Synanon: Its rise and fall as seen by The Fly
Part I
By PHILL JACKSON (The Fly)
Last week The Daily News Current reported the death of Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon. Since I had once belonged to that organization in its glory days, before it went the way of all too many promising social experiments, David asked me to write something about it and about its founder. Once I began thinking about it, I found old memories surfacing and realized that I couldn't give due justice to Synanon and its people in the compass of one of my normal weekly articles. So this one will probably be a three-parter.
I don't know the demographics of The Daily News Current's readers. However I suspect that, like most of the still breathing world, most of you folks are significantly younger than I am. In which case, Synanon was one of those funny things happening when dear old dad and mom frolicked in Elysian Park, dressed in bellbottoms, leather, and feathers (or, likely enough, in nothing at all; where do you think you came from?) while the fragrance of Patchouli and home-brewed dope filled the Summer air. It was, in short, groovy. And Synanon was one of the places that reconstructed those who grooved out on acid or heroin or life.
In those days there were lots of drug and alcohol rehab programs staffed with educated professionals and funded generously with public money. The only real difference between those well-intentioned government agencies and Synanon was that Synanon paid it own way and Synanon worked.
There were plenty of good reasons people went to Synanon. Like they were heroin addicts, alcoholics, or driven almost totally into that Hole in the Middle of the Bottom of the Mind. Me? I was just Looking For Girls, (an addiction in itself). Found one too, a fine one and if I had been as wise then as I delude myself I am now, I'd have married her.
Caveat:
I once referred to myself in these monitor screens as "an observant fly on the wall of history." In regard to Synanon, I think that a better metaphor would be that I was like the "observant fly in the soup", because I was in Synanon, but never part of the Synanon where the decisions were made and the secret histories written. I can only tell you all I saw, but that is just a small part of the truth.
In those days, Synanon was primarily centered in Santa Monica, in a huge old beachfront hotel and several nearby apartment houses. The hotel was for the Residents; the apartments for the "Lifestylers". For Squares like me, there were just folding chairs on the Wednesday nights when the Moolai tribe gathered to play "The Game". And more, much more, about "The Game" later.
When I first walked into Synanon, the first thing I saw was the former lobby, now containing several dozen couches. On each lay some haggard individual, supplied with a carton of cigarettes, a wastebasket and a companion.
The cigarettes were to smoke, the wastebasket to barf into and the companion to offer testament that the next 48 hours could be lived through because they themselves had done so. For that was how heroin addicts went "cold turkey" at Synanon.
You could smoke, read, throw up, watch TV, or bitch to your companion, but you couldn't run around banging your head on the wall like all those actors in the movies and TV. In Synanon it just wasn't done.
One of the remarkable things about Synanon was that somehow the process made heroin withdrawal seem not much worse than a terrific hangover. (Like the one I had when this innocent Hoosier country boy first ran into that lost German communist/nazi actress who filled me on our first date to overflowing with red label vodka. But that's another story.)
It was sometimes difficult to get into Synanon and easy to leave. Any of those suffering couch potatoes could get up and walk out the door. And some did. But it was remarkable how many stuck it out to become straight and join Synanon as Residents; no unmixed blessing because the new Resident was on the bottom of a social order and a training process that made Marine Corps' boot camp seem rather wimpy by comparison.
And the painful tool of self-reclamation after those days of withdrawal was "The Game." The Game that caught so many addicts and drunks by the scruffs of their nasty necks and flung them into a process that eventually led most of them back into the wide world as functional and productive citizens.
The "Game" that caught me, hooked me, scared the shit out of me, and taught me some home truths and survival skills that have served me well to this day.
So Chuck, wherever you are, here's to you and I hope I can tell your story well enough to give you the credit you deserved.
To Be Continued
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And the Least Shall be First
(Part II of ``Synanon: Its Rise and Fall as Seen by The Fly")
By PHILL JACKSON (The Fly)
I tell you, this has been a day. Today I have had to cope with the Taxman, the Building Inspector, the Electrical Inspector, The Seamless Gutter people, a trip to town to pick up scaffolding in my Ford F250 pickup with no power steering, the first day of our "get in shape before showing our bods in California in May" diet, unloading 1700 hundred square feet of tongue-and-groove pine for the main room ceiling, the writing of a "more in sorrow than in anger" letter to John O'Sullivan Editor of the National Review, an emergency dinnertime run into town to deliver a key to my architect/chef friend who had locked himself out of his kitchen with a pie in the oven, and a particularly tearjerking episode of Chicago Hope.
Now it's 10:10 PM and I written not word one of the next article about Synanon. You'll owe me for this David.
Oh yeah. I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome or something that feels like nails being driven through my palms. And last night's undercooked corned beef and cabbage dinner at the Grange is still making objections to integration with my digestive system.
But what the hey, as long as I'm having fun. If I quit in mid-sentence, however, you'll understand.
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There were three social classes in Synanon. The Residents, who were both the highest and lowest of the classes, the LifeStylers, and the Squares. I was a Square. (Typecasting!)
Residents were the guys and gals who dragged themselves off the street, flopped onto one of those lobby couches and barfed themselves into sobriety through 48 or so hours of Cold Turkey. If they survived that, they entered into the Synanon community as the lowest of the low. I seem to remember that their heads were shaved and certainly they performed the most menial of tasks.
They swept floors, washed dishes, scrubbed toilets, and suffered insult and verbal assault in The Game. Contact with the outside world was forbidden for some extended period until the new resident had achieved control over self and had earned respect. It was Marine Corps Boot Camp for civilians.
And from those folks, the leadership of Synanon was chosen. The lowest became the highest. It was a harsh, illiberal, insulting and degrading system, and dammit, it worked and worked well.
Many of those who went through the program in those early days officially "Graduated" to the outside world again as self-respecting and productive citizens.
Lifestylers were those who had no problems with dope or alcohol and coped quite well with life on the outside. Many of them were professionals and brought their skills to Synanon. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers, artists and just plain working folks, they lived in, and paid handsomely for, apartments in nearby buildings owned by Synanon. They were there because they believed in the community that Synanon seemed to be building
Then Squares. Folks like me. Trying out Synanon for some reason that they may not always have understood themselves. I thought I did; I was Looking for Women (LFW) but as it turned out, I found a lot more.
The prime engine of Synanon was "The Game". It was officially forbidden to call it group therapy (for, I suspect, legal reasons) but in fact it was, if you can imagine a therapy group that included mostly clones of Atilla the Hun.
Visualize this. A hotel room, bare of furniture except for 20 to 30 directors chairs arranged around the wall. There was a leader of sorts, I have forgotten the title, normally a resident. There were conventions: no threats of violence, supporting the indictment, pulling covers, and no contracts.
Supporting the indictment meant that if someone accused you of anything, including the most highly improbable, everyone else in the group piled on and added the nasty bits, even if they had to make them up.
Pulling covers was unveiling secrets, fears, and destructive behaviors, either toward the self or others.
No contracts meant that there were to be no explicit or secret alliances between players. No "I won't show you mine and you don't have to show me yours."
New members were treated rather gently. My first three games were a hoot. Other members probed and gently questioned and I ad-libbed. "A regular Johnny Carson," one old timer remarked.
During game four a woman looked directly into my eyes and raged, "You're a total shit, you know that"? More than her words, her body language and tone told me that this woman hated me and that I was within a hand's span of being destroyed by her anger. I can only describe the physical effect as having the very real impression that a 50 pound block of ice had replaced my lungs and heart. I was terrified. I left the game that evening swearing that I'd never return. Who needed this?
But during the days that followed, awaiting the next Wednesday game, I realized that for most of my childhood and much of my adult life, I had been afraid, not of pain or real danger, but of others' anger, for I somehow validated it. If anyone was angry with me, the fault was with me. If my father shouted at and demeaned me, it was because I had committed some wrong.. If in military school other cadets hazed and tormented me, I had accepted that it was for a reason.
But this woman, who I later learned was a well known "rage rat" (someone who played the game to vent almost uncontrollable anger in a controlled environment) didn't know me; I had done nothing to her and I somehow saw the internal dynamics of my emotional reactions. Not that that made it any easier. I was still scared shitless. (But being scared shitless doesn't have to mean you're a coward.)
So every week I requested to be put in the same game with my persecutor. If she didn't vent on me spontaneously; I'd insult her then sit in the stream of her hate and invective.
Eventually, one of us broke. She asked to be put in another game. My ability to absorb her hate had exceeded her ability to produce it. We both profited by the painful experience; emotional surgery without anesthetic. I learned that anger wouldn't destroy me; she learned that anger was an unprofitable currency in dealing with the world.
After that, I began to enter the game more fully. I learned to know, and care about my fellow players. When we screwed up, we raged at each other, not out of anger, but out of love. Sounds weird, but it worked.
When we gained confidence in ourselves, and our co-tribe members, we shared our hopes for ourselves and our perceptions of our failings. One Synanon principle was "to act as if". We selected role models, people who seemed to embody all that we wished to be ourselves. And we committed ourselves to act "as if" we in fact possessed those virtues. Do that long enough, and it becomes you. The Game monitored the process, stroked you when you lived up to yourself, and kicked your ass when you didn't.
Someone, Aristotle I think, once said that good drama produced a purgation of pity and fear. That perfectly explains the result of The Game. Sometimes, after the indictment, the anger, the reconciliation, the love, I left The Game feeling more completely at peace with myself and the world than I had ever felt before or have ever felt since.
One night I was doing volunteer duty behind the bar (soft drinks, tea and coffee only) when a game ended. An attractive woman approached me and said, "I just want you to know that you're the best looking man I've ever seen". She walked away and I never saw her again. But I understood; I had been there. That state of clearness when reactions were so purely instinctual and non-inhibited that a sort of primal truth was natural. She only thought that I was so handsome, because at that moment she felt so good about herself. If Quasimodo had been serving cokes, the result would have been the same.
As I said, I might quit in. . .
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Synanon: Part Three
By PHILL JACKSON
I think that I joined Synanon when it had just reached its Zenith. It had an enviable, and justified reputation as one of the few drug rehabilitation programs which worked. It was self-financing through a combination of donations paid by Squares, rents from Lifestylers and a number of businesses it owned, including apartment houses, service stations and an advertising business specializing in selling promotional items. With the low, or non-existent wages paid to its working Residents, Synanon had accumulated a surplus. Lifestylers and Squares, many of them professionals, donated their services. Synanon was on a roll.
Most if not all of the supervisory positions were filled with Residents who had come to Synanon after suffering defeat in the outside world. They now had respect, authority, and a modest allowance, "walking around money". More importantly, they were part of a community bonded by common experience and by the combats of the game. I suspect that to more than a few of them "Graduation" and a return to the world began to seem both chancy and less desirable.
"You couldn't survive on the outside" began to be heard. The Outer World began to be referred to as a unavoidably corrupting influence and certainly, to many Residents, it had been so. To Squares and Lifestylers who functioned quite well in that world, the close and idealized community of Synanon seemed to promise the hope of building something new: a community that would restore the kind of relationships many of us attribute to the small villages of American folklore.
This could not be done in the city and Synanon had resources. Finally the organization purchased land in Tomales Bay in Northern California. There the Synanon community would be built.
The leadership and many Residents and supporters moved to Tomales Bay and began to build. The hotel in Santa Monica remained as the urban center, serving as an intake facility for new Residents and as the local center for the many Squares and Lifestylers who remained behind but who still provided a valuable source of funding and technical expertise to the Tomales Bay pioneers.
Glowing reports were presented to us back in Santa Monica. And I have no doubt that real progress was being made. Buildings were going up and roads were being built. A school was established for those who had children and when years later I chanced to have two former Synanon students in one of my fifth grade classes I found them well prepared and ingenuous thinkers.
But something else was going on: Synanon was closing many of its links with the outside. This was made evident to me when Kathy (the lady I went to Synanon to meet -- and did) and I, on a motorcycle trip through the area, decided to drop in and see the facility firsthand. This was well within Synanon policy as we had understood it but it was obvious that when we arrived we were being greeted more like uninvited poor relations than as members in good standing.
We were, however, permitted to sit in among the observers at a game containing Chuck Dederich, the founder and intellectual/moral leader of Synanon. Unlike the games we had participated in, this one was held in a sunken conversation pit surrounded by rows of seats for non-participating spectators.
The game began and it provided a painful surprise to Kathy and me. Chuck took part and some of his insights and comments were valuable, but they were larded in among even more exchanges filled with the kind of self-satisfied nonsense that would have made an ordinary member the subject of enthusiastic scorn and ridicule; and no one seemed to notice. The cult of personality was already well established and the checks and balances of the normal game were suspended where Chuck was concerned.
There are various ways that power corrupts. Some societies, like Hitler's Germany, are corrupted by their leaders. But in Chuck's case, I think that his little society "corrupted" him by honoring him so much they were no longer willing to point out his human failings and errors. A fatal mistake for an addictive personality and that was the one characteristic all Residents had had in common.
I think that when Synanon residents left Santa Monica to escape the influences of the city, they lost more than they gained, because they left the rest of us behind: those Squares and Lifestylers who could always be counted on to comment that the King had neglected to button his fly.
The dialogue had become one between true believers and I suppose that ultimately it led Synanon down the garden path to its final difficulties with lawyers and rattlesnakes and, if rumor can be believed, a final flirtation between Chuck and the bott. I don't know; I was no longer a member, even at Santa Monica.
I wasn't happy with the changes I saw and was even less so with a scheme being bruited about to incorporate Synanon as a church to gain the obvious benefits. While I have some little trouble with real religions, I have a lot of trouble with phony ones.
I took part in one final game. Every Synanon member was expected to make monthly donations. The official statement was that even two cents was enough to maintain membership; only individuals could determine how much they could afford. In general that rule seemed to be respected, but just before I left more pressure was being put on those whose donations seemed too small, as mine apparently did. I was at that time trying to establish myself as an artist and was living on my small savings and just didn't have much to give, though I had built a set of garden gates for the hotel, the largest project I had ever undertaken, and had donated my materials and much time to do so.
That project appeared to have been filed under ". . . Yeah, but what have you done for us lately," because I was called into the hot seat and grilled by one of the leading Residents left in Santa Monica. I had learned the game pretty well myself and gave as good as I got and afterwards several seasoned players expressed envy at my performance. (And much of every game was, in fact, performance)
But I went home and thought it over and decided that Synanon and I might as well go our separate ways, with respect and some affection, at least on my part.
I never returned.
But I had one last encounter with Synanon, though at second hand. I was then involved with an interesting (and THAT'S an understatement) Mexican-American woman whose brother who became a good friend of mine. He had once been a heroin addict and had done felony prison time. I never knew the details and didn't care; he was fine by me.
He disappeared and for three days we didn't know where he was. Then we got a phone call; could we go to Santa Monica and pick up his truck? He told us that he had returned to heroin and was so humiliated and trapped that he had considered suicide but had at the last moment remembered my stories of Synanon and had plunged though those doors to save himself.
As he did. He was gone for several years, most of it spent in Tomales Bay, and when he returned, he did so not only clean and revitalized, but with a fine woman he had met there.
He told me then with every evidence of great conviction that I had saved his life.
But it wasn't me; I know who it was. So here's to you, Chuck, wherever you are.
-- Phill, of the Moolai Tribe
