Synanon Kid

by C. A. Wittman

  Possibly she sought to reclaim a childhood she had not lived properly herself. At fourteen years old, my mother was forced into the maternal role of caring for her brothers after my grandmother Gladys was struck down in her prime by debilitating depression, taking to her bed for years. The smothering sadness returned to stalk Theresa during her own experience of motherhood.

  I have vague recollections of the various men in whose homes we stayed. A house on stilts, the door in the kitchen opening to a spindly forest of trees, with no balcony to block a bone-breaking fall. A bowl of sprouts left on the table for me to eat, my mother and her friend behind his closed bedroom door.

  Alone in the hum of silence, I watched faint dust funnels swirl in the fading light. When the door opened and her friend emerged, his long, dusky brown hair spilling over pale naked shoulders, I ran to the futon bed where my mother lay curled under blankets. She lifted them for me and I wiggled myself into the curve of her body. Later we sat cross-legged on the bed, accepting her friend’s offerings of little white boxes, neat and compact like birthday presents, with the flaps open, long thin sticks thrusting out of them. Inside one of the boxes was something slick and gelatinous. The other held rice mixed with bits of carrots and pink, crescent-shaped things. I poked my finger into the slimy stuff.

  “Chinese food,” he said, also sitting cross-legged, his penis, shrunken and limp, tucked away under a thick cloud of pubic hair.

  At the house of a different friend, my mother washed dishes, completely at home in his kitchen. I wandered into the yard: a jumble of unattended shrubbery, dead grass and dirt patches. On the inside crease of my left arm is a pale little wrinkle, a scar where his dog bit me. I remember nothing of the attack, only the man shaking me so hard afterward that I was too shocked to cry.

  “What did I tell you, huh? Huh?” he demanded. “You were teasing him. That’s why he bit you. I told you not to tease my dog.”

  Beyond him my mother watched, her eyes mirroring my fear. When she stepped forward to reach for me, he yanked me out of her grasp. “I’ll take care of it.”

  She said nothing, the color gone from her face. Instead she stood very still while he whisked me down the hallway to the bathroom and poked his finger into the jagged bits of my torn flesh, blood spooling up from the wound. I held myself rigid as he lifted me up to thrust my arm under the faucet, turning on the water and washing the bite with a white sludge of melted soap.

  “Little brat,” he hissed, and he dried the wound, slapping on a bandage before prodding me toward his bedroom, where he sat me on the bed, rough as a sack of rocks. “You stay here until it’s time for you to go.”

  I shuddered and tried not to breathe as I watched him walk away and close the door. Long minutes ticked by. I didn’t dare move.

  When the door creaked open, I held my breath and focused on the carpet, but the person who entered was my mother, smiling, with an apology tucked into the corners of her lips.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  I remained silent; the thought of her friend rushing in to yell at us kept me mute.

  “He didn’t mean it.” She slipped into the room, closing the door with a quiet click and sat next to me. “Do you want some gum?”

  She dug into her jeans pocket for a pack of Juicy Fruit and pulled a slim silver stick from the cheerful yellow jacket, ripping it in half and handed me my portion.

  I took it wordlessly, unwrapped it and popped the powdery pale bit of treat into my mouth.

  “It’s okay,” she said a little louder. “Just wait here like he said. We’re going to leave soon.” Satisfied that I was placated, she smiled, putting a finger to her lips, and she left as quietly as she came in.

  Between apartments we sometimes stayed with my grandmother Gladys, crowding onto her sofa bed. I would not come to recognize my grandmother’s fun side, her love of jazz and preference for Miles Davis over Bing Crosby during the Christmas holidays, until I was much older. She took a girlish pleasure in dancing, putting on family skits and, believing her feet to be her best feature, decorating her toes with rings.

  As a small child, I knew her only as dour Gladys, with her tight headscarves, drab clothes and large purses that hung flat and old-ladyish from her shoulder. I spent long days in her apartment, an interior of beige blandness. The plastic artificial flowers placed on the coffee table and end table to brighten the place had only added to the feeling of lifelessness. I recall sitting for hours with a small bag of candy to keep me quiet while she rocked away the hours in her rocking chair, frowning to herself. My grandmother hated cooking, so we ate most of our meals at Thrifty’s Drug Store.

  Catching sight of my mother wearing blue jeans could set my grandmother off on a tirade accompanied by tears. “Where did I go wrong?” she wailed. “God have mercy! You’re a good Catholic girl, Theresa; that’s how I raised you. You got to stick with your own kind—Creole people.” My mother would roll her eyes and I’d laugh. Her distress was so overstated that it held a comical quality.

  “The devil has the chile, Theresa. She’s an imp,” my grandmother yelled when I giggled over her ravings.

  “She’s a child, Mama,” my mother said. I’d dance around my grandmother, making faces, teasing her, hoping she’d lose her temper, while my mother lounged on the sofa.

  “You see?” my grandmother said. “You see what she’s doing? You better teach that little imp a lesson: slap her behind.”

  When she made a grab for me, I darted away, too quickly for her to catch. She’d stumble forward, clutching nothing but air, then give up and break into melodramatic sobs.

  Her despair fascinated me. Normal, everyday things like my braided kinky hair, fitted at the ends with colorful plastic barrettes, made her nervous. At night, I awoke to her unwinding my small braids while praying to the saints for salvation before settling down to sleep.

  Often she stood hunched over the bathroom sink, washing her hands repeatedly while muttering Hail Marys. Other times she fingered the glass beads, creaking to and fro in her rocking chair and frowning at the injustices of her life.

  The Catholic churches I attended with my grandmother matched her melancholy mood with their poorly lit, cavernous interiors, stained glass windows and portraits of sad-looking saints. Behind the altar, Jesus hung on the cross, imbued with eternal sorrow.

  Expected to sit still on a hard bench for the hour we spent at church services, I inevitably swung my legs and received sharp pinches from my grandmother’s quick fingers. As we rose, knelt, rose, sat and sang with the other congregants, our voices reached to the high ceiling and outward, the echoes circulating like mournful ghosts. If I fidgeted again, my grandmother’s hand closed firmly around my wrist, cutting off circulation.

  I preferred my mother’s version of God as a friend who lived around the corner. When I recited the traditional prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” my mother stopped me. She didn’t want me to be on my knees contemplating my possible death. “God is your friend, Celena,” she said. “When you pray, you’re having a conversation with God. Prayer is like making a phone call.”

  She created a small book of green construction paper with the pages hole-punched and tied together with yarn. Glued to them were photographs of me engaged in various activities: smelling a flower, petting a llama at the zoo, laughing hysterically. Under each, she wrote a brief caption: “God loves flowers.” “God loves animals.” “God has a sense of humor.” My mother’s motto: “If you want to know God, get to know yourself.”

  My father inhabited the world of relatives; he held the status of a scarcely seen favorite uncle. When he visited, his personality seemed almost too big for our little studio apartment. He laughed loud and talked loud, his cologne and aftershave clotting the air around him, tickling my nasal passages. On his knee my father would place me for a pretend horse ride, or up into the air he’d throw me, making wide eyes at me as I came crash
ing back into his arms.

  Most of our visits took place in his apartment, neatly furnished with white brocade sofas and matching throw pillows carefully arranged. Plastic runners protected stretches of frequently vacuumed carpet. He didn’t understand my mother’s way of keeping house: clothes strewn about, dishes piled in the sink, books stacked on the toilet seat lid; nor could he understand the fact that my mother never really had a plan.

  We drifted, my mother and I. On one occasion, I recall my father squatting next to our car, peering into the window at my mother seated behind the steering wheel. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” my mother said.

  He looked at me, his grin a question mark. “Those earrings are too big on Celena.”

  My dress was too big as well; the top slipped off my shoulders, the costume jewelry brushed against my bare skin. My mother started the car. Without a goodbye, we glided coolly away. I craned my neck, watching him recede into the background as he remained on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. When he noticed me staring at him, his face lit up and he waved.

  I waved back.

  On one of my irregular afternoon visits to my father’s home, I discarded my clothes and breezed through the living room, looking for something to do. He’d been lounging on his sofa, watching soaps, but shot up when I went by.

  “Where are your clothes?” he asked.

  I shrugged, unable to decipher the alarm in his voice.

  “Oh, no.” He walked over to me, his mouth turned down hard, and took my arm, leading me back to the bedroom. “You can’t walk around naked. Understand?” My clothes lay in a puddle of fabric on the carpet. “Put these things back on.”

  “But it’s hot,” I said.

  “Little girls need to be dressed. Does your mother let you run around like this?”

  I wiggled back into my clothes. I’d never given any thought to nudity, but at my father’s it was wrong.

  My mind struggled to reconcile the dichotomy of my parents’ separate lives, as I was too young to comprehend that there would never be a connection. My mother diverged from the straight and narrow long before I had been born. The young woman my father met at a nightclub seven years earlier no longer existed. Soon I’d be living with him, but none of us knew that then.

  Anxiety swallowed my mother bit by bit. A prescription for antidepressants—too strong—only enhanced her despair. A side effect caused her muscles to freeze up and her mouth to remain locked open like a rusted gate that could no longer shut, her eyes staring, life diminished to a flat gaze. I learned to busy myself or sit and wait until the spell broke.

  At a trip to Denny’s, my mother sat looking at the menu one moment, the next she’d turned into a statue.

  The waitress approached our table and stared at the frozen woman across from me. “Ma’am, can you speak?”

  Mouth agape, a silent scream, lips as taut as those of a corpse. That was my mother.

  “Ma’am?”

  I didn’t know how to explain that she would eventually come back to life. I could only sit and hope the waitress would somehow figure it out.

  When the paramedics arrived and guided my mother’s Tin Man–like figure to the ambulance, a hush fell over the restaurant. A fierce protectiveness rose in my chest. I wanted to stomp away all the silent diners’ eyes. “Stop looking at us!” I screamed.

  When my mother finally decided to go to Synanon—“the people business,” as the commune liked to refer to itself—she told me plainly that she had to leave me with my father and wasn’t sure when we would see each other again. By the time the taxi arrived at my father’s apartment in Inglewood, I’d worked myself into a fevered pitch of agitation, begging her not to go.

  My father demanded I stop all that nonsense while my mother hugged me one last time, a pained expression on her face, and walked out of his apartment.

  I ran after her, twisting the door knob, which held firm. Panicked, I let loose a piercing shriek, quieting only when my father threatened me with a whipping.

  Synanon made my mother choose: either leave me and take advantage of the help they offered, or battle her crippling depression on her own.

  Chapter Five

  My Father’s Story

  My fate as a Synanon kid was etched into the blueprint of my life long before I existed. Over the years, through my mother and father’s narrative of their inauspicious beginnings with the cult, I was able to piece together my peculiar destiny.

  During visits with my father in my young teen years, a favorite activity of ours was to look at his family photo album. He would also produce a folder that contained pictures of the women he’d dated. Each photo he presented for my viewing came with a short story, piecing together his life though his long-ago love interests. Inevitably, he’d get to a picture of my mother, a black-and-white snapshot of her in a bikini on the beach, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and a demure expression on her face.

  “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he’d say. “My friends used to ask me, ‘Man, where’d you find her?’ She turned heads everywhere she went. And she really loved me, but….” He’d crinkle his brow and shake his head, his habitual response whenever the subject of my mother came up.

  “There was something,” he went on. “I couldn’t put my finger on it. She just wasn’t the right girl for me. For one, she was too quiet. But she was beautiful, there’s no doubt about that, and you inherited her looks, Celena. You have some of her mannerisms too. The way you sit, tilt your head to the side with your index finger at your temple, that’s your mother all over.”

  My parents met at a club called Maverick’s Flat on Crenshaw. They both loved nightlife and went out dancing every weekend, if not at a club, then at a house party. In the 1960s, South Central pulsed with music; young people packed the clubs, showing off their moves to the cha-cha, mashed potato, the twist and loco-motion.

  Theresa was twenty years old, with a slim, petite figure, fine features, greenish eyes and dark shoulder-length hair, a Natalie Wood look-alike.

  When my father, Jim, first glimpsed her, he told me he thought he’d witnessed an angel. He spent the next hour at the club searching for the elusive beauty. When a friend talked him into meeting a particular girl later that evening, he reluctantly agreed. The girl turned out to be Theresa. My father’s handsome looks, big beaming smile and brown eyes, glistening with warmth and playfulness, must have cut instantly through my mother’s natural shyness.

  Their romance remained a secret for their first year together. Although they both came from a Creole background in Louisiana, my father’s darker skin disqualified him as a suitor in my maternal grandfather’s opinion. He didn’t want his daughter to date anyone outside of their community of light-skinned Creoles. When the two men were first introduced, my grandfather refused to shake my father’s hand, and in a fit of dramatic fury threatened to kill my mother if she continued to date him. They went on seeing each other despite my grandfather’s violent reaction.

  As an older child, I heard my grandfather say repeatedly, “The blacks are nothing but trouble, and the whites are not much better.” And my grandmother liked to often remind me of my Creole status: “You have dark skin, but you’re still Creole. It says on your birth certificate: Mother, Creole; Father, Negro.”

  Their deep obsession with ethnicity and internalized racism mystified me as a girl. In Synanon, race was not an issue. I realized my grandparents’ ethnocentric focus was a reaction to a foregone time of strict societal segregation and the danger of passing for white in the Jim Crow South. In the 1930s, a black man’s life in Louisiana was worth little. A duck hunter in his youth, my grandfather on occasion found the body of a black man suspended from a cypress tree or floating on the still waters, murdered and left to rot in the hushed swelter of the swamps.

  According to my father, Theresa’s beauty and fairer skin immediately pleased his mother, and over time my grandfather warmed to my father, as most did,
for he had a sunny, charismatic disposition.

  My parents dated for three years. During that time, new ideas that Theresa wanted to explore—Eastern spirituality, meditation, awareness groups and psychology—swept through American society. When she tried to talk to my father about her interests, the topics seemed too foreign for him to grasp. He couldn’t relate to the “strange” concepts she brought up, notions like “money has no real value” and “Catholicism is dying and people don’t need it to experience spirituality.” To a deeply Catholic man who aspired to have millions of dollars one day, this was “crazy talk.” As Theresa gradually lost interest in the American status quo, my father continued to embrace mainstream values.

  By the winter of 1969, their relationship ended, and although they were no longer a couple, they maintained an easy friendship.

  “After your mother and I broke up,” my father told me, “I tried to keep some distance, but she kept calling me, complaining of feeling lonely. So one day, I said, ‘Look, I know of a club in Santa Monica. It’s part of this organization called Synanon. I go there sometimes. They supply food, drink, and live music—all at no cost. Why don’t you go? Just get out and mingle.’”

  My dad would talk to Theresa’s picture, deep in his story.

  “‘The only thing about this place is that the Synanon people use it to try to recruit you into their lifestyle, and believe me, Theresa, you don’t want to get involved with them.’ So, I tell your mother, ‘Feign interest, nod, take advantage of all the free stuff, then go home.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she tells me. ‘I’m not going to bother with them. I’ll just go check out the club.’”

  Raising his eyebrows, my dad would set the picture on his glass coffee table and point at me as I sat listening to him on the white brocade sofa in his modish living room, large abstract paintings displayed stylishly on the textured white walls.