Synanon Kid

by C. A. Wittman

  “That’s the leader,” she said. “Come on, boy. I’ve got some oats for you.”

  The horse pulled its lips back from its thick, wide teeth and answered her with a high whinny.

  Spike stepped forward.

  The horse stepped back.

  Spike set down the oats and grinned at me. “He wants them, but he knows it means he’s going to the corral.”

  I wanted to go back to the property and forget the whole project.

  Spike picked up the bucket. “We’ll walk away a little and they’ll follow.”

  Follow, they did. It was unnerving to have a herd of horses walking behind me and to have one of them nudging at my back.

  Spike stopped and held out the bucket. When the lead horse stretched his neck and nibbled at the air, my friend reached out her hand and grazed his nose with her fingers. His head shot back and he snorted, showering my face with a fine spray of snot.

  Spike laughed, unfazed by the fact that the whole lot of them could trample us to death if they didn’t feel like coming back to the corral. “They know there’s a lot more of these oats down below; they just don’t want to be locked up to get them,” she said.

  Overcome by the temptation of the sweet-smelling oats, the lead horse took a few steps forward and dipped its head into the bucket, the force of its movement pushing Spike’s small frame back. She petted his head while she attempted to remain standing.

  “Here,” she said to me. “You hold the bucket and I’ll saddle him.” Before I could say no, she pushed the oat bucket into my hands. Now I had to try to remain standing while the horse roughly satisfied his hunger.

  Spike saddled him while a few other horses vied for the grain in my hand. Without fear, she pushed the other horses away, wrestled the grain bucket away from the lead, then coaxed him into accepting a bit and helped hoist me onto his back. Once I was astride, she handed me the grain bucket and climbed up behind me using the foot stirrup. From this position she was able to get another horse close enough to transfer herself to its back.

  “Just give him a little kick; he knows where to go. The others will follow,” she said.

  I did as instructed.

  My horse began to walk, but soon set off into a gallop with Spike riding alongside me. I thought of Laura Ingalls, riding free in the prairie lands a hundred years ago, as Spike and I smiled at each other and laughed at the exhilaration of moving at such speed atop these tremendously powerful creatures with nothing in sight except the hills of golden grass and blue sky above.

  “What the children need is love.” These words were boldly stated by a short, slim woman who began to show up at the school on a regular basis. Her name was Pilar, and she was the mother of five children in the school.

  Pilar was not like the other adults. She dressed all in black: black stretch pants, black Kung Fu jacket and black Chinese slippers. She showed up with a cloth bag full of massage equipment slung over her shoulder, herded any kids she could find into the Commons and told us to sit on the floor. Then she pulled out strange-looking contraptions. Into the hands of one child she placed a foot roller. Another received a neck roller. Still another got a giant vibrating massager. She then gave impromptu instructions, showing us how to use the equipment and pairing us up to massage each other’s feet, neck and back.

  I loved when Pilar came around. She was terrifically odd and apparently had some clout over the demonstrators, who listened to her when she gave suggestions.

  Pilar’s campaign to incorporate physical affection in the form of nurturing touch evolved into a twice-weekly bedtime routine of massage. Demonstrators on shift for the evening went from room to room offering a back massage or tickle before sleep. I’d always opt for the tickle, lying in bliss as fingers slowly and lightly ran over my skin for three to five minutes.

  Pilar, I soon learned, was another close friend of Theresa’s. One evening Pilar invited me to sleep over in her room, where we had tea and she asked me questions about the school and how I was getting along there. It was the first time since I’d come to Synanon that an adult other than Theresa took a genuine interest in me.

  Later that evening, Pilar gave me two children’s books. “This is a book about Frederick Douglass, and this one’s about Harriett Tubman. Have you heard of them?”

  I examined the cover of one of the books. A stern-faced black man, with a shock of white, cotton candy–textured hair in an old-fashioned dark suit, gazed back at me. The other cover depicted people huddled in the dark, apparently hiding out, escaping from somewhere. I’d never heard of either of them, I told Pilar.

  Her slim, pale fingers traced the stern-looking man’s face. “Frederick Douglass was a very important man in history. A long time ago, black people were slaves in this country and were owned by white people. Slaves had to work all the time and weren’t allowed to learn to read or write. They had a very hard life. Frederick was born a slave, but he secretly learned to read and write and he escaped. When he was older he wrote about his experiences to help abolish slavery in America.”

  “What’s ‘abolish’?” I asked.

  “To put an end to.”

  She pointed to the other book. “This is the life story of Harriet Tubman, who also was born a slave and escaped.”

  Escape. The word always caught my attention. The children in Hansel and Gretel escaped the wicked witch’s house after their father and stepmother abandoned them in a forest. The Little Match Girl escaped poverty through death and joined her grandmother in heaven.

  “But Harriet did something different,” Pilar said. “She returned to the plantations to help her friends and family escape from slavery, too. She also had others who worked with her. Some of them were white people who wanted slavery to end. They helped Harriet by hiding runaways in their homes as they traveled toward the Northern states, where black people were legally free.” Pilar stretched out her hands. “The route they took, including the string of homes used as hiding places, was known by the slaves as ‘The Underground Railroad.’”

  I was enthralled and a little terrified. No one had ever told me about this history. I wanted to read the books right away. Questions raced through my mind: When did all this take place? Was I in danger of becoming a slave at some point?

  “It is important to know your history,” Pilar said, “and where you come from. When you understand history, you gain a better understanding of the world we currently live in and the people in it. A lot of us are fighting for justice in our own way.”

  When she finished talking, Pilar removed her black clothes, then put on a long, white cotton nightgown, knit cap and woolen socks. We climbed into her bed and I opened the first page of Harriet Tubman’s story. I became absorbed in a world where people were owned like objects or ranch animals and were treated far worse. I read The Underground Railroad several times that night, as well as Frederick Douglass’s story before I finally succumbed to the drowsiness that tugged at my eyes. Cuddling next to Pilar’s warm body, I drifted off to sleep.

  On our next trip to the Petaluma Public Library, I asked the librarian where I could find more books about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. I came away with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Early in the book Douglass states that slave children from the area of his birth in Maryland were parted from their mothers as babies, then usually raised by an older slave woman. This separation of children from their parents reminded me of Synanon.

  Harriet Tubman’s life also brought to mind snippets of stories I had heard shared among the older children about another Underground Railroad, the one that provided an escape from Synanon. Somewhere nearby was a farm with a family who welcomed and hid runaways from the commune. Apparently there had been a number of instances in which teenagers, mostly from the punk squad, had tried to escape, but were caught, beaten, then thrown into a labor camp called the slug camp, where they worked long days at hard manual labor. I was not sure if any of these stories were true, but the escape stories of slav
es had me pondering these rumors.

  On the heels of my ninth year, I regularly read adult novels, and my fascination with American slavery led me to study other dark eras in history, such as the obliteration of Native American tribes in early American history, the German extermination of the Jews in World War II, and segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. I felt continually amazed at the atrocities people committed against one another and innocently assumed that all such cruelty had been left far behind us.

  Reading about others’ plights also helped me to put my own feelings and life into perspective. While I was able to draw some parallels between my life in Synanon and what others had endured, it dawned on me that throughout history people had lived through and survived exceedingly grave and often grim circumstances. This knowledge helped me to mentally devise a kind of pain quotient related to human hardship.

  My Synanon experience could be considered hardly more than a bad cold in stark contrast to the experiences of those held in the harshness of the systemic crippling injustice of slavery. While I did not clearly conceptualize these ideas, my musings at nine years old were early sprouts of comprehension. A little Jewish girl in a Nazi concentration camp was fed only a bit of soup, if anything at all, on a daily basis, whereas I ate three meals a day. A slave girl could be sold and moved to a plantation far from her mother’s location. I did not see my mother much; however, she still remained in my life. Weighing, comparing, contrasting and recognizing that others had survived far worse helped me to rise above my condition and concerns for myself on many occasions.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sugar Freaks

  From my dorm window I saw in the distance a crowd of kids from the school running at top speed in my direction. Some of them were jumping as if on springs, and I heard faint sounds of yelling. I opened the window just as one boy broke free of the group and sprinted ahead, whooping at the top of his lungs.

  “What’s going on?” I called down.

  He kept running.

  My two roommates, Becky and Emily, joined me, and the three of us stared at the fast-approaching mob of our peers.

  “What’s happening?” Emily asked me.

  I shrugged and left the window with my roommates following closely behind. We walked out to the porch just as the fastest of the pack ran by. One of the kids shot a sideways glance at us and yelled hoarsely, “Sugar!”

  Some of the kids were dancing and spinning; others skipped-ran.

  “We can have sugar!” they cried.

  I bolted down the porch steps into the rushing stream of children and caught hold of one of the boys.

  “Is this true? It’s not a joke?”

  He grabbed my arms and began spinning me around, hugging me, then pushing me away.

  “It’s true! It’s true!”

  He continued to run, yelling out to any others who hadn’t yet heard that the ban on sugar was over.

  Joy.

  Everywhere I looked were bright, beaming faces. I took the hands of one of the merry-makers and we erupted in laughter, breaking into a 1950s twist before spinning round, then running to catch up with the others and help spread the word.

  Once we had gathered everyone, we turned and ran to the Shed. Pouring into the room, panting and talking over one another, we were shushed by some of the adults, who were listening with rapt attention to Chuck’s gravelly voice on the Synanon radio.

  “I just had a Snickers bar,” he said, his voice blasting from the speakers. “And it tasted fucking great.”

  A roar of cheers erupted from the crowd of us gathered in the dining hall. Like a headline on a news syndicate, Chuck’s announcement looped over and over along with VIP commentary about the Snickers incident and Chuck’s decision to lift the sugar ban.

  “He tasted a candy bar and decided it was really good!” one woman said as if she needed to say it aloud herself to be sure that it was true.

  People patted each other on the back, hugged and laughed. Some of the men cleared away the tables and chairs. Someone turned on music. Inside of a minute we created the block formation for the hoopla dance. Clapping, dipping our torsos, swiveling our hips and spinning in unison, we laughed and cheered while we celebrated.

  With the exception of the dinner party at my grandmother’s and a brief Synanon holiday in Visalia, California, it had been a few years since I’d had any real sweets. Throughout the ban I had not lost my intense cravings for white sugar.

  Before I arrived at Synanon, candy, colas, cookies and cake had been part of my regular diet as snacks and after every meal—so much so that I always felt thirsty because I rarely drank water. Whenever I asked for something to drink, someone handed me 7Up, Coca-Cola or Kool-Aid.

  On the street where I lived with my uncle and aunt, an ice cream truck came rolling around in the late afternoon, with its colorful advertisements of chocolate-dipped ice cream cones and Hostess treats pasted on the body of the vehicle. The truck enjoyed a booming business, consistently swarmed by children and adults queuing up to buy the same items that were available in the market not far away. I usually bought either a Honeybunn, similar to a cinnamon roll without the cinnamon, or banana-flavored Now and Laters, hard, square, chewy candies that stuck to my teeth.

  Theresa had been fond of the pink-and-white Mother’s circus animal cookies, while my father was a fan of Winchell’s Donuts. At Grandma Regina’s there were usually homemade pies, cakes and cookies available at all times.

  An absolute favorite of mine was a store-bought white birthday cake with fancy, swirly, multi-colored frosting. I missed this frosted cake so much that I sometimes drooled over a picture of a mandrill baboon in a wildlife book that I had in my possession because much of the animal’s face was formed into colorful dips and ridges that reminded me of cake frosting.

  In Synanon, we used saccharine in place of white sugar, despite the artificial sweetener’s acrid aftertaste. When we weren’t eating eggs and toast for breakfast, we often had Grape Nuts. Some of the children sprinkled their cereal with the powder from the pink packets placed in containers on the tables, but I ate mine plain. Nor did I touch the saccharin-laced birthday cakes. Gazing upon these cakes only depressed me. Despite their delectable appearance, they tasted the way I imagined cake batter would taste if powdered cleanser were added to it.

  White sugar wasn’t the only condiment omitted from our diet. At one point salt, too, had been prohibited and replaced with fake salt, which attacked my taste buds like a tangy Alka-Seltzer with the fizz factor dialed down. I stayed away from the stuff, and when my desire for salt became overpowering, I broke off chunks of the large salt licks attached to the corral fences for the cattle, though we kids had been forbidden from doing this and other children who’d had the same idea had been punished for it. When I was sure I was alone, I’d break off a piece of the salt and suck on it until I puked, and then I would suck some more.

  With the ban on sugar lifted, adults immediately scheduled trips to the grocery store. Bags of doughnuts, Twinkies, cookies, cakes, chocolate bars and ice cream were purchased and handed freely to us children by the armload. Some of the kids who’d already made plans to leave the property for a brief trip into town collected money from the rest of us and made shopping lists of requested treats.

  My first taste of sugar after years without it was not as great as I’d thought it would be. Though at first I was excited to receive an Oreo cookie, I could barely endure the first bite. It tasted terrible. How had I never noticed? The chocolate part was bad enough, but the icing inside tasted so sweet that I found it inedible. The fizzy lemon flavor of 7Up lingered on my tongue like watery, tangy pancake syrup.

  A gulp of Coca-Cola created the sensation that my teeth were dissolving in the high carbonation. Alarmed, I ran to the bathroom, opened my mouth and saw to my relief that my teeth were still intact. Doughnuts still tasted okay and some cakes did, too, but only if they were plain, without icing or frosting. Gradually my palate adapted, and once again I built u
p a tolerance for sugary foods, though I still care little for soda.

  The sudden release from years of sugar-deprivation seemed to turn the community into a horde of raving sugar lunatics. Everyone binged. Massive ice cream-eating contests became common. We’d file into the dining hall, where each person was given a giant wooden bowl large enough for four servings. We selected our flavors from five-gallon tubs, receiving two or more scoops of each flavor along with mounds of whipped cream, flavored syrups, nuts and maraschino cherries.

  Walking back to my table, I carried a bowl of ice cream so large and heavy it could have easily satisfied a party of six. Yet these giant overindulgent servings were small in comparison with the bowls placed before the contestants, who sat on a makeshift stage. At the announcement of “Go!” they would tuck in, shoveling the cold treat into their mouths among cheers and whistles from the audience, many of whom attempted to keep pace with the contestants. I was not a big fan of ice cream, so after a few bites I left the rest to melt into a soupy brown liquid, mildly regretting the waste.

  In Synanon we did everything in extremes. Disco parties were held often. Some began in the afternoon with a live production of early American Wild West culture. Dressed in our disco outfits of brightly colored polyester and Lycra spandex bell bottoms, skintight cat suits and miniskirts, with enormous platform shoes, we’d line up along the side of the road near the dining hall to watch the faux shootout. Groups of ten or twelve men dressed like vigilante cowboys from the 1800s would come galloping up on horses with holstered guns at their hips. They’d point their guns, which fired blanks, skyward, firing them off while whooping and pretending to assault one another. We stood clapping and cheering the showdown, which always ended in a duel. When one of the duelers inevitably received a mortal shot and fell to the ground, playing dead, the disco party started, with everyone rushing to the gambling rooms, which were open to all ages.