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 (11 page)

“The phone bill is fifteen hundred dollars this month,” my dad sneered at me, his nostrils flaring, his rage just sorta bubbling beneath the surface. My dad had this way of getting so mad that
you wished he would just hit you and get it over with. He was a master rager, and I took notes on his form. This might come in handy someday.

I slouched farther in my seat. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

My dad leaned into me and signed, “Phone sex?”

I shrugged. What could I do or say? My dad and the weight of the entire Jewish people were bearing down on me. I was fucked.

When I was eight days old, at my circumcision ceremony, Zeidi, then one hundred years old, held me in his gnarled hands and declared to my father and the Lord, “This boy will be a great rabbi, I can see into his soul.”

Thirteen years later I was explaining to my father how I’d racked up fifteen hundred dollars in bills while pumping my dick in his living room. Maybe Zeidi had been looking into someone else’s soul. Or maybe his soul-looking eyes had glaucoma. I’m not sure.

Conveniently, I had received approximately fifteen hundred dollars in Bar Mitzvah money from the complete strangers that my father had invited from the local Jewish community. I’d never had so much money in my life as that day after my Bar Mitzvah. But the day after the day after my Bar Mitzvah, it was liquidated on my penis.

I spent every penny of my Bar Mitzvah money on phone sex. I just imagined God, looking down at me, shaking his metaphorical head and asking me, “Phone sex? You spent your Bar Mitzvah money on phone sex? The holy rite I have commanded you to follow, you took and spent on calling ‘Hot Island Bitches’?”

Ashamed, I can hardly look God in his third, flaming eye. “Well, sorta. I mean, yes.”

God frowns. “This does not please me.”

“I’m the one who lost all that money,” I’d plead. “Anyway, isn’t this a passage into manhood? What better way to become a man than that?”

Beaten, God would mutter, “Well… I usually don’t cede to arguments as I am a being of omnipotent perfection, but that’s a really good point.”

At least I tried to convince my dad that that’s how the conversation would go. My dad did not seem amused.

The rest of my trip to New York was spent awkwardly interacting with my family, longing for drugs or accented voices, and watching my stepmother lock the phone away at night. I tiptoed around the house but knew what they were all thinking: “Who
is
this pervert?” I couldn’t wait to get home to Oakland.

I arrived back in Oakland with a sigh of relief and headed straight back to my stomping grounds. The guys were from all over North Oakland, but we hung out and terrorized a neighborhood called Rockridge. College Avenue. For years, it struggled to establish itself as the stuffy yuppie stronghold it has now finally become. If you go there today, you will see throngs of white people, doing white people things, such as inspecting rare cheeses and riding in packs of thousand-dollar bicycles with penis silhouette–enhancing spandex outfits. Vomit.

At the time, though, it was still in flux, and we did our best to ruin the yuppie dream. Rockridge sat where the rich Oakland Hills, the North Oakland killing fields, and the psychedelic wasteland of Telegraph Avenue buttressed up against each other—where worlds collided.

We were the local shitheads. You know those kids who get
on the bus and you think to yourself, “Oh great,
these
fucking kids!”? That was us. Rockridge rats—shitty, loud, shoplifting, graffitiing thirteen-year-old menaces.

Officer Joe, the local beat cop in the neighborhood, hated us. At least six-foot-thirteen, with all of his body weight resting in his barrel chest, inside of which, I assume, were gears and clockwork cogs keeping a robotic pig’s heart pumping, he was a giant.

Officer Joe, ignoring the conventions of probable cause, or perhaps assuming our very existence
was
probable cause, would search us on sight—every time, every day. Joe lined us up against the wall and a waterfall of contraband would spill out onto the streets. Sakura 64 permanent markers, pot-pipes screwed together from stolen plumbing supplies, knives, and pepper spray rolled down College Avenue, lowering property values with each rotation.

Officer Joe would then throw us up against the wall and cuff us, spin someone into a chokehold, and then drive us around in his car for an hour or so just to scare us. A piece of shit, that’s how I’d describe him. (Author’s note: My editor feels that the description of Officer Joe is a juvenile one. That I sound immature in calling him these names in my current narrator’s voice. After much soul-searching and questioning, I have found that any other description of him is impossible. Really, he was a dick. In other news, I have just given money to a Sudanese charity in what can only be described as a mature act and
anything
but juvenile.)

One day, the higher-ups at the Oakland Police Department assigned Officer Joe a police bicycle. This was in the early days of bike cops, and you can’t imagine how long and loud we laughed when Officer Joe rolled up with his bike and his little cop shorts.

“You have
really
pretty legs, Officer Joe,” I spat out, barely able to keep a straight face.

Joe, not amused.

He trailed behind us that day for about an hour. Everywhere we walked, he followed at a distance of about fifteen feet, his bike giving him agility his beat car never had. Maybe this bike thing wasn’t so funny after all.

We walked; he rolled. We turned left; he turned left. Finally Donny spun around and asked him, “Why the hell are you following us?”

“It’s a free country.” He smiled, obviously enjoying this game a bit too much.

“It
is
a free country!” I yelled back, one of my more brilliant ideas popping into my head. “Run!”

We all scattered in different directions, running at full speed playing cat and mouse through the streets. We darted here and there yelling at one another in code about where we would eventually meet once we shook this guy. We agreed on the monastery.

The monastery was an apple grove in the middle of Oakland, surrounded by an abbey, where Jesuit monks walked around in contemplation of the Lord and where we got fucked up and hurled apples at passing traffic. It was a space open for the public to enjoy, but by the time we got through with it, they built a six-foot fence around it and locked the gates forever. For a while, though, it was our spot.

We found each other there, breathing heavily and giddy with defiance. Someone had procured whiskey, and we cracked it and passed it around as we planned our next move.

Luckily, our next move walked right up to us. A group of guys from the grade below made the mistake of thinking they could find safe passage in these, the apple trees of the Lord. As they approached, DJ, our biggest, loudest, scariest friend, jumped up and screamed, “Break yo’ self! Empty yo’ mothafuckin’ pockets!”

Translated loosely from the original gangster, this means, “Hello! We are robbing you! Give us your money!” Usually this kind of belligerence would be enough to get us ten bucks, but unfortunately, this group of fellas had an upstart. A short, chubby kid with a bald head boldly stepped forward and fearlessly confronted DJ with the bravery/stupidity of a hero:

“Fuck you!”

I felt DJ’s excitement level rise at this kind of gauntlet toss. He cocked his head to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. That, in fact, this little shit had said what we thought he said.

DJ grunted, “The fuck you just say to me?”

No hesitation, the little shit in question repeated, “I said fuck you!”

Then things started to move in slow motion. DJ’s face lit up and I imagine his dick moved a little bit in anticipation of the violence he was about to inflict. The little bald dude didn’t seem worried in the least and even smirked a bit.

DJ cocked back and fired on him, a one-two, face-chin combo, broken nose—a DJ special. Wiped the smirk right off his face. Even in the dark, I could see the blood start to leak down his face. As the kid grabbed his nose in pain, all of his friends started to yell at once, like a Greek chorus, bringing us bad news: “Dude, what are you doing?!? That’s a girl!! It’s a girl!!”

You just don’t hit a girl.

That’s the rules. Don’t tag houses, trees, or cars (unless they are white box trucks); don’t backwash into the forty-ouncer; and don’t hit chicks. The rules. There is no chapter in the rules on what to do about chicks that don’t look like chicks, though. Well, there is now.

DJ stammered, waves of adrenaline and shame flooding his system at once, turning him into an even less articulate version of himself, a very inarticulate boy.

“What?! Oh shit. I’m so sorry; I thought you were a dude! You just look so much like a guy, I’m sorry!”

I’m not sure what’s worse: DJ socking that chick in the face, his apology where he explained he never would have hit her if she didn’t look so much like a guy, or the fact that, years later, I ended up fucking that guy. I wish I was kidding.

We always looked for places like the monastery. With cops like Officer Joe on our backs, we had to have places to go. We crawled through Oakland looking for secret hiding places where we could be cool for a while. In the back of Chabot Elementary School, we found a freeway underpass behind cyclone fencing. We threw a rug over the barbed wire and climbed in. We set up a little living quarters complete with stolen barbecues and lawn furniture. For a while
that
was our spot. We moved on.

We staked claims on garage roofs with branches pulled down into canopies of subterfuge. We tromped around the neighborhood exploring places like Huckleberry Finn trippin’ down the Old Miss.

We climbed up things and opened up manhole covers. We found abandoned houses and hollow bushes and made them our territory. We found alleys and garage roofs and sewers. Yes, sewers.

The sewer. Frohawk’s place. Nate was his real name, but everybody called him Frohawk. A tall black guy with this grubby Mohawk. Get it? We’d found Frohawk one day when we were on a desperate search for someone to buy us booze. He was nineteen
so he couldn’t buy it for us, but he had some warm gin back at his place. His place turned out to be a bit farther away than we’d expected.

He lived in the sewers underneath Oakland. Literally. He was a hobo of some kind. A literal gutter punk, the kind who sits on the sidewalk and harasses you for change. That was Frohawk. He’d been homeless for years and found a place beneath the city where he could sleep undisturbed.

Walk about a half mile down a drainage tunnel off College Avenue with a lit candle and a bottle of hairspray to torch any spiders or rats you might see and you’d get to an antechamber, and that’s where Frohawk nested. Nate had decorated the place with a stolen mattress and couch cushions. Everywhere you looked, there were empty bottles and candle stubs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, huddled together for warmth in the corner. There were rats and black widows and piles of cholera dust and skeletons and gold doubloons from shipwrecks and ghosts and gnomes and sewage water; there were dwarfs mining for precious metals and pet alligators grown to enormous size and then there was us, with another awesome place to get high.

Nate actually lived there. That was his house. After a while, Nate introduced us to Little Mikey Rip-It-Up’s place. The ultimate spot. The land of milk and honey to a thirteen-year-old drug addict.

Little Mikey Rip-It-Up was a thirty-five-year-old man who lived in the attic of the First Church of Christ on College Avenue in Rockridge. Mikey had been given the job of fixing things and cleaning up around the church in exchange for free room and board. It never occurred to us that it was odd that a man lived above a church. Actually it was sort of cute. A little man living a
little life in a little triangle of attic space carved out for him by the Lord himself.

Mikey looked a bit like an Eskimo elder with a face scrunched up from years of facing tundric ice winds. And much like an Eskimo, he was the type of guy you’d never know was there unless you smelled him. I’m kidding about Eskimos, but not about Mikey. He didn’t smell great. Perhaps that was in part due to the fact that I never officially located a shower in his little parsonage in the attic of that church.

Imagine! A thirty-five-year-old friend. Lucky. Mikey was awesome. He bought us cigarettes and booze and pornography and we hiked back to his place and smoked and drank and jerked off and made Top Ramen and punched the walls in. “Punch the fuckin’ walls in!” we’d scream.

Okay, relax. I know how it sounds, but it wasn’t like that. Mikey was one of us. It wasn’t an Old Man Don situation.

Now, Old Man Don owned an antique shop in town with an open-door policy: if you were young and broke, Don showed you
his
antique and you made some money the old-fashioned way. And no, I’m not into antiques.

No, Mikey was one of us, nothing creepy. Yeah, he was thirty-five, but he was cool.

More important, though, he offered us a better option than participating in the thirteen-year-old/bum-barter economy. Usually, if you’re thirteen and need to get drunk, you have only a few options: find a crooked store; ask a crooked man; or take your crooked ass into the booze aisle and steal some shit. The crooked stores were the hardest to find. Fines and piety kept most of the local liquor stores out of reach.