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 (19 page)

My mom looked up at me with this helplessness on her face that I’ll never forget. I remember it because I remember thinking, “She doesn’t get how helpless she really is. Nothing she can
ever
do or say is going to change me. I’m not changeable.” I went to her and sat down on the chair next to her. Took her hand. Tried to care. Tried to be human again. I looked at the books she had piled up around her on the kitchen table,
The Difficult Child
,
Tough Love
,
Parenting a Child with ADD
, dozens more books whose titles pointed to the theme of my household: I was broken and it was the only topic of conversation.

I hated my mom’s crying. I loved her. But never, not for one second, did it occur to me to change for her. I only thought how crazy she was for crying over me. Maybe first-class sociopath wasn’t so far off the mark after all.

We sat there for a while, silently, she trying to forgive herself, me trying to blame myself. Eventually I got up and left her to her tears. I couldn’t deal with that shit. I told myself I didn’t care, but the only thing I wanted to do in that moment was go get fucked up and obliterate myself, obliterate the memory of my mother’s tears.

I did just that.

I wanted out of those memories. Maybe that’s a kissing cousin of caring. I got high and forgot. I got high and silently fortified another paper-thin membrane wall around my feelings. Next time, next time I’d feel even less. That’s all I ever wanted. I didn’t want to feel good. I just wanted not to feel at all. With shit like this happening around you, who would want to feel it? I wanted out, and lucky me, at the bottom of every forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor was a trapdoor into oblivion. I leapt in and checked out.

The next day, my mom informed me of my summer plans.
“Things are going to change. I can’t keep accepting you trying to control me and the family. Larry is going crazy, too.”

“Fuck Larry.”

My mother’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve been trying, but having you in the house kills the mood.”

I mimed vomiting all over the kitchen.

Poor Larry.

Larry was my mother’s long-term boyfriend. The poor bastard. He had not signed on for me and, unlike most stepparents, actually tried his damnedest to just mind his own business. I hardly made that possible.

Larry was a Ph.D. student of entomology at UC Berkeley. Nerdy, meek, and funny, he was a damn sight better than my mother’s ex-boyfriend, Ward, who used to enjoy nothing more than throwing us around the room to exert his authority.

Larry just sat back and read such nerd anthems as
The Lord of the Rings
,
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
, and the classic,
The Principles of Pesticide Alternatives in the Controlling of Northern California Aphid Populations
. My mother, after much searching, had found her beta male. He was content to sit back and wait to be bequeathed a little deaf pussy. And I couldn’t even let him do that.

Cool or not, he was still an adult, and thus, I hated him even if he was pretty nice. One day I pissed him off so bad by waking him up repeatedly with my screaming matches with my mom that he actually screamed, “FUCK YOU!” Larry grew some nuts! I was impressed.

At any rate, my insanity had pushed their relationship to the breaking point, and it definitely would have been snapped in two had I simply been allowed to loll about the house all day, no school, no rehab.

My mother had other plans.

“This is a contract. I am going to tell you the school options you have and then you are going to sign it and agree to go back to school this summer. If you don’t, I’m sending you away.”

Oakland Public Schools, at least at the time, had a couple of different routes they would send you on if you started fucking up. There were the continuation schools, which were like regular schools if someone had had a hard life and been sent to prison; and then
there were the special ed schools, which were like regular schools if they had had a schizoid break and lost their minds.

Oakland Public Schools had had just about enough to do with me by the time I’d dropped out. Between the endless fighting, the constant class cutting, the incessant pot smoking, and the general malaise of horrific behavioral problems, I had been deemed more of a nuisance than anything else. I became a problem rather than a student, and a crack opened up beneath me large enough to fall into. I dropped out of junior high after Peter Cooke beat my ass, and that was, unbeknownst to me, another trapdoor that opened up behind me and dropped me down into a deeper level of insanity. I was lost in the system.

My mother and grandmother, probably due to the clinical, therapeutic lens through which they viewed the world, chose to send me down the path of the crazy, rather than the path of the criminal. But the truth is, at that age the difference is really marginal. Then again, maybe it is at any age.

I was informed that I had flunked eighth grade and that if I didn’t want to go back for another year of junior high, I needed to spend some time in a school that would help me close some of the academic credit gaps I had accrued. I agreed to what was to be one of the great bait-and-switch jobs of all time.

The next day, the short yellow bus came to pick me up and take me to school.

The short yellow bus is the lowest form of transportation possible for the adolescent. It’s the retard bus, the transport for kids who can’t walk, talk, or think. I saw that thing pull up in front of my house and I turned red. I looked at my mother like, “You have to be kidding me.”

She just signed, “Go,” and pointed to the bus. My self-esteem plummeted 50 points the second I climbed aboard and was greeted
with thick-browed paste eaters waving a happy, “Hello, mister!” Fucking kill me now.

If this information got out to my friends, I would be a virgin for the rest of my life. The fucking short yellow bus! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get girls while taking the short yellow bus? It’s hard. You have to unbuckle their helmet. You have to convince the girl your penis is made of candy. You have to bribe the bus driver to look away. I’m kidding!

I had, without quite understanding what I was getting myself into, agreed to go to a school with a rather telling name: The Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster.

The second I arrived, I smelled something wrong. Thick security doors shot open and slid shut behind me, autolocking. Fortified entrances to schools, never a good sign.

I looked around. This was not a place that was set up like any school I’d ever been to. At each of the entry and exit points of the one main classroom were adults standing sentinel, their eyes scanning back and forth at the students, looking for something, anything, to happen. You got the feeling as soon as you stepped in that anything
could
happen. You can feel when you are in a room of people who cannot control themselves. You can taste the tinny chemical dump of the insane when you share the air with them. The teacher droned on as if this weren’t a cuckoo’s nest situation and she was just teaching a regular class, not these mad kids. Meanwhile, the kids were muttering to themselves and pulling their hair out. Students looked up at me with evil grimaces I interpreted to mean, not “I’ll whoop your ass, white boy,” which I was used to, but rather, “I will eat your ass after disemboweling you, white boy,” which was new to me.

People rocked back and forth or laughed at jokes that weren’t
told. These kids were the people that made their fellow gang members uncomfortable with their level of violence.

I scanned the room looking for friendly faces. There were few. One kid, a guy named Ray, smiled at me. A gorilla of a boy, simply enormous, he was as good an ally as I could hope to have here. I smiled back.

When you become involved with clinical settings such as this, you grow adept at scanning a room and tasting its energy to see what role you are going to play in each situation. Some places, New Bridge, for example, I’d quickly become the loudmouth clown and get people to like me by making them laugh. Some places, I’d become quiet and try to be invisible. Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster was such a place. “Keep your fucking head down,” I told myself.

I took a seat. Within seconds, perhaps to impress the new kid, a boy named Jonathan, who had been sharpening his pencil with fervor, lunged at another student and tried to jab the pencil into his neck. He barely had begun to swing when security swarmed upon him and pulled him, foaming and kicking, mad with rage, into the built-in padded cell at the back of the classroom. Four huge men, hardly even having an emotional response to the seizure of anger they were holding, tossed that kid into the “quiet room,” hard. Jonathan screamed fucking murder for the rest of the period. The funny thing about the quiet room is that by the time you end up in one, you are anything but quiet. Just another bullshit clinical term. It wasn’t a quiet room, it was a padded fucking cell. A padded cell right here in class! How convenient. Where the
fuck
was I?

I’ll tell you, there is nothing quite so distracting to a lecture on the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
as the low, deep thudding of a severely emotionally disturbed youngster’s head repeatedly
slamming against an inadequately padded cell door. I think that child
was
left behind.

After the attempted murder, a Mexican kid sitting next to me leaned in and hissed, “What you claimin’, fool?” He was essentially asking me what gang I was affiliated with. I puffed myself up and answered, “I’m from Oakland, man, we don’t gangbang!” The Mexican kid stared at me with dangerous eyes for a beat and then nodded his acceptance and turned away. I tried to look tough as I evacuated my bowels.

The bell rang for recess. Everyone, like a military operation—no, more like a prison routine—lined up in twos. I looked at the line; everyone was paired off, relationships having been already established.

Finally, the bell rang for recess. Kids opened their palms to show that they weren’t carrying anything as we were released, two by two, out onto the yard to essentially just get some air and walk laps around the yard. It was as if they were training us to be the prisoners they were sure we were to become.

Everyone had a yard buddy, except that huge guy Ray. He smiled and signaled that I should come stand with him.

Uh-oh.

So, let me get this straight, here at the Stab You in the Neck Academy, the place that is saturated with the worst of the worst baby Hannibal Lecters, is one boy twice the size of everyone else with no friends and a huge toothy grin beckoning me to stand with him?

I’d never been raped and murdered, and it seemed totally unpleasant. I knew for sure that I was going to be killed like one of Lenny’s pets in
Of Mice and Men
, and I was trying to think of an excuse to scream like “My appendix!” or “My anal virginity!” when one of the Gestapo guards screamed at me, “Kasher, line up!”

Yes, massa!

I took a deep gulp and accepted my fate. Good-bye, cruel world!

I feebly scooted over to Ray and smiled. He smiled back. He didn’t speak. I didn’t either. I whimpered.