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 (22 page)

A pause. I could hear the gears turning in Seena’s head.

“Oh, wait. Is there a cop right there with you? Are you pretending to be my brother to get out of trouble or something?”

DING.

I turned to the cop. I smiled big.

“Yes!” I yelled, hoping.

“You fucking asshole. You better get me high if I come out there.”

“Of course!” Hearing her agree to rescue me was so amazing, I might as well have ejaculated a river of relief all over the sidewalk and paddled home in that. My sister was coming! My sweet, sweet, fake sister.

“I love you, sis!” I panted.

“Go fuck yourself,” she snarled. You know how my sister can be!

I turned to the cop and shouted, “She’s on her way!” From inside of the bug, I could hear my friends cheer like we’d won the lottery. This was a good night.

Seena showed up bleary-eyed and glaring at me just like a real sister would. I loved her more in that moment than I’d ever loved anyone.

“I’m so sorry about my brother, Officer,” she said as she pulled up. “I was sleeping and didn’t hear the boys take the car out.”

The boys. She should have won an Oscar.

“No problem at all, glad you could help.” The officer smiled.

“My boyfriend will drive my car home and I’ll take the bug. Thanks again.”

The officer stared at Seena’s blond hair and anti-Semitic features with a grin.

“No problem. You know, you two look exactly alike.” He smiled. Was that sarcasm? Jesus, who was this cop?

Just at that moment Dean Stockwell appeared and the cop quantum-leapt away (nerd joke!).

Or rather, we all drove away, waving the most amazing police officer since Robocop a disbelieving good-bye. We drove home in silence, awed by the miracle we had witnessed. All but Miguel, who suddenly came out of his mushroom stupor, leaned forward, and asked “Hey, what just happened?”

If he hadn’t been huge and Mexican, I might’ve hit him. As it was, I just laughed.

When we arrived at my home, Seena turned to me and said, “There’s no way you are going to get popped twice in one night, let’s take this hooptie out and go have some fun.”

Made sense to me. I ran upstairs, grabbed more booze, and we continued on with our evening, the majesties of the Lord forgotten the instant a suggestion for more fun was made.

Have you ever pushed a Bug on its last legs into the 100-miles-per-hour zone? It will make you remember past lives. Seena gunned the Bug down Highway 580 as we passed a forty around and laughed at our luck. As we sped down the straightaway, the poor little engine screamed, trying to keep up with our party. As the needle redlined, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car’s radio, which hadn’t worked for decades, squealed to life, blaring oldies into our insane night.

My brain was spinning as we pulled back to my place at four in the morning. I was shaking with speed and mushrooms, slurring with booze and pot; I was fucked.

It seemed, at that point, like a logical next step for me to snort
some Zoloft. Keep in mind that Zoloft has no psychoactive properties. But I figured, what the fuck, why not give it a whirl.

I shook out a couple of pills alone in the kitchen. I could hear the sounds of my buddies laughing and partying in the next room, but no, this rare delicacy I would keep for myself. I squinted at the pills, willing myself not to hear the thought that was creeping in the side of my head: “This is a really lousy idea.” I chose instead to heed the other much less logical but much more compelling thought, “What the hell, why not? See what happens, it could be awesome. Fuck it.”
Fuck it
is the great battle cry of the drug addict. It’s the rebel yell we all scream as we charge into the dumb, the ridiculous, the dangerous pool of bullshit that we inevitably drown in.

My hands were shaking as I crushed up these pills that had been jacking up my brain chemistry for the past year. Chunks of the protective easy-swallow coating stuck out from the white lines like coral rocks jutting out from a foamy surf, warning, “Bad idea! Pain Ahead!” I grabbed my surfboard and jumped in.

I leaned down and snorted half of a comically large line of Zoloft. I could feel the grit fly into my nose like sinking into quicksand in reverse. The back of my sinus cavity filled up in a split second and the inside of my face caught on fire. Pain shot through my head like the devil was giving me an old-school, ice-pick lobotomy. My head shot straight up as I slapped at my face, desperate to make it go away. I ran screaming to the bathroom, hoping there was something there to make the pain stop. I ran to the sink and looked at my face. Scary. My right eye was literally bloodred. The right side of my face felt like there were a thousand little elves on it, aerating a lawn with spiky little golf shoes. I felt like I was going to die. There was poisonous pain shooting into my brain. Oddly, the left side of my face was just fine and looked like my handsome old
self. I should have gone and fought Batman with a face like that (nerd joke!). Getting to that threshold of acceptance that you must come to in moments of great pain, I accepted that, perhaps, I was going to have a stroke. I waited. My face still hurt, so that meant it wasn’t paralyzed. Tears were streaming down my face that were opaque with medicine. I think my eye turned purple. I crawled to my bedroom window and spent the next hour sitting there, spitting out loogies filled with rocks of Zoloft onto the sidewalk below. If a depressed dog had walked along just then, he could have lapped it up and tasted happiness for the first time in dog years.

I slunk out of my perch, my poison face having backed off to enough of an extent that I could walk upright. I walked into my living room, where my friends were all sitting and drinking with each other.

As I walked into the living room, everyone screamed.

“A zombie!” Jamie yelled. “This happened to my uncle!”

Seena wept.

Miguel crossed himself.
“Dios Mío. Es El Diablo!”

Donny and Joey approached me like I was a feral animal.

“Dude,” Donny whispered. “You all right?”

Right! My eye.

“Oh, this? Ahh, this is nothing. I was just snorting a little Zoloft, you know? Seein’ what would happen.”

“Looks like you’ve been snorting a little cyanide, bro.” Joey sounded genuinely concerned.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I can see the future in my right eye, but other than that, I’m fine.” I laughed and coughed up a full pill of Zoloft. “Anyway, let’s go up to the roof.”

One by one, we all, even Miguel’s huge ass, climbed up to my roof. The bastard sun was making its threats on the night, revealing
to us all that this dark night was going to crash to an end. Teenage vampires we were, sucking down whatever blood we could find in the bottom of a bottle. Donny and I stood there, looking over the city lights to the west, the purple-red middle finger of the sun to the east, passing a cigarette back and forth. Just me and my friend Donny smoking again. I felt okay. In charge. Alive. The magic luck of the drug addict had been sprinkled on me, and I’d had a night to remember. But drug-addict luck always runs out.

I woke up the next day groggy, hungover, and ready to die. Donny was up and said something about going to the store to get booze. I threw him the keys and rolled over back to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later to my grandmother’s voice shrieking, “Wake up! Get up! Where is the car?”

Shit. The car. Where
was
the car?

Right! Donny. Fuck.

I was pretty fucked. I’d been given a thousand second chances the night before, but I’d fucked up and lost anyway.

But right then all I could do was vomit in my lap. I did so.

“Ugh, disgusting,” my grandmother sneered. “Just like your grandfather.” This was her version of the worst thing she could say to me. “Where is the car?”

“Well, I don’t
know
in the classic sense of knowing. Well…”

I thought fast in what seemed like a pretty good lie in the moment.

“I…”

I remembered the radio from last night.

“I fixed the radio!”

“What?” my grandmother asked, confused.

“Yeah!” I yelled, gaining confidence. “I fixed the radio. I have a buddy who does that kind of repair work, and so I wheeled the
bug down to his shop and fixed the radio to surprise Mom and Larry when they get back. Yep. That’s where the car is now. The radio-fixing shop.”

A pretty good, pretty high-grade lie. Jamie would have been proud.

“You
pushed
the car?” My grandmother looked dubious.

“Well, yeah! I didn’t drive. I don’t have a license. That’s illegal! Duh.”

“You
pushed
the car down the street to repair the
radio
?”

“Yes. Exactly.” Why didn’t she believe me? I was lying, but there was no way for her to know that.

“To repair the
radio
for your deaf mother.”

I paused.

“You know, I totally didn’t think of that! Ha ha!”

My grandmother looked less amused.

Just then I heard the car pull back into the driveway. Saved!

“Well, there’s the mechanic now, delivering the car!”

We walked downstairs together, me covered in vomit, my grandmother covered in doubt. Joey crawled out of the driver’s seat with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hands.

“Hey, thanks for fixing the radio, champ!”

“Yeah.” Joey stared at me, confused. “Anytime…
champ
.”

I sat down in the driver’s seat and looked up at my grandmother with a confident smile. “Here we go.”

I smiled, flipped on the radio.

Silence.

Somehow the radio had rebroken itself.

I felt God’s hands snatch away from me. I crashed hard onto the sand. Apparently God, much like everyone else, was tired of my shit. Once again, I was fucked.

“Get out of bed!” My mom snatched the covers off me for the fourth time that morning. “Get up, get up, get up!”

My mother and Larry were back from vacation, and after a debriefing from my grandmother, my mother stormed into my room determined to get to the bottom of the story. The problem was, I was crashed out after having stayed up for days.

My mother was constantly experimenting with creative ways of getting me out of bed. She would grab my feet and tickle-torture me, pour ice water on my head, snatch the covers off me with little reverence for the morning erection she might be uncovering.

“You can’t just sleep forever. You have to get up!” my mom screamed at me as I lunged for the covers, falling out of the bed.

“Look at you,” she signed, disgusted. “This isn’t working. You are going to have to get back in school if you want to keep living here.”

“Don’t you remember? I need to focus on my recovery instead.” I tried to look sincere.

“What recovery? You got kicked out of New Bridge months ago.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been going to meetings and staying clean the last few months,” I lied.

“You have?” My mom looked so hopeful, it was sad.

“Of course,” I said, pulling the covers over my legs. “I learned a lot in New Bridge. I’m pretty hurt you didn’t notice.”

My mom’s deepest hopes manipulated, she crumbled. “I’m really sorry. I had no idea you were taking sobriety so seriously.”

“I’m super serious. Jeez.” Just then I had an awesome idea, evil but awesome. “In fact, I’m on the ninth step right now.”

My mom looked impressed. “That’s great! What happens in the ninth step?”

“You don’t know? How seriously are
you
taking my sobriety?” I stared deeply at her, accusing her of not caring enough about me, her deepest fear. “The ninth step is the most important step of all. It’s where we make amends to people we have harmed through our drinking and drug use.”

My mom looked so sincerely pleased that it was hard to do what I knew I had to do next.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty big deal. And well, here’s the thing… I owe some people money. People I stole from and some people whose property I damaged. You know I don’t have a job, so…”

My mom looked at me, pride in her eyes, naïveté and codependency hemorrhaging from her every pore like an emotional Ebola virus, covering her reality sensors, making her insane with the desire to help. She smiled. “How much do you need?”