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

by C. A. Wittman

  I always focused on my breath, ignoring side cramps and any other kind of bodily pain. “Keep going,” I chanted to myself. When that failed to stimulate me, I switched to “You can do it!” forcing my mind to override my body’s complaints.

  I found the exercise easier when I knew how long I would be running than when we veered from familiar routes. I was fast, usually the first girl to finish behind the three fastest boys. Buddy normally ran alongside us, speeding up and slowing down, always watching for slackers. He did not tolerate slow runners, instead urging them to pick up the pace by barking in their ear and running on their heels. Anyone he caught walking was made to start over from the beginning.

  After our runs we played an hour or two of sports. We played every sport: baseball, football, soccer, hockey, tennis, handball and others. There was a call to action that demanded the physical excellence Chuck spoke about in his manifesto on raising children: “They’re going to know how to punch, too, they’re going to know how to do what they’re told, they won’t be such sissies and babies. Their imprinting is changing completely. It just might be that we have a hell of a good thing going.”

  The child’s age was hardly a consideration. Once, during a mandatory six-mile race through the hills, I found two small girls no more than five or six years of age huddled in the grass, crying. “Please help,” they’d called out to me. “We’re lost.” Others had run past them without even a backward glance. I stopped and took their little hands in mine, urging them to keep going. It would not bode well for them if they didn’t finish.

  “Line up!” Buddy instructed us. “You know what to do. I don’t want to see a single movement. You hear me?”

  Within seconds we were standing in our usual formation: five rows, six to a row, shortest to tallest. We stood erect, arms straight at our sides, eyes forward, unblinking, barely breathing. The sun seared the tops of our heads. I could feel a dampness spreading along my hairline.

  “All right, give me ten!”

  I groaned inwardly, wondering who had moved. I shot down with everyone else, hands spread shoulder-width apart, legs close together for the first round of ten pushups. The dark asphalt gave off the smell of warm tar. The pushups were easy for me, but some of the kids struggled. We all had to rise and fall at the same time.

  “One! Get those asses down. Two! Hold it together. You want to go for twenty? Three! We’re going for twenty!” Next to me, one of the girls whose arms were too thin and underdeveloped for such grueling exercise, struggled with trembling muscles to keep herself balanced.

  “ Five! Hold! When I tell you not to move, you don’t move! Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Buddy!” we all cried in unison.

  “What?”

  “Yes, Buddy!” My gaze snaked to the trembling mass next to me. It seemed as if all the blood in her body had traveled to her face. She stared miserably at the ground, mouth agape as if she could suck up strength through the air.

  “You!” Buddy stood over us. I could glimpse only his lower legs, knots of thick, ropy muscles. “Get up!”

  The girl almost collapsed before she rose slowly to her feet.

  “Go to the front,” Buddy said. “I want fifteen more pushups from the rest of you.”

  I powered through and jumped to my feet, followed by the others, and took up my rigid soldier stance. My previous companion stood before us, rumpled and wan, a red splotch on each white cheek.

  Buddy was a massive black man who stood six feet or taller. His muscles looked like lumps of sleek dark steel. His bald head shone under the penetrating afternoon sun. He marched up to the girl, hulking over her. The dark eyes in her thin face darted up to assess her situation. Just as quickly she looked back at the asphalt, her chest visibly rising and falling.

  “You think you can just cop out here?” His voice was soft.

  She shook her head.

  “What?”

  “No, Buddy.”

  “All right. Down. Give me twenty.”

  “I can’t.” The words were just a hiss of breath.

  She didn’t see it coming, but we did. His large hand connected hard with her thin chest. She flew back, landing on her bottom, the wind knocked out of her. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  “You want to play games?” Buddy said.

  She shook her head, eyes watering.

  “Is this a game?” Buddy called out to us.

  “No!” we yelled in unison.

  “Give me twenty!”

  She rose to all fours, shaking, and managed to get into the pushup position, her middle sagging.

  “Pull yourself up.”

  She did, her spaghetti arms trembling harder now as she attempted to make her first pushup. Creaking down, she collapsed, her body convulsing in sobs.

  Buddy stood, his hands on his hips, eyes hooded. “Up!”

  With an act of supreme will, she pushed herself back up.

  “Down! That’s two!”

  Again she collapsed.

  My neck felt stiff. My eyes strained from looking straight ahead.

  Giving up on the girl, Buddy began to pace among our ranks. “This is Synanon. You are Synanon kids, and I’m going to whip your asses into shape. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Buddy!”

  “After our exercises, we will be running. There is no stopping. I catch someone walking, all of you will start again! Understand?”

  “Yes, Buddy!”

  I heard the hollow smacking sound of something like a watermelon hitting the ground hard. It wasn’t a watermelon, but Tim’s skull. In a fit of epilepsy, he had fallen straight back from his military stance. We broke ranks and ran over to him. He was out cold, his body stiff. We stood, watching him. No one, including Buddy, seemed to know what to do.

  After some moments, Tim’s eyes fluttered. His face scrunched up as he came to and registered the pain. “Uh, ungh,” he cried.

  Tim’s epilepsy was one reason we kids were required to divide up our time with him. He needed to always have someone watching him. Yet no one had trained us on what to do when he had an epileptic episode. This major detail escaped the demonstrators in charge of his welfare.

  Tim opened his eyes.

  “You all right?” Buddy asked, a nervous smile flitting across his face.

  Tim said nothing.

  Buddy reached down to the boy, who stared silently up at all of us, tears sliding down his face. Buddy pulled him to his feet, guiding him to a shady place to sit.

  The rest of us set off on our run.

  From that day forward Tim did not participate in physical education. Then one day he vanished just as suddenly as he had arrived. It may have been weeks before we kids even noticed he was gone.

  In the spring of 1980 Buddy Jones put together our first basketball team to play against schools outside Synanon. I signed up immediately, excited to learn the sport and get the chance to skip some of the game-playing that usually took place after physical education and before dinner.

  I was one of two girls who registered for the team, and after a week, the second girl dropped out. Almost from the beginning I became obsessed with the sport, practicing whenever I had spare time. I loved dribbling the ball and trying to do what I considered fancy actions with it, like dribbling it around my body or through my legs and trying to run it up and down my arms like the Harlem Globetrotters.

  I began to gain proficiency at dribbling and snatching the ball from an opposing player. Buddy assigned me the position of shooting guard because I could move the ball up and down the court with some competence and without losing it too often to an opposing team member. I was great at defense as well, but lousy at shooting and scoring as most of us were. I spent as much as an hour practicing shooting the ball at the basket from different positions and distances and while in motion. My teammates began to call me Swish, not because of skill, but because we’d seen a movie about a woman nicknamed Swish who’d disguised herself as a man to play on an all-male basketball team. />
  Some of the girls asked if they could be part of the team as cheerleaders. Their request was granted, and cheerleading outfits were ordered for them. In the fall we rode out in our jitney to challenge one of the local Marin County schools on the junior high school level.

  A mere quarter of the way through the game, it was already clear that we stank. The team we played against was tight, the players seasoned. Their action sequences were well-planned, and they spotted many of our weaknesses right away. When I played against my own team, I found it easy to follow the ball and intercept a pass, but the team we played against was swift, the ball sometimes a streaking blur. I got confused, playing my position as shooting guard but then forgetting and reverting to the role of small forward, trying to do post-ups after catching the terrifying whizzing object, throwing it at the net almost without looking and missing every time as several large boys bore down on me.

  “Frederick!” Buddy yelled, calling me by my last name from the sidelines amid the maniacal cheers of the Synanon cheerleaders in their shiny, purple, short-skirted uniforms. Our cheerleaders did not understand the game and burst out in disconcerting shrieks that spun the other team’s heads as we ran up and down the court. Frustrated at our ineptitude, Buddy continuously swapped us, hoping someone would know what the hell they were doing.

  We lost every game. We were obviously not the superior athletes that Synanon members boasted we were. In honor of our participation, one of the schools we’d played against kindly made certificates for each of us. Mine read “Mr. Frederick.” Just like Swish in the movie, no one had guessed I was a girl. Buddy lost interest in the basketball team and it folded.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Ranch

  In 1980, a change in living arrangements required that the Synanon school be moved from Walker Creek to the nearby Ranch property, which until then had been living quarters solely for adults. The adults were ordered to take up residence in Walker Creek. We made the switch in staggered shifts, and I happened to be in the first wave of children.

  We found ourselves inhabiting half-empty buildings, having the run of the property, sparsely populated by the demonstrators and us. For the first time I was given a room that came as close to being my own space as I would ever have in Synanon. The room held two twin beds and a loft, which also had two twin beds. I was assigned to the loft and told that if I wanted to share it with another girl, I could. At ten years old, I had spent the last several years crammed into rooms with other girls, where every square inch was utilized. The long rectangular loft, with its sloping ceiling, Berber-carpeted floor and small slanted window, was a novelty. I had no desire to share it.

  Because there were so few of us and we were cut off from the main body of the community, a few routines, such as mandatory inspections, began to fall away. Games were played less frequently, and at times we didn’t have physical education. There were fewer seminars and school life became a loose assortment of academic activities. Often we filled out worksheets in the playroom and then lay about watching cultural and historical documentaries. These programs were all hosted by the same dreary man, who, in a voice little more stimulating than a speech synthesizer, stood in a suit and tie and spoke of long-ago dynasties and ancient artifacts. Lulled to sleep, I found myself startled awake by dramatic music as the camera zoomed in on what the producer obviously considered riveting imagery and then pulled back to the gray-faced man, who never so much as cracked a smile. We watched many of these programs, which frequently substituted for classroom learning.

  Later, math lessons, taught by a new teacher, were added to the curriculum. Short and stocky, Alan sported an afternoon shadow of heavy stubble every day. He had a thick accent and for most of the class period we studied a map tacked to the wall. Our sole focus was two countries: Iran and Iraq. Colored bits of paper were thumbtacked to locales within those countries. The papers represented national flags and signified where the bulk of the fighting was taking place. Each day Alan explained with careful detail the present situation of the Iran-Iraq war.Whenever one country gained an advantage, he moved a few flags from the other country’s map to the map of the temporary victor. “This is very important, very important,” he always added.

  As usual, I was confused. Apart from what seemed to be an endless war, I knew little about the history or culture of either country or how their war related to us. Our math teacher never offered us this information. In the last twenty minutes of each class, we were given basic math problems—addition, subtraction, long division and multiplication—to work on with calculators. Chuck had at some point denounced an education in math. Instead, he wanted us to learn how to use calculators because, as he liked to say, “that is the wave of the future.” Why waste time solving problems with our minds when we had the advanced convenience of modern technology at hand to help us get things done faster and more accurately?

  At another point there was a brief fascination with the abacus among the school administrators. A Chinese woman who’d been brought in as a guest to demonstrate how to use one stood with her beaded contraption opposite another adult with a calculator. A problem of long addition was written on the board and a timer set for a competition between the two. The young woman’s slim fingers flew over the beads, moving them up and down the wooden rods attached to the wooden frame. She called out her answer before the timer buzzed and while the other contender was still entering numbers into his calculator. Moments later he called out the same answer. We students gave them a round of obligatory applause. The Chinese woman grinned, gripping the abacus to her chest.

  Though I was amazed that she could compute so quickly with just some beads, I was even more fascinated with her figure. She was so thin that she looked like she had been modeled from a Gumby cutout. From every dimension she appeared alarmingly flat and her eyes stretched into such extreme slits that I wondered whether she could see at all.

  Although Synanon had been ahead of its time in integrating blacks and whites, there were few, if any, Asian people in the commune. I had come to acquaint Japanese and Chinese people with martial arts films and B-rated Godzilla movies. The latter had dialogue dubbed into English and also featured other giant dinosaur-like creatures from the Triassic period that suddenly came to life, with their only apparent desire being to trample people and rip up high-rises while shrieking their fury.

  The young woman with the abacus had a heavy accent, her words seemed swallowed back into her throat, consonants evaporating every so often, vowels blunt. Certain simple words were missing altogether. Although I had just watched her solve long division on an abacus so quickly she’d beaten someone with a calculator, I concluded she must be somewhat slow simply because she couldn’t speak English properly.

  My lack of contact with the outside world fostered other ignorant assumptions. For instance, I thought that all people in Africa still lived in ancient tribal bands and that people in some parts of England still traveled by horse and buggy and wore eighteenth-century clothes.

  My view of American family life was similarly skewed. Although I had spent the first six years of my life living outside the commune and I had clear memories of that time and had watched TV shows epitomizing contemporary culture, I somehow conjured in my mind a 1950s dynamic of American nuclear family living.

  In my imagination most women were housewives, creating domestic havens for their husbands and children, an idea I loved. I wanted nothing more than to live in a house with my mom, cooking alongside her and working on needlepoint projects during my free time. In my fantasy I was enrolled in a regular public school and had long, flowing hair. Synanon was a distant memory, a strange blip in the blissfully normal life that I imagined.

  My Synanon education lacked in other ways as well. I had no sense of geography and didn’t know where one country was in relation to another. I’m not sure I knew what a continent was, nor could I have pointed out California on a map had someone asked me to do so. I still struggled with telling time from a clock, and alth
ough I wrote and read incessantly, I had not learned even simple grammar. My ignorance of narration and punctuation in my writing led to pages of words all run together in one long, confusing string of events.

  After another month or two, the next wave of children came to join us on the Ranch compound. Having grown accustomed to the smaller group, thoughts of my other peers had dissolved into the recesses of my mind. For the most part, I did not miss them. Yet when they arrived, the second group merged seamlessly with the first. Within a few days it was as if we had never been split.

  One of the boys, Chris Waters, did not arrive with the second group, but showed up much later. Like the other children, I had not thought about him and was surprised when one day I stepped from the playroom and found him standing in the small courtyard between the play building and some of the dorms. He’d grown several inches and stood with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He seemed out of place.

  “Where have you been?” I asked, realizing for the first time that he had not been part of our group for some months. It startled me that I’d forgotten him so easily, even though I had never really liked him. He’d been one of the kids who’d liked to taunt me, but the mischievousness that usually lurked in his blue eyes was absent, replaced by a solemn and shadowy stare.

  “I was away,” he said.

  “Away where?”

  “Shh.” Chris grabbed my arm and pulled me farther from the entrance of the playroom. “I can’t talk to you here. Walk with me.”

  I stumbled after him, bewildered.

  His voice low, he said, “Some men came and took me just before the big move.”

  “What men?”

  His lips thinned as I watched him struggle to explain. “There’s a camp where they are keeping some kids from the punk squad. They sent me there. It’s like a concentration camp or something.”