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 (35 page)

We sat and did nothing all day. When you sit shiva, you aren’t even allowed to cook for yourself. If you are hungry, someone cooks for you. They don’t want you distracted. You just sit. You sit with your grief.

Three times a day, local men gather at the house of grief to make sure ten men are present. You need ten men to make what’s called a
minyan
, a quorum that forms a kind of express channel of communication to God. You need a minyan to be able to say Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer for the soul of the dead.

Three times a day, you are interrupted in your sitting to stand and speak to God. To tell the stories you’ve been hearing about your loved one back to the Lord. To stand and pray.

The time for the afternoon prayer had come one day and I stood, in a daze, to pray once again. Mordechai Ben David, the Chassidic rock star from my Bar Mitzvah, was the tenth to arrive. He took his fancy black coat off and assessed the scene. Me, my brother, my father’s deaf best friend Billy, and six local penguins made ten. Well, at least we thought it did.

“We have to wait for one more man,” Mordechai Ben David yelled to us.

“Why would we do that?” my brother asked. “There’s ten men here.”

“There’s nine officially,” the Pig spoke. “The deaf one doesn’t count.”

In my dead, deaf father’s house this peacocking asshole refused to acknowledge another deaf man as a man at all.

I needed to say something. I needed to scream, “Get the fuck out of my father’s house,” but I couldn’t. I was broken by grief, and the remnants of my childhood terrors still danced in my head. Screaming was hardly being invisible. Me, the one who always
had something to say to the adults who wronged me, simply sat there impotent and ashamed. We waited for one more man. We prayed to what must have been a very disappointed God. I just sat there and thought, “If I ever write a book, I’ll be sure to include in it what an asshole Mordechai Ben David is.”

A week after sitting down, we got up. During shiva, the soul is said to be lingering in the room, hearing all the stories about itself. My dad, maybe hearing for the first time. A week later, you stand, open the door, and walk around the block, setting the soul of the dead free, letting it go.

Grief in the Jewish religion is very structured.

A week of sitting.

A month of no shaving, no music, no parties.

For a year you say the Kaddish prayer every day.

It’s very comforting, actually. At a time when, more than any you can remember, you are at a total loss for what to do and how to do it, there is a structure that tells you, “Don’t worry, here’s how.”

A year passed. Three hundred sixty-five days since my father died. Almost time to stop grieving every day. Almost time to stop saying Kaddish. I flew back to Sea Gate one last time. Back in time. My family was gathered there for the last time we would say Kaddish that year. All we had to do was go to the synagogue led by Rabbi David Meisels, my ineffective savior who’d referred me to Chabad so many years ago.

There was one problem. In the previous year I’d grown my hair out, long. I had huge frizzy curls and really looked like a freak. Back home in Oakland, I loved it. Here in Sea Gate, the prospect of going back into synagogue like this sent bolts of fear into my scalp. I didn’t know what to do. I ran around the house, frantic, trying to stuff my hair into a comically undersized fedora that
belonged to my younger half brother when he was thirteen. With my hair spilling out of it, I looked like the Scarecrow stuffing my brains back into my head. Shame was swirling around me a thousand turns a second. I became twelve again, ashamed of who I was and how I looked. Painfully aware that I wasn’t, that I never would be, right.

Then I took a breath.

Realized I wasn’t twelve.

Realized I wasn’t ruled by those demons from my past.

Realized I was a grown-up.

Realized it didn’t matter if they knew I was different.

Hell, I
was
different.

I took off my hat.

My hair spilled down onto my shoulders like Samson’s.

I got my strength back.

I knocked down the walls of my past with my bare hands.

I walked to shul.

I became a man.

Every time Donny’s mom’s number popped up on my caller ID, I held my breath, waiting for her to say, “Donny’s dead.”

One night she almost did.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Donny fell asleep at the wheel. Crashed into a guardrail. Almost lost his leg. Almost died.”

He’d been up for days, smuggling speed in from Juárez, Mexico, and woke up in the hospital.

He’d be okay.

A year later Donny called me collect from New Mexico. I recognized the area code, expected the worst.

But he wasn’t dead. He wanted to live.

“I’m broken, bro,” he whispered.

“I know, man. Come home.”

I picked him up at the airport.

He was sucked up and stank. He’d been living out of a duffel bag for weeks. His only companion was an emaciated and slightly violent pit bull appropriately named Capone.

Donny took a right turn that day.

Last year I got a call from him again.

“Come to the hospital.”

I rushed over.

I lifted his baby girl out of his arms. His wife was asleep in the hospital bed. His mother was sitting next to her. I held his daughter, hours old.

“She’s beautiful. But you sure you don’t want to go with the name
Moshe
?”

Joey. Big Joey. Big Tough Joey. My hero. The guy who knocked Sean The Bomb the fuck out. The stud of studs. Joey Zalante. What a man. He fell off his motorcycle one day, jacked up on coke, riding like a madman. Ass scraping on the gravel, disintegrating beneath him. His tailbone gnarled, jutting out forever. Pain that would never go away.

He was in the hospital for months.

He was laid up in the hospital right across the way from the therapist that I went to, the final round of therapy that was paid
for by the funding from Oakland Public Schools, which lasted just long enough to ensure I was serious about getting better.

I visited Joey every week after therapy and talked to him about my new life, convinced that my proximity to him was a divine signal, God’s finger putting us together. I was going to save him. I never considered he wouldn’t let me. Or that it wasn’t my business to.

Just like a newly saved Christian, I bored him to tears with saccharine tales of my new life. He smiled. He appreciated me being there. My old hero.

Joey got out of the hospital half a year later. He sat on a donut and limped around.

He drank the pain away. He sucked down pills. He suffered greatly.

Years later, his doctor told him if he kept drinking, he was going to die.

Joey left the doctor’s office, locked himself in his apartment, and did just that.

They found his body frozen in an easy chair in the living room.

The pain gone forever.

Big tough Joey.

I sat in a meeting, bored. I’d been going to these things for years. At some point you’ve heard it all. No bother, I was there mostly to see friends and maybe remind myself of where I came from.

A voice spoke from the back of the room. The guy they’d just called on.

“I’m afraid. I’ve been sinking into a deep depression for years
now. I feel so scared and broken. I know I shouldn’t be this screwed up, I’ve been sober for twenty years now. I just need some love from the group right now.”

I know that voice. I know it from somewhere.

I turned and followed the voice back. I recognized him, and when I did, he melted from a resentful memory into a human being.

After the meeting I walked up to him.

“Tim? Tim Hammock?”

“Yeah, that’s me, do I know you?”

“You don’t recognize me? I guess that’s a good thing. You were my counselor once upon a time at Kaiser, and New Bridge, too, actually. It was really good to hear you. I really related. I’m sorry you’re having a tough time. Oh, and I’m sorry I was such a dick back then!”

Tim smiled. “You
were
kind of a dick. It’s nice to see you.”

He winked at me. Then he hugged me.

At twenty-five, I’d been a freelance sign language interpreter for years. I moonlighted as a stand-up comic but I was new in the game and it wasn’t paying the bills yet. Imagine, my deaf mom and my big mouth, the two things that seemed to stack the chips against me, were now getting me paid. Joke’s on you, Oakland Public Schools.

I got a call one day from the agency that sent me out on jobs.

“We have a six o’clock assignment for you at Kaiser Walnut Creek, in the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Program. I’ll e-mail you directions.”

“That’s okay,” I said, “I know my way there.”

“Oh, okay then. The appointment is for something called family session.”

My heart pounded as I sat in my seat at my old rehab, interpreting for a deaf family and their fourteen-year-old son. A kid falling into addiction. Maybe a touch of attitude, too.

The parents spoke and I listened, passive, a conduit for their communication, a fly on the wall.

Everybody assumed I was just another adult, sitting right where I needed to be. In my mind, I had shrunk back to a fifteen-year-old kid, lost, shattered, desperate. No one knew who I was. No one even suspected.

I listened to the parents complain and make excuses and I realized, like a lightning bolt, “Whoa, these guys are just as fucked up as their kids.”

I listened. I signed. I healed a little bit more.

The group ended.

I looked around and realized I was free to go. I was free.

The elevator dinged.

The doors opened.

Just as they slid closed, a hand darted in and set the sensor off, sending the doors back open.

That kid stepped into the elevator with me.

I turned and looked at him.

“Can I help you, bro?” He sneered at me like an enemy.

He thinks I’m an adult. I
am
an adult!

“No. It’s just… Well, I want you to know you aren’t bad, you’re sick. But you can get better. Once upon a time I did, too.”

“This is a really inspirational story, mister. Should I tell my dad the interpreter was giving me advice on getting better? Wouldn’t that get you fired?”