Straight Life (58 page)

The residents were divided into tribes of about sixty people who played the Synanon game together, and each tribe had a certain section of the Clump, maybe three apartments for the men and two for the women. If people had to be disciplined, the tribe leader did it. For drinking or stealing or using dope or physical violence, the punishment was a bald head or, for the women, a stocking cap, and if you had a good job or a nice pad you lost it and had to sleep in the basement and work scrubbing pots, and you'd suffer horribly in the games. (If you split, left Synanon, you were labeled a "splittee," and if you wanted to come back and were allowed to come back, the punishments were the same, only they lasted longer.)

In each tribe there were so many "elders," people who'd been around for a number of years, and we went to them when we needed anything-to try to get a pair of socks that fit or decent underwear. There was a Store where you got clothes for free, but the good things were in another store for the big shots; we got the old things they didn't want. If you couldn't find a pair of shoes that fit you, you could go to the elders and beg them and maybe they'd give you a voucher. Then you could go to a real store and buy shoes. If you wanted to write someone or make an emergency call-someone was dying-you'd have to go to the elders and seek permission. After you were there for three months, you could go for a walk but you had to get permission and you had to sign out; usually you had to take someone with you. Sometimes they'd change that: the whole place would go on "containment" and you couldn't go out at all. But that was the idea of the tribes. And if you did anything wrong or you didn't do your dorm assignment, that's what the games would be about.

You'd be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like, pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you'd tell it. You'd accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it's really a drag, so there'd be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody'd accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn't sleep, or some chick would accuse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that ranking you and exposing your bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked.

When I got healthier, I got a job. I wanted a job. I was bored just sitting around. Because I'd worked in the paymaster's office in San Quentin, they assigned me to the bookkeeping department, which was in a building a little ways down from the Clump, a gigantic, old warehouse where they kept all the stuff they hustled for Synanon, all the donations, furniture, food. They had offices upstairs, and one was the bookkeeping office. Most of the people in the offices were women, and my boss was an old battle-ax named Faye. She was one of those old reprobates, one of those stout, husky broads that look as if they'd just knock you down if you argued with them, and there was another chick that really looked like an old dyke. And always before, in my experience, women I was able to charm, always in my life. But I ran up against some women here that were uncharmable. I don't know how they'd ever been dopefiends, but they assured me that they had and talked continuously about what terrible lives they'd led.

I've never had any special schooling, but as a kid I was good at arithmetic and was always very neat, had an orderly mind, so I automatically fell into my job in the bookkeeping department and at first it wasn't so bad. I had a desk of my own. I liked that. I got into a routine, just as I had in San Quentin. I got hold of some pictures and put them under the glass on the desk. I got a good stapler and a whole bunch of pins. I've always been a hoarder, so whenever I could find anything or steal anything I'd take it. They had a little supply room. I'd walk by it and sneak in and grab cards, different colored cards, and notebooks and pins. I had my desk filled with brand-new stuff. They were always talking about saving and using things over; I just threw things away. If a pen just for an instant didn't make a perfect line, I'd throw it in the trash. When I opened a new box of staples I'd throw all the loose staples away, or if the box got wrinkled I'd toss the whole thing out. I didn't care about saving or conserving or the program they were trying to conduct. I wasn't trying to help anything along. I felt that they were hustlers and that they were conning people out of money.

Everyone around me was brainwashed into this Synanon system of brotherly love and helping each other. And everybody had a built-in guilt. If you did something wrong, you'd cop out on yourself. If you saw any of your fellow communers doing anything wrong, you'd immediately rat on them. That was being a good Synanon person and living the Synanon life-style. A group of rats. I've never been a bad person or a criminal type, but the naivete of these people was ridiculous. If Chuck Dederich or Jack Hurst were to tell them to jump out of the sixth-story window of the club they'd all jump because they'd think that that's the "Synanon Thing," the "Synanon Position," to jump out the sixth-floor window. These people talked about how they were dopefiends and hustlers and robbers and whores, and then they'd go along with this kind of program? There's no way in the world it could be so. But all these people were brainwashed. Innumerable people were brainwashed like this.

We had office games in addition to the three games a week we had in our tribes. In the office games they'd rank people for using too many pens or for having a bad attitude, for wasting coffee. Nonsensical things. I found that I could drive them crazy by speaking my mind. You're not supposed to bad-rap "on the floor," outside the games, say bad things about Synanon policies or Synanon people. I would just call it like I saw it. If somebody was an asshole he 'was an asshole, and I would tell him he was an asshole in a game or out of a game. If there was a rule and it was a ridiculous rule, I'd tell them it was ridiculous and I'd ignore the rule. In games they called me "sour." I'd talk about dope and getting loaded, and they'd say that that was "bad" and I was "evil." I called them names: "You fat, old, double-ugly bitch! I don't believe you ever used any dope in your life! Somebody as ugly as you never got anything given to them, and I know nobody would fuck you and give you money, and you're too dumb to steal." They said you shouldn't be prejudiced. You weren't supposed to have those feelings. Most white men fear the black man with the white woman. They're afraid he is really as superior sexually as he says he is. If I found out that some white broad was married to a black guy I'd rave at her in games and call her tramp, slut, whore. Most people tried to act like they weren't prejudiced, which is ridiculous. Everybody is filled with prejudice, and every now and then in a game if you could bring it out, they would admit, "Well, I used to be." They were hypocrites. But when it came down to the serious things, I played my cards right. I had jailed so much I knew how far you could go, and I found out you could do anything except drink, use dope, or use physical violence and get away with it.

The thing of it is, the people that ran Synanon had to keep everyone offguard and keep everything different. If they fell into a routine, if life became boring and fell into a pattern, they'd lose the people. So they would change. All the time. Just make changes for changes' sake. They'd paint the place where you were working or move the desks. The same thing in your living quarters. Every single room in Synanon, whether it was in the club, the Clump, Kansas Street, the school, each room had been maybe fifty different things in the last three years. You'd be here, so they'd move everybody over there. They move these people here, move you there, move this here, paint that. Make a rule: you can't have this. Then you can have it. They'd have "glut raids," which I'll get into later, getting rid of the opulence. Or somebody would attain a high position after years of carrying out his faithful duty to the Synanon doctrines and the word of the great lord and master, Chuck Dederich; he would be rewarded; and then all of a sudden the gestapo would come and take away everything he had and make him wash dishes and scrub toilets and make his wife live in a dormitory with the other broads and newcomers. They did all this to keep everybody messed up. That was the basis of Synanon because dopefiends and nuts can't stand routine and when they get bored they have to do something crazy, so Synanon made the insanity. Themselves. The people that ran it caused the insanity.

Shortly after I arrived, the insanity took the form of changing the hours. Ordinarily people get up in the morning and set certain daytime hours aside for this or that. Synanon decided to do away with this. They instituted something they called the "twenty-four-hour day." There was a group of bigwigs, the "regents," or whatever they called them-a group of people who were in favor at that particular time with Big Chuck, you know, Big D., the god, the Old Wino. This group would have games together and call each other names and then they'd figure out, "Well, how can we fuck things up and disrupt everybody now?" They decided on the twenty-four-hour day. One day I was told, "Instead of working from eight o'clock in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon, you're going to go to work at 11:30 at night and work until nine o'clock in the morning." Can you imagine that?

I'd go to work at 11 P.M. and at 3 A.M. a jitney would come pick us up and drive us down to the club to eat. We'd ride down the street; we wouldn't see a soul, no life, no cars; it was like death outside; and we didn't say a word to each other. We'd go to this ridiculous, old-time club that used to be a millionaire's hangout, now fallen into disrepair, a junk heap full of ignorant ex-dopefiends or whatever you want to call them, nuts, running around trying to be painters and carpenters and carpet layers. You can imagine what the place looked like.

We'd get out of our jitney at 3:20 and walk into this club that looked like some old movie set for Rudolf Valentino or Theda Bara. And here were these tired-eyed musicians. They were playing music, and the crazy people were standing around; chicks with no bras on were dancing. We'd walk into this mad revelry without drinks, without dope, and go into the kitchen and eat. We'd eat the same thing we had at supper: if we had breakfast at supper we'd have breakfast for breakfast; if we had liver for supper we'd have liver for breakfast; if we had meatballs and spaghetti for supper we'd have meatballs and spaghetti with dripping water running off the plate for breakfast. When we finished eating, the musicians would play a "hoopla," which was the standard dance of Synanon. Some nut invented this togetherness rock-and-roll dance: instead of dancing separately they all danced together, following the same steps. We'd walk out of the mess hall into this false gaiety. We'd sit around surrounded by posters proclaiming the twenty-fourhour day. We'd go to the bathroom. Then we'd get in our jitney and go back to this lonely warehouse, and nothing could be as desolate and miserable as the streets were during this drive, with the occasional sireeeen of an ambulance or a police car or an occasional old drunk staggering by and laying down in the gutter.

We'd drive up to the warehouse. We'd get out. We'd find the keys. They always had to look for the keys, they were so disoriented. Then we'd go back into the office and work until nine in the morning over figures and money matters. I'd sit and nod out over this thing I was doing, and one of the old hags would holler, "Hey! Wake up! Art! Wake up!" And I'd say, "Oh, you old bitch, shut up!" Faye would call me into her office and I'd tell her they could take Synanon and stick it up their ass.

That lasted a few months. It finally ended. Everything changed. Every now and then I'd run into somebody who had a little sense and they'd say, "Just cool it. Everything changes. It'll change tomorrow or the next day or next week." I knew I couldn't leave, so I'd go into my games and rave about how much I hated Chuck Dederich and his twenty-four-hour day. I was getting a reputation as the most "negative" person in Synanon. They'd say, "Why don't you just get the fuck out! We don't want you here! You're just ruining our thing!" And I'd say, "Well, I'm going to stay and ruin it for you dumb bastards as much as I can, and when I'm ready to leave I'll leave and not until, and hope you don't like it!"

While we were on the twenty-four-hour day, summer came, and the only thing I enjoyed at that time was going to the beach and riding the waves, trying to get healthy. If I went to bed when I got off work at about 10 A.M. it ruined the whole day, so instead I'd go down to the beach, stay until two, then grab a bite to eat, come back, and go to sleep. On one of those days I got off work at nine, walked back to the Clump, and I was standing there waiting for the Synanon bus to take me to the beach when I saw this car pull up at the corner. There were a few people waiting there for the bus. I saw this car turn the corner, and I looked, and just as I looked the person in the car looked at me, and I said, "Christine!" Evidently she'd been driving around trying to find me.

I should say that when you go into Synanon, for the first ninety days you're not allowed any communication with the outside, no letters, no nothing. I'd been there a couple of months, and I hadn't had any word from Christine. The other people were watching. I couldn't run out to her. I motioned to her hoping she'd understand. I wanted her to go down the street and wait for me. Evidently she got the picture. The bus came and everybody got on, but they were still watching me because they'd dug this little byplay. I started to get on the bus. I said, "Oh, I forgot something," to myself, like. As soon as the bus left I snuck down the street where she was parked. I jumped in the car and laid down in the seat and told her to drive.

She looked terrible. I said, "What's happening?" She said, "Oh, man, it's been awful." She started crying. I said, "What's wrong?" I thought she wanted me to leave with her. I said, "If you want me to, I'll leave." I wasn't ready yet, but I would have gone. She said, "No, let's forget it. You can't leave. You'd just die out here. What would you do?" I said, "There's nothing I can do. I'm too weak now to do anything." At the time I didn't know this, but later on I found out she was already living with some other guy. She still cared for me and she wanted to see me.