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 (21 page)

Jamie the liar had been missing for weeks. He popped up one day battered and bruised. He was speaking with a Mexican accent. This was new.

“I been in prison, Holmes. I been into some real gangster shit. I’m a Norteno now.” Jamie pulled out a red rag and began waving it in front of us like a matador.

The Nortenos are a Mexican street gang in Northern California that have a lasting rivalry with their Southern counterparts, the Surenos. Jamie’s claim to have gone to prison and joined the gang was, let’s just say, difficult to believe.

Confounding our dubiousness was Jamie’s new friend, Miguel. Miguel was a terrifying-looking Mexican kid dressed head to toe in Norteno reds. He was the real thing. Miguel was a gangbanger from West Berkeley, a notorious Norteno neighborhood. He stood a foot taller than any of us and was huge, 250 pounds at least. He was tough and scary-looking, but there was also something quite off about him. Miguel muttered to himself and laughed at the end of his own sentences, having hardly made a joke. It was disconcerting but really, we were happy to have him around; when’s the next time we’d get to hang out with a real live Mexican gang-banger? Miguel looked a bit like a cartoon character of a sly weasel who was sent to prison and gained fifty pounds by lifting weights
in the yard. When he looked at you, you couldn’t be sure you weren’t going to have to defend yourself from being eaten alive. Miguel was one of the more bizarre and off-balance people I had ever met, and Jamie loved to show him off like a prize buck he had shot while hunting.

“Have you met my carnal, Miguel?” he’d say. “My true Norteno hermano!”

We would all roll our eyes and then anxiously look to Miguel for some kind of reaction that would explain the social dynamic between the two of them. Had Jamie actually done something real? Or was this just some bizarre, long-form practical joke?

Unfortunately all Miguel ever did was chuckle and shake his head at Jamie, as if he were the most adorable thing ever. Miguel eventually stopped being an exotic social anomaly and just became one of the boys. A real gangbanger! We were proud.

I was prouder still of the day I fought Miguel. Normally, a six-foot-tall, 250-pound linebacker of a gangbanger would be enough to make me make up an excuse about how “fighting you isn’t worth it,” which is really just code for “having my face smashed in isn’t worth it because I really like my face.”

But for some reason, that day I stood my ground. Maybe it was because Miguel had been hanging out with us so much he seemed just like one of the boys. We were sitting in his living room taking bong rips, trying to cash entire bowls full of Mexican schwag weed in one hit. Miguel finished his bowl. Donny finished his. I sucked in big and took as much as I could but started coughing halfway through. Everyone laughed at me, which was nothing new, but then Miguel started in on a little chant, “Faggot Ass Lungs! Woo!” He repeated this, over and over again, for most of an hour, until I’d had enough.

“Faggot Ass Lungs! Woo!”

“Dude, shut the fuck up. I’m not as used to finishing whole bowls of things like you. You don’t just finish bowls of weed, you look like you’ve polished off a few bowls of carnitas, too.”

Miguel, not used to any of us talking back to him, looked puzzled and pissed. “Fool, I’ll slap the shit out of you.”

I snapped, “I don’t give a fuck. Go ahead and do it!”

Wait, what was I saying? I
did
give a fuck. I gave a fuck very much.

“Wussup then, you little white bitch, let’s step outside.”

Miguel got up and started walking outside, ready to fuck me up.

Jamie, DJ, and Joey all looked at me like I was crazy. But I got up. Fuck it.

Once outside, I grabbed a brick from the front yard of Miguel’s neighbor’s lawn, presumably to crack Miguel in the face with. I don’t know exactly how I planned to leap up and do that but it never mattered.

Miguel looked at me and shouted, “Why don’t you drop that fuckin brick and fight me man-to-man, you little white faggot-ass-lunged bitch?”

It hardly seemed fair, as I looked more like a kid Miguel was babysitting than a man when I stood next to him, but nonetheless, I dropped the brick and rushed him, screaming.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooooooooooou!!!”

We clashed. Well… more like, I crashed into Miguel’s belly. It was like the Ghostbusters going after that forty-foot Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or Westey when he fights Andre the Giant in
The Princess Bride
. I ran into his belly and nothing happened.

No movement, no effect.

“Fuck,” I thought. “What have I gotten myself into?”

I looked over at Joey and Donny, but their eyes contained no answers for me.

“You fucked up now, you little bitch,” Miguel whispered into my ear.

I thought, “Believe me, I know.”

Miguel, in his mercy, perhaps bemused by my valor, never punched me. He just kind of laid his weight on me, collapsing me to the ground. I was trapped, helpless under the weight of his blubbery countenance. He started laughing. He was
always
laughing.

“You done, faggot lung?”

“I guess,” I wheezed, my lungs popping like a novelty squeeze toy’s head.

“Just say, I got faggot lungs, woo! And I’ll let you up.”

“Are you serious?” I began to fuse with the gravel beneath me, sinking into the earth.

“Hell yeah, bitch, serious as a heart attack, woo!”

Oh God. “Fine. I got faggot lungs,” I relented.

“Say woo.”

I was losing consciousness. “What?”

“Woo, motherfucker, say woo.” Miguel was grinning like a Mexican Cheshire cat.

I wheezed, “Woooooooooooooooooo.”

Miguel rolled off me, and I felt a relief more pleasurable than a thousand orgasms.

As I lay there, waiting for my body to re-inflate like Wile E. Coyote after being flattened by a steamroller, I felt a pretty nice sense of pride, like I’d fought a grizzly bear. Sure, I’d lost, but at least I’d tried.

Miguel sat there next to me for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette. He patted me on the shoulder.

“You were pretty down back there, man.
Órale!
”

I grinned.
“Órale.”

“If you ever want to join the Nortenos, you let me know. We got a new white boy expansion program right now.”

“Thanks, Miguel, but I’m more down with the Surenos.” A look of anger flashed across Miguel’s face. I urinated on myself and then whimpered, “I’m kidding.” Miguel stared at me for a second with death in his eyes and then started laughing maniacally. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close to him. “
Órale!
You fuckin funny!”

That same weekend, Larry and my mother had gone out of town, presumably to get away from me. I was supposed to be staying at Donny’s, but you know, empty house, no parents, what was I supposed to do?

I broke into my own home and invited everyone over. Party time. Joey Zalante brought mushrooms. We all sat around and broke the mushrooms up into pieces, which we then downed with handfuls of CornNuts to mask the taste. Classy. There is no better way to begin a psychedelic trip than with chile-picante-flavored CornNuts. That’s how the ancient Mayans used to do it.

After the mushrooms came Donny’s Ritalin, which we crushed up and snorted. Speed and mushrooms—to make the cartoons play faster.

Now that we were high, it seemed like a really good idea to steal the car. Larry and my mother had spent years slopping together a VW bug out of two non-working cars. It was an eyesore of unparallelled proportions. Multicolored, unpainted, and rusted through the floorboards, my mother and Larry had been foolish enough to leave it at home, thinking I’d be too embarrassed to be seen in it. Little did they know that the mushrooms I’d be eating would make it look like a Transformer. I loved Transformers.

We all piled into the bug and Joey climbed into the driver’s seat. I didn’t know how to drive. None of us had a license. We picked up forties to drink and a bag of weed and headed into Tilden Park, a kind of wilderness reserve in the hills of Oakland.

We drove through the hills, pounding our beer, trying to find a spot to smoke and look out at the city. At one point, we went too far and attempted to turn around by pulling onto a steep dirt hill on the side of the road and then rolling back down it in the other direction. At least that was the plan. What happened was, due to the instability of the dirt, the shoddiness of the car, and the weight of five idiotic stoners in the backseat, the bug began to tip over backward, ready to flip on its end. We all jumped out, like an insane Chinese fire drill, and coaxed the car, by hand, back onto the ground. We sat in the car panting in fear and decided not to keep driving but to smoke where we were, right at the side of the road.

Then, as if on cue, the exact moment we lit the pipe, light flooded the car. The cops. We were busted.

Fuck.

This was it. My mother told me that one more bust by the cops and I was going to be sent away to a group home or, even worse, to study Talmud in Sea Gate with my father. Armed with that information, I had promptly stolen her car. These were the kind of decisions I made.

I couldn’t believe how stupid I was. It seemed like, in the face of the most obvious answer in the world, I always chose the dumbest thing to do. It was like I wasn’t in control of my own brain. Well, there was no use in trying to figure that shit out now. There were more-pressing issues at hand.

I dropped the pipe out the passenger window and sat staring straight ahead, trying to will the smell of pot out of the car.

The cop, making the closest thing to a joke possible for a police officer, walked from his car, right over to the pipe, and handed it back to me with a grin, saying, “I think you dropped this.” I tried to look like I’d never seen a pipe before.

“What is this thing?”

“You mean the pipe that I just saw you drop out of the window that’s still warm from you smoking from it? Is that what you are asking about?”

I sighed. I was fucked.

“So…” the cop began, “what are you guys doing?”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, well, here’s the thing. I just finished the final touches on this car—as you can see it’s a bit of a project car!” I laughed hysterically as my speedy shroomy brain spun into action, pulling the next line of bullshit directly from out of the sky.

“Soooooo then I thought, well, jeez, just like a boat needs a maiden journey, so does a car! AM I RIGHT? So we piled in and took her for a spin, in fact we were just on our way home when you stopped us, which I appreciate because it’s like… TIME TO GO HOME! Am I right?”

The speed was coursing through my veins, pumping me up. At that moment, though, Miguel, seated in the backseat, leaned forward and broke the awkward silence.

“He’s lying to you, Officer!”

What. The. Fuck.

Every head in the car spun around in shock at Miguel.

“He just stole his parents’ shit!”

Miguel had had some kind of psychic break. Or at least, it
seemed as though he had. Even the police officer looked a little surprised at what a weird snitch Miguel was being.

I looked at the cop. I exhaled, deep.

“Look,” I started, defeated, “this
is
my parents’ car. I lied to you because if I get busted again, I’m completely fucked. Sorry about the swearing, my mom lets me. She’s deaf. Like totally…”

I was cuing up the string section, trying for pity. If lying wouldn’t work, maybe heavy indulgence in the truth would.

“It’s tough having deaf parents and sometimes I act out to get attention. They just told me that if I fuck up again, I’m going to be sent away to like a group home or something. I know I fucked up, and if you could just give me a chance and let me call my sister and have her come meet me and drive the car home, you would be essentially making sure my life doesn’t get ruined. This is the moment. I could get sent off, fall into the cracks in the system, fall into crack, catch AIDS, and die. Or you could let me call my sister.”

The cop stared at me for a second, his face showing something in the middle of pity and bemusement.

He smiled. “All right. Let’s call your sister.”

I tried not to look shocked. Amazing. He was going to let us go. All I had to do was call my sister. Only one problem. The only sister I had was ten years old and lived in Brooklyn.

“You follow me down the hill and we can call your sister from a pay phone when we get back into town.”

To clarify, a real-life police officer allowed a drunk, high, unlicensed kid in a stolen car to drive down a windy mountain road at night. Sometimes there is only one set of footprints in the sand. That’s when God carries you. And that night, he carried me with
a gentleness that suggested, “I forgive you for the phone sex, I totally get it.”

Donny turned to me and exhaled, the first one of us to do so in many minutes. “How is this happening?” he asked.

We arrived at the base of the hill panting, our hearts beating in fear, sure that somehow this would turn out to be a trick.

When we reached the bottom of the hill, I sighed. “Here goes nothing. Hey, thanks for the help back there, Miguel.”

Miguel was too busy talking to himself to hear me, though.

I opened the car door and walked to the phone like a convicted killer walking to the gallows. I stared hard at that pay phone, willing my mind to work quick. I picked up the phone and dialed a neighborhood girl named Seena. We’d hardly ever spoken on the phone. Hopefully she wouldn’t be too surprised to remember she was my sister.

I plunked a quarter into the phone like a gambler playing his last cent on a slot machine. “God,” I thought, taking refuge in the prayer of the coward, “I know maybe two times in one night is too much to ask but… help me out here?”

The phone rang…

A click. A sleepy voice. An angel.

“Hello?”

“Sis! My sister! Oh, the girl with whom I share parents! It’s me, your brother!”

Confused and a little pissed, Seena spat back, “Huh? Brother? Why the fuck are you calling me this late? Wait, why are you calling me at all?”

“Totally!” I said, masking relief as brotherly love. “Hey, look, I stole Mom’s car. I know, I’m an idiot! Anyway, the cops are here
and they said they’d let me go if you just come pick up the car and drive it home.”