The Dead Inside

by Cyndy Etler

  Nobody’s circling their finger in the air, but I wrap it up anyway. “So that’s what tomorrow holds: my best druggie friend’s gonna kick my ass. But at least for today, by the grace of God, I’m sixteen months sober.”

  “Thanks for sharing, Cyndy,” the room says.

  At the end of the meeting, everyone stands around talking by the table with coffee and cookies. And all these nice grown-ups, all these AA meeting foster parents—they come up to give me a hug. “Glad you’re here,” they say. “Keep coming.”

  They want me here.

  One of these meeting parents is extra special. I met him three months ago, when I was home on my weekend pass. I went to a meeting and sat in the empty chair next to this nice old man. He looked like Santa Claus, minus the beard: seventyish, round pink cheeks, and a belly with his hands folded over it. When I shared how terrified I was of slipping when I seven-stepped, he patted my shoulder. Which kind of freaked me out at first—if someone touches me it means I’m in trouble, right?—but then I looked at him and saw little tears in the corners of his eyes. Like, he doesn’t even know me, but he cares that much about my sobriety. All the nice grown-ups surrounded him after that meeting, not me. Because everybody loves him. His name is Irish Mike.

  So now that I’m seven-stepped, and since my mother’s too busy, Irish Mike picks me up for meetings in his long maroon car. He drives me back home too. It’s two towns out of his way, but he doesn’t mind. He says he’s “passing it on.”

  And you’re not going to believe this: at the meeting on the night of my first day back, he gave me a seven-step present: a friendship ring! Fourteen-karat gold! It’s a heart held up on the sides by two hands. Nobody’s ever given me a fourteen-karat gold anything. I swear to God it’s a message, to help me solve the middle of the math equation. The part where I learn how to be okay.

  I know I’m gonna work that part out. I’m pretty sure it has to do with how I feel at my AA meetings: like, surrounded by love. Can you even imagine? I mean, these people just met me. Group said they loved me the second they saw me, but it took forever for me to feel—to feel—well, to feel like I belonged. At the meetings it was instant, and it felt like love. And I didn’t have to change before they would be nice to me.

  But even though the meetings are in church basements, I don’t think the love is coming from God. That’s the one part of the message I’ve got figured out. The kind of love that fixes? It comes from random grown-ups, like AA strangers in rickety folding chairs, or maybe a very cool English teacher, or maybe the staff at Janus House. Random grown-ups that take a kid’s broken heart and help her fit the pieces back together, and don’t want a single thing in return.

  So you know what? I don’t think I’m gonna do it, that garage thing. I’ve been praying every night, you know? Crunching myself into a ball and thanking God for Straight and my AA meetings, and asking what I’m supposed to do. And I think I just figured it out. I think I’m supposed to stick around long enough to become a random grown-up.

  Tonight’s meeting is over. Me and Irish Mike are walking through the smoking crowd, on our way back to his car. The smoke smells good, like Bridgeport, like Joanna. But it also smells good like tonight, like the AA smokers saying, “’Night, Mike. ’Night, Cyndy. Keep coming back.”

  Mike stops to talk to someone, so I stop too. I close my eyes and lean my head back and inhale. I inhale as much of that smoke as I can get. Then when I open my eyes, it’s like the stars have switched position. Swear to God. It’s not the Big Dipper up there, it’s a busted heart. With hands on either side of it, pressing it back together. Like it’s really possible. Like a heart can get fixed.

  Yeah. You know something? I’m gonna be okay. My heart is already starting to heal. And since I’m learning how to fix my heart, I’m gonna help fix other kids’ hearts too.

  So yeah. I’m gonna be okay. I am. Watch.

  EPILOGUE

  NO CAMERAS, TAPE RECORDERS, OR RADIOS IN THE BUILDING

  Of course, I wasn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic. But Straight’s job was to convince us we were druggies—and Straight was good at its job. By the time they let me out of Straight, I had a wicked case of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological flip-flop that can happen in hostage situations.

  It works like this: subconsciously, the hostage thinks, “If I can make my captors like me, this whole captivity thing is gonna go a lot better.” Even deeper in her subconscious she thinks, “If I can make myself think like my captors, they’ll like me even more.” So the victim leaves her own mind behind and adopts the mindset of her abusers. She comes to see them as the good guys, as her saviors. When released, a person with Stockholm Syndrome continues to identify with her oppressors, and dreams of being reunited with them. At least, I did.

  It was the good grown-ups at the Trumbull, Connecticut AA meetings who put Band-Aids on my psyche after Straight. With no reason to doubt my claims that I was an alcoholic and addict, they welcomed me. They served as my surrogate group. They listened, and they cared. They just cared.

  It was school, though, that really saved me. It took me a while to get there. I needed time to figure out how to survive, how to stop hating myself. At twenty-eight, I was right enough in the head to go to college. UMass gave me all kinds of scholarships for being old, poor, and smart. I walked out of there with a 3.97 GPA, academic awards, a couple of degrees, and a whole lot of swagger. Oh, and a career too.

  It happened, as the best stuff often does, when I was looking for something else—in this case, a professor’s well-hidden office. A bright sign on a concrete wall caught my eye. $15 AN HOUR, it blared. UNDERGRAD TUTORS NEEDED AT DORCHESTER HIGH.

  Damn, I thought. For fifteen bucks an hour, I’ll do anything. What I didn’t know then was that Dorchester was the kind of school with metal detectors at the front door, which was the only door in the building not chained and padlocked. I didn’t know that some of the Dot High students worked as prostitutes and small-scale arms dealers, or that I’d be lucky enough to be accepted by them. I didn’t know that working with struggling kids would feel like coming home.

  At fourteen, inspired by the staff at Janus House, I made a decision to work with kids like me: lost kids, “throwaway” kids. Seventeen years later, I kept that promise to myself when I became a teacher who works, by choice, with the kids society labels “bad.”

  Because of my horror-show childhood, I get those teens: their wants, their fears, and the fact that they will totally change how they act when they feel respected and inspired to do so. Watching kids change for a living—and I mean really change, so much that even haters see the difference—proves to me that anything is possible.

  I once read an article by a physical therapist who worked with burn victims. She focused on the quality of their skin—so tough and yet so glossy, the yin and yang of having walked through fire. In that fire-hardened skin, I saw a metaphor for myself, for all of us former Straightlings who survived, then went on to thrive. If I’d had an easy childhood, I wouldn’t have become the rebel I am, always grinning, always grateful. If I hadn’t lived through hell, I wouldn’t know my current life is heaven; if I hadn’t had to fight, I wouldn’t know that I’ve already won. And believe me. Grinning and grateful? It’s not a bad way to go through life.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Straight, Inc.’s grandfather was a Los Angeles–based cult named Synanon. Founded in 1958, Synanon started out as a drug rehabilitation center for hard-core heroin addicts. There would be no staff at Synanon, no hierarchy. It would just be addicts helping addicts kick their junk. The tools for achieving this goal: isolation, sleep deprivation, and attack therapy. Synonites would scream at, spit on, and humiliate each other during what was called “The Game.”

  In 1978, a reporter for Point Reyes Light, a local newspaper that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Synanon, made a strange discovery. Although it was a facil
ity for adults, a large number of children were running away from Synanon. A nearby family had created an underground railroad system to help them escape. A few months later, a grand jury issued a report on Synanon, which included physical and psychological child abuse, as well as the stockpiling of weapons and handguns. In summary, it said that Synanon had changed from a drug rehab facility into a business run by a dictator.1

  Synanon made its own laws and dealt with its own troublemakers. An ex-member tried to get his young daughter out of the program, and he was beaten into a coma.2 A lawyer helped a woman win a $300,000 settlement against Synanon, and two Synonites hid a live rattlesnake in the lawyer’s mailbox.

  When Los Angeles police raided the Synanon facility, they found a tape recording of its founder, Charles Dederich, saying this: “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… 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. That is a very satisfactory, humane way of transmitting information. I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk.”

  Synanon, which had renamed itself the Church of Synanon (because churches don’t have to pay taxes), was shut down after an IRS investigation found it guilty of “financial misdeeds, destruction of evidence, and terrorism.” Synanon’s legacy—child abuse, investigations by the media and the government, violence against naysayers—would become Straight, Inc.’s DNA.

  In 1971, the federal government gave a grant to a Synanon copycat called the Seed, which was founded by a stand-up comic named Art Barker. The Seed’s goal was to take Synanon’s methods and apply them to child drug addicts…and to children only suspected of trying drugs.

  Three years later, Congress investigated the Seed and other so-called “behavior modification” programs. The committee was led by political bigwigs: Senator Sam Irvin, who investigated Watergate and brought down President Nixon; Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts; and Republican Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. The investigation found that these programs were being used for research on how to change human behavior and how to make people comply, and the investigation ultimately found that these experiments were being done on children without parental knowledge or permission. The official report says the treatment model is “similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans in the 1950s.” That would be the Communist North Koreans, who brainwashed their prisoners of war in death camps.

  Just like Synanon, the bad press around the Seed led to its closing. But shortly thereafter, a reincarnation of the Seed popped up, founded by Seed parents.3 That program was called Straight, Inc. A 1976 St. Petersburg Times article described Straight’s purpose: “to treat youths between 12 and 18 who have drug-related problems, but are not hard drug addicts.”

  Two of Straight’s founders, Mel and Betty Sembler, explained to Florida Trend magazine why they opened the program: their son had smoked weed. As Betty put it, “We saw this as a fundamental breakdown of everything we believe in: family, education, law and order, responsibility to the community. Drugs represented the very antithesis of these values—pure selfishness.”4

  An Evening Independent article discussed Straight’s medical credentials: “Dr. Leon Sellers, a veterinarian, [is a] founding father of the program.” It also described Straight’s staff: “six young adults who have experienced drugs and been helped by other treatment programs.”5

  By the late 1970s, Straight, Inc. was a well-known drug treatment center. Self-promotion came easy for Straight; Mel Sembler was a salesman and a real estate tycoon. Before opening youth treatment centers, he sold shopping malls.

  The Semblers’ political influence also helped boost Straight’s enrollment. As long-time close friends of Republican movers and shakers, Sembler and his wife encouraged First Lady Nancy Reagan to launch an anti-drug movement. Soon afterward, the hugely influential “Just Say No!” campaign was born, and the First Lady and Princess Diana were filmed visiting Straight buildings.

  By 1983, Straight was operating two branches in Florida, two branches in Georgia, one in Ohio, and another in Virginia. Claiming to have treated 3,000 drug abusers with a 60 percent success rate, Straight had plans to open twenty-six branches nationwide by 1986.

  As Straight was filling new warehouses, the press was reporting on its controversies. In the six months between May and November 1983, seven lawsuits were filed against Straight for physical and mental abuse. A sampling of article titles from the St. Petersburg Times reads like a timeline:

  Some Straight Clients Were Illegally Held, State Officials Say

  Girl Forced to Return to a Straight Foster Home, Neighbors Say

  Youth Sues Mother and Drug Treatment Program

  Straight: Six Directors Have Resigned

  Straight Tells Staff Not to Talk

  At the center of the controversy stood Dr. Miller Newton, a Straight dad who was hired to join Straight’s executive team. He was an ordained minister who had tried twice to get elected to Congress. His doctorate was in public administration and urban anthropology.

  In 1982, Florida’s state attorney began a major investigation of the program. In that same year, a teen named Karen Norton went through the Straight intake process. Norton would later describe that intake—and the violence done to her that day by Dr. Miller Newton—in a sworn testimony as part of her lawsuit against Straight, Inc. She won the case, to the tune of $722,000.6

  A year later, the Florida state attorney released their 300-page investigative report. It included eighteen charges of child abuse, including “beatings, sleep deprivation, restricted diets, periods of isolated confinement and physical and mental abuse.”7 Straight was told that if they wanted to keep their license, they would have to stop imprisoning children, withholding food and medical care as punishment, and having teens discipline other teens by sitting on their necks.

  Straight didn’t deny using these practices. Instead, they said they were working with lawmakers to correct this problem. They corrected the problem by shutting down the Sarasota branch, where the investigation had taken place, and sent the Sarasota Straightlings to the St. Petersburg branch, which was also under investigation.

  Straight’s executive director spoke to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about these investigations, saying, “It seems…that no matter how much we do or how much we cooperate, we cannot resolve the issues to their satisfaction.”8 The St. Petersburg Times reported that Straight had spent more than $200,000 in lawyers’ fees to defend itself, and that the publicity from the investigations and lawsuits had “driven away new clients, forcing new enrollments to drop 40 percent below projections.”9

  Straight’s death spiral was slow but well publicized as big media picked up the story. In 1985, the year I entered the program, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a $500,000 lawsuit on behalf of a teen who was put on a diet of only peanut butter and water for nearly a month. As punishment for her refusal to cooperate, she’d been forced to walk naked in front of her host dad.

  Florida state prosecutor David Levin, for ABC’s 20/20, described the program as “…a sort of private jail, utilizing techniques such as torture and punishment, which even a convicted criminal would not be subject to.”10

  CBS’s 60 Minutes featured a former host dad, describing Straight’s reaction to his concerns about locking kids into rooms at night: “If your child was on the street, the child would die. In the case of a fire, the child would die. So you’re not any worse off.”11

  Straight, Inc. reported to have 50,000 clients pass through their warehouses across nine states: California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia.12 For seventeen years, Straight dominated the adolescent drug treatment industry. But in the end, there were too many in
vestigations, too many lawsuits.

  In 1990, it was discovered that Straight was admitting children who had never used drugs. When the state of Massachusetts investigated the Straight, Inc. Boston branch (where I spent the second half of my program), they discovered a twelve-year-old client whose file reported not that she had smoked weed once or twice, that she had never drunk beer…but that she had once sniffed a magic marker.13

  Game over. The last program called Straight, Inc. closed its doors in 1993.

  But that doesn’t mean that Straight died. The DNA kept spiraling. Just like Synanon became the Seed became Straight, Straight became new programs, some of which exist to this day. The Orlando Weekly described how this process worked: “Straight Orlando shut its doors on August 14, 1992… But it reopened for business the same day, in the same facility, with the same administration. The only real difference was the name: SAFE.”14

  Then there were the copycat programs opened by former Straight parents and staff, such as Miller Newton’s KIDS. Virtually identical to Straight, KIDS was able to operate until 1998, despite shelling out millions in lawsuits. One fourteen-year-old girl who had never drunk or used drugs was kept there for six years. She sued and won $4.5 million. A thirteen-year-old with “learning problems” was put into KIDS for wearing a leather skirt, and kept there for thirteen years. She sued and won $6.5 million.15

  Pathway Family Center, another Straight clone created by Straight parents, operated all the way up through 2009. And Straight-descendent AARC—or Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre, originally called KIDS of the Alberta Rockies—is still in business today.

  While a renamed Straight lives on in Canada, equally destructive programs are operating all over the United States. In 2007, the U.S. government released a report on the “troubled teen industry.” The report states that, between 34 states, there were 1,503 reports of abuse or neglect of children by residential program staff. Twenty-eight states reported one or more youth fatalities. The report went on to say that these statistics “understate the incidents of maltreatment and death.”16 Program kids are good at keeping their mouths shut.