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

by C. A. Wittman

  During a game, Theresa’s suggestions that children spend more time with their parents and that parents be more involved in the school had settled in the VIPs’ addled minds like

  indigestion. They burped up their distaste in following games, spewing their disregard for her parenting philosophy. Her belief that children need to have a relationship with their parents was in direct conflict with Chuck’s theory and experiment of creating distance and obliterating focused parental love, which he believed only weakened the individual. However, Theresa was not deterred from speaking her mind on this issue. Although she received a lot of flak for her “ridiculous and dangerous” ideas, she continued to stick to her unpopular opinion.

  When Theresa could not be with me physically, she wrote; and when she visited, her visits were much longer than the usual parental visit. It seemed that every chance she had, she wanted to remind me that I was her daughter and that she deeply cared for me. Her love, when she could parcel it to me in the form of a quick kiss, wave or chat if we crossed paths, emotionally sustained me in the school’s otherwise psychically erosive environment. I knew I was loved, and it helped me hold myself together.

  Once Theresa and I were living on the same property, we began spending as much time together as we could. There were many weekends when she arranged for us to go on a picnic or have a sleepover.

  Sleepovers were rare, but I enjoyed those times with my mother most of all because they reminded me of when it had been just the two of us and Synanon had not taken over our lives. We’d have dinner, then go to Theresa’s room, where we’d spend time looking over her record collection and reenacting her favorite musicals, coloring, cutting out paper dolls, reading storybooks and talking for hours. I discovered that Theresa could easily step into a child-like world and live there for hours, which created a kind of whimsy to our relationship.

  “Did you know that if you stand very still and are really quiet, you might get a chance to see a fairy?” Theresa said to me one day while we walked through a small wooded area.

  We stopped and looked up at the tops of the short trees that grew toward each other, creating canopies of branches that blocked out much of the sky.

  “Shh,” she whispered, eyes suddenly wide, index finger placed to her lips.

  I watched her stoop down to peek behind some low plant growth, gently pushing aside a cluster of tall clover. Birds chirped and chattered around us. I knelt to have a look, too, my heart hammering in my chest, wondering whether she had found something.

  Theresa was not pretending. The fairy world existed for her. When she spoke of the nature fairies to me, her green eyes would cloud over as if she were looking into that world.

  “Let’s sit down and wait,” she suggested. “We have to let the little forest fairies know that they are safe with us.”

  We made ourselves comfortable on the earthy floor, neither talking nor moving for ten minutes or so. I remained attentive, alert to the movements of any shy elusive creatures that were only inches high.

  Theresa finally gave a little laugh. “Come out, little fairies.”

  “Come out,” I echoed.

  When we saw not a single fairy, we finally stood and continued walking.

  “Did you know, Celena, that there is a community in Scotland that gardens with the help of fairies?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  Theresa’s eyes glowed. “It’s simply amazing. All of the vegetables are triple in size.” She raised her hands, opening them wide to show me how large some of the vegetables grew to be. “One day we’ll have to visit. You won’t believe it; it’s just out of this world.” She took my hand. “Would you like to see that one day?”

  I nodded, and I wondered: if we could go to Scotland, could we also go other places, like back to Los Angeles?

  “Theresa, do you think we’ll always live here in Synanon?” I asked.

  My mother’s lips flickered in an attempt to keep her smile. “Synanon is a wonderful place in its own way. They have a lot to offer us.”

  We left the cloistered, wooded setting and walked back into the open.

  I looked up at the curve of expansive blue sky and imagined the yawn of darkness beyond it. What was beyond outer space? And where did the space come from? If, say, God put that space there, where did God come from? My thoughts, mild at first, curled through my mind like wisps of smoke. Where did God come from? Where did all the space come from? What if the space was always here? What if there was never a time when it wasn’t? What if there is no time, if time doesn’t exist?

  “Are you cold?” Theresa asked.

  I was shuddering. I hated these types of thoughts. They snuck up on me sometimes, twisting my mind into a tunnel of confusion. How could something always have existed? I mentally pushed it all away and leaned into Theresa, forcing myself to think of the fairies.

  “I don’t think God is real,” I said.

  I’d been visiting with Theresa in her room, the two of us playing with paper dolls in a small corner by her record player. The bed took up much of the space.

  Theresa glanced up at me from the cardboard figure of a smiling girl with shoulder length brown hair divided into two ponytails. She had been busy fixing a tiny wedge of green paper, a hat, to the girl’s head, folding down the white tabs.

  “God exists,” she said, her slim eyebrows rising.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “God is all around.” Theresa waved her arms. “God is in us. God is nature.” She pointed to a potted plant, then touched one of the new unfurling leaves. She was so sure of a greater celestial being.

  Her comments furrowed into my young consciousness, trying to dislodge my skepticism, but it had already taken root. My Catholic education, hardly started and abruptly interrupted with my move to Synanon, faded in my mind like a drawing left out too long in the sun.

  I did not have a close relationship with any of the demonstrators and as a result I had to sort out my own thoughts about the world around me, without guidance. Often I went around for months or years believing wrong conclusions about things. Trying to understand how radio worked, I thought live bands stood in line and took turns playing music. My ideas about the Bible were similarly haphazard. The Bible, I’d decided, must be a book of fairytales, but for grown-ups—stories written to interest adults, like Grimms’ Fairy Tales for children.

  Nobody in Synanon bothered with the Bible or Santa Claus, for that matter. Heaven, Adam and Eve, Santa Claus—all of it must be made up. The more I thought about what was beyond Earth, the more I felt that God had nothing to do with it. Possibly, God did not exist.

  This idea troubled me. If God didn’t exist and God hadn’t created the world, where did the world come from? The world had to have come from somewhere, but where? Space had to be something, but what? I’d get choked up again. Sometimes it was hard for me to swallow, just thinking about it all.

  “When I look up at the sky, I think, what’s past the sky? There’s space,” I tried to explain. “How far does the space go? Where does it come from?” Waiting for an answer, I shot Theresa a look, but she didn’t say anything. “What if there is just space, Theresa?”

  Her expression appeared thoughtful. “Sometimes, in order to know God, we have to strike up a conversation with Him. You can tell God your thoughts. Maybe ask Him for a sign. He’s good at giving signs.”

  “A sign?”

  “Yes. A sign could be something that happens that has special meaning only for you. That would be God communicating with you. You could pray to God or write a letter; either way, if you really want proof, you’ll get it.”

  Again, I noticed how sure of herself my mother seemed to be on this matter. She went back to dressing her paper doll.

  In Synanon, at dinner, we would recite a prayer from St. Francis of Assisi:

  Please let me first and always examine myself.

  Let me be honest and truthful.

  Let me seek and assume responsibility.

&nb
sp; Let me understand rather than be understood.

  Let me trust and have faith in myself and my fellow man.

  Let me love rather than be loved.

  Let me give rather than receive.

  After that prayer, we would recite from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

  For the length of my time in Synanon, I would know these words by heart, but not their meaning. Chuck Dederich referred to Synanon as a religion, but other than the prayer at dinner, we didn’t have any apparent rituals or religious ceremonies.

  With the paper doll completely dressed, Theresa held it up for me to look at. “Isn’t she cute? This is her traveling outfit. She’s going on a long trip.”

  When I didn’t respond, she set aside the cut-out paper girl and pulled me into her arms.

  “God does exists, Celena. We’ll talk about this later, okay? It’s probably best not to talk about God to people here. They wouldn’t understand.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Ban

  When most of the toddlers from the Hatchery had outgrown their nursery environment, the demonstrators decided to move them to the Commons to have their meals and move the older children to eat in the Shed with the adults.

  At my first meal in the Shed, I spotted Theresa fixing herself a plate of food at the buffet. I ran up to her to say hello and received a quick, bland smile in greeting.

  “I’m not allowed to talk to you right now,” she hissed before she walked to the adults’ side of the room.

  I wasn’t sure what had just happened. My heart in my throat, I wanted to follow her and ask her to explain. A demonstrator told me to get my food and sit down. When I was slow to move, she barked the order again while walking toward me, adding, “You are spending too much time with Theresa. You need to focus on other things now.”

  I sat at one of the tables, my mind a scramble of panic. What did this mean?

  The next day I ran into Theresa along the dirt road on the way to the Shed.

  She looked over her shoulder and stopped for a moment.

  “Theresa, why can’t I talk to you?” I asked.

  “We’re on a ban from each other for spending too much time together. Soon it will be over, though.” She started to say something more, but the same demonstrator who had yelled at me the day before suddenly emerged from the Shed. She watched us with her arms folded. Theresa dropped her gaze to the ground and continued on her way.

  “It is a one-month ban,” the demonstrator told me later. “You two are always walking arm and arm, hanging out with each other. That is not allowed here. Parents should not be with their children too much. Personally I find the behavior disgusting and Theresa a bad influence.”

  “But it’s my birthday soon,” I said.

  “We are finished with this conversation, Celena. You can vent about it in the game.”

  Over the next weeks I saw Theresa now and then; however, she knew better than to even look at me and tried her best to ignore my existence. Perhaps she felt that the better she cooperated with the ban, the faster it might be over.

  Instead, she spent all her time caring for Gwyn, who was a handful. The palsy had not rendered the girl immobile. She could walk with slow, jerky movements, dragging her right foot, which rolled at the ankle. Her arms curled in. Her speech was limited to grunts, chortles and screeches.

  All of the children made fun of her, including me. We did not understand the challenges of her condition, and no one took the time to explain that although Gwyn had handicaps, she deserved dignity as well.

  For the community, Gwyn was simply a burden, and Theresa, a misfit, was perfect for the job. I saw, though, that Theresa was tremendously kind to her and even seemed to believe that Gwyn had potential to improve beyond her present abilities. I often observed my mother patiently explaining things to her, someone I considered a pathetic figure. Gwyn would swivel her head, moaning and making what we children called “retarded sounds.”

  Along with the care of Gwyn, Theresa’s other duties included washing the property’s sheets and towels. We children were individually responsible for our own laundry, but the adults had a different system when it came to linens.

  My eighth birthday came and went, yet Theresa and I remained banned from each other. Finally, after a month had passed, one of the demonstrators took pity on us and ended the forced separation. After that we were more careful about how much time we spent together.

  The next time we visited, Theresa took me to my room and shut the door. “I have a present for you,” she said. Into my hands she placed a thick book with a red cover and a picture of a gold chariot pulled by a team of white horses. “It is the Bhaghavad Gita. Open it to the middle, where there are pictures.”

  I flipped through the dense text until I reached the midsection, where I found enchanting images of exquisite beauty. I had never seen anything like it. Here were vibrant colors of blue, purple and pink, nature bursting in tuberoses, lilies and verdant green meadows. Cows were beautifully ornamented with necklaces of flowers, a smudge of red on their foreheads; they even wore earrings. Every picture also featured a magical, glowing, blue-skinned person with long dark hair and fine silk clothes.

  “This woman is so pretty,” I said.

  “He is a man, and his name is Lord Krishna,” Theresa said.

  My gaze shot up from the book. I stared at my mom. Was she putting me on?

  “This woman here is a man?” I pointed at the blue being to make absolutely sure we were talking about the same person.

  “Yes. But he is a special man because he is actually an enlightened being. God sent him.”

  “Really?”

  Theresa took the book and turned to a different page, showing me a picture of the blue man as a baby. She set the book back in my hands and said, “When Krishna was small, his mother found him putting dirt in his mouth. When she demanded he open his mouth, do you know what she saw?” Theresa’s green eyes danced as she watched my face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “When he opened his mouth, she saw the whole universe. Can you imagine how shocked and surprised she must have been? That was when she realized that the universe is too much to understand.”

  Krishna’s mother had glimpsed the visual of a concept that had been mentally plaguing me. I fell in love with the story, a great weight lifted off my shoulders. The epiphany of Krishna’s mother became my own enlightenment in regard to my capabilities. I did not have to force myself to make sense of something far beyond my comprehension.

  “Theresa, can I keep this book?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s for you.”

  For weeks I carried the Bhaghavad Gita wherever I went and even slept with it, comforted by the pictures. Sometimes I tried to read the Hindu bible, but the ideas and philosophies expressed in the spiritual text were too complex for me to grasp.

  In an attempt to spend time with Theresa while escaping the demonstrators’ scrutiny, I took to hanging around the laundry room, helping her with the endless mounds of washing. Gwyn would be given a hand towel or washcloth to fold, and Theresa always made a big deal over the rumpled cloth when Gwyn was done “folding” it.

  Whenever I wanted to be with Theresa, it seemed Gwyn was there, too, and I began to resent her. I thought of my mother and me as an already complete unit, like a hand with all five digits. Gwyn was an extra finger, dangling, useless and in the way. The other children found my association with the “retarded” girl as something more about which to tease me.

  At mealtimes the demonstrators
made allowances for me and other children to join Theresa and Gwyn at their table because Gwyn was technically part of the school. But watching Gwyn eat made me nauseated. She didn’t close her mouth when she chewed, and I often got sprayed with her half-masticated food and saliva. Flecks of her dinner inevitably flew out of her open mouth when she sneezed, landing near my plate. At some point she would bite her tongue and yell in pain or purposely knock over a glass of milk, smirking when Theresa rushed to clean it up.

  The specialness of having Theresa around began to wear off now that almost all of our interactions involved her needy charge. I stopped by the laundry room less often and chose to sit elsewhere at mealtimes when I could. A distance formed between us.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Synanon Kid

  “Ooh, ahh. Yeah, baby. Do it to me,” Melissa moaned as the voice of the Barbie doll she held.

  Bending and twisting, she pried the doll’s stiff rubbery legs apart. The short skirt, which barely covered the doll’s crotch stretched up while the plastic hip joints strained in their sockets. Every time Melissa moaned for the doll, she contorted her own face into a strained grimace.

  “There’s a giant penis coming up out of the manhole,” she said. “And it’s fucking her. She likes it.”

  I stared down at the fuzz of carpet where the pretend manhole was supposed to be. It wasn’t hard to imagine the manhole but I couldn’t picture the penis. By then I had seen plenty of erections in the Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines that some of the adults left lying around. Never, however, had I seen what would have been, in actuality, a three-foot-long penis.