Why I Split

WHY I SPLIT

I split because Synanon stole my baby.

Some say I can’t use the word “split” because I was a Lifestyler. A dopefiend split, but a Lifestyler left. All of us who left – who gave up close friendships and the community lifestyle – split. Except for the handful who hung on, true believers to the end, we are all splittees.

I know “stole” is a harsh word, but what else would you call it? Synanon moved my ten-month-old baby five hundred miles away from me. They did not ask if I agreed; they did not invite me along. Try as I might, I couldn’t get rotated from Santa Monica to Tomales. I put my baby in the School expecting a parent/Demonstrator partnership. But, almost simultaneously, Chuck decided Synanon wouldn’t have any more babies. So, they took my baby as their own.

I spent forty years remembering the remarkable community I found at age eighteen. It was 1969, and I had just stormed out of my parents’ house and ended a four-year relationship with my high school sweetheart. I had just transferred from U.C. Davis to U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley was the epicenter of the free speech, women’s, and anti-war movements. Haight-Ashbury was the epicenter of the hippie movement with its free love and rampant drugs. I was vehemently against drugs and vehemently against the Vietnam War.

I lost my bearings in Oakland after leaving the cocoon of my family home. Synanon became my new bearings and, soon, my new family. I loved the people, embraced Synanon’s inherent goodness and its vision, and dismissed any doubts.

There were signs of authoritarianism, cult if you will, all along. Forced no smoking, forced aerobics, and forced sugar abstinence – all healthy choices. But all forced upon us.

I married Bobby Best in a magical Wedding Festival with seventy-five couples. I joined the Breeders and went through pregnancy with eight other couples. We lived in Walker Creek and formed lifelong bonds. That and the Hatchery were my best times in Synanon.

I confronted Chuck in a Stew when I heard through the rumor mill we new parents had to move to Santa Monica, but Dorothy Garrett shut me down before Chuck even bothered to respond. He sat whittling, cocking one eye toward me as Dorothy Garret broke in. “You’re just in your nesting stage,” she cooed. “You’ll feel fine once you have your baby.”  Case closed. Synanon had decided we must move. Loretta and I flew standby from San Francisco to LAX when my baby, Robert, was four weeks old; Daniel was two weeks old. That was reckless; Bobby and Fabian had already taken the Synacruiser to Santa Monica. Loretta and I were left on our own to deal with two newborns.

Yes, Santa Monica was a lovely place, but it wasn’t the Tomales property I loved from the moment I heard about it at my first Saturday Night Party.

Even when I first moved Robert into the School at the age of eight months, I believed in the School. Bobby and I – and all of the Hatchery parents – planned to be part of the community school.

A couple of weeks after entrusting my baby to the School, a Demonstrator told me I shouldn’t visit every day so Robert could get used to being without me. Then, within two months, Synanon moved the entire School, including our ten-month-old infants, five hundred miles north back to Tomales, leaving many of us parents behind. Leaving me behind.

My baby was taken. Stolen. My baby, the color of caramel, with curly black hair and deep brown eyes, had gazed intensely into mine when he was born as if to say, “So that’s who you are.”  He didn’t nurse when I first held him to my breast as I lay on the delivery table. No, he turned his head and found my eyes, and I knew that when the doctor cut my umbilical cord, he didn’t cut our connection. I didn’t know I was capable of so much love.

Ten months later, I watched him be driven away in a jitney.

Shame on me for not speaking up. Shame on me for not grabbing him and splitting instead of waiting seventeen tortuous months hoping Synanon would return to the loving family I blindly thought it was. How could I give them my baby? Why didn’t I shout, What the fuck are you doing? This is my baby, not yours! What do you mean I can’t see him every day? I remember believing so strongly in the community, believing they were right. I had given them my power. Everyone I knew had their babies in The School. Everyone seemed happy about it. I still believed it was a community/parent relationship and the best thing for my baby. I just had to wait.

About the time I gave Robert to the School, Chuck decided we would no longer have babies. The entire community marched to his drumbeat—all of us. I’m sure you all remember the woman who was five months pregnant – a planned pregnancy – getting an abortion. Several more women had abortions. Cynthia was squeezed out for merely voicing how hard it was to put her baby in the School. If I spoke of wanting to transfer to Tomales to be near my baby, I was considered negative. I didn’t want to be squeezed out like Cynthia.

Then came vasectomies.  I inwardly cringed, watching man after man smilingly subjecting themselves to the cut. Bobby got a vasectomy (“What choice do I have?”). George Agnosticus, my Love Match, got a vasectomy, treating it as a fun event. We even appliqued scissors on our underwear at a public weigh-in, our fat shaming event. What fun! Cut your balls for the cause! Sure, some men thought they didn’t want to pass their genes along, but many split. I know two men who split over vasectomies but never had babies. One told me, “I could always grow my hair back, but a vasectomy? That’s permanent.” The other man said, “I didn’t want that choice taken from me.” How many succumbed to the peer pressure and callous rules either because they wanted to belong or our brainwashing convinced them they would fall down a manhole if they left?

When we shaved our heads, Loretta told me she was afraid she and Fabian would get back into drugs if they left. She would do anything to protect Daniel. She and Fabian split before me; I don’t remember exactly when, maybe when Daniel was eighteen months old. Maybe not that long. They were lucky to move back to Tomales with the infants as she worked in the Infant Program. (We called it a Program – ugh!)  She told me she left because Synanon was trying to take her baby – and she worked with the babies!

Loretta and Fabian had more kids after they left, and Loretta dedicated her life to her children and grandchildren. They never again used drugs—no manhole for them.

To my shame, I didn’t speak up about forced vasectomies or abortions. I’m proud of Phil, who spoke up, almost paying with his life for his stance when Synanon thugs beat him up almost to death. I was a coward, shielding my cowardice in my desire to belong, believing Synanon would return to the place so glowingly spoken of by Robert Navarro and Geoff Becker.

To my shame, I left my baby in the School for seventeen months after Synanon stole him from me. Seventeen months of pushing my heartache aside so I could be part of the community. Everything I had learned and cherished about expressing my feelings in the Game was lost because to speak of wanting to be with my baby was to invite wrath.

Some of you have called me bitter. You think I hold a grudge. I’m not bitter; I’m sad. I’m sad that we came so close to creating a communal lifestyle and let it slip away.

We let it slip away by obediently following every experiment Chuck foisted on us. We let it slip away by blindly letting our children suffer mental, physical, and sexual abuse. I take responsibility for this because I unquestioningly let others raise the children.

I take responsibility for the violence because I did not speak up when men started carrying guns. When the Hey Rubes formed, I thought it was ridiculous – who was attacking us? Who were we afraid of? Apparently, we were afraid of each other, afraid that any negative word would bring down Synanon when what really brought down Synanon was our failure to speak up.

And Chuck’s drinking? All of you who stayed enabling this alcoholic? Attending his drinking parties? No one has admitted when he took his first drink. Ben Parks thought it was the day Betty D. was diagnosed. Was it sooner? Everyone who knows is still holding that contract.

So, no, I’m not bitter. Disappointed, yes. Angry, yes. Mostly, I think I am being honest.