Intense? That’s an understatement.
We entered the commons area, where Last Light was getting underway. All of the furniture had been removed from the center of the room, pushed and stacked against the wall. This was to make space for what I can describe only as human furniture, a tangled mess of bodies stretched out across on the floor.
How about we go with horrifying?
Every head was in a lap. Every lap held a head There were teenagers and adults. Girls with girls and boys with boys.
(Holy shit! I forgot about boys!)
It was nightmarish, like some medieval depiction of hell. All Hydras and rat kings and tangled bodies.
“What the fuck are they doing?”
“Smooshing,” Maggie said.
“Smooshing?” I said. “I am never, ever, smooshing.”
“Don’t worry about that yet. No one expects you to do it on your first night.”
Maggie led me to the corner of the room where a few of the saner kids sat in chairs.
Thank God.
My relief lasted all of five seconds. When we got a little closer I realized that a lot of the chair kids were still doing some form of smooshing. They were rubbing shoulders or scratching heads. As someone who makes a point of avoiding all unnecessary affection, I was truly disturbed.
I scanned the area. I was relieved to see both Brittany and Kristen outside of the smooshing. Beatrice, on the other hand, was smack-dab in the middle of the pile. She didn’t have just one head in her lap. No, Beatrice had two.
I’m sure the staff took note. Smooshing was a nightly occurrence, and I’d later learn that reluctance to participate meant that cuddling would become a therapeutic assignment.
“It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it, guys?”
The voice preceded the man coming into the room.
“We’re so lucky to be alive.”
This was Alan. The lead counselor of Carlbrook. He was late into middle age, chubby and pasty. He wore khaki pants, a button-up shirt, and a vest.
“Let’s take a moment to feel all the love in this room. To feel how blessed we are to be here with all these beautiful people.”
Is this a church? Or a seminar? What, exactly, am I about to become a part of?
“Take a beat,” Alan said. “And say to yourself: I am so lucky. I am so blessed.”
I saw Beatrice close her eyes. Alan walked to the stereo at the head of the room. A moment later, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” began playing.
“Listen up, everyone,” he said. “We have a new student. Just arrived this afternoon.”
I could feel my face go red with the realization that he was talking about me. I dropped my eyes and stared directly at the floor.
“Why don’t you stand up and tell everyone a little bit about yourself? We’re so happy to have you here.”
If I can’t see him, he can’t see me. Right? Isn’t that how it works?
Maggie nudged me, and I had no choice but to stand. I felt naked all over again and had to remind myself not to spin around and squat.
“Hi. I’m Elizabeth. I’m from South Carolina.”
I sat right back down as fast as I could but it didn’t matter; everyone’s eyes were on me now. The new girl, fresh meat. I assumed they were all wondering what I’d done to get here. Was I a slut? An addict? Some sort of psychopath? All the same things I’d thought every time a new girl arrived at the woods.
“Elizabeth is pre-Integ,” Alan said. “So she’s on bans with some of you newbies. But the rest of you should introduce yourselves and make her feel at home.”
Home? Yeah, right. I don’t know what this place is, but it sure isn’t my home.
I tuned out the rest of the meeting and waited for my embarrassment to fade. I peeled my eyes off the floor and looked around at my new classmates, the smooshers, the nonsmooshers. A group of guys (nonsmooshers) caught my eye. They looked like guys I would have been friends with back at home. One of them stood out more than the others, a cute athletic type I later learned was named Luke. I brought my gaze back to Luke a few times, until I caught him looking back at me.
It had been months since I’d seen a member of the male sex my own age. Even the prospect of a crush was suddenly exciting. Maggie must have noticed because she gave me some advice on our walk back to the sleeping mods.
“I know it’s no fun,” she said, “but you should avoid boys if you can. At least the ones you think could be more than friends.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
“It’ll just make things so much easier. Trust me.”
Trust me.
As much as anyone else, at least. I had no reason not to trust Maggie. She was nice to me in those early days at Carlbrook. She was patient and helpful when I knew she didn’t have to be. She wasn’t fake like Polly, she didn’t use me as a tool for proving her own greatness. She was just a normal girl at a fucked-up school who’d figured out a way to make it through.
So why didn’t I listen when she told me not to spend time with Luke? To take the little things on the chin? To try to blend in?
I don’t know. I have no answer. I just keep coming back to the other question, the one that still plagues me.
What would have happened if I had?
Maggie killed herself less than a year after graduation. She overdosed alone in her car, and by the time anyone found her it was too late. No one saw it coming, least of all me. Maggie seemed normal. Maggie seemed fine. Maggie seemed like she had things figured out.
Chapter 15
ONE OF MY classmates ended up at Carlbrook because his mom thought he was playing too many video games. Another girl was offered a deal: Complete the program and you can have your trust fund. (You know, like finishing school!) There were a few students who’d experimented with serious drugs and a couple who’d gotten into trouble with the law. But mostly, we were all in some version of the middle. Somewhere between heroin and Call of Duty. In fact, pretty much everyone was sent away for one (or two) of the following reasons:
1. Substances
Drugs and alcohol was a big category. But within this group was a whole spectrum of severity. There were certainly kids who had done hard drugs, those who swiped pain pills from grandparents’ cabinets, and did lines of coke on the weekends. It was most common to see potheads and drinkers. Then there were those lucky kids among us whose parents overreacted to a missing bottle of vodka or found an eighth of marijuana hidden beneath the slats of a bed frame.
Overall, regardless of how serious a kid’s drug of choice might be, no one with a true addiction problem was admitted to Carlbrook. It wasn’t a detox center or a rehab, although it often felt like the intensity of a student’s drug use was amplified by the staff to justify their continued stay at the school.
2. Academics
ADHD. Learning disabilities. Skipping class, failing out, or doing just okay in school when you came from a family that demanded greatness at all costs. These kids were fuckups but in a minor way; they played fast and loose with their futures. In other words, they were teenagers.
3. Sexual Activity
This category included approximately 50 percent of the female students and exactly 0 percent of the males. “Girls are promiscuous, and boys will be boys” seemed to be a sort of unofficial motto at Carlbrook. There, “daddy issues” was considered a psychiatric diagnosis.
Just like the drugs-and-alcohol category, there was a lot of variance in what was considered problematic sexuality. Some of the girls afflicted with the defect of promiscuity were actually just dealing with a religious or conservative household. Which is to say: There were definitely some slutty virgins at Carlbrook.
4. Mental Health
If a girl hadn’t been sent to Carlbrook because she was too sexual, there was a good chance she had an eating disorder. Anorexics, bulimics, binge eaters, purgers. It was easy to recognize these cases because any visible change in weight meant they would soon have a bathroom buddy trailing behind them.
A lot of students were depressed or anxious, even suicidal. Some kids arrived with a clinical diagnosis: oppositional defiant disorder, OCD, mood disorders. Some of us were just difficult. We were sad or angry in a way our parents didn’t want to deal with.
There was one issue that even Carlbrook considered too much of a liability. Serious cutters weren’t supposed to be accepted. I don’t mean those of us who occasionally cut or burned ourselves somewhere secret. I mean the dangerous cutters, the ones with scars like latticework on their arms. Mostly the school stuck to their rule, but there was one cutter who arrived a few months after me. Her name was Alice and her mom was famous.
Surely, there couldn’t be a connection. Fame and special treatment, when has that ever happened before?
5. Trauma
A number of Carlbrook students had been through trauma. Abuse and sexual assault were common, and a few students had been deeply affected by the death of a friend or relative.
For some, the traumatic experience itself was the reason that person landed at the school. More often than not, it was the problematic behavior that developed in the wake of the trauma that made a Carlbrook kid. (See categories one through four.) There were kids whose trauma was home-based, like divorce or having been adopted.
There was overlap between categories, of course. Some of us could claim a little from Group A and a little from Group B, just enough from each to send us across some imaginary line. It often came down to a weird kind of math.
Joint + blow job + curfew violation.
Moodiness + bad grades + adopted at birth.
Maybe gay + definitely angry × a factor of Christianity.
Equals: a months-long tour of the woods followed by one to two years in Halifax, Virginia.
Ultimately, though, it didn’t much matter whether it was a specific issue that landed a kid at Carlbrook or a general trend of troubled teen behavior. Whatever someone’s path to Halifax may have been, once they were there, it could have been anything. The therapeutic curriculum was exactly the same for all of us. A one-size-fits-all treatment plan for opioid addiction, sexual assault, clinical depression, and spending too much time online.
In the eyes of the Carlbrook staff there was only one way to do things. A model was firmly in place, a cure-all for deviance, anger, and sadness alike. And where did this magical treatment plan come from?
The short answer is: a cult called Synanon.
And what the hell is that?
From one angle, Synanon is one of the strangest and most violent cults in American history. From another, it’s the world’s first therapeutic community and the model for America’s rehab industry. For a brief time, it was also a religion—but that was more of a tax thing than a spiritual thing. From a pop culture perspective, the most well-known thing about Synanon might be an attempted murder case from the late 1970s. The intended victim was a lawyer named Paul Morantz and the murder weapon was a rattlesnake hidden in his mailbox.
If none of that rings a bell, you’re probably still familiar with Synanon’s most famous catchphrase.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
The story of Synanon begins in 1958 in the city of Los Angeles. That’s the year a man named Charles E. Dederich started holding small gatherings in his squalid Santa Monica apartment. It was just an informal group at first, some friends from a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Chuck, as he was known, had been a desperate alcoholic for most of his life. He was a college dropout heading for his second divorce when he discovered the only thing he liked more than booze: AA. Specifically the part where he got to speak in front of a captive audience. He was a smart guy and a gifted orator, and soon he was going to several meetings a day just to hold court.
When Chuck spoke, people listened. Sometimes a few of them would head over to his apartment for a more informal discussion free from the rigid format of AA. Chuck would expound on his theories of addiction, throwing psychological and philosophical ideas into the mix. He quoted Emerson and Thoreau regularly and encouraged his friends to read books like The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
The group started calling themselves the Tender Loving Care Club. Members talked up their meetings to other alcoholics struggling in the rooms of Los Angeles, and more and more of them joined. A turning point came when a heroin addict showed up at Chuck’s doorstep in the throes of withdrawal. Alcoholics Anonymous considers drug users to be a different type of addict and therefore they are not allowed to attend member meetings unless they also have a drinking problem. Chuck Dederich took this guy in and set him up on his couch, where he sweated out his withdrawal.
Chuck took them all in. Suddenly the Tender Loving Care Club was Synanon, a name shrouded in mystery—not quite scientific, not quite religious, but somehow vaguely metaphysical.
This was, after all, Los Angeles at the dawn of the New Age. It was the beginning of the Human Potential Movement. Theories of self-actualization and newfangled spirituality were bubbling up at places like the Esalen Institute and the “church” of Scientology. At any other time and place, Charles Dederich’s experiment might have stopped there. But Synanon dealt in self-help, and self-help was about to be huge. They had something none of the other groups had, something called the Game.
The Game was an attack circle, an experiment in radical honesty and saying all the things polite society would never allow. Members would split up into small groups and confront one another for hours, revealing dark truths and shameful secrets that the rest of the circle would then viciously criticize. When it came to the Game, anything was allowed as long as it wasn’t physical violence. Members were actually encouraged to lie and cajole. It was all in the interest of self-actualization.
The Game wasn’t only for addicts. It soon caught on with “squares,” as they were called, nondruggies interested in experimentation. People began inviting Chuck to hold parties in their homes, specifically centered around playing the Game. Once the Hollywood set caught on, all bets were off. Celebrities like Natalie Wood and Leonard Nimoy were Synanon dabblers. Membership skyrocketed, and Dederich soon found himself running a multimillion-dollar operation. Historically, that has only ever gone one way.
The next decade of Charles Dederich’s life was one of paranoia in full swing. Synanon went the way of many cults, which is to say, things got batshit insane. Those years were pockmarked by incidents of forced sterilization, spouse swapping, the creation of a paramilitary group with its own special type of martial arts (called Syn-do, of course), and the aforementioned rattlesnake attack. It all ended for Chuck Dederich in 1978, when he was arrested for attempted murder after a manhunt that found him drunk and despondent in a seedy motel.
But this story takes a sharp left turn before any of that went down. Back in 1967, when Synanon was still a media darling with nary a rattlesnake in sight, a man named Mel Wasserman had an idea. Mel was very much a square. In fact, he was a furniture salesman from Palm Springs—and by all accounts, a very good one. He had all kinds of qualifications when it came to pricing armchairs. He had absolutely zero qualifications when it came to any of the following:
Addiction, mental health, education, child care.
Wasserman saw an opportunity and decided to take the Synanon model of “treating” addiction and apply it to adolescents. Like Chuck Dederich, he started small, holding Game-like sessions in his home for local teenagers caught up in the psychedelic sixties. Only he called them “raps,” probably as slang meant to appeal to teens.
Soon, Wasserman branched out. He bought property in Running Springs, California, and opened up a school. He called it CEDU—the current explanation is that it was named for the school’s motto: “See yourself as you are and do something about it.”
It wasn’t, though. CEDU was actually intended to be an acronym for Charles E. Dederich University, but Wasserman distanced himself after the whole spousal swap / forced vasectomy / rattlesnake thing. He did, however, pull the first CEDU st
aff almost entirely from Synanon. Wasserman didn’t pay much attention to formal qualifications. Instead, he prided himself on the fact that they had real-life experience on the streets and on the withdrawal couch. Plus, they knew how to play the Game.
At first CEDU got most of its young addicts from the state. They were juvenile delinquents and small-time drug offenders, and their treatment was subsidized by taxpayer money. That is, until Wasserman saw a real opportunity to expand. According to his right-hand man, Bill Lane, an ex–heroin addict from Synanon, Mel was looking for a “softer” type of kid.
Meaning there was a lot more money in opening up his services to troubled teens of all sorts, not just the ones who happened to be addicted to drugs. He didn’t amend his program or anything. Wasserman kept the same framework in place. One thing that continued to change, however, was his definition of “troubled.”
To recap: A system for drug-addicted adults became a program for drug-addicted teenagers, which became a system for any teenagers at all.
CEDU began to expand. First came Rocky Mountain Academy in Colorado, then a CEDU middle school. A man named Michael Allgood, who’d known Mel since he was a troubled kid in Palm Springs, was sent off to open Cascade in Whitmore, California.
And how does this get all the way to Carlbrook School in Virginia? Rather directly, as it turns out. Randall Moore, the founder of the school, went to Cascade in the early eighties. His experience had been a horrific one, abusive and traumatizing, and he thought they could do it better. His intention was to create a different, better emotional-growth school.
Why, then, did he hire Alan?
Alan, our head counselor, was a CEDU man through and through. He began working at the school in 1980 and eventually worked his way all the way up the ladder. He also ran Rocky Mountain Academy for a time and was headmaster of another CEDU offshoot, a place called Mount Bachelor Academy that would eventually close, years after he left, because of allegations of child abuse. Among other things, the school was accused of making a female student put on a miniskirt and perform lap dances for male students and staff.
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