I like Grandpa Frank because he talks to us and whenever we leave to go somewhere, he gives us a “smack on the fanny,” which means a hard hit on the butt. He’s funny about it, lining us up one by one. It’s true that his hands are very strong. He lets me grab his fingers and squeeze as hard as I can while he laughs.
He’s always making little jokes with us. We’ll say, “What are we doing today, Grandpa?”
And he’ll say, “Today, we are going to the dump.”
We’ll laugh and say, “No we’re not! We’re gonna play!” Because we know he’s going to take us to collect golf balls in his golf cart or to see his boat, the little white one he keeps at the dock.
Grandma will lean in and say, “Stop teasing the boys, Frank.”
“Jokes! It’s important to laugh, you know.”
Grandma is skinny with blue-white hair and small teeth so that you can barely see them when she smiles, if she smiles. Her face is bunched up, like she’s hiding something, something that escapes little by little through the day as she sits in her favorite chair in a thin blue robe across from Grandpa, drinking from a tall cup filled with ice and “Dutch.” That’s what she calls it: “Frank, dear, will you refill my Dutch?” Grandpa gets up from his throne and walks over to a small counter where he pours an orangish-brown liquid from a crystal bottle into the tall glass. It smells like sweet gasoline. She drinks the Dutch all day long every day and as she gets sleepier, her meanness leaves her like air from a balloon so that by the time dinnertime comes, she wants us to come sit by her. She smiles with her little teeth and says, “Hi schweety, are you happy here? Would you like a piece of candy?”
Mom says Grandma’s family lived in America before she moved to Dutch. Her dad was a coal miner and their family did something called quaking, which made them Quakers, so Grandma couldn’t do fun stuff like dance or play cards. One day she moved to New York to become a nurse which is where she met Grandpa who took her back to Dutch.
The mornings are worse for her. She says, “I have such a headache. Frank, dear, will you bring me my pills?” She shuffles her feet when she walks like she’s afraid to take steps too big while Grandpa Frank gets her pills or her slippers or her breakfast or another sweating glass of Dutch delivered at eleven fifteen A.M. sharp.
Mom is gone in the afternoons when Tony and I play outside on the grass. Grandpa sits on his chair and calls out, “A dit dit dit … Watch out for the bees.” I don’t know if this is Dutch or if it’s just how grandpas talk because I’ve never known another grandpa. They were in our storybooks with their white hair and bent backs. They have something to do with the moms and the dads. They seem permanent, like the trees. Grandpa tells us we have to be nice to Mom. She’s been through so much.
Grandma says at least she “finally got away from that awful place and good riddance to that drug addict ex-husband of hers.”
I know she’s talking about Dad but in Synanon everyone was a drug addict so I don’t understand why she’s so mad about it. Anyway we never used the words “drug addict.” We would just say someone was a Dope Fiend. People said this with pride and I’m pretty sure that’s what we are and if someone were to ask us whether we are white or black or Dutch or Italian, I’m not really sure but I know we’re all Dope Fiends because that’s all anyone ever talks about.
Tony draws monsters. I draw superheroes. Tony draws big battle scenes with tanks and soldiers and explosions, beasts with horns and big teeth that drip blood. They hold axes and clubs and guns in their claws. My superheroes fly through the air trying to kill the monsters. It’s never clear who wins. Grandpa says we should draw something nice for Mom so I draw a picture of her with long hair because even though it’s shaved all the way to the scalp and everybody stares at her when we go to Goodwill, she says it used to be long and pretty and that’s the way she likes to see herself in pictures. Plus she says men like long hair and she wants to be pretty for a man and no man wants a single mom with a bald head.
Mom gets an album and shows me photos from when she was growing up in Holland. She shows me the house where they lived. She says she grew up speaking Dutch which sounds like if you speak with peanut butter and crackers in your mouth. She didn’t come to the United States until she was fourteen and there was no one to speak Dutch with anymore so she spoke English or she didn’t speak at all.
She tells me there were bomb craters all around the neighborhood that she used to play in. They were like giant tears in the earth, like a piece of the earth had been scooped out. There was a war and Grandpa fought in it and that’s when she was born and afterward she lived in a big house but there was still rubble everywhere and those giant holes in the ground right in the middle of where everybody lived.
I ask her if she ever saw the bombs go off. She says it was all over by then but that craters from a war are a good place for a kid to go and hide.
CHAPTER 3
C-U-L-T
No one ever tells us we escaped from a cult. No one uses that word, except Grandma. Everyone else calls it Synanon or sometimes they say it was a “commune.” And everyone says it was great, “before it went bad.” That’s how they put it. Like it was milk that went sour.
When Mom argues with Grandma in the living room, she says that it saved our lives. She’ll put her hands up and say, “Where was I supposed to go?”
Grandma says, “You could’ve come home! I knew it was a mistake sending you to Berkeley.” Mom doesn’t know what to do when people get mad at her. It’s like she’s missing the piece of the brain made for yelling so instead she crumples up like a piece of paper and buries her head under pillows. She tells us how important Berkeley was. How she went off to college when she was only fifteen because she was so smart and she met all kinds of new people there and she learned how to change the world by sitting down in different places so they could beat Thatasshole Reagan.
She marched and she sat and she sang and they got hit with tears gas because they needed to stop a war (it was in a place called Vietnam) and have Civil Rights but Thatasshole Reagan didn’t want those things so he sent soldiers to launch tears gas at them which made them cry. They sat on the street with their arms locked and the soldiers on horses came straight at them and they weren’t sure if they were going to die but that’s what you have to do if you want to change the world.
Mom always says, “Synanon was mild compared to Berkeley.” Berkeley was the center of the world, she says. And the government was killing young men “to defend a lie.” I don’t know what the lie was but I bet she was scared. She says the bodies of those young boys were hidden. Like we’re supposed to forget they died at all. I don’t know who these boys are or how old they were or if we’re next. And I’m proud of Mom for trying to stop it and protect the boys like us, even though Thatasshole Reagan threw tears gas at her (which might explain why she cries so much, it’s the gas).
I wonder about the bodies. Where did they hide them? Could I stumble on one in the bushes outside Grandma and Grandpa’s house? Are people sad?
Mom says that Synanon was going to change the world, before it went bad. Synanon was going to be the new way people lived, all together, being honest and free and not taking drugs. She says people needed a new way to live because the old way wasn’t working anymore and she was proud to be part of it, this new group of people who were going to change the world.
It all sounds great when she tells it but did they have to make it so the kids were alone so much?
“Synanon was mild?” Grandma gets so mad when Mom says that. “They took your kids, Gerry, and put them in that, that place.” She spits the word out like a piece of meat caught in her small teeth.
“Synanon had a good school.” The School is where they put the kids when they took us from our parents. It’s where we all lived from the time we were six months old. Since Chuck, the Old Man, said that Dope Fiends would just mess up their kids anyway, we were all put in a building together to become children of the universe. You had to listen to Chu
ck. We had Demonstrators who were like teachers and classes and songs and I was lucky because I had a Bonnie. She would hug me every day and sing songs with me and call me “Suuuuuun” and ask me what I want for a snack.
Most of the other kids didn’t have a Bonnie though and some never even saw their moms or their dads. They just never came to visit. Dmitri said he doesn’t remember his mom’s face. She was somewhere else. He didn’t know where his dad was. The Demonstrators say we don’t need our parents because we have each other. But we don’t like sharing our toys and I didn’t know who to talk to when I woke up with a bad dream or fell off the monkey bars.
The older kids say that in the World Outside Synanon kids live with their parents and their parents take care of them. They hug you and kiss you and talk to you and pick you up. And it’s the same ones every day. They take you places and those are all your people and the whole group is something called a “family.”
All the kids in Synanon wish they had one of those.
Even if the mom or the dad was a Dope Fiend or busy trying to change the world. At least you weren’t alone.
Some of the kids were very sad. Tony used to sit alone at the edge of the playground all day. He would turn away when one of the Demonstrators tried to hug him. He doesn’t trust the adults and he doesn’t play with other kids that much. When Mom came to visit, she would say he’s just like that and he needs to learn how to “deal with his anger.” But maybe it’s because someone did bad things to him. That happened sometimes. The kids would get hit really hard or locked in a closet and there was no mom or dad to tell because they lived somewhere else and you couldn’t even remember their faces.
Maybe it’s just because he was alone so much. He’s almost seven and I don’t think Mom knows what it’s like to be alone for almost seven years.
Mom says it was “a good school.”
“It was an orphanage!” Grandma screams. “That’s what you call a place where strangers raise your kids!” Grandma says that Mom doesn’t even know who put us to bed or who woke us up or who taught us to read. She says we were sitting ducks. (We did play Duck Duck Goose a lot.) “You made them orphans, Gerry!” Grandma will point at us from her chair as we pretend not to listen. She has less control by the late afternoon, after her third or fourth glass of Dutch.
Mom doesn’t hear her. She’s good at not hearing people. If we tell her we’re hungry, she’ll say, “No you’re not. You ate earlier.” If one of us says, “I’m sad,” she tells us it’s not true, that we’re happy now because we’re with her.
It’s strange for someone to tell you your own feelings but maybe she knows better than we do.
She never says, “Why are you sad?” or “It’ll be okay.” It’s like we’re not allowed to be sad. We’re not allowed to be anything but what she tells us. She won’t hit us or scream. She’ll just wrap herself up in a ball on the couch and let her face go all blank. She’ll say, “It’s not my fault,” as she rocks her knees on the bed. She shakes her head and stares or she starts to cry until one of us tells her it’ll be okay, that we’re not sad, Mom, we were just kidding. We’re happy now because we are with her. Then she’ll wipe her tears and tell us she missed us every day.
Sometimes when we talk to her, she just stares at the ceiling with her hands on her chest and her face goes blank like she isn’t there at all. Grandpa says she’s sad but Grandma calls it the “deep-russian.” Tony will shake her shoulder or flash his hand in front of her face. We’re not sure what to do because we don’t know her very well. We only know her from the visits. And if she has the “deep-russian” then we know it’s our job to get her out of it because who else is going to do it?
We know she hates Thatasshole Reagan because she and Grandma argue about it. They argue about everything. Mom says, “Reagan is a fascist, Mother.” Or, “If Thatasshole wins the presidency, we won’t have a thing in the world.” When Mom says this, Grandma stares at her like something is ticking inside her, something turning and turning alone in her head like the crushed ice at the bottom of her glass.
“He was governor. You kids didn’t stop anything. It was a big tantrum. A tantrum with slogans and songs and drugs. Why couldn’t you just stay at Mills College? Why did you have to leave for Berkeley?”
Mom laughs when Grandma says that because everyone knows you couldn’t use drugs in Synanon. That was the whole point. She tells her that the people in Synanon were starting a better world. Then she’ll say, “I hated Mills, Mother. All those future Stepford wives learning how to be obedient little cogs in the machine of commerce.”
“At least they got to lead normal lives. You go off and join some cult.”
There’s that word again. C-U-L-T. I know my letters because everyone at Synanon knows their letters, even the little kids. My favorite one is O. I like to imagine there’s a whole world on the other side of it, a quiet place you can go to take a nap if you can just make yourself small enough to fit through the middle.
“C-U-L-T” is an ugly word. It looks like the C is spitting the U right at the L. The T is standing still with its arms out, trying to keep its distance from the other letters. They don’t seem like four letters that want to be in the same word together. Maybe that’s why everyone looks so mad when they say it.
“Well, I wish I hadn’t given them my babies,” Mom whispers. She looks at us. She always tells us Dad would’ve died without Synanon because he was such a Dope Fiend that he ended up in prison and he needed to go to Synanon and live there and play the Game so he could be out of prison and clean from drugs and not die.
Grandpa cooks dinner in the kitchen and Grandma is in her stuffed green chair in a robe, the glass of Dutch on the tray next to her.
“I liked Jimmy. Everyone did. He was funny.” When Dad visited us on his moto-cycle, you could hear the noise from the engine echoing off the hills and fields. We’d stop whatever we were doing and run to the front of the School because we knew it was him and he was a Tribe Leader, which meant he was really important in Synanon. Even Chuck respected him because nobody was tougher than Dad. He managed the gas station on Pico where the auto mechanics worked back before he moved to Tomales Bay because everyone said he knew a lot about cars, and people. He’d get off the bike and turn off the engine and we’d run up to him and he’d scoop us up.
We felt safe with Dad even though Grandma says mean things about him. “I know he quit the heroin, but I’ll never understand how you could marry someone who just got out of prison.”
Tony says Dad went to Synanon after an overdose, which is when you take too many drugs and your body goes to sleep. Some friends just dropped him on the front porch one day. Chuck, the Old Man, let him in and Dad spent a week on the couch shivering and throwing up into a bucket. That’s how the heroin gets out of your body, through all the puke.
Mom gives Grandma a sharp look then points at us.
“How could you trust a man like that?”
Grandma is cooking rice with chicken that she learned to make for Grandpa when he was in a place called “Indianezia.” It’s my favorite. He’ll stay in the kitchen looking after it while Mom and Grandma argue. Grandpa says that after he got home from the war, he had a company that took boats from Dutch to a place called Indianezia so that people in Dutch could have things from there. The house is filled with masks and little statues of smiling women in pointy gold hats, wooden men with bones through their noses that he brought back from Indianezia. They had a big house in Dutch where Mom and her sister Pam, who is something called an aunt, and her brother Jon, who is something called an uncle (those are things that happen in “families”), all lived with him and Grandma. They even had a maid who lived there with her husband and they took care of the babies a lot of the time. Mom says that’s who raised her, the nanny, because Grandpa had his boats and Grandma had her Dutch.
Maybe that’s why she put us in the School, because she didn’t think parents were supposed to raise their kids.
This was before they
moved to America when Mom was fourteen years old so she and Jon and Pam could go to good American colleges like Stanford.
When Uncle Jon comes to visit, you can hear him for miles. He drives a big, loud moto-cycle like Dad. He doesn’t look like the Synanon people with their shaved heads because he’s got a long beard and long blond hair. Mom says he came to visit us in Synanon once and just sat in the back thinking all the people were weird. He’s nice to us, making jokes like Grandpa does.
Aunt Pam visits too with her kids who are something called cousins (there sure are a lot of titles to keep track of when you have something called a family). Their names are Marci and Paul and they play with us on the floor or draw at the table. Uncle Jon gave us another cousin named Heidi. Cousins are good because they’re like friends who look like you. Aunt Pam has Dutch cheeks like Mom and a warm laugh and she’ll hug us and tell us she missed us when we were “in that place.” Mom will give her a look and everyone gets quiet.
Mom says our dad “wasn’t so bad,” and Grandma gets so angry. “He was a criminal! And a junkie! And he left you for a tramp.” I pretend to look away. “A good man would’ve stayed. A good man would’ve gotten you out of that horrible place!”
Mom says that she and Dad are “friends” now and that they both “love us very much.” I’m not sure what a tramp is but since everyone lived together in Synanon, Mom had to walk downstairs the day after Dad left while I was still in her belly and Dad was sitting in the big common room with the tramp on his lap. Mom says she knew then that she had to be strong for me because it was her job to guard me because I was a special life that had to be born into the world.
Hollywood Park Page 2