by Moshe Kasher
There was Hate Man, a famous staple of Telegraph Avenue, a man about whom rumors swirled of a past spent as a professor at the university until he tuned in, turned on, and went mad. Hate Man lived on the streets, downwind of the classrooms where he used to proctor exams. Always wearing a skirt, Hate Man was reliable. If you said hello to him, he would scream, “Fuck you!” Not in anger, but in his cosmology of hate. Don’t ask me to explain, I’m sure I couldn’t. No one could. He was just Hate Man.
There was Rawr. A man who looked like a Dark Ages barbarian who all day long hollered, “Rawr!” And if you yelled back, “How do you like it?!?” he would always reply, “Hot and wet!” We loved him.
There was a cobbler in Rockridge named Alonzo, who took all of these oddballs under his wing and had their VA checks diverted to his little storefront. Then he would pay them piecemeal, either in cash after taking a percentage for himself, or in cocaine that he stuffed into a shoe and passed to them, like a Brothers Grimm tale gone grimmer. Alonzo was a crooked cobbler. That’s life in Oakland.
These messes of humanity were the people I would get high with when I couldn’t find my buddies on the street.
All this to convince myself I wasn’t an addict. I’d smoke weed out of their crack pipes and look down my nose at people smoking alone. Unless I couldn’t find anyone at all. Then I just got high alone and looked down my nose at myself.
My life started to shrink.
The police had come back to my house looking for me. I’d been delinquent from school for months. My mother, exhausted at trying to convince me to go back, brought them into the pee pee nook and sighed, “Here, you deal with him.”
They threw me back into school, my first re-entry into an Oakland public school in years. I entered Oakland Technical High School in a daze. Tech, a mildly scary high school that white kids avoided like the plague, held little intimidation factor for me. How could I be scared if I was hardly conscious?
I stumbled into the classroom and all eyes shifted to me like an Apache scalper sauntering into a bar in Deadwood.
“What the fuck is that white boy doing here?” I’d hear them mutter.
The mutters went away soon as they realized I was more of a sleeping boy than I was a white boy.
My life at Tech looked like this:
I would wake up to my screaming alarm clock, surrounded by jars of piss, and knock the clock over, falling back to sleep, missing my first two classes. Finally, I’d wake and bake and crawl to school, late for third period.
I was a running joke in the school. The sleeping boy. I’d slop down into my desk and fall asleep to the snickers of my classmates, who I never got to know, anonymous faces laughing at the mess I’d become.
My gym teacher liked to ask me, as I zombie-walked past him from one class to the other, “See you first period tomorrow?”
“Yeah, Coach, see you there. We are doing running drills tomorrow?” I’d roll my eyes, he’d shake his head.
I literally never attended his class. First period, no can do.
I slept, passed out through each class, leaning back in my chair in a haze.
Once, in math class, I leaned back too far and slammed back onto the floor and woke to the cast of strangers laughing at me. I picked my chair up, flipped off everyone, and fell back asleep.
“Sleeping beauty fell down!” some kid yelled. Fuck him, I thought.
Two weeks later, I woke up with a start and looked at the girl sitting next to me.
“Thought I was gonna fall, huh? Not this time!” I sneered.
She looked at me, puzzled. “You still thinking about that? Nobody else here is.”
That bitch, I thought.
That insightful bitch.
Despite all my attempts to shut my thoughts off and numb out, I was stuck in my head, constantly thinking about myself and the way people thought of me. I couldn’t seem to get high enough not to care anymore. I think that’s why I slept so much. Make it all go away.
Constantly worried, constantly scared. No one thought about me like I thought about me. The real problem was that the drugs I was taking were no longer taking that painful self-awareness away. My medicine was starting to fail me. My painkillers weren’t killing the pain.
Addiction is like that. When you first start taking drugs, the thing that gets you hooked is that it takes the pain away. It kills the ache. It makes the wound numb.
Life was the wound. Life seared and stung. The world stung. I was born a mess of paper cuts, the world was a pool of lemon juice I’d been shot into.
So I found drugs, I found a painkiller that made me able to ignore the wound. I could walk upright. I could go forward. I could navigate the acidic reality.
Of course, if you are wounded, and you find a medicine that makes you numb, you don’t correct for the wound. I should have been limping, I should have been wincing, holding back, walking tenderly. But in the bag and the bottle, I found a way to walk upright. To fight and scrap and tumble and give life the finger. Not taking it easy, my wound ripped into me. It cut me deep. It rended itself open. The wound ached. Life got worse.
So, of course, I took more of my medicine. I took more handfuls of that painkiller, straightened out, and walked upright again.
Life raked into me. I had to shovel the painkiller into me. I got ripped nearly in two. There came a point where I was all wound. I couldn’t see where I stopped and where the wound began.
And, of course, as happens to all addicts eventually, I hit the point where I couldn’t take enough medicine to make any pain go away.
So I couldn’t make the pain be gone but I needed to keep taking my dose of medicine. If this was how badly I was hurting now, just imagine how I’d feel with no medicine at all.
The great irony of the addict is that the thing he takes, which is the only thing that has ever made life feel good, stops working long before he considers the possibility of life without it.
That first day I’d gotten high, I’d promised myself a life where I’d never stop. I never wanted to not feel that way again. The fact that I hadn’t felt that good in years hardly registered with me. Eventually my wound ripped so deep I couldn’t ignore it.
I didn’t know it then but the door had closed on me. I was never again going to find relief in drugs and booze. I was never going to find joy in a bag again. I was only going to feel slightly less misery. My only true friend had turned on me. One more best friend gone, this time without saying good-bye.
What I didn’t realize then was that what I needed more than anything was not something to kill the pain, but something new, something to heal the wound. Something to fuse me back to whole. To the whole person I never was. I didn’t need to feel good, I couldn’t. I needed to heal.
I needed to heal.
Chapter 14
“It’s All Bad”
—E-40
Donny moved back to Oakland just in time for me to hit bottom. We were fifteen. He and his father had been drinking together, and he’d been sneaking off to snort coke in the bathroom, and to no one’s surprise, that living situation hadn’t quite worked out. Donny came back to town beaten up and low.
I went with Donny’s mother to go pick him up at the airport. New Mexico had turned him into a new Mexican. During his stint in New Mexico, he had fallen in with some kind of Mexican street gang. They have so many, I can’t remember which one it was. His socks were pulled up like a cholo’s, his silky locks shaved bald to affect the look of a prison inmate.
The second Donny’s mom parked, she turned to the backseat to explain the rules to him. We were already halfway out the car door.
“Where the hell are you two going?” she screamed, frantic that things were about to default right back to where they were before Donny left.
“Out! Give me a night to myself!” Donny screamed at his mom and off we went into the night again. Into Oakland.
This was our city. Ready for us to take it over. But both of us were coming apart, and we knew it.
<
br /> Fuck it. Ignore the truth and enjoy the dank.
We climbed into an abandoned house on College Avenue and snuck to the top, to a little balcony that overlooked the city.
I pulled out the makings of a blunt I’d brought just for the occasion.
I split a Phillies Blunt cigar down the middle with my thumbnail, cheap brown tobacco spilling out like the stuffing in a sofa. I cracked the leafy shell of the cigar in half and pried it open between my two fingers while I sprinkled bright green bud in place of the crap that had just been there. I packed it full, determined to give my old buddy a royal welcoming ceremony. I ran my tongue down the serrated opening to seal the two sides of the cigar wrapper together and ran my lighter along the wet seam to dry it.
Perfection attained, we smoked.
I coughed, he coughed, we smoked away the night.
When the world swam behind us, and the blunt was cashed, we climbed up to the roof and threw building supplies at cars.
It occurred to me that I’d been doing something just like this with another best friend just a few years earlier.
It felt like a life ago. It felt like a different person’s life. I only vaguely identified that as my life. I didn’t even know Richard Lilly anymore, but more important, I didn’t really know the chubby kid who stood next to him throwing oranges either. I hardly resembled him. I was a different person. I was taller and slimmer, my appetite crippled by years of psychotropic medication and psychedelic drug use. My eyes were blurry. My hair was slicked back with a thick layer of Tres Flores hair grease, which dripped down onto my face and ringed it with a chinstrap beard of acne. I sagged my pants six inches below my waist as a matter of course. I walked with a pimp limp. I looked like a fool. A dangerous fool.
We climbed down and Donny told me, “There’s supposed to be a party tonight, let’s roll.”
I ran into the Lucky’s supermarket and Donny followed behind me about thirty seconds later. All eyes were on us the second we walked into the store. We looked like criminals now. There was no sheen of childhood innocence to protect us from prying eyes. More extreme measures were called for. Donny doubled back by the bakery and came out in front of the store. I heard him yell, “I don’t feel well!” and he then went down in the grand mal performance of a lifetime, foaming and shaking. The employees stopped what they were doing and ran to help the poor epileptic gangbanger in front of them. They never noticed the blur of a slightly chubby young Jew with a twenty-four pack of Budweiser hoisted on his hip, darting out the front door just feet away from the commotion. The second Donny saw me slip out the door, he straightened up and jumped to his feet.
“I think I’m feeling better now. Thanks, everybody!” Donny waved good-bye, and just like that, we were gone. Another hustle.
We met back at the BART station, jumped the turnstile together, and ran off to the suburbs. By the time we got to Pleasant Hill, we were both sloppy drunk, and as we tromped down the escalator, we saw two big BART cops sitting right at our only exit. We just decided to ride straight back to Oakland, tagging up the train cars. It was just like old times.
Back upstairs, at the station, I sat on the bench, waiting for the train, and looked over at Donny.
I sighed.
“This isn’t working anymore,” I said, cracking a Budweiser.
Donny looked up at me and I knew he knew exactly what I meant.
I sighed. “I mean, is it normal? What we are doing? We are headed no place, doing nothing. I keep waiting for this thing to just change, on its own accord. I keep waiting for the balance to shift in my favor but I’m starting to think it’s never going to. I’m starting to think it’s never going to change. It’s like, is this my life?”
I stared at my friend, my old friend, waiting for a laugh.
It didn’t come.
“I feel you.” Donny looked close to the edge. Weary. Cracked. Dusted. “New Mexico fucked me up, bro. It’s crazy there. I’m all jacked up. I don’t know what to do either.”
“So now what?”
We were both lost.
DJ and Corey were moving on. Their experiences in jail had fucked them up and scared them semi-straight. Jamie hadn’t been seen or heard from in months. We thought he was in jail but there was no knowing.
Everyone had scattered to the wind. Joey was tweaked on coke and hardly human anymore.
“That rehab I went to was a pretty good place. Maybe we could go check in there,” Donny muttered, uncertainty marbling his voice.
“Check ourselves into rehab?” I was incredulous.
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know. If nothing changes, nothing changes. You know what I mean?” Donny looked deflated.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I don’t need rehab, though. That shit never worked for anyone. I’ll quit for a while. Get my shit together. I’ll stop. We should stop.”
Donny looked dubious. “I’m down, I guess.”
I finished my Bud and stared at the BART tracks. How the fuck was I going to change?
The next day, I walked into my mother’s bedroom and triumphantly announced I would be getting my shit together. An empty promise she’d heard before. The drug addict, the king of the empty promise.
My mom looked at me wearily. She looked old. Tired. Tired of hoping for me. Tired of trying and watching me fail.
To be fair, I was also tired of failing. I truly believed that things were just going to get better on their own. I couldn’t imagine I was just going to fail. I looked at my brother and his yellow brick road to success as something that should belong to me, too, but was just out of reach. I couldn’t understand how he had faced the same shit as me and always managed to alchemize it to gold.
He was like a little Jewish Rumpelstiltskin, weaving feces into degrees.
I always imagined that things would just flip. That somehow, with no effort on my part, the tipping point would come and my life would right itself. My slimy world would congeal back to normalcy.
I imagined that, any day now, I would be getting a telephone call that would change everything…
RIIIIING!
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Mr. Kasher?”
“This is he.”
“Hi, Mr. Kasher, this is College calling.”
“College?”
“That’s right, Mr. Kasher, College… College! Listen, we’ve been tracking your progress for a while now, and while we are aware you’ve been having some difficulties lately, we think it’s obvious that you are far too smart to fail. Maybe even a genius.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!!!”
“Exactly! So anyway, we are prepared to overlook the repeated flunking of ninth grade…”
“That’s more complicated than it seems. I have had some serious setbacks, none of which were my fault!”
“Our research proves just that! We are willing to ignore all those difficulties and invite you join us, tuition free, room and board covered… here… at COLLEGE!”
I started to realize that call was never going to come. This wasn’t going to change unless I changed it. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
“I’ve decided to get my shit together,” I signed to my mom, walking into her room, triumphant, ready to receive her gratitude. She looked unimpressed. Okay, sure I’d said it before, but I meant it this time.
My mom looked up at me with doubt in her eyes. “I wish I could believe that.”
“Well, you can.” I resented her implication.
“I’m starting to think you’ll never change. I wish I had the courage to throw you out. That’s what Dr. Susan says I should do. I’m too weak. That’s love. Love makes you weak.” As my mother signed this to me, her fingers flew in the light, trails streaming from them, playing tricks on my drug-addled brain.
“Well, I’m saying I want to change now. I’m saying I’m going to change.”
My mom sighed. “So change then.”
So I’d lost her, too.
No matter, I’d sho
w her, I’d show everybody who thought I was destined to fail. I’d show them who the fuck I was.
I walked over to Monk’s place. He had moved from being a good friend to simply just my drug dealer. Old memories only allotted me a twenty-four-hour credit grace period. I knocked on his door and he slid the privacy screen to the side, identifying me. God, he was just like a real drug dealer.
“Hey, man,” I said as I extended payment for yesterday’s bag and a fresh one for today, a twenty I’d slipped out of my mom’s purse while she was telling me I’d never change. One last twenty. The last one.
“This is it,” I told Monk.
“What is it?” he asked, hardly interested.
I looked at him seriously. “I quit, man, I’m out of the game. I gotta get my shit together. This is my last bag. I’m done.”
Monk looked up. It looked like he was almost impressed as he handed me the bag. “That’s cool, man, whatever you need.”
So the next day when I went to his house to buy a bag, he came to the door, looked at me, and sneered in disgust.
I smiled and held out my cash. “Hey, lemme hold something, man.”
Monk looked at me like he couldn’t believe me. He shook his head and held out a bag for me.
“What hell are you doing here?” he snapped at me. “You said yesterday you were out of the game and here you are today. Dude, you’ve really got a problem.”
I am here to tell you that if your drug dealer ever does an intervention on you, it’s time to get help. That’s when I started quitting. Every night I’d quit. Every night I’d swear I’d never do it again. I had to stop. I had to stop hurting people. I had to get my shit together. I had to get out of high school before I was thirty. I had to stop pissing anywhere other than the toilet. Every night I quit. And every morning I woke up and forgot about the promises I’d made to myself the night before. The thought to get high would hit me and I’d be at my dealer’s house or at Safeway with a bottle of gin in my pants before I even had a chance to argue with myself. It wasn’t how you would imagine it to be. I didn’t crumble. I forgot. I didn’t have a wrestling match with my conscience, struggling back and forth until I gave up on it. Rather, it seemed like I didn’t have a conscience at all. It wasn’t a struggle of good over evil. I didn’t have an angel pop up on one shoulder…