My Take: HBO's "The Synanon Fix" (Episode 2)

Are you kidding? I lived in a cult?

Me at a Trip Break in 1969 (Screenshot from the documentary “Born in Synanon”)

On a late afternoon in April, I watched Episode 2 with my husband, Bruce. I knew I wouldn’t sleep if I watched too close to bedtime, so we closed the blinds to the cloudy spring day. My daffodils were still in bloom, having survived a late snowstorm. Our fourteen-pound Schipperke curled up on the couch between us.

Rory Kennedy didn’t pull any punches, and her punches landed right in my gut.

Bam! First thing: Women shaving each other’s heads.

I shouted to my husband, Bruce, who only knows Synanon through my eyes, “Okay, that looks creepy. But it wasn’t really. You had to be there.”

Oh my God. All these decades later, I still look at shaving my head through the lens of living in a cult. It made sense at the time. No! I shout to myself today. It didn’t make sense. Why do I keep insisting it even made sense to shave men’s heads when they broke a rule? Dederich did it to humiliate them, and like all good cults, everyone followed the leader. It was so commonplace when I arrived in 1969 that I foolishly thought head shaving was part of the addiction cure. Who was I to question? Now, I very much doubt shaving a man’s head kept him off drugs. I suspect living in community and playing the Game (before it was corrupted) kept addicts off drugs, but I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t an addict; I was an idealistic teen who moved in for an alternative lifestyle. The fear of humiliation kept us all in line. Humiliation wasn’t reserved for the addicts. I, too, was publicly humiliated. You’ll have to read my memoir for that story.

I disparage others for still being true believers, but this week, I admitted to myself that I am also. It made sense that we shaved men’s heads to humiliate them? How can I even say that?

Rory Kennedy got everything right in Episode 2.

I lived in a bubble. A bubble of groupthink.

As I watched Dederich, my gut churned. The coercion! Even though I never met him, I heard him daily on the Wire, our private radio network, which was always on. Like something out of 1984, his voice echoed through my mind. You think you’re not paying attention to that background noise, but the words sink in. I had forgotten that he even had a mic at his dining table. Dederich’s statements were parroted by his sycophants and reaffirmed in our Games. Enforcement was through peer pressure and humiliation.

I’ve worked on my memoir for seven years. In my critique groups, I am encouraged to write with more emotion. So, I’ve been delving into the emotions I didn’t allow myself to feel while I lived there, trying to remember the words, trying to remember the feelings I blocked out. I journal, hunching over my notebook before dawn, hearing the birds twitter as the sky gradually brightens, time-traveling to the 1970s, reliving intimate parts of my life. But I couldn’t remember Dederich. I didn’t know him, I rationalized. He was a small part of my Synanon life.

Then there he was on my TV, inserting himself into my life once again.

I sat on the edge of the couch. This wasn’t a popcorn movie.

Head Shaving: Oh, my God. How creepy. That was the night I lost myself to the cult. When I went along with the crowd. It felt so good to belong.

Synanon City: A self-sustaining city. Hello? Synanon couldn’t survive without donations. That is not self-sustaining! That is living off the largesse of the society we shunned. And when they got out of the dopefiend business, the IRS caught on and demanded back taxes. By then, Synanon had started paying its executives and salespeople salaries and commissions, so I suspect there wasn’t much left for the IRS to seize except the land. I am beginning to think the entire Synanon “business” was a scam.

The School: Dederich preached that Synanon had a better way to raise children, that the nuclear family doesn’t test kids’ brains, and that kids are better off with 30 or 40 adults.  I believed it would be like a Kibbutz. I was so far down the true believer rabbit hole that I stayed for over a year after they ripped my suckling son from my arms.

I didn’t hear Dederich say the best thing to do for your child is to get out of the way. “If I can’t see him, he will be a better person.” I want to puke.  What did he know? He didn’t raise either of his two children. He was a drunk whose wives left him and raised his children without him.

I wasn’t alone in losing my son. Synanon moved all the kids to the isolated ranch in Tomales Bay. In Episode 2, I heard for the first time that they moved the children “so parents can go to work and be productive.” WTF? Joseph Stalin, anyone? I stupidly thought I was working my ass off to build a drug-free utopian community. Teeth and fuzz, we called it. Smile while working at the speed of light. So Dederich could live like a king.

The Trip: While I listened to Dederich’s words over my TV, my entire body shook when I heard him say, “The biggest tool we have is fatigue. Then you can make a person believe anything.” I remember him saying he loved Catholics because they were so used to rituals that all you had to do was create a ritual, and he had them eating out of the palm of his hand.

Synanon had many other coercive tools, which I’ll share another time.

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More Gut Punches:

“I like to be rich.” I gave him my salary and then my free labor so he could have cars, motorcycles, private cooks, maids, and chauffeurs. Oh, and guns.

Someone in the documentary said Chuck began running the show in the 1970s – like that was something new.  Dederich always ran the show. From Day One. Read your history.

NO HUGS. Tears stream down my face as I write. I may as well have given my infant son to an orphanage.

Weight loss. Let’s call it for what it was: fat shaming.

Synanon was Dederich. I will no longer refer to him by his loving nickname, Chuck. Dederich was a charismatic leader who manipulated people for his own entertainment and enrichment.

I think I am finally leaving the cult.