By David U. Gerstel
For most folks living in Synanon, most days were ordinary days. They were not spent changing sexual partners, waiting in line for a vasectomy, or capturing a rattlesnake for deposit in a lawyer’s mailbox. In other words, the days were not filled with the stuff the titillation documentaries about Synanon like to hone in on after celebrating “the miracle on the beach.”
If you were a young person at the Synanon Academy on Tomales Bay in Northern California, where I began my Synanon tenure during the late 1960s, your days were spent mostly at the “melancholy details” of living in community. At sweeping floors, chopping vegetables for dinner salads, patching and painting, rebuilding an old fire truck, planting trees, sharing meals with friends . . . and collecting garbage.
Garbage collection became a specialty of mine shortly after I walked up the hill to the Tomales facility to visit a college pal — “Mark,” as I call him in the book I later wrote about Synanon — and was recruited into the “movement.” The first rounds of garbage duty were fun. The last was a dangerous chore. I did not expect to become a garbage man when I entered Synanon. I am not sure what I expected. But the pitch I heard was enticing. My friend and his mentor, a smart attorney turned apprentice guru named Dan Garrett, argued convincingly that Synanon was going to change the world and that Mark and I had the right stuff to play a significant role in its mission.
So, I jumped in and immediately found out that, for the moment at least, I actually had only enough right stuff to merit an assignment to the pot sink in the kitchen.
Garbage duties commenced. There at the sink, for ten hours a day, I scraped congealed cheese and macaroni off plates, scrubbed burnt crust off pots, wiped grease out of frying pans. And hauled garbage cans out to a stinky shed.
As I labored at the sink, my enthusiasm for Synanon was replaced by anger so obvious that a pretty girl I will here call “Lilly” complained in a kitchen crew Game that she was afraid I was going to grab a knife and carve up everybody in the place.
My anger was then supplemented by dismay and regret. Because Lilly, trim with curly black hair, was the very Academy girl I had secret hopes of getting to know better. (Did not happen, in case you are wondering. It would be almost two years before I met the right girl for me — Sandra, to whom I have now been married for 50 years).
A month passed. Relief from the pot sink was granted. I received new jobs, somehow always involving garbage collection. I prepped veggies on the night shift in the kitchen, swept the trimmings into garbage cans and hauled them out to the shed. I chipped cement off an ancient concrete mixer, collected the scrapings and dispatched them to the dump. Our lead carpenter had me paint the mixer glossy black and carefully inscribed “The Shoe” on it in bright red as homage to our construction foreman. Next thing I know, The Shoe himself, Jimmy Troiano, reputed to be a former Mafia enforcer and at the time a beloved Academy elder, was handing me the keys to a dump truck and telling me I was responsible for the morning garbage run. “This is real woik,” he gently barked. “No screwin’ aroun’” with the five-ton truck.
The truck was what guys in construction call a “beater.” Paint chipped. Bumpers dented. Seat upholstery torn and taped. I thought it was beautiful. It was just the vehicle to start me down the road I wanted to travel—learning how to accomplish physical work rather than going further with academic studies.
Each morning I’d crank the truck engine and back the beater toward the tin barn at the far end of the Tomales property that housed our construction department. My garbage run partner Mike, a freckle faced guy who had transitioned into Synanon right out of high school rather than even start college, swung trash cans filled with construction debris over the truck tailgate. I vaulted into the bed and upended the cans. Scraps of tin and wire, wood, and bent nails rattled onto the truck bed.
Mike stepped onto the running board. I aimed the truck down a narrow lane. Alongside it, two Academy students, Ann and Bruce, were tending newly potted saplings alongside a greenhouse. Bruce was a musician as well as a Tomales facility gardener. He had created the song Mike and I would sing toward the end of our run.
As the beater rattled past, Ann and Bruce smiled and waved. We smiled back. At the Academy, you were always friendly outside of the Game – (which, btw, for you readers who are not knowledgeable about Synanon, was our benign sounding name for the ferocious encounter groups Synanon people participated in for hours every week). If you were not friendly outside the Game, in it you would be told what a pompous, arrogant, conceited, nose-in-the-air asshole you were, how justifiably disliked by all who had to put up with your obnoxious presence, and how undeserving of a place at the Academy. And then, when the Game ended, with you having promised to take a motion and improve your behavior, hugs all around and heading over to the dining room for coffee or tea and a friendly visit. Ordinary Synanon day.
Further up the lane, I edged the truck to the side of the road and parked alongside a low-lying building with a red tile roof. We called it the “Powerhouse.” It had once been an actual power plant, sheltering generators for a facility developed on the Tomales property for Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of radio telegraphy, member of the Italian National Fascist Party, and the “first radiotelegrapher of fascism” as he anointed himself.
At the Academy, the Powerhouse sheltered another kind of communication device, the long-form version of the Game known as “The Stew.” It ran almost continuously at the Academy, with people rotating in and out. We billed it as a sort of social washing machine for wringing corruption out of our community and as the engine that drove our movement.
Not everyone who observed the dynamic was enthusiastic. There was this reporter from the New Republic. He took a look at Synanon and its Games. They were, he suggested, right up old Guglielmo’s alley: A homegrown version of fascism promoting criticism and self-criticism and employing humiliation and stripping away of social standing to enforce obedience.
And there was the view presented by Anthony Lang, a young man who joined Synanon in 1967 and left a couple of years later, just about the time I joined up. He wrote a book titled Synanon Foundation, The People Business, a calm analysis of the transformation of Synanon as a “re-education center” for addicts into a “revolutionary movement”—the change often described as the evolution of “Synanon One into Synanon Two.”
The book includes an account of Powerhouse events named the “Bloodbath Stews.” As Lang describes them, they were a systematic assault on Synanon old timers intended to shift their loyalties from Synanon One to Synanon Two and to refresh their gratitude to its by then undisputed leader, Charles Dederich. In other words, the Bloodbaths were a classic case of coercive conversion.
Synanon One was history by the time I landed at Tomales. Synanon was Synanon Two, and the Stew I encountered was a place to clear up a misunderstanding, to bring a romantic relationship to an end or start a new one, to play the “love game” and express concern for a friend you thought was having a hard time. And to push other community members to take motions and grow their commitment to Synanon while also fessing up to your own errors of thought and action. It was not, btw, a place to criticize Synanon. I gave that a shot now and again as I began to sense something was seriously out of balance with the place. My criticisms were met with furious contempt or stern admonitions: Get that garbage out of your head! (I tried.)
All that intense Stewing in the Powerhouse required fuel. Especially when you kept at it without sleep for 24 hours as Stewers did. It required caffeine. It required dosing with nicotine. It demanded amping up with sweets.
Mike and I slipped into the Powerhouse to remove the fuel’s wrappings and remnants—crumpled coffee cups, donut fragments, empty sugar packets, cigarette butts, stained paper plates and, also, Kleenex soaked with snot and tears. We dumped the trash into the bed of the truck and returned the cans, moving slowly so we could catch a moment of the action in the Stew.
I put the truck in gear. It growled forward for a hundred yards. I pulled it over behind the “Inn.” Originally built to house Marconi’s workers, it now housed our dining room and kitchen. Mike and I lugged out cans heavy with kitchen waste. Mingled in were dozens of empty cans of Gatorade, donated to Synanon in exchange for a tax write-off when sale of the stuff was banned in the U.S. Charles Dederich declared he was not afraid of Gatorade. At his corner table in the dining room, he held forth exuberantly, hoisting a can with one hand, rotating the other in emphatic slow circles as he envisioned Synanon’s grand future – the “big picture” that complimented the “melancholy details.” Academy students guzzled Gatorade, too. And they, too, rotated their free hands in slow circles as they held forth.
On to the next stop, two stucco cottages with red tile roofs just north of the Inn. The first was the private quarters for the man I had come to think of as “Chuck” — or as “Chuck ‘n Bettye” when the identity of his wife was merged with his own. Sorry to tell you this: Chuck ‘n Bettye’s trashcan was boring. I never came across an interesting artifact — say photos from a previous life, journal pages, or letters from old friends. Chuck ‘n Bettye seemed to throw nothing away. Their can was almost empty.
On to the second cottage for two more cans: The first from the artist’s studio in the basement of the cottage. It was filled with fragrant wood shavings from the great Bay Laurel log in which Ted Lujancyk was discovering with mallet and chisel his masterwork, the massive woman with the terrified child-man in her arms that he named Entelechy. You can view it and other of Ted’s work at https://www.jamesrreynolds.net/ted-lukjanczyk.html
The second can, filled with Stew-like debris but also crumpled paper, tangles of string, and empty glue containers, served the “Reach” room on the main floor of the cottage. There, Academy members in groups of a dozen or so were confined monthly to sit around a big table for 24 hours of “Reaching.”
“Reach? Reaching? For what?” you might reasonably ask if you are not yourself a former Synanon Academy member. Well, reaching for answers to questions like: Why does smoke rise? Why do boats float? How does wind blow?
Academy members avowed love for the Reach. Maybe some did love it. Maybe others despised it but were masking negativity. You could get rotated out of Tomales and back to one of Synanon’s urban facilities for expressing negativity about anything Synanon.
I did not love the Reach. I loathed it. I shudder still at the realization that I spent hundreds of hours of my life groping “in concert” with fellow Reachers for answers to questions like why does chalk stick to a blackboard. Not to say the answers are without significance. Perhaps some scientist has won awards for plumbing the mysteries of chalk’s adhesion to blackboards. Heck if I know.
Whatever, we Academy members were not doing award quality work. We were concentrating on “backing the other fellow’s play.” Whatever hypothesis was put forth, we built on it. Dare to contradict a fellow Reacher’s contribution? You’d be issued a firm pull-up: We’re thinking in concert! No negativity. Back his play! Robert, the boyfriend of the lovely Lilly, steps to the blackboard, flexes his muscular torso, pushes his pecs against his tight T-shirt, fingers his thick hair and, as he chalks lines on the blackboard, intones, “What we have here is “horizontal gravity at work.”
And then another youth says, “Yes!” and adds vectors to Robert’s drawing to represent horizontal gravity in play. And a third begins reeling off evidence of horizontal gravity at work beyond chalk and blackboards.
“Horizontal gravity is the force that keeps the world intact,” chimes in another Reacher. “Without it everything would fly apart. It’s the force of attraction, of adhesion, of bonding, of romance. It’s the force of love.”
“There is a subtle horizontal magnetism at play in our world. A force that binds.”
“Physical love!”
“Universal force of love!”
With “romantic horizontal physical gravitational magnetism” (RHPGM) established as a prime force of the universe, we Reachers began to deploy scissors, staplers, glue, string and paper from a bowl in the center of the Reach table. Hours later, models representing RHPGM littered the table.
I tried to chip in. Honest. I tried, snipping string, smearing glue on paper and licking it off my fingers, cheering on other attempts at modeling. But I could not keep my eyes off the clock. I had not seen the hands of a clock move so slowly since the sixth grade when Mrs. Cross made me stay after school two hours daily for weeks (just because I shoved another kid down the flight of stone stairs to the playground after he aimed a racist remark at me). Boredom crushed me. My eyes fluttered shut. My brain craved sleep. Happily, after a few Reaches, I figured out that if I spaced out the escapes properly, I could regularly hide away in the bathroom while the other Reachers cobbled together their mix of string, glue, paper and metaphor.
Once inside the bathroom, I’d softly shut the door. Briefly, I’d relax against a wall. Soon I would be simmering with anger at the realization that I could enjoy escape only briefly. But a moment later, I’d be scolding myself for not being able to get with the Academy program. Why could I not be more like Mark and other Academy members and join in the enthusiasm for all things Synanon? Why was I somehow at Synanon but never quite in it? What held me back from going all in with our social movement, a way of life that could give health to an extraordinary artist like Ted who had been so besieged by paranoia before finding Synanon that the authorities had locked him away in a psychiatric ward?
Well, here goes another try, I’d sigh to myself. I’d open the door and rejoin the Reach, trying to convince myself it was a valuable exercise in imaginative exploration and collaboration.
I never have convinced myself of that. I grudgingly put in my 24 hours monthly in the Reach room. But I rebelled inwardly against the surrender of independent thinking and at going unquestioningly along with the group. Thank goodness. In the end I could not give in, but left Synanon as it began to creep beyond non-violent fascism into the psychopathy that engulfed it during the later years of its existence.
Here, then, a dark thought: The actual importance of Reaching was not so much our soft-headed questing for truths about elemental physical phenomena but our hard-nosed enforcement of conformity: Back the play! No negativity! We were training ourselves in herd thinking and the coercing of obedience, preparing ourselves to go along with and support the brutalities that Synanon would in due course practice as it spun towards oblivion.
I dumped the Reach debris into the bed of the truck, wheeled it around, and turned left onto a lane that ran up the hill behind the Inn. I glanced at my watch. We were making good time. Maybe I started to hum the tune of the garbage man song. Just two more stops.
A hundred yards up the hill, I pulled over at the structures we called the “Caves” –assemblages of cheap plywood siding, shed-shaped roofs topped with thin asphalt shingles, blow-and-go texture on the interior sheetrock. Dederich felt he had been suckered into okaying their construction. What tirade of satire and sarcasm would he entertain us with today if he could learn that those sorry buildings are now refurbished as pricey vacation rentals while the handsome old Inn is boarded up by government order for fear it will collapse in an earthquake.
The contents of the trash cans at the Caves were as dull as the buildings. Worn out clothing, empty makeup containers, burned out light bulbs, vacuum bags, toothpaste tubes squeezed flat, socks with holes at the heels. Residue of our ordinary days. With the Cave cans emptied, Mike and I were on to the chalk white structure sitting alone at the end of the lane, the “Cliff House.” It was the very tip of the “tip of the arrow.” It was headquarters not only for the Academy, but for all of Synanon. Charles E. Dederich — CED, the Old Man himself, the Founder, the CEO and Chairman — was cloistered there, often with Dan Garrett, laughing and brainstorming.
In the Cliff House trash cans, I’d find copies of Time and Fortune—journalistic pillars of American conservatism and corporate power in the later 20th century. Corporations enthralled Charles Dederich. He spoke with reverence of the powerful executives he had glimpsed during his youthful employment at a large American company.
Shortly after Synanon got underway as one of a great many “intentional communities” that have cropped up over the course of American history and established itself in a dilapidated storefront in Venice, California, Dederich had encompassed the community in a corporation of which he made himself both Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board. He thereby created a basis in law for authority over the community, which he never relinquished.
“My house,” Dederich called Synanon. He meant it. If members thought of Synanon as a community, the CEO thought of it as a corporation — his corporation. As events proved out, it was. Toward the end for Synanon, when many in the intentional community wished Dederich, again deep in his cups, would just go away, they could not put him out to pasture. His corporation held the community firmly in its grasp.
Back in the beater, Mike and I checked our watches. Elapsed time for the whole run: One hour and twenty-nine minutes. Hot damn! We were well on our way to halving the time the previous guys on the garbage run needed to complete it. That called for a round of the song:
I don’t work for money
Oh, I don’t work for cash
I just work for the pleasure of taking out your trash‘Cause I am your Synanon garbage man
Watch out pretty mama, or I head straight for your garbage can
You better watch out pretty mama, I’ll head straight for your garbage can
Watch out pretty mama . . .I don’t work for money
Oh, I don’t work for cash
I just work for the pleasure of taking out your trashI am your Synanon garbage man. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
After the Cliff House pickups, I’d drop Mike off at the construction shed and head for the county dump. I loved that part of my ordinary day: The view across the dark blue of the Bay, the green of the national park along the opposite shore. And just me and my beater with the two-lane highway unfurling in front of us.
Eventually, I handed the beater over to two other guys, for Chuck ‘n Dan had promoted me to a new cleanup job. I was assigned helpers and told to organize discarded construction materials – pipes, wire, boxes of rusting nails, decaying lumber, collapsing sheds, wheel-less and bent wheelbarrows — heaped in a meadow behind the highest hilltop on the property.
I pushed my helpers. Too hard. Our one Asian guy at Tomales broke his arm when a rickety ladder collapsed under him. The minister’s son was run over by his big-wheeled Irish buggy as he tried to lead it downhill. Chuck ‘n Dan declined to give me any more Academy kids to demolish. I completed the cleanup on my own, straightening up the sheds, fitting them with shelves for boxes of plumber’s fittings, sorting and stacking lumber, heaping up trash for the new garbage guys to take away. I loved working up there in the meadow, cows grazing on the other side of the property fence. Hawks cruising overhead. Free!!! Probably I should have figured out right then and there I was not meant for corporate and communal life.
But one day, Charles Dederich came putt-putting up the hill on his Honda motorbike, his huge haunches drooping over the seat like overstuffed saddlebags, a straw hat secured to his big head, one eye hooded in flesh, the other glinting. He started rotating his forearms and talking. If you lived in Synanon in the early ‘70s you are familiar with the themes of the vision he delivered to me that day in the wind and sun on the hill above the Academy:
Synanon had gotten hold of a revolutionary process, new ways of living and learning. Recovery from addiction was just a by-product of the process. Synanon was going build a new kind of city that showcased it.
Dederich gestured toward the ranch land beyond the fence. Did I know, he asked me (rhetorically), that Athens was built on a smaller parcel of land than we will soon have here? No, I didn’t either, he said. I’m just a hick from Ohio. But even I know that Athens influenced the course of Western architecture, philosophy, politics, and damn near everything else for centuries. You don’t have to conquer a vast territory to have an impact. A single city can make a demonstration of new ways of living that can guide the course of civilization. We are going to build a city out there, and I have a hunch that city might just become a beacon to the world. We’re going to build a city that will demonstrate just how high the quality of life can be pushed if people will just take the step toward trusting one another and cooperating. Naturally, a lot of people are going to say we’re crazy. But we will just put our best foot forward and see what happens.
“That’s a pretty cool idea,” or something like that was what I replied. I imagine I was overawed. I was 24 years old, and I’d never met anyone else with intentions or accomplishments close to the size of Dederich’s. He nodded, revved up his motorbike, and putt-putted back down the hill.
I thought of that moment years later when my friend Jady, sitting in our living room with Sandra and me, told me she could never figure out why I was in Synanon. There was a practical reason, namely that I had persuaded my draft board to accept Synanon as my alternative to military service and was, therefore, obligated to stay for two years. But Dederich’s vision of Synanon as a demonstration of a cooperative life kept me there, too.
Like other people without addiction problems who slipped into Synanon Two, I was driven by utopian hopes. Heck, utopianism was a family tradition. My mother had been with the communists battling the Nazi takeover of Germany, imagining herself to be supporting glorious workers’ collectives in Russia. With the Nazis hunting her, she fled to the land that would become Israel. There she met and joined with my father to build a kibbutz— and not as a building block for a new state, but from utopian intentions to build a communal way of life. In America, she founded a racially integrated kindergarten co-op in the apartheid southern city where I grew up. I inherited her tendencies. From high school on, I was taken with idealistic quests: Summerhill, the original free school; and the civil rights, anti-war and environmental movements.
So, I was primed to drink in the Synanon vision, eager for belief supported by action. Plus, I have always hated the way in which we humans trash our environment. To this day, as I walk over to my tennis club, I notice that the yards of the elegant homes along the way are immaculate. But just beyond their gates, there is litter. I pick it up. A few other people do, too. But not many. In Synanon, we all took care of our commons. I loved that. The hardest thing for me about leaving was giving up the cared-for physical environment to go out into the trashy streets of America. Yep, I was primed to be a Synanon garbage man working “not for money but just for the pleasure of taking out your trash.”
Truth is, though, even as Dederich ran me the vision on that hilltop, Synanon had peaked and was starting downhill. Mistakes had been made. Too much power had been concentrated in the hands of a hugely talented but seriously impaired man. Angered by graduates of his house giving too little back after their departure, he ended graduation. Now, newcomers, rather than being offered “a tunnel back” into the world, were indoctrinated to believe that Synanon and only Synanon could save their lives and that, because they owed it their lives, they were ungrateful dummies bound to fall down a manhole if they elected to do anything other than commit their lives to Synanon indefinitely.
That message did not take hold widely. The “revolving door” set in. Folks wheeled in and wheeled out.
And then, in a moment of personal need, Dederich gave the revolving door a big shove. He was told to stop smoking or die. He decided all the other smokers in Synanon should break their nicotine addiction along with him. The demand was enforced by Game attacks, humiliations, and head shavings en masse. No support at all, nothing like the kind of tender loving care junkies got on the living room couch when they came to Synanon to kick a heroin habit was given to people required suddenly to give up nicotine. Hundreds of members spun out the revolving door. Synanon’s population plunged. It never grew again.
I got another garbage man gig out of no smoking. I was assigned to remove the Celotex tiles covering the Powerhouse ceiling. They were stained dark yellow, soaked halfway through with nicotine wafting up from the Perpetual Stew below. I was glad I would not have to be inhaling that stuff in Stews any longer. I had never smoked, despised the habit, had even scolded my friends when they started dangling cigarettes from their lips during high school. But I was dim-witted about the implications of Synanon’s new no-smoking mandate. It did not occur to me to wonder, “If this Dederich guy can order two thousand people to suddenly swear off smoking on pain of being pushed out of our community, what limits, if any, are there to his control of our lives?”
With the tile removal job done, my spell as a Synanon garbage man ended, or at least until that last one big push years after I left. Trash collecting had given me a foothold in the world of physical work. I had expanded it by working during my free time in the carpentry shop and in Ted’s studio. Meanwhile, Dederich attempted with carrots and sticks to urge me into a career in Synanon management. Mostly, other than agreeing to work briefly as his “special representative” and set up the Cubic Day across all the major Synanon facilities, I resisted. I stayed on my own track. Eventually, I decided to go out to work and learn how to build houses.
Two years later, with a union journeyman’s card in my pocket, I returned to the “tip of the arrow” to build offices in the new automotive facility. (Looking back, I can see that I was on a quixotic quest: trying somehow to have it both ways, independently determining my life path and yet living communally — and that in a community governed by a corporation solely controlled by a “megalomaniac” – as Charles Dederich somewhat charitably described himself.)
Back by the Bay, I found that Dederich’s vision for Synanon had shrunk. He was no longer talking about it as a new Athens. He was declaring it to be “a nice little family business.” By that he clearly meant his family’s business. “Now that’s some real garbage” was, in a nutshell, my response. I tried to clean up the garbage, attacking his chief acolytes and even Dederich in Games. No visible effect, of course. Dederich just walked out of the Games. His acolytes tried to shout me down.
Sandra and I got together for a weekend. She hesitantly told me she had decided to leave. Synanon had closed the school in her home facility and shipped her kids elsewhere. She could not bear that. I told her I had decided to leave also. We left together.
After a year of scrimping and saving, we bought a home in the hills above the San Francisco Bay. I built a construction company and wrote my book about Synanon. As I did so, startling information for a final section came my way. A “Squeeze” intended to force out all but the most militant and obedient of Synanon soldiers was underway. The absolute rule against violence had been suspended. Synanon acquired an arsenal. Managers stalked about facilities with pistols belted to their waists. Members of the community were threatened and even beaten when Gaming alone did not prove effective enough discipline. Outsiders perceived as enemies were assaulted.
More and worse trash, I thought. Reportedly, some people still in Synanon tried to temper the madness. If so, they were not able to. Maybe the task was impossible. Anyone remaining in Synanon had been through the Squeeze. Had they, collectively at least, given up so much of their independence that they had become almost entirely agents of the corporation, unable to reverse their mindset and resist it? So it seemed. The job of stopping Synanon would have to be done from the outside.
I felt compelled to try my hand to make one last Synanon garbage run. Along with a woman who had fled Synanon after being brutalized in a “fat camp,” I organized a group of ex-residents to alert law enforcement that Synanon had gone rogue. We did not get far at first. Some members of the group were too frightened to even sign a letter to law enforcement. Others, however, provided accounts of specific assaults. We presented a report of the assaults to the California Attorney General’s office. They blew us off: Come on guys, they responded. Synanon, the legendary recovery community terrorizing dairy farmers and passers-by? Sounds like you have a grudge or something.
Abruptly, however, law enforcement got more interested. You know the story if not all the details. A rattlesnake had been placed in the mailbox of an attorney bringing suits against Synanon. When he reached for his mail, the rattler took hold of his hand, tightening its jaws, loosening, tightening again in order to create a passageway through his flesh for its venom. Arrests were made. Two Synanon hit men were sent to prison. So was my buddy Mark for destroying tape recordings that tied Dederich to the attack. Mark had, however, lost track of one recording. It was discovered by the Los Angeles DA and served as evidence for their prosecution.
I watched Dederich push heavily to his feet in an LA courtroom and, in a subdued voice, plead guilty in exchange for probation. Eventually, I‘d feel empathy for him. The guy suffered; he was a self-medicating depressive, a drunk, and terribly needy. But he was also cruel. And he enjoyed cruelty. So, at the moment of his conviction, my response was more along the lines of “okay, trash run completed.”
Except it wasn’t. Because then, this: down in Guyana, hundreds of members of an intentional community named People’s Temple were murdered by their ruler and his lead acolytes. Now the Feds were interested in Synanon. They perceived a parallel between the Temple and Synanon, were worried about Synanon’s potential for similar violence, and wanted to know more about it. They contacted a professor who studied what she called “totalistic institutions.” She sent them two copies of my just published book.
A few days later, two FBI agents were sitting at my living room table. They were a matched pair of clichés. Each was tall and lean. Each had a close-cropped crew cut. Each wore a dark suit with thin lapels, a crisp white shirt, and a skinny black tie. They were polite and smart. They told me they had read my book cover to cover on their flight out from Washington and thanked me for relieving the boredom they usually felt when flying. “A real page turner” they said.
I thanked them for their kind words and served cups of coffee. The agents sat erect in their chairs, sipped and, over four hours, asked good questions about how Synanon was structured and how it worked.
They wanted to know about the in-the-Game and out-of-the-Game notion. I explained: Yep, a strict division exists for the rank-and-file in the community. Outside of the Game, you maintain civility. In it, you can attack your fellow community members with assurance that whatever you said in the Game, other than criticism of Synanon or Dederich, would be left behind outside of the Game. But for Dederich and the people who helped him run his corporation, the boundary between out-of-the-Game and in-the-Game disappeared. For them, it was a management tool. When Chuck Dederich issued a call to action in a Game and did so over and over, his executives backed his play and amplified his demands in and out of Games until the community got the message, whether that was “diet down to lean normal” or get out the word that “no one fucks with us.” The community called that kind of happening “the new position that was coming down.”
How did I know this? Because Dederich taught me to use the Game as a management tool when I was his representative putting Synanon onto the Cubic Day. The what!? asked the FBI guys. Ten days on, ten off I explained. They thought that sounded good. Beats the hell out of the FBI schedule, I imagine.
So, said the agents, we got it: Dederich’s defense that his talk in the Game about attacking the rattlesnake lawyer was just “Game talk,” that was bull. Yep, I answered, when he said over and over in a Game that he wanted something done, that meant he damn well wanted it done, rewards for the doers, woe to the resisters.
The agents thanked me and got up to leave. I said, “Before you go, one question for you, fellows.” I wanted to know, would our conversation lead to action or would it turn out to be a waste of time as the conversation with the California AG had been.
One of the agents turned. He smiled. He changed vernacular, shape shifting from government law guy to something else. I wondered if maybe before going straight arrow he’d had other inclinations, maybe been a bit of a ‘60’s utopian like myself? “Don’t worry, man,” he said. We got this stuff covered. These guys are toast.” I wish I could report that he said, “this garbage is going to the dump.” That would tie up my story nicely. He did not. But that’s what happened. The Feds hauled Synanon off to the dump. Sometimes, I regret that had to be.
A note to readers: Fifty years have passed since David and Sandra left Synanon and forty years since he wrote Paradise, Incorporated. Consequently, Garbage Man is based in part on aging memories. Knowing that memory can distort, David has done the best he can to validly represent the essence and the facts of Synanon during the time of his garbage runs. He welcomes corrections.
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