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 (8 page)

“Oh. All right, man, talk to you later.” I slunk down into my chair and hung up the phone.

A birthday party. That suburban motherfucker.

Back in Oakland, Donny started bringing me around the guys. A jalopy little group of true-blue fuckups. Together they made up the P.A.G., a little proto–street gang that stood for the “Pure Adrenaline Gangsters.” It was such a faggy name that it probably should have been named the Pure Hard-core Adrenaline Gangsters. P.H.A.G.

It was a broken group of boys. All of them, and I mean every single one of them, came from divorced homes. Most from fucked-up, abusive ones. Donny introduced me around.

There was DJ and Corey, a pair of brothers so incongruously proportioned they looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito from the movie
Twins
. DJ was enormous and incapable of having a violent thought without enacting it immediately with his fists. He carried penny rolls around with him wrapped in duct tape to increase the force and weight that his fists bore. He was the Luca Brasi to Donny’s Don Corleone.

Corey, on the other hand, was kind of the Joe Pesci of the group. Little, obnoxious, loud, and always instigating things. He was a couple of years older than us but a couple of years less mature, so everything worked out just fine.

Terry Candle, or as he was more well known, Monk, was a
half-Japanese kid with a meticulous mind and a mother who had deep connections to pot farmers in Northern California. He got the nickname
Monk
because he could never be seen without a thick hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head, making him look like a very small Benedictine drug dealer. I didn’t know it at the time, but his mother’s relationship to those pot-growing hippies up north made him the main weed peddler to the white-under-thirteen set in North Oakland.

And then there was Jamie. Jamie James was a kid so ridiculous he seemed like he must have been concocted by a screenwriter; bright orange hair and a preposterous pubescent peach fuzz mustache, Jamie looked like a clown. He acted like one, too. He was a pathological liar. It was impossible ever to know if he was telling the truth about anything. The victim of frequent, severe, man-sized beatings at the hands of his father, eventually his personality fractured into so many pieces that he just picked them up and shaped them into whatever fit the situation best. Unfortunately he did it poorly, and the result was a guy that only the P.A.G. could love.

Having a pathological liar as a friend scars you. To this day, if I ever meet anyone who tells too many crazy stories, I assume they are lying and I start to imagine a soft orange halo glowing about their countenance like a patron saint of dishonesty.

Guess who else was sometimes around? Joey! Imagine! The Italian giant slayer. He who fought a black kid and lived to tell the tale. This was like a Jewish kid in the sixties getting to hang around Sandy Koufax. I was hanging out with my hero. I tried not to swoon.

Little by little, the guys got used to me being around. I’d walk
through the halls at Claremont and DJ would nod his head at me, “ ’Sup?” I felt like I’d been let in on a secret.

After a few weeks of infrequent invitations to steel off across the street during lunch and smoke cigarettes with the guys, I guess I had been promoted. Donny came up to me and told me to meet him at his house that day after school.

If I’d known what I was getting myself into that day, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to show up, but then again, I’m not sure I would have had the courage not to.

I approached the back of Donny’s house and unlatched the gate to his backyard.

“Donny?” I called.

I rounded the bend into the backyard and saw everyone standing there—DJ, Corey, Joey, and the crew.

Donny grabbed me by the arm and announced to everyone that I’d decided to join the P.A.G. I’d done no such thing.

I looked over at Donny. “Uh, Donny, uh… we haven’t really discussed this in depth.” I was a bit nervous, not sure I was ready to take the plunge into being a full-fledged baby gangster.

Donny just winked at me.

I looked around at this little ragtag group of white bad boys and gulped a deep gulp.

These were the kids mothers said to avoid, and I was being asked to jump into the deep end with them.

“It ain’t nothin’, homeboy,” Jamie reassured me, speaking in the lilt of a character from a seventies blaxploitation film.

DJ rolled his eyes and muttered, “He’s too fucking scared.”

Jamie slipped his arm around me and said, sounding more
like an old-school traveling hippie this time, “Just be cool and go with it.”

Joey, not really a member of the gang himself, but more like an outside consultant, just smoked and watched me.

I had seen this before. I was being tested. Much like Kevin Costner in
Dances with Wolves
, the tribal warriors were trying to see if I was brave enough to be one of them. I knew what I had to do.

I stepped forward, crouched into Tae Kwon Do horse stance, took a deep breath, and announced, “I am ready to join.”

Everyone laughed hysterically. No one asked me to leave, though. Joining was not easy. Over the course of the next few weeks, I had to join like five fucking times. The thing about the gang was that it wasn’t really a gang at all, rather just a name for the group of fuckups that I had fallen into. In fact, the name was the last little piece of youthful innocence in us. It was a juvenile name, like a little clubhouse, akin to the “He Man Woman Haters Club” from
The Little Rascals
. It wasn’t the name that mattered, but the affiliation. The problem with it not being a “real” gang, however, was that the rules were rather undefined. Especially the rules concerning how to join.

Every P.A.G. initiation ritual I went through was somehow deemed insufficient afterward and then they’d ask me to perform some other pain ritual or sexual humiliation in order to be accepted in. I stuck my finger up my ass and tried to write my name on the wall in shit; I whacked my little pubescent dick against an ice-cold school bench; I drank a dead goldfish, and I put out a cigarette on my arm.

It was a Camel wide. I fucking remember that—believe me, you would, too. As this new group of guys gathered around, I
jammed the lit end of this cigarette into my forearm and shook in pain while my flesh bubbled and smoked. All the guys cheered and slapped me on the back for what at the time felt like the best decision I’d ever made.

The burn got infected quickly, but unwilling to ask for help, lest the FBI be called in to investigate the P.A.G., I just slapped a Band-Aid on it and hoped for the best.

A month later it was putrescent and crusted gold and my arm felt like a fifty-pound water balloon. It only hurt when I moved it or laughed or talked or pointed it downward or upward or breathed, so I figured it was probably okay.

A few weeks later, I flew home for a visit with my dad in Brooklyn. After eyeballing it for a while, he finally said something about the Band-Aid that never came off. He forced me to show him and then immediately vomited on my arm. Maybe that didn’t happen. He did, however, make me go to the hospital and save my arm from gangrene or amputation. What a square my dad was.

Worst of all, two months after my trial by fire, the P.A.G. disbanded. Not like anything whatsoever changed, not like we stopped hanging out or doing the exact same things we did before the end of the P.A.G. era; they just decided that the gang was lame and that it was over. I guess I should’ve been grateful. There was talk of ritual rape as my next induction ceremony. Despite it all, I never regretted the burn. I would look down at the scar over the years and grin a little, remembering the time I burned my way to fuckup.

It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve never been admired for anything, being admired at all—even if it is for being the world’s biggest fuckup—feels pretty good.

I sighed a sigh of deep relief when they took me in. These were
the first people in my life who weren’t asking me what was wrong with me. They didn’t give a fuck. There was something wrong with them, too. But more to the point, they
got
that the true problem was that there was something deeply wrong with everyone else. The world of adults and rules was fucked. Our parents were hypocritical shit bags. The police were corrupt bastards. Our teachers were incompetent assholes. Only we got it. Only I and this group of lost boys understood. We weren’t really in a gang so much as holding each other up. I had people. I wasn’t alone.

I realized, after hanging out with these guys for a while, that they were smoking pot.
Pot
. Our parents called it grass, they called it dank. If it was really good, they called it The Chronic. The D.A.R.E. program called it a gateway drug.

I made a decision that I’d smoke with those guys if they asked me. Fuckin’ weed! Bill Clinton said he didn’t inhale and the nation laughed at him. I didn’t. The first time I smoked weed, I related more to Bill Clinton than the black community did. I fucking tried. I’d been smoking cigarettes for months at that point, but the only time I’d inhale was when I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of smoke. I imagined that that was how people got lung cancer, just one too many accidental inhalations. I mean, it couldn’t be what you were
supposed
to be doing, right? I wanted nothing more than to look cool in front of those guys, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I propose, with zero knowledge of anatomy or anything scientific, that it’s an unnatural act for your lungs to allow smoke
in
. That’s why people die of smoke inhalation. So when Donny invited me to the bushes to smoke some weed and I didn’t get high, it was my lungs being a bitch, not me. I meant business. My lungs pussied up.

I wanted to do it right lest I not be invited to the fuckup birthday
party. Little did I know the fuckups don’t have parties, they fuck up other people’s parties. They also don’t tend to get rid of friends. Friends leave but not because they are asked. It takes a lot to be one of these guys. You gotta be willing to get robbed and beat up and have your parents’ house sacked and all that kind of shit.

In exchange, though, you get a group of motherfuckers who will rob or beat the shit out of someone on your behalf at a moment’s notice. That meant a lot to me. That meant the world.

So, when my pansy-ass lungs wouldn’t submit to my will, I freaked out a little. I needed these guys to know I was serious. So, like none of the women I’ve ever been with, I faked it.

To be fair, I wasn’t positive I wasn’t high. I mean, maybe this was it, maybe pot felt exactly like not smoking pot, you just felt cool and tough for doing it.

I walked from that bush to my grandma waiting in the car to pick me up after school and I tried to convince myself that I was a changed man, that I had gotten high. But it wasn’t until the next time I fired up that I realized how wrong I’d been.

The first time I got high for real was at Tommy Klark’s house. His older brother passed me a joint and my lungs opened up to the smoky gateway through which I passed into a new world. The THC drip-dropped its thick syrupy coating over my brain and I floated away. So this is what it’s like to be high…

I smoked and smoked and every hit chipped away another part of my life… puff puff… gone were my worries. What was there to worry about, it’s Ganja Time! Puff puff, gone was my retardation; I could puff away the extra chromosome and feel my Down syndrome become more of a Down Situation… puff puff, shit I was smart! And even if I wasn’t, fuck smart! Puff puff, gone was my fat! I had smooth, sculpted muscles under there somewhere.
Puff puff, gone was my fear of being rejected by the cool kids. I’d jumped through a Mario warp zone way past the cool kids. Fuck those square pieces of shit. I didn’t need to be popular, I didn’t want to be popular, I didn’t want to be anything. All I wanted was to kick it with these guys and stay high for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure if there’s a heaven, but if there is, I’m pretty sure it’s gotta look something like Tommy’s backyard.

After that, things get hazy. We started drinking Everclear margaritas. Everclear, for the uninitiated, is essentially potable rubbing alcohol. It’s 99 percent alcohol and you can feel your suffering trachea disintegrate while you drink it. I ate a Popsicle and sprinkled salt on it. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. Somebody put on the song “While the City Sleeps,” by Mc 900 Foot Jesus, and we all slam danced around the room until we collapsed in a heap. I’ve never had a better night.

Before I got high, I had no idea that’s what had been wrong the whole time. It wasn’t that I had deaf parents. It wasn’t that I had a frantic angry mother or a fanatic absent father. It wasn’t that I was fat and retarded or crazy, angry, Jewish, or anything else. I just needed to get high. That’s the secret no one tells you when you’re a kid. That it feels fucking great. They tell you that you feel loopy and disoriented, but no one tells you that it crawls through your skin, filling in every place of deficit, every gaping crack where your humanity didn’t fuse. The thick warm lava of euphoria fills in the crevices of your psyche, and you realize your soul was an electric blanket that hadn’t been plugged in until just then. Parents and shrinks never tell you that you will forget all the reasons you had to hate yourself. They don’t tell you that shit because then everybody will want to get high.