Straight Life (57 page)

They moved me to a bedroom where my new roommate was a young guy, the son of a doctor. He was a nice kid. Later on I heard he'd started a revolt and tried to get the kids to overthrow the government of Synanon. I asked him, "What are you doing here? I know you're not a dopefiend." This kid, Peter Kuhn, was about sixteen. He was very tall with black hair, wore glasses. He was very intelligent. The more I talked to him, the more I liked him. I realized that there were a lot of things I didn't know about Synanon, and I figured that maybe for my own sanity' I should try to squelch my hatreds for a while and find out what was happening. Maybe there was something going on that I didn't know about, so I started asking him, "Well, what are these people here? That isn't a dopefiend there. Who is that? What are all these children doing here?" And he gave me a little rundown.

Synanon had gone to Puerto Rico and recruited dope fiends. They got so much money from the government and a tax-free stamp for recruiting people. They went to Puerto Rico and New York and got these guys, who were now so far from home they couldn't leave. Synanon couldn't get people from California to come and stay. I found out that the, young kids were put in Synanon by their parents or by the courts. Some had dabbled in pot and some had actually messed around a bit with dope. And then people brought little children in with them-little, teeny children and babies. Sometimes women gave birth to children there. And sometimes people left and left their children behind for Synanon to take care of. So there were the babies, there were the young people, the Puerto Ricans, the New Yorkers, the blacks, a lot of blacks, and then, of all things, there were the squares. "Life-stylers." Game players who had moved into Synanon.

There were squares that came down and played the "Synanon game," which is like group therapy. It was a club for them. They met and played a game one night a week. When I first got into Synanon they had their own games, just the squares, and then the residents, the dopefiends, one or two of them would play in each game with the squares, which seemed like an interesting thing to have happen. There were all kinds of people in the "game club"-businessmen, real players, those phony guys that say they're writers. Everybody had some kind of line, but in the games they'd be ripped apart. In the games you study people and try to find their weaknesses. You point out the bad things. The squares were people that were lonely, searching for companionship. Some of the women were just beautiful, some of them had a lot of money, and I used to wonder why they came to a place like this. At first I thought they came to hang out with dopefiends, to have some excitement in their lives, but after I was around them and observed them, I saw that even though that was part of it, the main thing was it was a place to go. They'd play their game, and after the game they'd congregate in one area of the club where there was a bar with big windows overlooking the ocean. It had tables and was like a real bar except there was no liquor served. They served coffee, ice cream, things like that. The squares sat there and talked. You could talk to any girl you wanted. Any girl could talk to any guy. If they didn't talk they'd be ranked later on in the games. It was an open sesame to meet people. They went out together. They were in games together and could find out about each other.

So the people in the game club were lonely people, and I found out that even the ones that had money and were goodlooking and had way-out cars were just as hung up as everybody else. They didn't know how to communicate, they felt inferior, they were self-conscious, they didn't feel adequate. Synanon was great: it enabled them to release their hostilities in the games. They could make fun of people and say things they could never say outside. After a while they felt free. They found out about themselves, they found out that other people were the same, and it gave them self-confidence-they realized they weren't alone. It was ideal for them. They could come and go home, go home to their nice places.

There were squares who after a certain length of time decided they liked the Synanon way of community living, so they moved in. They moved into apartments across the street from the club and worked outside at different jobs and gave most of their money to Synanon. They spent all their free time in Synanon playing games and hanging out, and they could live there with their friends, away from the violence of the outside world, because there was never any violence in Synanon. That was a no-no. The main rules were no dope or alcohol and no physical violence, so Synanon was very safe in a world that's awfully frantic and crazy.

For a while it was all I could do to make it through the days and nights. Then I started feeling a little better. One day some people came into the infirmary with some tapes and a tape recorder, and I thought they were going to play music, but instead they put on a tape of some girl copping out about a guy, an Italian, who had balled a lot of chicks. She said she had been getting loaded with him. Here is this girl saying she'd gone with this guy and given him head in a Synanon vehicle. She's telling all these people, and it's on a tape! I asked somebody, "Is this chick still alive?" They said, "Yeah, what do you mean is she still alive?" I said, "Well, she just ratted on this guy. She's a fuckin' snitch, man!" They looked at me. They said, "Oh God, you're ... Phew! Well, it figures." I said, "What do you mean it figures? What the fuck are you talking about?" They said, "Oh, well, just stick around for a while and you'll find out what's happening." I got angry. I said, "You're a bunch of rats!" Not only were they a bunch of Puerto Ricans, blacks, inconsiderate New Yorkers, and funky, bratty, snot-nosed, little kids, but they were a bunch of rats besides! So all the things I'd heard about Synanon and knew about it before were true!

Before I went there, even in the condition I was in, I had asked Greg Dykes if the place was filled with rats. He said, "No, man, there might be a few, but that's it." I said, "I don't want to ruin my reputation after doing so much time to keep it. I don't want to live with a bunch of rats." Then I got there. I heard these tapes. Here's this chick. After she finishes, other people start copping out on this guy and that guy and this chick and that one. He was using dope. She was giving that one head. I thought, "I should have known better."

After they finished with those tapes they played another, of Chuck Dederich, the founder, Mr. God, with his bullfrog voice. It was a long, long tape, and he just kept repeating himself as if he was talking to some idiot five year old, croaking away about the camera's eye, saying that when you're loaded it's like having a camera that doesn't take all the frames of the movie. He's saying that you just get a part of it. He likened it to seeing Gone with the Wind with a bad projector that doesn't show all the frames. But then, he said, when you've been in Synanon awhile, the projector gets better and better, and after you're there for some length of time your projector, which is you, is perfect, and you see the whole movie, and you know everything that's happening, and you understand life and yourself and your problems and the world and your fellow man. He's running on and on with this garbage. An old wino. Well, I guess he drank whiskey, gin, and stuff, but here's a guy that had a big, old line of bullshit, some phony salesman out of the midwest who happened to land down on the beach and in order to live had to run some kind of a game up under somebody. He was a great bullshitter, so he found a little, beat pad, and he found some winos, and he got some dopefiends to come in, and he gave them some soup, and pretty soon he got some money from somebody. By the time I got there they had this huge, old luxury hotel and other places all over-Frisco, Oakland, San Diego-half a dozen places he'd built up from this scam. I'm listening to this tape and thinking, "How could he ever do it?" How? I couldn't believe it could possibly have been done from what I'd seen so far.

I saw a guy I'd known in jail and asked him what was going on. He told me, "You have to wait and see. Wait until you play some games. I couldn't explain it to you in a million years. The best thing to do is keep an open mind. You've got to stay here. You know you can't leave. Try to be cool and then when you get in a game you can rage and call everybody every name under the sun and get rid of your frustrations. That'll enable you to stand it until the next game. Believe me, it'll really be interesting. It's a hell of an experience, man." I thought, "Well, what the hell." I couldn't go. I could barely walk. The food wasn't bad, and from what I'd seen-the people were dressed alright-nobody seemed to want for anything.

They started taking me out by the swimming pool. The Clump was like one of those Hollywood apartment complexes. There was a little coffee shop where you could get coffee and peanut butter and bread for nothing. I sat out by the pool during the day. I'd see people and chat with them. I was a celebrity. Chicks talked with me and flirted with me. I thought, "This ain't bad." Then, finally, "Well, I think you'll be okay," the doctor said.

I got my clothes, and a guy took me to an apartment in the Clump right near the pool. It was a large, two-bedroom apartment with two baths, and the front room was filled with bunk beds. The guy went to one that was empty. He said, "This is you." It was a top bunk. I said, "Man, I don't know how I'm going to make it up there." He went to the office and came back and said, "When So-and-so comes we'll move him up. He's young. You can sleep on the bottom." In a little while the kid came in, he put his stuff on the top bunk, took my stuff, and fixed my bunk for me.

It had a feeling like jail, only there were no cells. The Clump had a lot of units and little walkways. I learned that a couple of blocks down, on Kansas Street, they had another complex and more people lived there; that's where they had a school for the little kids. A few people lived at the club and in the apartments across the street from it, but they were squares or people who'd been in Synanon for a long, long time.

In one of the bedrooms of the apartment were two guys who'd been in Synanon for two or three years, "old-timers" they called them. The other bedroom had one bed. I looked in there. It was really classy. It had a big double bed with a nice spread on it. There were pictures on the walls and statues and knickknacks and a TV and a record player with two speakers. I glanced in the closet. The guy had a lot of shoes and clothes. He was really living it up. He was our dorm head. I didn't see him for three or four days, didn't even know who he was. Finally he came one night and introduced himself. He was a tall, black, pimp type cat. When I saw him I realized I'd seen him down at the club working at the Connect, the desk where the cars were given out and all the details of running the club were taken care of. He looked to me like he was loaded. I didn't know if he was or not. He was going with a white, square game player.

I started finding out what was happening and what was expected of me. There were eight people in the front room and three in the other bedrooms. That's eleven people in an apartment where ordinarily maybe only a man and wife and child would be living. Eight of us used one bathroom. You can imagine the confusion. The dorm head was supposed to coordinate everything, but he had a guy called the ramrod who did all the work. There was a set of rules and a set of dorm assignments which changed periodically. I think my first assignment was cleaning the bathroom. It had to be spotless, all the time spotless, with eight people using it. That meant you were cleaning it constantly, that is, if you did it right, which I did. Some guys did the carpet; one did the trash; and someone did the kitchen. We didn't use the kitchen very often-we ate in the main dining room at the club-but sometimes somebody would cook something. After you were there awhile you got "walking around money." It's called WAM. After three months you got a dollar a month; after six months, two dollars; and so on to five dollars; then, after five years, fifty dollars a month. So you could go to the store and buy something, a little popcorn, coffee, or maybe you could hustle something from the big kitchen at the club.

You weren't supposed to hustle anything, but, as in all places, there was hustling going on. Fortunately, right across from me in the bottom bunk was an older guy, Del, and he worked in the kitchen. Most of the live-ins were dopefiends, supposed dopefiends, but there were some heavy alcoholics, too, and that's what Del was. He must have been about fiftyfive. He'd been a cook on the street, but he was one of those hustlers and he knew a million funny stories. We were in a game once, half women and half guys, and some chick was ranking Del because he was so old, and he said, "Well, dearie, I may not be able to cut the mustard, but I sure can lick the jar!" He cracked everybody up; he had a million of those old-time jokes.

Del was cooking in Synanon. He'd come home, and I'd be there, really unhappy, wanting to get loaded, especially during the first months, and he would start telling me great stories out of his past life. I don't know if he was making them up or what, but he'd get me laughing. He didn't trust the other guys because they were so young. He'd look around and then if everything was cool he'd whisper, "Want something to eat?" I'd say, "Yeah! Yeah!" In order to get our meals we had to take the Synanon bus down to the club, and it was a long trip. Del would hand me a big steak sandwich with tomatoes and pickles, the steak cooked perfect, about an inch and a half thick, tender.

People who worked in the kitchen weren't allowed to take anything out. That was a real bust. And, anyway, steak was something we just didn't have. We ate well, but only the people who'd been around a long time got steak. Jack Hurst, who was the director at the time, and the people who lived in the club, the big shots, would go in the back of the kitchen, get meat, carry it home to their families, and cook it. Bill Dederich, Big Chuck's brother, had an apartment in the Clump and he'd have barbecues on his terrace. You could smell the meat cooking. For a while the big shots even had their own section of the dining room, where they'd eat food like that, and you could see them, you know. It was sickening. But Del got that stuff, stashed it on his body, and brought it home to me.