So the people in the game club were lonely people, and I found out that even the ones that had money and were goodlooking and had way-out cars were just as hung up as everybody else. They didn't know how to communicate, they felt inferior, they were self-conscious, they didn't feel adequate. Synanon was great: it enabled them to release their hostilities in the games. They could make fun of people and say things they could never say outside. After a while they felt free. They found out about themselves, they found out that other people were the same, and it gave them self-confidence-they realized they weren't alone. It was ideal for them. They could come and go home, go home to their nice places.
There were squares who after a certain length of time decided they liked the Synanon way of community living, so they moved in. They moved into apartments across the street from the club and worked outside at different jobs and gave most of their money to Synanon. They spent all their free time in Synanon playing games and hanging out, and they could live there with their friends, away from the violence of the outside world, because there was never any violence in Synanon. That was a no-no. The main rules were no dope or alcohol and no physical violence, so Synanon was very safe in a world that's awfully frantic and crazy.
For a while it was all I could do to make it through the days and nights. Then I started feeling a little better. One day some people came into the infirmary with some tapes and a tape recorder, and I thought they were going to play music, but instead they put on a tape of some girl copping out about a guy, an Italian, who had balled a lot of chicks. She said she had been getting loaded with him. Here is this girl saying she'd gone with this guy and given him head in a Synanon vehicle. She's telling all these people, and it's on a tape! I asked somebody, "Is this chick still alive?" They said, "Yeah, what do you mean is she still alive?" I said, "Well, she just ratted on this guy. She's a fuckin' snitch, man!" They looked at me. They said, "Oh God, you're ... Phew! Well, it figures." I said, "What do you mean it figures? What the fuck are you talking about?" They said, "Oh, well, just stick around for a while and you'll find out what's happening." I got angry. I said, "You're a bunch of rats!" Not only were they a bunch of Puerto Ricans, blacks, inconsiderate New Yorkers, and funky, bratty, snot-nosed, little kids, but they were a bunch of rats besides! So all the things I'd heard about Synanon and knew about it before were true!
Before I went there, even in the condition I was in, I had asked Greg Dykes if the place was filled with rats. He said, "No, man, there might be a few, but that's it." I said, "I don't want to ruin my reputation after doing so much time to keep it. I don't want to live with a bunch of rats." Then I got there. I heard these tapes. Here's this chick. After she finishes, other people start copping out on this guy and that guy and this chick and that one. He was using dope. She was giving that one head. I thought, "I should have known better."
After they finished with those tapes they played another, of Chuck Dederich, the founder, Mr. God, with his bullfrog voice. It was a long, long tape, and he just kept repeating himself as if he was talking to some idiot five year old, croaking away about the camera's eye, saying that when you're loaded it's like having a camera that doesn't take all the frames of the movie. He's saying that you just get a part of it. He likened it to seeing Gone with the Wind with a bad projector that doesn't show all the frames. But then, he said, when you've been in Synanon awhile, the projector gets better and better, and after you're there for some length of time your projector, which is you, is perfect, and you see the whole movie, and you know everything that's happening, and you understand life and yourself and your problems and the world and your fellow man. He's running on and on with this garbage. An old wino. Well, I guess he drank whiskey, gin, and stuff, but here's a guy that had a big, old line of bullshit, some phony salesman out of the midwest who happened to land down on the beach and in order to live had to run some kind of a game up under somebody. He was a great bullshitter, so he found a little, beat pad, and he found some winos, and he got some dopefiends to come in, and he gave them some soup, and pretty soon he got some money from somebody. By the time I got there they had this huge, old luxury hotel and other places all over-Frisco, Oakland, San Diego-half a dozen places he'd built up from this scam. I'm listening to this tape and thinking, "How could he ever do it?" How? I couldn't believe it could possibly have been done from what I'd seen so far.
I saw a guy I'd known in jail and asked him what was going on. He told me, "You have to wait and see. Wait until you play some games. I couldn't explain it to you in a million years. The best thing to do is keep an open mind. You've got to stay here. You know you can't leave. Try to be cool and then when you get in a game you can rage and call everybody every name under the sun and get rid of your frustrations. That'll enable you to stand it until the next game. Believe me, it'll really be interesting. It's a hell of an experience, man." I thought, "Well, what the hell." I couldn't go. I could barely walk. The food wasn't bad, and from what I'd seen-the people were dressed alright-nobody seemed to want for anything.
They started taking me out by the swimming pool. The Clump was like one of those Hollywood apartment complexes. There was a little coffee shop where you could get coffee and peanut butter and bread for nothing. I sat out by the pool during the day. I'd see people and chat with them. I was a celebrity. Chicks talked with me and flirted with me. I thought, "This ain't bad." Then, finally, "Well, I think you'll be okay," the doctor said.
I got my clothes, and a guy took me to an apartment in the Clump right near the pool. It was a large, two-bedroom apartment with two baths, and the front room was filled with bunk beds. The guy went to one that was empty. He said, "This is you." It was a top bunk. I said, "Man, I don't know how I'm going to make it up there." He went to the office and came back and said, "When So-and-so comes we'll move him up. He's young. You can sleep on the bottom." In a little while the kid came in, he put his stuff on the top bunk, took my stuff, and fixed my bunk for me.
It had a feeling like jail, only there were no cells. The Clump had a lot of units and little walkways. I learned that a couple of blocks down, on Kansas Street, they had another complex and more people lived there; that's where they had a school for the little kids. A few people lived at the club and in the apartments across the street from it, but they were squares or people who'd been in Synanon for a long, long time.
In one of the bedrooms of the apartment were two guys who'd been in Synanon for two or three years, "old-timers" they called them. The other bedroom had one bed. I looked in there. It was really classy. It had a big double bed with a nice spread on it. There were pictures on the walls and statues and knickknacks and a TV and a record player with two speakers. I glanced in the closet. The guy had a lot of shoes and clothes. He was really living it up. He was our dorm head. I didn't see him for three or four days, didn't even know who he was. Finally he came one night and introduced himself. He was a tall, black, pimp type cat. When I saw him I realized I'd seen him down at the club working at the Connect, the desk where the cars were given out and all the details of running the club were taken care of. He looked to me like he was loaded. I didn't know if he was or not. He was going with a white, square game player.
I started finding out what was happening and what was expected of me. There were eight people in the front room and three in the other bedrooms. That's eleven people in an apartment where ordinarily maybe only a man and wife and child would be living. Eight of us used one bathroom. You can imagine the confusion. The dorm head was supposed to coordinate everything, but he had a guy called the ramrod who did all the work. There was a set of rules and a set of dorm assignments which changed periodically. I think my first assignment was cleaning the bathroom. It had to be spotless, all the time spotless, with eight people using it. That meant you were cleaning it constantly, that is, if you did it right, which I did. Some guys did the carpet; one did the trash; and someone did the kitchen. We didn't use the kitchen very often-we ate in the main dining room at the club-but somet
imes somebody would cook something. After you were there awhile you got "walking around money." It's called WAM. After three months you got a dollar a month; after six months, two dollars; and so on to five dollars; then, after five years, fifty dollars a month. So you could go to the store and buy something, a little popcorn, coffee, or maybe you could hustle something from the big kitchen at the club.
You weren't supposed to hustle anything, but, as in all places, there was hustling going on. Fortunately, right across from me in the bottom bunk was an older guy, Del, and he worked in the kitchen. Most of the live-ins were dopefiends, supposed dopefiends, but there were some heavy alcoholics, too, and that's what Del was. He must have been about fiftyfive. He'd been a cook on the street, but he was one of those hustlers and he knew a million funny stories. We were in a game once, half women and half guys, and some chick was ranking Del because he was so old, and he said, "Well, dearie, I may not be able to cut the mustard, but I sure can lick the jar!" He cracked everybody up; he had a million of those old-time jokes.
Del was cooking in Synanon. He'd come home, and I'd be there, really unhappy, wanting to get loaded, especially during the first months, and he would start telling me great stories out of his past life. I don't know if he was making them up or what, but he'd get me laughing. He didn't trust the other guys because they were so young. He'd look around and then if everything was cool he'd whisper, "Want something to eat?" I'd say, "Yeah! Yeah!" In order to get our meals we had to take the Synanon bus down to the club, and it was a long trip. Del would hand me a big steak sandwich with tomatoes and pickles, the steak cooked perfect, about an inch and a half thick, tender.
People who worked in the kitchen weren't allowed to take anything out. That was a real bust. And, anyway, steak was something we just didn't have. We ate well, but only the people who'd been around a long time got steak. Jack Hurst, who was the director at the time, and the people who lived in the club, the big shots, would go in the back of the kitchen, get meat, carry it home to their families, and cook it. Bill Dederich, Big Chuck's brother, had an apartment in the Clump and he'd have barbecues on his terrace. You could smell the meat cooking. For a while the big shots even had their own section of the dining room, where they'd eat food like that, and you could see them, you know. It was sickening. But Del got that stuff, stashed it on his body, and brought it home to me.
The residents were divided into tribes of about sixty people who played the Synanon game together, and each tribe had a certain section of the Clump, maybe three apartments for the men and two for the women. If people had to be disciplined, the tribe leader did it. For drinking or stealing or using dope or physical violence, the punishment was a bald head or, for the women, a stocking cap, and if you had a good job or a nice pad you lost it and had to sleep in the basement and work scrubbing pots, and you'd suffer horribly in the games. (If you split, left Synanon, you were labeled a "splittee," and if you wanted to come back and were allowed to come back, the punishments were the same, only they lasted longer.)
In each tribe there were so many "elders," people who'd been around for a number of years, and we went to them when we needed anything-to try to get a pair of socks that fit or decent underwear. There was a Store where you got clothes for free, but the good things were in another store for the big shots; we got the old things they didn't want. If you couldn't find a pair of shoes that fit you, you could go to the elders and beg them and maybe they'd give you a voucher. Then you could go to a real store and buy shoes. If you wanted to write someone or make an emergency call-someone was dying-you'd have to go to the elders and seek permission. After you were there for three months, you could go for a walk but you had to get permission and you had to sign out; usually you had to take someone with you. Sometimes they'd change that: the whole place would go on "containment" and you couldn't go out at all. But that was the idea of the tribes. And if you did anything wrong or you didn't do your dorm assignment, that's what the games would be about.
You'd be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like, pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you'd tell it. You'd accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it's really a drag, so there'd be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody'd accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn't sleep, or some chick would accuse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that ranking you and exposing your bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked.
When I got healthier, I got a job. I wanted a job. I was bored just sitting around. Because I'd worked in the paymaster's office in San Quentin, they assigned me to the bookkeeping department, which was in a building a little ways down from the Clump, a gigantic, old warehouse where they kept all the stuff they hustled for Synanon, all the donations, furniture, food. They had offices upstairs, and one was the bookkeeping office. Most of the people in the offices were women, and my boss was an old battle-ax named Faye. She was one of those old reprobates, one of those stout, husky broads that look as if they'd just knock you down if you argued with them, and there was another chick that really looked like an old dyke. And always before, in my experience, women I was able to charm, always in my life. But I ran up against some women here that were uncharmable. I don't know how they'd ever been dopefiends, but they assured me that they had and talked continuously about what terrible lives they'd led.
I've never had any special schooling, but as a kid I was good at arithmetic and was always very neat, had an orderly mind, so I automatically fell into my job in the bookkeeping department and at first it wasn't so bad. I had a desk of my own. I liked that. I got into a routine, just as I had in San Quentin. I got hold of some pictures and put them under the glass on the desk. I got a good stapler and a whole bunch of pins. I've always been a hoarder, so whenever I could find anything or steal anything I'd take it. They had a little supply room. I'd walk by it and sneak in and grab cards, different colored cards, and notebooks and pins. I had my desk filled with brand-new stuff. They were always talking about saving and using things over; I just threw things away. If a pen just for an instant didn't make a perfect line, I'd throw it in the trash. When I opened a new box of staples I'd throw all the loose staples away, or if the box got wrinkled I'd toss the whole thing out. I didn't care about saving or conserving or the program they were trying to conduct. I wasn't trying to help anything along. I felt that they were hustlers and that they were conning people out of money.
Everyone around me was brainwashed into this Synanon system of brotherly love and helping each other. And everybody had a built-in guilt. If you did something wrong, you'd cop out on yourself. If you saw any of your fellow communers doing anything wrong, you'd immediately rat on them. That was being a good Synanon person and living the Synanon life-style. A group of rats. I've never been a bad person or a criminal type, but the naivete of these people was ridiculous. If Chuck Dederich or Jack Hurst were to tell them to jump out of the sixth-story window of the club they'd all jump because they'd think that that's the "Synanon Thing," the "Synanon Position," to jump out the sixth-floor window. These people talked about how they were dopefiends and hustlers and robbers and whores, and then they'd go along with this kind of program? There's no way in the world it could be so. But all these people were brainwashed. Innumerable people were brainwashed like this.
We had office games in addition to the three games a week we had in our tribes. In the office games they'd rank people for using too many pens or for having a bad attitude, for wasting coffee. Nonsensical things. I found that I could drive them crazy by speaking my mind. You're not supposed to bad-rap "on the floor," outside the games, say bad things about Synanon policies or Synanon people. I would just call it like I saw it. If somebody was an asshole he 'was an asshole, and I would tell him he was an asshole in a game or out of a game. If there w
as a rule and it was a ridiculous rule, I'd tell them it was ridiculous and I'd ignore the rule. In games they called me "sour." I'd talk about dope and getting loaded, and they'd say that that was "bad" and I was "evil." I called them names: "You fat, old, double-ugly bitch! I don't believe you ever used any dope in your life! Somebody as ugly as you never got anything given to them, and I know nobody would fuck you and give you money, and you're too dumb to steal." They said you shouldn't be prejudiced. You weren't supposed to have those feelings. Most white men fear the black man with the white woman. They're afraid he is really as superior sexually as he says he is. If I found out that some white broad was married to a black guy I'd rave at her in games and call her tramp, slut, whore. Most people tried to act like they weren't prejudiced, which is ridiculous. Everybody is filled with prejudice, and every now and then in a game if you could bring it out, they would admit, "Well, I used to be." They were hypocrites. But when it came down to the serious things, I played my cards right. I had jailed so much I knew how far you could go, and I found out you could do anything except drink, use dope, or use physical violence and get away with it.
The thing of it is, the people that ran Synanon had to keep everyone offguard and keep everything different. If they fell into a routine, if life became boring and fell into a pattern, they'd lose the people. So they would change. All the time. Just make changes for changes' sake. They'd paint the place where you were working or move the desks. The same thing in your living quarters. Every single room in Synanon, whether it was in the club, the Clump, Kansas Street, the school, each room had been maybe fifty different things in the last three years. You'd be here, so they'd move everybody over there. They move these people here, move you there, move this here, paint that. Make a rule: you can't have this. Then you can have it. They'd have "glut raids," which I'll get into later, getting rid of the opulence. Or somebody would attain a high position after years of carrying out his faithful duty to the Synanon doctrines and the word of the great lord and master, Chuck Dederich; he would be rewarded; and then all of a sudden the gestapo would come and take away everything he had and make him wash dishes and scrub toilets and make his wife live in a dormitory with the other broads and newcomers. They did all this to keep everybody messed up. That was the basis of Synanon because dopefiends and nuts can't stand routine and when they get bored they have to do something crazy, so Synanon made the insanity. Themselves. The people that ran it caused the insanity.
Straight Life Page 48