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 Read Online Free PDF Page A

One of his favorite jokes was to hold his face in shock when he looked in the mirror and scream, “I’m
beautiful
!”
    Well, he sort of
was
beautiful. At least his wives thought so. While I had been in Oakland, my father had been busy. I met my two new siblings on my first visit back to New York. My brother Aron and my sister Hinda were born in quick succession after my father and Betty had married. They were respectively three andfour years younger than I, and both deaf. I was, at this point, essentially surrounded by deaf family. My brother and grandmother were the only hearing people I knew. Your normal was my abnormal. I spent my early childhood being “not quite.” I was Jewish, but not quite. I was hearing, but not quite. I belonged in my family, but not quite. However, back in Oakland, I
was
quite white.
    To most of the students in the Oakland Public School System, I was
white boy
. That was my nickname at school. Well, to be fair, that wasn’t my nickname, it was
our
nickname. I and every other white male student, and there weren’t very many, shared the well-thought-out, hypercreative moniker:
white boy
. That was on the good days. On the bad days, when things weren’t going as well at home for my black buddy, or maybe because I was being just a little too white, I became
honky
or
cracker
or
white bread
or
white chicken bread
or
bitch
.
    I tried calling a kid
nigger
once. Once. I was in third grade and was fighting with a kid named Darryl, who was yelling out a rapid-fire machine-gun assault of:
    Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
    Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
    Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
    So I got mad. A man’s not perfect, especially when he’s a boy. It seemed only fair at this point for me to let loose the rumbling slur from the recesses of my nonexistent Confederate roots.
Nigger
. All activity stopped.
    Darryl’s face fell; he looked more sad than mad.
    “You can’t say that, dog. You’ll get killed!” Darryl seemed to be warning me more than he was threatening me.
    “But what about all that honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch stuff?” I asked, confused.
    Darryl welled up with compassion and he explained the rules to me.
    “That’s different,” he said. “You’re white.”
    Then he punched me in the stomach.
    “I guess that’s true,” I admitted, groaning in pain.
    I felt like shit and slumped off the playground, determined that I’d rather be a honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch than a racist bitch. So that was my first and last time calling someone a nigger.
    Later, when I became black, I would often call people
nigga
, but that was affectionate and a reclamation of the word. Actually, technically it was a re-reclamation of the word, as it had already been reclaimed by actual black people. My people, whites who wished they were black, then re-reclaimed it from them and used it among ourselves, proving that white people could use the word in a cool, friendly way.
    Speaking of words, it was around then that I figured out what my main and only weapon would be from that point out. My big fat mouth. I slowly started sharpening my tongue on the whetstone of Oakland Public Schools. If I couldn’t win all the fights, I’d certainly win all the rounds of verbal sparring. People fucked with me so I learned how to fuck right back. I started to hone the questionable skill set of the class clown. In short, I became an asshole.

    I met Richard Lilly in first grade. He was one of the only white kids in my class, and we became best friends instantly. How kids become friends in that personality-less time in their lives is beyond me. What did we find in common?
    “Hey, I have an incredibly small white penis; do you?”
    Somehow we forged a connection and were inseparable from then on. Maybe our connection was subconscious. His family was as fucked up as mine, but we never talked about it like that.
    Richard lived with his grandmother,