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 by Moshe Kasher

Author:Moshe Kasher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781455504954
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Chapter 9

“Sorta Like a Psycho”

—RBL Posse

With my first stint at “recovery” over and the monkey of Claremont off my back, I thought I was headed into an amazing summer. Unfortunately my mother wasn’t as excited about things as I was.

I came home the next night and she was sitting at the table crying. When I walked in, she looked up at me and started sobbing. “What did I do to make you like this?” she signed.

Oh Jesus. This kind of conversation was starting to happen more and more, and I just couldn’t deal with it.

“I try so hard to help you change. I just keep believing that you’ll somehow change yourself and become better. But I’m just starting to think you are going to be like this forever. I wonder, did I make you like this? I wonder sometimes what you would be like if I wasn’t deaf.”

My mom looked up at me with this helplessness on her face that I’ll never forget. I remember it because I remember thinking, “She doesn’t get how helpless she really is. Nothing she can ever do or say is going to change me. I’m not changeable.” I went to her and sat down on the chair next to her. Took her hand. Tried to care. Tried to be human again. I looked at the books she had piled up around her on the kitchen table, The Difficult Child, Tough Love, Parenting a Child with ADD, dozens more books whose titles pointed to the theme of my household: I was broken and it was the only topic of conversation.

I hated my mom’s crying. I loved her. But never, not for one second, did it occur to me to change for her. I only thought how crazy she was for crying over me. Maybe first-class sociopath wasn’t so far off the mark after all.

We sat there for a while, silently, she trying to forgive herself, me trying to blame myself. Eventually I got up and left her to her tears. I couldn’t deal with that shit. I told myself I didn’t care, but the only thing I wanted to do in that moment was go get fucked up and obliterate myself, obliterate the memory of my mother’s tears.

I did just that.

I wanted out of those memories. Maybe that’s a kissing cousin of caring. I got high and forgot. I got high and silently fortified another paper-thin membrane wall around my feelings. Next time, next time I’d feel even less. That’s all I ever wanted. I didn’t want to feel good. I just wanted not to feel at all. With shit like this happening around you, who would want to feel it? I wanted out, and lucky me, at the bottom of every forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor was a trapdoor into oblivion. I leapt in and checked out.

The next day, my mom informed me of my summer plans. “Things are going to change. I can’t keep accepting you trying to control me and the family. Larry is going crazy, too.

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