Synanon Kid: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

by C. A. Wittman

  I watched as Theresa stabbed one of her potatoes and popped it into her mouth, chewing loudly, and dipped her buttered English muffin into the thick goopy mess of the sunny-side up eggs. Some of the yolk dripped onto her fingers, which she licked efficiently, making a sharp sucking sound.

  She wore a colorful silk scarf on her head and gold hoop earrings. When she glanced my way, we smiled at each other.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.

  I hadn’t eaten much, unable to take my gaze away from her. It was if she were an apparition and might disappear at any moment. I took a bite of muffin, savoring the chewy sour bread and rich taste of butter.

  The sounds of people playing the game filled the room from the Wire, a dedicated Synanon radio station. I had grown used to the noise and learned to block out the intense talks, screaming and cussing, a kind of ubiquitous vocal demolition derby.

  My mother’s visit lasted part of a day. I remember little of it other than strolling hand-in-hand with her through a plant nursery near the Shed, the walk back to my dorm and the surprise she’d mentioned when we’d encountered each other on the road. She presented me with several Golden Books and read them to me in my room while I snuggled against her body, pressing my cheek against her soft breast, everything feeling right again.

  After the last story, Theresa set the shiny, hard cover books in a small stack on my nightstand. “I have to go now,” she said. She frowned at the books, tracing one of the golden spines with her index finger.

  I pushed myself up and wrapped my arms around her neck. She hugged me and made to pull away, but I clung to her arms. “I want to stay with you. Don’t leave me.”

  Gently she pushed my hands away. “I will come back and visit. We can write letters. Do you know how to give an Eskimo kiss?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  She bent down and gently rubbed the tip of her nose against mine. “That’s an Eskimo kiss, and this is a butterfly kiss.” She brought her face closer, blinking so I could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against my cheek.

  I grabbed her pretty face and repeated the Eskimo and butterfly kisses.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  It would be months before I saw her again.

  Chapter Eleven

  Betty

  No demonstrator banged a cowbell in the doorway. When I glanced at Sophie’s bed, it was empty, unmade, the blankets in a twisted jumble. Slices of light cut through the Venetian blinds, creating bars of shadows on the opposite wall. The sun had risen, but no one had bothered to wake me for the start of the school day.

  Slipping from my bed and stepping gingerly onto the carpet, I heard movement and quiet talking. When I poked my head out of my room, though, I found the hallway empty. The hushed voices seemed to come from the living room.

  I wandered over to the communal area, pausing at the entrance. Everyone who lived in the bunkhouse sat huddled on the floor or a beanbag, listening to the Wire. A few demonstrators, their eyes red-rimmed and blurry with tears, stood over the radio listening to a man speaking in a sober tone. They leaned toward the box the way people do when the news is important.

  A child passed me in her nightgown. “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Betty died,” she said, tucking her head and scurrying to join the others.

  The idea that someone who wasn’t in a movie could die was a startling thought to me. I had no idea who Betty was, but I didn’t say so because it seemed that I ought to know. I imagined she must be one of the children in the school.

  Gradually, over the course of the morning, I gained little bits of information. She had died of lung cancer. I didn’t know what lung cancer was.

  The mournful atmosphere peaked an hour later when a little girl emerged at the top of the dorm’s second floor, her eyes blurred with tears, the skin around her nose ringed red. A demonstrator ran up the stairs to embrace her and stroke her dark head.

  “Oh, Leda, I’m so sorry,” the demonstrator said.

  The attention only made Leda cry harder. When the demonstrator pulled away, the girl’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling and she grabbed the banister, swaying slightly. The scene was very dramatic, and I felt out of place watching in my nightgown as if I were in someone else’s home witnessing what should have been a private moment.

  I didn’t remember ever seeing Leda before. Like so many of the kids, she came into existence, for me, seemingly out of nowhere. I later learned that she had been close with Betty, that Betty was the founder’s wife and that Leda was his grandchild. I didn’t know what “founder” meant.

  Someone mentioned Chuck.

  Chuck.

  Did I know Chuck?

  The name seemed familiar.

  We were given little booklets with a picture of Betty and Chuck on the front, and I recognized them from various framed pictures displayed throughout the premises. Chuck was a big, fat man with a dark pelt of graying hair and one eye smaller than the other. He always seemed to be in mid-sentence or glowering at the camera. Like everyone else, he wore bibbed overalls.

  An enlarged picture of Betty and Chuck hung in my bunkhouse. She wore a white dress with a high neck and lace collar. A silk hat adorned her bald head, and her thin arm was linked through her husband’s, who, for his part, sported a white suit. Betty’s black skin contrasted sharply with Chuck’s pale tones, making them appear to be negatives of each other.

  Until that morning I’d given these ubiquitous framed pictures no thought at all. They were merely part of the backdrop of the surroundings in which I’d been placed, blending in with the aseptic environment of the dormitories, cookie-cutter uniforms and shorn heads.

  In the days that followed, our time became a dedication and ongoing memorial for a woman who, I learned, had been much beloved and powerful within the community. Stapled booklets of her thoughts about good Synanon living were assembled and handed out for people to read. Her famous quotes were often repeated, as was the story of a bird that perched on her bed during her final moments, the notion being that the bird was a messenger that had come to take her away. This peculiar tale and the fact that she was often referred to as “The Magic Lady” fired my imagination.

  The demonstrators used Betty’s death as an opportunity for a teaching marathon about Synanon history and Betty’s importance to the community. During their impassioned speeches and home movies of past Synanon events, some of the commune’s rituals came to be explained to me. Betty had once been a prostitute and drug addict. I’d heard the term “drug addict” before, and I knew that many of the adults at Synanon as well as some of the demonstrators who took care of the children had been drug addicts or prostitutes. I hadn’t a clear idea what these things meant, only that they weren’t good.

  Chuck, the demonstrators preached, had saved everyone in Synanon from the wretchedness of their previous lives. “If it wasn’t for Chuck,” the demonstrators lectured, “the whole lot of us would be basket cases, rejects of society. Chuck developed the game to help people get their anger out and become new men and women who could have some self-worth. We all have a lot of anger eating away inside of us, even children; that’s why playing the game is important. In the game people release their festering feelings, feelings that are poisonous to their development.”

  Betty had come to Chuck for help in the early days of the community, when he was curing people in his living room. She’d been a raw trembling mess, strung out on drugs, spewing her rage and hatred of the world. No one had to teach her how to cuss. She knew all the bad words and wasn’t stingy with them. I imagined her as a wild-eyed woman with hair standing on end, legs spread in a fighter’s stance and hands on her hips while she yelled and screamed at others, who I envisioned cowering in their game chairs. Betty had come to Chuck wild from the streets, but his therapy had tamed her because he was a brilliant man, I learned.

  Community members considered Chuck and Betty’s marriage to be a beautiful symbol of racial equality. When demonstrators spoke o
f their union, they used the term “racially integrated couple.”

  During Betty’s ongoing memorial, I also learned how Synanon had adopted the ritual of cutting off all its members’ hair. It had started with a bakery and a steel beam built too low. When Chuck inspected the new building, he banged his head on the metal when he walked under the beam. Outraged, he demanded to know which idiot had made such a stupid mistake, and he immediately called for the man who’d created such a poor design to step forward, claim responsibility and have his head shaved. Men who fell into disfavor with the founder or a VIP shaved their heads as punishment. Woman who offended wore a stocking cap.

  A few men took responsibility for the shoddy design and shaved down; however, others who had been on the construction crew also believed the low beam was their fault. Before long the whole crew had shaved heads. Other men in the community who had nothing to do with the construction decided they, too, ought to stand by their brothers. Within a matter of days, all the men had shaved their heads.

  Until then, the massive head-shaving extravaganza had been a cleansing camaraderie for the men, yet when the women discussed doing the same, many of the men were appalled and spoke out against it. But once the first woman had started it, the rest followed. The children were next; however, they weren’t such willing participants. Adults had to run after them and bring them, kicking and screaming, to the grooming stations.

  With my peers, I watched one of the many home movies that depicted the first wave of head shavings amid a party-like atmosphere. One man shaved only half his head and beard, turning from side to side and laughing before taking all the hair off. Newly bald men and women danced to live music, which provided a jubilant backdrop to the mayhem of head shavings.

  Further into the film, three lean, slick, shiny-headed women, one of them Betty, call a meeting. They giggle garishly, banging their hands on a table to get the attention of their equally bald audience.

  We went over and over the same information: Betty’s courageous, fierce personality and the love she and Chuck had for each other. Tears. Poems. Movies again and again. This went on for weeks.

  Although I never met Betty, I began to envision her as a kind of angelic figure. In Theresa’s letters, she expressed a high regard for Betty, who had inspired my mother through regular written correspondence to keep faith in bringing me to Synanon.

  “She always responded when I wrote to her,” Theresa told me. The passion and fervor of Theresa’s feelings toward Betty seemed to spill from the pages of her letters.

  Yes, I decided, Betty had been a special woman. My young mind marinated in images and talks of her saintliness; I wished I could have met her. I could not have thought any differently.

  Once the Betty blitz wound down, we returned to our regular routine and talk of The Magic Lady dwindled.

  One day, not long after Betty’s death, the other children and I were told after inspection to wait outside our dorm instead of walking to the Commons. We stood for minutes in the crisp, cold air. I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets to stay warm.

  The demonstrators responsible for our dorm emerged. One of the women walked behind a small boy with reddish-orange hair, her hands on his scrawny shoulders. She smiled widely in an I’m-making-a-point-here way. The boy, whose name I knew to be Santiago, looked toward the ground.

  “This is a very special day,” the demonstrator said. “Santiago woke up to a dry bed.” She glanced down at him, the exaggerated smile never leaving her face. “When we put our mind to it, we can overcome our bad habits. Good job, Santiago!”

  His pale cheeks blossomed to a ruddy red.

  The demonstrator wasn’t finished. “Everyone should know about and celebrate your success.” She brought her hands together, methodically clapping, the loud, hollow, echoic sound breaking the quiet of the morning.

  Santiago’s head drooped. I wondered why the demonstrator didn’t notice how much she was embarrassing him.

  “Stand up straight,” the demonstrator said, motioning for us to join her clapping.

  We clapped long and hard while Santiago remained in his stiff stance, his brown eyes glazed and focused on some distant object.

  Finally the clapping died down, and the demonstrated patted his shoulder. “Congratulations!” she said. “You’re all excused for breakfast.”

  As we walked to the Commons, I watched one of the boys elbow Santiago in the ribs. “Yeah, congratulations, dork,” the boy hissed.

  Some of the other boys overheard this remark, and a dry laughter erupted from the group as they jostled one another, grinning hard as if to prove they were better than Santiago. Several of them had the same problem and lived on a floor dedicated to habitual bedwetters. The stench of urine clotted the air of their hallway like an unwanted badge of their inability to control themselves.

  While most of the kids who suffered from this problem managed to wake up now and then with dry sheets, Santiago never had until that morning. Because of that he’d become the scapegoat for the other bedwetters’ pent-up humiliation. Santiago had all the strength of a limp noodle and never bothered to defend himself, though he was often physically attacked by bigger boys who grabbed his thin arms and twisted them around his back.

  His strategy: wait it out.

  Throughout breakfast and then in the classroom that morning, adults and children continuously came up to Santiago to congratulate him. The boys pumped his hand and said, “Way to go. Good job!” in loud voices.

  Our first grade teacher Ginny didn’t get caught up in all the hoopla of fussing over poor Santiago. Later that afternoon, when school let out and our class set off for physical education, she pulled him aside, waving the rest of us away.

  I slowed and looked over my shoulder, watching her kneel down and offer him a stick of gum while she rubbed his back. My respect for her grew exponentially in that moment, and so when some days later Ginny made an announcement to our class, I was conflicted.

  “Everyone,” she said, “I have some really good news.” Eyes shining, she clapped her hands to get our attention. “Something really wonderful has happened for me. I will be going on a date with Chuck, so I won’t be here next week. When I get back, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  I stared at her, mystified. Chuck was an old man. In the pictures I’d seen of him, he looked like he could pass for Ginny’s grandfather. It didn’t seem right. He belonged with the dead lady Betty everyone had been crying over, not my young, pretty teacher.

  A girl raised her hand. “Why are you going on a date with Chuck?”

  Ginny glanced around the room at our blank expressions. Her smile seemed to tuck itself into the corners of her mouth, disappearing. “Well, I was chosen. It’s a great honor.”

  This was a lie, like the lie that we were beautiful with bald heads. Her words fell like soap bubbles, shiny, bobbing and bursting into nothing.

  Ginny seemed as if she might say something else. Instead, she grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote the date on the board. She never returned to the school to tell us how the date went. Weeks later, she married the old man.

  I never saw Ginny again except in pictures. Through the years, her figure became husky and thick. At times when I saw the scowling, fleshy-faced woman she’d become, aged far beyond her years and grossly out of shape, sitting on a motorcycle and wearing dark sunglasses, or when I heard her on the Wire denigrating one person, threatening another, I’d forget that she was the same kind, youthful person who’d been adored at the school where she’d once taught.

  Chapter Twelve

  Changing Partners

  I’d been living in Synanon six months when Theresa arrived for one of her irregular visits. She brought her new husband, Larry, and had made arrangements for the three of us to have an outing. The destination was San Francisco; our mode of transportation, a reserved Synanon car.

  I was given a dress for the occasion, black with flowers printed on the cotton material, the hem ruffled just above my knees. Theresa wore a draw
string blouse, wraparound skirt and brown, knee-high boots. A pale pink silk scarf covered her short hair. The ever-present hooped earrings dangled from her lobes. She tittered and fretted over me while she got me situated in the back seat.

  Larry watched silently, uttering only one sentence: “Are you ready to go, Theresa?”

  Once we were on the highway, Theresa turned in her seat to glance at me, her bottom lip tucked under her large front teeth, her face happy, excited.

  Larry focused on the road.

  “What do you think of my new husband?” Theresa asked. Her eyes twinkled at me, and I realized she expected an answer. I leaned forward so I could get a better look at Larry’s taciturn profile. Theresa also examined him as if she were sizing up a pet she’d recently purchased and wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice.

  Larry was boring, I decided. The robotic Abraham Lincoln, my least favorite attraction at Disneyland, was more entertaining than Larry, who had inexplicably become part of my mother’s and my life through their mysterious marriage, which I was just now learning of.

  “Nice,” I said.

  My answer seemed to satisfy Theresa because she turned to face the road. “We just recently got love matched,” she remarked.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I knew love matched was the same as married. Their union was just another fragmentary incident for me, part of a string of sketchy situations that I’d come to accept in my short life.

  Larry drove with one hand and rested the other on the seat. Theresa’s fingers grazed his lightly. “I thought maybe we’d go to Fisherman’s Wharf,” he said, pulling his hand away to place it on the steering wheel.

  We went to Fisherman’s Wharf. The air smelled of the sea. Flocks of gulls glided on the wind current in the bright sky. Boats of various sizes bobbed in the marina. Other tourists like us strolled the walkway and creaking wooden wharfs.