I have the recurring image of simply walking into the sea and disappearing. It’s a comforting thought, this idea of escape. But what am I escaping from? What did I mess up so badly about this life of mine? Why do I suddenly feel so worthless? Over and over again I think of drinking a mess of pills or jumping off the top of Hoover Tower. I don’t know why I feel so marked, so alone, like nothing I’m ever going to be or do could change the simple fact that I am a broken human being and I do not deserve any good things.
After my third MRI, the Stanford doctors schedule me for knee surgery. They are planning to cut my lateral meniscus to change the way my patella tracks across the cartilage of my knee in hopes they can stop the progress of the arthritis. They’re not sure it will work but nobody knows what to do and I’m just so desperate to run I’ll try anything. I’m so tired of the ice and the physical therapy and the stretching, the electro-stim, the ultrasound therapy, the feeling that I am cursed to move lamely through the world.
It’s a strange surgery, to simply cut a muscle and hope that the mechanics of my stride will work themselves out. I feel uneasy as I attend the pre-op exam the night before, as the kindly doctor pulls on my heel and asks me about my level of pain. He tells me to skip dinner and try to get some sleep. I toss around on my bed in my dorm room at Toyon Hall, my roommates from the track team sleeping in the next room. I’m beset by the feeling that something is very wrong, that I need to stop running, that there is something else I must face and the surgery suddenly seems desperate and strange.
My mind races through a wilderness.
What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t even focus your eyes. You buy yourself a big red sweater with an S across the chest, just like the Superchild you once were. You try to prove them all wrong. But you laugh at the wrong part of the joke and they see you trying too hard. You attempt to outrun it. But then you get injured and your mom goes insane and a kind man in a blue shirt with a trim black beard uses the words. Emotional abuse. Crossing physical boundaries. Trauma. Neglect.
I feel like a blank space covered in skin. There is no place for this walking blank thing among the warm beings, the ones with something inside, the people who can have a drink and laugh at a joke and look into their futures and see something other than the wretchedness I see in mine, the day that immeasurably thin skin falls away and I simply disappear. Into the ocean. My ocean. The one that will swallow me whole if I let it.
I sit up straight at 5:00 A.M. and call the Stanford Medical Center to cancel the surgery. The attending nurse sounds surprised. “So you want to reschedule?”
“No.”
I hang up the phone and turn on a desk lamp, grabbing a pen and a notebook to write out a letter. “Dear Mom, I can’t talk to you anymore … I need space to live my own life. There are too many things I am angry about, too many things to name … Do not contact me. Do not write me or call me. I don’t know when I’ll be in touch again, if ever. Your son, Mikel.”
I put the letter into a white envelope and place a stamp in the upper-right-hand corner. I grab my skateboard and head downstairs, emerging from the dorm just as the sun is coming up. I skate to the center of campus, feeling the wind in my hair, the possibility of morning, the freedom of being alive as I make my way to the post office. I drop the envelope into the slot and turn to face campus.
It looks different. Brighter. Bigger. Cleaner. I can feel the sun on my face. The warm orange light is rising over the quad, reflecting the morning over all that wonderful architecture as I see my whole life in front of me like that road in eastern Oregon disappearing into the horizon.
I look around, stunned at how free I suddenly feel. I can take any of these roads wherever they lead. I take a deep breath of the crisp air, holding my skateboard against my knee as students shuffle to class around me.
Fuck it. Maybe I’ll just drop out.
* * *
I SHAVE MY head with a pair of clippers and dye the buzz cut purple. I drop two classes and get put on academic probation. I meet some kids from Foothill College at an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting I attend off campus in a desperate move to seek answers. One of them is a drummer. I buy a used amp and an electric guitar and we start to jam in a garage in Menlo Park. I change my major from biology to history and psychology. My history studies focus on Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. I can’t explain my interest in Jewish history except to say I think it makes me feel closer to Bonnie, closer to the Posners, my adopted Jewish family who treat me as their own. The big joke among the Jewish studies majors is that I am the “Tarzan of the Jews. He was raised by Jews and he walks among us, though he is a goy.”
I enroll in Psych One, then Social Psychology, then the Psychology of Addiction, then the Psychology of Mind Control. We study cults. We read about Jonestown and the Peoples Temple and Vietnamese prison camps. It all feels familiar, like reading your own family history. I write my term paper on Synanon, reading Escape from Utopia and Synanon, the two dusty volumes everyone says are the definitive books on Synanon. I find myself scrolling through endless microfiche at Meyer Library, reading old copies of the Point Reyes Light, the newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize reporting on Synanon.
I’m surprised by how popular Synanon was in American pop culture. I didn’t realize there was a Hollywood movie made about it, starring Chuck Connors and Eartha Kitt. The Oscar-winning actor Edmond O’Brien played Chuck Dederich.
I didn’t know Bob Dylan referenced Synanon in his song “Lenny Bruce,” from his 1981 record, Shot of Love. The first two lines are
Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lived on and on
Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon.
All of it paints a picture in my mind of an experimental living community known for getting drug addicts clean that became a quest for something more: the dizzy, utopian dream of the 1960s come to life. At the time, before it went bad, it was cool. Actors and directors and artists hung out there, some of them playing the Game, like the comedian Steve Allen and the psychologist Abraham Maslow. The jazz musician Art Pepper went to Synanon to get clean, so did Frank Rehak from Miles Davis’s band. Joe Pass even put out an album called Sounds of Synanon.
The story had changed by the mid-1970s, by the time it had become a multimillion-dollar nonprofit, steeped in a battle with the IRS over its nonprofit status because of rumors of violence. There was an NBC Nightly News exposé in 1978 saying as much, which caused a stir in the community and led to threats made against NBC executives.
In the midst of the IRS investigation, the LAPD raided Chuck’s compound and that’s when the tapes came out. The Old Man, who had once forbade violence, who had made nonviolence a pillar of the community, could be heard saying his infamous words: “We’re not going to mess with the old-time, turn-the-other-cheek religious postures. Our religious posture is: Don’t mess with us. You can get killed dead, literally dead. I am quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs, and next break his wife’s legs, and threaten to cut their child’s arm off. That is the end of that lawyer. I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk.”
It’s strange to see these things in print because they were always legends, a type of folklore we heard through the years in bits and pieces: the Tomales Bay compound, Chuck Dederich, the violence, the Imperial Marines, the thousand rifles, the Game, the shaved heads, the forced divorces and forced vasectomies. I come upon a story about a man beaten nearly to death in his driveway by men from Synanon while a little boy watched from the porch, my hands shaking, tears in my eyes, thinking about Phil, his face, the dark figures, the body lying limp in the driveway. That little boy.