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 (9 page)

It’s that feeling—the numbing bliss of self-medication—that
makes people become drug addicts. Lots of people get high; only some become addicts. It’s not the getting high that makes you an addict, it’s what the getting high does for you. If you start low and you get high, you make it up to normal for the first time. Getting loaded feels good; but if it’s the first thing that’s ever felt good in your life, you’re in trouble. That’s what I chased. It wasn’t the high, it was the feeling that I was all right. All right?

Getting high that first time was like seeing for the first time. It was as if I’d been wearing blinders my whole life, and with that first hit, they shot off and I saw the world in its full repose for the first time. The world had seemed so small and myopic before that first hit, and as I exhaled, I inhaled the new scene before me. The world expanded forever. It was bright and clear and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I felt like I could see forever. My life had, until that point, been a dark, small, little place, the rules and dynamics of which had been set by all of the people who controlled me. I had no power over anything. And then, just like that, my world popped open. I could see for miles.

Right about the first time I got high, the famous thespian/professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper had just graduated from the Royal Shakespeare Academy and body slammed Andre the Giant. (The Royal Shakespeare thing was a lie.) He was at the peak of his fame and thus got a starring role in the seminal classic
They Live
. (The seminal classic thing was a lie.)

I loved that movie. In it, Piper is a blue-collar schmo who happens across a pair of unremarkable-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary sunglasses. As soon as he puts them on, an entire secret alien world is revealed to him. There are aliens everywhere and apparently they have been here awhile. Billboards that to the naked eye seem to be Coca-Cola ads are shown to have
messages for the alien occupiers. Famous actors have been aliens this whole time, their freaky alien faces revealed once Roddy slips the sunglasses on. A whole alien world had been running right under our noses, just beneath the surface. I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper after that first joint. Not like, I want to wear a kilt and beat up the Macho Man Randy Savage, but like, I knew about a secret fucking world that had always been there and mindless victims had been walking around it for years, pretending it didn’t exist. I saw the brave new world.

I’m not sure what happens to normal people when they get high for the first time. I assume that they get high, feel delighted, and think, “That was soul stimulating. I feel enlightened but not overwhelmingly so. I await another appropriate occasion for mind expansion in a reasonably far-off time, when I will make a conscious and mature decision to take a mood-altering substance again.”

Not me. I realized in that little high sambo slam-dance circle, right before I melted into hemp butter, that I never wanted
not
to be high again. I would do whatever it took to get high forever, all the time, for the rest of my life. I was twelve years old and I’d found my calling. Stay high, stay drunk, at all costs.

I went out to visit Richard a few days later. I jumped on the BART train and watched through the window as the scenery flicked by like an old-time nickel arcade changing from Oakland’s grime to Lafayette’s shine. I felt like a different person.

When I got out there, I suggested to Richard we sneak off to go smoke cigarettes. He’d tried those and hated them but agreed to do it. We sat out on a hill and I fired up a stogie, took a hit, and passed it to him.

“You’re inhaling it now, like my dad does,” Richard said, his voice a mix of impressed and concerned.

“Ha, yeah, I learned how.” I stared at my old friend, took a deep breath, and told him, “I smoked weed, too.”

He stared at me, confused. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah, I smoked weed, dude, it was awesome. It’s not like they say it is, you know? It felt awesome. Like jerking off but you’re just cumming the whole time. It’s crazy.”

Richard took it in in silence, put the cigarette out, stood up, and said, “Promise me you won’t do that ever again.”

I laughed. “C’mon, man, what are you talking about?”

He seemed near tears as he yelled, “Fucking promise me!”

I got a taste of how serious it was. I stared at my friend for a second, trying to figure out what to say. What could I say?

“I can’t do that, man, sorry. These guys are my only friends out there. It’s different for you, you’ve got this awesome thing going on out here, you’re playing baseball and shit, making tons of friends, I don’t have any of that. Besides, all that shit they’ve been telling us about drugs is a lie anyway. The D.A.R.E. shit? It’s bullshit. They just don’t want us to know the secret.”

“What fucking secret?”

“Why don’t you let me bring some by sometime and I’ll show you.”

A look of anger passed over Richard’s face, he was quiet a long time, and then he whispered, “I can’t be your friend if you do drugs. You have to choose. That shit or me.”

I never saw Richard again.

Just after my mind had been blown open by my newfound experiences, my brother and I flew back to New York for a visit with my father. Back to Sea Gate. Back in time. My mind had been thrust into the future by weed and alcohol even as my body flew back to the Stone Age. There was no place I would have less liked to be at that moment.

This isn’t to say I was unaffected by the allure of Jewish life. Growing up, I was sliced exactly down the middle of my psyche. As a boy, I said I wanted to be either a baseball player or a famous rabbi when I grew up. Neither career held any actual interest for me but just satisfied a deficit I imagined I had. Baseball for my manhood, Torah for my soul. I didn’t have much of either.

My Bar Mitzvah was a tragedy. It was a kind of farcical movie shoot. Extras were hired to play the parts of my friends and loved ones, and I was given the starring role of “Fat Uncomfortable
Kid.” I’ve never had less fun. I’ve had the pleasure (?) of meeting rich Jews who had pleasant experiences with Judaism and Bar Mitzvahs. They had elaborate parties to celebrate their ascent into manhood with themes like “Indiana Jones” and “The Yankees.” Everyone dressed up and cheered as a Harrison Ford look-alike cracked his whip into a piñata, spilling a waterfall of chocolate coins onto the floor. I’ve always felt chocolate money to be an odd choice of a treat for a people so concerned with their reputation as shylocks and money-grubbers. What are gentiles supposed to think when they see us training our children to actually eat money?

The theme of my Bar Mitzvah was the Holocaust. An old rabbi mumbled in Yiddish and I hurriedly said the blessing over the Torah reading, terrified that I would fuck it up, bile shooting into my stomach, my guts turning to liquid, my asshole quivering and clenching to prevent me from unleashing a chocolate waterfall of my own.

After the horror show that was the liturgical part of my Bar Mitzvah came the “party.” You know how parties are supposed to be fun? Now imagine the opposite of that. I sat, fat and awkward, in the chair of honor and received the guests. I knew none of them. A local Chassidic celebrity, Mordechai Ben David, crooned Yiddish songs to my father’s delight. He had sprung Mordechai Ben David’s performance on me as a big surprise, and he looked at me with joy in his eyes when the concert began. My father, being deaf, was spared the shocking realization of just how awful even the best of all Chassidic pop songs are.

My father signed to me, “Mordechai Ben David! See? He insisted that he be able to come perform here.”

It wasn’t until years later that I realized my father must have begged him to come and sing.

I just smiled and wished that my dad had hookups on a Snoop Dogg performance instead. My entire experience of Judaism was largely based on fear and terror, which was perhaps appropriate, as we are commanded to fear God always. I did. I mostly feared other Jews who acted as God’s thuggish earthling enforcers. Every second I sat in the synagogue, or
shul
to use the Yiddish, I was paralyzed by the fear that I would be called up again to do any sort of liturgical rite. Being asked to wrap the Torah or to open the Ark or anything of the sort was said to be a great honor, but for me it was the stuff nightmares are made of. I would try, with every shred of my being, to make myself invisible. My entire consciousness, every second that I sat in shul, was focused on being transparent.

My brother, on the other hand, went the exact other way with Judaism. He saw it as a pool of my father’s approval into which he could jump and be baptized (sorry) a true and actual Jew. He shucked and jived and looked almost like he knew what he was doing. My brother would sit at home in California and teach himself Hebrew for hours on end lest he be caught sitting in shul with an English prayer book, the ugly English lettering exposed for all to see, a sign that might as well have been flashing neon reading,
THIS GUY HAS NO CLUE WHAT’S GOING ON!
I felt like a fraud from the start. I was filled with shame.

Shame drove my father’s family. Everyone was ignorant for different reasons—he and his new family because of their deafness; me and my brother because of our California-ness. My father’s response was to keep it all a great secret.

When we would go out to a place where my father suspected there might be members of the Chassidic community, he would coach us on interrogation techniques. The Chassidic community is a particularly intrusive one and the big Jewish noses correspond exactly to big Jewish nosiness. It’s not unusual for a complete stranger to lob a few quick questions at you in order to assess where you are at religiously and educationally. This allows your interrogator to feel: (A) Smug if you are operating below his children. (B) Embarrassed if you are learning at a higher level than his children. (C) Interested in arranging a marriage if you are operating at an equal level to his children. It’s a very disconcerting process.

“If anyone asks you what yeshiva you go to,” my father would sign to us on our way to Borough Park for kosher pizza, “you just tell them it’s called Beth Jacob.”

Beth Jacob was the name of an Orthodox temple in Oakland and seemed plausible enough for my father to suggest as a name for a theoretical yeshiva.
Yeshiva
is the yiddish name for the seminary school that all young Jews go to. It’s the kind of place where kids spend ten hours a day studying Talmud and religious philosophy and an hour a day fulfilling the state’s legal requirements for “secular studies.” Every young Chassidic boy goes to yeshiva, and the thought of my father’s children going to public school with a filthy sea of non-Jews was unthinkable.

So he made up a lie for us to tell.

My brother, ever willing to dance the Jewish Uncle Tom shuffle, thought better of the name.

“Wait, don’t say Beth Jacob,” he signed. “We should say it in Yiddish, ‘Bais Yakov’; yeah, that’s better.”

“That’s great!” My father clapped David on the back “You are a genius!”

My brother nodded eagerly but I shuddered in fear. I knew I would fuck this up somehow. I envisioned some awful rabbi’s wife approaching me and asking, in the special grammar of the American Orthodox Jew, “So,
nu
, at what yeshiva do you learn?”

I knew I’d just sweat and piss my pants and scream, “I love black people!”

As it happened, reality was even more humiliating than my paranoid fantasies.

We went out to pizza and somehow, against all odds, the exact horror show we’d prepared for took place almost immediately. A nosy Jewish couple approached us, having met my father back in Sea Gate. They nasally whined some small talk before zeroing in for the kill.

They turned to me, their Jewish X-ray eyes searing into my secret soul. A single droplet of sweat beaded down my brow.

“So,” she asked, setting my skin on fire, “where do you two go to yeshiva?”

It happened. Worst Nightmare. Deep Shame.

My mouth opened but no sound came. I mouthed “Bais Yakov” but only to myself.