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

by C. A. Wittman

As the afternoon faded to early evening, the temperature dropped and the air thickened with moisture that clung to our hair, giving us gray halos. The fog rolled in, unfolding eerie whitish curtains, obscuring our vision. I ran toward the zoo but had to stop because I could barely see two feet ahead. A clap of thunder exploded from the sky, followed by hard sheets of slanting, icy rain. I forged forward, my head ducked to avoid the cubes of ice that fell as if being hurled from above.

  I heard kids calling out around me.

  “I saw Orangie! He’s alive. I found him hiding under the porch.”

  “Where is Blackie?”

  “Did you see the white cat?”

  I kept going. The fog thinned, moving rapidly. I broke into a run. At the upper end of the embankment trail leading to our zoo, Bear stood with something in her arms. I stopped then, and I knew as she made her way down, holding a small limp body, the brown and reddish patches of fur all too familiar. Closer still and I could see the perfect round hole a bullet had left in Tiger’s side.

  The zoo was over. And Bear was Melissa again, standing in the rain, her short hair plastered to her scalp, clothes clinging to her wet, cold skin, a dead cat draped over her arm.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Books

  “I hear you’re a fast reader.”

  I stood, hands folded before me in my schoolteacher’s small office, avoiding her penetrating gaze. She was not particularly fond of me and seemed to bear me a grudge for reasons I never understood.

  A few weeks earlier, I’d argued my case for moving up to the next grade level, but even though I’d completed all my work, she was determined to hold me back and have me repeat assignments for which I’d received sufficient marks. Outraged, I’d pulled folders of my schoolwork from her file drawer, loaded them on her desk and demanded that she take a look.

  I didn’t know whether she disliked the scene I’d made or worried that I might prove my point to someone else, but the next day, she ordered me to move my desk into the next room to join the rest of my peers who had moved up a grade some weeks ago.

  “Some people say you can read a whole novel in a day,” she said.

  When I didn’t respond, she opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a small paperback. On the cover was a picture of a young girl with dark, curly hair standing on a hillside with a goat and snow-capped mountains behind her. She wore a cotton dress and smock of vest and apron.

  “Have you ever read Heidi?” my teacher asked.

  “No.”

  She lifted her chin and inclined her head toward a chair pushed up against the wall next to her desk. “Go and sit over there.” She handed me the book. “I’m going to time you while you read. After an hour I want to see how far you’ve gotten and I will ask you questions about the story.”

  I sat down and opened the book, staring at the tiny print. No one had ever forced me to read, and I wasn’t sure whether this book was the type of story I’d pick up myself.

  I read the first sentence: “From the old and pleasantly situated village of Mayenfeld, a footpath winds through green and shady meadows to the foot of the mountains, which on this side look down from their stern and lofty heights upon the valley below.”

  My attention was already lost. I was not in the mood to read about the majestic beauty of the Swiss Alps or the next paragraph, which introduced a young girl and small child exerting themselves in climbing the mountain.

  To tell the truth, I had been secretly making my way through Harold Robbins’s The Carpet Baggers and The Lonely Lady, books I found around the property, in the dining hall and laundry room. In these stories I received my first taste of the seedier side of life: unscrupulous business practices; depressed, isolated women with suppressed sexual appetites; depraved men and their sexual fetishes; and cocktail parties where deals were discussed and feelings numbed through endless rounds of martinis and chain-smoked cigarettes. At the age of nine, the adult world of Synanon was shrouded in mystery for me. Harold Robbins’s novels were like keys, which opened doors to secrets that I wanted to explore.

  Heidi’s cheeks, aglow with heat “the crimson color seen through the dark sunburnt skin,” as the author described, did not compare to Jeri Lee in The Lonely Lady, which opened with Harold Robbins’s protagonist forced to have an abortion due to the Rh factor of her blood. I didn’t know what an Rh factor was, but I’d been immediately hooked.

  Heidi’s plight, also revealed on the first page, involved an older girl’s dubious plan to deposit Heidi, who’d been placed in the girl’s charge, at the top of the mountain with a relative known as the Alm-Uncle. While they walked through the little village of Dorfli, a place that seemed as interesting to me as the inside of a shoebox, various residents inquired as to the girl’s destination, each expressing a sense of concern about the prospect of Heidi being left with the uncle. After twenty minutes I’d read only about three pages and could barely recall any of the story. I tried to speed-read, picking up bits and pieces of pertinent information, but was left with muddled images in no sequential order: wild flowers, a frowning uncle, fresh air, happy child.

  The hour dripped by, and I jumped at the sound of a timer.

  “How far have you read?”

  I looked up at my teacher’s flat face and down at the book in my lap. For the last thirty minutes I had been trying desperately to absorb the words. I had no idea where I was in the story because I’d skipped around in increasing panic. I chose a page at random and watched my teacher’s lips tighten when she held out her hand for the book.

  “Tell me what’s been happening so far in the story,” she said.

  I stared at her, trying to think. I didn’t know. I couldn’t talk. I just stood there.

  She set the book aside. “You have been fooling people into thinking that you’re a reader. You are slow and have zero recall or comprehension of what you read.” She opened a folder and made a note. “You can leave now.”

  I suppose my love of books began with my earliest memories of my mother reading Goodnight Moon to me. It began, “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And there were three little bears sitting on chairs and two little kittens and a pair of mittens and a little toy house and a young mouse and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush and a little old lady whispering, ‘Hush.’”

  My mother would place her finger over her lips when she said “Hush,” her reenactment of the old woman sitting in the rocking chair.

  Leaning against my mother’s chest, I’d relax into our ritual of saying goodnight to each and every creature and object in the room.

  “Your first word was ‘book,’” Theresa had told me many times over the years. “I was talking to Grandma, and you were sitting on the floor and this little voice came out of nowhere and said, ‘Book.’ Grandma and I both stopped talking, and I said, ‘Mama, did you say that?’ She said no, and we looked at you, looking up at us. You were holding a book. You must have been about six or seven months, and I said, ‘Celena, did you say ‘Book’?

  “You just kept looking at me with those big eyes. You had great big eyes like a Hindu baby. So I said, ‘Celena, what’s that? Is that a book? Book?’ Then you said it again. The same little voice: ‘Book.’” Theresa always told this story as if it had just happened the day before. She’d get worked up at the punchline, her eyes shining from the memory.

  It seemed fitting that my first word had been “book” because books provided the ultimate escape from my anomalous environment. Other than an occasional field trip, usually to the supermarket or library, we children rarely left the Synanon properties. However, I found that I could go anywhere, whenever I liked, through books and later my own writings.

  The shelves of the playrooms were well stocked with books for early readers up to young adult novels. Some of the picture books were typical for children. They included Goodnight Moon and The Run Away Bunny, both by Margaret Wise Brown, Horton Hears a Who and other books
by Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose Tales and the like. Then there were the cartoonish informative guides to sex and puberty: Where Did I Come From? and What’s Happening To Me? both by Peter Mayle.

  Where Did I Come From? begins with the narrator announcing, “We wrote it because we thought you might like to know exactly where you came from, and how it all happened.”

  A few pages later, we see an illustration of a man and woman, the definitive parents, standing naked in a bathtub with bright cheerful smiles as the reader is taken on a tour of their reproductive anatomy and shown the distinct differences between them. This soon leads to the main action: Daddy, rosy-cheeked and on top of Mommy, enthusiastically pumping away. We had already been informed on the preceding page that when Mommy and Daddy are feeling loving, they like to kiss and then Daddy’s penis grows big and hard in preparation for entering Mommy’s vagina.

  The narrator assures youthful readers that this sequence produces pleasurable sensations like a “tickle” in both partners. Daddy repeatedly rubs his penis inside Mommy until the sensation is so pleasant that something called semen spurts out into Mommy’s vagina. The next page shows smiling sperm that look as if they might burst into song, swimming up a kind of tunnel that represents the inside of the woman.

  The mission is successful for one of the tadpole-like contenders, and a sappy romance between the sperm and egg is played out in what looks like a sudden formal dinner party. The sperm has donned a top hat and sports a cane. He is in jolly suspended animation next to the egg, a blushing massive white blob of a thing with fake eyelashes. The two join forces, and voila! We have the beginnings of life. Also revealed are the biological processes of cell division and the progression through embryonic stages, fetal stages and finally birth.

  What’s Happening to Me? was just as fantastically detailed and riveting as its predecessor, chronicling the many biological changes of puberty. These books were well-thumbed and appreciated for providing many of us the opportunity to absorb this information privately. They were much preferred to the candid sexuality seminars we had been required to attend.

  A book of photographs that made very little sense to me garnered more attention than Peter Mayle’s books, which seemed tame in comparison. The photos were artistic-looking black-and-white pictures of naked children as young as five up to thirteen, with an adult or two included as well. One picture showed two young girls, perhaps twelve years old, with budding breasts, curled against each other in soft lighting, looking innocently up at the camera. Another picture showed a man laughing while holding a giggling young girl upside down, his limp penis drooped over her vagina. Another page displayed two naked girls, one spread-eagle under the other. The girl on top held a doll that she pretended to deliver from between the other girl’s legs. These pictures were riveting and mildly alarming, giving a sense that something was about to happen that shouldn’t.

  When I wasn’t marveling over Peter Mayle’s rollicking, boisterous guides to puberty and sex or the erotic photography book, I was deeply involved in the timeless nursery rhymes and beautiful illustrations of Mother Goose or enthralled by the giant Walt Disney book of fairy tale stories complete with colorful pictures from the beloved animated movies.

  I frequently checked out the same stack of picture books from the Petaluma Public Library. At the age of seven, my favorite book was Horton Hatches an Egg, a story about a friendly elephant that’s duped by a bird named Mazie into sitting on her nest all year long. Mazie tells Horton she will not be gone long, but instead she flies away to the tropics for a vacation, leaving poor Horton sitting indefinitely. Throughout this ordeal Horton is teased by a variety of animals and finally is kidnapped from his beloved home in Africa to brave a perilous ocean journey to the Americas, all while seated loyally on the nest, itself still cradled in a tree. All manner of questions were raised in my youthful imagination as I read this story over and over.

  Why, for instance, did Horton never need to go to the bathroom or eat food? How did the men who found him manage to dig up the tree and transport Horton over a tall skinny hill that had a vertical incline of a sheer cliff and a peak so pointy and narrow that it looked like a needle? Why did the tree branch never break under Horton’s enormous weight? I analyzed and picked apart my favorite story in the same way that I questioned my world and the nonsensical happenings at Synanon.

  In the end Horton is accosted by Mazie when she happens to come flying by one day and sees him getting so much attention for sitting on her egg in a circus that he never wanted to be in. I always felt satisfied at the justice of the egg finally cracking open to birth a baby elephant with wings. This Dr. Seuss book, told in a humorous way that I could understand and to which I could relate at age seven, provided parallels to my own experiences and feelings of parental abandonment, displacement and living as an exile in a foreign culture.

  One day an announcement was made, in typical Synanon fashion, that children seven and older were no longer allowed to check out picture books at the library and instead were required to borrow books with a minimum of one hundred pages. This rule felt like a disaster to me. I loved picture books. Books filled only with text were one step below newspapers, which at least had comic strips.

  It took only a few days for me to realize that the new rule was one of the best ever enforced by the demonstrators. As I combed through the middle-school readers, I found Ruth Chew’s quirky stories of children who discovered befuddled witches in their closets and under their beds. The cover image of two girls dancing gaily with a lion, a wreath of flowers around the cat’s neck, soon had me immersed in the adventures of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I inhaled the whole Wizard of Oz series and the adventures of Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann and Andy.

  Raggedy Ann was something of a mystic. She and Raggedy Andy were forever going on adventures in forests where hotdogs grew on trees, lollypop bushes abounded and there were soda water springs if ever anyone became thirsty. Usually the characters would stumble upon a general store in the middle of nowhere, the proprietor only too happy to give away his merchandise, as the dolls had no money. The suspenseful part of the tale came when Raggedy Ann and Andy were captured by a wizard or witch who lived in the “deep, deep woods” and wanted to cut Ann open and steal her magical candy heart.

  Raggedy Ann’s compassion for her wicked captors knew no bounds. In one story she chided Raggedy Andy for purposely distracting a witch who was trying to remember the spell to render Raggedy Ann unconscious so she could then destroy the doll. These villains always burst into tears of frustration when their spells didn’t work, and Raggedy Ann would comfort them by telling them that all the magic they needed was right there inside of them and that if they would just clear the cobwebs of sorrow and selfishness from their minds, rays of goodness and kindliness would light up their souls. These enlightened words and a soft hug were all that was needed to forever transform the deranged creatures into beings of love and generosity.

  After reading Raggedy Ann for a few years, I decided I wouldn’t hit other kids unless they hit me first. I imagined Raggedy Ann somehow knew about this promise I made to myself and smiled up from the pages with approval.

  I blew through the Ramona Quimby books and everything else written by Beverly Cleary. I strongly related to Judy Blume’s coming-of-age stories, and The Chronicles of Prydain, a fantasy series by Lloyd Alexander, had me reading into the early-morning hours.

  I also discovered Roald Dahl’s stories featuring authoritarian schoolteachers and cruel caregivers and other books with similar antagonists, like the headmistress in The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. In these stories, little girl protagonists were kidnapped and shut away in a school run by mean-spirited women who forced them to keep their hair short. The children always escaped their circumstances and won out in the end. I read these books over and over.

  It was, however, the Little House on the Prairie books in which, like the television show, I found th
e greatest parallels to my life. Living on a ranch easily lent itself to my imagining what Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pioneer life had been like. In Synanon, adult members often hunted deer. The heads of the bucks with their crowns of antlers were saved and mounted on buildings all over the ranch property. The bike-shed walls were also lined with heads, their glass eyes glittering in the dim lighting.

  In the Little House books, Pa kept a pig or two all year for slaughter in the fall, and Laura remembered with fondness being given the pig’s bladder filled with air for use as a kind of balloon that she and her sister Mary played with. The pig’s tail was roasted and given to the girls as a crackling treat.

  Every year in Synanon we slaughtered our own pigs. Sitting on the fence of the corral, I watched as each got a bullet in its head, its neck slit and its body hung on a hook for bleeding and gutting. Later in the morning, we children were fed fresh sausages.

  Laura Ingalls rode horses bareback with a cousin, galloping over the hills and through the meadows, the wind in her hair and a sense of freedom that thrilled me to imagine.

  The commune kept horses, and learning to ride them was mandatory.

  Laurie, who still went by the nickname “Spike,” sometimes had the chore of searching for stray horses in the hills and bringing them back to the corral. After reading about Laura Ingalls’s thrills of horseback riding, I asked Laurie if I could go with her one morning to scout out the horses.

  “If you want,” she’d said.

  We woke at five on a Saturday morning and had a quick breakfast before we went to the tack room next to the horse stalls and collected a saddle, bit and straps. This equipment was for me. Spike rode bareback.

  Into the hills we hiked with the gear and a small bucket of oats.

  “They sometimes hang around this area,” Spike said after we’d walked for close to an hour. “This area” was a vast stretch of land that appeared similar in every direction. Another hour would pass before we saw a band of horses off in the distance.