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 (32 page)

“Well, I’m saying I want to change now. I’m saying I’m
going
to change.”

My mom sighed. “So change then.”

So I’d lost her, too.

No matter, I’d show her, I’d show everybody who thought I was destined to fail. I’d show them who the fuck I was.

I walked over to Monk’s place. He had moved from being a good friend to simply just my drug dealer. Old memories only allotted me a twenty-four-hour credit grace period. I knocked on his door and he slid the privacy screen to the side, identifying me. God, he was just like a real drug dealer.

“Hey, man,” I said as I extended payment for yesterday’s bag and a fresh one for today, a twenty I’d slipped out of my mom’s purse while she was telling me I’d never change. One last twenty. The last one.

“This is it,” I told Monk.

“What is
it
?” he asked, hardly interested.

I looked at him seriously. “I quit, man, I’m out of the game. I gotta get my shit together. This is my last bag. I’m done.”

Monk looked up. It looked like he was almost impressed as he handed me the bag. “That’s cool, man, whatever you need.”

So the next day when I went to his house to buy a bag, he came to the door, looked at me, and sneered in disgust.

I smiled and held out my cash. “Hey, lemme hold something, man.”

Monk looked at me like he couldn’t believe me. He shook his head and held out a bag for me.

“What hell are you doing here?” he snapped at me. “You said yesterday you were out of the game and here you are today. Dude, you’ve really got a problem.”

I am here to tell you that if your drug dealer ever does an intervention
on you, it’s time to get help. That’s when I started quitting. Every night I’d quit. Every night I’d swear I’d never do it again. I had to stop. I had to stop hurting people. I had to get my shit together. I had to get out of high school before I was thirty. I had to stop pissing anywhere other than the toilet. Every night I quit. And every morning I woke up and forgot about the promises I’d made to myself the night before. The thought to get high would hit me and I’d be at my dealer’s house or at Safeway with a bottle of gin in my pants before I even had a chance to argue with myself. It wasn’t how you would imagine it to be. I didn’t crumble. I forgot. I didn’t have a wrestling match with my conscience, struggling back and forth until I gave up on it. Rather, it seemed like I didn’t have a conscience at all. It wasn’t a struggle of good over evil. I didn’t have an angel pop up on one shoulder…

No devil popped up on the other shoulder.

There was no struggle to decide.

That’s how logic would dictate that the addictive thought process would work. Temptation stacked against prudence. Prudence crumbles. Temptation conquers. That’s how it should work. How it actually does work is much scarier. When it came right down to it, there was no moral struggle. There was no struggle at all. There was simply an empty space in my brain where the night before there had been a firm declaration never to do this again. When the thought to take a hit, hit, I simply forgot I was planning on quitting. I just forgot. It went more like this:

I’d think:

Then I’d think:

No struggle. How are you supposed to combat that?

That went on for months. Every night I quit. Every morning I forgot.

Another thing.

Another thing.

Another thing.

Every day was like the last one. Groundhog Day. Wake up. Get up. Steal money. Get high. Steal booze. Get drunk. Wake up. Get up. Steal money. Get high. Steal booze. Get drunk. Wake up. Get up. Steal money. Get high. Steal booze. Get drunk.

This.

Day.

Never.

Seems.

To.

End.

No end in sight.

I’m defeated.

I hadn’t expected this. I’d been telling myself for years what every addict will identify as a familiar trope: “I could quit if I wanted to, I just don’t want to.” Then came the day that I wanted to. Then came the realization that I couldn’t. The moment you need control is the moment you realize you’ve lost it.

Donny was having similar results.

We’d meet up and discuss our plans to sober up while drinking forties of St. Ides.

“Maybe we
should
check back into that rehab,” I said, scared.

“You can’t stop either?” Donny laughed a sick laugh.

“Naw.” I stared at my hands, wrapped around that thick bottle, beer sweat dripping down over my fingers. I finished that forty off and made up my mind.

I told my mother the plan, and a flicker of hope flashed in her eyes.

“I’m going to go to Kaiser and check in,” I told her.

“That’s great. I’m really happy to hear that.”

Donny and I traveled out to the Kaiser Outpatient Adolescent Chemical Dependency Program in Walnut Creek and told them the truth for a change.

We were admitted immediately.

I realized the second I got there that I hated them just like I had hated the people in the last place, just like I hated every fucking adult with power over me.

Oakland Public Schools had also noticed I’d dropped back out of school. Not that it mattered. I was a nuisance to them. More trouble than I was worth.

My mother caused a stink and got me on the waiting list for another school called Spraings Academy, which she was convinced would be the answer for me. Oakland agreed to one more year of funding therapy for me. I’d have another fucking counselor to go to. Oh joy.

I walked into group at Kaiser that first day and realized I’d made a huge fucking mistake. The kids seemed cool enough but then group started. The door opened and a voice from the back of the room boomed, “Hey, everyone. Great to see you all.”

I knew that voice. I knew it from somewhere. I turned and looked.

Tim Fuckin Hammock. New head counselor of the Kaiser program. My nemesis from New Bridge. The guy who hated me and baited me back at my old rehab was now the freshly minted head counselor of my latest one, conveniently transferred to Kaiser just in time to ruin my attempt at getting my shit together. I couldn’t ever catch a break.

He winked at me. He smiled big.

That fucking bitch, I thought.

This was going to suck.

Nonetheless, I was interested in trying. I was trying every night. And failing every morning. Rehab couldn’t take away that hunger. I was starting to get really scared.

I sat in group, wondering what the point of all this was. Tim walked into group every day and sneered at me. He sat down and lectured us about how to change. No one listened.

Donny and I spent our hours in group fucking around, mocking Tim for the wart he’d grown on his cheek in the years since I’d seen him at New Bridge.

We’d take turns, Donny and I, circling around the room making eye contact with the other kids in group and fucking with them. We’d convince them that they had something on their face and laugh as we watched them rubbing away imaginary stains.

Whenever the group psychiatrist, Dr. Dale Dallas, would enter the group and sit in to observe Tim’s leadership skills, Donny and I would yell, “Wokka Wokka Wokka!” at him.

What? He looked exactly like Fozzie Bear.

We’d yell about injustices Tim had never committed.

“Dr. Dallas, is it normal for Tim to be holding my penis while I give a urine sample?” I snickered.

“That’s not a funny accusation at all.” Dr. Dallas squirmed uncomfortably.

“Okay, fine, Tim never held my dick, but can you tell us one more time what life was like with Kermit and Miss Piggy?” I’d ask as Donny cackled one last “Wokka Wokka Wokka!!”

We died laughing.

Tim turned red. Dale Dallas left the room shortly thereafter.

I was trying. I was, I just didn’t really know how to try. Kaiser,
like New Bridge, chanted, “Get rid of your friends, you’ll never get better surrounded by those guys.”

How could I do that? No way. I’d just be strong.

Every night after group, I’d go back to Oakland with Donny and we’d go catch up with DJ and Corey and whoever else was around.

Again and again I’d declare to the boys, “I’m not drinking tonight, guys!” I said it earnestly, nudging Donny for his assent. It never came.

“More for us!” DJ would slur and take a slug of the booze.

We sat in a circle, the bottle being passed, person to person.

Each notch closer to me it got, the less clearly I could grab hold of my resolve not to drink.

It was coming to me next.

Ahh, forget it. A drink and oblivion. The pain didn’t go away but at least it quieted down. I get hazy memory when I look into a bottle of gin.

I stumbled home, glowing drunk, stinking of gin, close to the edge.

I fell into the house and hobbled my ass toward the bathroom.

My mother was waiting, standing sentinel at the top of the stairs. “Is this what it looks like when you get sober?” she said, angry at her hopes being betrayed again. “You’re drunk.”

“A bit!” I laughed and pushed her out of the way, making my way to the bathroom for a nice drunken shit.

She chased after me, screaming, but I stopped listening and slammed the door in her face. I plopped down on the toilet and began the drunken defecation. That’s when my mother kicked the bathroom door open like an angry police officer.

“I’m sick and tired of you pushing me around!” she screamed, charging me like a linebacker.

“Mom, I’m shitting!” was the only reply that made sense.

She didn’t slow a tick. She ran straight for me, screaming like a madwoman, “FUCK YOU!!!!!”

My eyes widened in terror.

Contact.

She slammed into me and wrestled me off the toilet, pulling me down onto the bathroom floor, a tail of feces still hanging from me.

With my pants around my ankles and shit everywhere, I threw her off me and her hands scratched and slapped at my face. I grabbed her hand and bit down, hard. Her skin popping under my teeth, her blood shooting into my mouth. I slapped her. I shook her.

She crawled out of there, crying.

Here I am on the bathroom floor with shit and blood and tears and anger covering me. I was just like that baby shooting down the birth canal. Once again, my mother was asking, “What
is
he?” I didn’t even know. I’m not human anymore, am I?

I’m a fucking animal. I’m a monster.

The police came. My mother called them. Aw, fuck. I’m too drunk for it. I fell asleep and hoped everything would go away.

I woke up early the next day, my head buzzing. That flush of the memory of what I did came flooding back to me.

“Hey, Mom,” I whimpered.

My mother turned and looked at me. Cold and pissed. Emotions gone. No disappointment left.

The police report that my mother had filled out was sitting beside her.

“They are sending us a date for you to go to trial. They said it would be a few months,” my mom signed to me, matter-of-factly.

“A court date? Ma, what’d you do?” I couldn’t believe this.

“I didn’t do anything. The police did. They are sending us a
date for you to go to trial,” she repeated, turning her back on me and flipping the TV on.

I could tell that the discussion was closed.

My mother had entered me in some kind of juvenile first-offense court program, which was the limit of the trouble she could get me into that night. Fed up and convinced that I needed to be taught a lesson, she pressed charges, and months later, I went to trial.

It was a kind of kangaroo court, where every single defendant was declared guilty and sent to anger management classes and community service weekends, humiliated and wearing a bright neon safety vest.

Head down, I entered the workspace with my vest hanging on me like a dunce cap, declaring me unfit for human consumption.

A thousand-yard walk to the work furlough check-in. My fellow juvenile delinquents sized me up.

“Ay, man,” one kid said to another. “Whachu in here for?”

A pimply black kid replied, “Grand theft auto. What about you?”