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 (2 page)

According to my mother, I was born out of control, a feral kid, wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity
of my own body. If you could see my little Jew body now, you would find that very difficult to believe.

I’d snarl and snap, I’d bite and foam, I’d shake with anger when the slightest thing didn’t go my way, and my body would seize in convulsions of rage and uncontrollable emotion.

Frightened, my mother sent me to a therapist. I was four years old. That is a demarcation point in my life. I was booted into the therapeutic garden and left to wander, entering an old rusty gate guarded by the ghosts of Freud and Jung. Being told, still wet from the womb, that you need therapy, it almost makes a boy feel broken.

Oh, and my mother and father are both deaf.

People are always fascinated when I tell them that.

“They are
both
deaf?” they ask, winding up for a dumb question: “What are the odds of that?”

I suppose they imagine two lost deaf people wandering across the land with a sign in hand reading:
DEAF LONELY HEART SEEKS MATE!

Having no experience with deaf people, folks usually assume they are rare as unicorns and that only magic could bring two of them together.

The real story is less magical, more practical.

In 1967, the World Games for the Deaf preliminary trials were held in Berkeley, California.

All the way in Brooklyn, New York, Steven J. Kasher, my father, the deaf, sickly son of two Jewish communists, was determined to make those games. Lord knows why. My father was hardly an athlete. He was a slight, scrappy, monkey of a boy, a shock of jet-black curls wrapped around his head like Art Garfunkel’s long-lost
evil, dark-haired cousin. Nonetheless, my father walked into the living room and announced to his family that he was hitchhiking to Berkeley and that he’d be leaving that afternoon.

His mother, my baba, Helen Kasher, wrung her hands with worry.

She hated when he left New York. She hated when people left her.

Baba was raised in Hungary, the first of five children raised by a mighty Chassidic patriarch, my great-grandfather Zeidi. Zeidi was the undisputed leader of the family, a chicken butcher by day, a Torah scholar by night, a saint by apocryphal family history. Zeidi isn’t a name, by the way.
Zeidi
is just the Yiddish word for “grandfather.” But in my family, Zeidi wasn’t just someone’s grandfather, he
was
Grandfather. He
was
Zeidi. As far as I know, everyone called him that, including his wife. Sounds like their sex life was rockin’. Give it to me, Grandpa!

His daughter, Helen, seemed to be the only one who was not convinced of his beneficent grandfatherness. Sometime in the 1920s, Zeidi sailed to America alone, waving good-bye from a ship’s bow vowing to send for everyone soon. I imagine a sad man with patches holding together his oversized suit playing a plaintive song on the fiddle behind Zedi as he yelled down to my baba and the rest of the family.

“I’ll see you all soon!” he’d cry as the ocean brined the sides of the ship. “In the meantime, there will be some really exciting news coming from Germany soon that should keep you guys busy!”

For years Zeidi struggled alone in Brooklyn to kill enough chickens to send for the family. Unfortunately for him, every chicken throat he slit further cut the cord of connection to his oldest child, my grandmother.

And as she saw the world around her fall into ashes and all of
Europe go septic with anti-Jewish infection, all she was able to see was that her father left her.

By the (nick of) time that Zeidi brought the family over, the gulf between them was more profound than the space between New York and Hungary.

To the shock and horror of the family, the second they stepped onto American soil, my grandmother threw a pair of pants on and declared herself free of the shackles and poison of religion. She cursed the Torah. She decried Judaism and all other faiths as divisive and archaic. She joined the American Communist Party and marched for civil rights. She vowed never to have anything to do with Judaism again. Then she married my grandfather, a Jewish, Yiddish novelist, Duvid Kasher.

Hardly the huge anti-Jewish rebellion she’d been planning.

My grandfather was a quiet, thoughtful man whose hands shook with the reverberation of the things he’d left behind in Poland. He was a writer who had chewed on Yiddish prose in coffeehouses in Warsaw with legends like Sholem Aleichem. He moved to America to escape the horrors and left behind the linguistic fluency that defined his career. He left a scholar; he arrived an immigrant.

When they had my father, their endogamic, muddied, closed-circuit DNA code zapped my father’s nervous system, leaving him deaf and addled with Gaucher’s disease, a rare disorder that strikes eastern European jews almost exclusively. An ironic proof to my baba that Judaism literally
was
poison.

Nonetheless, my father was born a fighter. Not expected to live past the age of six, he gave everyone the finger and did what the fuck he wanted. A scrappy firecracker, my dad took control of every room he was ever in. He sparkled with charisma. He was electric. My father was like a king.

The Deaf King.

So when the king stepped out onto the field of the World Games for the Deaf trials and dusted his hands off, my mother’s jaw dropped.

A week later she left a note on her mother’s kitchen table:
I moved to New York. I’ll be okay
.

And that is how two deaf people met and made me.

Seven years later, an old brownstone co-op building in Queens housed a family on the edge. In a one-bedroom apartment were my mother, my father, my big brother, David, almost four years old at the time, and a nine-month-old baby, handsome and charismatic as hell for an infant, but simmering with latent drug addiction, learning disabilities, and violent tendencies.

I was lying in my crib wondering when I could get out and start smoking and listening to hip hop when my older brother leaned in to say hello. I smacked him in the face.

“Why did he hit me?!?” David wailed.

“He must be angry already.” My father laughed.

Oh, Ha Ha, Father.

When no one was looking, I somehow made my way out of the crib and climbed down into the bathroom.

In there I found an array of pretty things: brightly colored makeup kits and glittery perfume bottles. My hand stopped on a Liz Taylor’s “White Diamonds” bottle. I grabbed it and wrenched the labial cap off the thing. I took a gulp of perfume. I kept gulping. The fact that I took a sip of perfume makes some sense to me. A baby smells a pretty thing and tries to see if it tastes pretty, too. The concerning detail is that I polished off the bottle. That night was my first night in a hospital due to out-of-control drinking.
Out of control. That’s how my mother always described me. She’d sign, “You were just always out of control.”

Apparently my father was, too. My mom told me stories of how scared she was, of how he threw her around, but to be honest, I never believed her. It wasn’t until years later, when I started throwing her around myself, that I thought there might be something to the story.

My father, the charismatic lightning rod of our family, sometimes burned, sometimes exploded.

Sometimes, according to my mother, lightning struck.

My father would spend hours in his studio, painting enormous canvases with rich oils, trying like hell to get his demons out in the painting. He’d gone to art school and was an emerging talent. The deaf beatnik painter from Brooklyn. It was a backstory gallery owners salivated over.

But my dad also raged. He also fumed and yelled. He also grabbed my mother by the hand so hard he broke her fingers. Seems like my dad might’ve been born angry, too.

In the spring of 1980, when I was almost a year old, my mom took us on a two-week vacation to California. We never returned. These days, stealing your children away across the country like that would be considered an abduction. But back then the Fathers’ Rights Movement was barely gaining steam, and my dad was mostly powerless to do anything but sit there and wait for us to come home.

Twenty years later, after his body caught up with him and he sickened and died, I found a wall calendar in a pile of his stuff as my family and I did that sick divvying of the loot that happens when someone dies. There in the square for April 18 was my
father’s unmistakable handwriting, packed with flourishes and loops. Even his scribble had pizzazz. The box read:

April 18th: Bea and the boys leave to California

Each day we were gone was crossed with a big X. Each day ticked off in anticipation of seeing his family again. Eventually, I imagine, he realized, sick to his stomach:

“They aren’t coming back.”

Eventually, the X’s stopped. When the X’s stopped, my life in Oakland began.

We moved in with my grandmother straightaway. My mother’s mother, Hope. There was never any question of going back. In my family, divorce was a kind of sacred rite, passed down from matriarch to matriarch. My mother is a third-generation divorcée, which means that my great-grandmother left her husband. Divorce in 1917 was likely to turn a respectable woman into the town harpy, but the holiness of the divorce rite was so deeply embedded in her genetic code that even witch burnings and convents couldn’t keep my great-grandmother married.

My grandmother’s heart fluttered when she saw us tumble onto her doorstep, bags in hand.

“Finally,” she said, “you’ve come to your senses and left that fucking man. I’ve said it a thousand times, all men are pigs.” She looked down at my brother and me, “Except you boys, of course.”

My mother had come home.

My grandmother burned all of her life with unceasing resentment toward my grandfather, a man named, appropriately, depending on who you ask, Dick.

Anytime his name would come up, my grandma’s knuckles
would go white with rage. “That bastard, that piece of shit.
An abuser that’s what he was, an ABUSER
.”

My little soft-palate mind registered,
“Do not be an abuser.”
Check.

Despite the endless fires of hatred that burned for Dick the Dick, my grandmother seemed to nonetheless have another flame burning for him. As far as I know, she was never with another man the entire forty years of her life after leaving him. She arranged her life neatly to live without romance, replacing it with poisonous resentment. That resentment bubbled over and then trickled down onto my brother and me, anointing us with holy oils, crowning us the princes of a man-hating coven.

About the time we arrived in Oakland, my mother started to notice there was something wrong with me. Or perhaps that was when my mother started looking for something to be wrong with me. Most likely it was a combination of the two. My grandmother had found the courage to leave Ol’ Dick through the support of a therapist she’d seen in secret for a year prior to her divorce. She impressed upon my mother that the only way through the trauma of her relationship with my father was to find a therapist.

She went, and that cemented my mother’s deep and abiding belief in the power of analysis. My mother believed in therapy the way that people believe in Jesus. It was simply infallible. It contained all of life’s answers. It was perfect. So when I began showing signs of the rage that would later come to define me, there was only one thing to do. Send me to therapy.

Therapy became, in my house, more than just a source for answers. It became a third parent. It was the pant leg of the father that I didn’t have around to tug on and ask for something when my mother refused me. When my mother’s characteristic franticness
kicked in, she was intractable. If she decided something was correct, it would remain correct until the peacemaker of a therapist would step in. My mother, tired of being told what to do and when to do it by my controlling father, became addicted to being right. She was sure she was right, even when she knew damn well she was wrong.

If my mother and I were engaged in an argument about, say, the blueness of the sky, and she swore with gasping incredulity that it was, in fact, green, all I had to do was wait until we went to family therapy to settle the score.

I’d begin, “Dr. Therapist, my mother insists the sky is green.”

“It
is
green,” my mother would snarl.

“You see what I mean?” I’d point to my mother helplessly.

Dr. Therapist would step in. “Now, Bea, you know that the sky is blue. It is blue.”

“It is blue,” my mother would repeat like she had been hexed by Obi-Wan Kenobi.

And
that
is how we found the truth in my family growing up.

My first therapist was a man named Ruben, who had white hair and an extensive collection of turtlenecks. To this day I cannot think of psychoanalysis without picturing turtlenecks.

Therapy for a four-year-old is different from regular therapy. Mainly, it involved Ruben sucking my penis while convincing me not to tell my parents. Just kidding. Ruben therapy was actually Nerf sword fighting: a Ruben-invented form of play therapy or, as it is commonly known, bullshit.

Six-year-old therapy looked like this: Ruben would hand me a Nerf sword and I would beat him as savagely as I could around the legs, buttocks, and genitalia. Then I would leave and Ruben would, I assume, take notes on my form:

WEEK ONE: Subject Moshe Kasher. The boy seems to have acute aggression issues and takes immediately to the swords. One note, he is slightly better than me at Nerf swords. Must remember to protect groin.

WEEK TWO: Forgot to protect groin. Aggression continues. Subject will likely calm down by next week’s session if past participants’ behavior is any predictor. However, if the aggression continues at this level, I will exert myself physically in order to show the boy that I, too, am a man with power. Therapeutically this is known as alpha exertion.

WEEK THREE: No change in aggression. Alpha exertion unsuccessful. MUST PROTECT GROIN!

WEEK FOUR: Pain. Only pain.

Ruben eventually told my mother that I was beyond help and I was too angry for therapy to work. What bullshit. I wasn’t too angry. I should have killed him for saying so.