Straight Life - Art Pepper [223]
There were squares that came down and played the "Synanon game," which is like group therapy. It was a club for them. They met and played a game one night a week. When I first got into Synanon they had their own games, just the squares, and then the residents, the dopefiends, one or two of them would play in each game with the squares, which seemed like an interesting thing to have happen. There were all kinds of people in the "game club"-businessmen, real players, those phony guys that say they're writers. Everybody had some kind of line, but in the games they'd be ripped apart. In the games you study people and try to find their weaknesses. You point out the bad things. The squares were people that were lonely, searching for companionship. Some of the women were just beautiful, some of them had a lot of money, and I used to wonder why they came to a place like this. At first I thought they came to hang out with dopefiends, to have some excitement in their lives, but after I was around them and observed them, I saw that even though that was part of it, the main thing was it was a place to go. They'd play their game, and after the game they'd congregate in one area of the club where there was a bar with big windows overlooking the ocean. It had tables and was like a real bar except there was no liquor served. They served coffee, ice cream, things like that. The squares sat there and talked. You could talk to any girl you wanted. Any girl could talk to any guy. If they didn't talk they'd be ranked later on in the games. It was an open sesame to meet people. They went out together. They were in games together and could find out about each other.
So the people in the game club were lonely people, and I found out that even the ones that had money and were goodlooking and had way-out cars were just as hung up as everybody else. They didn't know how to communicate, they felt inferior, they were self-conscious, they didn't feel adequate. Synanon was great: it enabled them to release their hostilities in the games. They could make fun of people and say things they could never say outside. After a while they felt free. They found out about themselves, they found out that other people were the same, and it gave them self-confidence-they realized they weren't alone. It was ideal for them. They could come and go home, go home to their nice places.
There were squares who after a certain length of time decided they liked the Synanon way of community living, so they moved in. They moved into apartments across the street from the club and worked outside at different jobs and gave most of their money to Synanon. They spent all their free time in Synanon playing games and hanging out, and they could live there with their friends, away from the violence of the outside world, because there was never any violence in Synanon. That was a no-no. The main rules were no dope or alcohol and no physical violence, so Synanon was very safe in a world that's awfully frantic and crazy.
For a while it was all I could do to make it through the days and nights. Then I started feeling a little better. One day some people came into the infirmary with some tapes and a tape recorder, and I thought they were going to play music, but instead they put on a tape of some girl copping out about a guy, an Italian, who had balled a lot of chicks. She said she had been getting loaded with him. Here is this girl saying she'd gone with this guy and given him head in a Synanon vehicle. She's telling all these people, and it's on a tape! I asked somebody, "Is this chick still alive?" They said, "Yeah, what do you mean is she still alive?" I said, "Well, she just ratted on this guy. She's a fuckin' snitch, man!" They looked at me. They said, "Oh God, you're ... Phew! Well, it figures." I said, "What do you mean