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 (30 page)

We burned into the parking lot with some kind of uncanny synchronized timing. Fat Pete and three carloads of North Oakland D-boys pulled in right behind us. Holy fuck. This wasn’t supposed to be the deal. First it was just me. Then it was me and Joey. Then Joey invited Fat Pete, and now it looked like all the thugs in North Oakland had heard it was free-plunder night down at Lake Temescal. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.

The cars parked, stacked up right at the entrance of the park, and we all jumped out. It was like an army. It was like a stampede.
There were some twenty dudes, each one more terrifying than the last. I was the weakest link.

As this army of Oakland stormed the field, my hippie locked eyes with me. His hand raised in a hello, his eyes widened in fear. I waved back. Joey ran up on his side and hit him with that pole. He went down, hard. Then there was no more party.

Very quickly, the entire party started streaming toward the parking lot. Suburban white kids came, screaming as the Oakland experience was brought to them. Kids were getting stomped left and right. A huge black dude I’d never met ran up on me, a bat in his hand. I screamed, “I’m with you guys!” and flashed him a North Oakland “N” symbol. He looked unconvinced for a second, hesitated, and ran off to stomp someone else’s head in.

All I wanted was some weed. And I had caused all this. The real, scary truth was that I hated it. I didn’t like seeing my hippie get hurt. I didn’t like seeing these kids in terror. No more than I liked hurting my mother, or seeing her cry. I just needed to feel all right. After all, that was the thing I’d been after this whole time. Just a little comfort. None of this was me. I didn’t fully know it yet, but I was cracking. I was coming undone.

I snapped out of it.

No time for pondering my identity, people were getting beaten half to death. Half of the North Oakland Bushrod boys were here. People were getting hurt. People were getting robbed. I was getting the fuck out of there. I never found out what happened to my hippie. I hope he was okay.

I took off into the night, figuring my weed was done for. I had some trouble imagining, realistically, in the wasteland of that party, saying to my big friend with the bat, “You see, Pookie, this was my lick. I planned this. So when you think about it, that’s really my weed.”

“But of course!” Pookie would reply, hugging me close to him. “It wouldn’t be fair to deprive you of your share of the plunder. It’s the pirate’s way!” Then he would toss me the weed and a jar of Grey Poupon.

More likely I would’ve whimpered, “Do you think I could pinch a little of that bud? I actually planned this whole thing. I know I don’t look like much, but I’m a thinker! Ha ha.”

“I
think
you can suck my dick. And stop talking to me before I break your fucking jaw.”

Oh Pookie!

Fuck that, I was out of there.

I stole home along the side of the road.

Some hippies pulled over.

“Hey, you need a ride, man? There’s some crazy dudes up there at the lake. You oughta be careful. You gotta get away from them!”

I felt like dying.

“Yeah, I know I do. I’ll be careful. I’ll be all right.” I looked straight on into the night. The kids drove on.

What was I becoming?

As if all the insanity surrounding me wasn’t enough, I started to become aware of a more frightening insanity bubbling up from inside me. The years of psychotherapy, psychoactive medicine, and psychedelic drugs were making me psycho. You know, like “Norman Bates” psycho. You know, like “seeing things” psycho. Everywhere I walked, I saw a three-dimensional pancake following me. It lived in the left side of my periphery. It joined me in all of my affairs. Turn to the left? Pancake. Look up? Pancake.

Pancake, Pancake, Pancake.

You know, like “pancake-hallucinating psycho.”

I was becoming emotionally brittle and any interaction at all was likely to lead to a full-on rage-filled blowout.

At home all my brother had to do was speak to me and things would sizzle of control. I’d throw baseball bats at his head and freak out the second after at the danger of what I’d just done.

I couldn’t look in the mirror without grimacing and making faces at the awful asshole I saw in front of me. I couldn’t even look at me. I couldn’t even look at me.

Oh, but it wasn’t all that bad! It wasn’t all just violence and self-hatred! No! There was piss, too! Lots and lots of piss.

Somehow, I’d also become lazy as fuck. Diabetic coma lazy. My room was at least four doors down from the bathroom. At
least
ten feet away. I’d raise my lazy head, my brain swarming from the dance of weed and acid and psychotropics whirling around each other like dervishes, cutting my head to shreds. My bladder cried out like a
Little Shop of Horrors
villain, “Drain me!” I’d begin to get up and then the reality of how far that bathroom was would hit me. Ten feet. Four doors. Too far. Plus if I leave my room, I might see my mom. Might see my brother. Might hurt someone else.

My eyes scan my room, looking for something. Boot, no.
Penthouse
magazine, no. Wendy’s cup! Yes. Better than a toilet, it’s
right here
.

I grabbed that cup and flipped my little dick into it and began to fill it. Full to the brim. Bye-bye, self-respect.

I didn’t even notice, to be honest. See, that’s how it happens. When you hustle like I did, you only notice the ups and downs of the day. Do I have money? Do I not? What should I do to get money now? Thoughts like “Where was I at last year at this time?” are rare and easily ignored for the more pressing issues
of the day. Every line of moral defense you have is compromised. Every “I will never” becomes an “I might” becomes an “I did.” The moment you sink to a new low is the same moment that your conscience becomes compromised to the point that it won’t rebel against the indignity you are putting it through. That’s why so few addicts get clean. They never seem to even notice there is a problem because, for them, there isn’t. You ever wonder how addicts let themselves become such animals? That’s how. They forget they were ever human. It wasn’t gross that I was pissing in cups and leaving them littered around the room. I simply had to piss and the bathroom was too far away.

Simple, simple.

In that way, I think, the people who
do
get clean are the weakest lot in the addicted bunch. Sure, it takes courage to get clean, but that courage is usually inspired by pain and humiliation. The real hard-core addicts never get sober because they never notice the ache, they never notice the pain. They can’t be humiliated, they have nothing left to embarrass. And just like that, they die. So tough they die.

My room quickly became a filth pit of decomposing piss jars. Sometimes, I’d fill a cup too much and rank piss would spill over and splash back onto my belly. Sometimes I’d just piss on the floor, no cup needed. Sometimes I’d bunch up a towel and piss in it. I’d piss in the heater because it made a funny sound. And a funny smell, I found out right afterward.

Oh, fuck you! Don’t judge. I told you there was a lot of piss coming. Also I told you I was losing my mind. My mother, usually a bastion of codependent over-involvement in my life, the woman who lived on top of my chest the first fourteen years of my life, suddenly became totally uninterested in coming into my
room. Hmm. I wonder why she didn’t want to come in. Into my dank, burnt-piss-stank science-experiment room. I finally had my privacy.

I was spitting on the floor. I’d been tagging on the walls in my house. Just like, you know, writing with permanent ink on my house’s walls. My mom would look at me like I was an insane person, shake her head, and say, “I know you did it.”

I was starting to be desperate for drugs, even as I pretended desperately not to need them.

I got high alone all the time and it had started to bother me.

“Smoking alone, that’s dope fiend shit,” Jamie told me as we sat together under a bridge one day, smoking out of an apple. “For real, after you start smoking alone, it’s a real short hop to sucking dick for crack.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “A real short hop? It seems like a longer hop than you are giving it credit for.”

“No, dude, I’m telling you. Only a fiend smokes alone.” Jamie was so sure of himself, I believed him.

That’s one of the odd things about pathological liars. You keep trying to believe them, no matter how fantastical the tale. The idea that they are just lying to you, time after time, seems so counterintuitive that you still try like hell to believe.

“I don’t want to be a fiend,” I told myself.

I had this bike back then. A bad bike. A junkie bike. I’d bought it for ten bucks from a drunken Indian.

That’s the truth.

Everything that could be wrong with it was. The handlebars rotated 360 degrees. The brakes had never worked, and I needed either to put my heel down and scrape my sneakers along the gravel or just leap off the bike altogether and run to a stop. There
was no seat. But there was a seat post. A gay joke waiting to happen. Oh, and one day it exploded. Bet you didn’t know a bicycle could explode, huh? I was riding along, trying precariously to keep my butt away from the seat post, when the entire bike just poofed into pieces. Just all of a sudden… boom… Legos! The bike disintegrated beneath my weight into a pile of scrap metal. My ass slammed into the seat post and my virginity was nearly taken. The bad virginity.

As horrible as the bike was, ironically, I used it to try and prove to myself that I wasn’t an addict.

I’d ride for hours, the weight of the bag in my pocket pulling me down, my bike squeaking beneath me, looking for a friend to smoke with to prove that I wasn’t fucked up. When no one was available, I’d ride my shit bike over to Harmonica Guy or some other homeless dude.

Oakland had an array of the oddest homeless people in the world. In the eighties, Ronald Reagan had opened up the California state mental hospitals to save money. “Don’t worry!” he said. “We will build community centers to manage these people.” Then, after releasing them, he did no such thing.

As a result, we got characters straight out of a comic book. Harmonica Guy was a local homeless guy who sat on a street corner, shucking and jiving for the passersby. He danced around, high on crack, playing the blues. An odd little man.

Then there was Ray, the Vietnam vet who stood on his perch at Rockridge BART like a British Beefeater, never moving, never abandoning his post. His face was burned and mangled from shrapnel. His mind was charred and wasted from trauma. Ray would stand there and scream at the top of his lungs, again and
again, shaking the Vietcong demons away. He dressed in rags and scared children away. We loved fucking with him.

There was Hate Man, a famous staple of Telegraph Avenue, a man about whom rumors swirled of a past spent as a professor at the university until he tuned in, turned on, and went mad. Hate Man lived on the streets, downwind of the classrooms where he used to proctor exams. Always wearing a skirt, Hate Man was reliable. If you said hello to him, he would scream, “Fuck you!” Not in anger, but in his cosmology of hate. Don’t ask me to explain, I’m sure I couldn’t. No one could. He was just Hate Man.

There was Rawr. A man who looked like a Dark Ages barbarian who all day long hollered, “Rawr!” And if you yelled back, “How do you like it?!?” he would always reply, “Hot and wet!” We loved him.

There was a cobbler in Rockridge named Alonzo, who took all of these oddballs under his wing and had their VA checks diverted to his little storefront. Then he would pay them piecemeal, either in cash after taking a percentage for himself, or in cocaine that he stuffed into a shoe and passed to them, like a Brothers Grimm tale gone grimmer. Alonzo was a crooked cobbler. That’s life in Oakland.

These messes of humanity were the people I would get high with when I couldn’t find my buddies on the street.

All this to convince myself I wasn’t an addict. I’d smoke weed out of their crack pipes and look down my nose at people smoking alone. Unless I couldn’t find anyone at all. Then I just got high alone and looked down my nose at myself.

My life started to shrink.

The police had come back to my house looking for me. I’d been delinquent from school for months. My mother, exhausted at trying
to convince me to go back, brought them into the pee pee nook and sighed, “Here, you deal with him.”

They threw me back into school, my first re-entry into an Oakland public school in years. I entered Oakland Technical High School in a daze. Tech, a mildly scary high school that white kids avoided like the plague, held little intimidation factor for me. How could I be scared if I was hardly conscious?

I stumbled into the classroom and all eyes shifted to me like an Apache scalper sauntering into a bar in Deadwood.

“What the fuck is that white boy doing
here
?” I’d hear them mutter.

The mutters went away soon as they realized I was more of a sleeping boy than I was a white boy.

My life at Tech looked like this:

I would wake up to my screaming alarm clock, surrounded by jars of piss, and knock the clock over, falling back to sleep, missing my first two classes. Finally, I’d wake and bake and crawl to school, late for third period.