Straight Life - Art Pepper [228]
The thing of it is, the people that ran Synanon had to keep everyone offguard and keep everything different. If they fell into a routine, if life became boring and fell into a pattern, they'd lose the people. So they would change. All the time. Just make changes for changes' sake. They'd paint the place where you were working or move the desks. The same thing in your living quarters. Every single room in Synanon, whether it was in the club, the Clump, Kansas Street, the school, each room had been maybe fifty different things in the last three years. You'd be here, so they'd move everybody over there. They move these people here, move you there, move this here, paint that. Make a rule: you can't have this. Then you can have it. They'd have "glut raids," which I'll get into later, getting rid of the opulence. Or somebody would attain a high position after years of carrying out his faithful duty to the Synanon doctrines and the word of the great lord and master, Chuck Dederich; he would be rewarded; and then all of a sudden the gestapo would come and take away everything he had and make him wash dishes and scrub toilets and make his wife live in a dormitory with the other broads and newcomers. They did all this to keep everybody messed up. That was the basis of Synanon because dopefiends and nuts can't stand routine and when they get bored they have to do something crazy, so Synanon made the insanity. Themselves. The people that ran it caused the insanity.
Shortly after I arrived, the insanity took the form of changing the hours. Ordinarily people get up in the morning and set certain daytime hours aside for this or that. Synanon decided to do away with this. They instituted something they called the "twenty-four-hour day." There was a group of bigwigs, the "regents," or whatever they called them-a group of people who were in favor at that particular time with Big Chuck, you know, Big D., the god, the Old Wino. This group would have games together and call each other names and then they'd figure out, "Well, how can we fuck things up and disrupt everybody now?" They decided on the twenty-four-hour day. One day I was told, "Instead of working from eight o'clock in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon, you're going to go to work at 11:30 at night and work until nine o'clock in the morning." Can you imagine that?
I'd go to work at 11 P.M. and at 3 A.M. a jitney would come pick us up and drive us down to the club to eat. We'd ride down the street; we wouldn't see a soul, no life, no cars; it was like death outside; and we didn't say a word to each other. We'd go to this ridiculous, old-time club that used to be a millionaire's hangout, now fallen into disrepair, a junk heap full of ignorant ex-dopefiends or whatever you want to call them, nuts, running around trying to be painters and carpenters and carpet layers. You can imagine what the place looked like.
We'd get out of our jitney at 3:20 and walk into this club that looked like some old movie set for Rudolf Valentino or Theda Bara. And here were these tired-eyed musicians. They were playing music, and the crazy people were standing around; chicks with no bras on were dancing. We'd walk into this mad revelry without drinks, without dope, and go into the kitchen and eat. We'd eat the same thing we had at supper: if we had breakfast at supper we'd have breakfast for breakfast; if we had liver for supper we'd have liver for breakfast; if we had meatballs and spaghetti for supper we'd have meatballs and spaghetti with dripping water running off the plate for breakfast. When we finished eating, the musicians would play a "hoopla," which was the standard dance of Synanon. Some nut invented this togetherness rock-and-roll dance: instead of dancing