Straight Life - Art Pepper [226]
People who worked in the kitchen weren't allowed to take anything out. That was a real bust. And, anyway, steak was something we just didn't have. We ate well, but only the people who'd been around a long time got steak. Jack Hurst, who was the director at the time, and the people who lived in the club, the big shots, would go in the back of the kitchen, get meat, carry it home to their families, and cook it. Bill Dederich, Big Chuck's brother, had an apartment in the Clump and he'd have barbecues on his terrace. You could smell the meat cooking. For a while the big shots even had their own section of the dining room, where they'd eat food like that, and you could see them, you know. It was sickening. But Del got that stuff, stashed it on his body, and brought it home to me.
The residents were divided into tribes of about sixty people who played the Synanon game together, and each tribe had a certain section of the Clump, maybe three apartments for the men and two for the women. If people had to be disciplined, the tribe leader did it. For drinking or stealing or using dope or physical violence, the punishment was a bald head or, for the women, a stocking cap, and if you had a good job or a nice pad you lost it and had to sleep in the basement and work scrubbing pots, and you'd suffer horribly in the games. (If you split, left Synanon, you were labeled a "splittee," and if you wanted to come back and were allowed to come back, the punishments were the same, only they lasted longer.)
In each tribe there were so many "elders," people who'd been around for a number of years, and we went to them when we needed anything-to try to get a pair of socks that fit or decent underwear. There was a Store where you got clothes for free, but the good things were in another store for the big shots; we got the old things they didn't want. If you couldn't find a pair of shoes that fit you, you could go to the elders and beg them and maybe they'd give you a voucher. Then you could go to a real store and buy shoes. If you wanted to write someone or make an emergency call-someone was dying-you'd have to go to the elders and seek permission. After you were there for three months, you could go for a walk but you had to get permission and you had to sign out; usually you had to take someone with you. Sometimes they'd change that: the whole place would go on "containment" and you couldn't go out at all. But that was the idea of the tribes. And if you did anything wrong or you didn't do your dorm assignment, that's what the games would be about.
You'd be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like, pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you'd tell it. You'd accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it's really a drag, so there'd be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody'd accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn't sleep, or some chick would accuse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that ranking you and exposing your bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked.
When I got healthier, I got a job. I wanted a job. I was bored just sitting around. Because I'd worked in the paymaster's office in San Quentin, they assigned me to the bookkeeping department, which was in a building a little ways down from the Clump, a gigantic, old warehouse where they kept all the stuff they hustled for Synanon, all the donations, furniture, food. They had offices upstairs, and one was the bookkeeping office. Most of the people in the offices were women, and my boss was an old battle-ax named Faye. She was one of those old reprobates, one