“Yeah, Celena shit in her pants. Yeah, she’s a stupid bitch. The doody run run. The doody run,” Charlie sang.
Laughter exploded from the other girls, and I felt my throat close as I tried to focus on my book. My eyes were watering, but something other than sadness was building within me.
“Yeah, Celena stinks so bad,” the other girls joined in, singing at the top of their voices.
I threw down my book, sprang from my bed and marched over to Charlie. When she saw me approach, she sputtered with laughter. I grabbed the needle of her record player and dragged it back and forth across the album. The loud screeching sounds rendered an instantaneous halt to the humor.
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” Charlie jumped up, but my hand shot out, hitting hard against her small chest. She fell back, worry flitting across her dark eyes. I wanted to destroy her and everything else. I pulled the album off the player and threw it across the room. A static quiet took the place of the cheerful pop beat as my roommates gazed at me, stilled from shock.
I grabbed Charlie’s lamp, tore it from the outlet and threw it with such force that it smashed against the wall.
“Stop that!” one of the girls said.
The fear in her voice only fueled my anger. I turned on her, but she scrambled away, so I grabbed her bed covers, stripping the mattress and pulling it from the box frame. My strength turned Herculean. I threw more lamps and overturned nightstands. Guttural sounds tore from my throat.
“Celena, stop it! Stop it!” Charlie yelled. “We’re sorry!”
I ran from the room and out into the sunny afternoon. Under a tree lay Sophie, curled on a blanket and reading. I hated her. I hated that we were always thrown together. In my fit, I grabbed the top of her book, but she held tight, staring at me, her eyes begging me to leave her alone. “What are you doing?” she whined. “Stop it.”
I pulled harder at the book, dragging her along the ground until she screamed. Then I ripped the book from her fingers.
“Please! Don’t do that!” she cried.
I tore out the pages, flung the book aside and jumped on her, hitting her over and over. When she covered her head with her arms and curled to protect herself, I kicked at her hands, until someone grabbed and restrained me.
Several seconds passed while a demonstrator roughly shook my body, shaking me out of the blackness. I heard sobbing. It was Sophie, curled like a pill bug, her fingers already swelling.
I’d wanted to kill her.
Chapter Nineteen
Hit and Run
Sometime after that another child was hurt much more severely.
We were on a field trip, clustered near a building that might have been a store, somewhere along a road. The Synanon school bus waited at the top of a steep driveway. Two of the boys and I separated from the group and ran down the driveway to the curving highway, which was flanked by redwood trees. One of the boys, Brett, and I decided to cross, but I changed my mind and went back to the shoulder. I was crossing; then I wasn’t. Somehow I knew to stay back even before I saw the car.
I may have yelled for Brett not to cross; or maybe I didn’t. I do not remember.
A car shot out from around the curve of the highway. A giant wave of metal swept Brett off his feet. His body flipped onto the hood, bounced high into the air, then fell to the pavement. A tennis shoe landed at my feet.
The car kept moving. Inside it, black-haired children with large, dark, round eyes screamed against the unfolding nightmare. As if the driver were on a mission to kill my friend, the car slowed, pushing Brett’s body down the highway. In the passenger seat, a woman clutched at the driver’s arm while he remained bent over the steering wheel.
One moment I was at the side of the road; the next I was up the driveway by the building, but behind a chain-linked fence.
The car pulled over and children poured out. The woman clutched a red-faced baby, all mouth, its cries shrill and loud. She and the man talked over each other in Spanish.
Brett lay abandoned, curled up on the road, slowly, noiselessly opening his mouth like a fish on dry land. His body convulsed with one big shudder, then he was still.
It seemed the occupants of the car were on the run. From what I didn’t know. Later I discovered that the driver had stolen the car. He had five children of his own, but if not for his wife, he wouldn’t have pulled over.
Brett was not killed. He remained alive, but in a comatose state for quite a while. After he was released from the hospital, he returned to the Synanon school, where he became the business of the demonstrators.
We were told that we could look at Brett, but we needed to keep quiet in his room. One by one, we stepped up to the large crib where he slept like a giant toddler and peered at his still form.
He slept for days. Once in a while he opened his vacant brown eyes and looked around. Everything he’d learned throughout the eight years of his life, his personal experiences, which made him uniquely Brett had all been wiped from his mind. He did not even know his name.
Gradually he stayed awake for longer periods, but didn’t talk. He’d become an infant again. He didn’t understand anything. We talked to him like he was a newborn. Sometimes he would smile.
After some weeks he began to speak, but only one word at a time. Most communication consisted of reminding him of the word or name for each and every thing. He would point at objects, and we would tell him, “That’s a sock.” “That’s paper.” “Those are flowers.” “Yes, that’s your nose.”
Within a month, he recovered a slow, stuttering form of speech accompanied by rapid blinking. Later he became strong enough to use a wheelchair. A few months after that he graduated to crutches and his words were interrupted less frequently by the stutter.
A year after the accident, Brett walked and ran about like normal. The only indicators of his having been mowed over by a speeding car were two long scars along his outer thighs from hip to knee and an occasional sticking of words he would repeat five or six times like a scratched record.
Chapter Twenty
A Visit With My Father
“Guess what?”
I’d been lying in bed ready to go to sleep when Theresa poked her head into my room, her eyes shiny and happy as she beamed a smile at me.
Surprised to see her during non-visiting hours on a school night, I sat up and rubbed my eyes while she made herself comfortable at the foot of my bed.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She covered my hand with hers and made a quiet little squeal. “I’m getting love matched.”
“I thought you were love matched to Larry.”
She waved her hand as if she were pushing Larry into a cosmic waste bin. “That didn’t work out. He wasn’t the one. But, oh, Celena, my new husband is going to be Andrew. He’s so wonderful! I can’t wait for you to meet him. And he’s really funny; he used to be an actor. He’s the one who sometimes wears the gorilla outfit.”
I was intrigued.
From time to time a man showed up at the school dressed in the furry costume. He would walk around like an ape, hold out his ape hands for the kids to slap him five and basically make an ass of himself. I never found him particularly funny, though a lot of other people did. As I tried to reconcile the images of her and a gorilla man, my mother talked.
“He is going to be your new dad,” she said.
A new father.
But where was my dad? Did he know where I was? A faint echo pushed through the morass of amnesia. Would I ever see my father again? A familiar heaviness settled in my chest, and when the first warm tears slipped down my cheeks, Theresa, now just a blurry image, asked me what was wrong. She stroked my forehead.
“I miss my dad,” I said under my breath. It felt hard to talk.
“You miss your dad?”
I nodded and wiped at my eyes.
She looked away for a long minute. “You know what? I’m going to arrange for you to have a visit with him.”
“Yo
u can do that?”
“I promise.” She smiled and kissed me. When her gaze held mine for a moment, her eyes told me it was all settled. “I should go,” she said. “I’ve already stayed too long.”
We hugged each other, and she left after wishing my roommates a good night.
A few weeks later I boarded a van with Theresa to spend a weekend with her and her new husband, Andrew, at the Marin Bay property. Children rarely set foot on the Bay property, which was reserved mostly for VIPs’ homes.
On the first night of my visit Theresa and I met Andrew in the dining hall for gracious dining, Synanon’s version of a gourmet restaurant.
When I first glimpsed Andrew’s face without the gorilla costume, I was surprised to discover he was magnificently ugly. For the first few minutes I couldn’t stop looking at him. His eyes seemed too close together under his prominent forehead. His lips were big for a white man’s, his nose shaped somewhat like that of a pug’s. He had the figure of a boxer and wore slacks and a buttoned-up long-sleeve shirt.
A smile danced at the corner of his lips, and anything he said sent Theresa into a fit of giggles. Her flushed cheeks and shiny eyes enhanced her natural beauty.
Having learned the word “sexy,” I saw that that was how Theresa saw Andrew. Were there ways to be sexy that I didn’t know about? I waited for a natural break in the conversation, then asked, “Excuse me, but are you a sexy man?”
My question broke through the giggles and harrumphs and landed in an awkward silence followed by a bellow of laughter. “Honey,” Andrew said to me in a booming voice, “I’m so sexy I can’t stand it.”
“Oh,” I said.
His answer disappointed me. I’d hoped he’d say no and thought that I’d somehow misunderstood something along the way.
During dinner I fired off a litany of off-color penis and potty jokes that we children found hilarious. Having spent so little time in the company of adults, I was out of touch regarding appropriate, respectful dialogue between a child and her elders.
“Did you hear the joke about these three men, a white guy, a black guy and a Chinese guy?” I said.
“No.” Andrew smiled and leaned his elbows on the table, resting his face in his palms.
“Well, there were three men: a Chinese, a white and a black trying to talk the devil out of sending them to hell,” I said. “The devil said, ‘If you want the chance of not going to hell, let me hold your dick and if it doesn’t melt, you can go to heaven.’ They all wanted a chance to not get thrown in hell. The Chinese guy went first. His dick melted, so he went to hell. Next came the white guy. The same thing happened to him. Finally, it was the black guy’s turn. When the devil held his dick, he was surprised because it didn’t melt.” I paused to give the punch line maximum effect. “The devil asked him, ‘How come your dick didn’t melt?’ And the black guy said, ‘It melts in your mouth, not in your hands!’”
Andrew stared at me, blank-faced.
“Do you get it? It’s like the M&Ms commercial. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands,” I sang.
Andrew still didn’t laugh. Maybe he hadn’t seen that commercial, I thought, so I tried another joke, an easy one about a person staying in a hotel room who hears small voices moaning from the bathroom.
“‘When the log rolls over, we’re all going to die!’” I said, imitating the voices. “The person freaks out, grabs his stuff and checks out of the hotel. Then another person checks into the room. He hears the voices, freaks out and runs out of the room. Then a third person checks into the room. He hears the voices and is curious, not scared like the others, so he enters the bathroom to check things out. He looks careful-like into the toilet bowl and guess what he finds? A group of ants sitting on a turd.”
I laughed myself silly at this punch line, but Andrew didn’t seem to get the joke.
“All right,” I said. “This one’s really funny.” I was about to launch into the joke about a man who was supposed to gather golf balls, but tried to get King Kong’s balls instead, when Andrew leaned toward Theresa and whispered into her ear. Her cheeks tinged with red, she stood up and motioned to me to follow her. We went out to the foyer.
“Celena, Andrew wants you stop telling the penis jokes and poop jokes. They’re making him uncomfortable.”
I felt my face grow hot. I thought I was being such a great dinner partner. We returned to the table, and for the rest of the meal I barely looked at Andrew.
Theresa made good on her promise and a trip was arranged for us to go to Los Angeles to visit my father and other relatives for a weekend. Later she told me that she hadn’t requested the visit outright, predicting that the request would be turned down. Instead, she’d applied for welfare, knowing Synanon would gladly accept the money. She then told management that since the organization was receiving public aid, my father had a legal right to visitation.
We arrived at my grandparents’ home in the early evening. It felt strange to be back at the house where I’d spent my days in refuge from Aunt Terry, who lived across the street. My father arrived shortly after we did, seeming to burst through the door.
“Hey!” he called.
“Daddy!” I ran into his open arms, and he held me tight, laughing, his voice deep and rumbling. His warmth seemed to spread into my own being. He smelled of aftershave and spicy cologne. His shiny brown face and large forehead gleamed in the light. His dark eyes crackled with humor. I felt as if we had seen each other only yesterday.
My father sat on the sofa and pulled me onto his lap. “So how have you been, sweetheart?”
For a moment I didn’t know where to begin, but before long we were deep in conversation, other relatives joining in to ask me about Synanon and what it was like to live there.
“My, you’re getting to be a big girl,” my father said, patting my legs. “Your grandma used to tell me when you were four years old, ‘Jim that girl is too old to be sitting on your lap.’ And I told her, ‘Mama, she’ll never be too old. She’ll be forty, and I’ll still have her sit on my lap.’”
My uncles threw back their heads and laughed with my father, and I nuzzled my face against his neck. I could see Grandma Regina laying plates on the kitchen table, a small smile on her lips.
As usual she busied herself in the kitchen with the feast she’d prepared. There was gumbo made with shrimp, sausage and chicken, rice, corn bread, green beans julienne, bread pudding, pies, soda and coffee.
My cousins and Uncle Joe came over from across the street, but Aunt Terry did not. “Our mom said to say hi,” they told me. “She’s not feeling well.” The mention of her name had a slightly souring effect on my mood; however, I felt too excited to be with my family and father to give her much thought.
After dinner I cuddled next to my dad, resting my head against his chest so I could hear the resonant base tones of his voice. The combined laughter of my uncles was thunderous, an earthquake of sound that vibrated off and through the walls.
A few hours into the visit, my cousins wanted me to go across the street with them to their house. I went. Nothing had changed. My gaze swept the same worn furniture and brown carpet. The air held the stale smoke of cigarettes, a signature smell. Fear tickled my skin as I recalled my younger self, an apparition encapsulated in a time past. When I glanced toward the kitchen, the image of my small body being dragged across the linoleum, the angry blows of plastic racetracks ripping into my skin, clouded my memory.
My cousins, unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge my discomfort, pulled me toward their bedroom. In the hallway I glanced over my shoulder at the room opposite theirs. A shroud of sorrow emanated from the static of the closed bedroom door. I knew my Aunt Terry was in there. Hiding? I wondered.
Giggling, my cousins led me into their own room, flopping on their beds to stare, amazed, at the drastic change in my appearance. They plied me with questions. What was it like to be almost bald? To live in a place like Synanon?
I answered, reveling in the attention.
; My visit lasted an evening and ended all too soon.
I would not see my father again for two years.
Chapter Twenty-One
Girls and Bald Heads
I heard someone crying.
The soft sounds of sniffling seemed to come from the bathroom. The door stood open a crack, and I poked my head in. One of the girls who lived in my dorm, Carol, stood glaring at her reflection in the mirror. Her bloodshot eyes were slits in the puffy wet skin that surrounded them. The tips of her ears were flaming red. In the dim lighting, her recently shaved scalp gleamed pale. Her face, swollen from crying, had lost any male or female characteristics. She appeared inhuman.
The movement of my image in the glass pulled her from her trance. She spun around, lunging for the door as I tried to close it.
I wasn’t fast enough.
Her hands grabbed at my face, her nails slicing long rakes in my cheeks while she shrieked her fury. Then, just like that, she was back in the bathroom, slamming the door after herself.
My face felt like it was on fire. I covered my cheeks with my hands just as two girls came down the hallway and darted past me into one of the bedrooms. “Get in the closet,” one of them hissed.
A demonstrator soon followed. When she spotted me, she caught hold of my shoulder, marching me in front of her and out of the bunkhouse to the deserted courtyard. Minutes before there had been groups of kids everywhere, but they’d dispersed like roaches exposed to the sudden glare of light. I heard whispering and saw a face or two pressed against a window as I was marched toward the playroom. I didn’t try to fight or run away. The head-shaving was going to happen. It was better to not make a fuss.
In the playroom several chairs were lined up, each with a demonstrator standing behind it. In their hands were electric clippers. I sat quietly, though my stomach felt like a cage of fluttering winged insects.
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