I ask her if she ever saw the bombs go off. She says it was all over by then but that craters from a war are a good place for a kid to go and hide.
CHAPTER 3
C-U-L-T
No one ever tells us we escaped from a cult. No one uses that word, except Grandma. Everyone else calls it Synanon or sometimes they say it was a “commune.” And everyone says it was great, “before it went bad.” That’s how they put it. Like it was milk that went sour.
When Mom argues with Grandma in the living room, she says that it saved our lives. She’ll put her hands up and say, “Where was I supposed to go?”
Grandma says, “You could’ve come home! I knew it was a mistake sending you to Berkeley.” Mom doesn’t know what to do when people get mad at her. It’s like she’s missing the piece of the brain made for yelling so instead she crumples up like a piece of paper and buries her head under pillows. She tells us how important Berkeley was. How she went off to college when she was only fifteen because she was so smart and she met all kinds of new people there and she learned how to change the world by sitting down in different places so they could beat Thatasshole Reagan.
She marched and she sat and she sang and they got hit with tears gas because they needed to stop a war (it was in a place called Vietnam) and have Civil Rights but Thatasshole Reagan didn’t want those things so he sent soldiers to launch tears gas at them which made them cry. They sat on the street with their arms locked and the soldiers on horses came straight at them and they weren’t sure if they were going to die but that’s what you have to do if you want to change the world.
Mom always says, “Synanon was mild compared to Berkeley.” Berkeley was the center of the world, she says. And the government was killing young men “to defend a lie.” I don’t know what the lie was but I bet she was scared. She says the bodies of those young boys were hidden. Like we’re supposed to forget they died at all. I don’t know who these boys are or how old they were or if we’re next. And I’m proud of Mom for trying to stop it and protect the boys like us, even though Thatasshole Reagan threw tears gas at her (which might explain why she cries so much, it’s the gas).
I wonder about the bodies. Where did they hide them? Could I stumble on one in the bushes outside Grandma and Grandpa’s house? Are people sad?
Mom says that Synanon was going to change the world, before it went bad. Synanon was going to be the new way people lived, all together, being honest and free and not taking drugs. She says people needed a new way to live because the old way wasn’t working anymore and she was proud to be part of it, this new group of people who were going to change the world.
It all sounds great when she tells it but did they have to make it so the kids were alone so much?
“Synanon was mild?” Grandma gets so mad when Mom says that. “They took your kids, Gerry, and put them in that, that place.” She spits the word out like a piece of meat caught in her small teeth.
“Synanon had a good school.” The School is where they put the kids when they took us from our parents. It’s where we all lived from the time we were six months old. Since Chuck, the Old Man, said that Dope Fiends would just mess up their kids anyway, we were all put in a building together to become children of the universe. You had to listen to Chuck. We had Demonstrators who were like teachers and classes and songs and I was lucky because I had a Bonnie. She would hug me every day and sing songs with me and call me “Suuuuuun” and ask me what I want for a snack.
Most of the other kids didn’t have a Bonnie though and some never even saw their moms or their dads. They just never came to visit. Dmitri said he doesn’t remember his mom’s face. She was somewhere else. He didn’t know where his dad was. The Demonstrators say we don’t need our parents because we have each other. But we don’t like sharing our toys and I didn’t know who to talk to when I woke up with a bad dream or fell off the monkey bars.
The older kids say that in the World Outside Synanon kids live with their parents and their parents take care of them. They hug you and kiss you and talk to you and pick you up. And it’s the same ones every day. They take you places and those are all your people and the whole group is something called a “family.”
All the kids in Synanon wish they had one of those.
Even if the mom or the dad was a Dope Fiend or busy trying to change the world. At least you weren’t alone.
Some of the kids were very sad. Tony used to sit alone at the edge of the playground all day. He would turn away when one of the Demonstrators tried to hug him. He doesn’t trust the adults and he doesn’t play with other kids that much. When Mom came to visit, she would say he’s just like that and he needs to learn how to “deal with his anger.” But maybe it’s because someone did bad things to him. That happened sometimes. The kids would get hit really hard or locked in a closet and there was no mom or dad to tell because they lived somewhere else and you couldn’t even remember their faces.
Maybe it’s just because he was alone so much. He’s almost seven and I don’t think Mom knows what it’s like to be alone for almost seven years.
Mom says it was “a good school.”
“It was an orphanage!” Grandma screams. “That’s what you call a place where strangers raise your kids!” Grandma says that Mom doesn’t even know who put us to bed or who woke us up or who taught us to read. She says we were sitting ducks. (We did play Duck Duck Goose a lot.) “You made them orphans, Gerry!” Grandma will point at us from her chair as we pretend not to listen. She has less control by the late afternoon, after her third or fourth glass of Dutch.
Mom doesn’t hear her. She’s good at not hearing people. If we tell her we’re hungry, she’ll say, “No you’re not. You ate earlier.” If one of us says, “I’m sad,” she tells us it’s not true, that we’re happy now because we’re with her.
It’s strange for someone to tell you your own feelings but maybe she knows better than we do.
She never says, “Why are you sad?” or “It’ll be okay.” It’s like we’re not allowed to be sad. We’re not allowed to be anything but what she tells us. She won’t hit us or scream. She’ll just wrap herself up in a ball on the couch and let her face go all blank. She’ll say, “It’s not my fault,” as she rocks her knees on the bed. She shakes her head and stares or she starts to cry until one of us tells her it’ll be okay, that we’re not sad, Mom, we were just kidding. We’re happy now because we are with her. Then she’ll wipe her tears and tell us she missed us every day.
Sometimes when we talk to her, she just stares at the ceiling with her hands on her chest and her face goes blank like she isn’t there at all. Grandpa says she’s sad but Grandma calls it the “deep-russian.” Tony will shake her shoulder or flash his hand in front of her face. We’re not sure what to do because we don’t know her very well. We only know her from the visits. And if she has the “deep-russian” then we know it’s our job to get her out of it because who else is going to do it?
We know she hates Thatasshole Reagan because she and Grandma argue about it. They argue about everything. Mom says, “Reagan is a fascist, Mother.” Or, “If Thatasshole wins the presidency, we won’t have a thing in the world.” When Mom says this, Grandma stares at her like something is ticking inside her, something turning and turning alone in her head like the crushed ice at the bottom of her glass.