Synanon Kid: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

by C. A. Wittman

  Until that rare visit with my mother and her new husband, I had no awareness of the experiment that was going on at Synanon. The reform, called Changing Partners, consisted of mass divorce followed by remarriage to a new partner.

  After Chuck Dederich took my young teacher Ginny to be his new wife, he wanted everyone in the community to start a new relationship. His first guinea pig was his daughter Jady. Having been displeased for quite a while with Jady’s husband, Dederich began to pressure her to divorce and marry someone else in the community whom Dederich felt more suitable for upper management grooming.

  With this first successful breakup, Dederich got other Synanon VIPs involved in divorcing and remarrying. As more couples followed suit, the ones who held out were pressured to leave their marriages and find someone new.

  It’s “no more trouble than casting off an old coat,” Dederich told members who balked at this drastic request.

  In the fall of 1977, Changing Partners became an official mandate. Whether members were happy with their present spouse or not, it was time to take a of leap faith.

  “We are jumping,” Dederich said, “from one nuptial or marital or romantic or erotic adventure to the next, from a platform of love rather than a platform of hatred.”

  He later told a reporter for the San Raphael Independent Journal, “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to perform some emotional surgery on people who were getting along pretty well.”

  Mass divorces were performed, followed by enormous wedding ceremonies called Love Matches of ten or more new partners vowing their commitment for a maximum of three years.

  Because children did not spend much time with their parents, Changing Partners had little or no effect on us. It made no difference in our day-to-day routines and was not a part of our lives in any concrete sense. I imagined it to be similar to the head-shaving films I’d seen, a party-like event. Only this time everyone danced in celebration of the divorces and remarriages. I also thought maybe they’d run out of the best men when it was my mother’s turn to choose. It turned out that I was not too far off the mark.

  Years later Theresa told me she had not wanted to participate at the beginning, when the new regimen was still voluntary and there were a variety of possible husbands from which to choose. Instead, she’d watched from the sidelines, amused, thinking it just a passing phase. Once it became mandatory to change partners if married or if single find a mate pronto, men she might have considered had already been snatched up.

  She was gamed incessantly for putting too much thought into the matter and aggressively hounded to pick from the men who were left. Each time she turned down a suggestion, the game became more vicious. She was being too picky, members shrieked. Who did she think she was? There was nothing special about Theresa, her status.

  Backed into a corner, both she and Larry entered their relationship reluctantly. They were married in a ceremony with several other remaining couples. “I did not really want to marry him,” Theresa told me years later. “He was a friend who I saw as more of a father figure.”

  Their pairing lasted one year.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Friend

  “No! No! No!”

  The sounds of someone pounding the wall stopped me.

  I watched as a young girl, writhing in the grip of a temper tantrum, came into view. A demonstrator pulled at the girl’s arms, which were twisted above her head, and dragged her body across the carpet. “I won’t wear a dress! I won’t!” While she screamed, she managed to free one arm, which she used to claw at the floor.

  “Your mother’s coming to visit, and you will put on a dress for her,” the demonstrator said.

  The girl’s head flew back. Her body arched as she tried to dig her short nails into the demonstrator’s wrist. Another girl returned to the room with three dresses, all of them ruffled and feminine. I wondered where they came from. A pink dress was held out as a sort of suggestion. The screaming girl—her name turned out to be Laurie—yanked the dress off the hanger, pulling at the neckline. Eyes bulging, she managed to tear some of the fabric while the other child wrestled it from her angry fingers. The demonstrator dragged Laurie the rest of the way down the hallway to her bedroom while the child who held the dresses followed solemnly behind.

  I later learned the visit never happened because Laurie refused to put on one of the despised dresses that had been hanging, hidden, in the back of her closet. I wondered why the visit with her mother mattered, as we were constantly being told our parents were not important.

  Anyone who knew Laurie soon learned that she was not only a tomboy, but believed that she was a boy and everyone had made a mistake in this matter.

  “I have a penis,” Laurie told me the day we were getting to know each other. Her dark eyes, framed by thick albino brows, held my gaze, challenging me to argue the point.

  I didn’t, and we became friends.

  When Laurie was not riding horses, she would hoist herself on my back and pretend I was a horse. I didn’t mind. This game gave me a sense of belonging, like we were a pair.

  When Laurie showered, she wore a washcloth over her genitals, explaining that she didn’t want us girls to see her penis. We all grew used to this eccentricity of hers, and it became normal to see her soaping herself while she held a washcloth over her private area.

  During room rotations, a few times I wound up sharing a room with Laurie; I found it hard to fall asleep because she spent thirty to sixty minutes every night banging her head on her pillow until she fell asleep. The springs of her mattress creaked loudly in protest to the thump, thump, thump of her head. Sometimes I watched her, too distracted with the noise to close my eyes. Her arms rested straight against her sides while she sat on her knees, eyes blank, upper body rising and falling rhythmically with machine-like precision.

  When I wasn’t running through the hills of tall blond grass with other girls, pretending to be princesses while we sang in high-pitched voices, our heads covered in pink-and-blue-striped blankets from the Hatchery that we used as imitation hair, I pretended to be a boy with Laurie.

  We looked no different from the boys. Elderly adults in the commune, most of them wandering around in a state of perplexity, a few of them in the early stages of dementia, having arrived under the custody of their grown children, would smile when they saw us, however strange we may have looked. Usually the old women would stop to ask, “Now, what are you, sweetheart? A little boy or a girl?”

  In the summer, I ran about shirtless during playtime. As much as I loved to play with dolls and pretend to be a mother, I also learned to enjoy climbing trees and hunting for snakes. I thrilled in the freedom of riding my bike full speed down steep hills with my hands off the handlebars. I came to realize I was naturally strong, so I liked to arm-wrestle, challenging anyone who might accept.

  Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would announce proudly, “A man. A big tall man.” This did not seem impossible. Reality in my short life was so warped that it seemed anything could happen.

  “Where is your belt?”

  It was dinnertime, and I stood before the door of the Commons, waiting for the demonstrator to give the okay that I could enter. She stood with folded arms, studying me from head to toe.

  My clothes were clean; my shoes not terribly scuffed up. There were no stains anywhere; however, I had not thought to wear a belt, nor did I remember being told that I must. I looked at my jeans and the empty loops around my waist. I wasn’t sure where my belt was or if I even had one. I didn’t recall having seen one in my wardrobe.

  Every week I stood in line with other children to receive my allotment of clothing.

  “Size?” a demonstrator would ask.

  “Seven.”

  A stack of white t-shirts and mix of dark blue jeans and overalls would be placed in my hands from the size seven shelf. Sometimes I received an overall dress. Many of the children and adults possessed wide, brown leather belts with enormous brass buckles.
Some adults wore a sliver dollar as a centerpiece in their buckles. It was a popular style.

  “You cannot come into dinner without a belt,” the demonstrator said. “Go and get it.”

  I stepped away from the building, watching other kids file through the doorway, my stomach grumbling.

  “What are you doing?”

  I looked up to see Laurie standing before me.

  “I can’t go into dinner,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have a belt.”

  “Did you lose it?”

  I shrugged, not sure. I was never really sure of anything anymore, and this situation was not the first time I’d dealt with arbitrary rules. Once a demonstrator had banned me from coming into my dorm in the evening because I wore nail polish. I did not know that nail polish was banned because we had acquired it from the staff in the first place. The polish remover was kept in the bathroom. I had had no choice that night but to stand in the muted light of the entryway for over an hour gnawing the polish off my nails.

  Laurie peered behind some bushes. She wore her favorite cowboy hat and brown cowboy boots, presents from someone. Legs slightly bowed and sturdy in her dark blue jeans, she bent over to sweep her hand under a hedge. “Were you carrying it?”

  “Maybe.” At seven years old, this scenario seemed as plausible to me as any. I helped my friend search for the missing phantom item, looking about more bushes, scouting grassy areas.

  “It might be by those trees,” Laurie suggested.

  We walked across the road to where a few trees lined the shoulder.

  No belt.

  “I think it might be over here,” Laurie said, lifting some barbed wire to a fence that skirted the bottom of the sloping hillside. She squeezed through the gap, then, holding up the pointy sharp wire, waited for me to follow.

  I ducked through, feeling doubtful. I didn’t remember ever playing in that area, but Laurie forged ahead. Soon we were on a narrow foot trail that wound its way gradually up into the hills. When the trail faded, we waded through knee-high grass.

  After a while I could no longer distinguish one direction from another. The land rounded out every which way, and the darkening sky narrowed our scope of vision until finally there was nothing to see. We trudged through a curtain of black, our only illumination a scant smattering of stars.

  Every time I expressed any doubt, Laurie sighed and claimed in her husky voice that she knew where she was going.

  My belt dilemma nibbled at the periphery of my mind. I wondered when I had ever walked thorough these hills before. I decided I hadn’t and that we were lost. I was sure of it.

  “No, we aren’t,” my companion barked back at me.

  We walked on. Before the sun had completely sunk into the west, we came across a herd of cattle with several massively muscled bulls, their thick fleshy humps rising out of powerful shoulders.

  After much urging, Laurie talked me into following her through the bovine convention, reassuring me in her I-know-best voice that they wouldn’t hurt us, then taking off at a sprint when one of the tremendous creatures snorted through its wide wet nostrils and began to make its way in our direction.

  I was not far behind her.

  In the last of the ashy twilight she unbuttoned her pants, pushed them down off her hips and stood with her legs apart and hips thrust forward, letting loose a jet of urine from between her legs.

  A cold fog fanned out around us before our final plunge into inky blackness. We had no jackets. I was cold. My legs were tired and my stomach cramped with hunger. In a late afternoon physical education session, I had performed one hundred sit-ups, thirteen pull-ups and a series of push-ups and leg raises and run two miles up a steep incline to several huge, domed, metal water containers. After the run there had been yet another hour of soccer and now this seemingly endless walk in the hills. As I followed the sounds of Laurie’s footsteps I was sure we were hopelessly lost and I had never had a belt.

  As we ascended another hill, a faint light lit up the sky in the distance. Curious, I walked a little faster, keeping closer to the brisk pace Laurie set. When we reached the top of the hill, I saw down below us a smattering of buildings. The dormitories looked familiar, yet they were differently arranged.

  “We’re at the ranch,” Laurie said. “See. I knew where we were the whole time.”

  We skirted down a sandy footpath slippery with pebbles. The path led to a paved road frequented by a passing adult or two.

  “Only adults live here,” Laurie explained. “It’s their dinnertime.”

  The scent of sausages and potatoes wafted through the air as we fell into step with others on their way for the last meal of the day. No one took any notice of us.

  Inside the dining hall we each grabbed a plate from the stack at the buffet and loaded it up with roast chicken, sausage, beef, rice, potatoes, vegetables and dinner roles with tabs of butter.

  Halfway through dinner, someone tapped me on the shoulder. A man and woman stood over us. “Who are you here with?” the woman asked.

  “No one,” Laurie said.

  “How did you get here?” the man asked.

  Laurie pointed at me. “We walked over the hills. We were looking for her belt.” She shoved a bite of chicken into her mouth and chewed, oblivious to the adults’ concern.

  “You walked here from Walker Creek?” The man’s mouth hung open. “But that’s six miles. No one at the school knows you two are here?”

  A flicker of uncertainty fluttered in my chest.

  “Nope,” Laurie said and took a long drink of apple juice.

  “Hank, go and call the school,” the woman said.

  The man left, but came back shortly. “Fred’s going to bring a jitney around and take these girls to the children’s property.”

  We were allowed to finish our dinner before we were bustled into a white van. Tired from the long walk and huge meal, I buckled myself into one of the plush seats and was asleep within minutes.

  The next I knew, I was shaken awake. Laurie and I climbed out of the van and walked to our dorm. No demonstrator waited to escort us back. The other children had already gone to bed. In my room, I removed my clothes, slipped into my pajamas, climbed into bed and fell back asleep.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Education

  A few of us were in the playroom, listening to records, reading and playing jacks when the door whisked open and one of the male demonstrators came through pushing a wheeled blackboard. Several other children followed behind him.

  I set down my book.

  “We need some chairs,” the demonstrator said.

  The children who had come in with him left to get the chairs.

  Next he gestured at the rest of us in the room. “Wheel those partitions over here.”

  I stood and went to the back of the room, walking around the babies from the Hatchery, who lay napping on blue-and-white-striped blankets. We were instructed to set up the partitions so they separated us from the sleeping toddlers.

  The children who had left to get the chairs came back carrying two each and set them in a semicircle formation, the usual layout for our seminars.

  The rest of us went to get more chairs.

  When I came back, the demonstrator had drawn three circles on the blackboard with a word inside each circle.

  After we took our seats, I sounded out the words silently to myself: eh-go, id, super eh-go.

  The demonstrator stood with a ruler and pointed at one of the circles. “Who can tell me about the ego?”

  A boy raised his hand.

  “Okay, Brad. Stand up,” the demonstrator said.

  Brad rose to his feet, his overalls sagging in the back. He gazed at the blackboard. “The ego is—” He paused. “The ego—” Another pause. “It’s like if you had this car and you wanted to drive it really fast, that’s the id. The super-ego says you have to go really slow to be safe, but your ego lets you go a little bit faster because the ego is in the reality.
”

  “That’s close,” the man said. “Who else can tell me about the ego?”

  Cindy raised her hand.

  “Yes! Cindy. Stand up.”

  She shot to her feet, hands on her hips. “The ego is our conscience?”

  I mouthed the word “conscience” to myself.

  “The ego is how we do stuff every day, the right stuff,” Cindy said. “The ego knows it’s not good to eat five cotton candies because the id would do that, so the ego lets you eat one even though it would be better if you had vegetables. The ego sometimes has to make deals with the id, but mostly we live in our egos. If you don’t listen to the ego, you might feel guilty from the super ego. When we play the game, sometimes we speak from the id. Our id is deep inside us.”

  I stared at the bubbles on the blackboard, trying to understand the ideas. In my mind I conceptualized the ego and id as tiny magical creatures forcing people to do things like eat too much cotton candy or drive cars a certain way while the conscience was just a big black space. The lesson continued, but my mind drifted. I didn’t understand what was being taught or why playtime had been interrupted to talk about the ego. I retreated into my own world, something I was becoming quite good at.

  Some days later I sat in another seminar, this one officially part of our schedule for the day.

  “You are the models for the future,” the demonstrator said while she paced the room before us. “And I am here to demonstrate that. Right? Am I right?”

  “Yes,” we chorused.

  “Are you lucky to be here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you lucky to be Synanon kids?”

  Silence.

  “Look how many brothers and sisters you have. Look how many parents you have. On the outside, kids have to live with their biological parents in the nuclear family, but we know here in Synanon that this isn’t good for children. The parents in these families smother their children with their clingy affections. Here you have freedom, you have space, you can breathe. Synanon children are smarter and healthier than children on the outside.