There’s no furniture in the apartment when we move in so we take our clothes out of the brown grocery bags and make neat piles in the living room for a couch. Tony stacks the jackets for a bed and I make a table from our shoes so we can kick our feet up. It’s better than regular furniture because we can use our imaginations and make the pile into any shape we want.
When we lie down to stare at the ceiling, Mom sets up her record player. It’s a small plastic suitcase that unfolds into little speakers and a turntable. All she has to do is plug it in and suddenly the empty room is filled with voices and instruments, all the people she carries with her in her record collection: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, small white 45s of the Beatles and the Doors.
The record player is always on in the spaceship because it feels less empty that way.
She makes us chicken soup on a hot plate since there’s no stove and pours it into white plastic cups which she says saves us time because it means we don’t have to do dishes like other people. The shoe table won’t hold the soup and crackers so we sit on the floor, leaning back against the wall to listen to Joan Baez.
When she sings, her voice fills the room like she’s hanging over us, high and silky, a sad angel who makes us feel like we are swimming in a sea of Joan Baezes, surrounded by her voice. It gets in your ears and fills your head, surrounding it, bouncing off the clothing and the shoe table, the T-shirts and socks and underwear that make up the bed. There’s a long window on the front wall. We can hear the cars outside and someone yelling as they walk down the street while we blow on our cups of soup. Mom says it’s good that we are “with the people now and not holed up in some guarded fortress like Nixon.”
We are the only four people on earth. Tony, me, Mom, and Joan Baez. Her voice echoes off the tinny walls of our spaceship:
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it has been the ruin of many a poor girl
And me, oh God, I’m one.
Mom says Synanon was like a giant circle, bigger than anything and leaving feels like she’s outside of it, outside of herself which is also the circle. She doesn’t know who the person inside her head is without it. The space feels so small with only her.
She tells us about the Synanon band, the dancing they did every night after the Game. Everyone would gather in a big room and dance, letting their bodies shake and shiver and jump and flap. “We knew how to have a good time. No doubt about that,” she says, shaking her head and looking out the window at the flashing sign for Oscar’s Burgers. “And your father was a great dancer.” She says they danced all night. That it was special to dance with friends and they were in love and free from the eyes of the world. That was the good part about it. The music.
We drift to sleep. When I wake up, Mom is snoring on her back with Tony on one side and me on the other. It’s strange to be in a new place. The silence. The darkness. The strange voices from the sidewalk. Where are Dmitri and Bonnie and Clubby? Are they in the circle? Am I outside the circle now?
Mom tells us that things are different here in the World Outside Synanon. That the World Outside Synanon has different rules than Synanon did. We can let our hair grow and we can own bikes and kids live with their moms and dads. There’s no Game, which was a big circle where everyone would sit and yell at each other. Everyone in Synanon had to play it. It started as something only Dope Fiends did so that new Dope Fiends could learn from old Dope Fiends, because it’s hard for Dope Fiends to hear anything unless someone is yelling at them. At first it was something called Group Therapy but then it changed when the Old Man decided it needed to be more extreme. That’s when all the yelling happened.
People liked it for some reason so when all the Squares moved in, the people like Mom who didn’t do drugs but wanted to live in Synanon so they could change the world, they played it too. You could be mean in the Game. You could say anything. You could call someone an “asshole” or a “bastard” or a “piece of shit.” You could accuse them of doing bad things, say all the ways they were lying and running and hiding. You could say the worst things about them. But then when it was over, you had to be nice. You had to smile and hug the person you just called a piece of shit. They had to hug you back and pretend they weren’t mad and wait until the next Game to call you an asshole.
In the Game everyone was equal but Mom says that “some people were more equal than others,” because everyone knew you couldn’t say bad things about Chuck or the other leaders, even if they were mean, even if they made you get divorced and shaved your head and took your kids away.
That’s what made it a C-U-L-T.
Everything in the World Outside Synanon is so much bigger than everything used to be. That’s what I think when we go for a drive to San Jose. There are cars in the streets and huge buildings and buses filled with people all staring ahead, not talking to each other. The noise comes from machines. Jackhammers and lawn mowers, air conditioners and diesel engines shooting black smoke in the air. There’s so much movement. So many people. Why don’t they talk to each other?
We go to Oscar’s for lunch and Tony wants a whole cheeseburger. Mom says he’ll never finish it so we have to share one instead. It comes with a basket of hot, salty yellow French fries the size of our fingers that we cover in ketchup. When Mom cuts the Oscar burger in half, red juice and mustard squirt into the basket and Tony and I lift our halves to toast them like princes. I think this must be how rich people live with cheeseburgers for lunch whenever you want. Tony says Dad took him for burgers before but I don’t believe him because he eats his whole half, licks the salty juice off his hands then licks the waxy paper from the bottom of the basket.
We cross a huge bridge made of metal and concrete and see the water stretched out in all directions, the factories on the shoreline behind us, Alcatraz prison in the middle of the bay surrounded by boats. Everything is so big! What could have made it all? How could you think of everything at once?
It feels like something created by giants. Like they walked the earth and put a building here, a bridge there, kicking a tunnel into the mountain with their giant shoes.
It’s late by the time we get back from dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in San Jose and when we get to the top of the stairs of the spaceship, the apartment door is wide open. Mom pulls Tony and me toward the railing. “Hello?” She leans forward squeezing my hand. “Is someone there?” We wait outside while she goes through the door.
Tony says maybe Dad came to visit so we look for his moto-cycle in the parking lot on the other side of the railing but we don’t see it anywhere.
We hear Mom’s voice coming from the inside of the apartment, “Oh, dear … For heaven’s sake … Well, shit.”
We go inside and find her sitting in the middle of the floor. Our stuff is everywhere, the bags turned over, the clothing and records spread out on the cream carpets.
“I don’t get it,” Mom says. “What could we possibly have that somebody would want to steal?”
We wait outside for the police and when they arrive, they nod at us as they walk by with their flashlights darting around the room, bursting through the big window in the front of the spaceship.