Throughout this post, I refer to Synanon. Synanon was a drug and alcohol rehab community which turned into a commune and later into something more militaristic and cult-like. The years I lived there were in between these latter two phases. I have friends who were there much later and have very different feelings and memories of the place. These recollections are entirely my own.
By the time I was seven years old, I’d lived in four places: the apartment on Balboa Island where my parents lived when I was born; the house in Fullerton they bought shortly after; an apartment, also in Fullerton, where my mom moved with me and my sister after leaving my father; an apartment in Santa Monica close to the one my father had taken. By the middle of second grade, I’d attended at least three different schools. And then my father moved into Synanon with me.
And that was my world turned upside down. I already knew one boy in Synanon, but I hadn’t spent any time in the community the way my parents had, given that they were both members of the Synanon Game Club. (One explanation of the game can be found here. It’s not great, but it’s a start.) Over the first year and a half I lived there, I saw my mother not much more than six or seven times that I recall. I moved in in November, 1974 but my mother and sister didn’t move in until the following February. She met my stepfather and they married in November, 1975 and left the community the following July. I think. I conflate hearing that they’d left with Bicentennial-related information. After they left, I recall maybe two visits of four or five days each to stay with them in Santa Monica.
My father and stepmother married in the big Synanon wedding in 1976 and stayed through September or October, 1977. I’m not sure how precisely it happened, but my mother succeeded in gaining custody of my sister and me. My father and stepmother left so they’d be able to see us.
The thing is, my stepmother had been in Synanon a lot longer than my dad or mom. My parents had only been away from friends and family for two or three years. I’m pretty sure my stepmother had lived in Synanon for about ten. She didn’t have, as far as I can recall, any real connections outside. Her dad lived in Monterey, I think, but I never met him. Leaving, I think, must have been at least as big a shock for her as going in was for me. I go through periods sometimes of trying to figure out what happened to all of us at the time. I was only ten when we left, and in the year before, there had been a couple of serious traumas. My father’s father had died in New York. I don’t remember if he was able to attend the funeral. He and my stepmother had a daughter who was born with a some major congenital defects and died at the age of 8 months. That would have been Spring, 1977. I think.
Synanon had a really strange relationship to both children and to emotions that weren’t sanctioned anger. (Anger that was sanctioned included the Game, but wasn’t limited to it.) I don’t think either my father or stepmother were able to work through what they experienced in such a way that would lead to healing, as we define it now. And once outside of Synanon, my stepmother didn’t have the support network that was the Synanon family, dysfunctional as it was.
Synanon’s successes in the rehab sphere had a lot to do with emotional abuse. For addicts, a scared straight way of life proved very effective. Later on, the powers that be in Synanon thought this would be an equally effective toolbox for childrearing, to the point that the person who led the school for two of my three years learned what he knew as a drill sergeant in the army. Most of the abuse I suffered there was emotional. Some was physical. What might have been the defining moment of my time in Synanon wasn’t meant to be either, I don’t think. The property the school was located on had a reservoir with a deck. Note: Teachers in Synanon didn’t actually have a pedagogical background. Synanon prided itself on employing people in areas outside of their fields of expertise. Unless your field was lucrative. My father continued to work as an attorney. Doctors continued to work as doctors.) On a visit to the reservoir, one of the teachers asked why I wasn’t swimming. At age 9 or so, I’d never learned. He picked me up to throw me in the water. It was not shallow and I screamed blue murder. He put me down after what seemed a very long time.
Having my butt paddled in front of my schoolmates for being tardy, which happened quite a few times, was not as hard for me to deal with at the time as those minutes at the reservoir. I don’t remember anything else about that day.
Most of what happened after in my immediate family relationships resonates from those jolts of moving into and out of the commune and the various forms of grief we were never able to experience.
In the eight years after Synanon, I lived in four places before moving to San Francisco for university. Each of the four years at San Francisco State, I lived in a different place. I moved nine times between 22 and 35 (and was also married and divorced). At 35, I moved to Prague.
I don’t know if all my moving about was a conscious or unconscious effort to take control of where I was at any given time. The downside (I learned after the eight-year relationship of my first marriage which included six different residences) is that moving puts a huge strain on a person and more on a couple. I lived in three different places in my five-plus years in Prague – the last for nearly four years. It was the longest I’d ever lived in one place. Since moving to the Netherlands, we’ve lived in two places. The first for almost five years before we bought this house just over eight years ago. The future is hard to read these days, but I plan on living here for rather a long time if I can.
And last summer, at the age of 52, I finally learned how to swim.
My family had all left Synanon by the close of 1977 and the snake incident didn’t occur until about a year later. (I should verify, but in my memory the Morantz attack, the People’s Temple mass suicide and the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone all ran together in the news. So perhaps by this definition, Synanon counts as a cult, or at least it did by that point. I have vague memories of an increased focus on self defense while I was still there, but that might be an amalgam of readings and memories and discussions that happened later.
Joe Jots 