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 (12 page)

The next thing to do was find a bum. Bums like smoking crack.
Yes, all of them. Crack, however, costs money that they don’t have, because the bum industry is one of the worst-paying on the market. That’s where we came in. For a five-dollar tip, we were able to get drunk, and the bums were able to smoke rocks. It was a good system; everybody got paid, so to speak. That is, until we met Little Mikey Rip-It-Up and threw the entire bum/kid economy to the wolves.

We were not the first to find Mikey. His place was constantly inundated with people eager to partake of the warmth of the church’s secret shelter. A steady cast of characters came in and out of Mikey’s place. Mikey and his flophouse attracted every strange hobo and street urchin in town. In his small way, Little Mikey Rip-It-Up was the ambassador of College Avenue, an ambassador representing only the cream of the crap.

At Mikey’s, we met guys like Leotis, an older black guy who lived mysteriously, like a Jack London character, in a tent in Tilden Park. I suppose technically that made him just a homeless person, but to us, he was an urban buccaneer. He even looked a bit like a buccaneer, with his trademark thin red ascot wrapped around his neck, cutting through his black skin like a wound. Surprisingly, he always wore a crisp white dress shirt that sparkled whiteness in defiance of the woodsy home from which it emerged.

Leotis had an aura that made him seem like the wisest man who had ever lived. In retrospect, the wisest man who ever lived can probably afford walls.

“The thing y’all don’t know about… is life itself,” Leotis explained as we listened with rapt enthusiasm. “I been hustling for forty years.”

“Please,” I thought, “teach me how to hustle.” I could, at that
time, only dream of a life spent living in municipal parks in a ten-dollar tent.

A street philosopher, Leotis loved to pontificate. I imagine in the Middle Ages, he would have rambled into town in a great silken wagon, addled with trinkets and baubles, and the town would gather around, to hear him dazzle with charisma.

“The thing thou dost not knoweth about, is life itself!”

“Huzzah!” the people would scream back. “Huzzah for Lord Leotis!”

But flash-forward two thousand years to 1992, and Leotis was simply a creep who lived in a park.

Leotis always hustled but he never hustled alone. His main partner in crime was Shane.

Shane was about twenty-five when we met him, his cheeks already puffy and swollen from years of alcohol abuse. He always had the perfect amount of stubble, too. Not perfect as in: Hollywood-chic, but perfect as in: Yes, in fact I do drink beer with cigarette butts in it—what of it?

Shane was funny and liked us and would tell us about how to get by and make some quick cash if you needed it.

He taught us about Carlo Rossi. “Carlo Rossi is the best wine a man can buy,” he told us. Hard to argue with. Only the best comes in 2.5-gallon bottles. Rossi was the finest wine we ever drank. We started with Cisco, and then came Boone’s Farm, and on the nights of celebration, we cracked Rossi.

Shane liked Rossi but I liked Cisco. Leotis, a Cisco drinker, taught me the “bang for the buck principle.” In the world of cheap drink, there are levels. Here’s Leotis’s Talmudic treatise on the wisdom of cheap drinks:

Malt liquor is standard alcoholic drinking fare, but there are levels. First, there’s Mickey’s—known as “white boy drink,” reserved for chicks and people who are still employed. In the middle of the spectrum is Olde English, a drink for Shakespearean alcoholics. And then there’s the bang-for-the-buck favorite, St. Ides. Ahh, St. Ides, the patron saint of cirrhosis. The only thing better than St. Ides is Crazy Horse, a true rarity, but if you ever see it on the shelf, you
have
to go for it. You know a drink is strong when, without any self-consciousness or irony, it is named after a leader of a culture that’s been decimated by alcoholism.

Wino wines had similar strata. Boone’s for girls, Rossi for groups, and Cisco for real men. Cisco was my favorite. A lethal sort of synthetic bum wine, it was made out of a combination of distilled Now and Laters, Ajax, and broken dreams. People called it Liquid Crack. I called it dinner.

Shane’s favorite was always Rossi. He and Corey came home one day with two jugs of the stuff and a look of delight—and a girl! Melissa.

Melissa was, for a time, Shane’s girlfriend. The only one of us who had one. She was an alcoholic, too, but much like alco
hol
, there’s also a spectrum of alcohol
ics
. Melissa wasn’t quite young and dumb like us, but also not as old and crushed as Shane and Leotis. She was pretty, although a few more years of drinking the way she was would take care of that. Mostly, though, she was sweet and quiet and racked with a kind of combination love/shame for Shane. Her father had been an alcoholic and had beaten her, and probably worse, all of her life. And—like many kids with alcoholic parents—in the ultimate irony, she started drinking to make that pain go away.

As we passed around the jugs of wine, Shane showed us how to
cradle them in the crook of our elbows in order to raise the jugs to our lips without struggling with the weight of the thing.

“It’s like my arms were made to hold bottles of wine!” Shane mumbled, barely comprehensible.

“You sound like such a fucking drunk, Shane,” Melissa shot at him, clearly a bit embarrassed that Shane seemed to love this jug of piss wine more than her.

Shane, red-faced and humiliated, shot back, “You shut the fuck up!” She did.

I heard Melissa eventually ended up getting the courage she was looking for at the bottom of the wine jug and left Shane.

I still see Shane now and again, wandering the streets, babbling to himself, piss stains crusted on his pants, his mind a joke. He hasn’t recognized me in years.

Leotis disappeared into the forest a long time ago to go join the Narinan resistance or to hustle up a life or something. But before everything changed, we had our little hustler training ground.

No matter where we started our day, we all always ended up at Mikey Rip-It-Up’s.

Mikey Rip-It-Up loved to rip it up. He’d crack bottles of booze and drink till we told him to stop. He’d take any dare. He’d lick a car battery or punch himself in the face ten times if we asked. He just didn’t give a fuck. I remember his teeth, too. They didn’t give a fuck either. Yellow, grimy—like God knit him a little canary sweater for each tooth. A teeny Christmas present of yuck. Man, when you’re thirteen and you have a thirty-five-year-old to hang around with, you are king. He was thirty-five, but cool. And he’d never kissed a girl! Just like most of us.

When I found that out, my mind was blown.

“Wait a minute, dude, you’ve never kissed a girl?” I asked him, terrified at the possibility of going another twenty years without getting some.

Mikey giggled and shook his head. “No, I’ve never kissed a girl, nope. I would, though. I’d kiss a girl. I’d fuck a girl, too.”

“Yikes. Good to know. But wait, how can you be thirty-five and not have kissed anyone?” I was almost angry at this point.

“Shut the fuck up, dude, you’re always talking.” DJ punched me in the shoulder to accentuate his point.

“He’s got a point, though,” Jamie said, defending me. “I first French-kissed a girl when I was six.” Jamie looked off into the distance after this lie, a self-satisfied grin on his face, ignoring the eye rolling going on all around him.

I looked back at Mikey Rip-It-Up. “So, seriously, you never kissed a girl?” I just couldn’t let it go. It was disturbing.

Mikey, however, was disturbingly unfazed by the question that should’ve sent him into existential angst, or at least horny frustration. He simply mumbled to himself and we all changed the subject.

There was something a bit unsettling about Mikey’s admission that he’d never been with a girl. But since none of us ever had been either, it fell mostly within the realm of our circle of normalcy. Then again, our circle of normalcy included four of the seven layers of Hell, so that’s best taken with a grain of salt.

We spent every day at Mikey’s place and treated it like our home. We were loud and hardly subtle about what we were doing. A parade of clear-eyed, sad-faced teenage boys tromped into Mikey’s place every afternoon and every night; we emerged bleary-eyed, stumbling men. We treated the place like shit. We tagged on Mikey’s walls and told the other janitors to fuck off. We climbed onto the roof and threw pinecones at passing cars. Basically,
despite the fact that we loved Mikey Rip-It-Up, all we ever did to his place was rip it up.

Eventually the church took notice. Apparently the Presbyterian Church is weirdly uptight about thirteen-year-old boys getting high in the attic with their thirty-five-year-old custodian. They asked Mikey to leave the church, his house, and his position, and they called our parents and let them know what had been going on.

Donny’s mom got a call from the church’s personnel manager complaining about us.

“Hello, Ms. Moon, I’m calling to let you know that your son and a group of boys have been hanging about in our church, smoking marijuana, causing destruction to our property, and taking advantage of our handyman.”

Donny’s mom, unconvinced, asked the obvious question, “Taking
advantage
of your handyman? Those boys are thirteen.”

The church lady dropped a bomb. “Well, Ms. Moon, Michael, our
former
handyman, is mentally retarded.”

So that explained it! We literally did not know that, all this time, we had been hanging out with a sort of ne’er-do-well, drunken Forrest Gump (minus the inspirational story/good nature/running skills/happy ending). Now we knew.

See, Mikey Rip-It-Up was so especially cool to us, a group of thirteen-year-old boys, because he had the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy. He really
was
just like us. Sad.

Eventually, though, our minds had begun to build more sophisticated spiderwebs of thought and conniving and Mikey just stayed the same way. Mikey was gonna be thirteen for the rest of his life, and we, sad to say, were going to get older. The consequences of our age were going to chip away at us until some of us were dead, and some of us were in jail, and some of us got the fuck
out of Oakland. But Mikey Rip-It-Up was going to stay the same. Too bad for him, our consequences ruined his little life. Mikey didn’t go back to his parents and ask for help after he got in trouble. He may have seemed like one of us, but he really wasn’t. We ravaged his life and left him severed from the charity that had been keeping him afloat. After we moved on, he sank.

Mikey hit the road and, as far as I know, is still roaming the streets of the old neighborhood, playing with little boys, hoping they won’t grow up.

Our days and nights were spent wandering through Oakland, looking for ridiculous fun things to do. Life as a thirteen-year-old outlaw is very difficult. Having blacklist fun is a constant challenge when you are that young. Much of the activity must be done under the cover of darkness. Some criminal activity was easy, as no one would suspect a boy with such a cherubic baby face was such a badass. That’s how we all got away with going bombing.

Going bombing
is what we called stuffing a backpack full of Krylon brand spray paint and going to cover the neighborhood with graffiti. The harder you crushed an area, the more solidly that place was yours. We owned Rockridge and much of North Oakland. Every block, every blank space and bus bench, was blanketed with our tags. Picking a tag was an important and definitive thing. It was like going on a Native American vision quest and coming back with a spirit animal. Except without any redeeming
spiritual lessons. Or emotional journey. Actually maybe it wasn’t like a vision quest at all. But once a tag was chosen, it became your identity, and your nom de plume represented you on every bus in the East Bay.

We
always
sat at the back of the bus. We did it for Rosa Parks. No, we did it to get away with tagging. Every time we jumped on the bus, someone would pass around a Magnum marker with a fat tip or a streaker, a grease paint pen that was nearly impossible to clean off a window once it dried. If we didn’t have one of those tools, we went more lo-tech—shoe polish bottles with big round sponges soaked in black polish that would drip down from the letters we drew on the windows of the bus, weeping for the lack of artistic skill we employed. Or we would scratch our tags into the windows with sandpaper-tipped drill bits we called scribes. Anything we could do to get our names up. Did I mention that I was absolutely terrible at graffiti? I was. It was a source of deep shame, but I ignored it daily and tagged the hell out of Oakland anyway. Graffiti exists in two realms: quality and quantity.

Being a brilliant artist would get you respect and admiration, but if you only drew beautiful pieces in your sketchbook, you might as well have not existed. I tried every day to figure out how to draw old-school, New York subway–style murals, but I only ever managed to draw something that looked like very edgy piles of vomit. So I decided to go with option two. Bomb the village. Literally. I wrote my name everywhere I could. Every second I was out on the town was one where I scribbled my tag on whatever surface I could. I took a great pride in walking through my neighborhood and seeing my defacing tags staring back at me.