Tony says Dad was thinking with his ding-a-ling.
“All I ever wanted was a man to take care of me. Just a normal man.”
“Then why’d you marry a drug addict?” Grandma looks at Mom who holds a pillow on her lap, staring at the blank white walls. “I don’t know what you expect your father and I to do but at some point you need to learn that the world isn’t just some fantasyland. All the crazies and weirdos and here you are with no husband, no money, two kids and a shaved head. You look like a mental patient.”
Grandma doesn’t know that you have to be nice to Mom or she’ll go into the deep-russian.
“Who’s hungry?” Grandpa yells.
“Do you think that’s why we moved to California? So you could end up like this?”
Mom sits still on the couch like she’s trying to solve a problem in her head. “I just wanted to see you. We’ll leave soon.”
“And what are you going to do with them?” She lifts her palm toward the dining room table where Grandpa put the steaming-hot bowls of spicy chicken and rice. “You know the crazies are looking for you and you can’t hide those kids forever.”
CHAPTER 4
BLOOD ON THE DRIVEWAY
The apartment in East Oakland is on the second floor of a building that looks like a giant spaceship. There are blue stairways that look like jets and huge pipes on the roof that look like a nose pointing toward space. It’s our new home. It sits on a corner across from a gas station and a hamburger stand with an electric sign saying, “Oscar’s Char Broiled ¼ lb. Burgers.” Tony says there’s nothing better than a cheeseburger and fries but how would he know? We’ve never been to a restaurant.
There’s no furniture in the apartment when we move in so we take our clothes out of the brown grocery bags and make neat piles in the living room for a couch. Tony stacks the jackets for a bed and I make a table from our shoes so we can kick our feet up. It’s better than regular furniture because we can use our imaginations and make the pile into any shape we want.
When we lie down to stare at the ceiling, Mom sets up her record player. It’s a small plastic suitcase that unfolds into little speakers and a turntable. All she has to do is plug it in and suddenly the empty room is filled with voices and instruments, all the people she carries with her in her record collection: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, small white 45s of the Beatles and the Doors.
The record player is always on in the spaceship because it feels less empty that way.
She makes us chicken soup on a hot plate since there’s no stove and pours it into white plastic cups which she says saves us time because it means we don’t have to do dishes like other people. The shoe table won’t hold the soup and crackers so we sit on the floor, leaning back against the wall to listen to Joan Baez.
When she sings, her voice fills the room like she’s hanging over us, high and silky, a sad angel who makes us feel like we are swimming in a sea of Joan Baezes, surrounded by her voice. It gets in your ears and fills your head, surrounding it, bouncing off the clothing and the shoe table, the T-shirts and socks and underwear that make up the bed. There’s a long window on the front wall. We can hear the cars outside and someone yelling as they walk down the street while we blow on our cups of soup. Mom says it’s good that we are “with the people now and not holed up in some guarded fortress like Nixon.”
We are the only four people on earth. Tony, me, Mom, and Joan Baez. Her voice echoes off the tinny walls of our spaceship:
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it has been the ruin of many a poor girl
And me, oh God, I’m one.
Mom says Synanon was like a giant circle, bigger than anything and leaving feels like she’s outside of it, outside of herself which is also the circle. She doesn’t know who the person inside her head is without it. The space feels so small with only her.
She tells us about the Synanon band, the dancing they did every night after the Game. Everyone would gather in a big room and dance, letting their bodies shake and shiver and jump and flap. “We knew how to have a good time. No doubt about that,” she says, shaking her head and looking out the window at the flashing sign for Oscar’s Burgers. “And your father was a great dancer.” She says they danced all night. That it was special to dance with friends and they were in love and free from the eyes of the world. That was the good part about it. The music.
We drift to sleep. When I wake up, Mom is snoring on her back with Tony on one side and me on the other. It’s strange to be in a new place. The silence. The darkness. The strange voices from the sidewalk. Where are Dmitri and Bonnie and Clubby? Are they in the circle? Am I outside the circle now?
Mom tells us that things are different here in the World Outside Synanon. That the World Outside Synanon has different rules than Synanon did. We can let our hair grow and we can own bikes and kids live with their moms and dads. There’s no Game, which was a big circle where everyone would sit and yell at each other. Everyone in Synanon had to play it. It started as something only Dope Fiends did so that new Dope Fiends could learn from old Dope Fiends, because it’s hard for Dope Fiends to hear anything unless someone is yelling at them. At first it was something called Group Therapy but then it changed when the Old Man decided it needed to be more extreme. That’s when all the yelling happened.
People liked it for some reason so when all the Squares moved in, the people like Mom who didn’t do drugs but wanted to live in Synanon so they could change the world, they played it too. You could be mean in the Game. You could say anything. You could call someone an “asshole” or a “bastard” or a “piece of shit.” You could accuse them of doing bad things, say all the ways they were lying and running and hiding. You could say the worst things about them. But then when it was over, you had to be nice. You had to smile and hug the person you just called a piece of shit. They had to hug you back and pretend they weren’t mad and wait until the next Game to call you an asshole.
In the Game everyone was equal but Mom says that “some people were more equal than others,” because everyone knew you couldn’t say bad things about Chuck or the other leaders, even if they were mean, even if they made you get divorced and shaved your head and took your kids away.
That’s what made it a C-U-L-T.
Everything in the World Outside Synanon is so much bigger than everything used to be. That’s what I think when we go for a drive to San Jose. There are cars in the streets and huge buildings and buses filled with people all staring ahead, not talking to each other. The noise comes from machines. Jackhammers and lawn mowers, air conditioners and diesel engines shooting black smoke in the air. There’s so much movement. So many people. Why don’t they talk to each other?
We go to Oscar’s for lunch and Tony wants a whole cheeseburger. Mom says he’ll never finish it so we have to share one instead. It comes with a basket of hot, salty yellow French fries the size of our fingers that we cover in ketchup. When Mom cuts the Oscar burger in half, red juice and mustard squirt into the basket and Tony and I lift our halves to toast them like princes. I think this must be how rich people live with cheeseburgers for lunch whenever you want. Tony says Dad took him for burgers before but I don’t believe him because he eats his whole half, licks the salty juice off his hands then licks the waxy paper from the bottom of the basket.
We cross a huge bridge made of metal and concrete and see the water stretched out in all directions, the factories on the shoreline behind us, Alcatraz prison in the middle of the bay surrounded by boats. Everything is so big! What could have made it all? How could you think of everything at once?
It feels like something created by giants. Like they walked the earth and put a building here, a bridge there, kicking a tunnel into the mountain with their giant shoes.
It’s late by the time we get back from dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in San Jose and when we get to the top of the stairs of the s
paceship, the apartment door is wide open. Mom pulls Tony and me toward the railing. “Hello?” She leans forward squeezing my hand. “Is someone there?” We wait outside while she goes through the door.
Tony says maybe Dad came to visit so we look for his moto-cycle in the parking lot on the other side of the railing but we don’t see it anywhere.
We hear Mom’s voice coming from the inside of the apartment, “Oh, dear … For heaven’s sake … Well, shit.”
We go inside and find her sitting in the middle of the floor. Our stuff is everywhere, the bags turned over, the clothing and records spread out on the cream carpets.
“I don’t get it,” Mom says. “What could we possibly have that somebody would want to steal?”
We wait outside for the police and when they arrive, they nod at us as they walk by with their flashlights darting around the room, bursting through the big window in the front of the spaceship.
One of the two cops asks Mom questions from the doorway while she sits on the floor with her back against the wall. He’s got a brown mustache and a real live gun in a black holster on his waist. He wants to know if we had any valuables. Any jewelry or a TV set or credit cards?
Mom looks embarrassed as she shakes her head.
“We had a record player,” Tony says. It must be worth something since it’s what filled up the empty room.
Mom kneels down. We sift through the thrift-store jeans and socks, placing them in a big pile in the center of the room. Bob Dylan has a boot mark right through his leather jacket. Some of the other records are under clothes or thrown against the wall. The record player is gone.
The cop asks if it was valuable. Mom shakes her head and tells him it was just an old plastic thing.
* * *
THERE’S A PICTURE of Dad we keep in a small golden frame on the windowsill at the front of the apartment. He’s stretched out on his back smiling with his shaved head, sideburns, and big black mustache. I take it down sometimes to stare at it, trying to imagine where he is and what he’s doing. When I see my face in the mirror, I don’t see him. People say sons look like their fathers but I have corn-silk hair and big funny teeth, a pug nose and Dutch cheeks like Mom. Dad has black hair and a big Italian nose. There’s a darkness around his eyes, his skin deep brown, the color of caramel and there’s something to the smile, something like a flash of light, the feeling that he’s already laughing at the joke he wants to tell you.
Mom said he left Synanon too, that it’s just too crazy now that they’re splitting up marriages and forcing all the men to have vast-ectomies. Since the Old Man’s wife died, he decided no one should be married. So hundreds of couples had to get divorced. It was for the good of the world, he said. So they had a big meeting and decided everyone would get a new partner and one day everyone found out who their new husband or wife was, even if it was someone they didn’t know that well. Mom says that some people thought that was nuts and that’s when a lot of people started to leave. Because only a C-U-L-T would do a crazy thing like that.
This made the Old Man angry so he started a group that had guns and boots and trained how to fight and these men started beating people up who were trying to leave. They called them “splittees,” the people who tried to leave. “Dirty fucking splittees.”
Dad left too. He’s living with another woman and her daughter somewhere near Los Angeles now.
Phil is the only man we know. He’s a friend of Mom’s from Synanon. He parks his van in the long driveway next to the spaceship. He knocks on the door every few days so he can come inside to use our shower. He just left too and is still getting used to the World Outside Synanon. His orange VW camper van looks like a giant pumpkin. He’ll bow his head when he walks through the doorway, holding his towel and toothbrush in his hand, his shoulders hunched, the wire glasses, the soft voice asking about the soap. He stays for dinner sometimes before heading back out to the van where he sleeps at night.
His ex-wife is still in Synanon and so is his daughter, Darla. Mom says Phil wants Darla to live with him but Synanon won’t allow it so Phil went to a judge to prove Synanon is not a good place for a child to live. I hear them talking when I stay up late with the door open because the bedroom is too dark. He says he’s scared, that he got a visit from two men, two of the Old Man’s crew, who told him to “back off the legal stuff” or there could be trouble. He was about to sub-peena the Old Man, which is when you make someone go and face a judge. He thought if the judge knew about the School, how the babies are taken away from their parents like an orphanage, he would let him have his daughter back. But he’s scared of the men because everyone knows they’re beating people up. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to see his daughter.
I wonder if Dad feels this way. If he looks at pictures of me the way I look at pictures of him or if he’s too busy on his moto-cycle in his new place with his new woman in Los Angeles.
Darla comes for dinner with Phil and we all eat Oscar’s Burgers because it’s a celebration since he hasn’t seen her for so long. Darla is my age and looks more like a porcelain doll than a kid. She has creamy-white skin and black hair cut straight across her eyebrows. She smiles with crooked teeth and eats her fries as she sits in Phil’s lap. After dinner she and I play with the Legos from the big bag that we got at the Goodwill on University Avenue. She says her mom is the prettiest in the whole world and I say my dad is the coolest in the world and Phil and Mom say, “Hey, what about us?”
* * *
WHEN WE MOVE to the house on Spaulding Avenue in Berkeley, Phil moves in with us. He brings his orange VW van, following us as we drive in the old white Vega with wooden doors that Grandpa bought us for eight hundred dollars. It’s packed with pots and pans and clothes that we got at the Salvation Army.
The street looks like a tunnel beneath the branches of the big trees that line the sidewalk. There are leaves on the ground everywhere, over the pavement, the gutters, forming a brown-and-yellow blanket on the lawns and driveways. Mom says we’ll have our very own house where we’ll live with Phil and even Darla sometimes and we won’t hear the neighbors through the walls or have to walk up the big stairs of the spaceship with our bags of food from the food bank where we have to wait in the long line for bags of flour and sugar and milk and the orange rubbery cheese that’s good for noodles or grilled cheese sandwiches.
It’s a brown house with a big porch with nine concrete steps and a long driveway running down the side. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom, a real kitchen, a living room, even a tree in the backyard covered in white flowers. We run inside and call dibs on the bigger bedroom which Phil says we were going to have anyway since the three of us have to share it.
I like Phil and I wonder if this is what dads are like. He doesn’t hug me, but sometimes he puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it and I feel a warmth in my chest like a hug and it’s good. I know he’s not my dad but I like that he lives with us because it’s safer with more people.
Is this what it means to have a family?
When he gets home, he lifts Darla up in his skinny arms and she clings to him like a little monkey. I think how lucky she is to be with her dad. I don’t even mind when Mrs. Morris thinks he’s my father. She lives next door with her two kids. “You should tell your dad it’s garbage day,” she says to me from the porch next door. I don’t know what to say because my dad is in the golden picture frame, in a house in another city with other people, so I don’t say anything.
Phil walks out and says he already knows it’s garbage day. He puts his hand on my shoulders and squeezes them and I feel the warmth because I know he doesn’t mind if she thinks he’s my dad even though I already have a dad. It means I don’t need to explain to her that he’s gone and we’re sad about it.
A pretend family is better than no family. It’s better than being at a school that’s really an orphanage where you wake up and there’s no one to talk to.
Mom says single mothers have it the hardest in the world and Mrs.
Morris is a single mother and we don’t understand how hard it is and it’s not her fault we were in the school like an orphanage even though she sent us there and we shouldn’t make her feel bad about it because Dad would’ve died without that place and all she ever wanted was a man to take care of her and we’re not sad now, we’re happy because we can be a family even though we know it’s just pretend.
She lies down on the bed and her face goes blank and we know she has the deep-russian so I rub her back and tell her I’m not sad.
When it rains, Phil sweeps the water from the yellow floor in the kitchen because it seeps in from the back porch beneath the door. There’s a drainpipe with a hole that splashes water like a faucet that gets into the house and makes a little lake on the kitchen floor. It’s nice to be in a house though. He even turns the garage at the end of the long driveway into a playroom for Darla and me. It’s got a concrete floor and high wooden shelves where he puts the toys.
Darla and I play in there all day. There’s a big rug from Goodwill on the floor so it isn’t so cold even though we have to wear sweaters when the chill comes.
Mom says everyone in Synanon went crazy. They think we belong to them. They think we are their kids, not hers. Darla and I have to stay in the garage because Mom says they might try to find us and take us back. I guess it’s safer in there but it gets old just sitting on the concrete all day. I know she’s scared for us. I think the men who spoke to Phil scared her too.
Some days we can hear the ice cream truck on the street, the slam of screen doors and the kids from next door pedaling their bikes trying to chase after it. We hear them playing freeze tag or hopscotch or drawing pictures on the sidewalk with chalk. We listen to them talk, trying to remember which is which. They’re lucky since they get to go outside. “That’s Sarah. She’s the tall one with the curly hair and freckles. She lives in the green house with the flower bushes out front. I think she got a new bike.”
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