IntroductionPart of growing up is realizing that you haven’t been walking a straight road to where you are now, that it’s been a labyrinth the whole time. It’s only in hindsight that you see how twisted the path has been.
I wrote my first memoir in 2009. A chronicle of addiction and ridiculousness that ended when I was fifteen and left rehab for the last time. I was a kid.
That was almost thirty years ago and now I’m a grown-up, I guess, despite the fact that my generation was the first to stop growing up altogether. Since that book came out, I’ve thought a lot about what happened next. How did I escape the chaos that was my life? How did I go from there to here? This is my attempt to turn that chaos into a story.
But it’s not one story. It’s six.
I’ve lived a lot of lives and yes, I do wonder if it’s possible to write “I’ve lived a lot of lives” without you rolling your eyes and dismissing me as a pretentious f***. I sure hope so, because . . . I’ve lived a lot of lives. I have spent my life being seduced by the charms of groups, of subcultures, of tiny communities.
I have at times been a professional raver/DJ/ecstasy dealer; a boyking of Alcoholics Anonymous surrounded by throngs of other confused young people getting sober; a Burning Man attendee and then employee stuffing the psychedelic sausage; a conflicted but proud Jew attempting to make sense of the ultra-Hasidic world I’d been raised in; an American Sign Language interpreter who was at once both insider and outsider in the deaf community; and what I am today, a stand-up comedian, which is the thing that eventually became my living and the reason I have enough cultural cachet to be writing a book at all.
Each segment contains a ramshackle history of the worlds I have inhabited, starting at the beginning and examining how they came to be. I actually did a lot of research to tell these histories, but I am not a historian so don’t expect any groundbreaking discoveries about the author of the Bible or the guy who invented trance music. At a certain point in each of these histories, I intersect with the world I’m describing and tell the story of how these communities became a part of my DNA.
Laid on top of one another, these six stories become one: They become my story. The history of me.
Laid on top of one another, they become, once again, a labyrinth. So let’s start in the center of the maze, where the way out seemed the most opaque. Where the path forward seemed the most twisted. Where I despaired of ever finding my way again. Let’s start where my last book ended. The day I got sober. Freshly broken, fully lost, and sure my life was over. It had just begun.
Copyright © 2024 by Moshe Kasher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.