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

too. His dad was an alcoholic, his mother was a crackhead prostitute. We were two deeply troubled white kids trying to keep our heads above water.
    Richard’s dad was that kind of handlebar-mustached, fluffy-haired, Cadillac alcoholic who would drive us around, smoking with the windows up as we gagged and coughed, overdramatizing our disdain for smoke just like the antismoking campaigns at school had taught us to.
    “I’m literally dying back here,” Richard choked, grabbing his throat, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
    “You kids shut it, or we don’t get dinner tonight.”
    We shut it.
    We stopped by a transient hotel on Martin Luther King Street in West Oakland, and Mr. Lilly turned to us with a smoking cigarette butt hanging from his lip. “Wait here.”
    He got out of the car and crossed the street to a strung-out blonde in a miniskirt who was pacing back and forth like she was in a hurry, but she clearly had nowhere to be.
    “That’s my mom,” Richard said flatly. I could tell questions were out of the question.
    I peered across the street to see Richard’s dad yelling at her. Richard turned red. I watched as his dad pulled out his wallet and handed her some cash, which she snatched and then scurried away. Then we went to McDonald’s.
    Richard never quite got around to telling me about how his mother’s life affected him, but in retrospect, I realize it playedout in his antidrug bravado. He was the poster D.A.R.E. child—he drank the antidrug Kool-Aid and preached the gospel. A success case.
    “I think drugs are disgusting and I’m never fucking doing them,” he told me out of nowhere, under the covers at a sleepover later that night. I nodded and suggested we throw things at cars from his grandmother’s balcony.
    We collected eggs and oranges from his kitchen and crouched behind the balcony, hurling stuff at cars as they drove by, him with increasing ferocity, me with my best friend’s interests at heart.

Chapter 3

    “Get In Where You Fit In”
    —
Too $hort
    Oakland in the mid-eighties was a very interesting place to be white. The real murderfest was just about to begin there, and East Bay gangster rap was about to hit. In a few years, rappers like Too $hort, Spice One, Tupac, E40, and the Dangerous Crew would become my mentors, my Eckhart Tolle, my Rilke. Rather than
The Power of Now
, I would study the power of
Freaky Tales
, the filthy anthem of Too $hort explaining the ins and outs of male-female love relations:
    “I knew this girl, her name was Tina, bitch so dumb we named her misdemeanor. Cuz it had to be a crime to be that dumb, I took her to the house and she let me cum in her mouth.”
    So my mother and grandmother hated men, and my philosopher kings and mentors hated women. With no one left not to hate, I spent my early years reading Gloria Steinem while imagining ejaculating on women’s faces in disdain.
    Of course, I never would have been allowed to listen to Too $hort when I was eight and nine years old had my mother not been deaf. Luckily she was, though, so for all she knew, I was listening to Brahms.
    Richard would sneak over and he, my brother, and I would blare X-rated rap albums with my mother in the room, unaware of a thing, often turning to us and exclaiming, “I can feel the bass, I love it!”
    We grinned as Too $hort explained how Nancy Reagan had given him a blow job:
    “She licked my dick, up and down, like it was corn on the cob.”
    “I like the bass, too, Mom,” I’d snicker.
    Those songs were how I learned about the birds and the bees. Or rather, they were what I chose to listen to. In typical Bay Area hippie mother fashion, my mother was hardly shy about teaching us about sex. The harsh “we don’t talk about that” boundaries of the 1950s were supplanted by porous, “I’m your buddy” parenting. I’m not saying I would have preferred an emotionally distant mother who never told me anything about sex other than that masturbating would make