by Moshe Kasher
“Where are you going?” she growled.
“Out.”
I was always going out. She was always in my way.
I never considered back then what happened those moments when I pushed her to one side and slid out the door.
Never considered that she sighed, wondering if I’d just stolen her money.
Never considered that she cried, wondering if she’d see me again.
Never even thought.
All I knew was that she was in my way and that my friend needed me.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I looked at my mom and the shock of crow’s-feet cracking her face and I wondered if I’d caused them.
At the time, though, all I knew was that she was in my way.
“Get out of the fucking way,” I’d said to her, unconcerned if she knew what I was saying or not. I was becoming a monster and I didn’t even know it.
I sat at the bus stop waiting for the 51A with my mind spinning. What the hell was going on? I’d never received a call like that from Donny before. His voice was shaky, desperate. I realized my hand was shaking.
The bus came, and as the rest of the squares got on the front and paid their fare, I pried the back door open, sliding my fingers beneath the black rubber lip of the thing and pulling. I slipped into the stairwell and immediately flipped the back door mirror up toward the ceiling so that the driver couldn’t see me. Then I sat down and collected myself.
As College and Hudson approached, I pulled the cable and dinged the bus to a stop.
I climbed out and Donny was nowhere to be seen. What the fuck?
I lit a Newport and waited.
I heard a whistle from behind me.
I turned to see Donny’s red hooded Starter jacket peeking from behind a staircase leading to the basement of the First Presbyterian Church on College Avenue.
“Get over here!” Donny beckoned to me.
I jumped back behind the wall and was surprised to see Miguel, Danny Soto, and Terry Candle back there, too.
“Surprise party?” I couldn’t resist.
“Stop cracking jokes.” Donny had that fear in his eyes again. “DJ and Corey are in jail. They both got pulled out of class today and arrested.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Rape.”
The word kinda floated there in the air like a thought bubble.
“Jesus.” I didn’t know what to say.
“That bitch Leah said they raped her,” Miguel said, looking pissed.
“Jesus,” I repeated, calling out to the wrong God, “why’d you call me out here? What can we do?”
Terry Candle lit a joint and passed it to me. “She said we all raped her.”
“Even me?” This couldn’t be.
“Even you,” Donny said flatly.
“But I’m a virgin!”
This wasn’t fair. I hadn’t even fucked yet and I was being accused of rape?
“Look, guys, here’s the deal.” Donny was taking over, establishing control like I’d seen him do so many times before. At least his mind was back with him. “We are all named by our first names only in the police report. At least that’s what Corey told me on the phone today.”
Terry Candle spoke up. “So what’s that mean?”
“It means we aren’t in jail already, obviously, but we might get rolled on at any second. As soon as they figure out who we are, we are all fucked. If Officer Joe hears about this, he tells the Piedmont Police, and we are all done for. That prick would get such a fuckin’ hard-on if he figured out how to bust us. One call from the cops to him and we are all in jail for raping that girl.”
I thought I’d throw in an obvious detail. “But we didn’t rape her!”
Donny grinned a sour grin. “You think that matters?”
All of this blew my mind. I was raised by two women in a feminist, bordering on man-hating house. I was raised to assume that all of the things I heard on television relating to men abusing women were spot-on true. My grandmother and mother watched the Clarence Thomas trials with “I believe you, Anita,” tears in their eyes. They cursed at the television coverage of William Kennedy at his trial and assumed he was guilty until proven otherwise. I assumed as much, too. It had never occurred to me, until that moment, that women could or would ever suffer that level of indignity for something false. It was like betraying a sacred trust.
My mind was spinning as I puffed on that joint. At least I had that. My thoughts slowed down. My fears numbed out.
That was one of the mightiest medicines of drugs. Their ability to make any crisis, no matter how severe, muted. They never made the problem go away, just the consciousness of that problem disintegrated one grain at a time until all that was left was the moment. It was very Zen. All but the false rape accusation part of it.
To be fair, I couldn’t be sure of what had happened between Corey and Leah. I wasn’t back there behind that church with them. But I knew Corey. I just didn’t think he would have done anything like that. And I knew DJ had been with me the entire time we’d been at the monastery. I had the chest bruises to prove it. And I knew me. And as far as I knew, I was still a measly virgin. I’d hardly even spoken to that crazy broad, much less fucked her, much less engaged in a weird ritual gang rape at a church with her as her friend Tina sat there and said nothing. Okay. Yes. I was pretty sure this whole thing was bullshit and would blow over.
But then, DJ and Corey were in jail. And Donny was freaking out. And my name was on a fucking police report.
Don’t be an abuser, remember?
How? How how how how had this shit happened? Why was I always getting in trouble? What the fuck was I going to do?
“What the fuck am I going to do?” Donny said, panicked.
What were any of us going to do? Get high. Check out. Worry again tomorrow.
For weeks, I stalked the streets of Oakland with the weight of a thousand police officers’ imaginary eyes on me. The fun stuff seemed gone. I got high at home and stayed out of sight. It was so hard to party when you were afraid of being arrested on sight for a rape you didn’t commit.
I stayed in. I became a night rat. Home all day, sneak out to meet Donny at night. Donny would call me with hushed tones and say agreed-upon code words and we would meet in secret at freeway underpasses. One evening, passing a joint back and forth between us, he turned to me and dropped a bomb. “I’m getting out of Oakland for a while. Let the heat die down. I’m going to live with my father.”
“The convict?” I asked, the paragon of sensitivity.
“Ha, yeah, I guess. I’ve been talking to him on the phone like every week. He’s real chill, man, not like Sheriff John, you know? He heard about all this bullshit going down and said I could come there for a while to hide out.”
I wish I’d been able to say what I was thinking, that I was sad and pissed that he was leaving. That I’d had a best friend leave me before. That I was scared of being alone in the world. But I just said, “Cool, man, good luck. I gotta bounce. I have therapy in the morning.”
I left that night, my head swimming from the pot, my heart heavy from Donny moving away, my guts churning with fear that the cops were around every corner. I went home and cried.
Donny was gone, and Corey and DJ were in jail. Terry Candle hadn’t been seen or heard from since that day in the church stairs. Miguel, of course, walked around like he wasn’t concerned in the least.
Thankfully, Corey and DJ were keeping their mouths sealed shut as to who the other people in the police report were. Leah had only mentioned us by first name since that was all she knew of us.
DJ and Corey, like silent Cosa Nostra enforcers, kept our confidence and kept us free.
There is a kind of feral protectiveness that takes over a family when a kid is in real crisis. Despite all the madness I’d put them through, my mother and grandmother never for one second doubted my account of the story, their love for me taking the place of their fierce feminist instincts. Donny’s mom, too. She’
d shuffled him onto a plane and sent him to New Mexico without batting an eye. Just like that, he was gone. And there I was, hiding from the cops, lonely as fuck.
“I don’t understand why that girl would say that about you,” my grandmother told me, grabbing my hand and squeezing it.
“I swear I didn’t do anything,” I told her, cries of “abuser” ringing in my mind’s ear.
“Of course you didn’t, honey. I know you didn’t. You aren’t a bad kid; you just act a lot like one sometimes.”
Those words washed over me like an absolving bath. But they didn’t fully resonate. I knew I hadn’t touched that girl, but I’d hurt everyone around me for so long, it was only a matter of time until the karmic wheel ran me the fuck over.
I’d done such a good job of drinking reality away, but it was becoming harder and harder to drink enough to blur its sharpness. I felt cut up and punctured. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did. I got high.
After having lain low for months, we got some hope. DJ and Corey were let out of jail. I got the rundown on the police report from Corey and DJ as told to them by their lawyer.
Corey was his normal excited self but DJ seemed hurt and subdued by his experiences. Corey did most of the talking.
“The bitch is fucking crazy! I didn’t get to even bust a nut. Just what I told you happened, happened, and anyway, you guys didn’t even touch her! Whatever. Doesn’t matter what did happen because she’s a fucking crazy-ass bitch. My lawyer told me all about her. Nutcase. Loco. I’m telling you for real. She’s been to fuckin’ mental hospitals and shit.” Corey looked at me, realizing.
“Oh, sorry, dude. Anyway, she’s like seeing dogs’ tails wagging with no dogs attached to ’em and shit. She said, that night after she left the park, she like walks away and right then, I ran up on her, fuckin’ all creep style and socked her. Just boom, clocked her in the face and she went down, right? Right, then I guess you guys were like hiding in the bushes or something because she said we all jumped out at her. Just fuckin’ held her down and ripped her clothes off. And then… well, you know.” Corey blushed with the last bit of innocence he had left.
“Anyway, then here’s where the story gets weird and don’t make no sense. She says we left her there in the dirt and shit. But says, afterwards she got into a change of clothes…”
“What, she keeps a spare outfit in case of gang rape?” I asked, mad.
“That’s what I’m saying!” DJ broke his silence.
“Right, so that shit doesn’t make sense.” Corey cracked his knuckles nervously. “Also, she left a person out of her story.”
“Who?”
“Fuckin’ Tina Yee’s ass. Where the fuck was she this whole time? Watching? Why didn’t she call the cops? And most of all, where the fuck is she now?”
I was confused. “Okay, where the fuck is she now?”
“Here.” Corey stared at me blankly, reset his teeny dinosaur brain, and continued, “But where was she then?”
I sighed, “Okay, then, where was she then?”
“China.”
“Excuse me?”
“Fucking China. Like fuckin’ chong chong choi! Tina was in China, and as soon as she got back, we had a person vouching for us, and another thing, here’s the weirdest part—she went to the hospital.”
“Who, Tina?” I said. Corey sucked at storytelling, I decided.
“No, you idiot! Fuckin’ Leah went to the ER and told them she was raped. Not a thing that a girl who was lying would do usually because they can tell by looking at it if there’s been like force or something. Like cuts and shit. They checked her out and found some cuts all right but they weren’t the right kind. They were exact and like surgical. Like someone had taken a razor blade to it and cut it like that.”
I just stared at Corey, confused.
“Bro, she cut up her own fucking pussy.”
I thought I was going to be sick.
“She did that to try and fuck us up but it ended up fucking her. The doctors can tell the fucking difference and they were, like, this ain’t it. They released the records to the judge and he let us out. My lawyer says the case will ninety-nine percent get dropped.”
I didn’t understand. “Dropped?”
“Yeah, like done! The whole thing will be over.” Corey pulled out the largest joint I’d ever seen and lit it in celebration. We would be free. I felt the weight of a thousand crazy mutilated vaginas ease off me.
“Hey.” I looked at DJ and Corey. “Thanks for not telling them our names. That was solid.”
DJ looked at me, his lip quivered for a second, then he smiled and punched me in the chest and yelled, “Don’t be a fag, Cave Chest!”
We partied that night, celebrating, drinking, smoking, sucking down nitrous. I felt my face vibrating from the gas and the relief. We all called Donny in New Mexico and yelled and cheered into the phone. It was a beautiful night. The air tasted freer. Still, though, somewhere deep, somewhere beneath the layer of intoxication, beneath the layer of relief, beneath the layer of anger, beneath all those sedimentary levels of delinquency, was a place of quiet pain. A little puddle of realization that, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything to Leah, I had, somehow, placed myself in a world where a girl like that had felt embarrassed enough and angry enough and crazy enough to accuse us of a thing like that. To put it simply, I wasn’t living right. That puddle of realization was rising and churning beneath the surface and soon would leak out from its deep place and flow, like veins of lava, into my conscious mind and melt the icy defenses of anger and self-righteousness that I’d built up over the years, fortifying them with drugs and delusion. The doomsday clock was ticking on my ability to defend how I was living.
Perhaps I was just growing up. Or perhaps I was being weighed down by the karmic weight I had accrued. I just realized somewhere that I had created this problem. It was a small shade of the crumbling edifice of my great illusion: that I was the victim of the world’s cruelties and the injustices of the adults surrounding me. A tiny little beam of light was trying to break through from that deep place. A small idea that I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see yet, but that someday would break through, undeniable:
You did this to yourself.
I walked home from Corey and DJ’s that night a freer man, but I had a new weight on my shoulders, too. The weight and the ache of cognizance.
I got home, scraped my pipe, smeared a resin ball onto the mesh screen, and smoked it red-hot until I couldn’t hold the pipe, until I couldn’t feel the ache. Then, my head quiet, I went to bed.
Chapter 13
“That’s When Ya Lost”
—Souls of Mischief
School was starting again and I was now entering my third year without having successfully passed a grade since the seventh. I was on my way to becoming the cool, older senior with a beard and a Camaro. Every time I’d get thrown back into a school, my new, doomed-to-failure educational plan would be outlined in an IEP.
An IEP, or Individualized Education Program, is created at a meeting that the school administration calls in order to determine the best means of making you successful in school. It never works. At least it never did for me.
“Well, I see here that you have been experiencing repeated failures in all of the placements we have sent you to,” the lady assigned to my case said as she handed me a chart that essentially, graphically, explained why I was such a fuckup.
“He just hasn’t found the right placement yet. That’s your responsibility to find.” My mother scolded the school district constantly for what she perceived as their complicit involvement in my educational failures. It was never just that I’d fucked up, it was always that I hadn’t been helped right.
Codependent or not, my mother knew the system and wasn’t shy about milking it dry.
“Mrs. Kasher, the school board has done all it can do.”
My mother upended her purse to reveal the catalogs of fifteen private behavioral modification and sp
ecial education schools that Oakland contracted through.
“You haven’t done enough,” she signed.
The entire team assembled by Oakland Public Schools shot eye daggers at my mother. You could almost hear the thoughts of “that uppity deaf bitch” ringing through the room.
My mama.
Whatever, I wasn’t thrilled either. Why my mother couldn’t just let me be a high school dropout bum in peace was beyond me.
By the way, dropping out wasn’t just my idea. Oakland’s dropout rate currently sits at 40 percent (Piedmont’s is 0.09 percent).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to make this a social critique! Back to the destruction!
I was sent, with my mother’s blessing, to a school in Alameda called Children’s Learning Center. An innocent-enough-sounding name for a school. Well, actually perhaps an innocent name was appropriate as the student body was made up of the most innocent people in the world, the mentally retarded.
I’m not making a joke here. I mean that, literally, the entire student body at CLC, with one notable, adorable, Jewish exception, was straight up retarded.
Some severely so. Autistic children who’d severed their connections to the world in the womb, taking the shortcut on realizing that people disappoint you and retreating inside their own complicated heads where Burger King logos and numerical patterns were very, very important.
Some were just mildly retarded, thick-lipped and amiable with enough smarts to make you wonder, “Is he or isn’t he?” and then you’d see them picking their nose in front of a cute girl and you’d think, “Ahhh! Of course!”
I was now enrolled in a school with a student body of less than one hundred who all had IQs of less than one hundred.
There are some times when the illusion that you haven’t made any wrong turns in life and that you are a victim of circumstance becomes very difficult to believe. Nothing quite defines that feeling as strongly as looking around a classroom and seeing drool dangling from the lip of more than one classmate surrounding you. Being the only non-retarded kid in class, at a certain point you have to ask yourself, “Am I certain I am not retarded?”