Synanon Kid

by C. A. Wittman

  “She’s my daughter now,” Alice said one day.

  I stood in the kitchen, sipping the nauseating obligatory glass of milk that Alice wanted me to drink every day. I heard her talking on the phone in the other room and knew better than to interrupt even though she was talking about me. Her voice took on the icy edge it had whenever something didn’t please her.

  “Her mother hasn’t seen her in over a year,” Alice said, “and you can’t afford to take care of her, Jim. Who takes her to school every day, feeds her and buys her clothes? I’m the mother every day, Jim.” Her voice dropped while she listened to my father, then she continued, “You can still visit her like you always do. Her mother’s not around. Who knows how long she’ll be in that place.” Alice’s voice grew softer. Whenever grownups spoke about my mother, it was always in a hushed voice. Conversation stopped altogether if they thought I was listening. I strained to hear more, but “the place” did not come up again.

  I tried to imagine my mom and Synanon but only drew a blank. I didn’t know what it was, and Theresa had faded in my mind. Alice’s sister Stella once forgot herself and asked Alice, “Is it true the women don’t have any hair in that place?”

  No hair.

  I could not paint a mental picture.

  Synanon was a blank.

  My mother was a blank.

  No hair?

  A few days after the overheard phone conversation, my bags were packed. Alice fussed over me while we waited for my father to pick me up and take me to his brother’s, where I’d been told I was to live.

  “You can come here any time, and I’ll visit with you. You’re still my little girl,” Alice said, arranging my ringlets into the perfect Shirley Temple spiral curls that she loved. I had never before seen Alice flustered or with tears in her eyes.

  My father showed up shortly, giving me a brief hug and Alice a breezy hello before he hefted the suitcases Alice had lined up by the door. We watched him as he made a few trips to place the luggage in the car before he came back to retrieve me. Alice bent down to give me a kiss on my cheek, leaving a residue of her perfume on my clothes. My father opened the door, and Alice followed us part of the way toward the car, her heels clicking on the cement.

  “You take care of my daughter, Jim,” Alice called out.

  My father’s hand tightened on mine, his jaw hardening. “Goodbye, Alice,” he said. “Get in the car, Celena.”

  Once I was buckled in, we pulled away. Alice hadn’t moved. Her brownish blond hair was pulled into a ponytail that accentuated the slimness of her face and the sad fatigue that had settled in her features.

  At first I liked the idea of living at my Uncle Joe’s. He had two children, my cousins James and Tammy, with whom I’d played during prior visits. We’d raced each other up and down the street with my father snapping pictures and sometimes arranging us in poses for the camera. When he could afford it, he took all three of us to an amusement park or movie.

  My cousins’ mother, Aunt Terry, was one of the few white people in the neighborhood. She always seemed delighted to see me, making a big deal about how pretty and smart she thought I was.

  All this changed when I came to stay with them. I was squeezed into an already cramped bedroom with my cousins, a single mattress set on the floor at the foot of their twin beds for me to sleep on. Almost immediately Terry expressed her resentment of my living in her home.

  The house was a small, boxy structure caged by iron bars that fitted the windows and front screen door. The interior embodied the decline of Aunt Terry’s mental state. The sofa and easy chair were worn and sagging. The carpet was frayed. The stale odor from the cigarettes Aunt Terry and Uncle Joe chain-smoked never seemed to clear completely from the grayish air.

  As a small child I had a habit of walking on my toes without realizing it, an idiosyncrasy my aunt particularly hated almost as much as she generally disliked me. In the early evenings before my Uncle Joe came home, she made me walk the length of the living room heel-to-toe with a clothespin fastened over my nose. I’d wait, keeping still with my head lifted toward her nicotine-stained fingers while she clipped the wooden pin on my nostrils, a cigarette dangling from her lips, limp brown hair framing her white, narrow face. “We may as well try and fix your nose. It’s too wide. Practice your walk.”

  I took a few steps toward the front door, careful to keep the soles of my feet close to the floor. When she felt satisfied with my obedience, she’d sit on the sofa, inhaling smoke deep into her lungs, then letting it seep out of her nose and lips in flat thin wisps. “I don’t want to see you on your toes tomorrow. Answer me when I’m talking to you, you little turd.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The wooden pin pinched my skin and made it hard for me to breathe. I focused on my steps and the faded brown carpet. I’d walk until my aunt grew tired of watching me and wandered off in her thin, pink terrycloth robe, the fabric balding in patches, the flap and scrape of her slippers emitting a tired sound.

  The irony of her latent racism confused me. “You’re an ugly little nigger. Too black,” she often told me. Yet she’d married a man darker than I was. Because I’d experienced my mother’s love and my father’s and Alice’s care and fuss over me, Terry’s ailing mental health and the beatings she administered soon after I moved in never quite penetrated my essence. It was as if I had been emotionally inoculated. My aunt terrified me, yet I had the maturity to understand that she wasn’t well.

  Most days, Aunt Terry lived in her robe. Stagnation and boredom were advertised in the fat curlers she and other women in our neighborhood wore shamelessly to the supermarket along with bedroom garments they couldn’t be bothered to change before they left the house. Their lives were one long day after the next. With their husbands gone to work, they had nothing to do but watch the soaps on TV and kids playing outside. And watch they did, their eyes heavy-lidded while they chain-smoked and drank endless cups of coffee.

  Sometimes my cousin Tammy and I imitated our sluggish mentors. We sat on the twin beds where she and her brother slept, the beds posing as our houses. We’d pretend to talk on the phone to each other, our dolls drooped over our arms like babies.

  “Girl, what choo fixin’ to do?”

  “Um-umh, dis baby be givin’ me all kines trouble, girl.”

  Nighttime became my refuge. When Uncle Joe returned home after work, Aunt Terry didn’t dare mistreat me. We sat down to dinner around the Formica table and ate pork chops, mashed potatoes and peas. Tall plastic cups of fizzy 7Up sat next to each plate.

  My bald uncle, soiled with dirt from work, the grime thick under his fingernails, kept mostly to himself. Although I felt safer when he was around, his fearsome tough look scared me into keeping my distance. Eleven months younger than my father, Uncle Joe looked eleven years older.

  My father maintained a trim figure, wore fashionable clothing and spoke in an elegant low timbre, rejecting the drawl of urban black speech in which consonants disappeared at the ends of words as though the speaker couldn’t be bothered to pronounce all the letters. He mimicked the suave mannerisms and tone of his favorite Hollywood actors, Cary Grant and Rock Hudson.

  Uncle Joe wore white tank tops, the fabric streaked with grease and straining across his hard, round belly. Tufts of hair shot out from the sides of his scalp, though the top of his head was smooth and shiny. At the end of a long day of work, he’d collapse into an easy chair and guzzle a few beers while having a smoke.

  Over the course of two years, my mother gradually receded in my mind to a ghostly shred of another time. She was no longer important in my day-to-day life. Then a phone call came in the middle of a winter afternoon.

  “Your mother,” Aunt Terry said, handing me the receiver. I reached for the phone, curious

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, Celena? It’s me. Your mother.”

  The voice sounded unfamiliar, a stranger’s voice.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Fine.”

&nb
sp; “It’s my birthday. I’m thirty years old today. What do you think of that?”

  What did I think? Time had run away from us, but I was too young to process its passage. I had no words for the gay, bright woman on the other end of the line, her face blurry in my mind. Through the screen door I saw the neighborhood children riding their bikes.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I hung up without saying goodbye.

  I hadn’t stopped loving my mother. I just didn’t see how she fit into my life. She had become an abstraction, the woman who went to “that place,” the secret place adults spoke of in hushed voices, shooing me away so I wouldn’t overhear something I shouldn’t.

  After a time, my father became suspicious about Aunt Terry. Maybe a neighbor dropped a hint. Perhaps his own intuition caused him to wonder.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said one afternoon, squatting before me so we were eye to eye. “Is your Aunt Terry treating you right?”

  I stared at his earnest, handsome face.

  “Sweetie, don’t pick at your skin like that.” He pulled my hand away from my arm.

  I’d taken up the habit of digging my nails into my skin and peeling it off a little at a time.

  My aunt stood behind my father. Fear crackled in her gaze, her lips tucked in tightly. Anxiety hung like a cloak around Terry whenever my father came around. It showed in her nervous smile and the steady stream of cigarettes like miniature lifelines assuaging her shipwrecked psyche. She seemed to sense his repulsion in the curt way he spoke to her and the flare of his nostrils. My father had a temper; several of his brothers did, too, and Terry had been on the receiving side of it more than once.

  What was I to tell him when he waited for me to speak? Would he take me home with him that day and never bring me back to Aunt Terry’s? I couldn’t afford the risk that he might later change his mind and decide Aunt Terry’s wasn’t that bad after all.

  “Celena,” he urged.

  I thought of the beatings she’d given me, the sharp edges of the plastic racetracks that belonged to her son slicing across my skin, and the alcohol she poured on to the cuts afterward that burned like cold fire. She’d laugh gaily at my screams.

  Should I tell my father of the spiders she forced me to kill? Or the eggs she cooked, scrambling the dead insects into the goopy mess, and forcing me to eat them? The games she liked to play in which she pretended to desert me at Taco Bell or McDonald’s?

  “Go and get some napkins,” she’d order me, smiling, her children grinning next to her in the family car.

  When I wouldn’t budge, her teasing smile would evaporate, a chilly hatred settling in her cold eyes. “I said, ‘Go get some napkins.’”

  Hoping she’d change her mind, I’d open the car door and do as she’d asked. When I returned to the parking lot, the car was always gone.

  At five years old, I didn’t know where I was, what my phone number was or when she might be back. Too afraid to ask for help, I’d stand and wait, a stack of napkins clutched in my hand. The asphalt of the parking lot seemed wide and vast, yawning out to the chunky sidewalks, the busy street and surrounding buildings an urban forest that I could not navigate. I could only hope she’d come back.

  She always did, after a few long minutes, pulling the car up next to me, my cousins and her laughing at my terror-stricken expression.

  One of them would open the door. “Girl, we’re just playing with you.”

  I stared into my father’s insistent gaze. I wanted to go home with him, but I had only one chance to get it right. If he didn’t take me with him, Aunt Terry would have her revenge. So I lied.

  “I like it here,” I told him. I looked at my aunt as her shoulders sagged with relief, a great puff of smoke floating from her mouth.

  She smiled. “I told you, Jim. Everythin’s fine. We love havin’ Celena.” The drawl of each word was as silky as ribbons.

  My father watched me, the deep crease of a V between his brows. He didn’t believe us. He rose to his feet as if he were being pulled against his will by an invisible string.

  “All right,” he said, turning around to face my aunt. “I’m warning you, Terry. If I hear anything, I mean anything, about you mistreating my daughter, you’re going to hear from me.”

  Aunt Terry nodded. Her hand shook slightly as she took another drag from her cigarette.

  Finished with her, my father led me out of the house and to his car for another outing to the movies.

  In an effort to seem motherly, Terry followed us out and stood on the porch, waving goodbye. She leaned against the railing, her slender figure in bell-bottoms and a knitted top. Large sunglasses covered half her face. Many years later, when I saw a picture of her in a family photo album, I was surprised at how pretty and young she’d been during the time I’d stayed with her.

  After that brief encounter with my father, she curbed her abuse quite a bit. The beatings grew less frequent.

  I began to spend the bulk of my time with my father’s mother, who lived across the street from Aunt Terry. A quiet woman, little more than five feet tall, my grandmother kept busy with her domestic routines. Cleaning her house, gardening, sewing and cooking took up all her time. She wore simple dresses adorned with aprons, a style reminiscent of her many years as a farm wife in Louisiana. She’d raised nine children in a small house while her husband worked in the fields, growing cotton and other agricultural products. Kerosene lamps provided light when it was dark; an icebox kept food cold, and my father milked the family cow every morning. Television had not yet infiltrated their home. Superstitions were rampant. It was a far cry from South Central Los Angeles.

  My grandmother had never been to school. She had never learned to read, write or drive a car. In all my life, I had seen her as a passenger in a car only twice. She grew up speaking Creole, broken French, giving her English a blunt, clipped accent. For all that, she was practical and hardworking. I felt cared for at her home, a refuge from my unraveling aunt.

  In the fall of 1976, I started first grade at a four-story Catholic school. I was proud to finally be a big girl, my Catholic school uniform a banner of proof.

  The following February, I was kidnapped.

  Chapter Eight

  The Kidsnatchers

  It was night when she came for me. Her shorn head, large hoop earrings and jean jacket were non-identifiers. She came with a friend. They were clearly a pair, dressed the same. When my uncle Danny, whose home I’d been visiting over the weekend, opened the door, my cousins and I fell silent, sensing danger.

  Were they here to rob us? I thought my uncle would slam the door in the women’s faces, lock it and call the police, but instead he invited them in.

  They sat on the couch. Aunt Rosa offered them coffee while Uncle Danny talked to them as if they were normal people.

  We children scuttled into the hall, peeping around the corner at this bizarre intrusion. Who were they?

  The leaner one dipped her head, rested her index finger against her temple, propped her elbow against the armrest. A familiar movement.

  Little by little I began to recognize her, the jaw line, the chin and the timbre of her voice, silvery, gentle. I came out from my hiding place, a little closer and a little closer, until I reached out and touched her arm. “Excuse me. Are you my mom?”

  The adults continued their conversation.

  “Excuse me. Who are you? Are you my mom?”

  She turned toward me. “So, you’ve finally recognized me. Yes, I’m your mother.”

  “And I’m Mary Ann,” the other woman said, her cheeks indenting into deep dimples.

  They both smiled, and I realized they were not as scary as I’d first thought. My mother rested her hand lightly on my shoulder. “I’ve come to get you,” she said. “I’ve come to take you to Synanon. Would you like to go to Synanon with me?” Her tone implied fun, like when my father said, “How ’bout we go see a movie?”

  I had not seen Theresa in more than two years, and at six y
ears old I couldn’t fathom why she’d shown up dressed the way I imagined a murderer or someone who rode around on a big noisy motorcycle might look. What was Synanon? I knew it had something to do with her, the place she’d gone off to. I’d never thought of Synanon as a place I could visit. Rather, I thought of it as a secret.

  Catching the excitement in my mother’s voice, my younger cousins, barely older than babies, ran up, no longer afraid of the bald women. They grabbed my hands and jumped up and down, yelling, “Yeah, we’re going to Synin.”

  “No. No.” Aunt Rosa pulled our hands apart. “Only Celena,” she said in her accented English. She physically prodded me out of the living room and down the hallway to my cousin Donna’s room, where I’d left my small suitcase when I’d arrived earlier in the day. My cousins followed us, watching silently while I retrieved my overnight case and my favorite doll, a Baby Alive from Toys “R” Us.

  A short time later, I left my aunt and uncle’s home with my mother and Mary Ann. I sat in the back seat of their car while Mary Ann drove and the two women talked to each other, the headlights from the traffic glinting off their earrings. I fell asleep, and when next I woke, we’d arrived at our destination. We stepped from the car, and I clutched my stranger mom’s hand as we walked across a desolate street to a large, rundown building. Trash fluttered across the sandy, cracked sidewalks. The air was cold and laced with the salty scent of the nearby ocean. Only later would I learn that we’d stayed at the old Casa Del Mar Hotel, owned by the Synanon community in Santa Monica, California.

  We entered the hotel through double doors into a dimly lit foyer. The carpet, faded and old, displayed an obsolete grandeur. We went up a short, winding staircase to a vast room. A single massive strobe light hung from the high ceiling. Most of the other lights were out, and a few people, bald like my mother and her friend and dressed in overalls, moved about the room, tidying up.

  “Sit here,” my mother said, guiding me to one of the long wooden picnic tables and benches that took up the middle of the room. “I’ll be right back.”