Synanon Kid

by C. A. Wittman

  “Why?” Even as I asked, I knew the question was futile. So many things that happened in Synanon seemed to just come out of the clear blue.

  Chris shrugged. “They told me I was behaving like a punk and they were going to teach me a lesson.”

  He stopped and we stood looking at each other. “They would make me do pushups.” Chris threw a furtive look over his shoulder. “When I couldn’t do any more, they’d punch me in the stomach or kick me. There are older kids who want to escape, but we’re all trapped here. Did you know that the entrances to the properties are manned by some of the Imperial Marines, with guns?”

  “They said it was to keep us safe from outsiders that want to hurt us.” Even as I spoke, I knew that it wasn’t the truth.

  Chris shook his head. “That’s only part of it. It’s also to keep people from running away.”

  His words churned sickeningly in my mind as I scanned the hills around us.

  “They could come for any one of us,” he continued, “and throw us into the slug camp. No one tells you anything. You don’t know you’re going to camp, and just like that you disappear.”

  Slug camp was a place for people Synanon members deemed worthless: parasitic, lazy slugs who needed to be taught a lesson. In slug camp people worked long, grueling days exposed to the elements. At day’s end they slept outside in flimsy tents. They were shunned by the rest of community until they proved themselves to be one hundred percent on board with whatever Synanon happened to be dishing out. I had always thought slug camp was for adults. I didn’t know that kids in my peer group also went there.

  Chris watched me, and when I looked up at his face, I realized that the boy he had been was no more. We were not far apart in age, but he seemed much older now.

  “They’re all bastards. You can’t trust them,” he said softly.

  He walked on.

  I didn’t follow him.

  Some weeks later Theresa arrived on the property with Gwyn. When we had some time to ourselves, I mentioned leaving the community.

  Chris’s story gnawed at me. Almost two years earlier the members of a community called The People’s Temple had committed mass suicide in Guyana. Those who did not willing drink the poison-laced punch were forced to ingest it drink poison at gunpoint, more than nine hundred people died. I’d seen pictures in TIME magazine of their bodies, men, women, children and babies, laying side by side. Synanon had been on friendly terms with The People’s Temple, donating whatever we didn’t need or couldn’t use to them. One woman who survived the massacre had come to Synanon. I wondered how she could be so trusting again.

  I couldn’t seem to get through to Theresa merely by begging her that we leave.

  “Where would we go?” she always said. “It would be tough for us to be out on our own without Synanon.”

  “We could stay with relatives,” I’d say.

  At times, she’d smile and list all the things Synanon had to offer us: food, shelter, friends, freedom from worries of survival. At other times, she was quiet, serious and nervous in response to my badgering. Her gaze would dart around as she worried about who might be listening. Yet she always concluded by making some positive statements about Synanon. I felt exasperated by my inability to get through to her.

  For the first time my adoration of Theresa began to develop cracks. At ten years old and approaching adolescence, I began to have a heightened awareness of my mother’s flaws as if a highlighter had been taken to every perceived imperfection in her character. She began to bother me. She seemed too dreamy, inattentive. When I spoke to her, I often had to repeat myself because she rarely listened to what I said and would become confused, picking up only the latter portion of my communication, thereby compelling me to start over again. As a younger child, I hadn’t noticed this quality of hers. Perhaps it hadn’t mattered because small children have a natural ability toward a wandering mind.

  Theresa kept a dream journal and liked to read to me about spiritual journeys she’d experienced in her sleep. Frankly, I found this practice to be slightly kooky. But what bothered me most was that she seemed content to remain in Synanon although it was becoming clearer to me through her work as a domestic and some snide remarks made by demonstrators and other kids that she garnered little respect. I wondered why and how she tolerated it.

  Being a voracious reader, I had graduated to reading mostly adult novels. When Theresa discovered the books I had in my personal collection, she confiscated them. “You shouldn’t be reading these sorts of books,” she’d told me, scouring my shelf and pulling out almost every novel. “The demonstrators shouldn’t allow you to read these kinds of novels. They have graphic adult content.”

  As I watched her walk away with a stack of my books in her arms, a white-hot anger seared through me. Who does she think she is? I thought. She’s not raising me. She’s hardly even a mother.

  Also annoying about her was the fact that she seemed gullible at times, that she was attracted to oddball people in the commune and that she loved Sophie, whom I simply couldn’t stand. Sophie always lit up when she saw Theresa and treated her very much as a mother figure. Many years later I learned that Sophie had no parent in Synanon. She had been left as an orphan, but because most of us had so little contact with our moms and dads, Sophie’s situation had not been apparent to me. Even if it had, it’s doubtful I would have been empathetic to her plight at the time.

  Theresa’s marriage to Ray also put a damper on our visits. Sleepovers were eliminated because as a couple they had a room to themselves. This meant that we had little privacy in which to talk about our feelings as mother and daughter or merely to connect, without Gwyn or some other community member taking up Theresa’s personal time and attention.

  When I considered my future, it seemed hazy. I knew that one day soon I would be an adult, as the teen years were short in Synanon. I’d try to picture myself as a woman in the community, working somewhere; but doing what, I couldn’t imagine.

  How hard would it be for me to leave once I had the choice? Would I be able to survive on my own? These thoughts sometimes kept me from sleeping at night. I desperately wanted Theresa to take a stand for us, to tell Synanon goodbye. I’d imagine us moving back to Los Angeles, starting over. When I thought of my mom and me surviving as a team, I felt sure we could make it.

  Her marriage never crossed my mind during my fantasies. The fact that she had a husband evoked no consideration, wasn’t even an afterthought. Marriage meant little to me, just as Chuck had said years earlier in an interview in the San Raphael Journal, in which he’d suggested that divorce and remarriage was equivalent to “little more than changing one’s clothes.”

  My own parents had never married, and Ray was Theresa’s fourth husband. My mother’s first marriage was to a man named Rodney. Their union had been brief, and Rodney was thrown out of the commune before I arrived. I don’t think I quite grasped the fact that Theresa loved her current husband, Ray, or that he had much importance in her life as I had initially worried might be the case after the sordid demonstration with his daughter, Sara. I might have thought she would just acquire another husband once we were settled on the outside. In my mind, Ray belonged in Synanon, and leaving the community meant leaving him behind too. Other times I worried that my mother stayed because she was afraid she would not be allowed to leave.

  Not only did I focus on Theresa’s flaws, but I also began to observe the demonstrators in a much more cynical manner. Feeling less intimidated, I started to view their arbitrary rules and punishments with contempt.

  Having resettled into our normal routines after the move, games increased to a daily event. To whip us back into shape, we were required to participate in a mini stew, a game of twenty-four hours’ duration. The stew started after breakfast, and we were off to a fierce start of attacks and counterattacks, which frittered away into jealous squabbles between some of the girls about who had stolen whose friend. Next came talks between couples who wanted to break up, each perso
n backed by his or her best friends.

  “I don’t want to go out with you!” one girl yelled at her boyfriend.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  She leaned forward, lips peeled away from her teeth. “Look, sucker, I never wanted to be your girlfriend in the first place.”

  This remark brought on a backlash from the humiliated boyfriend’s friends.

  “You fucking slut! He’s glad to be rid of your stupid pussy. He was doing you a favor!”

  “Yeah. You dumb bitch, you’re too stupid to know what you have!”

  “Oh, you think you’re good with girls, asshole? Have you ever had a girlfriend, dick-face?”

  The rest of us, who were a few years younger, sat out the amorous savagery, neither sufficiently experienced nor much caring to participate. Hours dragged by as the demonstrators took turns watching over us and encouraging us to keep going.

  “Play! Keep playing! This is a stew.”

  By midnight some of the kids had nodded off, spent, with nothing more to say. At some point I also drifted off and awoke to a demonstrator vigorously shaking me. “It’s not time to sleep! We’re still playing. You must participate!” The penetrating glow of fluorescent light, stark and hellish, illuminated my droopy-eyed schoolmates. My eyes felt grainy and scratchy with sleep.

  “Fuck. I’m tired,” I muttered.

  The demonstrator pushed her face close to mine. A black fury swirled in the depths of her eyes, the bags under them swollen to half-moons from lack of sleep.

  “You wake up and play. Do you hear me?”

  I sat up straighter, blinking rapidly. I didn’t know what was going on. Someone talked about a roommate not keeping her side of the room tidy. The child being attacked stared with glazed eyes, expressionless. The rest of my circle was almost comatose.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you, asshole!” an attacker shouted, trying to bring the level back up.

  I rubbed at my eyes and looked at the girl on the hot seat, waiting for her reply. She hadn’t moved or even blinked.

  “Are you listening?” The demonstrator shook her. Eyes open, sleep had found her anyway.

  She let out a low mournful whimper. “I want to go to bed. Oh, God, I want to go to bed.”

  “Shut up! We’re in a stew. Carla said you aren’t keeping your room tight.”

  Her mouth hung open, her eyes stayed glassy. “My room,” she whispered, trying to follow.

  Another kid jumped in to help steer things around, bring us back from the dead. “Your room? You’re a pig! When I lived with you, I was always getting in trouble.”

  I blinked again. Jesus. My neck felt like it was going to snap off. How many more hours till the sun came up?

  We played endlessly. Those who dozed were slapped awake.

  “Play the game! Play the fucking game!”

  Hallucinations of dark shapes clouded my vision. When I closed my eyes for a blessed moment of rest, an electric static raged behind my lids. We were finally sent to our beds at six in the morning, yet I couldn’t sleep. I lay exhausted in my bed, my body humming and crackling, beyond fatigue.

  During a routine back-to-basics, I was assigned to help Theresa in the laundry room as well as babysit three three-year-olds. Back and forth I carted mounds of linens in a large, square-shaped laundry basket on wheels. I loaded the basket with dirty sheets and then piled the small children on top, pushing my heavy load to the laundry room, where Theresa continuously folded when she was not loading or unloading linens from the machines. The clean, expertly folded sheets went into large, white mesh laundry bags that were placed back into the cart, which I then wheeled, the children atop, to the various adult bunkhouses.

  At one point when Theresa had to go somewhere, she asked whether I could watch Gwyn as well. Reluctantly, I agreed. It didn’t take long before I became frustrated with Gwyn’s slow walk. After my constant prodding for her to please walk a little faster, she stopped and stubbornly wouldn’t budge.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I have things to do.”

  She refused to move. Instead her lips snaked into the side smile that I knew so well. It was the look of a certain willful mischievousness that overtook her normally bland expression, the same smile that rose crookedly on her narrow little face when she purposely knocked things over to make more work for Theresa.

  Furious that I had to deal with her at all, I jabbed my finger at her face. “Listen, you fucking retard. You need to move now!”

  In one moment she leered at me and in the next her mouth had clamped down on my finger. It happened so fast I had no time to react. She bit hard. I thought she might take my finger off. Terrified, I screamed and smacked at her forehead, which seemed harder than rock, while the three-year-olds gripped the edge of the laundry cart, their eyes wide. Another child who happened to walk by came to my rescue and pried Gwyn’s jaws open so I could free my hand.

  The following week Theresa again asked me to watch Gwyn for a few hours. I spent the time ignoring her, my attention absorbed in a book, while she amused herself, constrained to a large playpen of sorts. A truce of silence held between us.

  Then, a powerful odor wafted through the room, a wet, sticky fart smell that prompted me to look up from my book. Gwyn had removed her pants and defecated on her mattress. She stood watching me, eyes glinting with challenge. Her bare legs were pale, thin and wiry. Between them, a surprising black bush of pubic hair announced burgeoning womanhood on Gwyn’s more or less underdeveloped girlish body.

  Not sure what to do, I stood up and yelled, “You know better than this! Now I need to put you in the bath!”

  She stooped down, grabbed a handful of her shit and slowly smeared it onto her face and hair, smiling her little crooked smile all the while.

  I ran into the bathroom, where I stood trying to calm my spinning mind. Make a bath, make a bath, I gasped to myself. I turned on the tap and went back into the room. In the one minute I had walked away, Gwyn had spread feces everywhere, all over her body and along the railing of the enclosed area. It was streaked along the walls and embedded in some of the carpet.

  I couldn’t do or say anything but squeak with rage and disgust.

  Fortunately, Theresa returned and took over the situation. While I watched her clean up Gwyn’s mess and patiently escort the girl to a bath, a sour feeling washed over me. I desperately wanted to spend some time with just my mom, without Gwyn, Sophie or Ray, and yet at the same time I seethed with irritation toward Theresa.

  “I had a dream about Gwyn,” Theresa told me after she had Gwyn bathed and dressed in fresh clothes. “I dreamt of her life before this one. In her former life she was a wealthy, horribly bitter woman who had acted selfishly toward others, creating a lot of darkness in her spirit. I learned that she chose to come back this way. She’s working out karmic debt.”

  I imagined a rail-thin aristocratic woman with long, sharp nails and a narrow, gaunt-looking face. Thinking about Gwyn’s former life, I wondered about my own. Was I working out karma too?

  As the lawsuits began to pile up against the community and we suffered from bad press, a frantic optimism swept through the cult. Pasted smiles and “act as if” attitudes were reinstated, partly as a way to shape up and show the outsiders who we were, but mostly to prove to ourselves that we were right and our way would prevail. One day the world would come to Synanon, and we would be ready.

  There were more seminars about the greatness of the commune and all that it had to offer. “The outside world is depraved with its miserable values and shortsighted ways,” demonstrators lectured. “You are lucky to get such a valuable education.”

  In one seminar a male demonstrator kicked things off by asking, “Who wants to leave Synanon?”

  Those of us who raised our hands were weeded out and sent to sit on the other side of the room. For the next two hours we were calmly lectured on the merits of Synanon and Charles Dederich’s vision, a warm smile injected here and there. After this longwinded psychological inoculation,
we were again asked who wanted to leave. My hand was the only one that went up. I didn’t know whether my peers gave up their ground simply to end the talky lecture, were too scared to show their opinions publicly again or had been inspired by the chatty informality of the speech, but I knew without a doubt that I wanted out.

  Would they let me go if I became insistent enough? The demonstrator’s smooth, persuasive voice became harsh and probing, but I waited it out. When my turn came to talk, I simply stated that Synanon was not for everyone and that it was never my choice to come in the first place. This time the other children and even some of the other earlier dissenters joined in the attacks. I remained stubbornly unconvinced and reiterated that I wanted to leave. The meeting ended late that night. I had not given in, a loss for the school.

  I became more rebellious. Weeks after the propaganda seminar I got up without permission from a dinner that had suddenly turned into a silent meal, the environment menacing and demonstrators hawkishly watching us, a punishment that far exceeded the small infraction of several kids talking too loud outside the dining hall before meal time. Tired of it all, I simply walked out, ignoring one of the demonstrators who yelled after me, “Where are you going?” I walked back to my dorm and into my room, where I grabbed a novel and lay back on my bed to read. I stubbornly refused the command of one of the children sent to retrieve me.

  A demonstrator came to my room, treading carefully. It was a curious matter that I wasn’t intimidated. “Why did you leave the meal?” she asked.

  “Because I’ve done nothing wrong, but I’m being punished anyway. I’m not going to sit in fear while I eat.”

  The demonstrator did not reply right away. I watched her thinking over what I’d said. My lack of fear and refusal to be the victim in their bullying behavior had interrupted the usual script.