Kasher In The Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 (15 page)

“Now I know you’re lying. Your dad doesn’t love you enough to look for you,” Donny shot at Jamie, annoyed. He looked at me. “Let’s bounce. We gotta go handle some business.”

Me! Donny was taking me to handle business!

Donny and the guys were constantly doing just that,
handling business
, a kind of generic term for “doing something that you don’t need to know about.”

We left Jamie behind with his cautionary tales and hopped on the bus to Berkeley with Frohawk, the sewer dweller. Joey walked with us to the bus stop, and just before we took off, he handed Donny a fat wad of cash.

“Don’t fuck up,” he said to Donny and then looked at me. “And keep an eye on this kid, man, he’s just about to jump into the deep end.” Joey winked at me again and walked off. We climbed onto the bus, and my mind started to warp into its trip.

The world followed behind me in slow motion. The outer reaches of my vision wove themselves into a detailed three-dimensional maze, and the patterns in the makeup of the city revealed themselves to me. I stared at a square inch of the bus seat’s fabric, the intricacies of its stitching calling out to me as it moved and pulsated like a handful of worms. We got off the bus
right in front of UC Berkeley. This was about the time my mind exploded.

It occurred to me that none of the information being disseminated in the classes held in the buildings behind me mattered in comparison to the knowledge that was being leaked into my mind,
from
my mind, by the ruptured pipeline in my brain. A system that had, apparently, been designed to keep this kind of flush of understanding from me, lest I be driven mad by the things I saw.

I vaguely realized that I was alone and that, somehow, Donny and Frohawk had gone away; I just couldn’t figure out why I should care. I did care about my mother, of that I was pretty sure. And she would be home in about five hours, so I knew I had better go to her. I walked home from the UC Berkeley campus, a four-mile walk, mostly because I couldn’t remember what a bus was. I got home and realized that I’d lost my house keys on my way home and so I sat on my front step, staring at the inside of my eyelids, my head in my hands, for hours. By the time my mother made it home, I’d collected myself to enough of a degree that cohesive thoughts were possible again, so I just spent the rest of the evening telling my mother how much I loved her and the various ramifications of the deeper meaning of love. For most parents this kind of an odd interaction would be a red flag, but for my mom, it was exactly what she had been waiting for, and it made her psychoanalyzed heart swell with pride. “He finally gets it!” she thought. And that was true, I finally did.

When I finally came down, my body ached but my mind felt sharper than it ever had. The next day at school, I finally hooked back up with Donny.

“There you are, what the fuck happened to you yesterday?” I
said. I was furious at having been left alone, although I couldn’t say for certain how and why that had happened.

Donny just laughed and told me, “We left you on the steps and went to go handle some business. When we got back, you were gone. So what happened to
you
?”

I sighed. “I don’t really know.”

After that day, I started eating acid constantly. I’d drop acid in the morning before gym class and float the day away. Morning classes were spent staring at my fingernails and the white roots of my nails doing loop-the-loops, swimming by like fish in a tiny aquarium. At lunch, the boys and I looked for one another, as our faces were the only ones that looked normal. We ate acid the way we smoked pot. All the time. There were no powwows of psychedelic healing. We dropped acid because there was nothing else to do. We never did anything cool on acid. I remember watching
The Doors
movie, and when Jim Morrison and the band went to the desert to eat peyote, I thought, “You can go places when you get high?” We would drop acid and hang around the subway station or go to class or go write graffiti. Urban psychedelia.

We ripped off slices of white blotter and made our world enjoyable. White blotter. Little white pages blowing my mind apart. The bad part about mind-expanding drugs when you are thirteen years old is that there really isn’t much to expand upon.

“Did you ever notice
canibus
is spelled cani-BUS?” I asked Donny one night, lying in his bed, the Cream
Disraeli Gears
cassette autoreversing to the beginning of the album for the twentieth time.

“Fucking, we should start a cani-BUS where people could ride the bus like regular but they could smoke weed, too. The CANI-BUS!”

Donny was blown away by my entrepreneurial genius. “Whoa. Wait, isn’t it spelled
cannabis
?”

I changed the subject.

We started to become legends with the acid. Joey and Donny had been impressed with the strain of acid they had given me and returned to the source of it to buy many sheets more. I and the rest of the guys were about to turn the empire of our minds into a much more real world drug empire. We set up shop at Claremont and word spread quickly. People knew who we were and admired/feared us. The black drug dealers wanted nothing to do with “that white boy acid.” Because we weren’t seen as being in direct competition with them, they allowed us to peddle our wares in peace. Kids from other schools would cut class and come and buy blotter. Dysfunctional children from far-off lands such as Berkeley and San Francisco would load up their donkeys and make the long trek to the promised land of Oakland, where wise men were offering enlightenment for three dollars a hit. The money flowed, and we lived like boy-kings. That is, until Justin Sabbaro came along and fucked everything up with his weak-ass heart.

This fat seventh grader walked up to us one day interested in stepping into a brave new world.

“Hello, I would like to purchase some LSD, please.”

“Name?”

A nervous look around. A fat sweaty-brow wipe. Nothing too out of the ordinary. This was a sketchy world we were introducing kids to.

“Justin Sabarro.”

“Age?”

“Twelve.”

“Perfect. LSD is an amazing mind-expanding drug that costs three dollars, won’t find more bang for your buck anywhere. Transports you to another world, drippy walls, profound ideas, all that shit. Here you are and enjoy!”

Little Justin popped a dose into his mouth in ignorant bliss.
Oops, one thing I forgot to tell him, “Oh, and don’t take LSD if you have a weak mind, dead parents, or a history of heart problems.”

He looked up, clutched his chest. “Heart problems?”

Well, I wish I’d warned him like that. I didn’t. Justin Sabarro ate the acid, and fucked everything up.

Up until that point, my mother was desperately seeking information about just how bad she could sense I was becoming. At home, things were a chaotic mess, mostly due to me. If she had been able to piece together what I was doing at school, she would have rung the alarm bell much earlier, but thankfully, I, for the most part, was able to keep her from that information.

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.