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

by C. A. Wittman

  Julia and Rachel, who were on my team, had quit and were sitting on the gravelly pathway under one of the window ledges, chatting with each other.

  For a moment, I stopped my work to look around. There were so many windows. It might take days to wash every window in every building.

  Mary, the fourth member of our team, was up on the little ladder, her thin arm swiping at the glass over and over, her nose and cheeks red from the cold and exertion.

  A group of boys passed us with a wheelbarrow of water repellent and wood preservative for the new jungle gym built recently in the play yard. A girl trailed behind them with a shovel.

  “How long do you think it might take us to wash all these windows?” I asked Mary.

  “How should I know,” she snapped, glancing down. “Are you going to help me?”

  “I’ve been working. What about them?” I pointed at the other two girls.

  They both looked up, pausing in their conversation. Rachel said, “Mind your own business,” but they both unfurled their skinny legs and stood up to resume the activity.

  Minutes later, one of the demonstrators came to retrieve me. “Celena, come with me. I’m going to put you on socks with Chloe.”

  I followed the demonstrator to a vacant dorm building. We climbed the porch steps and opened the door. Inside sat one small girl in a large room filled only with boxes. A formidable hill of mismatched socks lay in front of her next to an even smaller pile of matched socks tucked into each other. Off to the side were more socks of various colors and sizes laid out singly in long rows, all in need of a match. The box before her was half full of still more socks, but most worrisome were the boxes that had not yet been attended to. They filled the room in stacks.

  Chloe glanced up at us, her narrow face wan with resignation and boredom, but her brown eyes lit up when she saw that she had company. We worked all day sorting, matching and talking.

  The next day was a repeat of the first. I longed for the weekend to be over.

  The following week our regular academic lessons were supplemented with more psychology, including a lesson about Freud’s analysis of the human psyche and an introduction to Maslow and his theory of self-actualization. These lessons were over my head. Some of the older children understood the information, throwing out terms like “inner critic,” “reality principle,” “autonomy” and “transcendence” as we sat grouped at round tables, filling out charts and bubbles. Completely lost, I retreated into daydreams.

  The next afternoon we were given a non-coed sex workshop. Having showered and changed into our pajamas, we were ushered into the living room to lounge on large throw pillows and beanbags, lending the feeling of a slumber party. Styrofoam cups of hot cider with cinnamon sticks were distributed.

  Linda sat in a chair, waiting as we received our drinks.

  Whisperers circulated among us about this newest seminar topic.

  Once we’d settled down, Linda smiled, her round moon face gleaming in the subdued lighting. She spread her hands graciously, leaning toward us. “We are here to talk about our bodies and our sexuality. This is an open, safe space. You are free to say anything you like on the subject of sex and to share your thoughts.” She sat back.

  The silence provided its own sound, a ringing in my ears. Most of us were frozen with our cider in our hands. A few girls tittered.

  Linda opened her hands magnanimously and I focused on her long slim fingers while I sipped my drink.

  “At some point or another we discover masturbation, and it’s a very nice feeling, wouldn’t you all agree?” she said.

  I swallowed the warm liquid in my mouth, but it went down wrong and I was sputtering.

  “Who here masturbates?” Linda asked.

  No hand went up. Even the giggling stopped.

  “It’s very natural,” she said. “You don’t have to be shy about it. Does everyone know what masturbation is?”

  I squirmed on my pillow and glanced quickly about the room. Every face was red.

  “How about you, Becky?”

  At once, all eyes were on Becky. It seemed that even breathing stopped. Would Becky admit to this? The redness that flushed her face seemed to shoot up to the roots of her short blond hair. She shook her head vehemently, lowered her eyes and began to pluck frantically at the fringe of her pillow.

  Please don’t pick me, I prayed to myself.

  “I mention masturbation,” Linda said, “because for children it is the beginning of a healthy interest and relationship with our own sexuality, preparation for adulthood, when we begin having intercourse. Of course masturbation doesn’t end in childhood. Adults masturbate, I masturbate, your parents do, everyone does, but usually no one likes to talk about it.” She gave a little laugh. “I have even seen some of you girls masturbate when you didn’t know I was looking. I won’t name any names.”

  Torturously embarrassed, I wanted to be doing anything else at that moment—matching socks, washing windows, even watching the monumentally boring historical videos of ancient cultures that we were forced to look at as part of our curriculum—anything other than sitting in that room imagining my mother masturbating and Linda spying on us.

  To our collective relief, Linda finally left the topic and moved on to the physical act of consummation between a man and woman.

  A second demonstrator joined the lesson and gave us all the technical details of what happens during intercourse. “Sex feels really good,” she gushed. “For women, though, the first few times can be painful because we have something inside of our vaginas called a hymen.”

  The sex lesson started in the afternoon and progressed into the night. Long, relentless and needling to our young minds, the lecture demanded our full attention.

  At seven years old, I was not particularly interested in the smooth architecture of an erect penis or how many thrusts it might take for a man to ejaculate, although I was surprised to learn that it typically took between seventeen and twenty thrusts. When we took a break, I made a hole with one hand, then placed the index finger of my other hand into the hole with quick jabs, imagining the penis and counting. Somehow the total didn’t seem right. The number seemed too few for something that was supposed to be so enjoyable.

  We moved on to the subject of menstruation. A long, thick menstrual pad was passed around, complete with a slim white belt. I tried to understand that one day I would be bleeding out of my vagina and would need to wear the strange diaper-like thing. I felt dubious about this information and pondered it like I’d pondered the thrusting business.

  Late that night, the workshop finally ended. We girls went to bed quietly, no doubt mentally numb from our strange seminar, exhausted from working and hungry from the diet.

  “Snip, snip,” Chris said, cutting the air with his fingers. “All the men have vasectomies.” He grinned sharply.

  “What’s a visectomy?” I asked, mispronouncing the word. We were shoveling loose dirt from a hole into a wheelbarrow. It was the weekend again, and I had been assigned to a team led by one of the men of the community. We were to dig long, narrow trenches for pipe installation.

  “It’s vasectomy, stupid. You know, it’s something in the balls.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. The image of a plastic container of tennis balls came to my mind.

  “Balls.” Chris raised his eyebrows and struck the earth forcefully with his shovel, grimacing while he pressed down on the blade with his foot for a deeper gouge. “Balls, the baby-making part.”

  I suddenly understood. Was this something that he had learned in the sex workshop we were all forced to attend? I did not remember hearing it, but maybe the vasectomy information was only for the boys.

  “Their balls are cut off?” I asked.

  “No, it’s the part inside. It’s just the men, though. You have to be eighteen.” He grinned at me again, the kind of grin a boy gives when he’s trying to be brave.

  Although I later heard snatches of conversation between men and in
the games on the Wire regarding vasectomies, I did not give it further thought. Later still, I learned the vasectomies were related to a program that also included forced abortions, another new word in my vocabulary. When I learned the meaning of the word “abortion,” I felt some sadness, but again there was also indifference on my part. I found it hard enough trying to figure out my own predicament, let alone the opaque and bizarre world of the adults.

  A year before I arrived to live in Synanon, Chuck Dederich had decided that he did not want any more children born into the commune; however, his analogy that childbirth was like a person crapping a football did little to quell the remorse and intense grief that women felt when they were forced to terminate pregnancies, some already advanced into midterm.

  “We’re not in the business of making babies here,” Chuck said. “Fuck, we bring in children. There are too many goddamned children in this world.”

  That was Chuck’s response to parents who begged for their unborn children’s lives. In a speech, “Childbirth Unmasked: Teachings,” Chuck ranted about the ills of having children and hoped to convince his members that birth was more ludicrous than miraculous. “Why does a woman want to have a baby?” he said. “Do you really know? Does a child mean value? Or is it just kind of a lark? Do you think there is any appreciable difference between a person who moves their bowels several times and those who do that once a day? Do you really and truly think that this natural process has any effect on the person doing it?

  “I mean, what are you going to get out of the baby? Do you really want to go through an experience? I understand it’s more like crapping a football than anything else. What do you want to do that for, for Christ’s sake!

  “The only reason we permit anyone to have children is to indulge the woman. This movement doesn’t need children. We don’t need it. We have millions of starving children, children who won’t get education out on the streets. We have all the goddamn children we want. The only reason we have children is to indulge the woman.

  “And one day we’ll stop it. The problem is it’s too expensive. All the motorcycles in Synanon together don’t cost as much as to raise two children to the age of sixteen. All of them. When are we going to move ahead? When is it going to please everybody? I think the nuts had better realize we are going to move ahead now on this issue. Betty and I have been talking about this issue for damn near ten years. We’re going to control birth like the wealthy people in the world have always done. The people who rule the world always control their births.”

  As part of the solution of Childbirth Unmasked, he decided that the men ought to do their part and avoid these kinds of travesties. They should get themselves snipped.

  “The big slavery of women in modern life is that they’re tied to that one child for eighteen years after the child is born,” Chuck said. “Now the big thing that Synanon has done for women is to release them from that kind of bondage. The fact that they have residuals of longing to be back in that bondage doesn’t mean that their release wasn’t a good idea.”

  Makeshift clinics were erected as the Synanon doctors became very busy operating on the lines of men who arrived for their mandatory vasectomies.

  Chuck never received the procedure.

  “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, let me know.” Demonstrator Julie belted out the Rod Stewart song, rolling her enormous hips and stomach, which consisted of doughy folds of fat that obscured the crotch of her overalls. The dieting and jogging hadn’t done much for her obese figure.

  A few of us children stood idly in the play yard next to the Commons, watching. Her movements inevitably induced some giggles. Yet at any moment she could snap and get ugly with her words. I’d seen it before, but at the moment, humor crackled in her brown eyes, swallowed up by the fleshy sockets.

  “Let me know, baby,” she crooned seductively.

  We exploded with laughter as she made kissing noises and winked at us.

  Back-to-basics was winding down. Next week we would return to our regular schedule with our new and improved crew cuts.

  Chapter Sixteen

  God Does Not Exist

  It was the middle of the night, and I didn’t feel good. For minutes, I lay on my side, not daring to move, knowing that whatever was making my stomach ache would come out of me if I attempted to sit up.

  Lying still wasn’t making me feel any better, though. Pushing myself up, I tried to jump from my bed, but the vomit spewed out onto my covers. Even when there seemed to be nothing left, my stomach muscles seized until I passed out from exhaustion.

  Minutes later I awoke and, managing to get out of my bed, fumbled for my lamp, turning the switch on. My roommate slept soundly as I collapsed to my knees, vomiting again. Grayish chunks followed by red, runny liquid came out of me. It looked like blood.

  I passed out again.

  Minutes went by. My stomach seized. Frightened, I tried to stand but felt too weak to get past my hands and knees. I crawled forward a little, then threw up a third time, thick, foamy red stuff. I wanted to wake my roommate, yet I was too weak to talk. I threw up six times that night and made it only to the door of my room before I finally fell into a deep sleep sprawled across the floor.

  “Get up!” I opened my eyes to someone’s sneakered foot nudging my arm. Morning had come. The demonstrator stared down at me, a look of supreme disgust on her face. “How dare you make a mess like this and not clean up after yourself?”

  “I’m sick.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sick,” I managed to say a little louder.

  “I don’t care how you feel. You clean up all of this!”

  My roommate appeared with a bucket of water and plunked it down next to me.

  My stomach had eased somewhat while I’d slept, but as I pulled myself up, my head felt as light as a balloon. The room suddenly slanted. It seemed that every bit of strength I’d once possessed had been zapped out of me.

  The demonstrator waited until I put my hand in the bucket to retrieve the soapy rag. “Clean up every last bit of this vomit and then shower and take yourself to class.”

  “I think I was bleeding inside,” I said, trying to squeeze out the rag.

  She turned on her heel. “I don’t care.”

  The vomit had hardened into little hills, the blood having browned. I grabbed a chunk with the rag, pulled it off the carpet and deposited it into the water, my eyes warming with tears. I wanted my mother. I wanted to be hugged and loved. Even my aunt, who hadn’t liked me, had let me rest when I was sick.

  It took an hour for me to clean the throw-up from the carpet. Trembling to my feet, I carried the bucket to the bathroom, threw out the contents and washed the bucket until not a smudge of grime was left before I put it away in the utility closet.

  After I showered, I felt a little better, but my stomach still felt hollow and sore. I walked alone to class, mentally pushing away the discomfort like I did during our mandatory runs when we were not allowed to stop and walk. It didn’t matter if my side cramped or my legs ached. I’d learned to tolerate the aches and pains of running, and now I forced myself to tolerate the effects of the flu through a whole day of school and physical education. I needed to somehow forget that I was sick. It will go away, I told myself.

  Months later a demonstrator took me to the little medical clinic on the property to cut out an earring embedded in my earlobe. I had not been able to remove the jewelry, so I’d left it in place and the skin had grown over it.

  Taking notice of the odd lump in my earlobe, the demonstrator called me over and probed it, her brows knitted. “What is that?” she muttered to herself.

  “My earring,” I said.

  “What?” She squeezed and pinched my lobe, her eyes squinted and lips compressed.

  “I couldn’t get it out,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you ask for help?”

  I shrugged, unable to articulate my lack of confidence in and distrust of the adults who cared for
me.

  Although I missed Theresa deeply, I saw her only rarely, as was dictated. When I did see her, I lapsed into baby talk, trying to regain what I had lost. When I babbled, she would laugh, then ask me why I talked like a two-year-old. I didn’t know. I couldn’t explain, so I would bury my face in her chest, trying to breathe in her scent of fresh soap and the natural, vanilla-like fragrance of her skin.

  Once, when I visited her in her room, I asked, “Did you nurse me when I was a baby?” I knew the answer was yes, but I wanted to hear her affirm it.

  “Yes, I nursed you until you were six months old.”

  “Can I try it?”

  Theresa stood before me, her greenish eyes thoughtful. She sat on the edge of her bed and lifted her shirt to pull out her breast, still rounded and firm.

  I took hesitant steps toward her until I could reach out my hand and touch her. I knelt down and placed my tongue to her nipple. She sat very still. I looked up and our eyes locked for a moment.

  “Are you finished?” she asked.

  I nodded, and she tucked her breast back into her bra.

  When we didn’t visit, we wrote to each other often. One piece of correspondence from her came in the form of a large heart cut from construction paper, with the words “I Love You” written in the center. When I read those words, I realized I did not want to live anymore. I did not want to be in Synanon. At my core, I felt abandoned.

  Carefully, underneath, I wrote “Good by Momy I Am Died” and sent the red heart back to her.

  When she questioned me about it later, embarrassment curdled my insides and I shrugged away from her scrutiny. So much time had elapsed that I’d moved beyond those feelings and further into my role as a Synanon kid. My earlier transgression seemed babyish and shamefully silly.

  Just before my eighth birthday, Theresa received approval from upper management to move from the Synanon San Francisco house to the Walker Creek property where I lived. Management had taken advantage of her passion for wanting to participate in the school by giving her a job that nobody wanted with the promise that after a few years she could work her way into the role of demonstrator. The job involved the care of a physically and mentally disabled girl named Gwyn, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. Because Theresa had questioned the lifestyle values of the school program, senior demonstrators wanted time to scrutinize her behavior. Her charge of Gwyn was a sort of probationary situation.