“He was governor. You kids didn’t stop anything. It was a big tantrum. A tantrum with slogans and songs and drugs. Why couldn’t you just stay at Mills College? Why did you have to leave for Berkeley?”
Mom laughs when Grandma says that because everyone knows you couldn’t use drugs in Synanon. That was the whole point. She tells her that the people in Synanon were starting a better world. Then she’ll say, “I hated Mills, Mother. All those future Stepford wives learning how to be obedient little cogs in the machine of commerce.”
“At least they got to lead normal lives. You go off and join some cult.”
There’s that word again. C-U-L-T. I know my letters because everyone at Synanon knows their letters, even the little kids. My favorite one is O. I like to imagine there’s a whole world on the other side of it, a quiet place you can go to take a nap if you can just make yourself small enough to fit through the middle.
“C-U-L-T” is an ugly word. It looks like the C is spitting the U right at the L. The T is standing still with its arms out, trying to keep its distance from the other letters. They don’t seem like four letters that want to be in the same word together. Maybe that’s why everyone looks so mad when they say it.
“Well, I wish I hadn’t given them my babies,” Mom whispers. She looks at us. She always tells us Dad would’ve died without Synanon because he was such a Dope Fiend that he ended up in prison and he needed to go to Synanon and live there and play the Game so he could be out of prison and clean from drugs and not die.
Grandpa cooks dinner in the kitchen and Grandma is in her stuffed green chair in a robe, the glass of Dutch on the tray next to her.
“I liked Jimmy. Everyone did. He was funny.” When Dad visited us on his moto-cycle, you could hear the noise from the engine echoing off the hills and fields. We’d stop whatever we were doing and run to the front of the School because we knew it was him and he was a Tribe Leader, which meant he was really important in Synanon. Even Chuck respected him because nobody was tougher than Dad. He managed the gas station on Pico where the auto mechanics worked back before he moved to Tomales Bay because everyone said he knew a lot about cars, and people. He’d get off the bike and turn off the engine and we’d run up to him and he’d scoop us up.
We felt safe with Dad even though Grandma says mean things about him. “I know he quit the heroin, but I’ll never understand how you could marry someone who just got out of prison.”
Tony says Dad went to Synanon after an overdose, which is when you take too many drugs and your body goes to sleep. Some friends just dropped him on the front porch one day. Chuck, the Old Man, let him in and Dad spent a week on the couch shivering and throwing up into a bucket. That’s how the heroin gets out of your body, through all the puke.
Mom gives Grandma a sharp look then points at us.
“How could you trust a man like that?”
Grandma is cooking rice with chicken that she learned to make for Grandpa when he was in a place called “Indianezia.” It’s my favorite. He’ll stay in the kitchen looking after it while Mom and Grandma argue. Grandpa says that after he got home from the war, he had a company that took boats from Dutch to a place called Indianezia so that people in Dutch could have things from there. The house is filled with masks and little statues of smiling women in pointy gold hats, wooden men with bones through their noses that he brought back from Indianezia. They had a big house in Dutch where Mom and her sister Pam, who is something called an aunt, and her brother Jon, who is something called an uncle (those are things that happen in “families”), all lived with him and Grandma. They even had a maid who lived there with her husband and they took care of the babies a lot of the time. Mom says that’s who raised her, the nanny, because Grandpa had his boats and Grandma had her Dutch.
Maybe that’s why she put us in the School, because she didn’t think parents were supposed to raise their kids.
This was before they moved to America when Mom was fourteen years old so she and Jon and Pam could go to good American colleges like Stanford.
When Uncle Jon comes to visit, you can hear him for miles. He drives a big, loud moto-cycle like Dad. He doesn’t look like the Synanon people with their shaved heads because he’s got a long beard and long blond hair. Mom says he came to visit us in Synanon once and just sat in the back thinking all the people were weird. He’s nice to us, making jokes like Grandpa does.
Aunt Pam visits too with her kids who are something called cousins (there sure are a lot of titles to keep track of when you have something called a family). Their names are Marci and Paul and they play with us on the floor or draw at the table. Uncle Jon gave us another cousin named Heidi. Cousins are good because they’re like friends who look like you. Aunt Pam has Dutch cheeks like Mom and a warm laugh and she’ll hug us and tell us she missed us when we were “in that place.” Mom will give her a look and everyone gets quiet.
Mom says our dad “wasn’t so bad,” and Grandma gets so angry. “He was a criminal! And a junkie! And he left you for a tramp.” I pretend to look away. “A good man would’ve stayed. A good man would’ve gotten you out of that horrible place!”
Mom says that she and Dad are “friends” now and that they both “love us very much.” I’m not sure what a tramp is but since everyone lived together in Synanon, Mom had to walk downstairs the day after Dad left while I was still in her belly and Dad was sitting in the big common room with the tramp on his lap. Mom says she knew then that she had to be strong for me because it was her job to guard me because I was a special life that had to be born into the world.
Tony says Dad was thinking with his ding-a-ling.
“All I ever wanted was a man to take care of me. Just a normal man.”
“Then why’d you marry a drug addict?” Grandma looks at Mom who holds a pillow on her lap, staring at the blank white walls. “I don’t know what you expect your father and I to do but at some point you need to learn that the world isn’t just some fantasyland. All the crazies and weirdos and here you are with no husband, no money, two kids and a shaved head. You look like a mental patient.”
Grandma doesn’t know that you have to be nice to Mom or she’ll go into the deep-russian.
“Who’s hungry?” Grandpa yells.
“Do you think that’s why we moved to California? So you could end up like this?”
Mom sits still on the couch like she’s trying to solve a problem in her head. “I just wanted to see you. We’ll leave soon.”
“And what are you going to do with them?” She lifts her palm toward the dining room table where Grandpa put the steaming-hot bowls of spicy chicken and rice. “You know the crazies are looking for you and you can’t hide those kids forever.”
CHAPTER 4
BLOOD ON THE DRIVEWAY
The apartment in East Oakland is on the second floor of a building that looks like a giant spaceship. There are blue stairways that look like jets and huge pipes on the roof that look like a nose pointing toward space. It’s our new home. It sits on a corner across from a gas station and a hamburger stand with an electric sign saying, “Oscar’s Char Broiled ¼ lb. Burgers.” Tony says there’s nothing better than a cheeseburger and fries but how would he know? We’ve never been to a restaurant.