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 (18 page)

Her mother’s mother was a teacher in Utah in the 1800s, teaching Mormons to be creepily friendly (yeah, that was her idea!).

Her mother’s mother’s mother was responsible for teaching Abraham Lincoln as a youth. (Not true!)

Her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was Jesus’s after-school tutor, pop-quizzing him on things like “How to avoid the pull of Satan in the desert” and “Why the Jews seem cool now, but you should never trust them.”

Her mother’s mother’s… oh whatever, you get the picture. My family valued education.

So my refusal to return to school and, more disturbingly, my refusal to care at all about the repercussions devastated them. They had no idea what to do.

Luckily for everyone, good ol’ Dr. Patty Susan called my mother with a suggestion. Guess what? It was a shitty one!

“Apparently, the doctors at Ross Hospital overheard him constantly bragging to his friend Nate about how often he drinks and gets high with his friends Donny and DJ and Jamie. I’m sending you some pamphlets about an outpatient rehabilitation center for adolescents in your area called New Bridge.”

Only slightly lower on the “you are going nowhere” list than mentally ill junior high school dropout is mentally ill junior high school dropout in rehab. I was thirteen going on fourteen when I entered my first drug rehab. The New Bridge Foundation. A rehab for kids!

New Bridge was run by ex-cons and former junkies who, not surprisingly, had an odd bedside manner. My first day at New Bridge, I was welcomed by a scary man named Clarence and his soliloquy about “just what the fuck we are doing here.”

So… just what the fuck are we doing here? This is the New Bridge Foundation. We are a New Bridge back to life. Won’t you please walk across with us? In New Bridge there are some rules. This is a UA cup. You will piss in it in front of me twice a week. This is the part of my job I enjoy the most. I’m a fucking ex-con. I shot hundreds of thousands of dollars of dope and borax and HIV and hepatitis into my arms. I have veins of steel and blood of mercury. I have killed men with my bare hands and purchased men in prison for matchsticks. Don’t fuck with me or I will treat you like a pretty cell mate
.

We will also learn arts and crafts here. We will learn how to make stained glass and then we will talk about our feelings. Do not cross your arms as this is the universal sign for being closed off and defensive. If you are closed off and defensive I will punch you in the stomach as hard as I can
.

I’m not sure it went exactly like that, but that’s the best I can recall. The stained glass thing was real, though. For some odd reason, we would spend hours processing feelings and being yelled at and then retire to a basement to solder glass. I’m not sure what the therapeutic value of that was, but I do remember I soldered a glass effigy of a spray can and was quite pleased with myself.

Every rehab has a familiar trope: “You need to get rid of your using friends. You need new playmates and new playgrounds and playthings.”

The idea, of course, is that until a person leaves his drug-based social unit behind, he has little hope of staying sober.

It’s logical and sensible. Unfortunately it’s also the most unrealistic request to make of a teenager who is getting high and fucking up because he hates literally everyone but his friends.

My buddies were the only thing I had. Getting high with Donny and Joey and DJ and Jamie and Corey and all of those fuckups was the only thing in my life I enjoyed. And these fucking adult ex-cons were trying to scare me straight and telling me to get rid of them? And do what? Make fucking stained glass? Yeah, right. More to the point, I was, at this time, completely unconvinced I had a problem with drugs. What I had was a problem with adults having a problem with my drugs. To me, drugs were the solution to my problems. I used to feel alone, ashamed, and broken, remember? Drugs and my friends made those feelings go away. Anyway, I could quit whenever I wanted to, I just didn’t happen to want to.

One of the good things about New Bridge was that they convinced my mother and grandmother to deprioritize getting me back into school, as they felt my “recovery” ought to come first. One of the bad things about New Bridge was that my “recovery”
also got in the way of my “drug use.” Twice a week, on random days, I had to piss in a little cup next to Clarence’s greedy eyes. This forced me to figure out some creative ways to leave the world behind.

Leotis, the semi-homeless buccaneer, had been to rehab a thousand times and told me what to expect from my time there. “Those fucking piss tests make it pretty much impossible to smoke weed for any considerable period of time without getting caught. You got be careful.”

This was true. Pot, more than any other drug, stores itself in your system and builds up over time, the more you smoke. You might beat the test once or twice, but eventually you are going to get caught. That didn’t stop people from trying. No one, and I mean actually
no
one, at New Bridge was there attempting to be sober. We were
all
just trying to figure out how to beat piss tests.

Kids ate niacin and tried to flush their systems, we drank teas and cranberry juices and tried to wash the THC from our bloodstream with water. Once I drank a quart of vinegar, seared my insides, and vomited up acidic poison. But I passed my drug test!

The second time I got a pass-guaranteed tea, drank it, and failed. I eventually had to resort to just drinking and eating acid, snorting speed, sucking down nitrous, and eating mushrooms. Life in rehab is so tough.

I hated New Bridge, but I loved it, too. I met kids like me who were so absolutely unacceptable to everyone that they were shipped off to be fixed. Every day I’d take the bus up to New Bridge and they would try to force me to talk about my feelings. I didn’t care about that; I was used to being analyzed. But right beneath that callousness, I sensed that something was shifting here. I hadn’t left that mental hospital behind. I hadn’t left
Claremont. I hadn’t left that chaos behind, it was still all over me. The suspicion of something being deeply wrong with me that had defined my childhood was being made manifest here in these groups. What kind of thirteen-year-old goes to rehab? I couldn’t have articulated this shame, so instead I did what I always did when I was overwhelmed—I acted like an asshole.

I would cross my arms and mock everyone. I talked so much shit the other kids told me to shut the fuck up. You know you are an asshole when other drug-addicted kids in rehab are telling you to chill out. But they liked me, too. I was saying what they were thinking.

FUCK THIS PLACE.

“Fuck this place!” I’d yell across the room during family group. My mother’s sign language interpreter struggled to keep up with the pace of my vitriol. Health insurance was a little more able to afford interpreters than Oakland Public Schools. The interpreter didn’t seem to be too grateful for the opportunity to interpret for a real-life teenage dickhead, though. I was pissed.

A new counselor, fresh from university, had started work that night at New Bridge and seemed intent on fucking with me.

“Hi, everyone, I’m Tim Hammock and I’ll be heading up the adolescent groups here from now on. I’m very excited about the new job and very excited about some of the changes I plan to implement here in the near future. We have some kids I really think want to change, some kids who want help. And we have some kids who are essentially just here to be road bumps on the highway to someone else’s recovery.”

Tim looked right at me. I blew him a kiss.

I had been caught going to a party with a kid at New Bridge
named Mateo, who was old enough to drive, and another, much stupider boy in rehab named Thor.

Thor was named after the Norse god who wielded a mighty hammer, but our Thor seemed a lot more like he had been beaten in the head with an actual hammer.

The previous weekend, after we all had been drinking, Mateo and I dropped Thor off. Later that night, he took his dad’s car without permission and, when stopped at a red light, saw a police cruiser drive by. Even though they were driving right past him, not giving him a second look, Thor’s little fish brain was sure they were going to bust him. He floored it through the red light as fast as he could go. The cops probably high-fived at what an easy bust they’d made as they flipped their car around and threw the siren on.

Thor led them on a high-speed chase that ended with him driving the car directly into someone’s living room, crashing into their house, jumping out of the car, and continuing the chase on foot. Thor not smart.

Tim buckled down in his seat and leaned forward. “Thor has made some bad choices in the last week and he knows it. But after talking to him, I’m convinced he wants to change, and to prove it to us all, Thor has agreed to empty his contracts here, on group level.”

Emptying your contracts
is essentially rehab doublespeak for snitching on all of your friends. As a way of avoiding the lengthy jail stint he was sure to be facing, Tim had convinced him to dish all of the dirt he knew about the other people in the rehab. This not only served as some kind of sick proof of sincerity, but also shook the group up and pulled all the secrets and dirt to the surface.

There was a lot of dirt. Gerald was gay, Claire kissed the space where Mateo’s dick and balls met in the bathroom during group, Pablo was flirting with the ex-whore receptionist, I went to that ecstasy party, and we were
all
getting high.

Thor’s confessional done and everyone’s secrets on the table, I yelled, “Fuck this place!” searing Tim with my glare. “And fuck you for using Thor’s stupid ass to bust us.”

Thor looked up from his stupid stupor. “Did you just call me stupid?”

My eyes darted to Thor’s hulking girth. Yikes. “Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”

Thor smiled and nodded, satisfied at this.

My mother, who was at every group, every counseling session, following closely as the interpreter translated my raging stream of obscenities, had become a kind of model rehab parent, by which I mean constantly involved and totally oblivious to the fact that her own dysfunctions were at least part of the problem. She was constantly humiliated by me. The tables had turned. I grew up humiliated by how she said things; now she was humiliated by the things I said.

“This place is a fucking joke! You bust us for stuff you know we are going to do anyway.” I looked right at Tim. “Do you just enjoy being a dick because you are an adult?”

Tim bristled at this and shot back, “Do you enjoy wasting everybody’s time here? Standing in the way of the kids who want to get better here?”

“Nobody wants to get better here! You dumb ass, can’t you see that? We are all fucking trapped here like little rats. We all want to go get high. Most of us already are!”

Oops. Too much information.

“Like who?” Tim asked, hungry.

“Well, like your mother and I smoked some rocks together before I bent her over the soldering equipment.” Maybe I’d gone too far.

Tim’s face flashed in anger, and I thought maybe he was going to hit me.

I loved pissing adults off.

My mom jumped in at this point, speaking through her interpreter, who was flustered by now, fucking up every fifth word. “Why don’t you
hug
some respect?” he’d ask.

“Have.
Have
some respect.” I was simultaneously mocking him, correcting him, interpreting for my mother, and participating in the group dialogue all at once. Everybody liked to talk about what a dick I was, but no one talked about the communication savant I was becoming.

My mom shot back, “Don’t blame Tim for catching you do something
mistake
.”

I sighed. “Doing something wrong. Not mistake. Wrong. Seriously, guy, you are making her sound like Frankenstein.”

“Right, sorry.” The flustered little interpreter hardly looked grateful for the public correcting I was helping him with.

“It’s time for you to take responsibility for your own
acting
.”

“Actions! IT’S FUCKING ACTIONS. Jesus. You”—I turned to the interpreter—“go back to interpreting school. Mom, leave me the fuck alone. The rest of you, go fuck yourselves.”

I was asked to leave New Bridge. Tim winked me a good-bye. What a prick.

With my first stint at “recovery” over and the monkey of Claremont off my back, I thought I was headed into an amazing summer. Unfortunately my mother wasn’t as excited about things as I was.

I came home the next night and she was sitting at the table crying. When I walked in, she looked up at me and started sobbing. “What did I do to make you like this?” she signed.

Oh Jesus. This kind of conversation was starting to happen more and more, and I just couldn’t deal with it.

“I try so hard to help you change. I just keep believing that you’ll somehow change yourself and become better. But I’m just starting to think you are going to be like this forever. I wonder, did I make you like this? I wonder sometimes what you would be like if I wasn’t deaf.”