Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  I’m surprised by how popular Synanon was in American pop culture. I didn’t realize there was a Hollywood movie made about it, starring Chuck Connors and Eartha Kitt. The Oscar-winning actor Edmond O’Brien played Chuck Dederich.

  I didn’t know Bob Dylan referenced Synanon in his song “Lenny Bruce,” from his 1981 record, Shot of Love. The first two lines are

  Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lived on and on

  Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon.

  All of it paints a picture in my mind of an experimental living community known for getting drug addicts clean that became a quest for something more: the dizzy, utopian dream of the 1960s come to life. At the time, before it went bad, it was cool. Actors and directors and artists hung out there, some of them playing the Game, like the comedian Steve Allen and the psychologist Abraham Maslow. The jazz musician Art Pepper went to Synanon to get clean, so did Frank Rehak from Miles Davis’s band. Joe Pass even put out an album called Sounds of Synanon.

  The story had changed by the mid-1970s, by the time it had become a multimillion-dollar nonprofit, steeped in a battle with the IRS over its nonprofit status because of rumors of violence. There was an NBC Nightly News exposé in 1978 saying as much, which caused a stir in the community and led to threats made against NBC executives.

  In the midst of the IRS investigation, the LAPD raided Chuck’s compound and that’s when the tapes came out. The Old Man, who had once forbade violence, who had made nonviolence a pillar of the community, could be heard saying his infamous words: “We’re not going to mess with the old-time, turn-the-other-cheek religious postures. Our religious posture is: Don’t mess with us. You can get killed dead, literally dead. I am quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs, and next break his wife’s legs, and threaten to cut their child’s arm off. That is the end of that lawyer. I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk.”

  It’s strange to see these things in print because they were always legends, a type of folklore we heard through the years in bits and pieces: the Tomales Bay compound, Chuck Dederich, the violence, the Imperial Marines, the thousand rifles, the Game, the shaved heads, the forced divorces and forced vasectomies. I come upon a story about a man beaten nearly to death in his driveway by men from Synanon while a little boy watched from the porch, my hands shaking, tears in my eyes, thinking about Phil, his face, the dark figures, the body lying limp in the driveway. That little boy.

  I’m surprised by how violent it all is. Not just the violence against Phil and the other splittees, not just Chuck’s paranoid words, but the violence of dropping out of society completely, the violence of cutting off contact with family members outside, of taking children from parents, husbands from wives. This is what it means to join a cult.

  The Game is affectionately known in this literature as “attack therapy.” But I’ve never heard it described that way. Dad always said it was just a way to get through the hardened defenses of drug addicts because it was like AA in that there was a share, but unlike AA the rest of the group then picked the share apart, pointed out the lies, criticized, screamed and yelled, and made accusations—all to get the addict to admit to his problem. Except over many years, the Game transformed and became a form of brainwashing. Games lasted days, sometimes entire weekends. And eventually even the Old Man admitted it was a tool used to enforce the will of the leadership: for people to get forced vasectomies, to give up their kids, to split up marriages, abort babies and commit violence.

  The School is hardly mentioned and when it is, it’s glossed over, as if the children are accessories, as if the story of the commune that went rotten like bad milk did not affect them at all, as if it only happened to their parents, as if they were secure, safe from it within the walls of the orphanage where they were placed. I scour the articles and books for pictures of them, those skinny kids in thrift-store clothes, straining with toothy grins and shaved heads. I wonder about them. I wonder where they are and what they’re doing and if they’re having the same problems as I am, if they feel just as bewildered about their place in the world, their loneliness, their desire to flee.

  The articles reference a “school” in which children are raised “communally,” like a kibbutz. It doesn’t mention that unlike on a kibbutz the children don’t live with their parents; they don’t even have interaction with their parents. They aren’t even allowed to call them their parents. “Every adult in Synanon is your parent,” is what they used to say. There’s something powerful about the Orwellian turn of phrase in which everyone calls it a “school,” as if with the use of this word the separation, the isolation, the abuse, the loneliness and the neglect of orphans can simply be swept under the rug like it never happened.

  * * *

  SINCE THE LETTER, Mom has left me alone but on my twenty-first birthday I receive a ten-page single-spaced letter explaining to me the circumstances around my birth: that she lost friends, lost prestige, that she was ostracized from her social circles, all because the Old Man had decided that there would be no more children born into Synanon and any new pregnancies must be aborted, and she refused to abort me.

  She said she was “gamed” about it, which means she withstood all that “attack therapy,” people screaming at her, calling her disloyal and ungrateful and arrogant, all because she wouldn’t abort me. She says she felt that she was guarding a special life and it was her job to bring it into the world. It’s a difficult thing to understand because I’m grateful she did this for me; I even admire her grit in the face of all that pressure. But it also feels like an incredible weight, like she is trying to explain, in exacting detail, why I owe her so much.

  By the time we escaped, they were kidnapping children of splittees, bringing them back against their will. They were beating the Punk Squad kids, the court-appointed juvenile delinquents sent to Synanon to straighten out. Strangest of all, Chuck was drinking again. When he was arrested in 1978 for assault and conspiracy to commit murder, he was hammered-out-of-his-mind drunk.

  The letter is her birthday present to me. I have a sickening feeling in my stomach and I wish she could be like other parents, simply glad for my existence without placing so much of a feeling like a balance is owed. So it seems like one of those protective illusions she carries, a story she tells that absolves her from being a parent. I never respond to the letter.

  When I write a term paper on Synanon, trying to weave together the psychology of mind control and my family history with it, my TA, a kindly woman named Anne, tells me she wants to submit my paper to a psychology publication. I’m flattered but I tell her that I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t want everyone knowing my secrets. She has straight black hair and creamy white skin. We are sitting in her tiny office in the psych department at the front of the Romanesque quad.

  “You know this stuff isn’t your fault, right? Mikel, these aren’t your secrets.” I don’t know how to tell her about the shame I feel, the sense of being marked and cursed.

  Anne is gentle, her voice soft and warm. “It’s nothing you could control. It was a cult. And where you lived was not good for children. Are you familiar with the theory of attachment? The idea that we base all of our relationships on the attachments we form with our parents early in life, especially in the first three years? I wouldn’t be surprised if every child of Synanon has an attachment disorder. Do you know what that is?”

  She shows me an article she’s clipped for me. The risk of developing attachment disorders is higher in children who live in orphanages, or have been separated from their parents for long periods of time, or have a mother with depression. The fear of abandonment causes them to feel isolated, to create private worlds where they live alone. Some choose anger and become sullen and withdrawn in the presence of adults. Others are extremely outgoing, unable to distinguish between adults whom they are supposed to trust and those they cannot. For them, their lives are a performance, a kind of frenzied dance in which they feel like they must impress,
as if that impression is the only way they can receive love. Children with attachment disorders grow up to have difficulty in relationships, which they seek out of need and then destroy out of fear, resulting in a lack of self-worth and a sense of isolation.

  It’s too much. I feel a sense like a dam about to break. She puts a hand on my shoulder. I keep thinking, Is this me? Me and Tony? I hardly know this woman but maybe that makes it easier and I start to cry right there in that tiny office in the psychology department in the Romanesque quad at the precipice of the Dream. I hide my face and wipe my eyes. I feel so embarrassed, so weak, so fragile. Goddamn it, this is not supposed to be me. I was supposed to get out. The castle, the high walls, the quiet room with all those ghosts. I never imagined it would lead me here.

  “Children experience loneliness like shame.” I repeat the line I’ve read under my breath. I write it in my notebook.

  Children experience loneliness like shame. They imagine the reason they are alone is that there is something wrong with them, that they have done something bad, something that makes them too gross to touch.

  I think back to the School, to all my questions about who raised us, who was with us, who picked us up when we cried, when we were sick, when we were upset. My brother sitting alone on that playground until he was nearly seven. The shaved heads, the toothy grins. Those boys and girls. What becomes of us? What role do we play in our fate? Are we just destined to be ashamed and alone? Marked for failure or insanity or, more prosaically, to feel imprisoned in our minds, longing for the very connections we are too broken to make?

  I’m grateful for the information but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m not given a counselor to call, nor does the paper on Synanon or any of the psychology projects lead me to any kind of lasting change. It’s only a description. It’s like a disembodied voice telling you in great detail that you are currently falling off a cliff: “You seem to be falling. You will soon hit the ground at approximately one hundred miles per hour. Your brain will splatter on the rocks below. This is because of the force of gravity from the mass of the earth acting upon your body at the rate of 9.8 meters per second per second. You were abandoned and abused and you have an attachment disorder.”

  Okay.

  * * *

  THE JAM SESSIONS with the Foothill kids become more serious. We bring in guitar pedals and crank the amps. I speed up a few of the countless bad folk songs I’ve written to rock-and-roll tempo. Eric, the tall blond-haired drummer from the Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, keeps pace as I pound on my guitar and scream off-key into an old mike we’ve duct taped to a broken lamp. Nothing about it sounds good. But there are occasional moments when the loud guitar and the booming drum fuse together with a certain impromptu lyric and there is a brief feeling of transcendence, as if witnessing an apparition, a parting of the clouds to reveal a blinding beam of light and I feel like I’m floating weightless.

  The moment passes and the guitar sounds thin, the drum is off tempo, and my low, raspy voice resembles a chain saw that has hit a knot and stalled.

  Dad calls me once a week and we talk about classes and sports. I tell him about Saint Augustine, Maimonides, or cognitive dissonance and he tells me about the offensive schemes of the San Diego Chargers. It seems like a bargain we’ve made, to inhabit each other’s world like this, to have this closeness with another grown man. He doesn’t mind the purple hair and rock and roll. All he says about it is, “Things are starting to get interesting.”

  A group of us find ourselves at the Fillmore in San Francisco one night to see the band Weezer. The place has the contradictory air of faded glory: the smell of stale beer and old tile juxtaposed with a huge crystal chandelier and a raised stage suited for tragedy.

  The opening act shuffles onto the stage. The lead singer is a tall, skinny, balding young man in thick glasses who proceeds to plug in his guitar, look to his bandmates and start a riff. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. He growls into the mike while his guitar player screeches something off-key and atonal, a mix of sweet melody and frustration. The lanky singer screams, “You’ve got it all wrong! You can’t get it right!” and I can’t help but bob my head.

  I ask Eric their name and he tells me they are called Archers of Loaf.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  He shrugs.

  By the fifth or sixth song the singer is growling, “The people gathered all around the radio to hear the transmission from the devil’s soul, locked and stunned and sick and cold, toasting their dead hero.” The drums are pounding, as loud and overwhelming as any hard rock show, but nothing about it carries the whiff of preening falsehood. It’s all frustration and anger, a chaos among the blur of bad haircuts.

  I think, Why is this not the biggest band in the world?

  I don’t care that it’s devolved into discord and noise. I want the chaos. I want the noise. I feel relieved to be at the show, to be anonymous in the heat of bodies. There’s no way this band knows about the cacophony of shame and anger swirling around my head, but it’s as if they’re playing the soundtrack to it. To be precisely broken. To just embrace it. To lose yourself in the crowd, find yourself in the dark.

  We begin to go to shows as often as possible. To see Radiohead or Pavement, local punk bands or touring folksingers, artists who perform their pain onstage, who turn it into something beautiful or angry or cathartic or strange. I’m reminded of the long days listening to the Cure, the Secret Place where it was just Robert Smith and me, pounding fists into the bed at eleven years old wishing I was someone else, somewhere else. Did I realize I was wishing I was here? Right here with the energy from the crowd, the clapping, the feeling of buzz in my teeth like there might just be a riot tonight after all? Because I want it. I want the fucking riot. I want us to throw the chairs in the middle of the floor and light them on fire, to dance around them while we scream. And to know it might happen—that we might end up in the parking lot, torches in hand as we turn over a car, shirts off, fists raised, a primal bellow echoing up from our chests—that’s the whole reason we’re here.

  Maybe it’s the beer. Maybe it’s a desire to not go home, to not really know what that is. Maybe like my parents, like all the people who joined the cult, it’s a desire to just reject it all, the whole damn society, and start over. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m drunk, for the first time in my life, truly drunk and not caring about it, not thinking endlessly about the “addiction that runs in families” and just pounding vodka instead. Maybe I’m tired, from all the meetings, books and pamphlets, of being excluded from the basic desire to Just Not Give a Fuck. I’m a little scared because I know “alcoholism is a family disease” and I am thus playing with fire, but I guess that’s the point: the fire. I want to do whatever it takes to burn it all down. Maybe I’m lonely because there is no place for me at school, among all that crushing optimism. But there’s a place for me here in the darkness, here with the crowd where I can scream and wail and feel precisely weird. A place where you can take a kind of pride in pain. You wear it like a badge of honor the way a soldier wears medals on a uniform, symbols of battles fought long ago. Yes, that’s right, I’m not from the fucking suburbs. No, my dad was not a fucking lawyer. No, we were not tucked in and read a story at bedtime. We had nightmares and demons and it taught us to run. These are scars. All of them. Scars. And they are not going away. No, I don’t feel okay about it.

  Take your pain and make it useful. That’s what it means to be an artist. I never want to go home anyway.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME graduation arrives, we’ve been to at least a hundred shows. I know the rules by heart, the disinterested attitude, the ratty thrift-store clothes, a certain bob of the head that becomes a sway, the mosh, a frenzied jump around the circle pit, if there is one. It becomes second nature. Eric and the other kids from Foothill College are all planning to play music with their lives. I don’t know what I’m planning to do with mine yet. It
feels like my scholarship was a gift and with it came an obligation to give back, like a debt is owed to my community for the gift of an education. It occurs to me that teaching at a lower-income school might be a way to begin to repay this debt, so that’s my plan for the fall.

  I decide to invite Mom to graduation. We have not spoken since the letter. There’s a kind of quiet acknowledgment when she arrives, a formality we fake for appearances after not speaking for so long, as if the previous three years were simply a hiccup. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. She arrives, along with Dad and Bonnie and Grandma and Grandpa Posner, Tony and his son. Everyone tells me how proud they are. Dad most of all. He’s gone from being suspicious of higher education to being one of those parents who walks around in a Stanford sweatshirt chatting up anyone who will listen about the rigors of his son’s academic life. I don’t mind. It feels like a concession, like we’ve acknowledged our differences and decided to tell each other about our individual worlds. He’s still my favorite person to watch a Laker game with.

  In the morning, a few of the guys from the track team I stayed friends with and I decide to wear track spikes and T-shirts that say “Stanford Track” beneath our robes, which we plan to unzip as we run ahead of the crowd of incoming graduates at Stanford Stadium before the commencement address. We smile as we do this, our hands raised in triumph, sprinting in front of the procession.