Read Online 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 - Free Book Online

not sure I would have had the courage to show up, but then again, I’m not sure I would have had the courage not to.
    I approached the back of Donny’s house and unlatched the gate to his backyard.
    “Donny?” I called.
    I rounded the bend into the backyard and saw everyone standing there—DJ, Corey, Joey, and the crew.
    Donny grabbed me by the arm and announced to everyone that I’d decided to join the P.A.G. I’d done no such thing.
    I looked over at Donny. “Uh, Donny, uh… we haven’t really discussed this in depth.” I was a bit nervous, not sure I was ready to take the plunge into being a full-fledged baby gangster.
    Donny just winked at me.
    I looked around at this little ragtag group of white bad boys and gulped a deep gulp.
    These were the kids mothers said to avoid, and I was being asked to jump into the deep end with them.
    “It ain’t nothin’, homeboy,” Jamie reassured me, speaking in the lilt of a character from a seventies blaxploitation film.
    DJ rolled his eyes and muttered, “He’s too fucking scared.”
    Jamie slipped his arm around me and said, sounding morelike an old-school traveling hippie this time, “Just be cool and go with it.”
    Joey, not really a member of the gang himself, but more like an outside consultant, just smoked and watched me.
    I had seen this before. I was being tested. Much like Kevin Costner in
Dances with Wolves
, the tribal warriors were trying to see if I was brave enough to be one of them. I knew what I had to do.
    I stepped forward, crouched into Tae Kwon Do horse stance, took a deep breath, and announced, “I am ready to join.”
    Everyone laughed hysterically. No one asked me to leave, though. Joining was not easy. Over the course of the next few weeks, I had to join like five fucking times. The thing about the gang was that it wasn’t really a gang at all, rather just a name for the group of fuckups that I had fallen into. In fact, the name was the last little piece of youthful innocence in us. It was a juvenile name, like a little clubhouse, akin to the “He Man Woman Haters Club” from
The Little Rascals
. It wasn’t the name that mattered, but the affiliation. The problem with it not being a “real” gang, however, was that the rules were rather undefined. Especially the rules concerning how to join.
    Every P.A.G. initiation ritual I went through was somehow deemed insufficient afterward and then they’d ask me to perform some other pain ritual or sexual humiliation in order to be accepted in. I stuck my finger up my ass and tried to write my name on the wall in shit; I whacked my little pubescent dick against an ice-cold school bench; I drank a dead goldfish, and I put out a cigarette on my arm.
    It was a Camel wide. I fucking remember that—believe me, you would, too. As this new group of guys gathered around, Ijammed the lit end of this cigarette into my forearm and shook in pain while my flesh bubbled and smoked. All the guys cheered and slapped me on the back for what at the time felt like the best decision I’d ever made.
    The burn got infected quickly, but unwilling to ask for help, lest the FBI be called in to investigate the P.A.G., I just slapped a Band-Aid on it and hoped for the best.
    A month later it was putrescent and crusted gold and my arm felt like a fifty-pound water balloon. It only hurt when I moved it or laughed or talked or pointed it downward or upward or breathed, so I figured it was probably okay.
    A few weeks later, I flew home for a visit with my dad in Brooklyn. After eyeballing it for a while, he finally said something about the Band-Aid that never came off. He forced me to show him and then immediately vomited on my arm. Maybe that didn’t happen. He did, however, make me go to the hospital and save my arm from gangrene or amputation. What a square my dad was.
    Worst of all, two months after my trial by fire, the P.A.G. disbanded. Not like anything whatsoever changed, not like we stopped hanging out or doing the