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 (6 page)

Unless you were a fuckup. Fuckups weren’t white, they were fuckups. It was like you didn’t even notice their whiteness because the dysfunction was screaming so loud that you couldn’t pay attention to anything else. They were the kids people’s mothers told them to avoid. The kids who you can find at the back of any school campus. These were Claremont Middle School’s white boy terrors.

The first fuckup I saw was Joey Zalante. Joey was an eighth grader when I first entered Claremont and was one of the most badass motherfuckers I ever saw. Early in the sixth-grade school year I saw him do the impossible. He won a fight with a black kid.

At Claremont watching fights was a sort of holy ritual. As soon as anyone started squaring off, everyone, from the biggest to the smallest, from the toughest gangster to the dorkiest white boy,
immediately dropped whatever they were doing and ran, streaming across the blacktop toward the conflict. We would gather around the gladiators, forming a kind of makeshift human Colosseum while the familiar but rather crude chant would begin.

“A fight! A fight! A motherfucking fight!”

To show you the odds Joey was up against, I will tell you the rest of this chant reserved only for interracial fights:

“A fight! A fight! A nigga and a white! If the nigga don’t win, then we
all
jump in!”

These calls would spread across the yard, calling onlookers like a pied piper, and we would gather hoping for a show.

Something like this would happen almost every day, but to everyone’s disappointment, most of these conflicts would end without much violence. Often what we watched was just a sort of odd human version of two animals in the wild, puffing themselves up, presenting the equivalent of their bright red baboon assholes to one another in an attempt to frighten their foe away.

Most fights looked exactly like this. The two “warriors” would walk around one another with their arms raised, screaming at each other. As the action got more intense, they would walk in concentric circles, closer and closer to one another until they were literally shoulder to shoulder engaging in a sort of alpha male waltz. Contact. Tensions would rise to the point of physical conflict. Not the good stuff, though; the fighters would shoulder-check each other and then back up to continue the dance. Usually this went on and on until a teacher came and broke it up. Of course, the moment a teacher took away the threat of an imminent beat-down, the circlers would go mad with rage, swearing that they were just about to beat the other’s face in. “You’re lucky this teacher is holding me back or that’d be your ass, motherfucker!”

“What about the twenty minutes of slow dancing you guys just did?” I’d yell, too funny for my own good. “What was holding you back then?” Often this would earn me a death threat from both fighters, their mutual disdain for me providing a common ground for reconciliation. People called me the Gandhi of the playground. Wait, no they didn’t, they called me white bitch.

Once in a while, though, our dreams came true and actual fists would fly, violence would ensue, and the masses would be sated.

One of those times, Joey Zalante bent time and space. At least it looked that dramatic to me. He was standing in line for the poor kids’ lunch.

The poor kids’ lunch line was a humiliating place to be. A separate line reserved just for the kids who couldn’t afford to select from the horrific smorgasbord that awaited students on the inside of the cafeteria, the poor kids’ line stacked kids up outside, huddled in the cold like the lines for the food kitchens the school no doubt expected these students to end up frequenting in the years to come.

I stood in it every day that my mother didn’t pack me a horrible brown bag of hippie gruel: thick grainy slices of wheat bread with gritty natural peanut butter slathered on, pineapple juice, and fruit leather. Not Fruit Roll-Ups, mind you, fruit leather. A kind of actual leather made from whatever the brownest, most fecal-tasting parts of a fruit were. I imagined the factory workers at the Fruit Roll-Up plant sweeping the remnants of their work off the floor and dumping them into a bucket marked
FRUIT LEATHER SCRAPS FOR TORTURING BAD CHILDREN
.

My brown bag lunches were so awful I prayed for the poor kids’ line.

A snapshot of the poor kids’ lunch line would serve as a kind of predictive criminal lineup for Oakland’s future. The John
Dillingers and Bonnies and Clydes of the world always waited in the poor kids’ lunch line. I was there standing in the back, waiting to get my juice cup and nacho cheese fries alongside a mealy pizza slice and an egg roll. Anyone who thinks welfare is an awesome meal ticket for undeserving people ought to be forced to eat one actual meal from below the poverty line. Following the most intense diarrhea of their lives would be the realization that being on government assistance sucks balls.

Ahead of me in line was Joey, whom I would soon gaze upon lovingly as a prince among men. In front of him was Sean The Bomb.

Sean The Bomb had fists of dynamite. At least so he told everyone who would listen. “I’m Sean The Bomb with the strength of King Kong. I got fists of TNT and my dick is long!”

Sean was simply enormous for an eighth grader. Who knows how old he actually was, but he stood more than six feet and was thick as a wall. Sean was not smart, but if you were, you would avoid pissing him off. He carried himself with the air of the pimp that I’m sure he has since become. A rule with pimps is to never step on their shoes.

At Claremont the crack-dealer kids could be spotted by their ever-changing Nike Cortez shoe collection. They called the shoes “Dougies,” and the cooler you were, the more pairs you had. If you wore a red shirt, you
had
to have matching red Dougies. Black shirt, black Dougies, and so on. But the poorer you were, the fewer pairs of shoes you had to work with. Sean The Bomb had yet to figure out how to monetize his explosive fists and, as a result, had only one pair of white Dougies. Joey made the mistake of stepping on them.

“Get the fuck off my shoes, you dumb white motherfucker!”
Sean exploded, pushing Joey back into the line behind him, food flying everywhere.

“I ain’t white, you big-lipped bitch, I’m Italian.”

Joey just spat this back, almost as if he wasn’t scared of Sean’s bombs at all.

Sean tackled Joey without any pretense, no dancing, no chanting, no nothing. I held my breath.

Gravel flew everywhere as the two rolled back and forth scraping, scrambling, beating the shit out of each other. Somehow, though, Joey managed to flip Sean on his back and to sit on his stomach, pummeling him from the top. Sean The Bomb was not conscious long. He got knocked the fuck out.

I panicked.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Joey got up and started dusting himself off as campus security ran over, too little too late. I looked around at the other people watching, flabbergasted.

“Did you see what just happened?!? What does this mean!?! Is this the End Times?” I screamed with jubilation.

All of the Caucasian kids at Claremont danced the hora together to celebrate. We cooked an ox in sacrifice and promised to name all of our firstborn sons Joey.

Just before Joey disappeared into the swirling masses, slipping out of sight of campus security, I could have sworn he winked at me, as if to say, “Yeah, that
was
pretty cool, huh?” He winked at me! Not bad. I thought to myself that a fuckup seemed like a pretty cool thing to be. It was like a little Post-it note reminder that I stuck to the inside of my head.

Note to self: Fuckups are afraid of nothing. You are afraid of everything. This information might come in handy someday
.

Somewhere along the line, I figured out that the more I made people laugh, the less of a loser I would appear to be. I shucked and jived for my classmates, hoping like hell no one would figure out how scared I was. When an in-class lecture confused me, I’d make fun of the shoes of a kid poorer than me. At the end of the lecture, the teachers would only remember me mocking the kid’s plastic Moon Boots, not that I had been unable to answer a single question on dividing fractions.

This kind of behavioral distraction technique kept me feeling safe but made every day at school one where I fell incrementally behind without anyone really noticing, and as a result, when my final grades came in, everyone scratched their head and pointed at one another, trying to assign blame for the failure.

It was a lesson in consequences. Shortly after school started in the seventh grade, I was sent to the retarded portable. A fat teacher/clinician combo meal of a woman approached me in class and pulled me aside with the private solemnity of an army officiant charged with the job of delivering the heartbreaking condolences to the next of kin.

“You have learning disabilities,” she began, far too earnest for my comfort level. “LEARNING DISABILITIES.”

She stared down at my puzzled face. “Do you know what that means? It means you learn differently than other students. Everyone learns differently and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people learn better with their ears.” As she talked, she pointed to her ears just in case I wasn’t aware of what an ear was.

“Some people learn better with their eyes.”

She pointed to her fat eyes.

“We can’t figure out what you learn best with. It seems like something might be wrong with your brain.”

She pointed to her fat head.

“So we are going to bring you to a special classroom to help you learn. It’s called Portable Three.”

Portable Three. The retard portable.

“But isn’t that where the retarded kids go?” I asked.

She was shocked. “We don’t use that word anymore. Differently abled.”

“Do you use the word
Down syndrome
? Because the kid with Down syndrome goes to Portable Three. Do I have Down syndrome?”

I never got an answer. To this day I’m not sure I don’t.

Every day after fourth period, I would begin the long slog to the Portable Three DMZ at the back of the school. The first day there, I expected the door to open to a scene from an antebellum hospital for the mentally infirm. I expected young women chained to the door and people rocking in the corner picking at scabs. A woman with madness in her eyes would jump on top of me gasping, “Leave now… you’ll never escape this place.”

What I got was much different. Portable Three looked a lot like a regular classroom. The fourth-period class was specifically for people like me, regular kids with an appropriate amount of chromosomes but an inappropriate amount of F’s on their report cards. The more severely disabled students were given classes earlier in the day and then sent home to lift heavy things for the carnival or eat paint chips or whatever.

What I was expecting was a caricature of a special education classroom, but what I got was so innocuous that neither I nor any of the other students in there realized the real insidiousness of what was happening to us. It wasn’t Portable Three itself that would ruin you. It was the subtle left turn that your life makes
when the public school system enrolls you in a special education classroom.

The special ed classroom is an open door with a friendly face beckoning you in, smiling, telling you, “Come in, come in! In this room is the help you’ve been looking for!”

The moment you step in, the door locks behind you. The smiles disappear; your name glows white hot on their forms. You aren’t going anywhere.

The second your name is written into the blank space marked “Student” on the form for the Individualized Education Program, or IEP, you have been kicked down a trapdoor into the sick wonderland of special ed. Every special ed student gets an IEP, and in it, the “plan of action” for your future is outlined. Every detail about your past failures is listed. Every goal for your future is put down on paper. Your plan is set.

Every mistake you ever make again will be attributed to a “lack of educational support” or an “indication of unchanged educational deficiencies.” An inch at a time, you become a product of the system. You slide down that tunnel like Alice chasing a rabbit, slowly and cautiously at first, thinking you are after something nice and cute like Peter Cottontail or, as they put it, “a more appropriate educational modality,” but pretty soon you look back in the direction you came from to find that you have become quite lost. You couldn’t make it back if you tried. A while later you realize the bunny ahead of you has long since disappeared and you are surrounded with people as mad as hatters. Adults with their Cheshire grins assure you that you are “right where you need to be.” No one needs to shout, “Off with your head!” because they have been slowly taking your head away from you the whole time. A psychiatric guillotine has shaved your head away one thin slice
at a time like a deli slicer. In three years I would find myself stuck, fucked up, and my life becoming curiouser and curiouser every second. That’s the wonderland of Portable Three.

Of course, I realized none of this at first. All I knew was that Portable Three had a distinct corrosive effect on your social life. As soon as people find out you go there, you are out. No one likes a retarded friend.

Through the entire sixth grade I had managed to stay mostly socially neutral. I was almost popular. I had kept the weirdness of my home life to myself and tried very hard to make fun of the losers when it seemed appropriate in order to ingratiate myself with the cool kids.

I knew that I, too, was a loser, but as long as they didn’t know, I figured I’d be okay. I was such a ball of social anxiety and so desperate to fit in that I wasn’t quite accepted into the cool-kid club, but I wasn’t exactly rejected either. I clung to that with the hope that someday, I, too, could be a vapid shallow dickhead. Ahh, to be popular.

Then came Portable Three, and all of a sudden they just iced me. I had been summarily dismissed.

Early in the year of seventh grade, one of the leaders of the popular pack, a kid named Jono, was having a birthday party and I had
not
been invited. It burned my little twelve-year-old heart. I was crushed. Then, to my delight and shame, I found an invitation to the party that had been discarded underneath someone’s desk. I quickly snatched it up and stuffed it into my pocket and ran home. I didn’t know what to do.