say. “You talk to your mama like that? You’re nuts, Pork Chop.”
Pork Chop. Sweet boys. They’d call me Pork Chop and Fat Ass and other things and sock me in the chest and throw me around and slap me when they got pissed. I’d leave, lump in my throat, night after night, walking myself home alone in the dark, tears streaming down my face swearing to myself, “I’ll never hang out with them again.”
My little lost boy family was becoming as painful as my real family.
Donny stood silently. He never participated. He never stopped it either. He stood and stared. I tried to laugh it off. I tried not to cry in front of the guys. I tried to stay tough. I couldn’t keep this up. I was falling apart.
The next day I’d go back, pretending I forgot what they did, and what I’d said to myself. I’d go back because I didn’t have any other place to go.
I took all that shame and turned it into rage that exploded at home.
Anytime my mother ran screaming after me for coming home late or the cigarettes she found or the money I stole, I’d explode with rage, screaming in her face on a level I am simply not capable of anymore. A kind of primal snap. A little solar flare from the hellfire.
I’d go mad. I’d throw whatever was in my hands at her head, trying to kill her.
It got bad.
I’d overturn kitchen tables and break the doors. I’d throw off my own shoes and toss them through windows.
My body was racked with rage like the devil was squeezing my spine, pumping anger into me.
My mom would run into the fracas and try to make me stop. Try to make me right.
I’d throw her to the ground. I’d hit her. I’d kick her. I’d scratch her. My own mother. My grandmother, too. I’d become what she’d always told me men were. An abuser, that’s who I was. An abuser. I’d abuse at home and be abused in the streets. I’d abuse the ones I loved and be abused by the people I called friends.
Jeremy Moritz was a kid from Piedmont that DJ and Corey brought around one day. Just like Dave Hansen he had a car and long money so we welcomed him in. Unlike Dave Hansen, however, Jeremy Moritz was completely insane. No, really. He was toxically, chemically, Manson-level insane. A disgusting, violent weasel of a twerp, everyone loved him but me. Maybe that’s because he liked to hit me. I was so tired of being slugged and punched and fucked with, and Jeremy Moritz made everything worse.
Jeremy had a kind of skittish, ratlike energy. He came from money but had the demeanor of some kind of street crackhead. Am I painting the picture that I disliked him? Maybe that’s because he almost killed me.
One summer day, me, Jeremy, and the rest of the guys sat in the cemetery smoking cigarettes and talking shit. Maybe it’s odd but the cemetery was a constant source of sanctuary for us. The brothers at the monastery were increasingly hostile toward us, but at the cemetery, the ghosts of dead delinquents rolled out to greet us every time we arrived.
We’d spend our days in the cemetery getting high, sitting on the larger graves and looking at the city. At night, we’d sneak back in and spook ourselves by getting drunk among the ghosts and creaky noises of a hundred-year-old cemetery. We’d climb in mausoleums. We’d write graffiti on graves. We’d outrun the security guard we’d affectionately named Elmer after the big Elmer’s Security logo we read on the door of his white pickup. We’d knock graves over. We’d fuck shit up.
That day was a mellow one. Donny busted out a huge bag of mushrooms. More mushrooms, more madness. We passed it around, chewing the gross stems and caps, trying to ignore the taste. Mushrooms taste so bad and bring you to such psychedelic heights, it’s like tossing God’s salad.
We passed the bag to Jeremy Moritz but he waved them off, citing something about clashing with his psych meds. What a pussy. I was pumped full of meds at the time but I didn’t let that stop me.
I constantly felt the sway of psychotropics charging through my bloodstream, zapping my psyche, making me different. From the first day I started on a regimen of meds at Ross Hospital, I could feel them in me every second I was awake. I hated those things.
The only bright spot was that anytime I saw “Caution, do not combine with alcohol or other drugs” on the side of the bottle of the new medication they were experimenting with on me, I got excited in anticipation of the chemistry experiment I was about to conduct on my brain.
Zoloft + weed = buzzy high with a tinge of tweakiness.
Desipramine + malt liquor = a drunk with 3-D visuals.
Ritilan + Nothing = Meth
You get the picture.
I hated being on psych meds, but at least this way I could make them fun. That’s how I lived. But Jeremy Moritz was too scared.
“Don’t be a pussy, fucking eat some,” I told him, dangling the shrooms in his face.
Out of nowhere, he snapped, tackled me, and threw me into a bush of razor grass. I got sliced to pieces, blood scratches crisscrossing me all over, as if little Zorros had declared victory on me.
I pushed him off me and he started laughing like everything was just hilarious.
I swallowed hard, holding back tears of shame. Ugh. I felt like such a bitch.
My emotions were starting to flood out against my will. Years of medicating them with smoke and pills and malt liquor had stuffed them into places they didn’t belong. They would fall out when I didn’t need them, didn’t want them.
Every time I got really angry, my bitch-ass tear ducts would betray me. I couldn’t start fighting without tears bursting out, declaring me a little sissy.
It was all I could do at times like this to just stay perfectly still and hope I didn’t shake any bitch water loose upon my face.
No one noticed anyway because just then Jeremy jumped off me and, I suppose to prove his manhood, took a little pinch of mushroom powder from the bottom of the bag we had all eaten from and sprinkled it on some hash he had packed into a pipe and smoked it. By the way, smoking mushrooms has absolutely no psychoactive effect (this information will be important later). He puffed those mushrooms like it was the toughest thing anyone had ever done and then stood up declaring, “My grandparents just died!”
All of our faces dropped, and DJ’s brother Corey put a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder to comfort him.
Jeremy shrugged Corey’s hand off and cackled, “Let’s go fuck their old house up!”
We looked around confused and then, deciding there was nothing better to do, jumped into Jeremy’s minivan and drove out of the cemetery toward his grandparents’ place in Concord. The mushrooms kicked in and my brain melted.
We drove out to the suburban wasteland of Concord, one of those places that isn’t quite a podunk little town, but only because it has a mall. A terrible, terrible Orange Julius mall. But at least it was an actual mall.
In Oakland, the malls we had were on planes of existence far below the malls in Concord. We only had ghetto malls. If you’ve ever been to a ghetto mall, you know. It feels similar to what I imagine walking into a refugee camp in Somalia would feel like. There are people slaughtering live goats, there are tribal feuds, and it’s possible to buy products by yak barter.
The ghetto mall usually has 80 to 90 percent of its storefronts closed due to violence or economic inactivity, and the stores that do remain are mostly odd places you have never heard of. There are ethnic hair supply clearinghouses with such creative names as “Ge-Cho-Hair-On,” “We Be Doin’ Hair and Shit,” “Tyler Perry’s House of Haircare,” “nappy 2 happy,” “The NAAAHCP or National Association of African American Hair Care Products,” and “The Place Where Black People Can Buy Haircare Products.” There are your Korean import fire
hazard electronics stores. Only the finest brands are available at these stores, like electronics from “Bro-shiba” and “Smacintosh,” and there’s indigestion medication from Mrs. Butterworth and tennis shoes made by Alpo.
The food court would be one Vietnamese lady making egg rolls and a closed-down Popeye’s Chicken. Oh, and there was always a Chess King. A place for pimps to buy pimp peacock feathers. It was a ghetto mall.
Far beyond the urban blight of Oakland, though, was the Pollyanna expanse of the Sun Valley Mall. A place that dreams were made of. A mall with real stores like Sears and Macy’s to frolic in. A place where gentile children could pretend to visit their God, Santa Claus, at Christmastime. In Oakland, the Santa was just a fat homeless guy with a bag of garbage at his side. At least he was real.
We pulled up to the Sun Valley Mall and my brain was liquid. I didn’t know it until I stepped out of the van but I’d never been higher on psychedelics in my life.
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.